Waxman Subpoenaed Bush And Cheney’s FBI Interviews

By- Suzie-Q @ 7:30 PM MST

Bush, Cheney’s FBI Interviews Subpoenaed

TPM Muckraker

By Andrew Tilghman – June 16, 2008, 12:40PM

At first Rep. Henry Waxman asked politely.

But today the chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee issued subpoenas for the FBI’s paperwork stemming from interviews of Vice President Cheney and President Bush regarding the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

What are the odds Attorney General Michael Mukasey turns them over?

Meanwhile, we can expect former White House press secretary Scott McClellan to be on Capital Hill testifying about the same matter on Friday.

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Panic Hits Europe Over Failed EU Treaty!

GEF @ 6:48 PM MST

Sarkozy heads to Prague for emergency EU treaty talks

ELITSA VUCHEVA

French president Nicolas Sarkozy will today (16 June) fly to Prague for emergency talks on the Lisbon Treaty with the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, with Czech president Vaclav Klaus declaring the treaty dead after the Irish No vote.

“The project is over in its entirety,” Czech president Vaclav Klaus said after the rejection of the EU pact by Irish voters last week, AFP reports. “It makes no sense to continue the ratification of a dead document.”

The Lisbon treaty was signed last December – but is already “a dead document,” says the Czech president (Photo: Portuguese EU Presidency)

The Irish No vote represents a “victory for freedom and reason over artificial elitist projects and European bureaucracy,” he added.

Mr Klaus’ remarks come amid calls by the European Commission and some EU leaders – in particular French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel – for the ratification process to continue in the remaining EU countries.

Czech prime minister Mirek Topolanek did not comment himself on whether or not his country should approve the document, admitting nevertheless that the Irish result was a “political complication.”

The Czech Republic will take over the EU’s rotating presidency from France on 1 January 2009.

So far, parliaments in 18 EU member states have approved the Lisbon treaty. The UK has also indicated it would proceed with the document’s ratification.

Meanwhile, an adviser to Polish president Lech Kaczynski – who still has to complete Poland’s ratification by signing the document – has said that Mr Kaczynski should know whether the Lisbon treaty exists before he goes forward.

“For now, there is a strong suggestion the treaty may have ceased to exist as it was rejected by one [EU] country,” the presidential aide, Michal Kaminski, told Polish daily Rzeczpospolita.

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, is strongly pro-ratification, however. A TNS OBOP opinion poll over the weekend said 71 percent of Poles would back the treaty if there was a referendum in Poland.

German leader Angela Merkel will meet Mr Tusk in Gdansk today for a pre-arranged visit on Polish foreign policy plans for the union’s eastern neighbours. The pair will also discuss the EU treaty conundrum.

Paris nervous

The Irish No vote has made Paris particularly nervous, as France is to take over the rotating EU presidency in two weeks’ time.

Mr Sarkozy was quick to react to the referendum result saying ratification in the eight remaining countries should continue, “so that the Irish incident does not become a crisis.”

For his part, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, French EU minister, told French weekly Journal du Dimanche on Sunday: “We have lost a few months in terms of the institutional blueprint, but we haven’t lost any time as far as our plans [for the presidency] are concerned.”

“You can count on the [French] president not to leave Europe malfunctioning,” he added.

France has put forward an ambitious agenda for its six-month term at the EU’s helm, with priorities including immigration, defence, and climate change.

Several analysts and commentators have said the result of the referendum in Ireland may put a brake on the country’s far-reaching plans however, forcing it to focus on institutional issues instead.

Paris is counting on a “political agreement” at this week’s EU summit (19 – 20 June) to maintain its presidency’s agenda, Mr Jouyet said.

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Open Head Thread! Nerve Agents..

GEF @ 3:58 PM MST

CHEMICAL DEATH: BioTechs Use Nerve Agents On All Of Our Food!

MORGELLONS ANYONE ?

HOW ABOUT SOME GMO BEER ?….YUMMM!

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McCain’s Caveman Politics…

By- Suzie-Q @ 12:05 PM MST

McCain’s Playbook: Hate, Fear and Caveman Politics

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted June 16, 2008

Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, the media-manufactured ‘maverick’ has remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge.

Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. Half a continent away, amid yet another legacy-smashing fusillade of unsolicited invective from Bill Clinton, the excruciating Obama-Hillary mess is finally wrapping up, in a pair of anticlimactic primaries somewhere over the darkened plains of Montana and South Dakota. But here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy — who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who’s never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans?

You’d never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America “backward,” to the failed ideas of the Sixties. “I’m surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!” he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, “That’s not change we can believe in!”

The choice of New Orleans as a launching pad for McCain’s national campaign is the kind of leadenly obvious move that people who do politics for a living are pleased to call “sound strategy”: For a candidate supposedly desperate to avoid carrying the Bush label into November, this disaster-stricken city is about the only place in the country that offers a striking visual image of a Bush policy that McCain has actually criticized. So the candidate dragged himself onstage here, ostensibly to perform the dreary business of “distancing himself” from Bush by once again criticizing the president’s response to Katrina. The Bush-bashing money quote — “Americans have a right to expect basic competence from their government!” — was featured prominently in media accounts.

More

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Afternoon Jukebox… Rock The Casbah

By- Suzie-Q @ 12:00 PM MST

The Clash – Rock The Casbah (Live-US Festival 1983)

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McCain vs. McCain

By- Suzie-Q @ 7:00 AM MST

McCain vs. himself

Carpetbagger Report

Posted June 15th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

For all of the enormous differences between Barack Obama and John McCain, running second are the differences between John McCain and himself.

It’s a little long for TV, but with a little snip here and there, this would make quite an ad.

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The Lisbon EU Treaty Is Dead Jim! :)

GEF @ 5:08 AM MST

EU foreign ministers try to save rejected Lisbon Treaty after Ireland referendum

By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels and Rosa Prince, Political Correspondent

..

EU leaders will try to save the treaty following its rejection in the Irish referendum. Rescue efforts are also being led by Gordon Brown, who plans to ignore calls to suspend Parliament’s approval of the treaty this week.

The Prime Minister is determined to press ahead with ratification, which will be completed if the House of Lords votes it through on Wednesday.

The move will allow Mr Brown to argue against a drive by France and Germany, who want to force Ireland to vote again, or else establish a two-tier EU.

William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, accused the Government of political cowardice for failing to admit that the treaty had been killed off by the Irish “no”. He called for a halt to ratification.

However, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, who insisted that it was for the Irish to sound the “last rites” for the treaty, said that British ratification would go ahead. Mr Miliband said: “The rules are absolutely clear. If all 27 countries do not pass the Lisbon Treaty then it does not pass into law.

“There can be no question of bulldozing or bamboozling or ignoring the Irish vote. In the end it is for the Irish prime minister to decide what his next moves are. He has got to decide whether or not to apply the last rites.”

Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, is travelling to Prague to put pressure on the Czech government to continue its ratification process. He will also hold talks with Poland, another country that has not signed off the treaty, in an attempt to keep the EU institutional blueprint alive.

“The others must continue ratification so that the Irish incident does not become a crisis,” he said. EU officials are keenly aware that if any other countries halt ratification the treaty is finished.

An isolated Ireland will then be asked later this year to help draw up proposals either for “opt-outs” permitting another Irish referendum or a special “legal arrangement” to allow the other 26 EU countries to move on without Dublin – a plan oppose by Mr Brown.

Mr Hague said that the Prime Minister should come clean and admit that the treaty was dead.

“I just wish our Government would give a lead instead of saying let’s see what everyone else does,” he said. “The Government should show some leadership and tell other nations frankly that the time has come to abandon the Lisbon Treaty.

“The only point in other countries continuing to ratify the treaty is to put pressure on the Irish, to bully the Irish – a kind of preparatory move to saying to the Irish ‘You’re going to have to vote again on this.’ Let’s treat this as a wake up call and stop this centralising agenda and abandon this treaty.”

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