A “What you are up against” Update:
Woodhouse says he never remembers anyone going after Bush during his presidency the way Republicans are attacking Obama. Woodhouse said Democrats never equated Bush to a terrorist or as someone who had committed manslaughter.
“Many Republicans will say didn’t democrats attack George Bush in exactly the same way. what’s your response to that?,” Bashir asked Woodhouse.
“I don’t remember anything that equates from official Democratic Party. I mean, of course there are interest groups and people have their say, but I don’t remember anything coming from Democratic Party about George W. Bush being equated to a terrorist or George W. Bush being equated to somebody who has been accused of manslaughter. I don’t remember anybody questioning some of the things about George W. Bush that have been questioned about the president. I don’t remember an opposing Governor wagging his or her finger in president George W. Bush’s face,” Woodhouse said.
“The truth is, is that the Republican Party starts from a core of extreme positions and it seems that leads to extreme rhetoric when things don’t work out for them with the voters,” he said.
Search for Bush is A Chimp, a Moron, Stupid, or Hitler.
The cognitive dissonance or just plain dishonesty is what you are up against you.
************
For the first time, the Justice Department has made public a series of sensitive messages that passed to the highest levels of the agency within hours of an ambush that killed a U.S. border patrol agent along the Southwest border in December 2010, igniting a national scandal over a gun trafficking investigation gone wrong.
Justice officials sent the documents to Congress late Friday evening, only a few days before Attorney General Eric Holder is set to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The email messages show the former top federal prosecutor in Arizona, Dennis Burke, notifying an aide to Holder via email on Dec. 15, 2010 (Holder testified in May 2011- he heard about in the “last few weeks”) that agent Brian Terry had been wounded and died. “Tragic,” responds the aide, Monty Wilkinson. “I’ve alerted the AG, the acting Deputy Attorney General…”
Only a few minutes later, Wilkinson emailed again, saying, “Please provide any additional details as they become available to you.”
An email from one official, whose name has been redacted from the document, to now-former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke reads: On December 14, 2010, a BORTAC agent working in the Nogales, AZ AOR was shot. The agent was conducting Border Patrol operations 18 miles north of the international boundary when he encountered [redacted word] unidentified subjects. Shots were exchanged resulting in the agent being shot. At this time, the agent is being transported to an area where he can be air lifted to an emergency medical center.
Burke then delivered another piece of bad news: “The guns found in the desert near the murder [sic] … officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store.”
That investigation, dubbed Fast and Furious, was supposed to follow U.S. weapons into the hands of kingpins in the violent Sinaloa Mexico drug cartel, building a big case against the gangs. Instead, it cost Burke his job, got the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reassigned, and has prompted multiple federal probes by Congress and the department’s own inspector general.
The Justice Department also sent a letter to lawmakers Friday night outlining several changes they had made within their own ranks and at the ATF: from requiring additional oversight in cases that involve wiretaps and confidential informants to extra procedures at the ATF for putting weapons purchases under surveillance to a realignment at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Phoenix and the ATF itself.
The new documents are certain to stoke the fires among congressional Republicans, who have questioned what the attorney general knew about the botched investigation and asked why the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Lanny Breuer, didn’t do more when he found out about other questionable tactics used by ATF in gun trafficking probes in the Bush administration.
In a meeting with Mexican government officials in February 2011, for instance, Breuer “suggested allowing straw purchasers cross into Mexico so [police] can arrest and [prosecutors] can convict. Such coordinated activities between the US and Mexico may send a strong message to arms traffickers.”
A Justice official, speaking on background, said Breuer’s proposal involved coordination between the governments and didn’t contemplate agents losing track of guns, as happened in the Fast and Furious debacle.
A few days after the meeting between Breuer and Mexican authorities, the department’s attache to Mexico raised this issue, according to an email: “there is an inherent risk in allowing weapons to pass from the U.S. to Mexico. The possibility of the [government of Mexico] not seizing the weapons, and the weapons being used to commit a crime in Mexico.”
The attorney general, in testimony to the House and Senate last year, said he feared the Justice Department could be living with the consequences of more than 1,000 guns connected to Fast and Furious that remain unaccounted for years to come.
So The AG is lying again…Will anyone care? Probably Not.
“Obviously I think if the question is referring to things like Fast and Furious, I think everyone has acknowledged that mistakes, serious mistakes, were made there,” Napolitano replied, “The key question [is] to make sure that those mistakes, from my standpoint, are never again repeated.”
Mistakes? To suggest that Fast and Furious was not a program that was intentionally designed to funnel firearms to straw purchasers is disingenuous and to use the mild word “mistake” to color over a program that led to the death of a U.S. border patrol agent and more than 200 Mexicans is irresponsible. While it’s encouraging that Napolitano wants to ensure that administration officials never design such a foolish and lethal program again, her language seems too calculated to also create the impression that administration officials have no possible culpability here. In her mind, it was all just a series of “mistakes” from which to learn and move forward — but, again, even if the operation was intended to lead to a different ending — to the prosecution of the biggest fish within Mexican drug cartels — the sale of the weapons to straw purchasers in the first place was not a mistake. It was that tactic that was and is and will continue to be controversial — and Napolitano’s comments should reflect that the tactic should never have been used in the first place.
While the congressional investigation into Fast and Furious is far from over and while those of us who are strongly suspicious of DOJ higher-ups have to fight not to ascribe to them the worst of ulterior motives until those motives are established by the evidence, administration officials should at the very least express a stronger sense of the inexcusable facts of Fast and Furious.
**********
A $500 million green jobs program at the Department of Labor has so far provided only 15 percent of current participants with jobs, leading the agency’s inspector general to recommend that the bulk of the money be returned to the Treasury.
The program, which was funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aims to find employment for almost 80,000 people by providing grants for labor exchange and job training projects. With those grants expiring over the next 15 months, IG officials concluded that the program would fail to come close to that target.
So how many workers has this program actually placed? As of June 30th … 8,035, or about a tenth of what was projected after burning through 40% of the funding. That actually comes to a surprisingly modest $25,000 per job placement. However, that total includes temp jobs; only 1,336 people found jobs lasting longer than 6 months.
In other words, this is just like Obamanomics in general. It provides a short-term gimmicky gain at incredible expense that is designed to do nothing except give politicians a headline and a photo op. It would be cheaper in the long run to buy politicians a camera and get them a blog.
The woman wants to know why Obama is extending visas for foreigners when there is tons of demand for American jobs by Americans.
(and ignoring the border)
Obama told her his solution is to “grow the economy.”
Maybe she should give him $38,500 for his autograph like the Wall Streeters. 🙂
Indyfromaz's Blog: The Thoughts of An Independent Arizonan 