Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.
The fact that hardly anyone has heard of David Addington is no accident. As chief of staff to Dick Cheney, he shares his boss's fetish for secrecy. But as reporters are finally zeroing in on what Bush officials have really been up to these last seven years, evidence continues to pile up about the key role Addington has played in the skullduggery. Some are even suggesting he could be tried for war crimes for his role in approving the torture of terror suspects.

In the video above, in an interview with Steve Clemons, editor of The Washington Note, Jane Mayer discusses Addington, whom she profiled in the New Yorker last year and who plays a central role in her new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, which Trish, my colleague at PR, wrote about this week.

The excerpt in the following transcript comes about 11 minutes into the interview. The quote mentioned by Mayer and Clemens is the last line in Mayer's book. It comes from Phillip Zelikow, a former counselor to Condoleeza Rice, who attempted to explain what went wrong within the administration after the attacks on September 11 this way: "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools."

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

A new Field Poll shows that 42 percent of California voters say they will vote for Proposition 8, the ballot initiative sponsored by the national anti-gay lobby that would amend the California Constitution to revoke the right of gay people to marry, while 51 percent say they plan to vote against it, according to a report in the Mercury News:

Mercury News also reports that "[women], older baby boomers and residents of coastal California --- particularly the Bay Area --- were among those most hostile to the proposed ban. Protestants, Latinos, residents of inland counties and people in their 40s and over age 65 were the most likely to favor it."

At least one professional advocate of bigotry toward gays was quick to downplay the poll results. "Historically, the Field Poll has understated the support for upholding the definition of marriage," Jennifer Kerns, a spokeswoman for ProtectMarriage.com, told the Mecurty News. "The reality is that the vast majority of Californians support the definition of marriage as between a man and woman."

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Polling before Labor Day in the presidential race is all but useless, still -- this is amazing:

That last number, Obama's 46 point lead among independents, is significant. This is just a guess but much of the antipathy among independents toward McCain, the self-described "maverick," likely can be traced to his position in favor of drilling off the coast.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

There will be a hearing related to Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Article of Impeachment against George Bush in the House Judiciary Committee. That was assured by a vote of 238 to 180 on Tuesday. (Details on that hearing, now posted here.)

But, according to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's "Countdown" last night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has mandated that questioning in the hearing be relegated to Bush's abuses of power, not his criminal wrongdoing.

“There’s never been one [hearing] that accumulated all the things that constitute an imperial presidency,” said Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, according to CQ Politics. He indicated topics covered in the hearing would include the firing of U.S. attorneys for political reasons, the betrayal of CIA agent Valerie Plame and Bush's alleged lying to Congress about the reasons for invading Iraq.

Kucinich's single Article of Impeachment only deals with Bush's lies to Congress.

There were no Democratic votes against holding the hearing. While 180 Republicans voted to follow their Dear Leader lock-step over the cliff, 10 Republicans abstained and nine Republican members of Congress voted with the Democrats. Here are their names...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

As the campaign manager for the presidential bid of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Kent Snyder received a lot of credit for raising $35 million from grassroots supporters, a phenomenal accomplishment for an insurgent campaign.

But, like 48 million other Americans, Snyder had no health insurance, and when he died from pneumonia on June 26 after a two-month hospital stay, he left medical bills totaling over $400,000.

It is emblematic of our age that Snyder's boss, Rep. Paul, is a physician.

The story comes from the Washington Blade:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

It never came up in the GOP primaries. The mainstream media won't dare mention it. Even John McCain's most liberal opponents won't go there. But leave it to equal opportunity offenders brothers Evan and Gregg Spiridellis and their animation team at JibJab to introduce into the 2008 presidential campaign the allegations that John McCain cooperated with the enemy when he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Not that most people will notice it. The reference comes about one minute into the group's latest campaign video, "Time for Some Campaignin'," when the McCain character sings that he "spent years in a rat hole in North Vietnam" over animated graphics showing him swinging in a bird cage --- a reference to the fact that McCain's accusers refer to him as "Songbird."

A charge as heinous as collaborating with the enemy may sound like liberal revenge for the Swiftboating of John Kerry by Republicans in 2004, but the allegations against McCain come from conservatives, notably including former Rep. Bob Dornan of California and former Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire, both of whom are Republicans.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The McCain campaign's Alabama chairman, Attorney General Troy King, the virulent homophobe who is the subject of rumors that his wife discovered him having sex with another man, was a client of Strategum USA, the consulting firm of Ralph Gonzalez, a closeted gay GOP political operative who was killed last summer in a double murder-suicide in his home in Orlando.

Gonzalez was also the one-time campaign manager/consultant for Florida's hard-right, scandal-plagued 24th Congressional District U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney whose close ties to disgraced GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and involvement in an alleged electronic vote-rigging conspiracy have been reported extensively for years by The BRAD BLOG.

Last Friday, the McCain campaign quickly scrubbed all references to King from its website without offering a public reason.

The August 27, 2007 Birmingham News report of the murder-suicide which took Gonzalez' life, discussed the consultant's work for King in Alabama...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Click graphic to see full screen capture

The John McCain campaign scrubbed its website today to remove all references to its Alabama campaign chairman, Attorney General Troy King.

King, who is known for extremist views on religion and who has frequently made homophobic statements, including calling gays the "downfall of society," is the subject of rumors that his wife recently discovered him having sex with another man.

The story about King had been published at Wonkette and on numerous gay news websites, but none of them had reported King's connection with the McCain campaign before we published the story, "McCain’s Alabama Chairman Reportedly Outed - Attorney General Troy King Has a Record of Homophobic Rhetoric," at Pensito Review on Friday.

We happened upon the scrubbing of the campaign website as we did fact-checking for the article. At about 2:30 p.m PDT, when we checked the McCain campaign website, we found a news release from January on this now-blank page announcing the Alabama politicians who had joined McCain's "leadership team." The list included King, who was indeed named state campaign chairman.

A few minutes after we published the article, a reader left a comment alerting us that the link to the McCain website led to the blank page that is there now.

A search on the campaign site for "Troy King" returned no results, however a Google search for "Troy King" and "John McCain" still produced a link to the now-blank McCain campaign webpage near the top of the results as of 4 p.m. Friday.

We happened to have the webpage open and so made the screen capture of it and grabbed the text:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Video: Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) gets nowhere as he attempts to grill Attorney General Michael Mukasey on the investigation into Karl Rove's influence in the federal prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.

Update (from Brad): Wow. Remarkable exchange. Made either more or less astounding by the reminder that it was Schumer himself who, with Diane Feinstein, sealed the confirmation of Mukasey. Regretting that one yet, Senator?

(P.S. Good catch, Jon! Don't let me stop you from posting an update that includes the answer to Sheldon Whitehouse's question at the end there! )

Got it! See below --- Jon

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

When the Democrats regained control of the House in 2006, the new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, famously took the impeachment of George Bush "off the table." This puzzled and disappointed millions of people who rightly wondered why a president could be impeached over a sex lie in 1999 but not over a lie just four years later that sent hundreds of thousands of innocent people to their deaths in Iraq while draining the U.S. Treasury of billions upon billions of dollars.

In parliamentary proceedings, however, any item that can be taken off the table can be put back on it, if conditions change and the leadership wills it so. As we reported yesterday, Speaker Pelosi has signaled that an Article of Impeachment charging Bush with lying to Congress about his pretexts for invading Iraq might at least get a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.

There's no way to know what, if any, changes in conditions may have prompted her to rethink impeachment, but it may have something to do with a new Rasmussen poll released on Tuesday that found approval of Congress at 9 percent, which is essentially a statistical zero.

Pundits have long speculated that Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and the other leaders have been averse to impeaching Bush because the impeachment of Pres. Bill Clinton put the Republican-controlled Congress in such bad odor with the public.

Let's assume that Pelosi and company are not so blind that they can't see the difference in severity of Clinton's misdemeanor and Bush's high crimes --- or that they're such bad politicians that they can't judge the difference in the voters' view of Clinton, whose approval rating remained in the mid-60s throughout the ordeal, and its disregard for Bush, whose approval is in the low 30s. Nor can they be unaware of the corollary fact that disapproval of Bush's misadventure in Iraq is in the upper 60s.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The Los Angeles Times published a story today --- on the front page above the fold --- about the adultery of a presidential candidate that, if it had been about the Democrat, would likely have changed the dynamics of the 2008 presidential campaign --- possibly even throwing the election to the other party.

Instead, the story is about John McCain, the Republican, and is therefore bound to be ignored by the rest of the mainstream press.

The only possible interest the story might generate in the corporate media --- and in conservative circles, where McCain is already not particularly well-liked --- stems from the fact that McCain's extramarital affair with his current wife, Cindy, permanently ended his friendship with Ronald Reagan and, especially, his wife, Nancy, around the same time Reagan was running for president 30 years ago.

The Times article opens with the strained moments around Nancy Reagan's tepid endorsement of McCain earlier this year:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

L.F. Eason III, the director of the state of North Carolina's Standards Laboratory in Raleigh, was forced to resign this week because he refused to follow an order to lower the laboratory's flags in honor of former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, who died late last week. Eason, 51, had worked for the state for 29 years, the entirety of his career.

In email explaining his position, Eason wrote...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Operatives for the John McCain campaign expressed their displeasure at a protester who carried a sign that equated McCain with George Bush by behaving just like operatives for George Bush and having her forcibly removed and threatened with arrest.

The incident occurred outside a McCain townhall meeting in Denver on Monday when Carol Kreck was ticketed for trespassing and escorted off the sidewalk at the behest of the McCain campaign.

Her offense? She was carrying a sign that said, "McCain = Bush."

It is revelatory that McCain operatives see the sentiment expressed in Kreck's sign as an insult. If her sign had read, "McCain = Reagan," they probably would have given her a front-row seat...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Via BuzzFlash.com. On Tuesday, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, announced that he has scheduled a vote for July 16 on whether to charge Attorney General Michael Mukasey with contempt of Congress.

Mukasey has refused to comply with the committee's subpoena for FBI transcripts of a June 2004 interview with Dick Cheney about the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

The administration has asserted that Cheney's interview cannot be shared with Congress. However, Waxman has confirmed that the interview was not covered by a secrecy agreement, primarily because it was part of grand jury inquiry into the leak.

The confirmation comes from Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the leak investigation:

The committee is looking into allegations that Cheney directed the unmasking of Plame, a specialist in the black market for terror weapons, because her husband, Joe Wilson, had criticized him in a newspaper.

In early 2007, Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was found guilty of obstructing the inquiry by lying to investigators.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Last week, on his campaign plane heading toward Colombia, John McCain all but blew his top when a reporter asked him how his status as a former POW qualified him to be president:

Less than a week later, McCain releases a campaign ad, titled "Love," that focuses on --- you guessed it --- his status as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.