President Bush ordered former Counsel Harriet Miers to defy a congressional subpoena and refuse to testify about the firings of federal prosecutors, even as a second former aide revealed new details Wednesday about White House involvement in the dismissals.
The possibility of contempt of Congress citations against both women hung over the developments.
Several Republican senators told President Bush’s top national security aide privately Wednesday that they did not want Bush to wait until September to change course in Iraq.
The meeting that lawmakers had with national security adviser Stephen Hadley came as GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel announced they would back Democratic legislation ordering combat to end next spring.
For nearly six years now we’ve been hearing from politicians and pundits about how Sept. 11, 2001, “changed everything.” One especially unwelcome change wrought by that day has been that, ever since, large numbers of otherwise sane and sensible people continue to utter the most ridiculous things regarding the subject of terrorism.
Consider a column last week by The Washington Post’s David Ignatius. Ignatius wonders how the nation would react to a future terrorist attack. “Would the country come together to combat its adversaries,” he asks, “or would it pull farther apart?”
Rupert Murdoch, the international media mogul, is trying to buy The Wall Street Journal, and Bill Moyers of PBS is scared to death, not to mention angry.
Murdoch, he said in a diatribe on his TV show, is “to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity. When it comes to money and power, he is carnivorous, all appetite, no taste. He’ll eat anything in his path …”
President Bush’s former political director says she intends to follow his directive and not answer questions about her role in the administration’s firing of federal prosecutors — unless a court directs her to defy her former boss.
With his failed Iraq policy crumbling around him, an embattled President George W. Bush Tuesday pleaded for more time from a growing list of Republican dissenters, a skeptical Democratic Congress and a disillusioned American public.
As Bush stubbornly claims his lost war can still be won, more Americans and Iraqis died in an attack inside the heavily-fortified Green Zone and a roadside bomb today destroyed a military Hummer, killing or wounding an undisclosed number of soldiers.
Senate Democrats moved Tuesday to cut off funding for Vice President Dick Cheney’s office in a continuing battle over whether he must comply with national security disclosure rules.
A Senate appropriations panel chaired by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., refused to fund $4.8 million in the vice president’s budget until Cheney’s office complies with parts of an executive order governing its handling of classified information.
Disgraced Louisiana Republican Conservative Senator David Vitter not only liked high-priced call girls in Washington, DC, but frequented a pricey brothel in his hometown of New Orleans and had a “Tuesdays and Thursdays” fling with another prostitute in the 1990s.
But Republican officials in Louisiana helped cover up Vitter’s dalliances with prostitutes, saying “it’s very sleazy, and it’s illegal. But, OK, it doesn’t apply to senators. They’re an elite group.”
Democrats raised new questions Tuesday about whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales knew about FBI abuses of civil liberties when he told a Senate committee that no such problems occurred.
Lying to Congress is a crime, but it wasn’t clear if Gonzales knew about the violations when he made his statements to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
One Democrat called for a special counsel to investigate. President Bush continued to support his longtime friend.
“He still has faith in the attorney general,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters.
It is rare if not completely unheard of to find a book about sports that is really about something far more profound — the human condition and the impact of a game that helped change if not entirely improve it.