Salon.com | News Wires: "George W. Bush's rising political fortunes provided a windfall for Harriet Miers' law firm.

Campaign records show Bush's Texas gubernatorial campaigns paid Miers a total of $163,000 in legal fees, most of it for work done during the future president's 1998 re-election bid.

Some senators are planning to explore Miers' legal work for Bush during her confirmation process to be the newest Supreme Court justice, but the White House says it won't release any memos detailing that work.

'I think people across the country recognize the importance of attorney-client privilege,' said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

Reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission show that two payments of $70,000 were made to Miers' Locke, Purnell, Rain and Harrell firm in Dallas within a month of each other during the 1998 campaign. Another $16,000 in payments were made between March and December 1999."

(Via Salon.)

Salon.com | Fitzgerald is no Ken Starr: "With the mounting anticipation that Bush administration officials will be indicted in the CIA leak investigation, we have arrived at the stage that was always inevitable: a wave of preemptive attacks on special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and his expected prosecutions.

While the attackers have various motives, their arguments tend to share the same specious themes: that the special counsel has 'run amok'; that he is pursuing the 'criminalization of politics'; that no crimes were committed except possibly in covering up administration misbehavior, which supposedly are not crimes worth prosecuting; and that Fitzgerald is somehow comparable to Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel whose gross abuse of his office led to its abolition.

To anyone familiar with the most basic facts about Fitzgerald's prosecution, the quarreling with him and his methods simply sounds stupid. Do the Republican partisans who claim that he is running a 'political' investigation realize that John Ashcroft's deputy appointed him? Do those same Republicans remember that the president endorsed his appointment and the purposes of the investigation? Do they know that the original demand for an investigation came from former CIA director George Tenet?"

(Via Salon.)

t r u t h o u t - Cheney 'Cabal' Hijacked Foreign Policy: "Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

    

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: 'What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

    

'Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.'

    

Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran."

(Via t r u t h o u t.)

Martini Republic » No Report in Plame investigation, indictments likely: "Via atrios, former CIA agent Larry Johnson is reporting that Fitzgerald is considering up to 22 indictments, including Hadley, Rove, Libby, Cheney, and Matalin.

Raw Story has been reporting for a few days that John Hannah, a national security aide who worked with Cheney and John Bolton, is cooperating with Fitzgerald.

Also via atrios, the NY Daily News is reporting that Rove told Bush two years ago that he had spoken with reporters about Plame, while the White House and Bush himself vehemently denied any connection at the time, as Billmon reminds us."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Texas Court Issues Warrant for DeLay - Yahoo! News: "A Texas court on Wednesday issued a warrant for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's arrest, and set an initial $10,000 bail as a routine step before his first court appearance on conspiracy and state money laundering charges.

Travis County court officials said DeLay was ordered to appear at the Fort Bend County, Texas, jail for booking, where he'd likely be fingerprinted and photographed. DeLay's lawyers had hoped to avoid such a spectacle."

(Via AlterNet.)

The Counterterrorism Blog: Iraq's Constitutional Referendum: Encouraging Signs: "As Andy Cochran observed earlier, the lack of violence accompanying Iraq's constitutional referendum is encouraging.  I have a few observations about what the referendum means for the future of the war in Iraq.

First, the insurgency's second straight failure to produce a bloodbath on election day shows that the insurgents aren't as strong as media reports would lead you to believe.  Remember that the insurgents did everything they could to try to intimidate voters from reaching the polls in January, and promised a massacre."

(Via The Counterterrorism Blog.)

Martini Republic » Downright snarky: "But equally as interesting is the first vote count on the Miers nomination, which predicts confirmation could go as low as 52-48, the same margin as the Thomas vote.

The Thomas hearings were a watershed in American politics for reasons beyond nastiness. Republicans lost the White House in 1992 for many reasons, but the 1991 hearings made the nation conscious of sexual harassment, and 1992 proved to be a backlash Year of the Woman in politics. The Miers hearings, if they tackle religion and science, threaten to make the nation conscious of the lunacy of Christian evangelism, and 2006 could prove to be another backlash: the Year of the Scientist."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Salon.com | News Wires: " Potential Democratic presidential candidates who voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq could face a political problem -- they supported a war that their party's rank-and-file now strongly view as a mistake.

Their pro-war votes -- cast three years ago -- could haunt them as they seek early support among die-hard Democrats and gauge whether to launch formal candidacies for the party's 2008 presidential nomination."

Boo hoo.

(Via Salon.)

The Blog | John Amato: Condi Rice finally tells the truth | The Huffington Post:

"'But the fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al-Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al-Qaeda and perhaps after the Taliban and then our work would be done and we would try to defend ourselves. Or we could take a bolder approach, which was to say that we had to go after the root causes of the kind of terrorism that was produced there, and that meant a different kind of Middle East. And there is no one who could have imagined a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein still in power.'

I thought the reason we went into Iraq was because they had WMD’s? Members of the administration even outed an undercover CIA agent and smeared her husband in retaliation because somebody actually had the nerve to do a little fact checking on the lies that the White House told about Iraq's WMD capabilities. As Ari Fleisher said on 4/10/03:

'But make no mistake -- as I said earlier -- we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found.'"

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Baghdad Burning: "The referendum promises to be somewhat confusing. People are saying it should be postponed. Now is not the right time. More changes were made a few days ago to the supposed ‘final’ draft of the constitution- the one that was submitted to the UN. It was allegedly done to appease Sunnis.

The trouble is that it didn’t address the actual problems Iraqis have with the constitution (Sunnis and Shia alike). The focus of negotiations by ‘Sunni representatives’ seemed to revolve around Iraq’s Arab identity and de-Ba’athification. A clause has also been added which says that the constitution will be subject to change (quelle surprise! Yet again!) with the new government after the next elections. That doesn’t make me feel better because changes can work both ways: if the next ‘elected’ government is, again, non-secular, pro-Iran, the amendments made to what is supposed to be a permanent constitution will be appalling."

(Via Iraq The Model.)