The Hollywood Liberal

Bush condemns Green Zone attack

AP
Excerpt:
“There is a type of person that would walk in that building and kill innocent life and that is the same type of person that is willing to come and kill innocent Americans,”…
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the attack showed terrorists were determined to destroy the Iraqi people’s dreams of democracy, but did not mean that Bush’s troop increase in Iraq had failed…
McCain said the bombing could not take away from the initial, small successes of the surge. “It makes all of us sad for these public servants who have been injured or killed, but I don’t think you can change the larger picture (that) we are achieving some small successes,” said McCain, a presidential candidate who has been a vocal supporter of the war effort….

HL’s Take
It has gotten to the point now where we know they are lying, and they know that we know that they are lying so why not just tell the most obvious lies possible. It’s not like anything is going to be done about it. So why even try to come up with something plausible. After 4 years and another 40,000 more troops being sent over there they still cannot even protect their own people at the highest levels in the green zone, let alone the American soldiers and Iraqi citizens over there. It is failure at it’s most stunning level of incompetence. Which is exactly the way Bush, and Rice want it. The longer we fail the longer we stay and the more money Bush makes. In another year and a half the Bush family will slither off to Paraguay with the US Treasury never to be heard from again. Then we can start rebuilding America from the ground up. Like we did with Clinton, after the last Bush fiasco. Oh and by the way more proof the Surge is a piece of S**t just like the people who came up with the idea.

April 2007: The deadliest month of the Iraq occupation

Attytood
Excerpt:

We’re more than a third of the way through April now, and I haven’t seen this actually reported in the media anywhere, but unfortunately this has been the deadliest month for the U.S.-led coalition forces — on an average daily basis — of the four-year occupation of Iraq.

So far, according to icasualties.org, 47 American troops and six British soldiers have died in the 11 days of April so far — an average of 4.82 coalition deaths every day. And — looking at the month to month statistics — no month has been that high since Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003.

Not even November 2004, when the U.S. beseiged Fallujah in the days following President Bush’s re-election — the daily fatality average that month was 4.7. In April 2004, when radical Shiites loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr were up in arms, the average was 4.67 coalition deaths per day. Ironically, al-Sadr’s henchmen had been sitting out the recent fighting, but just yesterday the radical cleric renewed his pressure, at least verbally, on the Americans. Does that mean things get even worse before they get better?

Next they will be saying the dog ate them. Aren’t you glad the grownups are back in power?

Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing

Washington Post
Excerpt:
A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years’ worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman’s account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove — and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts — from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Waxman said the RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also raised the possibility that Rove had personally deleted the missing e-mails, all dating back to before 2005.

Leahy says Bush aides lied about e-mails

AP
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON – President Bush’s aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said Thursday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.

“They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.

“You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many servers,” said Leahy, D-Vt. “Those e-mails are there, they just don’t want to produce them. We’ll subpoena them if necessary.”

Archiving old e-mail a compliance and legal issue

Globe & Mail
Excerpt:
Spoliation: it’s an ugly piece of legal jargon. But if you haven’t put in place an e-mail archiving policy, you may learn its meaning, and it won’t be pleasant.

Samsung Electronics found that out a couple of years ago when its failure to produce requested e-mails in a legal dispute with Ottawa’s Mosaid Technologies Inc. led a New Jersey judge to conclude the tech giant had engaged in e-mail spoliation (or destruction) to prevent the messages’ contents from hurting its case.

“The fact that no technical e-mails were preserved . . . demonstrates, at the least, extremely reckless behaviour,” the judge ruled. (Samsung ended up settling the case.) Others, from Philip Morris to Morgan Stanley to a growing number of Canadian firms, have similarly learned that arguing e-mails couldn’t be located in time or were automatically deleted by the server gets no more credence today than claiming the dog ate them.

World Bank boss admits mistake on girlfriend’s job

Washington Post
Excerpt:
Wolfowitz personally ordered the hefty pay rises given to his Libyan-born partner, Shaha Riza, according to a Financial Times report published on Thursday.

It cited two people who had seen a memo from Wolfowitz to the head of human resources spelling out the terms of the package…

While still on the World Bank payroll, she was rapidly promoted and ended up with a $200,000 package – more than Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state.

Wolfowitz acknowledged that the situation surrounding Riza “had the potential to harm this institution” and stressed that he had initially wanted no involvement in her employment terms.

Given his romantic involvement with her, he faced a “painful personal dilemma when I was new to the institution” but had made a “good-faith effort to promote my understanding of that advice” of the ethics committee.

More from CNN
Wolfowitz, who was nominated for the bank job in 2005 by President Bush, joined the institution from the Pentagon, where he was one of the architects of Iraq war.

He has faced lingering distrust by many staff members and resentment over his close ties to the Bush administration and his role in the Iraq war that have overshadowed his first two years at the bank.

The bank’s staff representative association, which demanded last week that Wolfowitz explain his actions, have called on Wolfowitz to resign, saying it seemed impossible for the institution, whose mission is to fight global poverty, to move forward “with any sense of purpose under the present leadership.”

HL’s Take
This guy is the man who put the biggest debacle in American history in motion. He is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, in the biggest failure in the history of the earth, so of course Bush promotes him and makes him the President of The World Bank (we won’t even get into what’s going on over there) But the only way he can get any is to give the “woman” $200,000. Hey Paulie you could have gotten some through the DC Madam for a lot less, and saved your job. Of course Bush has already made a statement of support for his brother in evil.

PAUL KRUGMAN: For God’s Sake

NY Times
Excerpt:
In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement — the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right — suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure,” he wrote, “and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university’s law school. She’s the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.