Bob Schaffer hides from Abramoff/Marianas questions
| By Alan Franklin - Apr 11th, 2008 at 9:22 pm EDT |
Courtesy KREX-TV Grand Junction, from Schaffer's fundraiser with Dick Cheney today:
The Denver Post reported this afternoon that Schaffer was "visibly angry" when asked about the budding scandal at a press conference later:
The facts emerging are erasing any doubt that Schaffer is indeed connected to the "individuals in this story," from the Saipan garment manufacturers who set up his sham "inspection" of working conditions in the CNMI to Jack Abramoff who orchestrated not only Schaffer's trip, but the stalling of reform in the Marianas Islands in general. For Schaffer to simply reject and deny the whole controversy out of hand, after walking into it with his own praise for the situation there, is sufficiently ludicrous to require no rebuttal.
See also:
Damaging Schaffer/Abramoff disclosures continue
Schaffer/Marianas scandal explodes
Marianas questions dog Bob Schaffer
The Denver Post reported this afternoon that Schaffer was "visibly angry" when asked about the budding scandal at a press conference later:
"I am really disgusted with the tone and tenor and direction of The Denver Post stories. I have had no contact with the individuals in the story, particularly Jack Abramoff," Schaffer said. "It's a matter of fiction. That's all I'm going to say about it."
Schaffer went to the Northern Mariana Islands as part of a trip partially arranged by Abramoff's firm. He visited textile factories which were the target of a class-action lawsuit alleging abuses of workers. Abramoff had been hired by factory owners and island officials to stave off attempts at reform.
In a recent interview with the Post, Schaffer cited the island's guest-worker program as a "model" that could be followed in overhauling U.S. immigration policy.
Schaffer campaign manager Dick Wadhams said today there is room for a legitimate discussion on that point. The U.S. Department of Labor cited the factories for more than 1,000 safety violations in the late 1990s.
After deflecting one question about his Mariana involvement, Schaffer turned back to his impressions of the Vice President's visit...
The facts emerging are erasing any doubt that Schaffer is indeed connected to the "individuals in this story," from the Saipan garment manufacturers who set up his sham "inspection" of working conditions in the CNMI to Jack Abramoff who orchestrated not only Schaffer's trip, but the stalling of reform in the Marianas Islands in general. For Schaffer to simply reject and deny the whole controversy out of hand, after walking into it with his own praise for the situation there, is sufficiently ludicrous to require no rebuttal.
See also:
Damaging Schaffer/Abramoff disclosures continue
Schaffer/Marianas scandal explodes
Marianas questions dog Bob Schaffer
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I want Democrats who will defend the Constitution and the Separation Of Powers to win in November.
We don't another pretend Democrat like Salazar in the Senate.
Didn't Salazar champion Gonzales for US Attorney General.
We will not forget.
This has been said time and time again, so many times that everyone who's had to say it is sick to death of doing so. Nobody I know fails to recognize that many, many impeachable offenses have been committed during the Bush administration. We simply understand that a Republican Congress abetted those offenses for too long, and impeachment is no longer a practical option.
Your single-minded devotion to the lost cause of impeachment, at the expense of alienating public officials and making an unreasonable ass of yourself to all of us who would otherwise agree with you on a broad range of issues, is something you should really re-evaluate.
To begin, the House of Representatives refers
the investigation to its Judiciary Committee,
which reviews the evidence and may conduct
hearings. It determines whether an official
impeachment inquiry is warranted and, if so,
asks the House for permission to proceed. An
official investigation follows, with the
Committee deciding whether to offer articles
of impeachment to the full House.
I would remind all who are naysayers-
"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"- Dr. King, 31 March 1968
While we Americans may think that "it ain't gonna happen" the other nations that occupy this world may have a very different view about Mr. Bush and his cohort on being the leaders of an aggressive war without provocation against another sovereign nation, of using kidnapping of citizens of other nations, of creating and using a justice system that is not a part of a nation's native justice system, of utilizing torture to extract confessions, of hiding citizens of other nations from the International Red Cross, creation and utilization of illegal interrogation camps, of use of banned weapons of war against civilian populations, and of having no accountability for actions by the command personnel of civilian, intelligence and military organizations.
I would point out-
"U.S. embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away
yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris
organized by the Foreign Policy magazine
after human rights groups filed a criminal
complaint against the man who spearheaded
President George W. Bush's "war on terror"
for six years.
-presscue.com, October 29,2007
And this about another brutal dictator who lost power and had to go into hiding for their crimes but justice on an international scale was brought to bear-
On the night of October 16, 1998, London
police arrested Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.
They were acting on a Spanish warrant
charging the former dictator with human
rights crimes committed in Chile during his
seventeen-year rule.
-Human Rights Watch
And this-
Just after dawn Tuesday, Kaing Guek Eav,
better known as Duch, gathered his clothes
from the military prison cell he has lived in
for the last eight years and walked, silent
and expressionless, to a waiting car.
Duch is the only man facing charges for the
crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge, a
radical communist regime that oversaw the
deaths of some 1.7 million people – roughly
one quarter of the population – when it ruled
Cambodia in the late 1970s.
Experts say Duch could be a key witness in
the long-delayed efforts to bring justice to
the people of Cambodia, and in a Wednesday
statement from the court Duch said he "is
ready to reveal the crimes committed by the
Khmer Rouge."
The world will not tolerate injustice. Can Americans afford the attitude of do nothing?