Dear Sen. Arlen Spector,

Please stop trying to hold up the nomination process for Attorney General-designate Eric Holder.
Why do you feel like you need to "tenderize" him? Is it because the 5-year statute of limitations will be up in March on Bush, Card and Gonzales allowing the secret taps on journalists, talk show hosts, and various other Democrats? Are you afraid of someone being prosecuted for torture or illegal wire tapping? Please stop listening to the advice of Karl Rove. It's time to put aside childish ways and partisan ploys.

You can copy and past this note into the contact form on Specter's website at http://specter.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.ContactForm

More from the Department of Injustice

More on the Department of Injustice
Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper — Schleswig Leader, Thursday, May, 31, 2007 – Page 3 by Ted Mallory http://tmal.multiply.com

“Caging” is a technique that political operatives use to disqualify voters. This is not just another political “Dirty Trick,” (remember those from the Nixon era?) Caging is a way of targeting a group of voters that you suspect will vote for your opponent, and making sure that their vote doesn’t count.

One way to cage is to send registered mail to a voter’s address. The cager hopes that the mail will be returned as undeliverable, or that the voter will refuse to sign for the letter. When that happens, they can use the failed delivery to call the voter’s home address into question and force them to prove that they can legally vote.

“Caging lists” are simply rosters of people who didn’t respond to the registered mailing. These lists are given to political operatives who volunteer to work at the polls on election day. When someone on the list shows up to vote, the operatives will challenge them. Often voters give up and leave without voting, or cast a provisional ballot which is less likely to be counted.
Caging targets the most vulnerable voters, people who might have the hardest time proving their status. For instance; the elderly, Black veterans or homeless people.

Former liaison to the White House for the Justice Department, Monica Goodling testified to the House Judiciary Committee, last week that Deputy Attorney General McNulty knew that the White House’s pick of interim US Attorney for Eastern Arkansas, Tim Griffin, had been involved in vote caging during the 2004 presidential election. Griffin, a former research director of the Republican National Committee, was behind a plot to disenfranchise 70,000 Florida voters during the 2004 presidential election, according to BBC News.

Hmmm. Sure would be convenient for Republicans to be able to suppress votes in Arkansas come 2008. In the event that the Democratic Presidential candidate were to be, say, the former First Lady of that state, delivering a big win to whatever Republican candidate is running would sure make her look bad.

The most frightening thing about this whole Justice Department mess is that it has turned up proof like this, that there is a ruthless movement among some (not all, mind you) Republicans to establish a one-party system in our country.

I have moderate friends who say, “yeah but we shouldn’t concentrate too much power in the hands of the Democrats either, because neither party should control all three branches of government.

Yeah, okay, except that they’re forgetting that as Will Rogers once said, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
This caging business is more than enough reason for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to be impeached.

Much of Goodling’s also testimony underscored the inconsistency (dishonesty?) of Attorney General Gonzales’ previous testimony.

And incase you didn’t hear about it from the mainstream media (Larry King was busy talking about Joey Buttafuco and Amy Fischer’s affair- circa 1997!) There’s also the little thing about how Gonzo tried to strong arm his predecessor into violating the Constitution for the President.
You hadn’t heard about that? Oh, well, it seems like former Attorney General John Ashcroft (no great defender of civil rights and civil liberties himself) was on his death bed after an attack of gallbladder pancreatitis.

According to testimony from former Deputy Atty. Gen. James Comey, Gonzales, then the top White House lawyer, and then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card tried to persuade Ashcroft to sign papers reauthorizing President Bush’s controversial warrantless domestic wiretapping program.

Ashcroft, former Solicitor General Theodore Olson and FBI Director Robert Mueller all believed the program to be illegal and were all willing to quit, rather than sign off on it.
Ashcroft reminded the two thugs that he wasn’t even acting Attorney General at the time and that they’s have to ask Comey. The left without even acknowledging Comey was in the hospital room.

That night Card called Comey and demanded that he meet with them in the White house.
Comey refused to meet with them without witnesses. He asked FBI Director Oslon to accompany him. The four men discussed their differences over the program and the next day the White house reauthorized the program without any approval from the Justice Department.

I know that the Democrats will never have the votes to impeach President Bush or Vice President Cheney, but I think that there may be enough Republicans who actually value the rule of law that they could impeach Gonzales. I don’t think that a mere non-binding “no confidence” vote goes far enough.

Please, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, write your Congressman and tell them that you value justice too much to let Gonzales continue as the top law enforcement officer of the land. Write IA Dist 5 Rep. Steve King Write IA Sen. Tom Harkin Write IA Sen. Chuck Grassley

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PS (About the Cartoon) Man, Lieberman burns me! Everyone is angry that the House Dems gave Bush what he wanted on the Iraq Funding bill, but the fact is that part of the pressure they're facing from Republicans is because of this dweeb from Connecticut. If only South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson would get healed-up and head back to DC.

On the technical side. I spent WAY too much time on this cartoon. ( I SO need to be getting the yearbook done) I'm also afraid that I relied on the "warp" tool in PhotoShop too much, instead of my own caricaturing skills. Be that as it may, I kind of like how it turned out. I think it looks like some REAL professional cartoonist somewhere did it, instead of me.

Oh, by the way- check out his tie! Cool huh?

Go see a lot more of my cartoons at http://tmal.multiply.com/photos/album/2

A fox was protecting the hen house

A fox was protecting the hen house
Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper — Schleswig Leader, Thursday,March 22, 2007 – Page 3

I was really starting to believe that the treasonous outing of CIA agent Valarie Plame in retaliation for her husband, career Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s criticism of the Bush Administration lying us into the war in Iraq would be their undoing. Especially after Vice President Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff Scooter Libby was found guilty on four of five perjury and obstruction of justice charges relating to the leaking of Plane’s identity to conservative pundit Robert Novak and others. Extra especially when Congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday he wants Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to testify before his committee about his investigation. There was even a chance that Waxman would eventually subpoena the vice president and senior adviser to the president Karl Rove.

But then another scandal broke. Boy, it’s amazing what the power of subpoena and proper congressional oversight of the executive branch can bring to light.
It seems that at least eight U.S. Attorneys were fired because they weren’t loyal enough to the Bush administration and weren’t aggressive enough in investigating Democratic candidates in the 2004 and 06 elections.

Some people compared the Libby decision to when Nixon aide Alexander Butterworth let it slip before a Senate committee that there was a secret tape recording system in the Oval Office. People are comparing the firing the of eight U.S. Attorneys to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973.

What happened that night is that President Nixon, sick of taking so much heat during the Watergate investigations, called Attorney general Elliot Richardson and asked him to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson let the President know that he was overstepping his Constitutional bounds, refused to fire Cox and resigned. Nixon then called Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus and told him to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused and Nixon fired him. That meant that the Solicitor general, Robert Bork became acting Attorney General, and loyalist that he was, he gave Cox the ax. Nixon then declared that there was no longer an independent prosecutor and all of the Watergate investigations would come under the responsibility of the Justice Department and it’s new boss, Bork. This was one of the high crimes and misdemeanors that were described in the articles of impeachment that were started against Nixon before he so graciously resigned.

According to ABC reports last Thursday, March 15, one e-mail from Kyle Sampson, who worked at the Justice Department to then-deputy White House Counsel David Leitch shows that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and then White House Counsel, now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were both thinking about firing all 93 U.S. attorneys as early as January 2005.
Gonzales first told a congressional committee that White House counsel Harriet Miers (who was later a Supreme Court nominee) had brought up the idea, but that both he and Rove rejected the idea out of hand. Then he changed his story and half-admitted that “mistakes were made.”
In one e-mail they discuss replacing “15-20 percent of the current U.S. Attorneys,” because “80-85 percent, I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies, etc.”

Bush defenders argue that many Presidents have fired U.S. Attorneys, but what they fail to mention is that they do it as soon as they come into office and they replace people who their predecessors had appointed. This administration fired their own appointees because they obeyed the law rather than letting themselves be pressured into letting the White House abuse the Justice Department for political means.

Gonzales attempted to place limitations on the Freedom of Information Act by restricting access to the records of former presidents.

Gonzales authored a controversial memo in January of 2002 that concluded that the Geneva Conventions were “quaint” and outdated He wrote a Presidential Order allowing for secret prisons and torture. He’s also deported people to nations that allow torture.
He fought with Congress to keep Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy task force documents secret.

Gonzales was a major proponent of the USA PATRIOT Act. Things like secret wire tapping without warrants and opening U.S. citizen’s mail.

It’s ironic that someone with so little regard tor the Constitution should have been appointed top law enforcement officer of our Nation. Our only hope is that like with Nixon, our system still works. If it does, he will eventually be prosecuted under it.

Ted Mallory lives in Charter Oak and teaches at Boyer Valley Schools in Dunlap. ‘Ted’s Column’ has appeared weekly in the Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper since 2002. If you’d like to see any of Ted’s editorial cartoons bigger and brighter, you can visit http://tmal.multiply.com/photos/album/2