George W. Bush doesn’t love America because he wants to be King, which is decidedly not what America is about. I’m not sure how else one can reconcile his administration’s behavior with regard to these subpoenas.

All snark aside, we’re heading into dangerous waters here. If this or, even worse, future Executive branches thinks it can unilaterally ignore Congressional subpoenas, I’m not sure what check exists against Executive overreach. This is decidedly not how the country was intended to operate.

But we won’t ever know because the media won’t tell us. Seriously, he is a sketchy, sketchy guy. I don’t understand how he’s still Speaker.

Via Atrios

I realize that it might be easier to scare Americans about the idea of a vast record of their phone calls and the data in them, but I’m disappointed in the nature of the discussion around the newly disclosed NSA spying program. The issue isn’t the fact that the government feels that this helps the war against terrorism. That’s an interesting question worth debating but ultimately not the point.

The point is that the law makes it very likely that this program is illegal. Even if you believe the President is behaving in good faith, he has to follow the law. Ultimately, this is what this issue boils down to. While it’s not as sexy as “Big Brother is watching,” it is accurate.

USA Today also reported that the NSA was aware that it didn’t have the legal authority to do this:

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

It’s one thing to take advantage of a gray area or a loophole and exploit it. It’s another to recognize that maybe there isn’t loophole, and to actively avoid oversight by the other branches of government.

And that’s what the most amazing about this whole story, including the previously disclosed NSA program. All they have to do is get the law changed and the NSA could’ve continued with the entire program. If the law was passed by this Congress, it probably wouldn’t even have any oversight requirements. It’s telling, then, that the President didn’t get the law changed. A Republican dominated Congress filled with spineless leadership like Sen. Frist and Rep. DeLay didn’t pass a new law authorizing these programs.

It’s like the White House said, “You’re not the boss of me!” to Congress like a petulant little child. The White House needs a timeout and a reminder that Congress and the Judiciary does have oversight over these programs. It’s curious why the White House would have such a problem with oversight in the first place.

Just ask to have the law changed. Let’s put in the right oversight controls and move on with the running of this country.

Many Republicans, including Sen. Martinez (R-FL), have returned campaign contributions linked to Rep. Bob Ney or Jack Abramoff as a statement against the corruption. Well, Sen. Martinez has a tough choice: Abramoff co-chaired a $250K fundraiser for him. Will he return all of it? Read the rest.

There’s an interesting bit of reporting over at TPM. It’s not clear if this means anything, but a private photo studio that does the photo shoots for a lot of Republican events deleted all the photos in their archive with Bush and Abramoff together. They keep the photos they take and resell them along with rights to publish, etc. Thus they have them all cataloged and available. TPM called the studio as part of their research into what kind of relationship Bush and Abramoff had. Read the story, it’s hard to believe why the studio would do this on their own… The existence of these photos aren’t secret.

Steve Clemons has a good article up about how Bush’s defense of the NSA program misses the point entirely.

Some more on the NSA domestic spying scandal…

The Bush administration is doing a great job of acting guilty of some wrongdoing. While Congress is calling for investigations into whether the President broke any laws, the administration has launched an investigation into who leaked the story to the NYT. Which would be alright except for the fact that, um, the Bush administration knew about the leak over a year ago and chose to do nothing about it. On a related note, the new Public Editor for the Times is pissed that the Times’ Keller and Sulzberger (managing editor and publisher, respectively) aren’t offering any explanation of why they held the story up for a year or why they chose to publish the story now. More discussion at PressThink.

Of course, none of that gets at the substance of the story, and even that’s not going well for the administration. At the center of the latest revelations lies Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Seems that in 2004, he refused to sign off on the program, causing Gonzales and Card to visit Ashcroft in the hospital to try to get him to sign off on it.

Whether this is significant or not depends greatly on the judgement and credibility of Comey. If his objection to the program reflected a wider concern among the top Justice Dept. staff attorneys, then this is indeed significant. If not, well, I doubt all the folks in the administration or even a particular agency agree on everything all the time. As long as the final decisions reflect the best judgement of the staff, that’s OK. Of course, this administration has overridden consensus reports from the staff in the past. Remember the Texas redistricting case or the FDA process on RU486.

Interestingly enough, Comey was the one that convinced Ashcroft to recuse himself and appoint Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame case. Jane Hamsher runs down the particulars. Like Fitzgerald, Comey seems like a by-the-book kind of guy. Is it surprising that the honest ones seem to be causing the administration so much trouble?

Update: Kevin Drum, being a better writer, sums it up best:

I think it’s safe to say that something is seriously wrong here. After all, we now know that the FISA court was unhappy about the NSA program; Congress was unwilling to pass a law authorizing it; and both John Ashcroft and his chief deputy — in an election year! — eventually came to feel that the program was being abused. That’s the trifecta: senior officials in all three branches of government felt that the program went beyond the president’s authority.

Update 2: Jane Hamsher has more on Comey on her blog.

Atrios highlights Larry Johnson’s testimony to Congress about the Valerie Plame affair. He is a career CIA officer and was a classmate of Valerie Plame’s in the CIA training program. He discusses how the CIA classifies their agents and how they work. Plame was most definitely a CIA agent even though her story might not be as sexy as James Bond. More troubling, the White House knew this according to an article in the Washington Post. Maybe I’m a weak-kneed liberal or whatever, but screwing over a covert agent and putting intelligence assets at risk is a big deal. Maybe even a bigger deal that a guy lying about a blowjob.

I hope the press and Congress don’t drop this. Whoever leaked the name should get fired at the very least.