Bush on Boehner
From President Bush's White House press conference today:
QUESTION: The Republican leader in the House this week said that Democrats -- he wonders if they are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people.
Do you agree with him, sir? Do you think that's the right tone to set for this upcoming campaign? Or do you think he owes somebody an apology?
BUSH: I wouldn't have exactly put it that way. But I do believe there's a difference of attitude.
Take the Patriot Act, for example. Interesting debate that took place not once but twice. And the second time around there was a lot of concern about whether or not the Patriot Act, you know, was necessary to protect the country.
There's no doubt in my mind we needed to make sure the Patriot Act was renewed to tear down walls that exist so that intelligence people could share information with criminal people. It wasn't the case before 9/11. In other words, somebody had some intelligence that they thought was necessary to protect the people, they couldn't share that with somebody whose job it was to grab (ph) people out of society to prevent them from attacking. Just made no sense.
And so there was a healthy debate, and we finally got the Patriot Act extended after it was passed right after 9/11. To me, that was an indication of just a difference of approach.
No one should ever question the patriotism of somebody, you know -- let me just start over.
I don't question the patriotism of somebody who doesn't agree with me. I just don't.
And I think it's unwise to do that. I don't think it's what leaders do.
I do think that -- I think that there is a difference of opinion here in Washington about the tools necessary to protect the country, the terrorist surveillance program, or what did you call it...
QUESTION: Eavesdropping.
BUSH: Yeah, the illegal eavesdropping program you wanted to call it.
(LAUGHTER)
IEP, as opposed to TSP.
(LAUGHTER)
There's just a difference of opinion about what we need to do to protect our country. I'm confident the leader, you know, meant nothing personal. I know that he shares my concern that we pass good legislation to get something done.
14 Comments:
at 5:47 PM, September 15, 2006 
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Post a Comment*Boehner "wonders if they [Democrats] are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people."
Last time I checked folks such as Lindsey Graham, John McCain, John Warner, and Colin Powell were all Republicans. They all believe -- as I do along with most Americans -- that torture is wrong.
NEWSACHE BLOG: NewsAche is the feeling you get when you read the Cincinnati Enquirer, the worst newspaper in the United States.
What is it with everyone mocking our democracy? Laughing about terror-proof legislation born from slaughter of innocent lives?
Ohio is in the midst of convicting a politician put under pressure by the president and VP to break the law*, lawsuits are brought forth by the League of Woman Voters over fundamental voting rights, and missing is $224 million for which the median tax payers will be gouged?
Today in his column, Peter Bronson mocks a democracy for which men and women are sacrificing their lives in Iraq.
It would be easier to have a one party system but it would be no laughing matter because some lives appear to be more disposable than others.
Buy the City new police officers and stick them in a middle of a fight between the haves and have nots for people who laugh off poverty.
Is there no dignity for life left?
*quoted in all the papers but not here. This would obviously be dismissed through laughter.
"There's no doubt in my mind we needed to make sure the Patriot Act was renewed to tear down walls that exist so that intelligence people could share information with criminal people."
Bush is a criminal that steals elections, starts illegal wars, illegally spies on Americans and tortures people in secret gulags.
"There's no doubt in my mind we needed to make sure the Patriot Act was renewed to tear down walls that exist so that intelligence people could share information with criminal people."
The only wall was Bush's thick skull when he continued to clear brush and ride his trusty bike in Crawford Texas after being briefed on August 6, 2001 with a Presidential Daily Brief titled
Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US.
August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB):
Al-Qa'ida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have
resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently
maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida
members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in E. Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks. We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ... (redacted portion) ... service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ 'Umar 'Abd
al-Rahman and other US-held extremists. Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types
of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
Bush's reply to the FBI agent who delivered the PDB to him in Crawford Texas, you remember the longest presidential vacation ever, has reported that Bush said to him, "All right, you've covered your ass now."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901211.html
The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light
By Barton Gellman,
a Washington Post staff writer who reports on intelligence and national security
Tuesday, June 20, 2006; C01
THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE
Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
By Ron Suskind
Simon & Schuster. 368 pp. $27
snip
The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now." Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."
snip
There can be no other conclusion than that this administration is incompetent.
FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP:
-Ignored repeated warnings OBL detrmined to strike US
-Cherry picked intel, ignored facts to start Iraq War.
-"Mission Accomplished-no contingency plan
-advocated TORTURE ignored Article 3 of Geneva Convent.
-9 BILLION $ missing from Iraq.
-Allowed "waterboarding, degrading treatment"
-KATRINA FAILURE
-Record DEFICIT
-CULTURE OF CORRUPTION (Delay, Ney, Abramoff, Duke...)
-Spying on Americans
-Large Increase in Poverty
-Outsourcing of American Jobs to enrich Corp Cronies.
-Privatization of Elections to Partisan Corporations=ELECTION FRAUD>
-Increase in POLLUTION + Global Warming.
-NO CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT.
-Unfettered Oil Companies Writing Policy.
-Ignoring Scientific Peer Review Studies.
-No Port Security, outsourced to UAE.
-Rampant Cronyism (Noe, Michael Brown, etc)
-Trampling the Constitution.
HAD ENOUGH?
So the ethically challenged Boehner, Mr Tan Always Golfing Man wants to question whether the Democrats would prefer protecting the terrorsts...
Fact: You may not know this if you watch Fox or listen to partisan talking point shouters, but FISA allows eavesdropping for 3 days without a warrant. So when Bush trots out his favorite phrase, "If Al Quaeda is calling you we want to know why" unless he is a dunce he is fully aware that he always had the abilty to eavesdrop, no questions asked for 3 days before applying for a warrant.
Back to Mr. Tan Always Golfing Man Boehner...
Boehner gets his way on ethics reform
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Elizabeth Auster
Plain Dealer Columnist
Could John Boehn- er, the west ern Ohio con gressman who replaced Tom DeLay as House major ity leader last winter, wield more power in some cases than Speaker Dennis Hastert?
That's one way of interpreting what happened last week when the House revisited the question of improving its ethics, and voted not for a broad set of reforms, but rather for a narrower change that would require lawmakers to identify costly pet projects that they quietly tuck into bills.
Back in January, you may recall, Hastert loudly vowed to press for sweeping reforms to clean up congressional ethics. Among his ideas: a ban on privately financed congressional travel and sharper curbs on gifts to lawmakers.
Hastert made his pitch in the wake of several embarrassments: the guilty plea of lobbyist Jack Abramoff to corruption-related charges, the guilty plea of former Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham on bribery charges and the indictment of DeLay on campaign finance charges.
But shortly after Hastert's promise to press for major reforms, something interesting happened. DeLay's decision to step down as majority leader led to an election to pick his replacement. And Boehner, as part of his hard-fought campaign for the job, distributed to his GOP colleagues a platform that took a notably different tack than Hastert's on the question of how to cope with the corruption fallout.
Boehner, who has long enjoyed close ties to lobbyists, proposed a much more modest response. He suggested two areas for congressional improvement and, in each case, proposed increasing disclosure rather than banning activities.
Boehner said Republicans should "think seriously about bringing greater transparency to the lobbying industry." And he called for finding a way to make it easier to distinguish between worthy and unworthy "earmarks" - pet projects that lawmakers slip into spending bills.
This was not the sort of far-reaching action Hastert had championed. But Boehner was unapologetic, at one point even saying he thought the idea of a travel ban was childish.
Enough of Boehner's colleagues apparently agreed to allow him to win the election for the No. 2 leadership post in the House. And sure enough, when the House eventually passed a lobbying reform bill in May, it was much narrower than what Hastert had described. Moreover, it's yet to go anywhere.
The Senate passed a stricter ethics bill in March. But the two chambers have done virtually nothing to try to resolve the differences between the two bills, making it unlikely that a broad ethics reform package will pass this year, despite all of the earlier promises. Hence, the House's decision last week to act on the narrower question of earmarks reform.
It's still remotely possible that congressional leaders, chastened by Ohio Rep. Bob Ney's agreement Friday to plead guilty to corruption charges and Democratic complaints of a "do-nothing" Congress, will change their minds and push broader legislation. But if the current situation holds, mark it as a victory for Boehner's approach over Hastert's.
Boehner, whose seat is safe, is taking a risk on this one: that the public won't care as much about ethics reforms as Hastert feared. The results of that gamble won't be known until Nov. 8. But since he clearly wants to keep the job of majority leader, Boehner has plenty riding on it - no matter how safe his seat is.
Auster is a senior writer in The Plain Dealer's Washington, D.C., bureau.
The Liberals have just gone insane over their projected losses in November. First they thought they were winning the whole shebang, but now that new figures are showing the Left losing percentage points, you will see their hate flower on boards like this!
Insanity! Insanity!
The Left has gone Nuts!
Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.Those are your tax dollars that are being siphoned from the federal treasury and wasted on Bridges to Nowhere, a Medicare drug plan that is a giveway to big Pharma and the insurance industry.
Want to debate the economy and budget under Clinton?
Who knows what Clinton's Recession was hiding. That's where Enron and the corporate scandals were birthed. That's where the fake tech bubble grew and burst.
And that's where Clinton ignored Osama bin Laden. We all saw it in ABC's Path to 9/11
Clinton let us down, because he was just a failure as a man and as a President.
.
"Since Sept. 11, the CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people in its effort to dismantle terrorist networks. Many of them have been secretly taken by 'extraordinary rendition' to other countries, hidden from U.S. legal requirements and often subject to torture."
Turns out one of those estimated 3,000 was a Canadian Muslim, Maher Arar. He was referred by a special unit of the Royal Mounties and spirited off to Syria by the CIA for interrogation and torture. After a two and a half year investigation, a Canadian commission concluded Arar had no connection to terrorists.
From earlier in the article:
"Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found."
Full text: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14897315/
Oops.
No, Mr. Boehner, it's not terrorists' rights we're concerned about, but innocent individuals such as Mr. Arar.
The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.
"The most effective propaganda techniques works by misdirecting or distracting the public's limited attention away from important issues like the Iraq War and fight for Democracy."
Hey Susan Clearfield you shouldn't get your news from a docudrama
And that's where Clinton ignored Osama bin Laden. We all saw it in ABC's Path to 9/11
How about that August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief personally delivered to Crawford Texas by a CIA briefer. Not that the docudrama bothered to show that. Why depict reality when you can use the excuse of compression to conflate. Guess that 2 minute scene would have made the docudrama too long.
Wanna guess what the title othe PDB was?
Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US.
August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB):
Al-Qa'ida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have
resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in E. Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks. We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ... (redacted portion) ... service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists. Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
Wanna guess what Bush did after being briefed? Continued his planned month long vacation
Monday, August 6: 4-mile run, built nature walk in canyon, fishing.
Tuesday, August 7: Golf. 3-mile run. Fishing, cookout with Mel Martinez.
Wednesday, August 8: Habitat for Humanity, Waco, TX (injured finger).Worked out with weights.
Thursday, August 9: Jogging, fishing, announced stem cell decision (9pm EST)
Sunday, August 12: Church near Crawford.
Monday, August 13: Golf, signed agriculture bill with audience of farmers.
Tuesday, August 14: Thinned brush and raised money at a picnic in Colorado. Talked to children at YMCA camp in Colorado.
Wednesday, August 15: Talked to children in Albuquerque, opened job-training center, addressed Chamber of Commerce, attended fundraiser for Sen. Domenici, Rockies v. Braves.
Saturday, August 18: Radio address re: faith-based initiatives.
Monday, August 20: Addressed VFW Convention, toured Harley-Davidson plant, Milwaukee. Work out, dinner with friends.
Tuesday, August 21: Truman High School, Independence, MO re: taxes.
Wednesday, August 22: Ran, lifted weights.
Thursday, August 23: Golf,
Crawford Elementary School, met with horticulturalist re: trees
on ranch.
Friday, August 24: Press conference re: economy (1st press conference of vacation).
Saturday, August 25: Ranch tour for the press (80 minutes).
Sunday, August 26: Steel Plant in Pennsylvania, barbeque. Little League World Series Champ-
ionship (Japan v. Florida).
Wednesday, August 29: Spoke at an American Legion Convention re: military budget, tax cut.
Dedicated a restored grist mill, San Antonio.
Guess the decider decided that PDB didn't merit any decider type action.
Facts are pesky things. You can return to your docudrama now.
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