Bush Abusing State Secrets Claim To Hide His Crimes:
"... the most disturbing aspect of the Bush administration's expansion of the state secrets privilege may well be this: More and more, it is invoked not in response to run-of-the-mill government negligence cases but in response to allegations of criminal conduct on the part of the government ... The Bush administration has fought at every turn to limit scrutiny of its conduct since Sept. 11. And, unless courts start to reject its assertion, the administration may have found in the state secrets privilege the ultimate tool for making its actions invisible."



GOP Lawmakers Get New Religion About Separation Of Powers:
"House and Senate leaders challenged the constitutionality of an FBI raid on a lawmaker's office, saying it broke a 219-year precedent and raised concerns about the separation of power between the administration and Congress ... The Jefferson case is one of several continuing criminal probes of lawmakers.  Former Representative Randy Cunningham, a California Republican, is in prison after admitting accepting $2.4 million in bribes. Representative Robert Ney, an Ohio Republican, has relinquished a committee chairmanship because of a federal investigation into his dealings with former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.  Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, will leave office next month after being indicted in a state fund-raising case."

Anybody Got A Razor? Occam?  Occam ...?
"We know that al Qaeda sought to provoke the United States into a broad military response that would engulf the whole world. We know that the main power players in the Bush Administration were actively, publicly looking for a provocation that would justify a worldwide campaign of military expansion. We know that the U.S. intelligence community was "blinking red" with warnings and intimations "off the scale" of an impending terrorist attack, most likely on U.S. soil, all through the summer of 2001. We know from its own admission that the Bush Administration took no extraordinary action to meet this extraordinary threat."

Bush Aims For The Intel He Wants - But What About The Intel He Needs?:
"As head of the National Security Agency, (Hayden) walked in lockstep with his commander in chief, George W. Bush. Hayden helped designed the illegal program of spying on our telephone calls and emails and then repeatedly defended it when interrogated by the senators at his hearing, citing "legal" opinions of Bush's hired guns in the Justice Department.  Rather than providing the White House with a neutral assessment of Iran's nuclear capabilities, we can expect Hayden to give Bush the "intelligence" the president seeks to justify his war on Iran. Things did not run as smoothly as Bush would have wished under the last two CIA directors. He had to dispatch Dick Cheney to the CIA several times to furnish the "intelligence" he needed to rationalize his war on Iraq ..."

The GOP War On Health:
"It isn’t exactly rocket surgery to figure out that under Republican control of all three branches of government, the bottom has rapidly begun to fall out of public health ... the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 1.4 million last year and 5 million since the Bush-Cheney administration came to power, reaching a total of 45 million-the largest number of uninsured Americans ever recorded."