I don’t understand how many hands normally would have a hand in the pie to allow such a raid to go forward. If the raid were politically embarrassing to the administration, I’m sure the number of hands would be plenty to throw wrenches into the process.

So if instead the raid goes ahead (was there any Judy Run Amok article in the NYT warning of the raid?), then this seems to be green lighted by the administration–including hiding in the presidential library wastebin archives any seized records derogatory to the administration.

What does Fox News say? What channel are they on in Boston? *g*

I wonder how long it’s going to take bright legally sophisticated people to realize that while historically DOJ has conducted vendettas, there is a massive hijacking of DOJ by this administration to do whatever the hell it wants.

There is no significant effort by Democrats to counter this, just as there has been no significant efforts by Democrats to counter the fiasco in Iraq.

Hey hey hey–there may be a quasi-real estate banking depression in the U.S., but in Iraq where everything is going smoothly, including the Dover coffin business, there are plans afoot for a massive multi billion dollar project in the Green Zone. That’s going to stabilize things for 100 years more in Iraq fer sure.

Who is Scott Bloch? Perhaps his background can shed some light on what’s going on? Here’s what I’ve been able to dig up. This may be familiar to you all:

From today’s WaPo:

Bloch assumed office in January 2004 for a five-year term. Before taking the job, he served as deputy director and counsel to the Justice Department’s Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

From his official OSC bio:

Before serving in the Justice Department, he was a partner with Stevens & Brand, LLP, of Lawrence, Kansas, where he practiced in the areas of civil rights law, employment law, and legal ethics. Mr. Bloch tried jury trials before state and federal courts, representing employees and employers in cases involving whistleblower and other retaliation claims, as well as civil rights claims. He worked on important cases that set precedents in the field of legal ethics, including a ground-breaking Texas case that changed the way plaintiffs’ lawyers handle mass tort cases.

From Wikipedia:

Bloch’s first major actions as head of the office were to choose as deputy a lawyer who had publicly taken a position against the “homosexual agenda”, and to hire young lawyers from Ave Maria School of Law, the Catholic school founded by Domino’s Pizza billionaire Tom Monaghan.[2] In February 2004, Bloch ordered all mention of sexual orientation workplace nondiscrimination be removed from OSC’s website and printed materials. Bloch stated his office lacked the authority to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation…

…In January 2005, the controversy escalated when Bloch ordered twelve OSC staffers, including the only two known gay employees, to transfer to distant cities or lose their jobs. [14] Bloch was accused of conducting a political purge of OSC employees by three government watchdog groups (the Government Accountability Project, the Project on Government Oversight, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), two federal trade unions (the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union), an LGBT rights organization (the Human Rights Campaign), and the OSC employees themselves.

From Mother Jones in 2007

It appears that the OSC’s probe will go well beyond the prosecutor firings, delving into the broader issue of the politicization of federal agencies at the hands of the White House. Among the things OSC investigators will be looking into is a PowerPoint presentation delivered to political appointees …(by) Lurita Doan … “I really think something inappropriate took place with the GSA administrator and some high level folks there,” the OSC investigator said. “And it sounds like this might have happened at other agencies.”

Putting it all together, I’m inclined to speculate that Bloch isn’t a Bush hack. Rather, he seems to be a hard-boiled Latin-Mass Catholic homophobe, (the Ave Maria connection) who fought dirty against his own staff to stuff gay rights – because he thinks this is what God wants. The kind of Catholic who believes in the martyrs and all the rest of it.

He may have been angry and alienated when Bush admin forced him to recognize that antidiscrimination law does cover sexual orientation.

Whether my attempted mind-reading is correct or not can be tested:

Does anyone know what that Texas ethics case was? That could tell us alot about how this guy thinks.

To my mind this is a predictable consequence, along the lines as what resulted in the invention of dynamite, or the Oklahoma bombing, & in this case by combining an aged, embittered, twisted Dick Cheney & combining it with an unrequited George Walter Bush & enflaming the volatile mixture with unfettered power. I state this notwithstanding it may reveal me as having fallen prey to combined fixation with conspiracy theory.

FIRST ELEMENT: FROM THE CHENEY DNA: EVERYONE GETS BURNED – EXCEPT THOSE ABLE TO CRAWL INSIDE THE PRESIDUNTIAL FIRESUIT

To my mind the capacity for survival of Steven Hadley as ubiquitous “senior administration official familiar with the decision making process, who made it clear that revealing his identity may imperil ongoing talks with” whoever, and all the variations on that theme, reveal that the conduct of every other person in the Bush-Cheney administration is held to his impossible standard.

“Impossible” in the sense that while it is just as tinged with hubris as anyone else, just as Cheney [& by extension Addington] is permanently stationed by one ear of this presidunt [sic], Hadley [supposed as surrogate to Rice but in fact more prominent given his seniority there pre-dates anyone else in the White House, and in any event there by virtue of his determination to devise all his positions so as to avoid conflict with the OVP] is perched by the other.

The value in this positioning cannot be overstated with a chief executive who does not read & does not seek to think for himself, but spends his waking hours in a constant state of being batted from one executive “decision” on to another, with his COS acting as on-site minder interspersing the numerous obligatory ceremonies accompanying the putting of his X to those politically expedient executive orders designed to feed the Base & voluntary ceremonial framings with the winners of sporting events, with snippets where his eyes & ears are brought to bear on making the call reserved for his office between simplistically framed horrible Option A & elaborately supported strategic Option B, with the “unwritten” premise being whispered into one or the other of his ears.

“Impossible” that is in sense that without that pre-emptive & post-consequences access to spin this most distractable of presidunts on his pointy head, the head attached to the spinner inevitably will roll: because in this most consciously distracting of all American national administrations the easiest means to deflect questions is to make out a straw man to burn in effigy – as we have seen even with those who themselves felt entitled to rely on the particular favors of the Son King, like Gonzales, like Rove, like Rumsfeld, like Miers.

SECOND ELEMENT: FROM THE GWB DNA: HUBRIS

From the ancient Greek, deriving from molesting of corpses & humiliation of captives, employed by the ancient Athenians to capture the horrors of what was then considered the ultimate sin, inevitably associated with the doing of violence to the social fabric in acting to shame & humiliate one’s actual & supposed opponents to enhance one’s self-esteem & appearance of superiority.

Though all forms of human government are characterized by it to some extent, no other national administration in US history as the current one is so marked by it, not at all coincidentally because no other concept so captures the essence of the personality of its leader.

If memory served, it was Ron Suskind who first widely reported an incident from the college days of George W Bush in which he asserted the hegemony of his fraternity’s basketball team by deliberately fouling his counterpart with total disregard for whether he caused serious injury in savaging cutting him down under a basket, and then stood looming over his shocked opponent & made clear his intentions to really turn things ugly at the slightest sign of continued resistance.

THIRD ELEMENT: FROM THE ADDINGTON DNA: NO CONSEQUENCES

Having spent more hours than I would care to admit, lest I risk admission into an institution of enforced rest, on the question of how might the last remaining assignment to Chief Counsel Addington seek to use the Presidential Pardon Power to immunize such a large number of persons who expect it & feel they can count on it to ensure their continuing silence [It’s far beyond a mere Hillarian village; its an entire Bushie Nation], from time to time I find myself dwelling in consideration of the impressive number of efforts to date, many still ongoing, to provide something less sweepingly legal but nonetheless practical in the way of immunity.

EG the ongoing deliberate avoidance of a paper trail, destruction of paper records, deliberate misfiling & mis-storage & negligent storage & destruction of electronic records

EG the ongoing process of turning procedural rules for example those governing the business of the Senate into walls of stone

EG the ongoing deliberate perversion of Congressional oversight powers

EG government agencies operating with no or merely nominal regard for US laws

No less than others I have been struck by the coincidence of the resume & demeanor of Scott Bloch being that of the quintessential loyal Bushie. No less than others it has occurred to me that his role in the Bush-Cheney administration seemed rather obviously to absorb each & every executive agency sin as it came in view to Congress & the American public, vacuum up all the evidence, give the appearance of having submitted to autopsy in examining every aspect of it under a microscope like so many frozen sections, while his betters much closer to the presidunt decided which straw man should be offered in sacrifice to get on with business, then emerge as needed to pronounce that it would have been appropriate for the presidunt to have disciplined government personage X, but for the fact that X just happened to have resigned the month before, then reporting that unfortunately all the evidence had been irretrievably compromised in the examination or mis-stored & rendered forever unusable or even recoverable.

ELEMENT FOUR: FROM THE FORCES OF NATURE: THE INEVITABLE DEGRADATION

That is: inevitably human constructs emade from corrupt premises deteriorate towards transparency & the asinine types typically assigned to carry them out towards being revealed as ass-clowns.

THE CONSEQUENT COMPOUND: PARANOIA

But for the fall of the house of Romanov, I think it would have been fair to expect even Rasputin might have survived to die of natural consequences. However, such ass-clowns as Bloch are never granted access to such a fate, but always torn apart by the mob in the universal dismissal which accompanies the downfall of complete failures.

The FBI raids suggest to me that Bloch [who to me bears an uncanny resemblance to Seth MacFarlane’s Peter Griffin on The Family Guy, from whose maw comes such ennobling observations as: “Have you ever sat on your arm until it fall asleep & then played with yourself & pretended someone else was doin’ it?”] has failed to instil in the mob bosses in the White House the requisite confidence that he has arranged for the destruction of all possibly incriminating evidence.

But then, who could?

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: THE COMING UNPLEASANTNESS

Recently GWB achieved special status among US presidential historians in opening up a rather impressive lead over the 15th POTUS James Buchanan as “worst ever”. What is particularly remarkable about that distinction is that as late as 2006 the membership of the same academy voted his signal achievement as being the “Worst Presidential Mistake Ever Made”, which suggests that in less than 2 years the Mistake in Mesopotamia may well have overtaken it.

I must say, having spent some time reading on Buchanan’s life &, dare I say, “legacy” [It’s difficult to credit the greatest “Do Nothing” chief executive with having such a thing.], it seems clear that he is main beneficiary of the GWB legacy, as he himself anticipated on the day preceding his last in asserting: “History will vindicate my memory.”

Given the deaths of over 600,000 combatants & that almost as many suffered grievous wounds, & that many more than those numbers civilians were killed or died of starvation & neglect, in the Civil War which Buchanan is credited in doing his best nothing to forestall, that must have seemed quite an astounding assertion in those times. But even such a miserable excuse for procrastination & unconscionable forbearance as he has his likeness cast in bronze over granite framed by figures representing the tactfulness of diplomacy & the equanimity of law, and a plaque bearing a quotation in tribute from his very own Stephen Hadley, the redoubtable Jeremiah [ha!] Black, a lawyer & jurist [although a failed nominee for the SCOTUS] whose powers of persuasion continued on to persuade the first President Johnson into the policies which led to his impeachment, most notably in Johnson’s very own Katrina, the veto’ing of Congress’ bill providing for the Reconstruction of the Southland, and thereafter specialized in representing the impeached, starting with Johnson.

The words on the plaque read: “The incorruptible statesman whose walk was upon the mountain ranges of the law.”

The statue was the second, & presumably last, tribute to Buchanan, with the first being a bunker-like stone pyramid laid down in a park in his birthplace near Cove Gap, Pennsylvania, the Buchanan family compound being known as Stony Batter, located in what is now a remote & pretty much forgotten corner of the state.

All in all, it suggests a daunting outlook for the next decade or so in our history.

It’s fantastic that Bush DOJ is on top of any alleged irregularities in Bloch’s HDs and Bloch’s emails, and it makes me proud that the White House has been a paragon in the exemplary preservation of emails and their backups and comporting with existing code sections on White House computer conduct.

Congrats to Gavin Floyd who pitched a no-hitter for 8 and 1/3 innings tonight in Chicago.

Letter from Prof. J. Bradford DeLong to Prof. William Drummond, Chairman of Faculty Senate, University of California (Berkeley) in the matter of Prof. John Yoo, etc.

If you’re a member of the Berkely community, Brad invites you to get in touch with him, email at site.

Bmaz do the courts always “seal” to keep it from the public eye? When is “sealed” appropriate? from a rookie

Did anyone see Colbert’s piece on Karl Rove last night?
http://www.indecision2008.com/…..oId=167585

Can anyone explain how Rove is still able to fill our air waves with his poison? Why did Fitz let him off the spit?