Red Rover, Red Rover — let KARL come right over!

So, the beat goes on — and Pennsylvania, no stranger to bloody battlefields, will be the next skirmish point for the Democratic candidates. The ‘high road,’ the one that spoke of a new way of perceiving the political process, the fresh way of doing things, will fall wounded to the ‘old way.’ Smear, innuendo, political maneuver … and dare we speak it, Rush Limbaugh … will spread bile far and wide. It will splash all over the nation. We will get what we asked for — a rousing dogfight with blood flying. [Oh, and Britney’s Dad will continue to handle her affairs through summer — I knew you’d want to know!]

Speaking of smear and innuendo, I’ve clicked past pudgster Karl Rove lately, now a political analyst on FAUX News, pausing occasionally to gaze on in fascination, like watching a reptile behind the glass at the zoo. Amazing thing, trotting out a man of such immense karmic implication and allowing him a platform to infect the body politic via a ‘news’ medium … directly … uncensored.

I found a little snip in a Froomkin piece that I thought illustrated the Rove mindset … hence, the epitome of double-speak … and I wanted to share it with you; I trust you will appreciate the nuance. It’s the equivalent of turning a coat inside out and putting it on upside down; and you’ll recognize the tactics … we’re seeing them today in our own party. If we wanted to know “how he did it,” sit with the first snip for awhile. Even Alan Colmes had problems absorbing the perversity.

And while we’re pondering Karl, the high price of being a Democrat in his crosshairs was counted the other night on 60 Minutes. It ran, I believe, on the same night as the Oscars, so I don’t know how many saw it. It was also blacked out ‘accidentally’ in Arkansas, the state where Rove ran a Democratic Governor to ground and saw to it that he was falsely imprisoned. A GOVERNOR!

If we wonder why the DoJ lawyer-gate scandal was so important, seems as though the fate of Don Siegelman should punch that up for us; and note that with Mukasey in charge [thank you DiFi, thank you Chuck S] the enormous dysfunction within the DoJ will fade quietly from sight along with the subpoena’s for Bush’s inner sanctum players.

Of course, he couldn’t do it alone. For whatever reason, the Dem’s are back to waiting for the Bush term to expire to do anything assertively substantive — yesterday, as Dubby killed time in preparation to introduce his heir apparent, Mc Nutball, he had a lot of swagger going on, did a spontaneous little dance for us; he appeared almost giddy — he can’t wait to get out of Dodge. The only thing he’s got going for him at the moment is the steady creak of the cogs which are continuing to produce a dissolution of the Republic … but the Dem’s will WAIT to pick up a stick and wedge it firmly? I’ve heard that rationale for seven years now — we’ve become the Party In Waiting. I guess the only fire shooting out of anybody’s ass is headed for Pennsylvania, where the supposed ‘brightest and best’ the nation has to offer can pick at each other like scavengers.

By the way — with apologies if you think Hil’s the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread — I’ve lost all respect for HRC. The day she proclaimed herself and McNutball the only one’s experienced enough to run the country, throwing party unity under the wheels of the Straight Talk Express, she lost me entirely. My ‘bullshitometer’ is set to detect high levels of egoism — I find the take-no-prisoners Clintonian machine a thing no less egregious than the Rovian low-road approach [and if you don’t think she has such a smoke machine, how many other candidates could lose twelve in a row and still declare “victory?” … except perhaps Huckabee, who was, after all, running with Jesus!] There’s spec that Joe Lieberman is available to run with Mac … maybe Joe’s the default ‘changling’ that could run with either.

Some are saying this Dem smackdown is just “politics as usual,” and that the Pubs are split and weakened, anyhow … not to be concerned — I say, this is the candidate who will be the full-throated impresario over 2012. Sound important to you???

Here’s the Don Siegelman story — and Youtubes of the 60 Minutes episode, if you didn’t see it.

Jude

Rove v. Obama
Snipped from Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Friday, February 29, 2008

John D. McKinnon writes that Bush’s criticism of Obama yesterday offered “glimpses of his campaign role to come.”

So, I would maintain, did former White House political strategist Karl Rove’s appearance on Fox News on Wednesday. Rove spoke about Obama to Alan Colmes.

Rove: “Look, with all due respect, he is a very left-wing Democrat. He came out of a very radical background in organizing. His record in the Senate is the most liberal, according to the ‘National Journal.’ He has been a conventional far-left Democrat. And we ought to recognize that. As a result, he has these associations and these people he has been comfortable being with who are not in mainstream America. Look, after 9/11, when he said true patriotism did not consist of wearing a lapel pin - - an American flag lapel pin on your lapel, but instead speaking out on the issues, he was basically, with the back of his hand, being very dismissive to millions of Americans who thought it was a patriotic act to put a flag pin on their lapel.”

Colmes: “Does he lack patriotism because he does not wear a lapel pan? Is he basically saying, patriotism isn’t about a pin? That is his point of view.”

Rove: “Alan, I didn’t say that. What he said was that people — he was implicating that people who did wear a flag on the lapel were not true patriots. My point is not — in America, you get to decide whether you want to wear a flag lapel pin or not. What he did though was say, it was true patriotism to speak out on the issue, not to wear a flag lapel pen. He was the one questioning the patriotism of people with flags on their lapels.”

Colmes: “I didn’t get that from what he said. What I got –”

Rove: “Read the statement carefully. He said, true patriotism — quote, true patriotism consisted of speaking out on the issues, not wearing a flag lapel pin.”

Colmes: “He wasn’t questioning people who wore it. He was questioning the war.”

Rove: “No, he was questioning the patriotism of those who did put a flag on their lapel. Admit it. I’m not questioning his patriotism. But he certainly questioned the patriotism of millions of people who felt the simple gesture of putting the flag on their lapel was a patriotic act, and it was.”

Going to Jail for Being a Democrat: How Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman Got Roved
Once a popular governor of Alabama, Siegelman was framed in a crooked trial and sent to prison by the corrupt Bush administration.
Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch via Alternet
March 3, 2008

Don Siegelman, a popular Democratic governor of Alabama, a Republican state, was framed in a crooked trial, convicted on June 29, 2006, and sent to Federal prison by the corrupt and immoral Bush administration.

The frame-up of Siegelman and businessman Richard Scrushy is so crystal clear and blatant that 52 former state attorney generals from across America, both Republicans and Democrats, have urged the US Congress to investigate the Bush administration’s use of the US Department of Justice to rid themselves of a Democratic governor who “they could not beat fair and square,” according to Grant Woods, former Republican Attorney General of Arizona and co-chair of the McCain for President leadership committee. Woods says that he has never seen a case with so “many red flags pointing to injustice.”

The abuse of American justice by the Bush administration in order to ruin Siegelman is so crystal clear that even the corporate media organization CBS allowed “60 Minutes” to broadcast on February 24, 2008, a damning indictment of the railroading of Siegelman. Extremely coincidental “technical difficulties” caused WHNT, the CBS station covering the populous northern third of Alabama, to go black during the broadcast. The station initially offered a lame excuse of network difficulties that CBS in New York denied. The Republican-owned print media in Alabama seemed to have the inside track on every aspect of the prosecution’s case against Siegelman. You just have to look at their editorials and articles following the 60 Minutes broadcast to get a taste of what counts for “objective journalism” in their mind.

The injustice done by the US Department of Justice (sic) to Siegelman is so crystal clear that a participant in Karl Rove’s plan to destroy Siegelman can’t live with her conscience. Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who did opposition research for Rove, testified under oath to the House Judiciary Committee and went public on “60 Minutes.” Simpson said she was told by Bill Canary, the most important GOP campaign advisor in Alabama, that “my girls can take care of Siegelman.”

Canary’s “girls” are two US Attorneys in Alabama, both appointed by President Bush. One is Bill Canary’s wife, Leura Canary. The other is Alice Martin. According to Harper’s Scott Horton,a law professor at Columbia University, Martin is known for abusive prosecutions.

What was the “crime” for which Siegelman and Scrushy were convicted? Scrushy made a contribution to the Alabama Education Foundation, a not-for-profit organization set up to push for a lottery to benefit secondary education in Alabama, to retire debt associated with the Alabama education lottery proposal. Scrushy was a member of Alabama’s Certificate of Need board, a nonpaid group that oversaw hospital expansion. Scrushy had been a member of the board through the terms of the prior three governors, and Siegelman asked him to serve another term.

Federal prosecutors claimed that Scrushy’s contribution was a bribe to Siegelman in exchange for being appointed to the Certificate of Need board. In the words of federal prosecutor Stephen Feaga, the contribution was “given in exchange for a promise for an official act.”

Feaga’s statement is absolute nonsense. It is well known that Scrushy had served on the board for years, felt he had done his duty, and wanted off the board. It was Siegelman who convinced Scrushy to remain on the board. Moreover, Scrushy gave no money to Siegelman. The money went to a foundation.

As a large number of attorneys have pointed out, every US president appoints his ambassadors and cabinet members from people who have donated to his campaign. Under the reasoning applied in the Siegelman case, a large number of living former presidents, cabinet members and ambassadors should be in federal prison - not to mention the present incumbents.

How in the world did a jury convict two men of a non-crime?

The answer is that the US Attorney used Governor Siegelman’s indicted young assistant, Nick Bailey, to create the impression among some of the jurors that “something must have happened.” Unbeknownst to Siegelman, Bailey was extorting money or accepting bribes from Alabama businessmen in exchange for state business. Bailey was caught. Presented with threats of a long sentence, Bailey agreed to testify falsely that Siegelman came out of a meeting with Scrushy and showed Bailey a $250,000 check he had accepted in exchange for appointing Scrushy to the Certificate of Need board. Prosecutors knew that Bailey’s testimony was false, not only because they had Bailey rewrite his testimony many times and rehearsed him until he had it down pat, but also because they had the check. The records show that the check, written to a charitable organization, was cut days after the meeting from which Siegelman allegedly emerged with check in hand.

It is a crime for prosecutors to withhold exculpatory evidence. The Washington Post reported on February 26 that Siegelman’s attorneys have called for a special prosecutor after CBS quoted prosecution witness Bailey “as saying prosecutors met with him about 70 times. He said they had him regularly write out his testimony because they were frustrated with his recollection of events. The written notes, if they existed, could have damaged the credibility of Bailey’s story, but no such notes were turned over to the defense, as would have been required by law.”

In video documentaries available online, Bailey’s friend, Amy Methvin, says that Bailey told her that he was going to parrot the prosecutors’ line, “pay for play,” “quid pro quo.” Methvin says Bailey went into a speech about money exchanged for favors. “You sound like a robot,” Methvin told him. “You would have it memorized, too, if you had heard the answers as many times as I have heard the answers,” Bailey replied.

The prosecutors also had help from some jurors. On a WOTM Special Report hosted by former US Attorney Raymond Johnson, Alabama lawyer Julian McPhillips produced emails from two jurors about influencing other jurors in order to achieve a conviction. Jurors are not supposed to discuss a case outside the court or to consider information other than what is presented in court and allowed by the judge. The outside communication among the jurors is sufficient to declare a mistrial.

However, Federal District Judge, Mark Fuller, a George W. Bush appointee, ignored the tainted jury. Fuller’s handling of the case suspiciously favored the prosecution. He bore a strong grudge against Siegelman. Fuller had been an Alabama district attorney before Bush made him a federal judge. Fuller’s successor as district attorney was appointed by Siegelman and produced evidence that suggested that Fuller had connived with his former senior assistant in a “pension spiking” scheme, which some viewed as a fraud or attempted fraud against the state retirement system.

Despite his known animosity toward Siegelman, Fuller refused to recuse himself from Siegelman’s trial. According to the WOTM Special Report, Fuller owns a company that was receiving federal money during Siegelman’s trial. Fuller did not disclose this conflict of interest. The charges raised by 60 Minutes cast the trial as Karl Rove’s effort to rid the Republicans of the candidate they could not beat. The strange conduct of the presiding Republican judge, who had recently become a rich man as the company he owned was awarded a mass of discretionary federal contracts, only raises more very troubling questions.

The Justice Department’s answer to the accusation that it framed Siegelman is that Siegelman was indicted by career prosecutors and convicted in a fair trial by a jury of his peers. These claims are no more truthful than anything else the DOJ says. Horton reports that career prosecutors advised against the case, concluded it was a political vendetta and walked away from it. Canary’s “girls” were “flailing about trying to find loyal troopers who would shut up and do what is expected of them,” a category into which Scott Horton says Louis Franklin and his deputy Stephen Feaga fell. The jurors were presented with what Bailey’s and Methvin’s testimony indicates to be Bailey’s perjury suborned by the US Attorney’s office and misled about what the testimony actually meant.

Horton says the case was “pressed forward with brute political force.”

According to Horton, Leura Canary refused to recuse herself despite her obvious conflict of interest. After she was forced to recuse herself, she continued to control the case from her office. In Horton’s words: “Her husband was managing the campaign against Siegelman and leaks from the investigation were emanating from someone at his address. But beyond this, her husband, Bill Canary, had a long, well established, close working relationship with Karl Rove covering work he did in Washington and Alabama over a period of more than 17 years. Leura and Billy Canary were close friends of, and socialized with, Karl Rove.”

On his Bush League Justice program, MSNBC’s Dan Abrams reported that a Republican attorney said under oath that “key Republicans on Republican candidate for governor Bob] Riley’s team discussed talking to Karl Rove about the case, quoting one of them who said, “Not to worry, that he had already gotten it worked out with Karl, and Karl had spoken to the Department of Justice.’”

The Bush Justice Department first went after Siegelman during his 2002 reelection campaign. When Siegelman was first elected in 1998, the Republican Alabama Attorney General, William Pryor, began investigating Siegelman. There was nothing to investigate, but his “investigation” was the entry for Leura Canary, who federalized the “investigation.” Politically motivated leaks from the “investigation” were used in an effort to defeat Siegelman’s reelection.

It almost worked, but Siegelman narrowly won.

Unable to defeat Siegelman even with leaks from a phony investigation designed to smear him, the Republicans decided to steal the election. After all districts had reported the vote count, Siegelman thanked the voters for reelecting him and went to bed. During the night the Republicans, with no Democratic voting officials present, “recounted” the ballots in Baldwin County. Six thousand Siegelman votes that had been reported disappeared in the recount. The next morning Republican Bob Riley declared himself the winner.

The theft was so hastily arranged that the thieves forgot to change any of the other vote outcomes on the ballots. All other races had the same totals as originally reported, a statistical impossibility had there actually been a computer glitch as the election thieves claimed.

The Republican attorney general Pryor refused a recount. The Bush Justice Department and Republican federal judges looked the other way, as did the Republican propaganda sheets that masquerade as news media in Alabama.

President Bush rewarded William Pryor for his service by making him a federal judge in a recess appointment as he could not be confirmed by the US Senate.

According to MSNBC and other reports, a prosecution witness against Siegelman also made charges against Pryor and US Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL), but neither of the Republicans were investigated.

The case against Siegelman was drawn out in the media for two more years in the hopes of smearing him forever. When Leura Canary’s false case was finally brought to court, Federal District Judge U.W. Clemon threw it out of court. Clemon cited an assistant US Attorney and an assistant state attorney general for contempt of court. All charges against Siegelman and his co-defendants were dropped on October 5, 2004.

Vindicated, Siegelman began his campaign for recovering the governorship in 2006. The word came from Washington to “take another look at the case,” a phrase that could well be understood as “get Siegelman at all costs.” Siegelman was indicted a second time on October 26, 2005, costing him the Democratic primary. The jury twice deadlocked and was twice sent back by Siegelman’s adversary, Judge Fuller. With charges of jury-tampering in the air, Siegelman was acquitted of 25 counts and found guilty of “pay for play.” Judge Fuller had Siegelman handcuffed and manacled and immediately whisked off to prison for a seven-year sentence. Normally a non-dangerous person is left at liberty while the case is being appealed.

The Siegelman case makes it clear exactly what Bush, Rove, and the disgraced Bush flunky Alberto Gonzales intended by firing the eight Republican US Attorneys. These eight refused to politicize their office by falsely prosecuting Democrats in order to achieve a Rovian political agenda. Apparently, there were only eight honest persons among the 1,200 Republican US Attorneys. Bush, Rove, and Gonzales had no problem with the other 1,192. Professors Donald Shields and John Cragan report that the Bush Justice Department has investigated seven times more Democratic than Republican officials.

Former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Terry Butts said that justice in America today is about political agendas, “not about convicting real criminals.” Butts said that Siegelman’s attorneys and allies expect reprisals from the US Attorney’s office and Alabama’s Republican establishment.

Siegelman has been in prison for over a year. His appeal cannot move forward, because Judge Fuller’s court has not produced a transcript of the trial needed for appeal. In other words, Republicans are preventing Siegelman from being released on appeal by a higher court.

Karl Rove refused to testify about the case before Congress.

On February 25, 2008, Fox “News” gave Karl Rove airtime in which to deny the accusations and evidence against him, which he did.

The Department of Justice refuses to release Siegelman trial documents to Congress. It won’t even let Congress see what Leura Canary had to say to her bosses about the ethics challenges brought against her, which they swept under the carpet.

Siegelman’s family home was broken into.

Siegelman’s attorney’s office was broken into and ransacked.

Jill Simpson’s house had a mysterious “electrical fire” and her car was run off the road.

Is a justice system that functions in this way worthy of respect? Can we believe any convictions obtained by federal prosecutors?

Author’s note: Scott Horton, Harper’s Online, http://harpers.org/ has reported extensively and courageously on the frame-up of Don Siegelman. Raw Story http://rawstory.com/ has a multi-part report by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane. The 60 Minutes broadcast is available from YouTube as is the WOTM Special Report. YouTube http://youtube.com/ also has a multi-part documentary on Richard Scrushy. Brad Blog http://bradblog.com/ provides good coverage including a MSNBC broadcast on the Siegelman prosecution which traces it back to Karl Rove. Ernest Partridge’s Online Journal account provides additional information including the study by Professors Donald Shields and John Cragan. See also Glynn Wilson http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/wilson at The Nation.

The Siegelman Case — A Political Prosecution Exposed
Scott Horton, FireDogLake
Monday March 3, 2008

[FDL is pleased to welcome Scott Horton, who writes No Comment for Harper’s, to discuss politicized prosecutions and the Siegelman case for today’s installment of First Monday — our monthly legal discussion in conjunction with Alliance For Justice. As always, please stay on topic and take any off-topic comments to the prior thread. Thanks! — CHS]

Last Sunday, CBS aired its long-awaited feature on the prosecution and imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman.

The CBS piece, for which I was repeatedly interviewed, came through on its promise to deliver several additional bombshells. The most significant of these was the disclosure that prosecutors pushed the case forward and secured a conviction relying on evidence that they knew or should have known was false, and that they failed to turnover potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel. The accusation was dramatically reinforced by the Justice Department’s failure to offer a denial. It delivered a fairly elaborate version of a “no comment,” and even that came a full twenty-four hours after it had conferred with the prosecutors in question. The gravity of the accusations made and the prosecutors’ failure to deny them further escalates concerns about the treatment of the former Alabama governor.

Republicans Lead the Attack

But the show was dominated by one of 52 former attorneys general from 40 of the 50 states who have called for a Congressional probe of the conduct of the Siegelman case, former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods. He leveled a series of blistering accusations at the Bush Administration’s Justice Department. With the Alabama G.O.P. this evening issuing a near-hysterical statement in which it characterizes the CBS broadcast—before its transmission—as an anti-Republican attack piece, it was notable that Woods, like the piece’s other star witness, is a Republican. Not just any Republican, either. Grant Woods is co-chair of the McCain for President leadership committee, and a lifelong friend and advisor to the presumptive 2008 G.O.P. presidential candidate. Woods is also godfather to one of the McCain children.

Attorney General Woods has this to say about the Bush Justice Department’s prosecution of Siegelman: “I personally believe that what happened here is that they targeted Don Siegelman because they could not beat him fair and square. This was a Republican state and he was the one Democrat they could never get rid of.”

In other words, not being able to beat Siegelman at the polls, Woods believes that his own party corruptly used the criminal justice process to take out an adversary. This is an extraordinary, heavy accusation. Not something that a senior Republican would raise easily about his own party. And the facts back the accusation up, beginning to end.

Crimes for Democrats, Fundraising as Usual for the G.O.P.

Start with the notion that the conduct that figures in the accusations is actually a crime. The basic charge is that businessman Richard Scrushy gave $500,000 to the Alabama Education Foundation, a vehicle Siegelman created to run a campaign for a state education lottery, and Siegelman in exchange appointed him to the state’s hospital oversight board.

WOODS: You do a bribery when someone has a real personal benefit. It’s that you’re exchanging an official public act for a personal benefit. Not, “Hey, I would like for you to help out on this project which I think is good for my state.” If you’re gonna start indicting people and putting them in prison for that, then you might as well just– build nine or ten new federal prisons because that happens everyday in every statehouse, in every city council, and in the Congress of the United States.

PELLEY: What you seem to be saying here is that this is analogous to giving a great deal of money to a presidential campaign. And as a result, you become Ambassador to Paris.

WOODS: Exactly. That’s exactly right.

Indeed, Karl Rove pursued financing for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 and again in 2004 by organizing a special elite status—called “Pioneers” and “Rangers”—for persons who donated or raised $100,000 or more for the campaign. These donors understood that if they wanted to be appointed to a government office, like an ambassadorship, they only had to ask for it.

So how many Bush-Cheney donors in amounts of one hundred thousand and more were appointed to government offices or to positions in the Bush-Cheney transition team? The answer is one hundred and forty-six (146). And in how many of those cases did the Justice Department initiate investigations of corruption? The answer is zero (0). The Justice Department’s rationale is that this crime is one that can be committed by Democrats alone. When a Republican does it, it’s normal campaign fundraising.

False Evidence

But even if we accept that it’s possible for the Bush Department to create a new category of “Democrats Only” Crimes, we still have the basic fact that the evidence on which the Siegelman conviction was secured was false, and was known by the prosecutors to be false from the beginning. Indeed, the evidence of this is now so overpowering that the Justice Department refused to answer charges on camera, just as it has resisted Congressional demands to turn over documents and wrongfully failed to comply with FOIA requests. The key testimony at trial came from a man named Nick Bailey, who, unbeknownst to Siegelman, was a crook. He never contested that fact. And he’s now in prison, where CBS interviewed him—notwithstanding the Justice Department refusal to authorize an interview. The prosecutors nabbed him and then told him he could get a light sentence if he worked with them to nail Siegelman, their real target. This very process is a perversion of the justice system, which as former U.S. Attorney Jones very properly says, requires that prosecutors investigate crimes and not people. But it gets still worse. Bailey testifies that he saw a check change hands at a meeting at which Scrushy’s appointment to the oversight board was decided. This is the evidence that landed Siegelman in prison. And it was false. And the prosecutors knew that it was false.

JONES: They got a copy of the check. And the check was cut days after that meeting. There was no– there was no way possible for Siegelman to have walked out of that meeting with a check in his hand.

PELLEY: So, Siegelman could not have had that check–

JONES: No.

PELLEY: –in his hand that Bailey–

JONES: It was–

PELLEY: –testified to seeing?

JONES: Absolutely impossible and they knew that, absolutely impossible.

PELLEY: That would seem like a problem with the prosecution’s case…

JONES: It was a huge problem especially when you’ve got a guy whose credibility was going to be the linchpin of that case. It was a huge problem.

So the Justice Department’s silence in response to the charges was masked with a platitudinous statement. They stated that Siegelman’s case was pursued and developed by career prosecutors, that it was based on the law, and justified by fair evidence.

Each of the statements is about as honest as Attorney General Gonzales’s statement, under oath, before Congress, that he just couldn’t remember any details concerning any decisions to fire eight U.S. Attorneys on December 7, 2006. Which is to say, they are false.

First, we know that the first two career prosecutors assigned to the case, including the most experienced prosecutors who worked on it, came to the same conclusion that Grant Woods did: no reasonable prosecutor would ever have charged this case. The Justice Department has consistently made false statements about the roles of the two earlier prosecutors, and their role only emerged in the last few months. It’s extremely noteworthy that throughout the history of this case, whenever a career prosecutor concluded that charges should not be brought, that career prosecutor ran into a bump in his career and was off the case. The message to the remaining career prosecutors was plenty clear. In fact it is clear that the career prosecutors’ views were overridden by political appointees driven by a strong partisan political agenda.

Second, they claim that the case was brought on a fair reading of the law. It was not, and indeed reasonable career prosecutors never would have acted on the basis of the reading they advanced, and a fair detached judge never would have allowed the case to go forward. This case offered neither.

Third, they claim that evidence was produced to sustain the charges. But the key evidence that the prosecutors brought forward was false, and they knew it was false. In this case proceeding on the basis of that false evidence was a corrupt wielding of prosecutorial power, pursued for a corrupt partisan political end—the elimination of a political adversary. They withheld the Bailey notes which would have demonstrated that his memory on this was conflicted or wrong and would therefore have devastated his testimony. There is mounting evidence that one or more witnesses were unethically pressured to give false evidence or face retaliation. This suspicion surrounds not only Nick Bailey, but also Jefferson County Republican Commissioner Gary White. Note the affidavit of his wife, which a federal judge in Birmingham stated only two weeks ago he found “established a prima facie case of impermissible conduct” by the prosecutors. The claim put forward there goes precisely to these facts.

White was pressured to give false evidence supporting Bailey on his false claims about the meeting. It is suggested that he would be prosecuted if he failed to do so. He refused, saying the testimony would be false. And he was prosecuted. This seems to summarize the crooked criminal justice system that Karl Rove and his friends have promoted in Alabama.

This is Only an Introduction

CBS conducted dozens of interviews and has much more that it hasn’t shown. The additional footage concerns the Canary team—husband Billy who advised the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidates against Siegelman, and wife Leura Canary, whose prosecution of Siegelman was essential to the G.O.P.’s efforts to secure the Montgomery statehouse. And they have much more on the inexplicable conduct of federal Judge Mark Fuller, appointed by George W. Bush, a former member of the Alabama G.O.P.’s Executive Committee, and a man who publicly stated that Siegelman had a grudge against him—but who refused to recuse himself from the case.

The Significance of the Siegelman Case

On December 7, 2006, Alberto Gonzales fired eight U.S. attorneys for refusing to implement a program of political prosecutions. Many observers at that time notes that the case of the eight terminated U.S. attorneys might ultimately prove far less interesting that the 85 U.S. attorneys who were retained. The Siegelman case suggests this approach has merit. The two U.S. attorneys involved here—Alice Martin and Leura Canary—are Rovian models of politically engaged prosecutors. As the case continues to be investigated, I believe there will be a strong focus on them and their ties to the Bush White House. They both have a tight connection to Karl Rove, through the same figure, Billy Canary, a man who worked with Rove for 17 years.

But as I have argued in “Vote Machine,” this is but one manifestation of an overall phenomenon of modification of the Justice Department for partisan political purposes. The shift in policies and personnel in the Civil Rights Division, and particularly in the arena of voting rights, is another clear example. The accelerated hiring of partisan hacks to fill career positions. The prosecution of “voting fraud” cases consciously measured to dampen minority turnout at the polls. The prosecution of political figures and donors associated with Democrats, with prosecutions timed to overlap with election cycles.

Michael B. Mukasey has promised that this political process will end on this watch. But there is no evidence so far that he has recognized the problem or that he has taken any steps to end it.

FCC Official Wants Probe of “60 Minutes” Blackout
Peter Kaplan, Reuters
Monday 03 March 2008

Washington - A U.S. Federal Communications Commission official is seeking an inquiry into the blacking out of a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine “60 Minutes” by a local television station in Alabama.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he had asked the chairman of the FCC to open an inquiry into the February 24 incident at WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in which civil rights footage from the 1960s was blacked out.

“The FCC now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here,” Copps said at a luncheon with media watchdog groups. “Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?”

Copps is one of two Democratic appointees on the five-member FCC. The chairman of the agency, Kevin Martin, is a Republican.

Martin responded by saying he would look into the matter but has not indicated yet whether he would issue a letter of inquiry to the station, a source close to the commission said.

The “60 Minutes” segment centered on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who was convicted in 2006 on charges of corruption.

The program made the case that Siegelman had been wrongly convicted on the basis of a politically motivated case built by Republican prosecutors and White House political advisor Karl Rove.

The blackout of the segment in Huntsville prompted an editorial in The New York Times the following week that raised comparisons between the WHNT incident and systematic efforts by a Mississippi TV station to suppress information about the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

WHNT denied that the blackout was politically motivated. It said it had failed to get the segment on the air because of an equipment failure at the station that cut off the feed from CBS. WHNT said the problem was corrected a few minutes before the end of the Siegelman segment.

In a posting on WHNT’s Web site, the station’s news director, Denise Vickers, said the station had been “bombarded” with complaints and accusations that the station had sabotaged the broadcast for political reasons.

“But I assure everyone that the notion is patently false,” Vickers wrote in her Web site posting. “Who would invite such a public relations nightmare on themselves??”

WHNT was sold along with eight other stations by The New York Times Co last year to the private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners.

Station managers requested and received permission from CBS to re-air the segment twice in the following days, Vickers said.

Copps said on Monday the FCC should move quickly to “determine the facts” surrounding the incident.

“If the decision was intentional, who made the decision and why? The FCC needs to get to the bottom of this,” Copps said.

Reporting by Peter Kaplan; editing by Stuart Grudgings.

“Grotesque Imaginings”
Pamela Troy, Smirking Chimp
March 4, 2008

The Don Siegelman case recently publicized on 60 Minutes marks yet another nasty convergence between reality and the “You’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us” rhetoric driving the American right these days. For anyone who somehow managed to miss the story, which aired on February 24th, Don Siegelman was the Democratic ex-governor of Alabama. He is currently serving a prison term for what looks like a politically motivated frame-up. His greatest “crime” was apparently being a powerful and popular Democrat.

There’s been a good bit of emoting from the Alabama GOP in response. Before the 60 Minutes segment even broadcast they sent out a press release that was almost British in its dignified anger, bristling with Peter Cushing-ish words like “perfidy,” “ludicrous charges,” and “grotesque imaginings” and describing the segment as a “hatchet job.” Afterwards, the Alabama GOP demanded a retraction. “Only the most committed anti-Rove/Bush activist could swallow such a tale,” wrote party chairman Rep. Mike Hubbard.

“What?” The right wing sputters, opening its eyes very wide and laying a hand upon its chest to still the pounding of its outraged heart. “You say Karl Rove wrecked someone’s life and career using trumped up criminal charges merely because he was a political threat to the Republicans?”

“Why, that’s… that’s just crazy talk!”

Of course, the problem is that the right has, for the past twenty years, been doing its best to blur in the minds of thousands of people, the difference between being a liberal or a Democrat or anyone else perceived as an adversary of the G.O.P., and being a criminal. At the rock-bottom level you’ve got the Freepers, Michael Savage, and that fun bunch at KSFO wishing that Democrats or other perceived critics of Bush could be arrested and charged with treason, or hanged, or electrocuted slowly and painfully in defective electric chairs. Higher up on the food chain you’ve got more well known personalities like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter describing Harry Reid as “a propaganda minister for our enemies,” and coverage of the Haditha scandal as “a gang rape by the Democratic Party… to finally take us out in the war against Iraq,” or writing bestselling books with titles like Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.

And at the top you have GOP strategists who’ve exploited this equation of dissent with disloyalty and criminal behavior and consider themselves clever bunnies indeed for doing so. As far back as 1994, Newt Gingrich described supporters of Bill Clinton as “the enemies of normal Americans.” At a 2005 Conservative Party fundraiser in Manhattan Karl Rove opined “Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Sen. Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”

The string that holds all these nasty little pearls together, from Free Republic to the DC Beltway, can be found in a 2001 online essay written by someone named Eric Heubeck for the Free Congress Foundation and entitled “The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement.” The Free Congress Foundation, I should point out, is a conservative think tank headed by Paul Weyrich, with close ties to Karl Rove.

“We must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes,”…wrote Heubeck. “We must be feared, so that they (the opposition) will think twice before opening their mouths…We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs. If we act as if this were in fact true (of course, it is not), we will not needlessly expend our energy on being upset with our opponents.”

In short, Heubeck advocates spreading unreasoning loathing among the masses and using it as a political weapon. After reading his essay it’s difficult to imagine Heubeck – or anyone else at the Free Congress Foundation — being shocked or upset by the prospect of imprisoning a prominent Democrat solely because he’s a prominent Democrat. It’s certainly consistent with “channeling undesirable impulses.”

In the seven years since it was published, it looks like Heubeck’s strategy has been used to good effect. As language from the right equating liberalism with criminality becomes more and more mainstreamed, the idea of sending someone to prison on a flimsy pretext because they’re a powerful Democrat has become more and more palatable to a certain segment of the American population. The recent scandal surrounding the firing of attorneys in the Justice Department who were reluctant to pursue weak cases against Democrats indicates that “certain segment” is not confined to the relatively powerless crackpots who post to Free Republic and send mash notes to Ann Coulter.

One of the most depressing successes of the right has been the shutting down of dialogue. Online, the far right has pretty much made it their policy to talk only to other right-wingers in echo chambers like Free Republic or Little Green Footballs or, (at a rock-bottom level of malicious stupidity that makes FR look like Harvard) Conservapedia. When a conversation with a liberal does take place, offline or online, it tends to be for a very limited amount of time in venues where the right-winger has control, like talk radio or on a cable news show with a sympathetic host.

The people who utter statements like Karl Rove’s vile insinuation that liberals are motivated by the desire to put our troops in greater danger, or Hannity’s equation of Reid saying that the “[Iraq] War is lost” with being a “propaganda minister for our enemies,” are rarely confronted directly and in detail with the actual meanings and implications of their words. And that’s exactly how they want it to stay.

Because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the question to ask them, whether they are operating on the level of Freepers or of eager young aides to Karl Rove, is not “Is Don Siegelman in prison now because he’s a Democrat.”

The question to ask them is, “would it bother you if he were?”

Don’t assume, even for a minute, that the answer would be a simple and unequivocal “yes.”

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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Using ringtones to buy if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a handheld ringtones to buy on April 3, 1973.

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