You have a problem with your expectations.

Skillful witness?

You don't have, like, any opinions on whether her testimony was deceptive or evasive, and whether that's okay or not given her position?

She says she never had any contact with the White House about hirings and firings, despite there being many emails from her where she talks about what the WH thinks will be politically best. She has no idea where the mystical list came from, which so far appears to have no author at all: it was simply handed down from the heavens without anyone ever having to compile it.

I caught a bit of the testimony earlier and I agree with Kerr's impressions. Goodling testified about a meeting and was very careful to name everyone who was 'in the room.' No one even bothered to ask her if anyone was attending the meeting via video conference or conference call. The committee looked weak.

you mean the awesome intellects of Congress are not able to reduce her to a quivering pile of jelly-after all, she graduated from a fifth rate law school.

King's remarks about Harvard, Yale, and his side of the isle defending the role of christianity in the law was simply vile.

"Edgardo, at least I don't write cryptic blog comments."

Orin, I love most of your threads, very informative and educational. But lets cut with the Republican bunk here about how great it is that Goodling is just one of the best when it comes to the art of aiding the deceit of others in DOJ. Most Americans are pretty fed up with the Bush Administration at this point, as anyone who goes on YouTube knows. No doubt that's why the DOD has banned YouTube to our Iraqi soldiers.

Clearly the Republican posture is Gooolding is "credible" because she went to Regent Law School which according to Mr. King is a successor of Harvard and Yale due to its religious founding.

By that same logic, so are St. Thomas School of Law (Miami) and the university of San Francisco School of Law, both Catholic Jesuit, therefore earlier-in-time successors to Harvard and Yale.

Why would we need law school rankings, FBI background checks, and testimony under Oath by such logic -- alls we have to do is ascertain whether the person in questions (1) is a Republican, (2) votes Republican, and (3) is a graduate of a religious law school.

I next expect the Republicans trying to bolster Ms. Goodling will recommend all Bar admissions should simply exempt applicants from the character and fitness process based on their graduation from such a religious law school.

"She has no idea where the mystical list came from, which so far appears to have no author at all: it was simply handed down from the heavens without anyone ever having to compile it."

Exactly, as I said ...

"after all, she graduated from a fifth rate law school"

And this is why she was hired at DOj and entrusted with such enormous responsibility? No wonder the civil rights div. folks hired by her could not tell the difference between Title II and Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act as I was told a Title II claim had "no basis under Title III." Well, duh!

I would say that we won't know how skillful of a witness she is until she goes up to the Senate. They have some extremely sharp minds and good questioners there compared to those in the House

I take it you never watched the Roberts/Alito confirmation hearings with Kennedy, Schumer and Biden demagoguing and giving speeches.

"She testified, essentially, that Sampson (or was it McNulty?) committed clear perjury."

She said McNulty was less than candid. Maybe we should hear from McNulty again, since so far he cas come off as a pretty straight shooter, like Comey.

Goodling comes off as a very skillful witness. She often gives a partial answer to the question that is technically true but very vague, and then turns the focus elsewhere and starts talking for a while to help run out the clock.

All in all, this morning's testimony went much better for the Administration than I would have expected.

In other words, her testimony consisted of deliberate evasion and obfuscation, and this is good for the administration. I suppose so, if they can continue to get away with it. Why you encorage and approve of this behavior is a mystery to me.

If these people were eight graders in the principals office, it would be far past time to say "Cut the crap. Who assembled the list of attorneys to be fired?" Instead, somehow we accept childish non-responsibility from what are purportedly grown adults. Pathetic.

"In other words, her testimony consisted of deliberate evasion and obfuscation, and this is good for the administration. I suppose so, if they can continue to get away with it. Why you encorage and approve of this behavior is a mystery to me.

If these people were eight graders in the principals office, it would be far past time to say "Cut the crap. Who assembled the list of attorneys to be fired?" Instead, somehow we accept childish non-responsibility from what are purportedly grown adults. Pathetic."

Exactly my sentiments, and why Republicans think religion has anything to do with it is soooo ridiculous.

Wow, even as I wrote my previous comments the Democrats just had three good questioners in a row, from Baldwin, Schiff(I think), and Davis have gotten several great lines of questioning in. Goodling's attorney just had to jump in to give her a break from Rep. Davis.

EvanH says: "Has anyone asked her yet if she communicated via email with Rove or Miers about the USA's?"

Woooooh! Have they! Wow anyone, anywhere who has communicated with Karl Rove surely has something BIG to tell. I bet if MG exchanged e-mail with Rove, we can bring down Bushitler with its content.

***

"aisle"

my issue is more with the questioning than with her testimony; i actually find her to be a fantastic witness.

This quote on the USA firings is pretty amazing to me:

We didn’t talk about what the reasons were, other than Mr. Bogden, in conversations I was in, until after it was in progress...

Even in the case of Bogden, the substance of the conversation about why he was to be fired was pretty minimal. It basically consisted (according to Goodling) of Kyle Sampson saying:

I think it’s a general sense, a general kind of sense that we could do better.

So it seems pretty clear that Goodling was merely a conduit for the list of people to be fired. (She was of course involved after the fact in trying to construct reasons to explain the firings, but that's a separate matter.)

Let's pick our accusations. Some people want to have it both ways with Goodling: she's amazingly good at being dishonest, but completely unqualified to be highly placed in the DOJ. If you're going to argue that she's capably evil, admit that she's capable.

My personal opinion is that she is remarkably capable, was underexperienced for a job into which she was promoted for a combination of her capability and ideology, and because of that lack of experience, committed inadvertent ethical lapses (or at least lapses in judgment which left the appearance of ethical lapses). She should not have been promoted to the point she was at, but she wasn't promoted there simply because she went to Regent. She's able.

Full disclosure: I think she's pretty, too.

Don't tell my fiancee. (Don't tell her I have low standards, either.)

Anderson, maybe we're just turned on by articulate blondes in business suits. (Don't tell my fiancee I said anything about blondes. She's not.)

Did anyone notice she pronounced "staffs" as "stalves" in her written statement? She must think "staff" follows the pattern of "calf," with which it rhymes.

perhaps he was using Janet Reno as the benchmark for the strikingly beautiful comment? or Nancy Grace? or HRC?

Mary Katherine Day-Petrano (mail):
Fifth rate law school, fifth rate justice

Well, that’s the most elitist thing I have heard in quite some time. How egalitarian of you. I guess we need to vacate all decisions involving lawyers from second tier on down schools based on the fact they had provided incompetent legal representation.

JamesT: Perhaps you should pass your concern about academic credentials and elitism to every law firm in the country, since they also tip the scales towards people who went to "good" or "accredited" law schools and can barely hide their contempt for quality institutions like University of Phoenix Law School. Merit-bigots the lot of them.

In fairness to Goodling I should point out that she was admitted to American University, qualified in the top 20 percent of her class, then transfered to Regent. Nonetheless, she is still a partisan hack and immunized criminal, transfered from the RNC opposition research office to a high-ranking job at the DOJ at a young age.

"They banned it for the same reason a lot of corporate firewalls block YouTube, video, and online radio stations - it eats up too much bandwidth."

This may be a good Republican excuse, but that is not the real reason they banned it. And most Americans know why and aren't buying the lame excuse.

Hey, Mary! You should know that the US Army never ever lies about anything! Certainly not to the American public.

Pat Tilman

Incidentally, as we have been discussing a bit in the more recent thread, apparently that Regent Law grad with very little prosecutorial experience still knew enough about things like witness tampering and obstruction to be "uncomfortable" during a conversation with another fact witness about the events to which they would be testifying. And the person trying to have that conversation with her was a Harvard Law grad.

Less charitably, I also believe that she is full of it when she pretends ignorance of the illegality of caging and also of her lack of intent to break the civil service laws with her hiring practices.

Investigative journalist Greg Palast caught something in Ms. Goodling's testimony that the judiciary committee missed. The paragraph below was in his latest emailing.

Goodling testified that Gonzales’ Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin’s “involvement in ‘caging’ voters” in 2004.

Goodling is a lawyer and like Griffin, a product of Robertson's Regent University. This was covered by a Moyers show on PBS. She may have had immunity but she was still not going to admit to wrongdoing if she could help it.

The Goods on Goodling and the Keys to the Kingdom
Special to BRADBLOG
by Greg Palast

This Monica revealed something hotter — much hotter — than a stained blue dress. In her opening testimony yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee, Monica Goodling, the blonde-ling underling to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Department of Justice Liaison to the White House, dropped The Big One….And the Committee members didn’t even know it.

Goodling testified that Gonzales’ Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin’s “involvement in ‘caging’ voters” in 2004.

Huh?? Tim Griffin? “Caging”???

The perplexed committee members hadn’t a clue — and asked no substantive questions about it thereafter. Karl Rove is still smiling. If the members had gotten the clue, and asked the right questions, they would have found “the keys to the kingdom,” they thought they were looking for. They dangled right in front of their perplexed faces.

The keys: the missing emails — and missing link — that could send Griffin and his boss, Rove, to the slammer for a long, long time.

Kingdom enough for ya?

But what’s ‘caging’ and why is it such a dreadful secret that lawyer Sampson put his license to practice and his freedom on the line to cover Tim Griffin’s involvement in it? Because it’s a felony. And a big one.

Our BBC team broke the story at the top of the nightly news everywhere on the planet - except the USA - only because America’s news networks simply refused to cover this evidence of the electoral coup d’etat that chose our President in 2004.

Here’s how caging worked, and along with Griffin’s thoughtful emails themselves you’ll understand it all in no time.

The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to voters’ homes. Letters returned (”caged”) were used as evidence to block these voters’ right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and — you got to love this — American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.

Why weren’t these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation — and the soldiers were overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Mission Accomplished.

How do I know? I have the caging lists…

I have them because they are attached to the emails Rove insists can’t be found. I have the emails. 500 of them — sent to our team at BBC after the Rove-bots accidentally sent them to a web domain owned by our friend John Wooden.

Here’s what you need to know — and the Committee would have discovered, if only they’d asked:

1. ‘Caging’ voters is a crime, a go-to-jail felony.

2. Griffin wasn’t “involved” in the caging, Ms. Goodling. Griffin, Rove’s right-hand man (right-hand claw), was directing the illegal purge and challenge campaign. How do I know? It’s in the email I got. Thanks. And it’s posted below.

3. On December 7, 2006, the ragin’, cagin’ Griffin was named, on Rove’s personal demand, US Attorney for Arkansas. Perpetrator became prosecutor.

The committee was perplexed about Monica’s panicked admission and accusations about the caging list because the US press never covered it. That’s because, as Griffin wrote to Goodling in yet another email (dated February 6 of this year, and also posted below), their caging operation only made the news on BBC London: busted open, Griffin bitched, by that “British reporter,” Greg Palast.

There’s no pride in this. Our BBC team broke the story at the top of the nightly news everywhere on the planet — except the USA — only because America’s news networks simply refused to cover this evidence of the electoral coup d’etat that chose our President in 2004.

And now, not bothering to understand the astonishing revelation in Goodling’s confessional, they are missing the real story behind the firing of the US attorneys. It’s not about removing prosecutors disloyal to Bush, it’s about replacing those who refused to aid the theft of the vote in 2004 with those prepared to burgle it again in 2008.

Now that they have the keys, let’s see if they can put them in the right door. The clock is ticking ladies and gents…


***************
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone WILD. For more info, or to hear Brad Friedman, Ed Asner and other troublemakers read from Armed Madhouse, go to www.GregPalast.com