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Schmuck – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “In his famous cultural lexicon, The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten lists the Yiddish schmuck as related to the Slovene word, šmok, meaning ‘a fool, an innocent, a gullible dolt”

“St. McCain’s look of desperation
By: John Amato

John McCain had this weird—glazed look in his eyes as he attacked John Kerry’s botched joke on Hannity & Colmes Tuesday night. (Here’s Kerry’s reply to the distortions)

Video -WMP Video -QT

How quickly St. McCain forgot his high praise of Kerry:

In his work toward that day, Kerry earned the ‘unbounded respect and admiration’ of McCain, who, like others in the Senate, originally viewed Kerry with suspicion. ‘You get to know people and you make decisions about them,’ says McCain. ‘I found him to be the genuine article.’

or this :

On a more serious note, McCain added later, ‘I think that the best Americans from both parties should be the nominees of their parties, so that the American people would have the very best to select from, and I would certainly put Sen. Kerry in that category.’

It’s sad how an election cycle will bring out the worst in people. I guess the Republicans are that desperate, but by bringing up the Iraq war front and center, they might have made a mistake:

In attacking Mr. Kerry and defending the war, the White House clearly made the calculation that achieving what has been its”

The Heretik “How much must it suck to be Dick Cheney, to know you have Democrats with subpoena power looking for answers you said you didn’t have to give when Republicans were in charge, when Republicans didn’t ask questions anyway?
“I expect real answers, or we’ll have testimony under oath until we get them,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, who will head the committee beginning in January, said in an interview this week. “We’re entitled to know these answers, and in many instances we don’t get them because people are hiding their mistakes. And that’s no excuse.”
Leahy sent a letter to Alberto Gonzales.
“The American people,” Mr. Leahy’s letter said, “deserve to have detailed and accurate information about the role of the Bush administration in developing the interrogation policies and practices that have engendered such deep criticism around the world.”
Of course the White House will claim it must protect secrets, but it will soon be no secret it is protecting its own ass. Of course this begs the question of whether a building can have an ass. Just how many asses does the White House have?”

Crooks and Liars: “The Jurist:
US Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has launched an internal investigation into the DOJ’s use of intelligence gathered under the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, according to a letter from Fine to Congressional leaders obtained by AP Monday. Fine has notified leaders of the House and Senate judiciary, intelligence and appropriations committees that his office is investigating the Justice Department’s ‘controls and use of information related to the program’ as well as its ‘compliance with legal requirements governing the program.’ Under the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program [.PDF], warrantless wiretaps are used to intercept telephone calls and e-mails of conversations of individuals suspected of being involved with the al Qaeda terrorist network if one of person is located outside the US.
After the program was first disclosed last year, inspectors general from both the DOJ and the Defense Department refused requests to investigate the program, with Fine citing a lack of jurisdiction. The DOJ request was referred to the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, but the internal probe into the role DOJ lawyers played in designing the program was dropped after the NSA denied investigators clearance to review all relevant documents. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales later said that President Bush personally put an end to the internal OPR investigation. “

The Republicans and their media friends are in counterattack mode. They’ve been stinking up the place during their decade-plus in power, so it stands to reason that Democratic ethics will be one of their major themes. ‘The Democrats are no better than we are’ has been their song for most of that time.

Lots of Democrats do have ethics problems, but that’s not why we’re hearing about them so much. A lot of the Republican stooges are better wreckers than builders (Limbaugh as much as confessed to that), and the wrecking is underway.

Some Republican voters and many independent voters are disillusioned with the Republicans, but the Republican core is as energetic and vicious as ever, and the media are zombified. So it’s still all up to us

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald

“the warrant can be obtained retroactively, up to 3 days after the wiretap (15 days in time of war). Of course, the Bush admin was and is
not trying to obtain warrants even retroactively for some wiretaps”

HaloScan.com – Comments: “Who’d a’known,

If you google Diggs, wiretapping, NSA, and ‘federal court,’ you will quickly learn that Bush’s spy program has been declared illegal by a federal judge.

You may also not know that a judicial decision is not necessary to make an activity illegal when the activity is specifically prohibited by a statute. Congress defines what is illegal by enacting laws. In this case, it enacted a law making it a crime to conduct domestic electronic surveillance without first obtaining a specific type of warrant. Bush’s spy program intentionally conducts domestic electronic surveillance without obtaining the warrant that the law requires. See? It’s illegal. Is that really so hard to understand, or are you just goofing on everybody?”