From Editor and Publisher.

 

Apparently, the man Cheney shot had a heart attack.  More when we get it folks.

From Nedra Pickler's AP report on Cheney's got a gun: 

Both the sheriff's department and the state have determined that alcohol did not appear to be a factor.

That sentence is conspicuous for what it does not say.  I ask you, Mr. McClellan, was the Vice President drinking on Saturday?

Also, you can see that they make use of the latest open-source intelligence, mainly Google maps. In one part of the video, the plotters are shown poring over printouts of the neighborhood, marking routes of access. They look exactly like Google maps. The maps are also later used to show the planned points of attack.

Rob Courdry joined in.

Courdry: "Jon, tonight the Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time-there-were-quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be the 78 year old man. Even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists-he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face.

Whittington is an allegory.  When real life uses fictional devices to get its point across, you know things are messed up.

We find out that Scotty McClellan's most important job is that of First responder:

Q Scott, do you think that the shooting accident involving the Vice President on Saturday should have been disclosed to the public on Saturday?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I, personally, was informed by the Situation Room that there had been a hunting accident, and that is was a member of the Vice President's hunting party. But I didn't have additional information other than that at this point.

"Squad 51 . . ."

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that the first priority was making sure that Harry Whittington, Mr. Whittington was getting the medical care that he needed, and I think that's where everybody's attention should have been focused and was focused when the hunting accident took place.

And it's important always to work to make sure you get information out like this as quickly as possible, but it's also important to make sure that the first priority is focused where it should be, and that is making sure that Mr. Whittington has the care that he needs.

MR. McCLELLAN: So there is some different circumstances. And the other circumstance here was that someone was injured and needed medical care. And the Vice President's team was making sure he was getting taken care of and that he got to the hospital and received additional treatment.

Good to see that Scottie's first priority was getting medical care for the wounded, not doing his own job.

Polling data shows that the American people utterly overestimate the threat that Iranian nuclear weapons pose:

Fifty-nine percent thought Iran would use nuclear weapons against the United States, and 80 percent thought the Iranians would hand them over to terrorists to use against the United States.  More thought Iran would use the weapons against Israel -- 77 percent -- and about as many -- 81 percent -- thought Iran would give them to terrorists who wanted to use them against Israel.

I do believe that a nuclear-armed Iran is not in the best interests of the United States or the world.  However, its incredibly unrealistic to think that there is a 51% chance that Iran will use nuclear weapons against the United States.  We have enough striking power to take out the country--utterly.  They'd be fools to do so.  They are rational, if misguided actors.  We should stop them from building a bomb if we can, but this is ridiculous.

Check out this quote from the Volokh Conspiracy (via Kevin Drum) and take a guess who said it.  I'll give you a hint that he's been in the news the last couple months but I guarantee you'll be surprised by the answer and the chutzpah of it all.

Okay, everyone know Vice-President Cheney accidentally shot someone in his hunting party over the weekend which doesn't look great on the evening news, but Josh Marshall points to another embarrassment; the effort by friends and supporters of Mr. Cheney to downplay the injuries of the man he shot.    Eyewitnesses would have you believe that Cheney's shotgun blast barely "broke the skin" of Mr. Whittington, yet Mr. Whittington's injuries are so minor that somehow he's still in an intensive care unit two days later? 

These people really need to put their energy into something else because covering Dick Cheney's ass at this point in his political career is definitely a lost cause. 

Oops!

A former top aide to California Republican Rep. John Doolittle traveled to Puerto Rico on a trip paid for by Jack Abramoff's lobbying firm, records show. 

Looks like the Abramoff probe is inching closer to one of my favorite Republicans, John Doolittle.  Having lived with two of his staffers, I can tell you that the man's policies are to the left of Vlad the Impaler.  Of course, there's more:

The trip is the latest example of connections between Abramoff's interests and Doolittle, a conservative ally of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and a member of the House GOP leadership. Those ties have caught the attention of federal investigators.

Doolittle accepted at least $14,000 in campaign money from Abramoff and tens of thousands of dollars more from Abramoff's tribal clients, and wrote letters to the Interior Department on behalf of two tribes that were clients of Abramoff's firm.

Doolittle's wife did fundraising work for Abramoff, and another former Doolittle aide, Kevin Ring, later went to work for Abramoff as a lobbyist.

The reporter on this has been out front on the Doolittle-Abramoff connection for some time.  I can't wait to see where this goes next.

Security needs money,
Money comes from oil,
Oil needs foreign investment,
And foreign investment wants security.

I've been trying to find a "realistic" candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 2008.  But Russ Feingold keeps trying to steal my heart away with his appeals to law and order on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

The President was blunt. He said that he had authorized the NSA’s domestic spying program, and he made a number of misleading arguments to defend himself. His words got rousing applause from Republicans, and I think even some Democrats.

The President was blunt, so I will be blunt: This program is breaking the law, and this President is breaking the law. Not only that, he is misleading the American people in his efforts to justify this program.

How is that worthy of applause? Since when do we celebrate our commander in chief for violating our most basic freedoms, and misleading the American people in the process? When did we start to stand up and cheer for breaking the law? In that moment at the State of the Union, I felt ashamed.

Congress has lost its way if we don’t hold this President accountable for his actions.

The President suggests that anyone who criticizes his illegal wiretapping program doesn’t understand the threat we face. But we do. Every single one of us is committed to stopping the terrorists who threaten us and our families.

Defeating the terrorists should be our top national priority, and we all agree that we need to wiretap them to do it. In fact, it would be irresponsible not to wiretap terrorists. But we have yet to see any reason why we have to trample the laws of the United States to do it. The President’s decision that he can break the law says far more about his attitude toward the rule of law than it does about the laws themselves.

This goes way beyond party, and way beyond politics. What the President has done here is to break faith with the American people. In the State of the Union, he also said that “we must always be clear in our principles” to get support from friends and allies that we need to fight terrorism. So let’s be clear about a basic American principle: When someone breaks the law, when someone misleads the public in an attempt to justify his actions, he needs to be held accountable. The President of the United States has broken the law. The President of the United States is trying to mislead the American people. And he needs to be held accountable.

In December, we found out that the President has authorized wiretaps of Americans without the court orders required by law. He says he is only wiretapping people with links to terrorists, but how do we know? We don’t. The President is unwilling to let a neutral judge make sure that is the case. He will not submit this program to an independent branch of government to make sure he’s not violating the rights of law-abiding Americans.

So I don’t want to hear again that this Administration has shown it can be trusted. It hasn’t. And that is exactly why the law requires a judge to review these wiretaps.

At the hearing yesterday, I reminded the Attorney General about his testimony during his confirmation hearings in January 2005, when I asked him whether the President had the power to authorize warrantless wiretaps in violation of the criminal law. We didn’t know it then, but the President had authorized the NSA program three years before, when the Attorney General was White House Counsel. At his confirmation hearing, the Attorney General first tried to dismiss my question as “hypothetical.” He then testified that “it’s not the policy or the agenda of this President to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes.”

Well, Mr. President, wiretapping American citizens on American soil without the required warrant is in direct contravention of our criminal statutes.

We need answers. Because no one, not the President, not the Attorney General, and not any of their defenders in this body, has been able to explain why it is necessary to break the law to defend against terrorism. And I think that’s because they can’t explain it.

Instead, this administration reacts to anyone who questions this illegal program by saying that those of us who demand the truth and stand up for our rights and freedoms have a pre-9/11 view of the world.

In fact, the President has a pre-1776 view of the world.

The President was right about one thing. In his address, he said “We love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it.”

Yes, Mr. President. We do love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it. We will fight to defeat the terrorists who threaten the safety and security of our families and loved ones. And we will fight to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans against intrusive government power.

As the President said, we must always be clear in our principles. So let us be clear: We cherish the great and noble principle of freedom, we will fight to keep it, and we will hold this President – and anyone who violates those freedoms – accountable for their actions. In a nation built on freedom, the President is not a king, and no one is above the law.

I yield the floor.

So you're the new House Republican Majority Leader who ran as the "reform" candidate after the previous Majority Leader got in trouble bilking the DC lobbying community, what's your first move?  That's right, immediately oppose your own party's proposals for lobbying reform.  Brilliant!

This is really not a very good way to begin this hearing.

So said Sen. Arlen Specter, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The matter was the decision not to swear in the Attorney General of the United States in the Domestic Spying scandal.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER, CHAIRMAN (R-PA): So the question is, should the ruling of the chair be upheld that Attorney General Gonzales not be sworn?

HATCH (R): Aye.

GRASSLEY (R): Aye.

DEWINE (R): Aye.

GRAHAM (R): Aye.

KYL (R): Aye.

CORNYN (R): Aye.

SPECTER: By proxy, for Sen. Brownback, aye. Sen. Coburn – We’ve got enough votes already. Sen. Leahy?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY, RANKING DEMOCRAT: Emphatically, no.

KENNEDY (D): No.

BIDEN (D): No.

KOHL (D): No.

FEINSTEIN (D): No.

FEINGOLD (D): No.

SPECTER (R): Aye. The ayes have it.

FEINGOLD: Mr. Chairman, I request to see the proxies given by the Republican senators.

SPECTER: Could you repeat that Sen. Feingold?

FEINGOLD: I request to see the proxies given by the Republican senators.

SPECTER: The practice is to rely upon the staffers. But without counting that vote – Well, we can rephrase the question if there’s any serious challenge of the proxies. This is really not a very good way to begin this hearing.

Despite the posturing of Specter over the last few days, as this vote shows, the senior senator from Pennsylvania will go along with his party.  Expect nothing to come from these hearings.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion.

Not exactly buried. Second paragraph of the Post's article tommorow.  Surveillance Net Yield Net Yields Few Suspects:

Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as "terrorist surveillance" and summed it up by declaring that "if you're talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why." But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.