Foggy Tuesday

Bush Wars
Seven children were killed during an airstrike by the United States-led coalition against a religious compound thought to be a Qaeda sanctuary in remote eastern Afghanistan, the coalition said Monday. The death of the children on Sunday may well add to the crescendoing anger many Afghans feel about civilian casualties from American and NATO military operations. More than 130 civilians have been killed in airstrikes and shootings in the past six months, according to Afghan authorities. That toll may soon inflate dismally. Afghan officials said late Monday that more than 50 civilians may have died during fierce fighting over the past three days between NATO forces and the Taliban in the Chora district of the southern province of Uruzgan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/world/asia/19afghan.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Probing Rove
White House aides made extensive use of political e-mail accounts for official government business, despite rules requiring that they conduct such business through official communications channels, according to new evidence disclosed yesterday by congressional investigators. The Republican National Committee told the investigators that White House senior political adviser Karl Rove alone sent or received more than 140,000 (illegal) e-mails between 2002 and 2007, more than half of which involved individuals using official ".gov" e-mail accounts, a report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said. The RNC said it still has copies of those e-mails. (Well, then, fork em' over!)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/18/AR2007061800809.html?referrer=email

Which Brings us to the blog quote of the day, from Marcy Wheeler at "The Next Hurrah", with some more revelations into Roves meanderings back and forth across legal lines (AKA "LAWLESSNESS"!!) "As part of his interim report on RNC emails, Waxman released Susan Ralston's testimony before the committee. Reading the deposition, it becomes pretty clear why Tom Davis was trying to warn Rove of the danger of Ralston's testimony. Because even what she was willing to testify to makes it clear that Rove is in some deep legal trouble. And then when you look at the areas where she carves out immunity for herself, you realize that if she were ever to testify under immunity, Rove would be in deeper trouble."
http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/

Under a New Category Label called;
"The Lawlessness Files"
Federal officials have disobeyed at least six new laws that President Bush challenged in his signing statements, a government study disclosed yesterday. The report provides the first evidence that the government may have acted on claims by Bush that he can set aside laws under his executive powers. In a report to Congress, the non partisan Government Accountability Office studied a small sample of the bill provisions that Bush has signed into law but also challenged with signing statements. The GAO found that agencies disobeyed six such laws, while enforcing 10 others as written even though Bush had challenged them. House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, said yesterday that the GAO's findings demonstrated a need for a more "extensive review" of how the government has followed up on hundreds of other laws challenged by Bush. Bush's signing statements have drawn fire because he has used them to challenge more than 1,100 sections of bills -- more than all previous presidents combined. The sample the GAO studied represents a small portion of the laws Bush has targeted, but its report concluded that sometimes the government has gone on to disobey those laws. (and that is the definition of "LAWLESSNESS!!!)
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/06/19/us_agencies_disobey_6_laws_that_president_challenged/

THE ENVIRONMENT
The Birds AND the Bees?
We got trouble, right here in River City!
Last week, the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds in America: several kinds of sparrows, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of the 20 species in the Audubon Society’s report is 68 percent. Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 5.5 million. Compared to the hundred-some condors presently in the wild, 5.5 million bobwhites sounds like a lot of birds. But what matters is the 25.5 million missing and the troubles that brought them down — and are all too likely to bring down the rest of them, too. So this is not extinction, but it is how things look before extinction happens. The word “extinct” somehow brings to mind the birds that seem like special cases to us, the dodo or the great auk or the passenger pigeon. Most people would never have had a chance to see dodos and great auks on their remote islands before they were decimated in the 17th and 19th centuries. What is hard to remember about passenger pigeons isn’t merely their once enormous numbers. It’s the enormous numbers of humans to whom their comings and goings were a common sight and who supposed, erroneously, that such unending clouds of birds were indestructible. We recognize the extraordinary distinctness of the passenger pigeon now because we know its fate, killed off largely by humans. But we have moralized it thoroughly without ever really taking it to heart. (So now we have the Birds AND the Bees both suffering tragic, mysterious declines? So what about the proverbial canary in the coal mine? How long has that little bird been DEAD, but no one told us miners about it??? I would wager Chernobyl is at the root os this, but other influences contributed. The evergreens seem to have been similarly decimated, at least here in Kansas, one ot of every ten sthat you see in the wild is turning brown and dying.)http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/opinion/19tue4.html?th&emc=th