Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

The Brad Blog reported on how Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) may have set in motion some events she didn’t mean to “with her complaint at the Ohio Election Commission against David Krikorian, claiming he made ‘false statements’ by alleging she took ‘blood money’ from Turkish interests to suppress a vote in the U.S. House on the Armenian Genocide resolution”. It led to the deposition of Sibel Edmonds, which prompted this reaction from Krikorian:

From my opinion, if I’m some of the current members of Congress, I’d be very very worried about the information that’s going to come out of this. There are current members of Congress that she has implicated in bribery, espionage. It’s not good. It’s crazy, it’s absolutely crazy. For people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don’t take action against it, in my opinion, it’s negligence.

It turns out we bribed witness in order to obtain testimony against Guantánamo detainees. Additional details never seem to improve the picture there.

A couple of weeks ago I linked to Jeremy Scahill’s article on Blackwater/Xe’s legal maneuvering. Scahill advanced the story (to put it mildly) this week. Via.

Also via Raw Story is the latest from Charlie Savage, this time on Obama’s embrace of signing statements. Savage writes “After Mr. Bush transformed signing statements from an obscure tool into a commonplace term, Mr. Obama’s willingness to use them has disappointed some who had hoped he would roll back the practice, not entrench it.” A fair assessment, I’d say. Also, the article mentions a Sternly Worded Letter co-authored by David Obey, he of “As chairman of the appropriations committee, I have no intention of reporting out of committee any time in this session of Congress any such (war funding) request that simply serves to continue the status quo” fame. It’s always fun when he makes an appearance for some comic relief.

Yves Smith has become one of my favorite bloggers in the last year or so because she consistently gives informed and level-headed but unsparing takes on the fiscal insanity going on in Wall Street and Washington. For instance, this post is great. This one points out “if Lyndon Johnson were still Senate majority leader, you’d have had a Constitutional crisis,” a sentiment near and dear to my heart. Finally, there is this, the latest proof that the world is filled with people much smarter than me:

Consulting my Divine Comedy, I find lobbyists are relegated to the eight circle of hell no matter how you cut and slice it, as either flatterers (second bolgia) or false advisors (bolgia 8) or falsifiers (bolgia 10, along with alchemists and perjurers). This puts them on the same general level as corrupt politicians (bolgia 5), although one could make a case they belong in the ninth circle, traitors.

Marcy Wheeler reported on the effort to have Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer argue the government’s case in the effort to get Patrick Fitzgerald’s interview of Dick Cheney made public. Problem is, the Department of Justice “forgot to reveal that Breuer had represented one of the people involved with issues directly related to Cheney’s interview.” She details how there’s probably nothing illegal going on, nor strictly immoral. It does, however, make the DOJ look bad. Whether “bad” means deeply confused, compromised or unethical is not clear.

UNPACKING JANE: On page 282 writes the following on the tale of Khaled El-Masri:

Masri had no inkling of it, but he was causing great excitement inside the Skopje station of the CIA, where a young officer who was in charge for the holiday saw the case as a chance to score a counterterrorism coup. “Everyone wanted to play the game,” a former Agency official said.