Liberal Repercussion

Due to the nature of the blog, and my disorganized brain, the finer points turn up higher on the page than the seminal notions.

So, if you are wondering what my beef with Manuel A. Miranda is, let me recap.

Miranda, legal counsel to Republican Senate Majority Leader Frist is the guy who was taking information illicitly obtained from Senate Democrats' computers, through a security hole in the Congressional intranet and leaking it to the most rabid of right wing reactionary nutjobs. He managed to get private information out of the Dems' private directories and into the hands of the Scaife broads (the IWF), Robert "Treasonesque" Novak and the pathologically insane Federalist Society. The facts regarding this dissemination, along with some interesting bits about Miranda's career, follows.


__________


Manuel A. Miranda, Esq., president of the Cardinal Newman Society, also argued that “personnel is policy.” He said that the most important and easiest step toward enforcing mission-centered personnel policies is to replace troublesome student affairs staff, who most often are responsible for “the problems of Catholic identity on our campuses and the scandals and harm to integrity they cause.”

Miranda was referring to problems such as excessive and underage drinking, sexual promiscuity and advocacy of activities not consistent with Catholic doctrine, such as abortion and homosexual activity. These were described in detail by Liz Fiore, who graduated from Georgetown University last May. Fiore and other students described numerous problems at their schools, including university-sanction condom distribution, hostility toward traditional Catholic devotions, policies mandating acceptance of homosexual conduct and a lack of appropriate Catholic retreat programs and liturgies.

posted by Rei Toei @ 8:55 p.m.

< sarcasm>
NOOOOO, Miranda's ill-gotten information wasn't abused.
< /sarcasm>

The Federalist Society is about the evilest, most self-centered gaggle of hypocrites that can be scraped up from the legal professional pool.


Philadelphia Lawyer’s Chapter, Federalist Society

To be presented Thursday, December 4, 2003:

The Senate Minority's War on Judicial Independence

Speaker:
Manuel A. Miranda
Counsel to United States Senate Majority Leader William Frist (R-TN)

Location:
Dechert LLP
1717 Arch St., 40th Floor, Philadelphia, PA

Registration and reception at 5:00 p.m.
Program begins at 5:30 p.m.
Cost: $15.00 for non-members, $5.00 for members.
No charge if no CLE credit is requested.
To preregister, e-mail info@philafedsoc.org, or call (215) 568-2000 (ask for Danielle)

posted by Rei Toei @ 8:33 p.m.

http://www.thehoya.com/viewpoint/032701/view3.htm

Georgetown University is not untouched by freedoms beyond the gates. For eight years, gay students waged a court battle to receive “recognition” as a student club — then the key to benefits. They lost, but they won the right to equal access to activity funds without forcing the university to recognize them. Administrators happily adopted the concept of “access to benefits” originally to avoid having to recognize groups considered inconsistent with Catholic identity.

University policy, however, continues to invite legal challenge for curtailing associational rights and academic freedom, and Church scrutiny since “access to benefits” is being duplicitously treated as “recognition.”

Students and alumni must be vigilant that our university’s marketplace of ideas does not become a bargain basement for just some people’s ideas.



"The time is coming for Irishmen to stop writing our history." -- Manuel A. Miranda

http://www.thehoya.com/viewpoint/110700/view4.htm

http://www.cin.org/archives/cinjub/200005/0038.html


Loved this bit. The original subject of this thread was if you would go to Hell if you voted for Al Gore. Proof positive that the Religious Right is devoid of intellect, reason or any trace of scruples. Miranda here, thoughtfully explains the New World Order, and elaborates a tiny bit on Skull and Bones. (Successful persons are Yale graduates. Huh. Reasoning like this from an attorney?)

From: "Manuel A. Miranda"
Subject: Re: Jubilee 2000: A Sin to Vote for Al Gore?
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 14:22:39 -0400

Just a quick comment that the term New World Order is a rather old one and it was long used in international affairs to imply a global view on matters of security, trade, and relief. It is usually associated with the best of United Nations idealism. An internationalism which was not foreign to the generation of Bush senior for good reason. It is not the term that is the problem. But its more recent association with an abdication of national sovereignty over security and legislative matters which both Bush's have repudiated but which the current administration has increasingly embraced. In fact, in the speech you cite, Bush senior was making the point that the US is bound only to the principles that they have signed on to. It was a rejection of UN expansion into untold areas. His point was correct. Under our constitutional law, international conventions become part of our law. Bush was saying that it would only what was signed in 1946 (?).

As to the Skull & Bones fraternity. Some of last century's greatest public servants have been Yale graduates and members. Of course, that too is all over.

Let's hope for the Holy Spirit and that we remember our courses in Logic and catechism...hierarchy of principles, collaboration with evil, and principle of non-contradiction, etc.

posted by Rei Toei @ 8:18 p.m.

And what REALLY pisses me off is this characterization of Manuel Miranda is a staffer.

Miranda is NOT just a staffer. He is COUNSEL TO THE SENATE MAJORITY LEADER. He is William Frist's ATTORNEY.

This means that it is not an error or mischief or the detachable activities of an overzelous staffer. These actions were taken with full knowledge of their criminal import.

posted by Rei Toei @ 8:04 p.m.

www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17502-2003Nov27

The press release goes on to identify Manuel Miranda, a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), as circulating the memos .

"Manuel Miranda, counsel in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office, recently sent around an e-mail composed of strategy memos that had been obtained from the 2001-2002 period when Democrats ran the Judiciary Committee," the Women's Forum release said. "The 'real bosses' of Democratic legislators, Miranda concluded, are the liberal interest groups that more or less tell the senators when to sit, speak and roll over -- and which Bush judges to confirm or not."

Miranda, who worked for the Judiciary panel's Republican staff until joining Frist in February, said in an interview Wednesday that he had sent the Women's Forum and other groups an e-mail copy of the Wall Street Journal article but nothing more. Asked about the Democratic strategy memos, he said they "have never touched my office. . . . I have never distributed any memos to anyone."

Rieva Holycross, the Women's Forum official who said she was responsible for the Nov. 17 press release, described it as "a terrible mistake." The group never received the memos, she said, and only had the Wall Street Journal article that Miranda had sent. Holycross said the quote attributed to Miranda in the press release was a rewrite of a sentence in the Journal article, something that Miranda had also suggested.

posted by Rei Toei @ 8:01 p.m.

Lovely, the Republicans ONCE AGAIN try to shirk accountability for obviously criminal actions by blaming a programmer hired by Patrick Leahy. If this is what Washington D.C. is like when "the adults are in charge", GIVE IT BACK TO THE KIDS.

The GOP is truly the party of criminal behavior.



Infiltration of files seen as extensive
Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 1/22/2004

WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.

The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.

Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.

Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.

Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.

"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."

As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.

Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.

The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of confidential Democratic files represents a major escalation in partisan warfare over judicial appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987, when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.

Against that backdrop, both sides have something to gain and lose from the investigation into the computer files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws.

"They had an obligation to tell each of the people whose files they were intruding upon -- assuming it was an accident -- that that was going on so those people could protect themselves," said one Senate staffer. "To keep on getting these files is just beyond the pale."

But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees Democratic senators would filibuster. Other revelations from the memos include Democrats' race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they feared would make him difficult to block from a later promotion to the Supreme Court.

And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case."

After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."

Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports." He did not name the staffer, who he said was being placed on leave and who sources said has since resigned, although he had apparently already announced plans to return to school later this year.

Officials familiar with the investigation identified that person as a legislative staff assistant whose name was removed from a list of Judiciary Committee staff in the most recent update of a Capitol Hill directory. The staff member's home number has been disconnected and he could not be reached for comment.

Hatch also said that a "former member of the Judiciary staff may have been involved." Many news reports have subsequently identified that person as Manuel Miranda, who formerly worked in the Judiciary Committee office and now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office. His computer hard drive name was stamped on an e-mail from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League that was posted along with the Democratic Senate staff communications.

Reached at home, Miranda said he is on paternity leave; Frist's office said he is on leave "pending the results of the investigation" -- he denied that any of the handwritten comments on the memos were by his hand and said he did not distribute the memos to the media. He also argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.

"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."

Whether the memos are ultimately deemed to be official business will be a central issue in any criminal case that could result. Unauthorized access of such material could be punishable by up to a year in prison -- or, at the least, sanction under a Senate non-disclosure rule.

The computer glitch dates to 2001, when Democrats took control of the Senate after the defection from the GOP of Senator Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont.

A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

posted by Rei Toei @ 6:33 p.m.

Political Rallies End in Brawl

Two political rallies turned into a brawl Saturday night in Des Moines.

A Democratic rally at Drake's Olmstead Center, urged young Iowans to get out and vote. It was targeted toward high school and college students. A group known for not voting. The rally featured comedian Janene Garafalo and classic rock star Joan Jett, but it got a surprise visit from some unwanted guests.

A group of college republicans at their Midwest caucus leadership conference heard about the rally and stormed in.

"There are seven of us who worked really hard at putting this conference together, said Jason Cole of the college republicans. "so, we met, discussed and majority ruled. We went down there."

What they didn't discuss is what to do if things get out of hand. One of the Bush supporters shoved Jett and she pushed back in anger. Ole said that was the decision of one person, and not at all representative of what the conference was trying to do.

Campus security did show up break things up. The concert did resume as planned. In fact, Jett wrapped up her day with two more performances. One in Fort Dodge, the other in Marshalltown.

posted by Rei Toei @ 5:12 p.m.