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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (752039)	10/19/2006 11:29:15 PM
From: pompsander	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

WASHINGTON - A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to release information about who visited Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and personal residence, an order that could spark a late election-season debate over lobbyists’ White House access. While researching the access lobbyists and others had on the White House, The Washington Post asked in June for two years of White House visitor logs. The Secret Service refused to process the request, which government attorneys called “a fishing expedition into the most sensitive details of the vice presidency.” U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said Wednesday that, by the end of next week, the Secret Service must produce the records or at least identity them and justify why they are being withheld. The Secret Service can still try to withhold the records but, in a written ruling Thursday, Urbina questioned the agency’s primary argument — that the logs are protected by Cheney’s right to executive privilege. Republicans have suffered a spate of bad news lately. Ohio Rep. Bob Ney pleaded guilty in the Jack Abramoff lobbying investigation, Florida Rep. Mark Foley resigned after reports of his sexually explicit Internet conversations with teenage House pages, and the FBI intensified its corruption investigation into Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon. Further ammunition for Dems? If Cheney’s visitor logs show meetings with lobbyists, releasing them just weeks before Election Day could provide ammunition to Democrats. “The political price is very high,” said L. Sandy Maisel, director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs at Colby College. “Even more than that, Cheney has a vested interest in keeping them out of public eye at a time when people will pay attention to them. After the election, they will pay much less attention.” The newspaper sought logs for anyone visiting Cheney, his legal counsel, chief spokesman and other top aides and advisers. The Secret Service had no comment on the ruling Thursday. In court documents, government attorneys said releasing the documents would infringe on Cheney’s ability to seek advice. “This case is about protecting the effective functioning of the vice presidency under the Constitution,” attorneys wrote. A lawsuit over similar records revealed last month that Republican activists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed — key figures in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal — landed more than 100 meetings inside the Bush White House. The Post cited those records, which were released to the Democratic Party and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, as evidence that the documents should be released. URL: msnbc.msn.com

To: PROLIFE who wrote (752039)	10/20/2006 6:24:34 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

...Mr. Gingrich’s one-time lieutenant, Dick Armey, the former House Republican majority leader. In recent weeks, Mr. Armey has stepped up a public campaign against the influence of Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and an influential voice among evangelical protestants. In an interview published last month in “The Elephant in the Room,” a book by Ryan Sager about splits among conservatives, Mr. Armey accused Congressional Republicans of “blatant pandering to James Dobson” and “his gang of thugs,” whom Mr. Armey called “real nasty bullies” — arguments he reprised on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and in an open letter on the Web site organization FreedomWorks. In an interview this week, Mr. Armey said catering to Dr. Dobson and his allies had led the party to abandon budget-cutting. And he said Christian conservatives could cost Republicans seats around the country, especially in Ohio. “The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about the things people care about, like how do I pay my bills?” he said. Mr. Armey also pinned some of the blame on Tom DeLay, the former Republican House majority leader, who “was always more comfortable with the social conservatives, the evangelical wing of the party, than he was with the business wing.” Mr. Armey, who identifies himself as an evangelical, said he was tired of Christian conservative leaders threatening that their supporters would stay away from the ballot box unless they got what they wanted. “Economic conservatives,” he argued, were emerging as the swing voters in need of attention, in part because they had become more likely to vote Democratic in the years since President Bill Clinton was in office. “A lot of people believe he brought us from deficits to surpluses, and there is a certain empirical evidence there,” Mr. Armey acknowledged.... ...Many blame neoconservatives who argued most vocally for the invasion of Iraq. “The principal sin of the neoconservatives is overbearing arrogance,” Mr. Keene said. Neoconservatives, in turn, blamed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s insistence on holding down troop levels for the fouling up of the war “There is a bit of a battle between people who say, Hey, your tax cuts wrecked our war and people who say, Hey, your war wrecked our tax cuts,” said David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who was among the war’s proponents.... Republican Woes Lead to Feuding by Conservatives By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Published: October 20, 2006 nytimes.com