By 2011 President George W Bush “had given some 140 talks, for at least $15 million,” Kruse wrote, noting the trail of information dried up after that. Kruse found that Bush’s customary speaking fee fluctuated between $100,000 and $175,000, and may have gone higher.
At one point, Bush charged $100,000 to speak at a fundraiser for a McKinney homeless shelter:
“We paid his regular fee,” Lynne Sipiora told POLITICO. She’s the executive director of the Samaritan Inn, a homeless shelter in McKinney, Texas. “Which is $100,000.”
Attorney Jim Troupis has been appointed to fill the seat of retiring Dane County Circuit Judge John C. Albert and will serve until August 2016. Troupis’ appointment comes seven weeks after a committee and group of advisers that vet judicial hopefuls rejected all four applicants for the job.
Those applicants were: state Assistant Attorney General Devra Ayala, state Assistant Public Defender David Klauser, criminal defense attorney John Hyland and Madison attorney and UW-Madison adjunct professor of law Nick Schweitzer.
Hyland, who said in his interview that he had signed the 2012 recall petition against Walker, plans to run for the seat next April and has formed a campaign committee.
Troupis was a partner at the Madison law firm of Michael Best & Friedrich before starting his own law firm in 2010. He worked with Republican legislators during their redistricting of the state following the 2010 census and also represented state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser in the recount of the 2011 election.
McLeod then added, "I think Tad and (especially) Adam have Jim's 'number,' as my parents generation would say. He's hurt himself in this engagment. Given enough 'rope' he'll do further damage to himself as time goes by."Plus they illegally withheld emails, that they were court ordered to turn over. I wonder if judge Troupis will think its OK to blatantly ignore a court order?
Troupis was disappointed Judge Sumi is considering a run. "It's obvious she was talked into it because of Act 10," Troupis said. "It should be about competence and qualifications, and clearly the only purpose of her running is to open that pro-union stuff."
But James Troupis, an attorney for Fitzgerald, said rounding up the senators is legal under a constitutional provision that allows the Senate to enforce its own rules, including mandatory attendance. That section allows each house to "compel the attendance of absent members."
Troupis insisted the detention is not an arrest because the senators are not suspected of any crimes. Rather, he said, the resolution seeks to enforce a legislative process.
"The Legislature has its own powers - that's the principle here," he said. "The constitution is quite explicit in providing our Legislature with independent authority."
But the distinction between "arrest" and "detention" was lost on a pair of Madison attorneys who are active in Democratic politics who said the state constitution provides an absolute bar against legislators being arrested for non-criminal offenses.
In an open letter to the Senate, Madison attorneys Lester Pines and Susan Crawford said "none of the fourteen absent Senators has been charged with a crime. Nor has any crime occurred. The Wisconsin Senate has absolutely no authority to order any of its members arrested or taken into custody in order to compel their attendance."
Congratulations #2 — to Dane County’s newest judge, Jim Troupis.
WAHHOOOO!!! #GeorgeZimmerman the LAW prevailed!
— Taylor Palmisano (@itstaytime) July 14, 2013
Of the 298 groups subjected to additional review, 72 were “tea party” groups, 11 were “9/12″ groups and 13 were “patriots” groups, according to the inspector general’s report.
4. The Bush Justice Department Targeted Democrats for Prosecution. Back in 2007, the House Judiciary Committee investigated charges that attorney general Alberto Gonzales singled out prominent Democrats for prosecution, specifically Pennsylvania Democrats -- an assertion that was backed up by Dick Thornburgh, the attorney general under Reagan and Bush 41.
5. The Attorney Firing Scandal. Of course there was the attorney firing scandal in which the Bush Justice Department fired a slate of U.S. attorneys for strictly partisan reasons, either because the attorneys were prosecuting too many Republicans or because they weren't prosecuting enough Democrats.
6. The Bush IRS Audited Greenpeace and the NAACP. Not only was the NAACP suspiciously audited during Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, but high-profile Republicans like Joe Scarborough had previously supported an audit of the organization even though he's suddenly shocked by the current IRS audit story. Also in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IRS audited the hyper-liberal group Greenpeace at the request of Public Interest Watch, a group that's funded by Exxon-Mobil.
The point is, however, that even with no political targeting at all, hundreds of thousands of conservative voters would have been chosen for audits in the I.R.S.’s normal course of business. Among these hundreds of thousands of voters, thousands would undoubtedly have gone beyond merely voting to become political activists.
The fact that Ms. Noonan has identified four conservatives from that group of thousands provides no evidence at all toward her hypothesis. Nor would it tell us very much if dozens or even hundreds of conservative activists disclosed that they had been audited. This is exactly what you would expect in a country where there are 1.5 million audits every year.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Monday called for any investigation into the IRS not only under President Barack Obama but stretching back to the George W. Bush administration, while he also saying Obama should fire any staffers involved in inappropriately targeting conservative groups.
“If the IRS was selectively enforcing the law, then, yeah, absolutely heads need to roll,” Schiff said on MSNBC. “I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way. I found only one Republican, [Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C)], that would join me in calling for an investigation during the Bush administration. I’m glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern. The IRS absolutely should not be picking winners and losers or picking political ideology. It ought to neutrally enforce regulations.”
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor expressed doubt Friday about the decision to take the 2000 Bush v. Gore case that resulted in the election of President George W. Bush.Justice John Paul Stevens has also joined the "we messed up" bandwagon!
"It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," O'Connor told the Chicago Tribune editorial board in an interview. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"
"Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision," she said. "It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn't done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day."
The Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual recount on Dec. 8, 2000, of all Florida votes in the 2000 presidential election between Vice President Al Gore and Bush, then the governor of Texas. But a 5-4 Supreme Court majority, including O'Connor, ordered an injunction the next day. The Supreme Court ruled on Dec. 12 in a decision "limited to the present circumstances" that the Florida recount was unconstitutional, giving Bush the presidency.
Obama, Aug. 1, 2007: If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.
1. If all Mitt twas going to do is lie anyway, what the hell did he write on his cheat sheet?
2. Since we have a clear patter of cheating by republican candidates, how will Paul Ryan (R - Wall St.) break the rules?
3. When will the republicans learn that you can not get your information from sources like this or this and expect to be able to hold a conversation?
According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to "plagiarize" means
In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward.
- to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
- to use (another's production) without crediting the source
- to commit literary theft
- to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.
On September 8, 2011 — one year ago tomorrow — President Obama laid out a series of policy proposals known collectively as the American Jobs Act. The plan included stimulus spending in the form of immediate infrastructure investments, tax credits for working Americans and employers to encourage consumer spending and job growth, and efforts to shore up state and local budgets to prevent further layoffs of teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public safety officials.
The American Jobs Act never became law, however, because Republicans opposed it from the start, blasting it as another form of “failed stimulus” that wouldn’t help the economy. (They ignored the fact that the first “failed stimulus,” the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, wasn’t a failure at all.) One month later, the GOP blocked the bill in the Senate, preventing the creation of more than a million jobs and the added growth that multiple economists predicted would occur if the bill passed:
–Moody’s Analytics estimated the American Jobs Act would create 1.9 million jobs and add two percent to gross domestic product.
–The Economic Policy Institute estimated it would create 2.6 million jobs and protect an addition 1.6 million existing jobs.
–Macroeconomic Advisers predicted it would create 2.1 million jobs and boost GDP by 1.5 percent.
–Goldman Sachs estimated it would add 1.5 percent to GDP.
Is that really true? Why yes it is!"Since 1961 … our private economy has produced 66 million private-sector jobs. So what's the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 (million)."
Let’s cut to the chase. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, here are the net increases in private-sector employment under each president, chronologically by party:
Republicans
Richard Nixon: Increase of 7.1 million jobs
Gerald Ford: Increase of 1.3 million jobs
Ronald Reagan: Increase of 14.7 million jobs
George H.W. Bush: Increase of 1.5 million jobs
George W. Bush: Decline of 646,000 jobs
Total: Increase of 23.9 million jobs under Republican presidents
Democrats
John F. Kennedy: Increase of 2.7 million jobs
Lyndon B. Johnson: Increase of 9.5 million jobs
Jimmy Carter: Increase of 9.0 million jobs
Bill Clinton: Increase of 20.8 million jobs
Barack Obama: Increase of 332,000 jobs
Total: Increase of 42.3 million jobs.
Bush left office in 2009 with a 22 percent approval rate, making him one of history’s least-liked presidents, according to CBS News. In all, 73 percent said they did not approve of the way he ran the country for eight years.
The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks.
“I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.Do not worry, it gets even worse for the Bush Administration:
Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it saysOf course know that clearing brush and taking pictures took priority over any attempt to keep Americans safe:
During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”
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