This is one of the most offensive and self-serving “occasions” ever INVENTED by people who claim to have dedicated their lives to educating children!  I work for an elementary school in rural North Carolina.  This is EXACTLY what appeared in my Friday, May 4^th, staff bulletin.  -- Exactly as it appeared. --

I am embarrassed to go to school Monday, Shine the light on the subject day.  Does this offend you, too?  I asked a few staff members on Friday about the week of recognition, and they also felt it was a bit over the top.  How does one react to a week of obligatory gifts?  Do you thank them and let the kids and parents think they have done the right thing?  On the other hand, do you refuse the gifts and offend kids and parents?

I was never asked about this “special occasion.”  I never petitioned for such a week of recognition.  I am certainly uncomfortable having the school layout a rigorous schedule of gift giving.  It all sounds like extortion to me.

What about parents who truly appreciate my service?  I do not feel they are compelled to purchase gifts for me at anytime.  I earn a paycheck for my services.  I am really bothered by this entire “occasion.” 

Is your child’s school “celebrating” this way?

First Indictments in the CIA Leak Case

By Christine Gates

 This story is never ending… Lewis “Scooter” Libby resigned as VP Chief of Staff after a twenty-two month investigation were he was indicted on 1 count of obstruction of justice, 2 counts of giving false statements to a grand jury, and 2 counts of perjury on Friday, October 28, 2005.  (For those of you who are keeping track of such things, Clinton made 267 provably “erroneous” statements to a grand jury.  No indictments were filed.) 

 Libby was only indicted, but US Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s wording to the press was suspiciously strong and definitive as if he had just been convicted by a jury after a trail.  In the press conference after the indictments were announced, Fitzgerald did not use the typical legal verbiage like “alleged…” or “the government’s case will demonstrate the law as broken in this manner….”   Instead, he said -----

 After the indictments were handed down, a Washington reporter asked federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about any leaks from Libby.  Fitzgerald replied that Libby’s investigation was not about an outing of a Plame.  Then what was the crime being investigated? 

 This is then likened to someone giving you a test on all the things you did and said at work for the last five years.  Libby turned over all notes and fully cooperated with the prosecutor and all grand jury appearances.  Libby is said to be an excellent lawyer and should know the threshold for perjury.  Surely, he would not perjure himself.  Suppose Libby were given 500 questions to answer about his job for the last five years and the test-giver has all of his notes to compare every single answer to.  Libby missed 5 questions.  Those would be the one’s he was indicted on, because Fitzgerald officially stated on Friday that Libby was not being investigated for outing Plame.  This is terribly confusing and seemingly unfair.  Apparently, in Libby’s case, there was no crime until Libby’s memory “failed” him.

 However, the President’s top advisor Carl Rove, aka Bush’s Brain, is still under investigation for involvement in the CIA Leak because the grand jury did not indict Rove.  But Prosecutor Fitzgerald will have to convene a new grand jury since this one’s term ended on Friday 10/28/05, which, unfortunately for us, means this whole investigation may have to start over.

(notes to my editor for submission.)

====== the story could end here for just the indictment news.

/

/

/ADD LATER: 

/ AFTER 2 YEARS – NO GREATER INDICTMENTS THAN THESE

/

====== the rest is summarized history of the Leak Case – Very interesting for me but I’m sure you’ll [my editor] yawn.  I love this!!!   My editor at L-RC did not run this “history” part story.  She felt it was boring and no one would care.  I loved doing this investigation to see what was under those rocks.  I could easily make a living doing this kind of analysis.  Or at least, doing the research for someone else to do the analysis.

 
CIA Leak Case History

by Christine Gates

 During a series of interviews in 2003 on WMD’s NewYork Times Washington bureau reporter, Judith Miller, asked many questions of Carl Rove and Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, about details about the validity of WMD’s story.  One question she had was who was sent to Niger to investigate this for the U.S?  The answer was Joseph Wilson, husband of CIA employee Valerie Wilson-Plame.  Months ago, Cheney said on Meet-the-Press he referred to Plame as, “that woman who is married to Wilson and works for the CIA” but he says he did not know her name.  Her employment was common knowledge in all Washington circles. 

 One reason why Miller was asking these questions was because Robert Novak originally and used her name in a July 14, 2003, article in the New York Times.  Novak writes, “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”  He wrote a previous opinion article on July 8, 2003, asking the question why Joseph Wilson was chosen for the CIA investigation when he was clearly unqualified.  Matt Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, also wrote a story asking the same questions.  He has also been cleared of any wrong doing by federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and the grand jury.  

 But Miller spent 85 days in jail for contempt of court because she would not divulge her source for identifying Plame by name.  Now that she is out of jail and we find out that Rove and Libby both gave her permission more than a year ago to discuss the details of their interviews, I guess I really don’t know why she went to jail unless she is protecting someone else.

 It turns out now that Miller is out of jail, her notebook read on a blank page Valerie “Flame,” not Plame.  The most mystifying part of this whole story is that now she can’t remember exactly who told her Plame’s name.  What?  How could that be, she went to jail 4 months instead of revealing her source.  Was she able to remember the source’s name before jail?  Maybe she should have written it down before she went to jail. 

 The media claims that CIA agent Valerie Plame was alledgedly outted by either Rove, President Bush’s closest advisor, or  Libby during interviews with Miller, Cooper and/or Novak. 

 
A guide to keep these “players” straight:

Robert Novak – reporter, columnist, author; originally used her name in print

Matt Cooper – Time magazine reporter who worked on the story before Judith Miller

Valerie  Wilson-Plame – CIA employee whose current and past employment is unclear

Joseph Wilson – diplomat and husband of Valeria Plame

Judith Miller – New York Times reporter who is spent time in jail to protect a source

Patrick Fitzgerald – Independent Council in this case, a federal prosecutor

Carl Rove – Bush’s top aid

Lewis “Scooter” Libby – VP Cheney’s Chief of Staff

Legal background –Victoia Tunseng, Ronald Reagan’s Chief Counsel, drafted and negotiated the 1982 “Intelliegence Protection Law.”  She has been on a few TV and radio news shows and written numerous articles telling people for months that no law has been broken in this case.  Tunseng states that the law was written so that intelligence reporting could still take place, especially the reporting of wrongdoing by the government.

  It has been said of Fitzgerald that his “greatest talent is his creative ways to interpret laws.”  Tunseng commented on this colleague’s description of Fitzgerald this way, “This [creativity] is okay in civil law, but absolutely wrong in criminal law where the law and crime are to be clear” so that the government doesn’t contrive laws to arrest and prosecute individuals.  Something our Founding Fathers took issue with in the British government three hundred years ago and spelled out such individual protections in our Constitution.

 In an interview on October 26, 2005, Ed Meese, former Attorney General for Ronald Reagan, says he is withholding judgment about the case, but he is very puzzled by the investigation because on the surface he does not see where a law has been broken.

 Patrick J. Fitzgerald, US prosecuting attorney, has kept the evidence in this case secret.  All aspects of the investigation are uncommented on by his office.  So why is this such a big story?  All the speculation on who and when someone will be indicted so silly, because we don’t even know exactly what the focus of the investigation is.

 According to Tunseng, who drafted this Intelligence Protection Law, it is legal to print or report the name of non-covert CIA agents.  It is legal for former covert agents to write books and tell of their adventures in the CIA (with CIA approval).  It is legal for the names of these former covert agents to be reported in the media as long as they have not been undercover for within the last five years and as long as the report does not compromise national security.  So where has the law been broken? 

 If either Rove or Libby named Plame directly or indirectly, she has not been undercover for eleven to at least 8 years and, according to some who know her, she has or had no intention of going back under cover with the CIA since she had her twins in 2000. 

 We know she has not been undercover, because Plame she is not living under a false identity to protect her, her cover, and/or national security; she uses her real name at work and at home.  She drives herself to work at the CIA headquarters and enters through the front doors.  If she were still undercover she would never openly enter the front doors of the CIA building.  Her neighbors all knew she worked for the CIA.  The Washington DC elite, party-goers all knew she worked for the CIA.  Her employment was not secret.  After the indictments on Friday, most media is referring to her as “covert.”  

 If she were really covert, why did she posed for a January, 2004, Vanity Fair magazine story with her husband the diplomat, Joseph Wilson?  This seems illogical, if she really were a covert CIA agent.  According to many Republicans in Washington, “Wilson is a known liar.”  He claimed that Dick Cheney sent him to investigate yellow-cake uranium mining in Niger, then he retracted that statement later.  Cheney claims he has never met Wilson.  Now, this goes back to the Bob Novak story from 2003 about why Wilson was chosen for this very sensitive assignment.

 So what is the big deal about outing a CIA employee who is not covert?  There must be more to this story than meets the eye.  It may be a political hack job against the Bush administration.  It may be an Executive Branch cover-up to protect past officials and not necessarily anyone from this administration.  Maybe this is an example of Judith Miller and the New York Times trying to make news not just report the news.  But after of the Friday indictments, it is just confusing.  Stay tuned there will be to come.  If you want to read any of the archived articles, go to: http://www.factcheck.org/article337.html.

I told you so…

 …about the CIA/Whitehouse leak.  There was no crime!

 Last spring, the alleged outing of allegedly covert CIA agent Valerie Plame made headline news everywhere.  Network TV, newspapers, cable news, magazines, and radio were all abuzz about the alleged Bush Administration the scandal.

 The Leftists called for the head of Carl Rove, then Dick Cheney, then Scooter Libby.  They all went through Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s legal meat-grinder for nearly two years.

 I wrote an article explaining that were was no crime, because Plame was not a covert agent and therefore could not be outted.  The entire scandal was just a political hatchet job by the Left.

 Well, I was proven right this week with the little news story about Richard Armitage the second in command at the U.S. State Department.

 Armitage was the Deputy Secretary of State directly under Secretary of State Colin Powell.  When Armitage saw Bob Novak’s article that started this whole investigation, he called Powell to say he thought he was the one that Novak was speaking about.

 Powell instructed Armitage to contact the Special Prosecutor (SP) in the case.  Armitage was told by SP Fitzpatrick “not to discuss this and I honored his request” through this whole embarrassing ordeal.  

 Armitage explained he told journalist Bob Novak about Plame indirectly, but he would have never known about her if she had been covert.  He said, “Her name showed up in memos.”  Covert agents are never officially written about.

 SP Fitzpatrick should be prosecuted for abuse of power because he knowingly withheld information that Rove, Cheney, and Libby were not guilty.

"Richard Skinner admitted yesterday under oath that his top deputies gave members of Congress false information painting Border Patrol agents as rogue cops who were not in fear for their lives and who were 'out to shoot Mexicans,'" Culberson said in a statement.

Culberson said he believes false information was given to congressmen to "throw us off the scent and cover up what appears to be an unjust criminal prosecution of two U.S. law enforcement officers whose job was protecting our country's borders from criminals and terrorists."

California State Assemblywoman, Sally Lieber (D), has proposed the law that says any, any, any, any physical punishment or discipline of a child under 4 years is a misdemeanor.  (Physical punishment or discipline includes slapping the back of the hand.) Currently, teachers and daycare workers are banned from spanking.  Lieber says this makes the law clear so someone can claim after injury or death, “I guess the spanking went too far.”  Another advocate for the proposed law agreed, "sometimes after parents get home from work they cannot judge how hard to hit.  They might pick-up a spatula!"  How many of us survived the spatula?  Come on... this is craziness!

Careful, parents in California, there are cameras everywhere and Leftists who can't wait to disrupt your "traditional" family.  I hope you will contact your legislators.

I would think California lawmakers would have more important issues to deal with like illegal immigration and terrorism!  Parental spanking should NOT be an issue for lawmakers in this day and age.

1/5/07 California Governor proposes statewide health insurance for all children in the state, including illegals.

1/4/07 Whitehouse annouces the signing of some 2004 secret program of a shared Social Security benefits program that would extend to Mexicans in the U.S.  Simply put:  If a Mexican worker works 8-years in Mexico and then 2-years in the U.S., they will qualify for Social Security benefits at age 65 regardless of citizenship.  Who's side is Bush on?

originally written April 5, 2006

by Christine Gates

 
“Strike to support undocumented people for legalization,” is the rallying cry from the Immigrant Solidarity Network website I found last week.  That is nonsense!  I don’t know what exactly that means.  “Undocumented people” are who? 

 Do they mean some people are here in America without the proper legal documents allowing them to be here?  Does it mean they have not been invited to enter the country by our government? 

 Would that not mean those people are breaking American law?  Which then means we can call them aliens (foreigners) here illegally, thus illegal aliens and, finally, criminal invaders.

 Amnesty is bad no matter what it is called.  It rewards those who knowingly choose to break the law and, technically, invade this country.  This behavior cannot be rewarded.

 If we begin to enforce all of the immigration laws already on the books, we could go a long way to stopping this invasion.  Maybe later, with calm cool heads our politicians can draft some legislation with real meaning and purpose. 

 Some of the proposed bills in Congress allow the invaders to sign-up for benefits, how nice.  It is nice that we are going to “ask” these law-breakers to come into government offices to pay their fines and back taxes.  It is nice that we are not going to go out and actively search for these twelve million invaders, but we will ask them to come-on-in.  That is insane public policy.  What if they don’t come-by the office to sign-up, can we deport them then?  Well, no, that wouldn’t be nice.

 What kind of euphemism is “undocumented people for legalization”?  We have established what “undocumented people” means, criminal invaders, but “for legalization” of what?  Does that mean the aliens want to become something “legal”?  Legal workers or naturalized / legal American citizens.  They are very different. 

 Legal workers would fall under a guest worker program instituted when there are not enough people for the number of jobs offered.  Legal migrants would be those who come into our country as invited guests to work in taxed and regulated jobs and then go back to their country.  They would not be eligible for all the extraordinary right’s of American citizens.  They would participate in a guest worker program and go home.

 We have millions of people on welfare in America and millions more people on unemployment, a tremendous social burden.  And still, we are going to allow more documented people into America to take jobs away from those Americans.  Just because they are “documented” doesn’t make me feel any better about it.

 A guest worker program will not make this North Carolina job shortage any better.  A guest worker program will only drive the wages down for everyone in blue-collar jobs, because these wonderful hard-working “guest workers” will do any job for next to nothing. 

 They are thankful for the opportunity, but it doesn’t make invading and exploiting our country right.  They are willing to live 20 people to a house and spend virtually no money here in America. 

 They are satisfied to send nearly all of their untaxed income back to Mexico.  Making those money transfers collectively the largest source of money to the Mexican economy.  Mexico does not want to stop that free flow of money.  That is why no one in the Mexican government is interested in stopping the illegal border crossings.

 If all of those American people receiving Welfare benefits and unemployment benefits worked in the eight to twelve million jobs which the illegal aliens currently hold, we could eliminate a large portion of our federal and state social spending. 

 My solution is to deport all criminal invaders for additional fiscal savings to our country and build a wall to keep them out.

 Oh, and don’t forget to clear out the jails and prisons of the “undocumented people” or criminal invaders, too.  They cost us, the taxpayers, billions of dollars each year to feed, cloth, and provide legal services, because, unfortunately, they are not all hard-working people.

 So, these “undocumented people,” or criminal invaders, came to America for a better life, a better future, better wages, freedom, liberty, and justice without adhering to our most basic laws to reap the benefits?  Who can blame them for trying to get here, but are they not still invading this country and subverting the sovereignty of our country? 

 I am a granddaughter of an Italian immigrant and an Irish immigrant.  My husband is the grandson of a Mexican immigrant.  I am proud to be an American.  Our grandparents became naturalized American citizens.

 Our grandparents were extremely proud to become Americans.  My mother and my mother-in-law were not permitted to learn the native language of their parents, because they were in America now - Americans.  These people were proud of their struggle to learn English and have their kids learn better English.  They all became truly Americanized.  I thank them for acculturating the way they did.