If true should Cheney be arrested?

THEHILL-Former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA not to inform Congress about a secret counterterrorism program for eight years, according to separate media reports on Saturday.

Subsequent CIA officials determined the program had not gone forward enough to merit telling members of Congress, the Associated Press reported. Cheney’s involvement was first reported by The New York Times.

Democrats on the House Intelligence panel this week said President Obama’s CIA Director, Leon Panetta, told them in a briefing that Congress had not been told of the program. The AP reported that Panetta determined the other CIA officials had made a mistake in not alerting Congress.

The latest revelations make it likely lawmakers will continue to deal with the battle over what intelligence officials have told the congressional panels with oversight over their activities when Congress returns to Washington next week. The issue has become a distraction for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who repeatedly has been hit with questions over the briefings.

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Big brother….

USA-Pentagon health experts are urging Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ban the use of tobacco by troops and end its sale on military property, a change that could dramatically alter a culture intertwined with smoking.
Jack Smith, head of the Pentagon’s office of clinical and program policy, says he will recommend that Gates adopt proposals by a federal study that cites rising tobacco use and higher costs for the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs as reasons for the ban.

The study by the Institute of Medicine, requested by the VA and Pentagon, calls for a phased-in ban over a period of years, perhaps up to 20. “We’ll certainly be taking that recommendation forward,” Smith says.

A tobacco ban would confront a military culture, the report says, in which “the image of the battle-weary soldier in fatigues and helmet, fighting for his country, has frequently included his lit cigarette.”

Also, the report said, troops worn out by repeated deployments often rely on cigarettes as a “stress reliever.” The study found that tobacco use in the military increased after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began

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Should we increase or decrease taxes?

AJC-Tax revenue collections were off a total of more than $1.9 billion in the 2009 fiscal year that ended June 30, Gov. Sonny Perdue’s office announced Friday.

Collections of state personal income, corporate income and sales taxes were off 11.1 percent for 2009, compared to 2008. In June alone, tax collections fell 17.8 percent from the same 30 days in 2008.

For the year as a whole, corporate income tax collections fell most dramatically, as the state took in 26.3 percent less from businesses in 2009 than in 2008. Personal income taxes fell by 12.2 percent while sales taxes were off 8.8 percent.

“It means it’s pretty much status quo, and that’s not a good thing,” said Alan Essig, executive director of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a private think tank. “With reserve funds and some savings the governor has prepared, we’ll pay our bills.”

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Interesting!

NPR-The 4,000 U.S. Marines now pushing deep into Taliban-controlled tracts as part of an expanded war in southern Afghanistan are setting up fire bases amid some of the most productive poppy fields in the world’s opium-producing capital.

It’s not harvest time in Helmand province, the center of Afghanistan’s thriving opium poppy industry. But even if the flowers were blooming, it’s doubtful the Marines would do much about it.

Convinced that razing the cash crop grown by dirt-poor Afghan farmers is costing badly needed friends along the front lines of the fight against Taliban-led insurgents, U.S. authorities say they are all but abandoning the Bush-era policy of destroying drug crops.

“Eradication is a waste of money,” U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke told The Associated Press last month.

On a small scale, the new live-and-let-live policy on poppy farming neatly illustrates the redrawn goals for a nearly eight-year war that all the military might of the United States and its allies has failed to win.

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WOW very interesting!

TNR-A lot of conservative Democrats, not to mention Republicans, express two big concerns about health reform. They’re worried that reform will cost too much. And they don’t want a government-run insurance plan.

It’s about to get a lot harder to make those two arguments simultaneously.

According to a pair of Capitol Hill sources, preliminary estimates from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that a strong public option–the kind that the House of Representatives is putting in its reform bill–should net somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion in savings over ten years.

The sources cautioned that these were only the preliminary estimates, based on previous discussions–that CBO had not yet issued final scoring on language in the actual bill. But the sources felt the final estimate would likely be close

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Interesting?

HP-The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they’re still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to “unprecedented collection activities” by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be “carefully monitored.”

The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.

Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the “President’s Surveillance Program” did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the “mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile.”

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This is not cool…..!

McC-Supporters of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are quietly targeting the Connecticut firefighter who’s at the center of Sotomayor’s most controversial ruling.

On the eve of Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearing, her advocates have been urging journalists to scrutinize what one called the “troubled and litigious work history” of firefighter Frank Ricci.

This is opposition research: a constant shadow on Capitol Hill.

“The whole business of getting Supreme Court nominees through the process has become bloodsport,” said Gary Rose, a government and politics professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

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The big fight!

HP-President Obama has threatened to veto a Democratic-backed bill that would likely expand the number of lawmakers who can be briefed by the White House on covert national security operations.

In a statement issued on Wednesday afternoon, the White House Office of Management and Budget said that it does support many provisions in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 currently making its way through the House of Representatives. But it had “serious concerns with a number of provisions that would impede the smooth and efficient functioning” of the intelligence community.

In particular, the administration opposed a provision of the bill that would give Congress greater authority to decide which members are briefed on covert actions. The Intelligence Authorization Act proposed restructuring the “Gang of Eight” briefings, which are currently provided to the House and Senate leaders from both parties and the chairs and ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence panels. The House legislation, backed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (a former intelligence chair herself), would give the intelligence committees, not the president, the authority to determine which members were briefed.

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Bad news for immigrant bashers.

Reason: “If you want to find a safe city, first determine the size of the immigrant population,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. “If the immigrant community represents a large proportion of the population, you’re likely in one of the country’s safer cities. San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—these cities are teeming with immigrants, and they’re some of the safest places in the country.”

If you regularly listen to talk radio, or get your crime news from anti-immigration pundits, all of this may come as a surprise. But it’s not to many of those who study crime for a living. As the national immigration debate heated up in 2007, dozens of academics who specialize in the issue sent a letter (pdf) to then President George W. Bush and congressional leaders with the following point:

Numerous studies by independent researchers and government commissions over the past 100 years repeatedly and consistently have found that, in fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or to be behind bars than are the native-born. This is true for the nation as a whole, as well as for cities with large immigrant populations such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami, and cities along the U.S.-Mexico border such as San Diego and El Paso.

Why not?

Slate-According to an unsubstantiated Internet rumor circulating since Michael Jackson’s death, Jordan Chandler, the boy who in 1993 claimed to have been repeatedly molested by the pop star, has now recanted his story. Fifteen years ago, Chandler reached a $20-million settlement with Jackson, in which he agreed that neither he nor any of his family members or representatives would make any public comment about the case. Now that Jackson is dead, can Chandler speak out?

No. Jackson’s settlement with Chandler, like any well-crafted confidentiality agreement, binds not only the parties themselves but also their “heirs, administrators, executors, conservators, successors, and assigns.” The death of Jackson, or Chandler for that matter, would have no effect on the settlement’s secrecy obligations.

Generally speaking, contractual rights extend to a party’s heirs even if the contract fails to make that point explicit. Death voids a contractual obligation only if the person who died was himself central to the performance of the contract. For example, if Chandler had agreed to cut Jackson’s hair every month, Jackson’s death would have released Chandler from his responsibilities. (No, your hair doesn’t keep growing after you die.) Chandler might argue that the confidentiality provision in the 1994 settlement was personal to Jackson—it was solely for his benefit and, now that he’s gone, the obligation should be dissolved. However, Jackson’s heirs could make the straightforward case that they rely on a stream of income (royalties on record sales, licensing fees, etc.) that is partially dependent on Jackson’s reputation.

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi Stops Michael Jackson Resolution In Congress

Will this put the Dems out of power in the HOUSE?

CNN-They are two presidents from different parties but have striking similarities.

Former President Ronald Reagan and current President Obama are incredibly popular, and both faced rising unemployment early on.

Reagan’s experience could be instructive for Democrats today; the GOP lost 26 seats in the 1982 elections. Reagan’s popularity could not trump double-digit unemployment.

“If we look back at 1982, as soon as the unemployment rate hit 10 percent, there was a political dynamic that changed significantly … and it became much harder for the incumbent party to be able to make their case,” said Daniel Clifton, head of policy research at Strategas, an investment strategy and policy research firm.

But Reagan was fighting joblessness, inflation and high interest rates. Obama has a full plate, but inflation and high interest rates are not on it.

Nonetheless, the jobless rate today is at 9.5 percent, which is above the peak of 8 percent the White House predicted earlier this year. The administration now concedes 10 percent is likely in the next couple of months.

While some economists have long forecast jobless rates this high, Vice President Joe Biden now admits that the administration “misread how bad the economy was.”

Not exactly, according to the president.

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Communist China!

USA-(AP) — China flooded the capital of western Xinjiang province with security forces Wednesday after ethnic riots left at least 156 dead. The city’s Communist Party boss promised those behind the killings would be executed.

Ethnic clashes have paralyzed Urumqi over the past several days — with minority Uighur and Han Chinese mobs roaming the streets and attacking each other. The violence forced President Hu Jintao to embarrassingly cut short a trip to Italy where he was take part in a Group of Eight summit.

Communist Party chief Li Zhi told a televised news conference that many people had been arrested, including students.

“To those who committed crimes with cruel means, we will execute them,” he said, adding government forces would crack down on any security risk. He did not give details.

More than 1,100 people were wounded in the violence, and hundreds of vehicles were damaged or set on fire in the riots on Sunday. It was not known how many Uighurs and Han Chinese died or who was behind their deaths.

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WOW!

NYP-The former fiance of Gov. Sarah Palin’s 18-year-old daughter says he believes he knows why the Alaska governor is resigning - concerns over money.

Nineteen-year-old Levi Johnston, whose wedding to Bristol Palin was called off earlier this year, says he thinks the governor is resigning over personal finances.

Johnston says he lived with the Palin family from early December to the second week in January. He claims he heard the governor several times say how nice it would be to take advantage of the lucrative deals that were being offered, deals that included a reality show and a book.

Johnston made his comments at a news conference Thursday at his lawyer’s office.

He and Bristol have a son, Tripp, born in December.

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