Thoughts on the DOJ debacle

I guess I'm a bit naive or wasn't really thinking about the department of justice as a political machine.

I had always thought that of all the branches of our government those that served they should hold to a higher standard. Apply themselves with honor and uphold the truth above all political considerations.

I had not considered or kept in my mind that the Attorney General is appointed by the president and in the same we he appoints state attorney generals that the president or his advisors favor.

In the past the congress of our nation vetted the AG and so there was the understanding that appointing one that would act as your de facto hatchet man wouldn't make it past them. That all changed when the last congress was sitting.

The checks and balances the people of this country thought or assumed were in place vanished and in turn whatever was deemed good by the administrative branch was deemed good by the legislature.

One of the AG's job is to tell the administrative branch of the government when they cross the line, not to write them a pass that allows them to do whatever they please.

Keep in mind that this AG said that coercive physical interrogations were legal and that the Geneva Convention was not relevant to the 'war on terror'.

Are the opinions rendered by the AG in keeping with our concepts of justice here in the United States? Or were they simply 'get out of jail cards' issued to the administration by the AG? It seems that the more light that is shone on the operations of the current AG, the more it looks like there's an attempt to fix in place a mindset in every state AG office one that follows the dogma issued by the same people that hold to the PNAC core belief systems.

Instead of diversity of opinion: One Opinion and only one philosophy.

Now there are some people in this country that may think a world with a mono-culture would be a great thing but if you look around the one thing you discover in a mono-culture is stagnation and decay. It would be a pity if that were to befall this country.

more improvements

Made some changes to Homefires navigation system.
Testing a new chat system, (it remembers your login).

That'll need some more feedback before we choose which we want to keep.

Some other under the hood work has been done. Users may or may not realise it ;)

Plame testimony follow on.

Ok, a mess of misdirection by the GOP on whether Ms. Plame was undercover has been hitting the sheets.

Well you can kiss the snow job buh-bye, Melinda Henneberger's report posted over on the Huffington Post from the hearing makes it clear just what the former operatives status was at the time her cover was blown.

You'll need to go down eight paragraphs to get to the meat of the subject, but once you've read through the account there should be no doubt as to the fact that she was in fact undercover.

Something that would have been easy to ascertain by the inner circle.

There's an amazing display of a lack of conscience by the people responsible for this leak. If they had any guts they'd publicly accept responsibility their lack of discretion and foresight and resign.. and turn themselves in for prosecution. But honor isn't something we've seen coming from most 'CEO' types in government lately.. most of the time it's duck and cover and oh yeah, "I can't recall..."

Memory loss

It's very scarey that we seem to elect people to the highest offices who's memory is hazy when it comes to recalling the genesis of critical policy decisions. Someone should buy them a PDA or the like.
Read the article.

Broken Promises

This article relates directly to my post earlier this morning and underscores it.

Treason

In the mid 20th Century revealing the identities of one of our undercover intelligence agents was made a capital crime conmensurate with treason.

Fast foward to our present administration and the Plame debacle.

For reasons based on partisan politics a CIA operatives name was leaked to the press in an attempt to undermine her spouses criticism of our incursion in Iraq.
In the process the leak exposed the name of the company that provided the false cover background operatives require for their safety in the field. That in turn exposed all the operatives in the field who were using that company for their cover.

This isn't just about one lone operative.

Think aboout this, anyone else who had their cover blown just had to run for home because someone in the current administration used a ham fisted ill concieved method to smack down a critic of their policy.

But beyond that, the individual or individuals responsible for the leak are getting away with treason.

I guess it's just one more sad example of how well the current administration upholds the laws and constitution of our country. It reminds me of the OJ trial. In personal crimes: got enough money, doesn't make the 'little guy' think he can pull a fast one? You go free. Violate federal law but you're a personal friend of someone at the top of the tree, no problem, you'll be taken care of...

If nothing else I would have hoped that they had a bit more depth of thought on the consequences of their actions.
Today Ms. Plame is testifying before Congress, but will her words bring the culprit(s) to justice?

It seemed pretty clear that the federal prosecutors probe pointed squarely at the WH and more importantly to people in the inner circle. If you were really serious about getting rid of a traitor and you couldn't refine the search beyond three individuals then logic says you remove those three from critical posts if nothing else.

When the current administration ran on the idea that they would be the CEO Administration who knew they meant CEO's like those of WorldCom and Enron?

ps. The excuse being circulated goes that all these people 'knew she was cia, but they didn't know she was undercover'.

Fine, if you want to tell the world you operate in a vacuum and that you can't employ simple logic, go with that story.

So you have us posit that your IQ falls in the 70 to 80 point range. You know that she's with the cia and that doesn't fire a synapse and tell you maybe you should check her status before you blab it to the world? If that didn't happen then you seriously need to hire people better able to think things through to oversee all your command decisions!

Presto Change-o

I'd say it's pretty obvious that I've changed the template I've been using here on Blogger.

Mostly it's because I was using the old one in the beta blooger and it looked fairly poor compared to how it had looked in the prior iteration. The new iteration uses this drag and drop interface for arranging what goes where on your page.. sort of. Some things you just can't do anymore apparently.. like tweaking the profile using html/css code directly.

Not sure if this is a step foward or not.. I will be trying to modify/customize the current template as soon as I figure out how these 'widgets' that control it work!

Meanwhile life seems to go on.. no one is sure why.