By Dave Lindorff

A federal district judge appointed by President George W. Bush to
the bench has done the right thing, ruling definitively this morning
that the President’s claim of absolute immunity for his advisors from
Congressional oversight and subpoena is “entirely unsupported by
existing case law.”

The ruling, by Judge John Bates, is as important as much because of
who issued it as it is for its impact upon Congressional investigations
into presidential wrongdoing.

Certainly the ruling will open the way for Democrats in Congress to
move harder to investigate the abuses of the current administration,
which have been stymied by administration refusal to provide witnesses,
even to come in and plead the Fifth Amendment protection against
self-incrimination.

When CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted on 12/7/07 that the CIA destroyed torture tapes in 2005, anonymous sources blamed the head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez. But today the New York Times says four top White House lawyers debated the decision: Harriet Miers, John Bellinger, Alberto Gonzales and David Addington. (If you find it hard to keep track of the details, bookmark the outstanding detailed timeline on the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes by Cooperative Research.)

The White House is offering to allow Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to interview with congressional committees investigating the firing of 8 U.S. attorneys, but will not allow them to go testify under oath.

Bush will speak to the nation this evening at 5:45 EST.

An SF Chronicle editorial:

WHEN President Bush says of White House counsel Harriet Miers, "I know her heart," those words may not be of much guidance to most Americans trying to assess her fitness to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Bush has long had a way of speaking in code to what appears to be the main target of this and many other public comments that seem insufficient or even mystifying to others. Bush has mastered the art of effectively signaling to religious conservatives, his bedrock base of supporters, "Trust me. I'm one of you."

What did James Dobson mean when he famously said he knew things "that I probably shouldn't know" about Miers's judicial philosophy?

Dobson insisted Karl Rove never told him that Miers would overturn Roe. But did Rove supply Dobson with that information through a simple bank shot?

According to rightwinger John Fund, Dobson was on a conference call arranged by Karl Rove the day Miers' nomination was announced. The featured speakers were two judges who know Miers best: her living-in-sin lover, Justice Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, and Judge Ed Kinkeade, a Dallas-based federal trial judge.

Listen to your granny!

Granny Bee

10/16/05 - Dang Proud! (1:10)

Real    .mp3

More Granny Bee

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Thanks to Holden's Obsession with the Gaggle we learn that Scotty McClellan did a Texas two-step to dodge a couple of questions about Miersgate - the no-bid contract given to Ben Barnes' client by Harriet Miers to keep Barnes from revealing that Bush lied about the stringpulling that got him out of Vietnam and into the Texas Air National Guard ahead of 500 applicants. The question came from Les Kinsolving, a maverick conservative talk show host.

Plamegate sleuths think 3 top Busheviks could be indicted for conspiring to out Valerie Plame: Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Stephen Hadley.

But Dick Cheney and Karl Rove may also have conspired against Plame. And Harvey Wasserman says that could put them in Deep Voodoo:

the labyrinthian complications of the Plame case multiply the odds overshadowing any simple case against any single individual from the White House. But conspiracy would be a different story. It would seem patently obvious that outing Plame had to have been discussed in some form by the very top of the Bush junta.

Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers is widely seen - on both the left and the right - as an act of crude cronyism, a payback to an utterly loyal aide.

But is that all there is to the story? Or is the nomination a reward for crimes Miers committed on Bush's behalf? Worse yet, did Miers actually force Bush to nominate her through blackmail?

These are the shocking implications of this shocking report by tas at Loaded Mouth, which is based on the reporting of Greg Palast.

Robert Parry writes:

The most common theory is that Bush was looking for a stealth candidate who wouldn’t provoke strong Democratic opposition but would get solid Republican backing – after some wink-wink assurances that she would vote the right way on abortion and other core conservative issues.

That indeed may be the answer. Bush may have just miscalculated how disappointed his conservative base would be and how offended other Americans would be at his straight-faced assertion that his White House counsel was “the best person I could find.”