A Bronx response: Yankees! Yes!

HARRIET WHO?
PENTAGON TO COMBAT BIRD FLU
FIGHTING PROPAGANDISTS

Who is she? Is there a there there? This Harriet is not a Harriet Tubman, that’s for sure. Who is she? What do we know? What are we learning about this latest crony candidate to fill the bench? The Los Angeles Times carried an honest admission by Michael Newman:

It’s hard to have an opinion on a subject you know very little about. It is not impossible, however, and this morning editorial writers rise to the occasion with President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers.

The first step is to admit ignorance. For the Wall Street Journal, “the nominee is mostly a Texas mystery.” The New York Times worries that Miers’ record “is so thin that no one seems to have any idea of what she believes.” The Washington Post observes that her “views and approach to the law are largely unknown.” The Boston Globe says she’s “close to a blank slate.

WHY HE NOMINATED HER

President Bush says none of this matters because he knows her “heart.” The Nation’s David Corn was at the rare press conference:

Asked if he had ever discussed abortion with Harriet Miers, his latest Supreme Court nominee, he said, “I have no litmus test.” That was a non-responsive answer. Pressed on this, he seemed to say he had not, but we will have to check the transcripts. When informed that conservative female lawyers were disappointed by the Miers pick, Bush said, “People can OH-pine all they want.” He maintained he knew Miers’ “heart.” He remarked, “To me a person’s strength of character counts a lot.” He asserted that “she doesn’t change over the course of time,” and he cited this as a positive trait. He said he believes it is important to nominate someone from outside the judicial system and “therefore there’s not a lot of opinions to look at.” (”Not a lot”? Make that none.)

http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2005/10/bushs_latest_pr.php

‘PATHETIC’

Notes Tom Lewis:

The problem is not, as MoveOn and others allege, that we know nothing about her. The problem is we know most of what there is to know and it’s not much. This is a pathetic nomination.

I would say her service… as a squelcher of rumors about Bush’s military service makes her part of the Rove team in the White House. Rumors, both squelched and widely spread, are his specialty.

SHE BRIEFED THE BIG ONE

An Associated Press photo reveals that Harriet Miers briefed Bush on the famous Bin Laden memo warning of an imminent attack on the U.S. You know, the one that was ignored because he didn’t give a date.

Not all of the media coverage of this event was consistent, reports Editor and Publisher:

On its front page Tuesday, The New York Times published a photo of new U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers going over a briefing paper with President George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch “in August 2001,” the caption reads.

USA Today and the Boston Globe carried the photo labeled simply “2001,” but many other newspapers ran the picture in print or on the Web with a more precise date: Aug. 6, 2001.

Does that date sound familiar? Indeed, that was the date, a little over a month before 9/11, that President Bush was briefed on the now-famous “PDB” that declared that Osama Bin Laden was “determined” to attack the U.S. homeland, perhaps with hijacked planes. But does that mean that Miers had anything to do with that briefing?

As it turns out, yes, according to Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times. An article by Richard A. Serrano and Scott Gold observes that early in the Bush presidency “Miers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the crucial ‘presidential daily briefing’ hinting at terrorist plots against America just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

MIERS ON GAY ISSUES

CNN reports:

A questionnaire filled out in 1989 by U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is being promoted as an insight into her views on gay rights and the law. In answers to a Texas gay rights group when she was running for a seat on Dallas City Council, she said she believed gay men and lesbians should have the same civil rights as straight Americans, but that she also opposed repeal of the state’s sodomy law criminalizing same-sex sexual conduct.

MIERS ON CORPORATE CRIME

“Miers Led Law Firm Repeatedly Forced to Pay Damages For Defrauding Investors,” reports David Sirota on The Huffington Post:

In case anyone thought Harriet Miers wasn’t a corporate-shill-in-White-House-clothing, take a gander at how Miers did her best Ken Lay impression while heading a major Texas corporate law firm. That’s right, according to the 5/1/00 newsletter Class Action Reporter, Miers headed Locke, Liddell & Sapp at the time the firm was forced to pay $22 million to settle a suit asserting that “it aided a client in defrauding investors.”

The details of the case are both nauseating and highly troubling, considering President Bush is considering putting Miers at the top of America’s legal system. Under Miers’ leadership, the firm represented the head of a “foreign currency trading company [that] was allegedly a Ponzi scheme.” The law-firm admitted that it “knew in March 1998 that $8 million in [the company’s] losses hadn’t been reported to investors” but didn’t tell regulators.

This wasn’t an isolated incident, either. The Austin American-Statesman reported in 2001 that Miers’ lawfirm was forced to pay another $8 million for a similar scheme to defraud investors. The suit, which dealt with actions the firm took under Miers in the late 1990s, was again quite troubling. As the 9/20/00 Texas Lawyer reported, Miers’ firm helped a now-convicted con man “defraud investors and allowed the firm’s [bank] account to be used as a ‘conduit.’” The suit said “money from investors that went into the firm’s trust account was deposited into [the con man’s] bank accounts and was used to pay for his ‘expensive toys.’”

RELATED: ROBERT PARRY ON CRIME IN HIGH PLACES
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/100405.html

CONFLICT OF INTEREST?

Harvey Wasserman poses a question in the Columbus, Ohio, Free Press: “Will Harriet Miers vote to overturn Bush’s conspiracy conviction?”

An angry groundswell has risen against the appointment of George W. Bush’s personal attorney to the US Supreme Court.

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2005/1222In

HOW MANY DIED IN NEW ORLEANS?

We still don’t know, report David Zucchino and Nicholas Riccardi in the Los Angeles Times:

BATON ROUGE, La. — When he finally could leave his post guarding a nuclear power plant after Hurricane Katrina struck, Richard George Reysack III sped to the flooded home of his 80-year-old father east of New Orleans. Slogging through the muck, he found his father’s corpse face-down in the hallway.

As devastating as that discovery was, at least “Reysack had his father’s remains. Then even that was taken away. The authorities who moved the corpse to a temporary morgue not only won’t return it to Reysack for burial, he said, but they won’t even confirm that they have it.

Reysack’s family has published an obituary and held a memorial service — all without a body…

A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands here, families of the dead have been traumatized yet again by the ordeal of trying to pry loved ones’ bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed bodies.

Many of those bodies are unidentified. But authorities have been provided with ample information to identify dozens of corpses that they continue to hold, to the dismay of family member scattered across the country.

BIRD FLU? CALL DR. RUMSFELD

CNN reports that the President thinks the military will have to be pressed into action if there is an epidemic of bird flu. Many governors say they do not want the military pre-empting state authority in the case of disasters:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Bush said Tuesday that the possibility of an avian flu pandemic is among the reasons he wants Congress to give him the power to use the nation’s military in law enforcement roles in the United States.

“I’m concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world,” he told reporters during a Rose Garden news conference.

Such an deadly event would raise difficult questions, such as how a quarantine might be enforced, he said.

“One option is the use of a military that’s able to plan and move,” he said. “So that’s why I put it on the table. I think it’s an important debate for Congress to have.”

THE DISASTER THAT IS IRAQ

“We are dying a slow death in here:”

The cellblocks echoed with groans. Emaciated prisoners were vomiting blood or dropping unconscious to the floor. The military hospital overflowed with strikers being force-fed through their noses.

BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS

Asia’s poor build U.S. Bases in Iraq:

Numerous former American contractors returning home say they were shocked at conditions faced by this mostly invisible, but indispensable army of low-paid workers. Third country nationals frequently sleep in crowded trailers and wait outside in line in 100 degree plus heat to eat “slop.” Many are said to lack adequate medical care and put in hard labor seven days a week, 10 hours or more a day, for little or no overtime pay.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10514.htm

THE BEST OF THE BLOGS FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

Dave Schuler writes:

Welcome to the Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts of the week from Iraqi and Afghani bloggers. This week we have Ramadan, a trip to the north, the new constitution, advice from the Saudis, and much, much more.

Check out Truth Teller’s description of his trip to northern Iraq.

Ramadan Kareem to our Iraqi blogger friends. The beginning of Ramadan is much on many Iraqi bloggers’ minds and An Average Iraqi, Sunshine, and Caesar of Iraqi Snow have all posted about it.

Riverbend talks with a neighbor about the new constitution while sitting in her yard swing.

Imad Khadduri explains why Americans shouldn’t wonder “Why do they hate us?”

Osama Al-Aqili of Friends of Democracy analyzes a terrorist’s confessions.

You may have heard about the recent outburst from the Iraqi Interior Minister that he didn’t think that Iraqis needed advice from “a Bedouin riding on a camel”. Hammorabi gives some background on the tensions between Iraqis and Saudis.

Raed Jarrar of Raed in the Middle is now living in San Francisco.
Khalid Jarrar of Tell Me a Secret is posting again, now from Jordan.

From Sooni: no one speaks for the Sunnis.

Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi posts again after a lengthy hiatus about the prospects for Iraq and the new constitution. Will Iraq become like Yugoslavia or will there be a new Saddam?

The post of the week is from Baghdad Treasure who is, indeed, proving to be a real treasure. Is Fallujah controlled by Al-Qaeda again?

Dave Schuler posts regularly to his own weblog, The Glittering Eye. The Carnival was originally conceived by Ryan Boots.