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Looking at the recent history of the Justice Department, any one with a law enforcement background knows that this is going to result in an Internal Affairs referral, and it will be targeting the upper levels of the Department because the problems are so wide-spread that the root problem has to be at the management level.

Consider the massive abuse of National Security Letters. Who believes that dozens of agents were struck with the idea of abusing NSLs, all at the same time? Someone at the top, implicitly or explicitly, indicated to agents that such conduct was acceptable, if not recommended. I’ve interacted with FBI agents, and they don’t improvise. They have procedures and the procedures are followed. This is like Abu Ghraib – the people at the bottom don’t do these things for an extended period without an okay from further up the chain of command. All large organizations work like this – if the problem is widespread, management approved it.

Then there is the current flare-up over the firing of US Attorneys. The first thing to remember is that Alberto Gonzales has no experience or training that qualifies him to manage a large organization. For much of his professional career he had only one client, the Shrubbery. He is a figurehead, not an administrator. He is dependent on his staff to get anything done, and the first loyalty of his staff would appear to be to Karl Rove, not Alberto Gonzales.

I don’t think Gonzales is going to leave quietly because of what happened when Gates replaced Rumsfeld. Gates started firing people and investigating problems, and I seriously doubt the White House wants anyone looking under carpets at the Justice Department.

We are going to find out eventually that things are much worse than most of us imagine at the Department of Justice. People like William Jefferson [D-LA] are going to get off because of this. Many corruption probes are going to be lost based on the actions of the Justice Department rather than the evidence. People who should be in jail are going to be free to plunder because everything is political in this administration. Once that is established, every defense attorney has a head start on “reasonable doubt.”

John McKay of archy: I don’t get animal rights radicals.

Of course, Cute Overload has video of Knut.

“Knut, who recently posed for a photo shoot with star-photographer Annie Leibovitz for an environmental protection campaign, is scheduled to make his public debut at the zoo later this week or early next week…”

Frank Albrecht is out of his mind suggesting: Cuddly polar bear cub better off dead.

Before this is over, Albrecht is going to end up a bloody spot on a middle school playground when a mob led by the Olsen twins beats him up with their Hello Kitty lunch pails. You mess with “cute” at your own risk.

CBS has the Shrubbery’s response to the call for White House officials to testify.

Mr. Bush, in a late-afternoon statement at the White House, said, “We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants. … I have proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse.”

He added that federal prosecutors work for him, and it is natural to consider replacing them. “There is no indication that anybody did anything improper,” the president said.

[snip]

Bush said his White House counsel, Fred Fielding, told lawmakers they could interview presidential counselor Karl Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and their deputies – but only on the president’s terms: in private, “without the need for an oath” and without a transcript.

The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented and a reasonable way for Congress to get all the information it needs about the matter.

[snip]

“He said he wanted this to be a conversation rather than a hearing,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who is leading the Senate probe into the firings. “A conversation is fine, but let’s have the conversation under oath, with a transcript.”

The only “honorable public servants” involved in this mess are the US Attorneys who were labeled incompetent and fired for political reasons. Congress doesn’t want to talk to “honorable public servants,” they want to talk to Rove and Meirs. Someone should remind the Shrubbery that he was going to investigate the Plame leak, and a lot of other things, but it never happened. He and his officials lie. It is time to document the lies and prosecute the liars.

UPDATE: House panel authorizes subpoenas for Rove, Miers, and their deputies.

As a public service for the US Marshals Service: it’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest – big white house, you can’t miss it. Don’t forget to take pictures.

From the BBC: three guys highjacked a truck in Straffordshire containing £70,000 of Cadbury Easter eggs.

There is no information as to whether there were Creme Eggs in the truck.

Oh, I can prove I was in Florida at the time.

CBS reports: Pet Food Co. Knew Of Problem Last Month

Menu Foods told the FDA it received the first complaints of kidney failure and deaths among cats and dogs from pet owners on Feb. 20. It began new tests on Feb. 27.

During those tests, the company fed its product to 40 to 50 dogs and cats and seven animals — the mix of species was not immediately known — died, Sundlof said. The contamination appeared more deadly to cats than to dogs, he said.

I have a certain knowledge about kidney problems in people, and that tells me that the problem is more likely chemical than biological. The kidneys are filters, as is the liver, and tend to be affected by specific minerals. Most people have never heard of a calcium overdose, but it can land you in a hospital bed for a week. If they look only for toxins they might be missing the obvious – a massive overdose of a mineral that is actually required. Sodium, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, etc. are all necessary, but an excess of any of them throws off your blood chemistry and overworks the “filters” in your body.

They only way to find out what’s going on, and how to prevent it from happening again is by testing. The company mentioned the change in the source of the gluten, because that was the variation they were aware of when they became aware that there was a problem.

Norbizness’s version of the Shrubbery’s speech reads better than the Washington Post transcript.

I found the first paragraph interesting:

Four years ago today coalition forces launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to remove Saddam Hussein from power. They did so to eliminate the threat his regime posed to the Middle East and to the world.

We know now, that there was no threat to anyone outside of Iraq because of the containment put in place after Gulf War I, but the Shrubbery keeps trying to convince people that invading another country and throwing it into turmoil was the right thing to do.

Apparently our current goal is to pacify Baghdad. Four years and we don’t even control the capital city is a pretty sad state of affairs. You would think that we would have been able to restore electricity, water, and sewer, but that is apparently beyond the scope of no-bid contracts. [Natasha at Pacific Views wonders the same thing – four years and we need more time to control Baghdad?]

In other news in the Washington Post, Ann Scott Tyson writes that the U.S. military ill-prepared for other conflicts. We are running out of everything and Rummy wasn’t buying replacements for the equipment that was being blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If Robert Gates is an honest man, I hope he will issue a report at some point explaining where in hell all of the money that Congress gave to the Department of Defense went, because we know it wasn’t used to buy equipment, repair buildings, or pay light bills.

The Republans keep talking about running government like a business, but they don’t seem to believe in accounting. Accounting is not a barrel of laughs, but no matter how large or small a business is accounting is the only real way of knowing how things are going.

Tonight in the US , March 20^th in Iraq, marks the fourth anniversary of the official invasion of Iraq. Of course, we now know that Special Forces teams went in earlier and the air forces of the US and Britain had been doing some “pre-emptive bombing” prior to the missile attacks on possible locations that the Shrubbery’s intelligence services [as opposed to the CIA, NSA, DIA, and the regular intelligence groups] swore contained Saddam Hussein.

For those who have short-term memory problems: Iraq did not have WMDs and, as a result, was not in violation of UN Resolution 1441. The UN weapons inspectors were forced out of Iraq by the actions of the President of the United States, not the President of Iraq. The “intelligence” was selected to support the desires of the White House, not the reality on the ground.

Every problem encountered in Iraq was anticipated, but the warnings were ignored. After four years we are further away from anything that might be considered winning than we were on the day before the war started.

Tens of thousands of innocent people are dead. The infrastructure of Iraq is in tatters. More countries than at any point in our history consider the United States a threat to the world. We are throwing a massive debt onto the shoulders of our great grandchildren. Our military is on verge of breaking, if it isn’t already.

What does it take to get the government to acknowledge that enough is enough?

The position, United States Attorney, is a Presidential appointment. It needs White House approval to go forward, so the White House can’t claim they didn’t know about it. The Attorney General can draw up a list, but the Shrubbery has to sign off on the individuals. They work for the Attorney General, but he has no power to appoint them or dismiss them under current law.

The BBC reports: Mexico police in $205m cash haul.

It was cash, stacks of $100-bills, in a house. It looked like the days of the CPA in Baghdad – stacks of money on pallets.

Litbrit at Shakespeare’s Sister in the post, And The Point Of Having A White House Security Director Would Be…?, notes that there is no record of any investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame’s name.

I guess they might have put a post-it note on the break room fridge asking anyone who outed a CIA agent to call Karl, which would have been the basis of Scotty’s denial that anyone in the White House was involved.

I think it’s long past the time at which journalists need to ask themselves: does access have any value if all you get are lies? Do journalists understand that they are not protecting sources, they are shielding criminals from prosecution? [It is illegal for the government to conduct a misinformation campaign in the United States.]

Karen at Peripetia considers changing her Brand Loyalty based on the news that Chiquita has just agreed to a $25 million fine for hiring terrorists, right-wing AUC and left-wing FARC thugs, in Colombia to protect their crops and deal with labor problems.

Actually this is a step up, as in the old days, the part of Chiquita that was called the United Fruit Company sponsored coup d’états and revolutions to benefit its plantations in Central and South America.

Yes, in the “good old days” you couldn’t be a real Latin American fascist dictator unless you were on the UFC payroll. Why do you think they were called “banana republics?”

In Europe anything longer than two months is considered to be a long campaign, but we hadn’t finished counting the votes from the 2006 elections when people started running for 2008.

Ms Kane presents her platform: How About Campaigning For Shorter Campaigns?

Over half the field has made it to Nome, but the race will continue for a few more days as people push on to finish.

Sigrid Ekran of Norway came in as the first rookie and first woman to finish. She was the 21^st musher to reach the arch in Nome.

Winner Lance Mackey is still concerned about his dog, Zorro, who was diagnosed with pneumonia. As the Anchorage Daily News put it: Zorro didn’t finish, but he left his mark. Actually he was the father of seven of the dogs on the winning team, and is Mackey’s main stud for his breeding business.

Phinky of Ignorant Hussy posted that she is still in Iraq.

She left for Iraq on November 15^th, 2006 thinking she would be gone for three months, but it now appears she will be in-country until June. She is in western Anbar province working for a contractor.