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Friday, June 29, 2007 |
Azzaman: "As U.S. troops battle to retake Baghdad and surrounding areas, the government is reported to have lost its control of Basra where almost all of the country's oil exports originate.
The city, according to well-placed sources, is under the hegemony of militias who do not run its streets only but have imposed levies and taxes on oil output."
11:01:04 AM 
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IHT: "The White House announced Thursday that it was invoking executive privilege to reject subpoenas for internal documents that Congress is seeking in its investigation into the firings of nine federal prosecutors last year.
The White House counsel, Fred Fielding, made clear that the Bush administration would not release documents from two senior officials - Harriet Miers, the former counsel to the president, and Sara Taylor, the director of political affairs - and that it would not allow them to testify before Congress. The White House has rejected previous requests from the Senate and House judiciary committees to interview presidential aides, saying instead that it would allow interviews in private if no transcripts were kept."
The Nation: "No one was all that surprised when the Bush administration announced Thursday that it would not cooperate with congressional demands for documents and testimony by prominent former officials that would likely confirm this White House's reckless disregard for the rule of law.
What was surprising, and encouraging, was the decisiveness with which key players in Congress responded.
After the White House asserted executive privilege in rejecting subpoenas issued by the House and Senate Judiciary committees as part of the ongoing probe of abuses within the Department of Justice, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers wasted no time expressing his sense that a Contempt of Congress citation is in order.
The issuance of a Contempt of Congress citation would provoke the sort of Constitutional showdown that it now appears will be required if this administration is to be held to account for its abuses of power. In such a showdown between the legislative and executive branches, the third branch of the federal government, the judiciary, would be asked to decide whether the White House has a right to assert, as White House counsel Fred Fielding did in a letter telling the committee chairs that their demands would not be met.
'Increasingly,' says Leahy, 'the president and vice president feel they are above the law - in America no one is above law.'
The senator is right, at least in theory.
But, in practice, this administration has operated above, or more precisely outside the law for more than six years. Without proper congressional and judicial oversight, the White House has expanded the reach and authority of the executive branch far beyond the limits imagined by the founders. And it will continue to do so until Congress reasserts itself as a coequal branch of government.
That process begins with the issuance of Contempt of Congress citations. For the sake of the Republic, those citations cannot be dispatched quickly enough."
Slate: "In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify."
10:58:54 AM
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LiveEarth: "Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis."
10:44:45 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Hetty Litjens.
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