Jay Dedman was twittering about wanting people to spread the word about Political Video.org -- a cool new George W. mash-up site.

They have a raging, searchable archive of G.W. in action!

Go there and see...

Bush Talks about using "the google"

This is from CNBC.

This is from the October 30, 2005 program of 60 minutes

I've been clearing off my TIVO since I've been home so much lately, and what do I run across but a 60 Minutes piece from October 30, 2005 about Valerie Plame. Not about the scandal per se, but about Valerie: who she was, what she did, and the lives potentially at risk and irrepairable damage that has been done to our National Security as a result of her identity being revealed.

Valerie was an undercover Agent gathering intelligence about numerous countries' Nuclear Weapons programs. She dedicated her life to protecting the National Security of the United States. She recommended her husband, Joseph Wilson, to go on another patriotic mission to Nigeria to verify whether or not Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from there. Wilson went on this mission, almost as a favor, for the Vice President himself. When Wilson came back with the truth - that the documents saying Saddam had purchased uranium were forged, the Vice President wanted Wilson to keep quiet about it.

When he did not, and instead offered up to the press what he had uncovered, our Bush, Cheney and Rove conspired to reveal his wife's identity in retaliation.

Wow. You've really got to see this for yourself.

Video - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - All

Video - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - Part One

Video - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - Part Two

Audio - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - All

Audio - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - Part One

Audio - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - Part Two

I'm late for lunch and swamped finishing my masters (three more days!)....

But I just finished uploading Keith Olbermann's report on this situation from last Thursday, April 6, 2006, so I wanted to at least make it available to you raw style until I can blog it properly later.

The file is available as "all three parts together" and in three parts here w/pics.

1- Olbermann's overview

2-Shuster's take on it

3- John Dean's take on it.

This is from Sunday, April 9, 2006:

A "Concerted Effort" to Discredit Bush Critic
Prosecutor describes Cheney, Libby as key voices pitching Iraq-Niger story.
By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer for The Washington Post

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" - using classified information - to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the previous year - in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there - as "a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife," CIA case officer Valerie Plame.

Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for denying under oath that he disclosed Plame's CIA employment to journalists. There is no public evidence to suggest Libby made any such disclosure with Cheney's knowledge. But according to Libby's grand jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed this week, Cheney "specifically directed" Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson's visit to Niger.

One striking feature of that decision – un-remarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it - is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

The first of those conversations, according to the evidence made known thus far, came when Libby met with Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, on June 27, 2003. In sworn testimony for Fitzgerald, according to a statement Woodward released on Nov. 14, 2005, Woodward said Libby told him of the intelligence estimate's description of Iraqi efforts to obtain "yellowcake," a processed form of natural uranium ore, in Africa. In an interview Friday, Woodward said his notes showed that Libby described those efforts as "vigorous."

Libby's next known meeting with a reporter, according to Fitzgerald's legal filing, was with Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, on July 8, 2003. He spoke again to Miller, and to Time magazine's Matt Cooper, on July 12...

Fitzgerald wrote that Cheney and his aides saw Wilson as a threat to "the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." They decided to respond by implying that Wilson got his CIA assignment by "nepotism."

They were not alone. Fitzgerald reported for the first time this week that "multiple officials in the White House" - not only Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who have previously been identified - discussed Plame's CIA employment with reporters before and after publication of her name on July 14, 2003, in a column by Robert D. Novak. Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040800916.html

A "Concerted Effort" to Discredit Bush Critic
By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
The Washington Post

Sunday 09 April 2006

Prosecutor describes Cheney, Libby as key voices pitching Iraq-Niger story.

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" - using classified information - to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the previous year - in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there - as "a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife," CIA case officer Valerie Plame.

Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for denying under oath that he disclosed Plame's CIA employment to journalists. There is no public evidence to suggest Libby made any such disclosure with Cheney's knowledge. But according to Libby's grand jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed this week, Cheney "specifically directed" Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson's visit to Niger.

One striking feature of that decision – un-remarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it - is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

The first of those conversations, according to the evidence made known thus far, came when Libby met with Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, on June 27, 2003. In sworn testimony for Fitzgerald, according to a statement Woodward released on Nov. 14, 2005, Woodward said Libby told him of the intelligence estimate's description of Iraqi efforts to obtain "yellowcake," a processed form of natural uranium ore, in Africa. In an interview Friday, Woodward said his notes showed that Libby described those efforts as "vigorous."

Libby's next known meeting with a reporter, according to Fitzgerald's legal filing, was with Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, on July 8, 2003. He spoke again to Miller, and to Time magazine's Matt Cooper, on July 12.

At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told Miller that the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term of art indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance.

In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments, which were identified by a headline and bold type and set out in bullet form in the first five pages of the 96-page document.

Unknown to the reporters, the uranium claim lay deeper inside the estimate, where it said a fresh supply of uranium ore would "shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons." But it also said US intelligence did not know the status of Iraq's procurement efforts, "cannot confirm" any success and had "inconclusive" evidence about Iraq's domestic uranium operations.

Iraq's alleged uranium shopping had been strongly disputed in the intelligence community from the start. In a closed Senate hearing in late September 2002, shortly before the October NIE was completed, then-director of central intelligence George J. Tenet and his top weapons analyst, Robert Walpole, expressed strong doubts about the uranium story, which had recently been unveiled publicly by the British government. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, likewise, called the claim "highly dubious." For those reasons, the uranium story was relegated to a brief inside passage in the October estimate.

But the White House Iraq Group, formed in August 2002 to foster "public education" about Iraq's "grave and gathering danger" to the United States, repeatedly pitched the uranium story. The alleged procurement was a minor issue for most US analysts - the hard part for Iraq would be enriching uranium, not obtaining the ore, and Niger's controlled market made it an unlikely seller - but the Niger story proved irresistible to speechwriters. Most nuclear arguments were highly technical, but the public could easily grasp the link between uranium and a bomb.

Tenet interceded to keep the claim out of a speech Bush gave in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, but by Dec. 19 it reappeared in a State Department "fact sheet." After that, the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the US intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not? If they had, the Pentagon would need to reconsider its ties with Niger.

The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four US officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

Bush put his prestige behind the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address. Less than two months later, the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the principal US evidence as bogus. A Bush-appointed commission later concluded that the evidence, a set of contracts and correspondence sold by an Italian informant, was "transparently forged."

On the ground in Iraq, meanwhile, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction was producing no results, and as the bad news converged on the White House - weeks after a banner behind Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln - Wilson emerged as a key critic. He focused his ire on Cheney, who had made the administration's earliest and strongest claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear program.

Fitzgerald wrote that Cheney and his aides saw Wilson as a threat to "the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." They decided to respond by implying that Wilson got his CIA assignment by "nepotism."

They were not alone. Fitzgerald reported for the first time this week that "multiple officials in the White House" - not only Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who have previously been identified - discussed Plame's CIA employment with reporters before and after publication of her name on July 14, 2003, in a column by Robert D. Novak. Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

At the same time, top officials such as then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley were pressing the CIA to declassify more documents in hopes of defending the president's use of the uranium claim in his State of the Union speech. It was a losing battle. A "senior Bush administration official," speaking on the condition of anonymity as the president departed for Africa on July 7, 2003, told The Post that "the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech." The comment appeared on the front page of the July 8 paper, the same morning that Libby met Miller at the St. Regis hotel.

Libby was still defending the uranium claim as the administration's internal battle burst into the open. White House officials tried to blame Tenet for the debacle, but Tenet made public his intervention to keep uranium out of Bush's speech four months earlier. Hadley then acknowledged that he had known of Tenet's objections but forgot them as the State of the Union approached.

Hoping to lay the controversy to rest, Hadley claimed responsibility for the Niger remarks.

In a speech two days later, at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney defended the war by saying that no responsible leader could ignore the evidence in the NIE. Before a roomful of conservative policymakers, Cheney listed four of the "key judgments" on Iraq's alleged weapons capabilities but made no mention of Niger or uranium.

On July 30, 2003, two senior intelligence officials said in an interview that Niger was never an important part of the CIA's analysis, and that the language of Iraq's vigorous pursuit of uranium came verbatim from a Defense Intelligence Agency report that had caught the vice president's attention. The same day, the CIA referred the Plame leak to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, the fateful step that would eventually lead to Libby's indictment.

From the "Hey is anybody listening? The information we've been waiting for years to break has broken" department, Jason Leopold and like five other reporters are covering what has got to be the most exciting development in this dismal administration: not only did Cheney tell Libby to leak the information to the press about Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, being a CIA agent, but , according to Libby himself, Bush told Cheney to tell him to do it.

I have some nice clips from Keith Olbermann going up next, but this story published this morning in the Times sums it up nicely too.

Bush and Cheney Discussed Plame Prior to Leak
by Jason Leopold for t r u t h o u t.

In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media.

Other White House officials who also attended the meeting with Cheney and President Bush included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

This information was provided to this reporter by attorneys and US officials who have remained close to the case. Investigators working with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald compiled the information after interviewing 36 Bush administration officials over the past two and a half years.

The revelation puts a new wrinkle into Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's two-year-old criminal probe into the leak and suggests for the first time that President Bush knew from early on that the vice president and senior officials on his staff were involved in a coordinated effort to attack Wilson's credibility by leaking his wife's classified CIA status.

Now that President Bush's knowledge of the Plame Wilson affair has been exposed, there are thorny questions about whether the president has broken the law - specifically, whether he obstructed justice when he was interviewed about his knowledge of the Plame Wilson leak and the campaign to discredit her husband.

Details of President Bush's involvement in the Plame Wilson affair came in a 39-page court document filed by Fitzgerald late Wednesday evening in US District Court in Washington.

Fitzgerald's court filing was made in response to attorneys representing I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators for not telling grand jury he spoke to reporters about Plame Wilson.

Libby's attorneys have in the past months have argued that the government has evidence that would prove Libby's innocence and that the special prosecutor refuses to turn it over to the defense. Fitzgerald said in court documents he has already turned over thousands of pages of evidence to Libby's attorneys and that further discovery requests have been overly broad.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041006Z.shtml

Bush and Cheney Discussed Plame Prior to Leak
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 10 April 2006

In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media.

Other White House officials who also attended the meeting with Cheney and President Bush included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

This information was provided to this reporter by attorneys and US officials who have remained close to the case. Investigators working with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald compiled the information after interviewing 36 Bush administration officials over the past two and a half years.

The revelation puts a new wrinkle into Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's two-year-old criminal probe into the leak and suggests for the first time that President Bush knew from early on that the vice president and senior officials on his staff were involved in a coordinated effort to attack Wilson's credibility by leaking his wife's classified CIA status.

Now that President Bush's knowledge of the Plame Wilson affair has been exposed, there are thorny questions about whether the president has broken the law - specifically, whether he obstructed justice when he was interviewed about his knowledge of the Plame Wilson leak and the campaign to discredit her husband.

Details of President Bush's involvement in the Plame Wilson affair came in a 39-page court document filed by Fitzgerald late Wednesday evening in US District Court in Washington.

Fitzgerald's court filing was made in response to attorneys representing I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators for not telling grand jury he spoke to reporters about Plame Wilson.

Libby's attorneys have in the past months have argued that the government has evidence that would prove Libby's innocence and that the special prosecutor refuses to turn it over to the defense. Fitzgerald said in court documents he has already turned over thousands of pages of evidence to Libby's attorneys and that further discovery requests have been overly broad.

The attorneys and officials close to the case said over the weekend that the hastily arranged meeting was called by Cheney to "brief the president" on Wilson's increasing public criticism about the White House's use of the Niger intelligence and the negative impact it would eventually have on the administration's credibility if the public and Congress found out it was true, the sources said.

Bush said publicly in October 2003 that he had no idea who was responsible for unmasking Plame Wilson to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters. The president said that he welcomed a Justice Department investigation to find out who was responsible for it.

But neither Bush nor anyone in his inner circle let on that just four months earlier, they had agreed to launch a full-scale campaign to undercut Wilson's credibility by planting negative stories about his personal life with the media.

A more aggressive effort would come a week or so later when Cheney - who, sources said, was "consumed" with retaliating against Wilson because of his attacks on the administration's rationale for war - met with President Bush a second time and told the president that there was talk of "Wilson going public" and exposing the flawed Niger intelligence.

It was then that Cheney told Bush that a section of the classified National Intelligence Estimate that purported to show Iraq did seek uranium from Niger should be leaked to reporters as a way to counter anything report Wilson might seek to publish, these sources said.

Throughout the second half of June, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, and senior officials from Cheney's office kept Bush updated about the progress of the campaign to discredit Wilson via numerous emails and internal White House memos, these sources said, adding that some of these documents were only recently turned over to the special counsel.

One attorney close to the case said that Bush gave Cheney permission to declassify the NIE and that Cheney told Libby to leak it to Bob Woodward, the Washington Post's assistant managing editor, which Libby did on June 27, 2003.

But Woodward told Libby shortly after he received the information about the NIE that he would not be writing a story about it for the Post but that he would use the still classified information for the book he was writing at the time, Plan of Attack.

Woodward would not return calls for comment nor would Libby's attorneys Ted Wells and William Jeffress.

Libby told Cheney that he had a good relationship with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and that he intended to share the NIE with her. Libby met with Miller on July 8, 2003 and disclosed the portion of the NIE that dealt with Iraq and Niger to her.

According to four attorneys who last week read a transcript of President Bush's interview with investigators, Bush did not disclose to the special counsel that he was aware of any campaign to discredit Wilson. Bush also said he did not know who, if anyone, in the White House had retaliated against the former ambassador by leaking his wife's undercover identity to reporters.

Attorneys close to the case said that Fitzgerald does not appear to be overly concerned or interested in any alleged discrepancy in Bush's statements about the leak case to investigators.

But "if Mr. Libby continues to misrepresent the government's case against him ... President Bush and most certainly Vice President Cheney may be caught in an embarrassing position," one attorney close to the case said. "Mr. Fitzgerald will not hesitate to remind Mr. Libby of his testimony when he appeared before the grand jury."

Speaking to college students and faculty at California State University Northridge last week, Wilson said that after President Bush cited the uranium claims in his State of the Union address he tried unsuccessfully for five months to get the White House to correct the record.

"I had direct discussions with the State Department, Senate committees," Wilson said during a speech last Thursday. "I had numerous conversations to change what they were saying publicly. I had a civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said and done."

Wilson said he was rebuffed at every instance and finally decided to write an op-ed in the New York Times and expose the administration for knowingly "twisting" the intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear threat to make a case for war. The op-ed appeared in the newspaper July 8, 2003. Wilson wrote that had he personally traveled to Niger to check out the Niger intelligence and had determined it was bogus.

"Nothing more, nothing less than challenging the government to come clean on this matter," Wilson said. "That's all I did."

In the interest of fairness, any person identified in this story who believes he has been portrayed unfairly or that the information about him is untrue will have the opportunity to respond in this space.

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.

Did the White House make a conscious decision to do nothing about getting Katrina rescue efforts to the people of New Orleans?

If not, how could Bush have been relieved on Tuesday morning when he mistakenly thought that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet?"

This article is from Friday, February 10, 2006.

Now we can't give the reorganization of the Department of Home Security all the credit for single handedly screwing up the rescue system that Clinton had taken 8 years to build. The Shrub gets some credit for cutting a lot of FEMA funding too, straight across the board.

So in many areas, it didn't matter who was in charge, there was no money for the program anyway. (Here's factcheck.org and washington monthly for some more good information on that.)

White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
By Eric Lipton for The New York Times.
via
t r u t h o u t

Washington - In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.

"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought - also a number of fires."

Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.

White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.

But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.

The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.

This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.

On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed...

"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.

The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10katrina.html?hp&ex=1139634000&en=914abcf6c2b5fc5a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

also from truthout: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021006K.shtml

White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
By Eric Lipton
The New York Times

Friday 10 February 2006

Washington - In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.

"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought - also a number of fires."

Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.

White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.

But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.

The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have found.

This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.

On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.

"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.

The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.

"The real story is with this new structure," he said. "Why weren't more things done, or what prevented or delayed Mike Brown from being able to do what he would have done and did do in any other disaster?"

Although Mr. Bahamonde said in October that he had notified Mr. Brown that Monday, it was not known until recently what Mr. Brown or the Homeland Security Department did with that information, or when the White House was told.

Missteps at All Levels

It has been known since the earliest days of the storm that all levels of government - from the White House to the Department of Homeland Security to the Louisiana Capitol to New Orleans City Hall - were unprepared, uncommunicative and phlegmatic in protecting Gulf Coast residents from the floodwaters and their aftermath. But an examination of the latest evidence by The New York Times shines a new light on the key players involved in the important turning points: what they said, what they did and what they did not do, all of which will soon be written up in the committees' investigative reports.

Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony were these:

Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.

Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.

The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put no plans in place to do any of this."

Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.

The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers.

Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.

Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.

"The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine," Mr. Davis said. "In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement."

One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.

Eyewitness to Devastation

As his helicopter approached the site, Mr. Bahamonde testified in October, there was no mistaking what had happened: large sections of the levee had fallen over, leaving the section of the city on the collapsed side entirely submerged, but the neighborhood on the other side relatively dry. He snapped a picture of the scene with a small camera.

"The situation is only going to get worse," he said he warned Mr. Brown, then the FEMA director, whom he called about 8 p.m. Monday Eastern time to report on his helicopter tour.

"Thank you," he said Mr. Brown replied. "I am now going to call the White House."

Citing restrictions placed on him by his lawyers, Mr. Brown declined to tell House investigators during testimony if he had actually made that call. White House aides have urged administration officials not to discuss any conversations with the president or his top advisors and declined to release e-mail messages sent among Mr. Bush's senior advisors.

But investigators have found the e-mail message referring to Mr. Bahamonde's helicopter survey that was sent to John F. Wood, chief of staff to Secretary Chertoff at 9:27 p.m. They have also found a summary of Mr. Bahamonde's observations that was issued at 10:30 p.m. and an 11:05 p.m. e-mail message to Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of homeland security. Each message describes in detail the extensive flooding that was taking place in New Orleans after the levee collapse.

Given this chain of events, investigators have repeatedly questioned why Mr. Bush and Mr. Chertoff stated in the days after the storm that the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, as they made an effort to explain why they initially thought the storm had passed without the catastrophe that some had feared.

"The hurricane started to depart the area on Monday, and then Tuesday morning the levee broke and the water started to flood into New Orleans," Mr. Chertoff said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sept. 4, the weekend after the hurricane hit.

Mr. Chertoff and White House officials have said that they were referring to official confirmation that the levee had broken, which they say they received Tuesday morning from the Army Corps of Engineers. They also say there were conflicting reports all day Monday about whether a breach had occurred and noted that they were not alone in failing to recognize the growing catastrophe.

Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman, said it would not have made much difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the midnight report. "Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or in an hour, or even six hours," he said.

But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said it was obvious to her in retrospect that Mr. Chertoff, perhaps in deference to Mr. Brown's authority, was not paying close enough attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response to the disaster may have been slowed as a result.

"Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process," Ms. Collins said in an interview.

Compounding the problem, once Mr. Chertoff learned of the levee break on Tuesday, he could not reach Mr. Brown, his top emergency response official, for an entire day because Mr. Brown was on helicopter tours of the damage.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the homeland security committee, said the government confusion reminded him of the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Information was in different places, in that case prior to the attack," Mr. Lieberman said, "and it wasn't reaching the key decision makers in a coordinated way for them to take action."

Russ Knocke, a homeland security spokesman, said that although Mr. Chertoff had been "intensely involved in monitoring the storm" he had not actually been told about the report of the levee breach until Tuesday, after he arrived in Atlanta.

"No one is satisfied with the response in the early days," Mr. Knocke said.

But he rejected criticism by Senator Collins and others that Mr. Chertoff was disengaged.

"He was not informed of it," Mr. Knocke said. "It is certainly a breakdown. And through an after-action process, that is something we will address."

The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals or others in the urban population without cars.

Focus on Highway Plan

Mr. Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator that he had focused on improving the highway evacuation plan for the general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to remove people from hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal government.

In fact, the city was desperately in need of help. And this failure would have deadly consequences. Only 21 of the 60 or so nursing homes were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were lost in hospitals and nursing homes.

One reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is that it never bought the basic equipment needed to respond to the long-predicted catastrophe. The Fire Department had asked for inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply, but none were provided, a department official told investigators.

Timothy P. Bayard, a police narcotics commander assigned to lead a water rescue effort, said that with just three boats, not counting the two it commandeered and almost no working radios, his small team spent much of its time initially just trying to rescue detectives who themselves were trapped by rising water.

The investigators also determined that the federal Department of Transportation was not asked until Wednesday to provide buses to evacuate the Superdome and the convention center, meaning that evacuees sat there for perhaps two more days longer than necessary.

Mr. Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in retrospect, that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the response effort to the Department of Defense. It was not until the middle of the week, he said, that he asked the military to take over the delivery and distribution of water, food and ice.

"In hindsight I should have done it right then," Mr. Brown told the House, referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.

Go to Original

Former FEMA Director to Testify about Katrina
By Spencer S. Hsu
The Washington Post

Friday 10 February 2006

Denied executive privilege, Brown plans to discuss communications with Bush.

Michael D. Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was rebuffed in his request for a claim of executive privilege and plans to testify to a Senate panel today about his calls and e-mails to President Bush and top White House aides in the Hurricane Katrina crisis, Brown's lawyer said yesterday.

White House Counsel Harriet Miers declined to offer Brown a legal defense for declining to testify or respond to a Feb. 6 letter advising that without such protection Brown "intends to answer all questions fully, completely and accurately," said Brown's lawyer, Andrew W. Lester.

Lester wrote that Brown will testify if asked about communications with Bush, Vice President Cheney, Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin, domestic policy adviser Claude A. Allen and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

As the federal official in charge of the disaster before he resigned, Brown is "between a rock and a hard place," his lawyer said. "On the one hand he desires to answer fully any and all questions the Committee may have," Lester wrote. "On the other hand the President's statements indicate concern that the President be able to 'get unvarnished advice from [his] advisors.'"

House and Senate investigative committees have battled the White House over its refusal to make available top aides and their correspondence from the response to the storm. Instead, the White House has provided 15,000 pages of records and briefings by a deputy White House homeland security adviser.

Bush spokesman Trent Duffy declined to comment on Brown's letter. But Duffy noted a Jan. 26 news conference in which Bush, while declining to cite Brown by name, defended "people who give me advice" from being forced to disclose such conversations, citing a "chilling effect on future advisers."

In testimony to a House committee in September, Brown did not discuss such conversations on the advice of counsel, although he estimated that he communicated with the White House "30 times" during the weekend before Katrina made landfall on Monday, Aug. 29. That included "several" calls to Bush to help speed evacuations by Louisiana and New Orleans leaders.

Yesterday, Lester said that Brown "is planning to testify by answering all questions."

Brown could shed light on the White House's lack of awareness of events on the day of Katrina's landfall. Documents released by the Senate show that although the Homeland Security Operations Center reported at 6 p.m. Aug. 29 that no New Orleans levees had been breached, authorities received no fewer than 16 reports to the contrary before then.

Beginning at 8:30 a.m. Aug. 29, levee breaks were reported by sources including New Orleans and Louisiana homeland security officials, the Transportation Security Administration, the National Weather Service, FEMA officials, White House Homeland Security Council and Homeland Security Department "spot reports," the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, and the American Red Cross.

Today's the day you can "do something" about what's starting to look like an easy rubber stamp for Alito.

Go to http://www.nocrony.com/ to look up your local senators and give them a call *and* send them an email urging them to Filllibuster his nomination.

The Watchers: Maria Hinojosa on NOW - The Truth About Bush's Domestic Spying Program

This is from the January 13, 2006 episode of NOW.

Link to NOW website on this story, which includes documents a plenty backing up all the facts mentioned below (and much more).

So really things are getting pretty interesting.

On the one hand we have the Vice President's right hand man Scooter Libby indicted by the Justice Department for leaking CIA Agent Valerie Plame's identity.

We have Republican House Leader Tom DeLay having to step down in the face of his indictments in Texas.

We have "Bush Pioneer" Jack Abramoff pleading guilty to various money laundering and fraud charges, and in the process revealing the names of 60 or more other corrupt Republicans that were in on the racket.

But now, it would appear we have something like "Watergate On Steroids."

This isn't some office break-in that the President "knew" about via smoke filled rooms. This is an executive order straight from Bush himself self-authorizing a no-warrants-necessary domestic spying program.

Perhaps you saw Condi Rice on Meet The Press a few weeks ago making absolutely no sense whatsoever. She cites FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) as the reason for the President's authority to issue no-warrant spying. In reality, of course, FISA is actually the reason we can conclude so easily that the President so clearly broke the law; If he had obtained FISA warrants for his Domestic Spying program, it would have been legal.

Programs such as Bush's are exactly the reason that FISA was created: to protect Americans from the kinds of governement abuses carried out by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations during the 60's and early 70's. It was passed in 1978 after it came out that the government was spying heavily on whoever they wanted -- on everyone from Jane Fonda to Martin Luther King.

The point was that "No," actually, being at War isn't an excuse to throw the Constitution out the window, in case you were wondering. That part the Founding Fathers wrote about "The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures..." -- They meant that. And they meant it *especially* during times of war. Because then, like now, there was always some war going on with someone, somewhere. These rights have to be protected...but...hey, here's this other court -- one set up explicitly for granting these kinds of spying warrants, and quickly. So really, the government can still spy on you if it wants, but not as much as it wants to, willy nilly, and not without having to answer to anyone, ever. (So if you're doing something that *looks* reasonably suspicious, look out!)

And spy they did. Only 5 of the more than 19,000 spy warrants presented to FISA were ever refused. But Bush wanted to spy on even more people. And on people that maybe didn't have any connections to foreigners on the outside - what FISA was initially set up for.

Bush's supporters are also saying that Congress explicitly gave Bush permission to commit these acts under the Joint Resolution passed almost unanimously by Congress in the days immediately following 911, referring to the passage that authorizes the President "To use all necessary and appropriate force against those...planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks..." But we already know that the types of people being spied on in what came to be known as "The Program" went far beyond those directly connected to Al Quaeda or 911.

Here's NOW's take on this story. They let both sides tell there story.

But I think you will agree, after seeing the details for yourself, that it's pretty matter of fact.

I've split it up into 4 pieces. I'm learning to list them all individually now so video RSS readers, such as FireAnt will download the media.

Now The Watchers - Domestic Spying 1 of 4 (11 MB)
Now The Watchers - Domestic Spying 2 of 4 (11 MB)
Now The Watchers - Domestic Spying 3 of 4 (7.3 MB)
Now The Watchers - Domestic Spying 4 of 4 (8.6 MB)

MP3s
Now The Watchers - Domestic Spying 1 of 4 (MP3 6.8 MB)
Now The Watchers - Domestic Spying 2 of 4 (MP3 7.1 MB)
Now The Watchers - Domestic Spying 3 of 4 (MP3 5.2 MB)
Now The Watchers - Domestic Spying 4 of 4 (MP3 6.2 MB)

This is from the December 18, 2005 program of Meet the Press.

Here is a link to MTP Condi Rice video and mp3s Of Her Meet The Press Interview

it's still uploading as of 3:30pm on sunday the 18th. If it's close to then, it's still uploading...

I'm just watching this mornings Meet the Press with Condi Rice. Tim Russert is drilling her accordingly on why G.W. Bush isn't violating the same laws that Nixon violated when he authorized secret wire tapping.

She pauses, struggles with her answer for a moment (although she does get one out) and then she ends it with "I am not a lawyer."

She says it again later. ("Again, Tim, I am not a lawyer.")

Well hey. If you're not a lawyer, I guess there's no need for you to understand it completely.

Even if you are Secretary of State for the United States of America. You have people that handle that for you.

"I'm not going to talk about my role as National Security Advisor ...which of course is not a constitutionally confirmed role."

What does that even mean?

The bottom line is that Bush authorized some wire tapping (without getting a proper warrant) and she knew about it.

I'm way behind on this one guys. I just got here.

But I'll have her interview for ya in a few :-)

Oh wait. this is good:

Tim Russert: "Where in the Constitution does it say the President can eavesdrop, wiretap American citizens, without a court order?"

Condi Rice: "Tim. The President has authorities under FISA, which we are using and using actively. He also has constitutional authorities that derive from his role as Commander in Chief and his need to protect the country. He has acted within his Constitutional authority and within his statutory authority."

This is from the October 2, 2005 program of
60 Minutes.

This contains the "Military-Industrial Complex Speech" by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.

Andy Rooney's really a stand up guy! One of the few on television these days to have the courage to tell it like it is.

Video - Andy Rooney On The Military Industrial Complex Taking Over The U.S. (6 MB)

Audio - Andy Rooney On The Military Industrial Complex Taking Over The U.S. (MP3 4 MB)

Dwight D. Eisenhower:
"We must guard against the aquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disasterous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist."

Andy: "Well, Ike was right. That's just what's happened."

Complete Transcription:

I'm not really clear about how much a billion dollars is. But the United States, our United States, is spending five billion, six hundred million dollars a month ($5,600,000,000.00) fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into. We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today. Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

Now, we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way that our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China. Another way the government is planning on paying for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like medicare perscriptions, highway construction, farm payments, Amtrak, national public radio, loans to graduate students. Do these sound like things you'd like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?

I'll tell you where we ought to start saving, on our bloated military establishment. We're paying for weapons we'll never use. No other country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year, Japan spent $42 billion dollars, Italy spent $28 billion dollars, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion. We have 8,000 tanks, for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford stationwagon. We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. Enough to destroy all of mankind. We're spending $200 million dollars a year on bullets alone. That's a lot of target practice.

We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women, and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldiers what to do. We have 40,000 Colen and 870 generals.

We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President, and on leaving the White House in 1961 he said this:

"We must guard against the aquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disasterous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist."

Well, Ike was right. That's just what's happened.

These clips are from the May 9, 2005 program.

Actually, the blogging clip might be from the 10th. (Sorry.)

Daily Show Clips From May 9, 2005

Mirror of these clips (Please use it! :-) (thanks Guan!)

another mirror of these clips. (Thanks Matt!)

Metadata that goes with these clips (you can tell which is which from the filenames):

CNN's stupid blogging segments - where people actually just read from blogs verbatim, as if it's news.

A movie about Texas' freaked-out cheerleading censorship law.

Bush's visit to Russia - Putin on 60 minutes. (daily1.mov)

Samantha Bee covers the online gambling craze.

How Arnie's Screwing Over California Educators (and therefore California Education)

The Roadless Area conservation rule that Clinton signed into law before he left, and how the repubs are going about overturning it.

This is the kind of thing that really frustrates me about Colin Powell. Just like his coming out with what's wrong with the Shrub War after the election, instead of during the election, when it could have really helped.

Now he's talking to senators in private about what a loose cannon John Bolton is.

Why can't he come out and say what he knows publicly? He could blow this guy out of the water with two sentances. He could save us from the horrible fate of letting this war monger lead the nation into
WW III.

Some of you will think I'm overreacting, but I truly believe that I am calmly stating one likely possibility. Granted, it's already a possibility, with this administration in power, but it's a far more likely possibility with Bolton as our UN Ambassador.

Powell Plays Behind the Scenes Role in Bolton Debate
By Jim VandeHei and Robin Wright for the Washington Post.
(via
t r u t h o u t)

Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell is emerging as a behind the scenes player in the battle over John Bolton's nomination to the United Nations, privately telling at least two key Republican lawmakers that Bolton is smart, but a very problematic government official, according to Republican sources.

Powell spoke in recent days with Sens. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), two of three GOP members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who have raised concerns about Bolton's confirmation, the sources said. Powell did not advise the senators to oppose Bolton, but offered a frank assessment of the nominee as a man who was challenging to work with on personnel and policy matters, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

"General Powell has returned calls from senators who wanted to discuss specific questions that have been raised," said Margaret Cifrino, a Powell spokeswoman. "He has not reached out to senators" and considers the discussions private. A Chafee spokesman confirmed that at least two conversations took place. Bolton served under Powell as his undersecretary of state for arms control, and the two were known to have serious clashes.

Powell has stayed out of the confirmation fight in public, but influenced it in direct and indirect ways, according to several Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. It is not Powell's style to weigh in strongly against a former colleague, but rather direct people to what he sees as flaws and potential problems, they say. Powell's views are highly influential with many Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Those who know Powell best said two recent events provide insight into his thinking. Powell did not sign a letter from seven former US secretaries of state and defense supporting Bolton, and his former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson recently told the New York Times that Bolton would be an "abysmal ambassador."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7420-2005Apr21.html

Powell Plays Behind the Scenes Role in Bolton Debate
By Jim VandeHei and Robin Wright
The Washington Post

Friday 22 April 2005

Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell is emerging as a behind the scenes player in the battle over John Bolton's nomination to the United Nations, privately telling at least two key Republican lawmakers that Bolton is smart, but a very problematic government official, according to Republican sources.

Powell spoke in recent days with Sens. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), two of three GOP members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who have raised concerns about Bolton's confirmation, the sources said. Powell did not advise the senators to oppose Bolton, but offered a frank assessment of the nominee as a man who was challenging to work with on personnel and policy matters, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

"General Powell has returned calls from senators who wanted to discuss specific questions that have been raised," said Margaret Cifrino, a Powell spokeswoman. "He has not reached out to senators" and considers the discussions private. A Chafee spokesman confirmed that at least two conversations took place. Bolton served under Powell as his undersecretary of state for arms control, and the two were known to have serious clashes.

Powell has stayed out of the confirmation fight in public, but influenced it in direct and indirect ways, according to several Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. It is not Powell's style to weigh in strongly against a former colleague, but rather direct people to what he sees as flaws and potential problems, they say. Powell's views are highly influential with many Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Those who know Powell best said two recent events provide insight into his thinking. Powell did not sign a letter from seven former US secretaries of state and defense supporting Bolton, and his former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson recently told the New York Times that Bolton would be an "abysmal ambassador."

"On two occasions he has let it be known that the Bolton nomination is a bad one, to put it mildly," said a Democratic congressional aide. "It would be great to have Powell on the record speaking for himself, but he's unlikely to do it.

With a final committee vote delayed until next month, Chafee is studying Bolton's record and withholding judgment, his spokesman said. Chafee told reporters Wednesday he is "much less likely" to support Bolton because of questions about his credibility.

President Bush yesterday accused Democrats of blocking Bolton's nomination to the United Nations for political reasons, as the White House intensified its campaign to confirm Bolton and discredit his critics.

"John's distinguished career and service to our nation demonstrates that he is the right man at the right time for this important assignment," Bush said in a speech to insurance agents. "I urge the Senate to put aside politics and confirm John Bolton to the United Nations."

Yet it was Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) who prevented a final vote in the Senate Foreign Relations committee this week and called for more time to study Bolton's past. "The senator's motives are to do what is best for the American people," said Marcie Ridgway, Voinovich's spokesman. Chafee and Hagel share Voinovich's concerns. Powell called Hagel asking the Nebraska Republican if he should return Chafee's call. Hagel said he should, according to the sources, and be frank.

"I think it's being held up because Democrats oppose John Bolton, oppose him with passion," said Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), when asked if politics were to blame for the delay.

Bush entered the increasingly tense showdown over Bolton's nomination, as both sides are digging in for a tough fight over the confirmation of the next ambassador to the United Nations. Democrats are charging Bolton is an out-of-control bully with a history of berating people he works with and seeking to remove those who disagree with him. The White House is accusing Democrats of using "trumped up" charges to prevent a highly qualified Republican from shaking up the U.N. The committee yesterday failed to agree on whether Bolton should be called before the committee again to answer more questions.

Bolton, who has a reputation as a smart, but gruff, Bush ally, has been accused of mistreating subordinates throughout his career, threatening a female government contractor and misleading members about the handling of classified materials. Initially, Democrats opposed Bolton because of his harsh comments about the UN in the past. But their attack now centers on Bolton's character and tempermant. "I do not believe that's a convincing case," said Lugar.

Former State Department official Carl Ford last week told the committee that in 2002 Bolton sought to remove two intelligence analysts who refused to endorse a speech he was preparing on Cuba's weapons capability.

Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), the ranking minority member on the committee, last week also released a letter from Melody Townsel, a subcontractor for the US Agency for International Development in Kyrgyzstan, charging Bolton harassed her over work-related matters more than a decade ago. Since then, at least two people have denied Townsel's charges.

Democratic committee sources said Biden and others are opening new lines of inquiry, including looking into a report posted on yesterday's Newsweek website that Bolton twice clashed angrily with former US Ambassador to South Korea Thomas Hubbard. Hubbard, who appointed by Bush, has discussed his concerns about Bolton's credibility with committee members. In addition, Hubbard challenged Bolton's testimony to the committee that he had praised Bolton for a 2003 speech denouncing Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea, as a "tyrannical dictator."

Democrats are also trying to corroborate Townsel's testimony, and look into a report posted on the "Washington Note" blog that Bolton may have sought to force out members of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, on which he served, the sources said.

White House officials are moving quickly to address concerns among Republicans. Matt Kirk, the president's liaison to the Senate, grabbed Voinovich shortly after this week's hearing to tell him the White House stood ready to provide him any information he wanted, and the administration followed up with a call to Voinovich's legislative director, according to Republican sources. The White House also helped organize Republicans to speak out in favor of Bolton yesterday and get people who have worked with Bolton in the past to do the same.

The Repubs' latest fabrication is that Roosevelt himself personally endorsed private accounts, and presumably the cuts in benefits that go with them.

According to Roosevelt's grandson, James Roosevelt Jr., who is a former Associate Commissioner on Social Security, the quote was taken completely out of context. Keith Olbermann had him on the show to clear things up. The two of them go over the quote in question with a fine-toothed comb and provide the larger context in which it appears.

(see below for full quote within context)

Even a simple reading of the quote makes it clear that Roosevelt envisioned private accounts in addition to regular benefits, for those who could afford to invest in them, so they would have additional benefits later. (Not as a replacement for the current system.)

Video - Keith Olbermann and Roosevelt's Grandson Call Bush Roosevelt Claim A Fraud (14 MB)

Audio - Keith Olbermann and Roosevelt's Grandson Call Bush Roosevelt Claim A Fraud (MP3 - 9 MB)

Transcription:
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, father to the New Deal and, at minimum, mid-wife to the Social Security system, would have endorsed President Bush's plan to partially privatize it. Our third story of the countdown, that is the claim anyway of at least three conservative commentators and several Republican congressman, but it turns out, those guys pretty much just made it up...

At the risk of doing a little too much reading, just to put it on the historical record, let me read the entire quote from which those quotes were pulled (portion of quote misused by Brit Hume and others is in italics):

"In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles. First, non-contributory old age pensions for those who are now too old to build up their own insurance. It is of course clear that perhaps 30 years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions. Second, compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations. Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amount received in old age. It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supported annuity plans."

This is from the February 3, 2005 program.

In this clip, Time magazine's Joe Klein talks about the State of the Union address and the truth behind the Shrub's Social Security overhaul: it's all about benefit cuts, not increased payments due to shrewd investment of private accounts.

Joe Klein On The Daily Show (Small - 12 MB)

Audio of Joe Klein On The Daily Show (MP3 - 8 MB)

Joe Klein:

Here's the cool thing about Social Security. Yesterday, before the speech, the White House explains it the "torters," the private investment accounts, and here's the way it works:

You put your money in your own private investment account. And then, when it's time for you to retire, you give a whole lot of it back to the government so that they can dribble out little benefits to you that are the equivalent of Social Security as it now stands.

Jon Stewart:

That's really what this plan is?

Joe Klein:

If you make more than a designated amount, you might get a little bit extra. Yes.

Jon Stewart:

That's it?

Joe Klein:

It's an annuity.

Jon Stewart:

But here's what I don't understand...

Joe Klein:

It's really remarkable.

Jon Stewart:

But how does that save Social Security? Because the government still has to dish out the same amount of money, no?

Joe Klein:

Well, they're going to lower our benefits it was they're gonna actually do, and the President said he would last night.

Bush to Propose Billions in Cuts
Farm subsidies and food stamps are among the targets in the 2006 budget plan, to be sent to Congress on Monday. Opposition is building.
By Joel Havemann and Mary Curtius For The LA Times.

President Bush will propose a 2006 budget Monday that, despite record spending of about $2.5 trillion, will call for billions of dollars in cuts that will touch people on food stamps and farmers on price supports, children under Medicaid and adults in public housing...

In addition to the cuts proposed in the 2006 budget, Bush is expected to ask Congress to approve in principle many billions of dollars in additional, unspecified cuts...

The lower-income Americans who benefit from food stamps and Medicaid do not typically provide the Republican Party with many votes or campaign contributions.

The proposed budget will give states less flexibility to include working poor families with children as beneficiaries, sources said.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cuts6feb06,0,5530657.story?coll=la-home-headlines

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020605Y.shtml

Bush to Propose Billions in Cuts
By Joel Havemann and Mary Curtius
The Los Angeles Times

Sunday 06 February 2005

WASHINGTON - President Bush will propose a 2006 budget Monday that, despite record spending of about $2.5 trillion, will call for billions of dollars in cuts that will touch people on food stamps and farmers on price supports, children under Medicaid and adults in public housing.

Even before the budget is officially sent to Congress on Monday, resistance to Bush's proposals was welling up Saturday from interest groups that benefit from federal aid and from the members of Congress who represent them.

Powerful agricultural interests were among the first to label Bush's proposed budget cuts as unfair and shortsighted. Farmers receive about $15 billion annually in federal farm program payments to help produce major commodities, including corn, cotton, rice and wheat.

California farmers could end up bearing a disproportionate share of the burden if the cuts in crop subsidies were enacted, said economist Daniel Sumner. "Rice and cotton are very important to this state," said Sumner, who is director of the Agricultural Issues Center at UC Davis.

The cuts are being proposed as the president is striving to keep a campaign promise to rein in government spending and halve the federal deficit in five years. The deficit has soared since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war on terrorism - and as revenue has fallen as the economy has slowed and tax cuts have taken effect.

In addition to the cuts proposed in the 2006 budget, Bush is expected to ask Congress to approve in principle many billions of dollars in additional, unspecified cuts.

Bush has seemed to challenge congressional Republicans and Democrats to make the tough choices necessary to achieve the deficit reductions that members on both sides of the aisle have called for recently.

"I welcome the bipartisan calls to control the spending appetite of the federal government," he said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "On Monday, my administration will submit a budget that holds the growth of discretionary spending below inflation."

Deficit hawks outside the government welcomed Bush's tone but warned that members of Congress would fight to maintain spending for programs popular with their voters.

"It's going to be a tight budget," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group that lobbies for smaller deficits. "That doesn't mean it's going to be a realistic budget."

Bush's budget will cut "where the money is," Bixby said Saturday, "but it's also where the resistance is."

The lower-income Americans who benefit from food stamps and Medicaid do not typically provide the Republican Party with many votes or campaign contributions.

The proposed budget will give states less flexibility to include working poor families with children as beneficiaries, sources said.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said he was willing to trim farm subsidies if other programs suffered proportionately.

"But if they try to single out the farm bill," Chambliss told reporters on Capitol Hill last week, "then we are going to have one heck of a fight."

The administration will propose a 5% across-the-board cut in price supports for crops and a reduction from $360,000 to $250,000 in the annual cap on subsidies that farmers can receive.

Under the current system, some farmers evade the limit by dividing farms into several separate corporate entities, a practice that the budget also will seek to eliminate.

A Senate Agriculture Committee aide, saying evasion of the cap was extremely rare, argued that farmers needed the safety net of federal aid for the years when they could not sell their crops for the cost of producing them.

In a letter Thursday to Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, a coalition of more than 100 organizations led by the American Farm Bureau Federation, said that Congress, in the 2002 bill that authorized farm subsidies for seven more years, had already cut subsidies by $4 billion a year by imposing the $360,000 cap.

"A budget that requires further cuts or structural weakening in these important programs will put at risk the promising environmental benefits of the bill and the nutritional health of some of the poorest populations in our country," the letter said.

In California, 1.5 metric tons of rice is grown a year, second only to Arkansas, said Tim Johnson, chief executive of the California Rice Commission, which has about 1,500 farmer members. Approximately 600,000 acres of farmland in the state were planted in rice in 2004.

"It's not just farmers that benefit - rice plays an important role in the economy of California," Johnson said. "We are an important export crop - about 40% of what's produced in the state is exported to Japan, Korea, Taiwan and other countries."

Daren Coppock, chief executive of the National Assn. of Wheat Growers, said the budget must not be balanced on the backs of farmers. Referring to the $360,000 maximum payment, he said: "If they change it now, that's not terribly helpful to those who made purchasing decisions over a seven-year planning period.

"The other thing to remember: The president always proposes, but Congress writes it and puts it into law," Coppock said. "There is a lot of work to be done and a lot of people to be heard from before this gets finished."

Rumors of the proposed farm subsidy cuts had been widely circulating in Washington for days before officials at the Department of Agriculture confirmed them in a background briefing to reporters. But the food stamp cut, expected to be about $1 billion in a $32-billion program, received less notice.

States must provide food stamps to people on cash welfare. But this is a much smaller population since Congress overhauled welfare in 1976.

A larger number of people now receive federal job-related aid, such as child care for working women with small children. The budget, sources said, gives states less flexibility to provide food stamps to these working poor people.

The nation's governors can be expected to lead the opposition to this proposal, just as they fought a 2003 proposal to cut their federal Medicaid support in return for greater flexibility in administering the program.

Administration officials made public Friday their proposal for increasing access to health insurance, and critics said they expected the budget itself to make another try at giving more flexibility and fewer dollars.

As announced Friday, the administration said it could save $60 billion in Medicaid over 10 years without service cuts. About $40 billion would come from changes in the way Washington pays the states for Medicaid services. The administration says states are gaming the Medicaid program by unfairly inflating costs.

Amid the welter of spending cuts, a few domestic programs were singled out for increases. Among them: community health clinics and aid to schools in low-income neighborhoods - although those schools are slated for a smaller increase than Bush proposed last year.

The budget also will seek $3 billion for the Millennium Challenge Account, the president's signature effort to help poor countries boost their economic growth. That is $500 million more than was sought for 2005 - but $2 billion less than was promised last year for 2006.

And the budget would expand Pell grants, which help the lowest-income students attend college, at the expense of the Perkins loan program for low- and middle-income college students. The $6-billion loan program would be eliminated.

Eighteen housing and community development programs would be consolidated and cut by about 40% to a total of $3.7 billion.

The budget also proposes eliminating federal subsidies for Amtrak, the national passenger rail carrier. Subsidies totaled $1.2 billion this year.

This is from the January 20, 2005 program.

These guys are starting to cover real news in a timely manner.

Jon calls out the fact that, in his acceptance speech, the shrub uses the word "freedom" 27 times and "liberty" 15 times.

Daily Show On The Shrub's Inauguration Speech
(Small - 9 MB)

Daily Show On The Shrub's Inauguration Speech
(MP3 - 6 MB)

ROE V. WADE AT CROSSROADS: Abortion foes are just one Supreme Court justice away from victory
In Newsweek.

Anyone who thinks abortion rights aren't in serious jeopardy should consider the plight of Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Specter has been a Republican for 40 years. He's in line to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January. He has voted to confirm every single one of President George W. Bush's judicial nominees. Despite that record, angry conservatives are determined to block his rise to chairman. Why?

Because Specter supports abortion rights. And because he had the temerity to state the obvious: That Bush would have trouble winning Senate confirmation of any Supreme Court nominee who is notoriously anti-abortion rights. That's a simple mathematical fact.

It takes only 51 of 100 Senate votes to confirm a judicial nominee. But it takes 60 votes to cut off debate and move to a confirmation vote. Come January, there will be 55 Republicans in the Senate. Do the math. That's not enough to derail a determined Democratic filibuster. Specter said he was alluding to that numerical reality when he made the remark that has haunted him all week.

But conservative foes of abortion rights have been emboldened by the perception that they provided Bush's margin of victory Nov. 2. They aren't of a mind to tolerate even the barest hint of resistance to their agenda, which is reversal of Roe v. Wade. That would be a tragedy. It would strip women of the right to control their bodies and turn the clock back to the grisly days of back-alley abortions.

Bush has a choice to make. Option 1: He could opt for polarizing political warfare by nominating anti-abortion absolutists for the top court. He could push for a change in Senate filibuster rules to deprive Democrats of that time-honored tactic and rely on raw political power to beat back all opposition. Option 2: Do what he promised during the campaign - impose no abortion litmus test for judicial candidates, while nominating people who will strictly interpret the Constitution rather than legislating from the bench. That's the better course...

Replacing Rehnquist, a solid vote against abortion rights, isn't likely to alter the court balance. But that balance could tip decisively should any one of the abortion-rights supporters leave the bench. That includes Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, as well as swing voters David Souter, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, whose positions on abortion are less black and white.

The nation may be approaching a legal sea change that could end or sharply curtail a woman's right to abortion. But change that profound should be approached through reasoned debate, not a political beat-down.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vproe134040507nov13,0,6398338.story?coll=ny-editorials-headlines

Abortion foes are just one Supreme Court justice away from victory

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November 13, 2004

Anyone who thinks abortion rights aren't in serious jeopardy should consider the plight of Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Specter has been a Republican for 40 years. He's in line to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January. He has voted to confirm every single one of President George W. Bush's judicial nominees. Despite that record, angry conservatives are determined to block his rise to chairman. Why?

Because Specter supports abortion rights. And because he had the temerity to state the obvious: That Bush would have trouble winning Senate confirmation of any Supreme Court nominee who is notoriously anti-abortion rights. That's a simple mathematical fact.

It takes only 51 of 100 Senate votes to confirm a judicial nominee. But it takes 60 votes to cut off debate and move to a confirmation vote. Come January, there will be 55 Republicans in the Senate. Do the math. That's not enough to derail a determined Democratic filibuster. Specter said he was alluding to that numerical reality when he made the remark that has haunted him all week.

But conservative foes of abortion rights have been emboldened by the perception that they provided Bush's margin of victory Nov. 2. They aren't of a mind to tolerate even the barest hint of resistance to their agenda, which is reversal of Roe v. Wade. That would be a tragedy. It would strip women of the right to control their bodies and turn the clock back to the grisly days of back-alley abortions.

Bush has a choice to make. Option 1: He could opt for polarizing political warfare by nominating anti-abortion absolutists for the top court. He could push for a change in Senate filibuster rules to deprive Democrats of that time-honored tactic and rely on raw political power to beat back all opposition. Option 2: Do what he promised during the campaign - impose no abortion litmus test for judicial candidates, while nominating people who will strictly interpret the Constitution rather than legislating from the bench. That's the better course.

Partisan warfare over the abortion positions of Supreme Court nominees would inflame the country's political division and undermine public confidence in the independence of the judicial system.

Bush has the right to nominate people who share his political views. But he should engage Democrats in the process in search of nominees acceptable to both sides. Democrats have blocked 10 of his lower court picks, employing the filibuster as their weapon of choice. But Bush is in the driver's seat. The Senate confirmed more than 200 of his judicial nominees, many of whom share his anti-abortion convictions.

Anti-abortion forces won't like a less confrontational approach because they're just one justice away from achieving their objective. Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, commanded a 7 to 2 majority in 1973. More recent abortion decisions have seen that majority slip to 5 to 4. There are no immediate Supreme Court vacancies. There haven't been any for a decade. But the court is aging and Chief Justice William Rehnquist was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer. There will probably be one or more spots to fill in the next four years.

Replacing Rehnquist, a solid vote against abortion rights, isn't likely to alter the court balance. But that balance could tip decisively should any one of the abortion-rights supporters leave the bench. That includes Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, as well as swing voters David Souter, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, whose positions on abortion are less black and white.

The nation may be approaching a legal sea change that could end or sharply curtail a woman's right to abortion. But change that profound should be approached through reasoned debate, not a political beat-down.

This is from the November 7, 2004 program.

Karl Rove On Meet The Press (Parts 1-3) (19 MB, 18 MB, 9 MB)

I found the "Political Capital" Shrub speech I and others were looking for (Thanks Hetty).

There are Windows and Real clips available, but nothing you can download.

I'd still prefer a copy from one of you so keep looking everybody, ok?

There's also a transcription available ("More" below).

It's even more frightening to read it in print.

Apparently, he's enjoying himself madly. (Emphasis on madly.)

How can he laugh and crack jokes when he's going Roman on Fallujah, killing thousands of innocents, and sending 10,000 of our troops to their death in the process?

He's also decided that our "Free Press" only needs to have one question answered at a time now.

He also hasn't bothered to figure out how much the war will cost, or how many troops it's going to take to do the job.

Incredible that he hasn't felt the need to do President work while campaigning while we're casually at War on the other side of the globe. The War's like a back drop to him. Like "Made In America."

He's also lying about when he says that he hasn't heard from anyone in the army that they need more troops. They've been saying that since before we made our first attack. The estimates were 200-300,000 soldiers would be needed to do the jjob. (It's all in the Rumsfeld's War program on PBS's Frontline.

Q Would you like it? Now that the political volatility is off the issue because the election is over, I'd like to ask you about troop levels in Iraq in the next couple of months leading up to elections. The Pentagon already has a plan to extend tours of duty for some 6,500 U.S. troops. How many more will be needed to provide security in Iraq for elections, seeing as how the Iraqi troops that you're trying to train up are pretty slow coming on line?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, first of all, the -- we are making good progress in training the Iraqi troops. There will be 125,000 of them trained by election time. Secondly, I have yet to -- I have not sat down with our Secretary of Defense talking about troop levels. I read some reports during the course of the campaign where some were speculating in the press corps about the number of troops needed to protect elections. That has not been brought to my attention yet.

And so I would caution you that what you have either read about or reported was pure speculation thus far. These elections are important, and we will respond, John, to requests of our commanders on the ground. And I have yet to hear from our commanders on the ground that they need more troops...

Q Do you feel more free, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, in terms of feeling free, well, I don't think you'll let me be too free. There's accountability and there are constraints on the presidency, as there should be in any system. I feel -- I feel it is necessary to move an agenda that I told the American people I would move. Something refreshing about coming off an election, even more refreshing since we all got some sleep last night, but there's -- you go out and you make your case, and you tell the people this is what I intend to do. And after hundreds of speeches and three debates and interviews and the whole process, where you keep basically saying the same thing over and over again, that when you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that's what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as the President, now let's work to -- and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let's work together.

And it's one of the wonderful -- it's like earning capital. You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That's what happened in the -- after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I've earned capital in this election -- and I'm going to spend it for what I told the people I'd spend it on, which is -- you've heard the agenda: Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror...

Listen, thank you all. I look forward to working with you. I've got a question for you. How many of you are going to be here for a second term? Please raise your hand. (Laughter.)

Good. Gosh, we're going to have a lot of fun, then. Thank you all.

Here is the full text of the webpage in case the administration decides to alter it in the future:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/11/20041104-5.html

President Holds Press Conference

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President's Remarks
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President George W. Bush holds a press conference in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004. White House photo by Tina Hager. 11:17 A.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all. Please be seated. Yesterday I pledged to reach out to the whole nation, and today I'm proving that I'm willing to reach out to everybody by including the White House press corps.

This week the voters of America set the direction of our nation for the next four years. I'm honored by the support of my fellow citizens, and I'm ready for the job.

We are fighting a continuing war on terror, and every American has a stake in the outcome of this war. Republicans, Democrats and independents all love our country, and together we'll protect the American people. We will preserve -- we will persevere until the enemy is defeated. We will stay strong and resolute. We have a duty, a solemn duty to protect the American people, and we will.

Every civilized