Today, the Washington Post’s Angler series explores Vice President Cheney’s heavy hand in Bush’s domestic surveillance program. Documents giving “strategic direction to the nation’s largest spy agency” were held not in the White House but in Cheney’s office. Cheney’s lawyer David Addington, who wrote the documents, even kept White House Chief of Staff Andy Card in the dark:
It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had “no idea,” he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.
In an interview, Card said the Executive Office of the President, a formal term that encompassed Bush’s staff but not Cheney’s, followed strict procedures for handling and securing presidential papers. “If there were exceptions to that, I’m not aware of them,” he said. “If these documents weren’t stored the right way or put in the right places or maintained by the right people, I’m not aware of it.”
Asked why Addington would write presidential directives, Card said, “David Addington is a very competent lawyer.”
OBAMA: "You would be hard-pressed to explain to me what John McCain's economic vision is about how he's gonna get this economy back on track. That, I believe, is somebody who is out of touch with what is -- should be the central question of this election."
Obama also commented on the McCain camp's continued obsession with the town hall meetings of yesteryear, calling the town hall idea, "a little bit of a gimmick":
OBAMA: "The reason that we're not talking about the issues doesn't have to do with the fact that we didn't have town halls. The reason that we're not talking about the issues is because John McCain has shown a lack of interest in talking about the issues. That's how their campaign's been run."
Palin Claims Right to See All State Files. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is fighting a probe into an alleged abuse of power by claiming an unlimited right to pry into the files of her ex-brother-in-law and all other state workers, Jason Leopold reports. September 14, 2008 [Consortiumnews.com]
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New York - Barack Obama is unleashing both of the Democratic Party's heaviest hitters - Bill and Hillary Clinton - as he battles to fend off a revitalized Republican ticket in the White House election.
For the first time, former president Bill Clinton is set to join his wife Hillary on the campaign trail for Obama, whose poll lead over John McCain has evaporated since the Republican chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Obama and Bill Clinton broke bread over a 90-minute lunch Thursday, after months of bitt
This week on “The View,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed that Sarah Palin had never requested earmarks as governor. Today on ABC’s “This Week,” campaign spokeswoman Carly Fiorina repeated the lie, claiming Palin did not request earmarks for Alaska:
FIORINA: Sarah Palin as governor stood up and said, I know earmarks are corrupting. We must ask for less of them–
STEPHANOPOLOUS: But she still requested them.
FIORINA: As governor she did not. […]
MCCASKILL: Sarah Palin has been an earmark queen in Alaska. That’s the facts.
Stephanopolous corrected Fiorina when she falsely claimed that Palin had “rejected the money for the Bridge to Nowhere.” Watch it:
Fiorina’s assertion that it is a “fact” that Palin “rejected the money for the Bridge to Nowhere” is wrong. Once Congress removed the designation for the bridge from the earmark, Palin took the money and redirected it to other projects.
As Keith Ashdown, chief investigator for the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, pointed out, Palin’s constant claim to have said “thanks but no thanks” to the bridge earmark is simply a lie: “To say ‘thanks but no thanks’ would imply that they didn’t take the money. And they got every dime of it.”
