Saturday, May 27, 2006

Random News & Views Roundup

- Alberto Gonzales was actually going to quit Bush if he didn't get his way in the FBI's search of Rep William Jefferson's office:

Mr. Gonzales was joined in raising the possibility of resignation by the deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, the officials said. Mr. Gonzales and Mr. McNulty told associates that they had an obligation to protect evidence in a criminal case and would be unwilling to carry out any White House order to return the material to Congress.

The potential showdown was averted Thursday when President Bush ordered the evidence to be sealed for 45 days to give Congress and the Justice Department a chance to work out a deal.

And, FBI Director Mueller was ready to resign as well. Whiny wankers. Dear Leader Bush doesn't care about the law. He just didn't want to lose his precious appointees. That would have been embarrassing and Bush can't have that, now can he?

- AT&T leaked sensitive information when it filed its brief on the lawsuit it's facing in the NSA spying program.

AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable (click here for PDF).

But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11.

The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic.

So much for that 'technological giant' moniker.

- Iraqis shot for wearing shorts after militants had distributed pamphlets forbidding shorts. With the ever-changing rules, how is one supposed to know what they might get killed for?

- General Michael Hayden, the man who doesn't even understand the 'probable cause' portion of the fourth amendment, was confirmed by the senate on Friday as the new CIA director. Another Bush Yes Man in a position of extreme power. Expect the worst.

- Time Magazine has been court-ordered to hand over drafts of an article written by Matt Cooper in the Libby case. Earlier this week, the court decided that Judith's Miller's infamous notebooks were not relevant to Libby's defense.

The Cooper documents include unpublished drafts of his July 25, 2005, article recounting Cooper's grand jury testimony and giving his version of the conversation with Libby upon which some of the indictment is based.

Time had argued there was no need to hand over the drafts, because they were essentially the same as the published article. But after reading them, Walton said, he "discerns a slight alteration between the several drafts of the articles, which the defense could arguably use to impeach Cooper" as a witness.

Because of pretrial confidentiality rules, Walton wrote, "the Court has purposefully excluded what the alteration was."

- Bush blooper of the day - speaking at West Point, the great communicator said:

"This is only the beginning," Bush said. "The message has spread from Damascus to Tehran that the future belongs to freedom, and we will not rest until the promise of liberty reaches every people in every nation."

Every time he goofs up in public, Laura dies a little bit inside.

No comments:

Post a Comment