Courtesy Huffington Post

From his column; Under the Radar: Courts, Transparency and More

A federal judge in Washington has dismissed the last legal remnants of Filegate, a scandal that engulfed the Clinton White House nearly 14 years ago.

Judge Royce Lamberth dispatched a pair of suits over the matter today, ruling that there was no intentional misconduct and that the acquisition of hundreds of FBI background files on former White House staffers was simply a mix-up.

The nut graph to Lamberth’s 28-page ruling :

After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, and innumerable histrionics, this Court is left to conclude that with this lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, ‘there’s no there there.’ While this Court seriously entertained the plaintiffs’ allegations that their privacy had been violated–and indeed it was, even if not in the sense contemplated by the Privacy Act–after ample opportunity, they have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode–about which they do have cause to complain–was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu.

First Lady Hillary Clinton once dismissed filegate as a ‘pseudoscandal.’ It was no laughing matter to Clinton aides, who racked up huge legal bills to defend themselves in the lawsuits.

The litigation gave rise to a series of colorful, videotaped depositions, including one where former White House aide George Stephanopoulos was asked repeatedly about his use of a pen while appearing as a guest on ABC’s “This Week,” a program he would later host.

Stephanopoulos and his attorney, Stan Brand, eventually walked out of the session, which ended with Klayman memorably declaring: “All right, certify it. We’ll move for sanctions.”

Klayman’s antics in the case were later loosely reimagined in a character named Harry Klaypool on the TV show “The West Wing.

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“The same idiots who have been seduced by cigarette-money-sized tax cuts for themselves, used to justify a massive slashing of the burden once carried by the rich, are now bitching as government services implode. The New York Times is reporting that citizens of Arizona – one of the most regressive states in the union – are now unhappy because their highway rest stops have been eliminated due to the state’s fiscal crisis. I just want to grab these people and shake them by the shoulders, politely suggesting to them that next time they have to pull over in the desert sands between Tucson and Phoenix and squat by the side of the road, they might want to give a thought or two to all the money they pissed away in another desert, this one in Mesopotamia. Likewise, people are now also starting to whine about schools closing and prisoners being released from jail, also because of budget slashing. And I just want to ask those bright folks whether they still think all those tax cuts for the already outrageously wealthy plutocracy were such a good idea in retrospect, after all.
“This is just the tip of the spear. American government is in the process of imploding, and it won’t be long until the pathetically minuscule social safety net that we have will be shredded as well. Stupid voters who turn to the Republican Party in the next two election cycles will be outraged at the GOP if it does what it says it will do and slashes social spending. And, of course, they will be equally outraged if the Republicans don’t. It just doesn’t seem to occur to these folks that you have to pay for government services. And why should it, really? The GOP have been selling the magic of free government since Ronald Reagan brought voodoo economics to the national stage in 1980, nearly quadrupling the national debt in the process.”
– David Alan Green, “To Hell in a Handbasket,” CommonDreams.org, March 7, 2010.

“Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.
“A similar ‘backfire effect’ also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.
“… Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might ‘argue back’ against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same ‘backfire effect’ when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.”
– Shankar Vendatam, “The Power of Political Misinformation,” Washington Post, Sept. 15, 2008.

Liz Cheney vs. al Qaeda 7…

“whose values do they share?”

Scribe’s retort..

“American values. And you and your father?”

Written by Eric Boehlert

When news broke last Thursday that a deranged gunman had opened fire outside a Pentagon security checkpoint, wounding two officers before being stopped by return fire (the gunman later died from his wounds), the reaction from some oddly giddy right-wing bloggers was swift. They wanted everyone to pay attention to the story. Why? Because bloggers claimed the gunman, John Patrick Bedell, was a loony liberal.

Under increased scrutiny for the rampant anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, along with its often violent imagery and open talk of insurrection, right-wingers seemed anxious, even frantic, to hold up the Pentagon killer as proof that they weren’t responsible for — or connected with — every political act of vigilante violence that makes headlines these days.

Want to read more? Click HERE.

Anyone else think a party filled with leaders willing to strip people of HUMAN rights, but gives corporation more rights than any human on the planet, is filled with traitors and corporate shills?

-A-non-E-Moose