Author: librarylil

The Night They Took Old Cheney Down

My coworker forwarded this to me and I just had to share!

With apologies to Joan Baez
and to Bootribbers if someone else already posted this

THE NIGHT THEY TOOK OLD CHENEY DOWN

Scooter Libby’s the name and I helped them to out Ms. Plame
‘Til Fitzgerald’s indictments came and with it a lot of the blame
By November of twenty ’05
Our polls sucked that ain’t no jive
By next spring it all goes to hell
It was a time I was on crutches ’cause I just fell

CHORUS

The night they took old Cheney down
And the GOP hands were wringing
The night they took old Cheney down
And the Democrats were singing, they went
La la la la la la, la la la la la la la la, la

Mr. Cheney came before me and said I want the Iraqi land
And like Mr. Bush above me he had no post-war plan
We couldn’t find Osama in his cave
More than 2000 young men have gone to their grave
It now seems the insurgents can’t be beat
You can’t raise your polls up when you’re in defeat

Chorus

Back with my lawyer in DC when one day he called to me
Scooter, act quick, you’ve got to cop a plea
Now I don’t mind moppin floors
And don’t care if it’s behind iron-gated doors
We took a big chance and flunked the test
Soon they’re gonna get Karl Rove and the rest

Chorus

Planning to march in San Francisco Saturday?

Do you want to try for a BooTrib contingent? The rally is at 11 a.m. at Dolores Park, march supposed to take off at noon. (Some info here.)
I went by Dolores Park this morning to scope out a likely landmark, and I think the tree at the corner of Dolores and 20th, overlooking the rest of the park, would be good. I can loiter there in my Booshirt.

There’s a Kossack meetup at Gordon Biersch downtown after the march but I will probably be with some friends at a beer joint that’s a little less preppy.

How to send what is needed to the Astrodome [UPDATED]

SanJoseLady has posted a diary at Kos with some useful info about sending supplies directly to people at the Astrodome: what’s needed and how to send and address packages. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/3/203740/3260
(Pertinent info reposted below with her permission)

They have set up a zip code just for the Astrodome/Arena/Reliant Center so that people can get donated items.

You can send it addressed to General Delivery or to a specific person if you know they are there, or you can address it to a group of people:

Suggested Group Names:

* Pregnant and Nursing Mothers

* Men

* Women

* Babies/Children

* School age Children

* Elderly (includes diabetic testing supplies, vitamins, adult nutritional supplement, depends, canes, walkers, etc)

* FOR Evacuee USE: BABY FORMULA AND BABY FOODS
(Formula must be NEW, UNOPENED, and UNEXPIRED. READY TO FEED OR POWDERED IS OK. PLENTY OF CLEAN WATER IN HOUSTON. Plastic Bottles/Nipples MUST be included. Pacifiers/soothies also needed. NO GLASS CONTAINERS. This includes baby food. Gerber makes a plastic food container. PEDIALYTE NEEDED BADLY)

* FOR Evacuee USE: MEDICAL SUPPLIES ENCLOSED (Send only NEW and Unexpired Supplies)

* Children: TOYS/ART SUPPLIES ENCLOSED

The postal service will get those items to whomever you have addressed them to.

Address is:
General Delivery (or put name of person/group etc)
Houston, Texas 77230

What Would You Ask Judge Roberts?

What Would You Ask Judge Roberts? is a new website from seven of our eight women Democratic Senators where we can submit our questions. Apologies if this has already been diaried…

The Democratic women announced the creation of a new Web site, democrats.senate.gov/AskRoberts, which they said will allow citizens to send in questions they would like the nominee to answer.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., is leading the effort, joined by Boxer, Hillary Clinton of New York, Maria Cantwell of Washington and others. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and the only woman on the Judiciary Committee, did not attend the news conference to announce the Web site, but Mikulski said it has her full support. No Republican women joined the effort, and Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., was also absent.

The women said they expect Roberts to answer questions on abortion.

At least one of my senators is making no bones about it. Boxer said yesterday, “there can be no confusion” about where he stands on the right to privacy. Correct! Let’s ask our questions.

Why Roberts could surprise us (advocating for Beelzebub)

My sympathies are with Madman in the Marketplace. Like several others who commented on his diary, my heart agrees that it’s high time for the Democrats in Congress to stand up for us. And yet my head says this nomination is not an issue that will win us any points politically. And maybe just maybe Roberts is not the troglodyte we think he is. At least one apparently smart and liberal lawyer who knows him says Roberts could well surprise us.
Roberts’ law school roommate says we shouldn’t be too quick to pigeonhole him:

Despite his conservative views and record as a Reagan administration lawyer, Roberts chose a bipartisan Washington law firm and a liberal mentor when he entered private practice in 1986, said Richard Lazarus, a law professor and head of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University, and a former roommate of Roberts at Harvard Law School.

“He could have gone anywhere,” Lazarus said. “It’s remarkable how little (a role) politics has played in his life. … He has friends of all political and ideological stripes. I think that counts for something.”

Liberal groups that were quick to label Roberts as the soul mate of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia after President Bush nominated him Tuesday may be pleasantly surprised when they look back on his work five to 10 years from now, Lazarus said.

I didn’t know anything about Lazarus so I looked him up and he seems to have good pro-environment and pro-worker credentials as an advocate before the Supreme Court himself.

Be that as it may, a fellow who interned at Roberts’ firm twelve years ago thinks Roberts has the potential to be a powerful leader for conservatives on the Supreme Court. From the same article:

As a second-year law student, 12 years ago, Joondeph spent a summer at Hogan & Hartson with Roberts, the firm’s appellate chief, as his mentor. Joondeph said he both admired Roberts and feared his potential influence on the Supreme Court.

“He’s open-minded, he’s thoughtful, and he’s reasonable,” Joondeph said. As a consequence, he said, it’s conceivable that, a few years from now, “Roberts can become, through his geniality and sheer intellectual force, the leader of the conservative view (on the court) in a way that Scalia and Thomas have never been able to do.”

How do we want our conservatives served up? I’m not quite ready to jump on the anti-Roberts bandwagon yet. Maybe we could do a hell of a lot worse than John Roberts. I’m very interested in what the confirmation hearings bring to light.

How to find out just about anything about just about anyone

David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle often has an interesting take on current events, and today is no exception. In an article called “Privacy is easy to breach”, following an instructive re-cap of the Valerie Plame affair, he offered a lesson in gaining “private” information using readily available Web resources, most of them free. [Note: he wrote this before today’s plot twists about who said what when to whom.] His search for information based on Rove’s “Wilson’s wife” statement is detailed below.

First of all, I knew from published reports that the full name of the author of the critical op-ed piece was Joseph C. Wilson IV. A Google search quickly told me that he was born in 1949.

So I went to ZabaSearch.com, which readers of this space know is a powerful online people-search tool that rapidly combs through public records – – for free.

My first nationwide search for a Joseph C. Wilson born in 1949 turned up too many matches, so I narrowed the search by guessing that he likely lives in Washington, D.C.

Bingo. Now I had his home address. But I didn’t know his wife’s name.

So I went to the Web site of LexisNexis, a prominent data broker, and did a public-records search for Joseph Wilson in Washington, D.C., subsequently narrowing the search with Wilson’s street address. Bingo again.

“Spouse name: Wilson, Valerie E.”

For non-subscribers, LexisNexis is available online on a pay-per-search basis. It’s also accessible via acquaintances at universities, law schools and a wide variety of private companies.

I did another LexisNexis search for Valerie E. Wilson in Washington, D.C. This confirmed she lives at the same address as Joseph C. Wilson. It also took me the next step.

“Former name: Plame, Valerie E.”

I now had the identity of a covert CIA agent (who was using her maiden name as part of her cover as an energy-industry analyst working for a firm called Brewster Jennings & Associates, now known to be a CIA front company).

It took me less than a half-hour to identify her.

We already knew that it would have been easy to identify Plame, and many of us are info-finding experts. Lazarus has highlighted how all the data being amassed on all of us is a serious cause for alarm.

I then went back to Google and got a map of Plame’s neighborhood and directions to her home. Google also allowed me to study a high-resolution satellite photo of Plame’s house.

I could see that the property appears to be in a quiet residential community and looks approachable from all sides. It also offers ready access by car to major thoroughfares.

And I now possess all this information simply because I know (from Karl Rove, via Matt Cooper) that Joseph Wilson’s wife “apparently works at the agency on WMD issues.”

Jeez Louize. Call me slow, but I really hadn’t considered this aspect of the Plame affair, and its ramifications in my own life. Someone in the Cafe wrote yesterday that they wouldn’t send Rove anything with their name on it, even a pink slip.  When I think of how easy it is to get such detailed information on anyone, it does give me pause about being an enemy of the state. Unimportant little me with the big mouth. OK, now I’m paranoid.