“Gays Too Precious To Risk In Combat,” Says General

The Onion:

Gen. McBrayer discusses how valuable homosexuals are, and why we must never put their lives at risk by allowing them in the military.

RNC Now Seeks Shelter of Executive Privilege

t r u t h o u t | Report: By Jason Leopold

• The Republican National Committee said it will not abide by a subpoena and turn over documents to a Congressional committee investigating the firings of at least eight US attorneys last year because the RNC is waiting to see if the White House will assert executive privilege over RNC documents at the center of the controversy, according to an outside law firm retained by the RNC.

Are they freaking kidding me!!! So let me see if I understand how Executive Privilege works; you don’t have to work in the White House or even be a passed employee of the White House staff, you just have to have associations with the Bush gang. Well crap that’s have the country that now claim executive privilege.

• The White House has asserted executive privilege to block senior administration officials from testifying before Congress about their involvement in the decision to fire the federal prosecutors. Moreover, the White House has cited executive privilege in declining to turn over specific documents to Congress that may shed further light on the circumstances behind the attorney firings. The US attorneys believe they were fired for partisan political reasons. In some instances, the US attorneys said they were pressured by Republican lawmakers and RNC operatives to file criminal charges against Democrats at the center of public corruption probes prior to last year’s midterm election as well as individual cases of voter fraud, which the attorneys said was based on weak evidence, in order to cast a dark cloud over Democratic incumbents and swing election results toward Republican challengers.

• Earlier this year, internal Justice Department documents related to behind-the-scenes discussions involving the US attorney firings revealed some Bush administration officials have primarily used email accounts maintained by the RNC to conduct official White House business in what appears to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act. The RNC is believed to have thousands of pages of documents from White House officials in its possession, dating back to 2005, that could answer lingering questions about the role the administration played in the decision to fire the US attorneys.

• The latest salvo between the RNC and Congress over the documents under subpoena sets the stage for a legal showdown between the House and RNC Chairman Robert Duncan, who Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers threatened to hold in contempt if documents and internal RNC emails relating to the Congressional probe are not turned over to his committee. Neither Conyers nor a spokesman for the congressman returned calls for comment on Monday. Presumably, any further legal action would take place when Congress returns from its summer vacation next month.

• In a letter sent on Friday to Conyers, Robert Kelner, an attorney at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC, said the White House counsel’s office instructed the RNC not to “produce Category Two documents at this time.”

Full Read

Gonzales To Oversee Death Penalty

This is stunning, Alberto Gonzales the guy who can’t recall where he put his shoes will be in charge of overseeing the death penalty. Obviously there were several items that were missed by the 109th Congress when they reauthorized the Patriot Act. Interesting that the items missed have to do with the Department of Justice.

• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could see his influence over death penalty decisions increase under new regulations expected to be approved soon by the Justice Department, the Los Angeles Times reports.

• Implementing a “little-notice provision in last year’s reauthorization of the Patriot Act,” the Justice Department rules give Gonzales authority that had previously been held by federal judges to decide whether states are providing adequate council for defendants in death penalty cases, according to the Times.

• “The move to shorten the appeals process and effectively speed up executions comes at a time of growing national concern about the fairness of the death penalty, underscored by the use of DNA testing to establish the innocence of more than a dozen death row inmates in recent years,” reports Richard B. Schmitt in the Times Tuesday.

• On the same day the Times story appeared, Gonzales addressed the Fraternal Order of Police National Conference in Louisville, Ky. Although the attorney general did not mention his soon-to-expand death penalty influence, he did invoke his nephew’s service in Iraq.

• “Recently, some in the media have questioned how I deal with the recent challenges in the Department. It’s simple. You see I have a nephew stationed in Iraq. I visited with him on Saturday and we talked about his challenges,” Gonzales said. “Yes, I face criticism, but he faces bullets. I sleep comfortably in my own bed next to my wife. My nephew sleeps with his buddies in a converted meat packing building.”

• Gonzales has faced withering criticism from Congress over his role in firing nine US Attorneys last year and a host of other scandals. In Louisville, Gonzales joked about his and other administration officials’ frequent appearances before congressional committees investigating his conduct.

• “And as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has noted, ‘In Washington, most of my public remarks tend to begin with someone asking me to raise my right hand,’” Gonzales said.

• Among the topics that have come up during Gonzales appearances in hearing rooms on Capitol Hill was his handling of a previous death penalty case. TPM Muckraker revisits an exchange between Gonzales and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican.

• Specter and Gonzales sparred over the Justice Department’s decision to overrule a federal prosecutor who decided not to seek the death penalty for Rios Rico, who had been convicted of murder in Arizona. The US Attorney overseeing the case previously, Paul Charlton, testified that deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and Gonzales had deliberated on the case for “five to 10 minutes” before deciding to seek the death penalty.

• Gonzales said he could not recall anything about the case of his discussions with McNulty about it.

• “Well, Mr. Attorney General, I’m not totally unfamiliar with this sort of thing,” Specter chided Gonzales. “When I was district attorney of Philadelphia, I had 500 homicides a year. I didn’t allow any assistant to ask for the death penalty that I hadn’t personally approved. And when I asked for the death penalty, I remembered the case.”

Elizabeth Edwards Smacks Down Hillary & Obama

You really have to love the openness and straight talk from Elizabeth Edwards. In a recent interview she smacked down Hillary and Obama on a variety of issues but one important one for me was their lack of blocking the Iraq Funding Bill.

• NEW YORK (AP) — Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic candidate John Edwards, lambastes his rival Barack Obama as “holier than thou” on the Iraq war and accuses Hillary Clinton of failing to show leadership on health care and Iraq.

• As her husband trails Clinton and Obama in national polls, Elizabeth Edwards has been an outspoken critic of his opponents. Last month, she said her husband would be a better champion for women as president than Clinton and more recently said, “We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman. Those things get you a lot of press, worth a certain amount of fundraising dollars.”

• In an interview published in the August issue of The Progressive magazine, Elizabeth Edwards complained about Obama, who opposed the war when he was a state legislator in Illinois but has voted for funds for the military.

• John Edwards, then a North Carolina senator, voted in 2002 to authorize the military invasion of Iraq. Since then, he has said his vote was a mistake. He also voted against several funding requests while in the Senate — but not all, as Elizabeth Edwards claimed in the interview.

• “And honestly, the other candidates?” Elizabeth Edwards asked. “Obama gives a speech that’s likely to be extraordinarily popular in his home district, and then comes to the Senate and votes for funding … So you are going to get people behaving in a holier-than-thou way. But John stood up when he was in the Senate for exactly the thing he’s asking these people to stand up for now.”

• Edwards also criticized both Obama and Clinton for not using their influence to line up additional votes to block an Iraq funding bill in May. The two senators were among just 13 Democrats to vote against the bill.

• “We’re electing the leader of the free world,” Elizabeth Edwards said. “They should have been making speeches about why it was they were doing this, and standing up and trying to rally. And they didn’t. They weren’t leaders.”

• On health care, Edwards said Obama’s plan for universal coverage was inadequate because it left 15 million uninsured. She also criticized Clinton for not producing a health care plan and for questioning whether there was sufficient “political will” to enact universal care.

• “Hillary is saying we need to develop a political will. She hasn’t been talking to people if she thinks we need to develop it. We do not. There is consensus on this issue,” Edwards said.

• Edwards even suggested Obama’s signature theme — a plea for hope and political unity — had been lifted from her husband’s 2004 presidential campaign.

• “You listen to the language of what people say, particularly Obama, who seems to be using a lot of John’s 2004 language,” Edwards said, noting that Obama’s media adviser, David Axelrod, worked for Edwards that year.

• Spokesmen for both Clinton and Obama declined to comment on the Elizabeth Edwards interview.