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Mccain Advisor Randy Scheunemann Was Big Booster of Iraqi Exile Ahmad Chalabi
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Is Tim Kaine Too Much Like Barack Obama to Be Vp Choice
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Judge rules that White House staffers can be subpoenaed (Muckety)
A setback for the Bush administration came from a Bush appointee and former Kenneth Starr associate today.
Federal Judge John D. Bates ruled that two Bush staffers, one no longer at the White House, do not have absolute immunity from testifying before the House Judiciary Committee.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
Click to activate the interactive map (requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.“The Executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law,” Bates wrote in his 92-page decision.
Bates stresses that his decision is “very limited.” Nonetheless, it contrasts with two earlier decisions, both controversial, in which he sided with the White House.
In 2002, Bates dismissed the General Accounting Office’s attempt to have Vice President Dick Cheney reveal the names of the members of his energy task force. Bates ruled that the GAO did not have standing to sue.
In 2007, Bates threw out a lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, against Cheney and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s aide.
Plame had sued on the grounds that Cheney and Libby helped reveal to the press that she was a CIA operative.
Bates dismissed that lawsuit for jurisdictional reasons, as well.
If it stands, today’s decision means that Harriet Miers, the former Bush White House counsel, and Joshua Bolton, the current White House chief of staff, have to appear before the judiciary committee.
They could at that time choose not to respond, Bates wrote.
The committee subpoenaed Miers and Bolton to testify in the matter of the forced resignation of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Democrats have argued that the attorneys were asked to leave for political reasons.
The White House insisted that Miers and Bolton had immunity because of their positions in the executive branch.
The judiciary committee then sued.
Bates, 61, was named to the district court in 2001 by Bush.
A graduate of Wesleyan University and University of Maryland’s School of Law, he was in the U.S. Army for three years, serving a tour in Vietnam.
Later, he clerked for a federal judge and was an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
From 1995 to mid-1997, Bates was deputy independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation headed by Kenneth Starr.
In 2005, Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court appointed Bates to serve on the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management.
In 2006, Chief Justice John Roberts, Rehnquist’s successor, appointed Bates to the U.S. Intelligence Foreign Surveillance Court.
The court decides on requests for surveillance warrants against foreign intelligence agents.
The White House did not indicate today whether it would appeal Bates’ decision. Earlier news reports speculated that the case would be appealed, regardless of outcome.
In his ruling, Bates encourages both the White House and the judiciary committee to “resume their discourse and negotiations in an effort to resolve their differences constructively, while recognizing each branch’s essential role.”
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Larry McMurtry’s enduring passion: buying books
Larry McMurtry’s latest book, titled simply Books, is a memoir of his many decades as a book dealer. One of his favorite activities, he writes, has always been buying books. Lots of books. His personal library at his home in Archer City, Texas, numbers 28,000 volumes and his bookstore there has nearly 400,000 volumes spread over several buildings.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
Click to activate the interactive map (requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.His memoir is getting some rough reviews. The Austin American-Statesman, in his home state, called it “rambling, disorganized, dull.” The New York Times says it “reads like notes waiting to be assembled into a book.”
There might have been a time when criticism like that bothered McMurtry. Early on in his career he wore a t-shirt that read “a minor regional novelist,” referring to himself, or what he perceived critics thought of him.
But a Pulitzer Prize (for Lonesome Dove) and an Academy Award (screenwriter on Brokeback Mountain) pretty much eliminate any use of the word “minor” in reference to his nearly 50-year writing career.
McMurtry is happy to be working and still writing.
During an appearance in Dallas earlier this month with his Brokeback co-screenwriter, Diana Ossana, McMurtry was asked how their collaboration began.
McMurtry had a heart attack and bypass surgery in the early 1990s and afterward he just showed up at Ossana’s house, he said.
According to the Dallas Observer, which covered the event, Ossana then interrupted McMurtry.
“I thought he would just be there for three days, but he stayed three years,” she said. “He quit writing. But not only that, he stopped reading as well. He was one of those people who read seven newspapers a day and maybe 10 books a week. He just sat on the couch. He became an outline of himself.”
McMurtry refused to write without Ossana’s help, the Observer said.
“I was very badly wounded,” McMurtry said. “I didn’t even go into my bookshop for five years. And that’s a big deal for me.”
In Books, McMurtry talks briefly about his bout with depression.
McMurtry’s newest book is indeed a bit rambling and disorganized, but if you like rummaging in antiquarian bookstores, it is never dull.
He writes a little about his own writing and about his son, James, a singer-songwriter. (John Mellencamp produced James McMurtry’s first album.) But, mainly, Books is about buying books and selling books, an enduring passion for McMurtry.
In one short chapter, McMurtry writes about coming across a fat copy of The Whale, the British title for Moby-Dick, in a group of books he was trying to buy. The copy had been owned by a prominent British author and editor who was trying to shorten the Herman Melville classic to make it more salable.
“He began his editorial work by drawing a bold line through ‘Call me Ishmael,’” McMurtry writes of the British editor.
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Judge Rules That White House Staffers Can Be Subpoenaed
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Google Plans to Take on the Venture Capitalists
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Michelle Obama Makes Vanity Fairs Best Dressed List Cindy Mccain Does Not
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Peter R Kellogg Continues to Build Fortune Through Offshore Company
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Clark Rockefeller Brazen in Fabricating Identity Planning Daughters Kidnapping
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