Gonzales is beneath contempt

From the testimony today of Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey about events in 2004:

[COMEY:] Told my security detail that I needed to get to George Washington Hospital immediately. They turned on the emergency equipment and drove very quickly to the hospital.

I got out of the car and ran up — literally ran up the stairs with my security detail.

SCHUMER: What was your concern? You were in obviously a huge hurry.

COMEY: I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to that.

SCHUMER: Right, OK.

COMEY: I was worried about him, frankly.

And so I raced to the hospital room, entered. And Mrs. Ashcroft was standing by the hospital bed, Mr. Ashcroft was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn’t clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off.
. . .

I sat down in an armchair by the head of the attorney general’s bed. The two other Justice Department people stood behind me. And Mrs. Ashcroft stood by the bed holding her husband’s arm. And we waited.

And it was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the attorney general very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there — to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was — which I will not do.

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general.

SCHUMER: But he expressed his reluctance or he would not sign the statement that they — give the authorization that they had asked, is that right?

COMEY: Yes.

And as he laid back down, he said, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. There is the attorney general, and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left.

The two men did not acknowledge me. They turned and walked from the room. And within just a few moments after that, Director Mueller arrived. I told him quickly what had happened. He had a brief — a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general and then we went outside in the hallway.
…

COMEY: I was concerned that this was an effort to do an end-run around the acting attorney general and to get a very sick man to approve something that the Department of Justice had already concluded — the department as a whole — was unable to be certified as to its legality. And that was my concern.

According to The Lede:

Mr. Comey said that several officials, including himself, Mr. Ashcroft, the F.B.I. director and other senior staffers were willing to resign [rather than approve the program].

President Bush relented, according to Mr. Comey, asking the Justice Department to formulate a wiretapping program that they could approve.

But Gonzales’ behavior is simply embarrassing to us as a nation. He must be removed from office.

Toddlers in Jail

Inmate Faten Ibrahim was unlikely to escape. She lived at a compound built as a prison for Texas’ worst criminals, within a perimeter of razor wire. Her eight-by-eight-foot cell offered only a thin sliver of window, her toilet in an open corner left no cover for stashing break-out tools, and, at any rate, cracking the cell’s thick steel door at night would have tripped an alarm. She certainly wasn’t going to try bolting, especially since Faten, who lived in the cell with her mother for three months, is five years old.

Read more Detention Center Blues.

The article is from February. Here’s an update: Jailing Toddlers in Texas.

Best line of the day, so far

[…] Gonzales’ appearance yesterday was nothing but a thumbing of the Administration’s nose at Congress. It reminded me of the scene in Office Space when Ron Livingston goes into the conference room to interview with the consultants, and he slouches in the chair and explains that he doesn’t do anything all day because he’s bored with his job and doesn’t give a shit, and then he basically tells the interviewers to go to hell.

FunctionalAmbivalent

When a ballplayer is too old

Letterman’s Top Ten Signs A Baseball Player Is Too Old:

8. While playing outfield, yells at teamates to get the hell off his lawn

7. When buying performance-enhancing drugs, gets the AARP discount

1. When he’s in the on-deck circle, asks bat boy, “What did I come in here for?”

Best line of the day

“If a couple of lesbians or gay men want to get married, and they love each other, they should have the right to do that and enjoy all the legalities in our society that go along with that. I have no problem with that at all. I think that people who create these problems of homophobia and the likes of that do us a disservice. We are all human beings and one of the things that should motivate us, most of all, is love.”

Presidential candidate and former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel

Why I don’t like thunderstorms

Twelve years ago today NewMexiKen made the round trip from Northern Virginia to Blacksburg to bring Jason, official youngest son of NewMexiKen, home from Virginia Tech for the summer. It was about a 550 mile drive, so not long after I got home from dropping Jason and his stuff off, I collapsed in my Arlington townhouse’s second floor bedroom; exhausted, but not really asleep.

As I lay there dozing on-and-off a little after nine a thunderstorm blew in. I began listening to it, the lightning closer and the thunder right behind and increasingly loud. I was counting the seconds to see how far away the strikes were, when, BAM, the lightning and thunder came in the same instant.

“Wow! That was close.”

I got up to look out the back and front windows to see which large tree it had hit. Not the one in the back open space. Not the even bigger and older one across the street. Odd I thought. It had to be that close.

I went down the two stories to the basement to reset the circuit breakers that had popped. Coming back through, I began the inventory of damaged electronic gear. No phones worked. The TV was screwy and the VCR was blasted. Sitting in the living room I heard a loud static-like sound upstairs and concluded the clock radio had come on, but didn’t work, or maybe the station was off the air. I headed back up, but the noise wasn’t coming from the radio. I started back down again, confused.

Above the stairway landing was a pull-down stepladder to the attic. As I passed—for the third time since the lightning strike—I looked up. Through the seam around the molding I could see what was making the crinkly sound. Flames!

It was a townhouse with a common attic so I immediately alerted neighbors on both sides and had one of them call the fire department (remember, my phones didn’t work). Foolishly perhaps (though there was no smoke), I went back in to get my wallet and car keys from the top of the bureau in the bedroom upstairs. I also grabbed a couple of envelopes with utility payments—but not my work ID (which I later thought was an interesting psychology).

The nearest fire station was only a few blocks down the street but they were already out on a call. It was ten minutes before the next nearest engine company arrived. You think waiting for a computer to load a program or waiting for a red light to change is long? Try standing in the pouring rain waiting for the fire trucks when your house is on fire.

The firemen arrived, vented the attic, went out of their way to protect some of my furniture, and stopped the fire just before the slate roof crashed through the burned-out attic and destroyed the place top down. Even so there was water and smoke damage all the way down to the basement (water gets into walls and runs across ceilings). It took $50,000 and several months to rebuild the place (I was a renter, but I did return after it was rebuilt). State Farm handled my personal claim with courtesy and generosity. I got a lot of new stuff.

The fire inspector the next morning told me that lightning strikes are about 2000° F. It hit about 20 feet from my bed.

Good, better, best lines of the day, so far

• Spiderman 3 made $382 million worldwide over the weekend. But then again, so did the guy who owns a Texaco station near my house.

• According to a new study by the University of Washington, 90 percent of children under the age of 2 are couch potatoes. You know what you call these kids? Tater tots.

Leno

• The last time the queen was in the United States was in 1991. An awful lot has changed since 1991. Hell, back then, President Bush was fighting the war in Iraq.

• Gas? This summer it could be $4 a gallon. It’s all part of President Bush’s No Oil Company Left Behind program.

• This Paris Hilton thing is tearing this country apart. On the one hand, people are calling for leniency. On the other hand, people are calling for lethal injection.

Letterman

• We’re circulating [our own] petition. We’re asking Gov. Schwarzenegger to officially declare June 5 “Paris Hilton Is Going to Jail Day.”

Kimmel

It has everything, except, perhaps, the fun factor

Dan Neil really is my favorite writer. Who else could begin a car review with:

PROPOSED: The Lexus LS600h L is the most complicated, most elaborate machine ever to take to four wheels. What “Ulysses” is to light reading and Confucianism is to the simple declarative sentence, this hybrid-powered limousine is nothing less than everything Toyota has ever learned about cars poured into one stupendous, stupefying, “because we can” performance piece.

I’m willing to entertain contrary opinions. Is a Formula 1 car more high-tech, more highly engineered? These are extraordinary confections, it’s true — all aero-optimized carbon fiber and ballistic engines — but in terms of the sheer number of parts, subsystems, processors and electronics, an F1 car is a Babylonian goat cart compared to the mega-Lexus. The LS600h L, just as a for instance, monitors the driver’s face with infrared beams and detects if he or she is nodding off. This system seems prudent, since the car is so smooth, so honeyed with refinement, with such a gliding, lighter-than-air ride, that a deep coma only ever seems just a few exits away.

The car has everything: “You can fine-tune the loudness of the Lexus’ door lock-unlock beep;” or “rear seating with a climate-controlled ottoman recliner with shiatsu massage function.”

Deputy Caught with Photo Blocker on License Plate

Sheriff Greg Solano has this item this morning:

Fear of getting a Red Light Camera citation led at least one Bernalillo County Deputy to put a Photo Blocker cover on the license plate of his squad car. Unfortunately he parked his car near a news conference and was caught by none other than City of Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz.

Sheriff Solano is sheriff of Santa Fe, not Bernalillo County. The sheriff has a cool “bad day at the office” photo with the post.