Thursday, January 22, 2004

Wasn’t this what the Watergate break-in was about?   Planting listening devices to snoop on the deliberations of the Democratic party?   Well, looks like today’s GOP had done Nixon one better (or is that worse?).   I guess they really mean business when they say they don’t believe in a right to privacy….   Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.   The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.   With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.   But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.   Still think it’s just “politics as usual”?   That’s why this election is not just about policy, it’s about defending democracy and democratic rights, like the right to privacy and the right to free assembly, that too many in today’s GOP would just as soon dispense with.   After all, Bush and his fellow Falangists don’t need no stinkin’ rights, they’ve got God whispering the answers straight into their ears….   Just see how right they were about the WMDs in Iraq?   At the very least, Frist should fry over this. 6:16:31 PM

Dragging the White House into shame   …and undermining the security of the US – all in one fell swoop.   For all the yahoos who think that the outing of CIA agent Plame was “politics as usual”--think again:   "The disclosure of Ms. Plame's name was an unprecedented and shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, has damaged U.S. national security, specifically the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence-gathering using human sources," the group wrote in the two-page letter.   In a telephone interview, Mr. Johnson, who described himself as a registered Republican who voted for President Bush, said he and other former intelligence officers had been discussing the idea of a letter for months and decided to go forward with it because of a lack of evidence of progress in the Justice Department investigation.   "For this administration to run on a security platform and allow people in the administration to compromise the security of intelligence assets, I think is unconscionable," Mr. Johnson said.   And where oh where is the librul media on this one? Where are all the celebrity talking heads talking about the shame brought on the office, about the death of outrage?   But Howard Dean had a pep-rally!! And Wesley Clark wears sweaters!!! 6:06:02 PM