Hard Rain Journal is one of four components of the Words of Power blog. It is posted daily, and provides updates and insights on developing stories. Words of Power, which delivers in-depth commentary, and GS(3) Intelligence Briefing, which provides global risk-related news, are posted on an alternating, bi-weekly basis. GS(3) Thunderbolts are posted as appropriate to deliver timely news on developing stories that require urgent attention.
"I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest...
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten...
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin'...
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."
Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
Hard Rain Journal 6-12-06: Sealed vs. Sealed, Net Neutrality, Congressional Corruption
It was heartening to see Jason Leopold's by-line, this morning, on a story about the Plame investigation. I am confident that Leopold and Truthout will be vindicated by the facts, and that in the process, what many of us believe to be true will be verified, i.e., that Karl Rove was indicted as reported several weeks ago. Perhaps a struggle, involving the White House, the Vice President, Rove and his attorneys, the Attorney General, the presiding judge, and US DoJ prosecutor Patrick J., Fitzgerald, has been going on since "Sealed vs. Sealed" (case number 06 cr 128) was handed down the week of 5-10-06?
I encourage you to access "Sealed vs. Sealed" at www.truthout.org, and read between the lines.
Remember, as Sidney Blumenthal wrote two weeks ago, the US is hurtling toward three Constitutional crises:
"Bush's defence of his war paradigm may precipitate three constitutional crises. In the first, freedom of the press is at issue. On May 21 Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, announced the possibility that the New York Times would be prosecuted for publishing its Pulitzer prize-winning article on the administration's domestic surveillance...
"In the second case, a wartime executive above the law may be asserted. Last week the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who charged the vice-president's former chief of staff Lewis 'Scooter' Libby with perjury and obstruction of justice, made plain his intention to summon Cheney to the witness stand to impeach Libby's credibility or else commit perjury himself. But will the administration fight the subpoena as an infringement on a unitary executive that should be immune from such distractions in wartime?
"In the third case, if either house of Congress should fall to the Democrats in the November midterm elections, the oversight suppressed during one-party rule would be restored. Would the administration refuse congressional requests for documents as it did when the Democratic Senate in Bush's first year asked for those pertaining to Cheney's energy taskforce, which reportedly included Enron's CEO Ken Lay, last week convicted on numerous counts of fraud?"
(Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian, 6-1-06)
Have we already entered into the second of these three Constitutional crises? Will the indictment issued in May ever be unsealed? Will Fitzgerald's investigation be allowed to go in the direction it seems to be headed?
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo, is posting a running vote tally on the US Senate will come down on Net Neutrality. Please access TPM 'Net Neutrality' Vote Tally and then start calling those Senators who are still hiding from their responsibility to protect the freedom of the Internet.
-- Richard Power
Plame, Rove, Cheney,
Bush
Libby, Karl Rove
