Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

After a story in today’s Washington Post suggesting that Cheney was under investigation in the Valarie Plame case, government officials and advisers were abuzz with rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Said one Bush insider;

It’s certainly an interesting but I still think highly doubtful scenario. And if that should happen, there will undoubtedly be those who believe the whole thing was orchestrated – another brilliant Machiavellian move by the VP.

Said another Bush advisor;

Folks on the inside and near inside are holding their breath and wondering what’s next.

The rumor spread so fast that some Republicans by late morning were already drawing up reasons why Rice couldn’t get the job or run for president in 2008.

Let’s see…. the last time a Vice President resigned, wasn’t he a former Maryland governor? And….help me here….didn’t something really big follow along after he resigned?

The Cincinnati Greens have an interesting debate — it’s in the October 10th entry — on instant runoff voting and proportional representation… (http://cincinnatigreens.blogspot.com/)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html

…[T]he Wall Street Journal’s John Fund digs up a story that, if true, will have a major impact on the Miers debate:

“On Oct. 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, James Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the Miers nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which I have obtained, and on which the following account is based. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers’s close friends — both sitting judges — said that she would vote to overturn Roe.

“The call was moderated by the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. Participating were 13 members of the executive committee of the Arlington Group, an umbrella alliance of 60 religious conservative groups, including Gary Bauer of American Values, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and the Rev. Bill Owens, a black minister. Also on the call were Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court and Ed Kinkeade, a Dallas-based federal district court judge.

“Dr. Dobson says he spoke to Mr. Rove on Oct. 2, the day before President Bush announced the nomination. Mr. Rove assured Dr. Dobson that Ms. Miers was an evangelical Christian and a strict constructionist, and said that Justice Hecht, a longtime friend of Ms. Miers who’d helped her join an evangelical church in 1979, could provide background. Later that day, a personal friend of Dr. Dobson’s in Texas called him and suggested he speak with Judge Kinkeade, a friend of Ms. Miers’s for decades. . . .

“What followed was a free-wheeling discussion about many topics, including same-sex marriage. Justice Hecht said he’d never discussed that issue with Ms. Miers. Then an unidentified voice asked the two men, ‘Based on your personal knowledge of her, if she had the opportunity, do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?’ ‘Absolutely,’ said Judge Kinkeade. ‘I agree with that,’ said Justice Hecht. ‘I concur.’”

So much for keeping an open legal mind.

Activists Take On Developers, Bureaucrats

Standing in her kitchen on New Year’s Eve, Amy Presley and her friend Kim Shiley reflected on the unlikely turn their lives had taken. Margaritas were mixed. And they discussed a question that many in Montgomery County would come to ask over the next year: Why are they doing this?

The pair had spent hundreds of hours in 2004 digging through arcane county planning records and grilling reticent bureaucrats to try to document problems in their new housing development. Presley, a marketing consultant, had begun scaling back clients. Shiley, an administrative nurse with the federal government, had sacrificed weekends and days off.

Tears welled in Shiley’s eyes. She thought about her cancer, a Stage-4 melanoma now in remission. “Another holiday. It makes me wonder will I still be here next year, and if I have been doing what I could be doing,” she told Presley. “I want to have fun, too.”

“You will be here, and so will I,” Presley remembers telling her.

Click here for link.

Privacy-Minded Coalition Seeks to Quash Pentagon Database

In a letter being sent today to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, more than 100 groups charge that the database violates federal privacy laws and is collecting demographic and other personal information on young Americans that could be misused by the government and the marketing firms handling the program.
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The Pentagon program was little known until June, when the military issued a privacy notice that it was buying lists of all high school and college students to create a database that included birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.
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According to Pentagon documents, the information on roughly 12 million individuals is compiled from a variety of sources, including motor vehicle records, commercial vendors of personal information on students, and those who take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, which is given in many high schools.

The program also includes information from Selective Service registrations. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, the Pentagon also is entitled to entire public high school student lists, which it says are kept separately.

One of the goals of the opposition coalition, organizers said, is to make high school and college students aware of how much private data they routinely give away.

“When young people are asked to provide personal information in hopes of receiving a scholarship or an academic honor, they may be giving up their right to privacy with nothing being given to them in return,” said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the groups spearheading the effort.

Click here for link.

The Iraqi constitution could have been blocked if three provinces voted by a two thirds majority against it. In the Western Sunni provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin, a solid Sunni turnout provided a two thirds vote against the constitution. In the Sunni majority province of Ninevah, north of Baghdad, first results show the constitution failing, but only by 55% of the vote–not enough to block it.

Now Iraq’s electoral commission has delayed announcing the results of the nation’s constitutional referendum because of possible voting irregularities. In at least six provinces, the turnout to vote on the measure appears to have topped 95 percent, said Izzadin al Mohammadi, a senior commission official.

The audit announcement came amid allegations by the nation’s Sunni minority that the voting was marred by fraud.

If it’s proven that there was fraud in Ninevah or any other place it would affect the entire Iraqi political process and the credibility of democracy in Iraq,”

said Naseer al-Ani, a senior official in the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group that backed the constitution at the last minute.

It’s a fraud; it was a rigged election,

according to Fakhri al-Qaisi, an official with the Sunni political group the National Dialogue Council.

Election officials acknowledged after January’s elections that militia members in Ninevah took ballots and ballot boxes from polling centers and returned them stuffed to the brim, which has Sunnis concerned that this election may have been stolen.

No sightings of Katherine Harris, but nothing would suprise me now.