CNN.com – Gingrich doesn’t rule out presidential run – Jan 9, 2005

Republicans close to Gingrich said he privately has mused about potentially running for president in 2008 or beyond. These officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Gingrich would not approve of public speculation, said odds are against him seeking and winning the White House.

If nothing else, they said, Gingrich understands that talk could help sell his book, which goes on sale Monday.

Gingrich Finds God in Washington (washingtonpost.com)

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich says he “got fed up with people who argue that somehow the concept of the creator wasn’t central to how the Founding Fathers understood America.” So in a book being published today, he includes a 19-page “Walking Tour of God in Washington, D.C.,” cataloging references to the Bible, Moses and a heavenly father on the Capitol, monuments and memorials.

“In the last 30 years, you had this politically correct delegitimizing of God in American public life, which I think is a denial of the core of American civilization,” he said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Daily Howler

If you watch the propaganda mill euphemistically known as the Fox News Channel, you may not have the slightest idea why Armstrong Williams is in hot water. On Friday night’s O’Reilly Factor, then on Sunday’s Fox & Friends, the channel’s stars let Williams pretend that he had simply taken money to run legitimate TV/radio ads about the No Child Left Behind program. By Friday morning, it was clear that Williams had been paid to do far more than that. But his Fox hosts stared into air, letting Williams pretend he was being slammed for a “perfectly legitimate” ad buy. …

[B]y Sunday, when Williams did Fox & Friends, the deception was total and repetitive. In the course of a nine-minute interview, Williams kept framing the issue in terms of selling ad time, mentioning nothing else for which he’d been paid. And his three Fox hosts went along with the sham. …

[A]t no time in the nine-minute session did anyone note that Williams was paid for more than a simple ad buy. And Williams kept pimping the bogus idea that the flap concerned nothing but legitimate ads.

Over and over (and over and over), Williams kept pretending that he was only paid to run legitimate ads. And none of his three Fox hosts ever tried to correct or challenge him. Indeed, by the end of the session, the hosts had reached new ground in their open pandering, agreeing with Williams when he said he was being held to “a higher standard than anyone else.”

Was Williams paid to pimp for Bush? Yes. But then, these hosts are paid to pimp for Williams! They know what Roger Ailes pays them to do, and they delivered on Sunday like cash machines. “God bless you,” one host said to Williams as The Three Storeboughts signed off.

So anyone who depends upon Fox as their primary ‘news’ source concludes this is much ado about nothing, oblivious to the government buying propaganda to mislead the public in violation of federal law. mjh

Welcome to uExpress featuring Richard Reeves — The Best Advice and Opinions The Universe!

The harshest words and judgments came from Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.

Speaking of Gonzales’ role in the formulation of new and deeply disturbing U.S. policy on torture in war, on the defining and treatment of prisoners taken or seized in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on our holding pens at Guantanamo, Graham was direct and focused. He was the one who said, without fancy words or legalisms, that Gonzales had played a crucial role in “creating legal chaos,” in “putting our troops in jeopardy” and in “losing the moral high ground.”

“I do believe we have lost our way,” said Graham. …

Gonzales lost me in the third paragraph of his opening statement: “The Department of Justice’s top priority is to prevent terror attacks against our nation.”

I don’t agree with that — and neither does history. The office of attorney general, created by the Judiciary Act of 1789, was a one-man operation to prosecute lawsuits before the Supreme Court, which was created by the same act. Times change. The Justice Department now has 112,000 employees and multiple tasks. Obviously fighting terrorism is one of them, a priority of all the government. It is the top priority of the new Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed many duties (particularly immigration control) that were once delegated to Justice. Perhaps fighting terrorism could be considered the top priority of the Department of Defense these days, or even of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a small part of the Justice Department.

But the Justice Department’s priority should be “justice,” or as it officially defines its own role: “to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.” …

The best analogy to these times in our history might be the excesses of World War I and its aftermath, which climaxed with the Palmer Raids from 1919 to 1921.

Alexander Mitchell Palmer, a former congressman who was President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, arrested and detained without charge more than 15,000 people on suspicion of being communists or anarchists or whatever. Socialist elected public officials were arbitrarily removed from office. A clothing salesman in Connecticut was thrown in jail for six months because someone overheard him saying he thought Lenin was very smart. And things got worse after an anarchist blew himself up in front of Palmer’s house.

Palmer made terrorism his top priority and ended up disgracing the Justice Department. I find it hard to believe Gonzales is as foolish and dangerous as Palmer was. But he has lost his way. Our new nominee was fool enough, or blindly loyal enough to his president, to clumsily argue that torture and secret detention were necessary now to keep America free — all in the name of justice.
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[via m-pyre]

“Promoting Torture’s Promoter”
By BOB HERBERT
January 7, 2005

The Bush administration hasn’t changed. This is an administration that believes it can do and say whatever it wants, and that attitude is changing the very nature of the United States. It is eroding the checks and balances so crucial to American-style democracy. It led the U.S., against the advice of most of the world, to launch the dreadful war in Iraq. It led Mr. Gonzales to ignore the expressed concerns of the State Department and top military brass as he blithely opened the gates for the prisoner abuse vehicles to roll through.

There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence. In the Bush administration, that mixture has been explosive. Forget the meant-to-be-comforting rhetoric surrounding Mr. Gonzales’s confirmation hearings. Nothing’s changed. As detailed in The Washington Post earlier this month, the administration is making secret plans for the possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists who will never even be charged.

Due process? That’s a laugh. Included among the detainees, the paper noted, are hundreds of people in military or C.I.A. custody “whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts.” And there will be plenty more detainees to come.

Who knows who these folks are or what they may be guilty of? We’ll have to trust in the likes of Alberto Gonzales or Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush’s new appointee to head the C.I.A., Porter Goss, to see that the right thing is done in each and every case.

Americans have tended to view the U.S. as the guardian of the highest ideals of justice and fairness. But that is a belief that’s getting more and more difficult to sustain. If the Justice Department can be the fiefdom of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales, those in search of the highest standards of justice have no choice but to look elsewhere.

It’s more fruitful now to look overseas. Last month Britain’s highest court ruled that the government could not continue to indefinitely detain foreigners suspected of terrorism without charging or trying them. One of the justices wrote that such detentions “call into question the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been very proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention.”

That’s a sentiment completely lost on an Alberto Gonzales or George W. Bush.

USATODAY.com – Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams “to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts,” and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004. …

The contract may be illegal “because Congress has prohibited propaganda,” or any sort of lobbying for programs funded by the government, said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “And it’s propaganda.”

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said he couldn’t comment because the White House is not involved in departments’ contracts. …

Williams’ contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum [a public relations firm] that produced “video news releases” designed to look like news reports. The Bush administration used similar releases last year to promote its Medicare prescription drug plan, prompting a scolding from the Government Accountability Office, which called them an illegal use of taxpayers’ dollars.

Williams, 45, a former aide to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is one of the top black conservative voices in the nation. He hosts The Right Side on TV and radio, and writes op-ed pieces for newspapers, including USA TODAY, while running a public relations firm, Graham Williams Group.

So, your tax dollars are being spent to fund commentators and create fake news to brainwash you. Slavery is Freedom! mjh

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: New rape-treatment debate By Marie McCullough, Knight Ridder Newspapers

The Justice Department has issued its first-ever medical guidelines for treating sexual-assault victims — without mention of emergency contraception, the standard precaution against pregnancy after rape. …

In the half-page on pregnancy “risk evaluation and care,” the protocol says to take victims’ pregnancy fears “seriously,” give a pregnancy test, and “discuss treatment options, including reproductive-health services.”

Advocates note that emergency contraception — nothing more than high-dose birth-control pills — reduces the chance of pregnancy 75 to 90 percent, but only if taken within 72 hours of sex. …

The development of national guidelines was required under the 2000 renewal of the decade-old federal Violence Against Women Act to develop uniform, quality care for sexual-assault victims. …

Emergency contraception is controversial because, like stem cells and cloning, it has become tangled in the politics of abortion. The method usually works by keeping an egg from being released or being fertilized. However, it sometimes may prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus — equated with murder by some conservative groups and the Catholic Church (which opposes all forms of contraception).

“I think it’s very smart not to put that in the guidelines,” said Dr. George Isajiw, a board member of Physicians for Life, a Philadelphia anti-abortion group.

By giving emergency contraception, he said, “you’re giving a dangerous drug that’s not doing any good, or else you’re causing an abortion. As a moral principle, a woman has the right to defend herself against an aggressor. But she doesn’t have the right to kill the baby.”