Long before the third Prez debate, Mary Cheney was gay and proud of it! Media Matters reports: "Mary Cheney was responsible for gay community outreach as lesbian/gay corporate relations manager for Coors Brewing Company and served as a member of the advisory board of the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-straight alliance formed within the Republican party. According to an Associated Press article, Mary Cheney helped the GOP recruit gay voters during the 2002 midterm elections. As Margaret Carlson noted in the Los Angeles Times, 'Mary Cheney is happily in the public eye.' " So what's all the hysteria about Kerry's gentle mention of Mary's sexual preference? If it isn't just pure political sensationalism trumped up by the clueless media, then maybe it's Lynne Cheney (the one whining loudest) who has the problem. Whatsa matter? Are YOU ashamed of your daughter?

Statements made by Lynn Cheney about Kerry's reference to her lesbian daughter smack strongly of someone who is ashamed of her daughter's sexual orientation.AP: "Lynn Cheney accused Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry of pulling a "cheap and tawdry political trick," apparently for invoking her daughter's sexuality in his debate with Bush." But Kerry's comment was neither cheap nor tawdry:"Asked Wednesday night whether homosexuality is a choice, Kerry noted that one of Cheney's daughters is a lesbian, and said she would probably affirm that she was born that way. "We're all God's children," Kerry said." Maybe what Lynn Cheney finds cheap and tawdry is her daughter's sexual preference.

The White House's media minions have pandered a smokescreen story about how a goodly part of the increase in oil prices is due to "unrest in Nigeria." But they haven't told America the rest of the story: that a major cause of the unrest can be traced back to criminal activities perpetrated in Nigeria by Dick Cheney while he was CEO of Halliburton and to more recent negligent conduct of Halliburton. (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3674370.stm) In the 1990s, the Cheney-led Halliburton paid out millions in bribes to Nigerian officials and others, contributing greatly to the destabilization of the government. So now Americans are paying through the nose for the crimes of the man who wants voters to hand him a SECOND term in the White House!?

Matt Kelley and Randy Herschoff write: "Vice President Dick Cheney, who has called Iran 'the world's leading exporter of terror,' pushed to lift U.S. trade sanctions against Tehran while chairman of Halliburton Co. in the 1990s. And his company's offshore subsidiaries also expanded business in Iran. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards criticized Cheney in Tuesday night's debate for his position on Iran during the 1990s, and Edwards said he supports expanding the sanctions against Iran. Cheney countered that he now supports sanctions against Iran but sidestepped the issue of Halliburton's involvement, saying it was being raised by Democrats 'to try to confuse the voters.' Halliburton's foreign subsidiaries did about $65 million in business with Iran last year, company documents say. A federal grand jury is investigating whether Halliburton or its executives deliberately violated the U.S. ban on trade with Iran."

Joel Connelly: "The words of our future vice president - defending the decision to end Gulf War I without occupying Iraq - eerily foretell today's morass. Here is what Cheney said in '92: 'I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home... And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many.' How - given what he said then - does Cheney get off challenging the judgment and strength of those who argue that we are bogged down and shedding blood today? Is Saddam worth the lives of 1,046 (at last count) dead Americans, and 7,000 injured Americans?" Cheney was correct in '92, and that he considered Saddam Hussein harmless enough to do business with as late as 1999. Cheney's flip-flops on Iraq got 1000s of Americans killed and wounded.

In true slithery corporate style, Dick Cheney is now claiming that he was "misinterpreted" last week when he tried to extort "fear votes" out of Americans by suggesting they'll be attacked if they vote for Kerry. "Explaining that he wanted to "clean up" a controversy, Cheney said a remark he made earlier this week -- that "the wrong choice" in November could lead to another terrorist attack -- did not mean the United States would be hit again as it was in 2001 if voters elected Sen. John Kerry." What makes Cheney's original comment truly scary is that it can most certainly be read as a DIRECT THREAT: i.e.: "Vote for Kerry and we will make you pay."

Maureen Dowd writes: "This week, Cheney wooed the voters with, Message: You die. The terrible beauty of its simplicity grows on you. It is a sign of the dark, macho, paranoid vice president's restraint that he didn't really take it to its emotionally satisfying conclusion: Message: Vote for us or we'll kill you... He finally simply spit out what the Bush team has been more subtly trying to convey for months: A vote Kerry is a vote for the terrorists... It's like that fairy tale where vipers and toads jump out of the mouth of the accursed mean little girl when she tries to speak. Every time Cheney opens his mouth, vermin leap out... Cheney implies that Kerry couldn't protect us from an attack like 911, blithely ignoring the fact that he and Bush didn't protect us from the real 911. Think of what brass-knuckled Republicans could have made of a 911 tape of an uncertain Democratic president giving a shaky statement that looked like a hostage tape as the veep ordered planes be shot down."

Just re-released is the book "Sisters" by Lynne Cheney - a lurid tale if ever there was one. Writes Pat Morrison: "Throughout its pages are fornication (the heroine with her late sister's husband), incest (half brother knocks up half sister), adultery (the heroine, with her first husband's friend), contraception (by the wed and the unwed) and lesbian couplings (the heroine's sister and an older woman). And incidentally, lynchings, dogicide, cattle theft and robber-baronism."

This week, Bush is making a big show of giving back $27,000 in donations received from an Iraqi-American businessman who did a deal in 2000 with Saddam. But consider what Martin Lee reported in Nov. 2000: "According to the Financial Times of London, between September 1998 and last winter, Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, oversaw $23.8 million of business contracts for the sale of oil-industry equipment and services to Iraq through two of its subsidiaries, Dresser Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump, which helped rebuild Iraq's war-damaged petroleum-production infrastructure. The combined value of these contracts exceeded those of any other U.S. company doing business with Baghdad." And don't forget that Reagan-Bush armed Hussein's military, with the help of their envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, who paved the way for US business deals with Iraq back in 1983.

Capitol Hill Blue claims a memo by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales's office "presents a 'devastating' case against the Vice President and concludes Cheney has violated both the 'spirit and intent' of federal laws on conflict of interest." This alleged memo says "Cheney faces criminal indictments for illegal activities while CEO of energy giant Halliburton and also illegally intervened to secure a $7 billion no-bid contract for his former employer after his election to office." The first matter - bribery over a $6 billion petrochemical plant built by Halliburton and its partners in Nigeria - is in the hands of French Magistrate Renaud van Ruymbeke. The second - Cheney's role in approving no-bid contracts for Halliburton in Iraq - is being stonewalled by the Republican Congress. Does this alleged memo exist? We'd sure love to see it!

Sportswriter Mike Lupica of the NY Daily News writes, "You bet Cheney got booed while Ronan Tynan sang 'God Bless America.' Cheney - close to the action for a change - had been down in a box seat next to the Yankee dugout with Rudy Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki. Now Cheney was upstairs in George Steinbrenner's box, and when they put his face on the big screen in the outfield, there was plenty of booing. It was about the only thing that stopped the real cheers for the Yankees at Yankee Stadium as they kept pouring it on against the Red Sox. Real game story last night? Cheney got booed." Of course this story has been blacked out by the corporate media. Imagine if it happened to John Kerry - it would be top headline news!

"Cheney on Friday vigorously defended his vulgarity directed at a prominent Democratic senator earlier this week in the Senate chamber. Cheney said he 'probably' used an obscenity in an argument Tuesday on the Senate floor with Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and added that he had no regrets. 'I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it,' Cheney told Neil Cavuto of Fox News. The vice president said those who heard the putdown agreed with him. 'I think that a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue.'... Cheney said yesterday he was in no mood to exchange pleasantries with Leahy because Leahy had 'challenged my integrity' by making charges of cronyism between Cheney and his former firm, Halliburton Co. Leahy on Monday had a conference call to kick off the Democratic National Committee's 'Halliburton Week' focusing on Cheney, the company, 'and the millions of dollars they've cost taxpayers,' the party said."

When John Kerry told Rolling Stone magazine, "Did I expect George Bush to f--- it [Iraq] up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did.' The expletive drew a rebuke from White House, which suggested an apology might be in order. 'That's beneath John Kerry,' the resident's chief of staff, Andrew Card, said in a televised interview. 'I'm very disappointed that he would use that kind of language,' Card said. 'I'm hoping that he's apologizing at least to himself, because that's not the John Kerry that I know.'" Hey Andrew - how come we haven't seen you on TV demanding an apology from Cheney? Is it because such behavior is NOT beneath Cheney? Is it because that is precisely the behavior Card expects from Cheney?

"On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice. 'F*** yourself,' said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency. Leahy's spokesman, David Carle, yesterday confirmed the brief but fierce exchange. 'The vice president seemed to be taking personally the criticism that Senator Leahy and others have leveled against Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq,' Carle said. As it happens, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the 'Defense of Decency Act' by 99 to 1." It was also the day the Supreme Court upheld Cheney's power to tell Energy Task Force critics to "f*** yourself.

Doug Ireland writes that France's "Journal du Dimanche revealed on June 13 that Judge Van Ruymbeke's investigation has uncovered how Albert 'Jack' Stanley, the president of huge Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) at the time of the alleged bribery, received so-called 'commissions' of 3 percent of the deal from the slush fund. The total amount Stanley received is some $5 million, according to reports in the International Herald Tribune and elsewhere. The Nigerian oil minister at the time, Dan Entete, got $2.5 million, reported the JDD. The slush fund was set up with Halliburton money by a London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler--who worked for Halliburton at the same time he was financial adviser to the notoriously corrupt late Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha--as a shell-company front called TriStar, which Tesler established in the British tax haven of Gibraltar. Stanley, the 5 Million Dollar Man, is a close friend and associate of Dick Cheney."

"Pentagon officials acknowledged that a political appointee was behind the controversial decision to have Halliburton Inc. plan for the postwar recovery of Iraq's oil sector and had informed Dick Cheney's chief of staff before finalizing the deal, [Henry Waxman] said Sunday. The decision, overruling the advice of an Army lawyer, eventually resulted in the awarding of a $7-billion, no-bid contract to Halliburton, which Cheney ran for five years before he was nominated for vice president... Cheney repeatedly has denied having any influence over the decision to award the massive contract in March 2003... 'Rumsfeld's political lawyers steamrollered the career guys to push through Halliburton's secret deal,' said Charles Tiefer... In October 2002, [political appointee Michael] Mobbs reviewed his decision to use Halliburton with an executive committee of deputies from various government agencies. That panel included I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, the VP's chief of staff." Impeach Cheney Now!

In 9/03, Tim Russert asked, "Were you involved in any way in the awarding of those contracts?" Cheney's reply: "Of course not, Tim" ... But TIME has obtained an internal Pentagon e-mail sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official... that raises questions about Cheney's arm's-length policy toward his old employer. Dated March 5, 2003, the e-mail says "action" on a multibillion-dollar Halliburton contract was "coordinated" with Cheney's office. The e-mail says Douglas Feith, a high-ranking Pentagon hawk, got the "authority to execute RIO," or Restore Iraqi Oil, from his boss, Paul Wolfowitz. RIO is one of several large contracts the U.S. awarded to Halliburton last year. The e-mail says Feith approved arrangements for the contract "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP's office." Three days later, the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract, without seeking other bids." Impeach Cheney Now!

Philip James writes, "The more that is unearthed about the march to war in Iraq, the more it becomes clear that the vice-president, Dick Cheney, is the puppet master in the Bush White House. Senator John Kerry must make ridding the White House of Dick Cheney as central to his campaign as replacing President George Bush. Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, his description of how the administration became hellbent on war, is really an account of just how much Mr Cheney was running things... Halliburton, the company Mr Cheney led until he became vice-president, has just posted $5bn in revenues for the last quarter, 80% of which is due to the no-bid contract it 'won' to rebuild Iraq. Perhaps that uncertain goal for which Americans are dying isn't so uncertain after all. "

"A source close to the White House tells NewsMax that Dick Cheney is a true gun aficionado. Cheney's collection, our sources say, is in the hundreds of guns, including pistols, shotguns and machine guns - from antique Thompsons to the most modern European automatic machine guns. To let off some steam (God knows he has some to let off these days), the Vice President has been known to go out to the federal training center in Maryland where the Secret Service does its own gun practice. A typical Cheney visit, told to us by a person who attended one, included the Vice President bringing some 30 guns from his own collection. On the ranger, Cheney would blow away his targets - with Thompson machine guns, the latest German and Austrian machine guns, Lugars, MP5s, shot guns, you name it. One after another an aide would hand the Vice President his latest armament, and Cheney would fire away, no doubt imagining al-Qaeda terrorists in his gun sights."

Cheney "never hesitated to advocate sending American men and women into harm's way... but when it was CHENEY's time to serve, he himself admitted, he had 'other priorities in the 60's than military service.' 'Cheney said that when he was between 18 and 26 there were periods when he was eligible to be drafted but had obtained student and marriage deferments from the draft for most of the period because 'I had other priorities in the '60s than military service.' Cheney helped himself to 4 student deferments; stretched his college education over SIX years, at three institutions. Cheney gets a fifth deferment - when wife becomes pregnant... 'Students of obstetrics will observe that Elizabeth Cheney's birth date falls precisely nine months and two days after the Selective Service publicly revoked its policy of not drafting childless husbands. This would seem to indicate that the Cheneys were seized with an untamable passion the moment Dick Cheney became vulnerable to the Vietnam draft.'"

Dick "Bunker Boy" Cheney spent most of the first year after 9/11 cowering in a bunker at an undisclosed underground location interested only in the safety of his own butt. Yet now we are supposed to buy that Cheney - who never served in the military even in peacetime - "cares more" about the security of Americans than John Kerry, who risked his life voluntarily for his country in a brutal war? Even now Cheney is displaying his cowardice: as this USA Today article states, his cheap shots at Kerry this week were delivered in front of a "friendly" [hand-picked] audience. The article also points out that Bunker Boy and Dubya will be testifying "together and in private" (real courageous, eh?) before the 9/11 commssion this week, a few days after Cheney's pal Scalia will do his damnedest to fix the energy task force case for him. Great displays of concern for national security here!

Before misleading Americans across the country in a speech attacking John Kerry today, Vice President Dick Cheney misled his host - Westminster College - about the tone and topic of his speech. Expecting an issue-based discussion on foreign policy and Iraq, students, faculty and staff were instead treated to a series of inaccurate, misleading and false attacks against Kerry. The Vice President's decision to "resort to Kerry-bashing" prompted Westminster President Fletcher M Lamkin to email Westminster students, faculty and staff expressing his surprise and disappointment. And to inform them that he has invited Kerry to speak at the college in the coming months.

"Judicial Watch, the public interest group that [once in a great while] investigates and prosecutes [Republican] government corruption and abuse, said documents turned over by the Commerce Department under JW's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.' The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org."

Wow! This is like one of those movies where the creepy villain pulls off his false "human suit" and reveals himself to be an even creepier alien bloodsucker! Dick Cheney decided to go for a new historic record in odiousness by responding to the news of Kerry's highly admirable service record with a lie-filled series of smears against the senator. What makes this an awarding winning new low is the fact that Cheney himself has never served in the military - he has been content to send others to die and be maimed to secure his personal profits.

"Woodward describes a relationship between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- never close despite years of working together -- that became so strained that Cheney and Powell are barely on speaking terms. Cheney engaged in a bitter and eventually winning struggle over Iraq with Powell, an opponent of war who believed Cheney was obsessed with trying to establish a connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and treated ambiguous intelligence as fact. Powell felt Cheney and his allies -- his chief aide, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith and what Powell called Feith's 'GESTAPO' office -- had established what amounted to a separate government." He certainly has! Impeach Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld too!

"The case Cheney vs. U.S. District Court is scheduled to be heard before the Supreme Court next month and could end up revealing more about the Bush administration's motives for the 2003 Iraq war than any conceivable investigation of U.S. intelligence concerning Iraq's purported WMD's." Read all of the growing evidence that the invasion of Iraq was ALL ABOUT OIL.

This week, John Kerry outlined a military "bill of rights" that would provide better benefits to soldiers and veterans. Joining him at the speech were former Sec of State Madeleine K. Albright and former Defense Sec William J. Perry. Among Kerry's proposals: providing more training and equipment to U.S. troops, improving military housing, and increasing military health care subsidies and family separation pay. He would also temporarily increase the active-duty Army by 40,000 troops. That step, which would cost up to $8 billion/yr would ease the burden on soldiers who have been on extended tours. Laughably, the person appointed by the Bush camp to answer Kerry was the unindicted international gangster Dick Cheney, perpetrator of dozens of corporate frauds and crimes against humanity, whose former company Halliburton is in the business of ripping off the military.

Desperate for a boost in Bush's approval ratings, Karl Rove & Co. have (an inside source tells us) planted a story in the media about a "persistent rumor" that Cheney may be dropped from the ticket. The story was planted to test public reaction - if in response to the articles, there are more people calling to encourage Bush to drop Cheney than there are people calling to protest, then Cheney will be history by summer - we predict his departure will be attributed to "health problems." Watch for the bodies to start to be heaved overboard from the sinking ship, SS Bush! Whaddya want to bet that John McCain is the VP candidate Rove has in mind!

"Early in the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney met secretly with Enron-type corporation moguls to draft the new national energy policy, which favors oil, gas and coal owners. Cheney hid the names of his 'task force' advisers... In December, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Three weeks later, Cheney and ultraconservative Justice Antonin Scalia flew in a government jet to Louisiana, where special government cars for them had been flown down from Washington earlier...Various newspapers and some Democrats in Congress said Scalia should recuse himself from the Cheney case. Scalia refused. He told The Los Angeles Times: 'I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned.' That's laughable. Even without the duck-shooting trip, his vote in the Cheney case is fairly predictable." Not to mention that Scalia is one of the Felonious Five behind the criminally partisan Bush v. Gore decision.

Two of the most controversial schemes built into the Bush/Cheney Energy scheme are calls for drilling in ANWR and a sweeping expansion of new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the biggest winners from Bush's call for a1.47-Million-Acre expansion of Gulf drilling would be the folks who prepare the sites for drilling and do the dredging for ships, right? Well, guess who is the biggest purveyor of these services in the Gulf of Mexico? Diamond Services Corporation, owned and operated by none other than Wallace Carline, who hosted Cheney and Scalia's recent duck-hunting venture. For story on Bush Gulf drilling plan see http://florida.sierraclub.org/miami/cons_offshore.htm Carline may very well be one of the names on Cheney's secret energy task force list.

Scalia pawned off his hunting trip with Cheney as "purely social." Yet the outing bore all the earmarks of a high-level, closed door power meeting, one hosted, no less by one of the nations most powerful oil services barons, Wallace Carline. As the Houston Chronicle recounts: "The two men arrived near this coastal town in a U.S. government jet, then were whisked away in a motorcade with police lights flashing to the elaborate floating hunting camp of a multimillionaire oil-services tycoon, a longtime friend of Scalia's. A panoply of Secret Service and local law enforcement guarded the hunting party." Yep, just your typical "boys day out."

LA Times: "Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia traveled as an official guest of Dick Cheney on a small government jet that served as Air Force Two when the pair came here last month to hunt ducks. The revelation cast further doubts about whether Scalia can be an impartial judge in Cheney's upcoming case before the Supreme Court, legal ethics experts said. The hunting trip took place just weeks after the high court agreed to take up Cheney's bid to keep secret the details of his energy policy task force. According to those who met them at the small airstrip here, the justice and the vice president flew from Washington on Jan. 5 and were accompanied by a second, backup Air Force jet that carried staff and security aides to the vice president. Two military Black Hawk helicopters were brought in and hovered nearby as Cheney and Scalia were whisked away in a heavily guarded motorcade to a secluded, private hunting camp owned by an oil industry businessman." Impeach Scalia AND Cheney!

A French investigation has revealed that Halliburton appears to have paid out over $166 million in bribes to secure a natural gas deal in Nigeria, back in the 1990s when Cheney was its CEO. Investigators have found that LNG Servicos, a company indirectly owned by Halliburton laundered four payments totaling at least $166 million through a Gibraltar company owned by a London lawyer and a Swiss bank account. Of course Cheney claims ignorance. But the French aren't buying it - Cheney may ultimately be charged with misuse of corporate funds.

"Dick Cheney, US vice-president, 'waged a guerrilla war' against attempts by Tony Blair, the British prime minister, to secure United Nations backing for the invasion of Iraq. Mr Cheney remained implacably opposed to the strategy even after George W. Bush, US president, addressed the UN on the importance of a multilateralist approach, according to a new biography of Mr Blair. The US vice-president, along with the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, has consistently argued that the US could be constrained by the UN's inability to reach agreement over the need to invade Iraq."

The LA Times reports: "Vice President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spent part of last week duck hunting together at a private camp in southern Louisiana just three weeks after the court agreed to take up the vice president's appeal in lawsuits over his handling of the administration's energy task force. While Scalia and Cheney are avid hunters and longtime friends, several experts in legal ethics questioned the timing of their trip and said it raised doubts about Scalia's ability to judge the case impartially. But Scalia rejected that concern Friday, saying, 'I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned.'" Hey Scalia, you threw away all pretense of impartiality when you stopped the counting of the votes, and appointed Bush and Cheney to the White House! Scalia must recuse himself from the Energy Task Force case!

While George W. Bush tries to convince us that irrelevant "victories" like capturing Saddam Hussein have made us safer, his puppetmaster Dick Cheney is pushing a grim picture of the future: warfare that could last generations, the constant threat of terrorist attacks in America, and an imperialist expansion of our military forces that would destabilize the world while doing nothing to protect us in our homes. And these are the people who accuse the Democrats of campaigning on fear and anger? We have nothing to fear but BUSH himself!

Doug Ireland writes: "Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets. At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton--the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President--in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh... According to accounts in the French press, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret 'retrocommissions' paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery's construction."

Slate has obtained a copy of Dick and Lynne Cheney's holiday card. It features a rather disturbing quote, to say the least.

French magistrate Reynaud van Ruymbeke "is examining whether to prosecute Dick Cheney over alleged complicity in the abuse of corporate assets dating from the time he was head of the services company Halliburton, the French newspaper Le Figaro said. The case stems from a contract by a consortium including the American company Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a Halliburton subsidiary, and a French company, Technip, to supply a gas complex to Nigeria. van Ruymbeke has been conducting investigations since October into allegations that $US180 million was paid in secret commissions during the late 1990s up to 2002 from funds established by the consortium in Madeira. Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive between 1995 and 2000. In a letter to the attorney-general's department, van Ruymbeke ruled out directly prosecuting Cheney on a charge of bribing foreign officials. But [he] did not exclude the possibility of prosecution on the grounds of complicity in misuse of corporate assets."

"The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear Vice Resident Dick Cheney's argument for keeping private the details of closed-door White House strategy sessions that produced the administration's energy policy, a dispute that tests the limits of White House secrecy... Claims of a constitutional conflict are overblown, and the government is merely delaying, lawyers for Judicial Watch told the high court. 'This transparent strategy of running out the clock should not be tolerated,' they said. If the Supreme Court rules against the government, the case would return to a lower federal court for a preliminary fact-finding process called discovery. Although the government could still fight release of specific information at that stage, it is asking for blanket immunity ahead of time, Sierra Club and Judicial Watch lawyers argued... Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder: 'The Supreme Court has laid to rest that kind of imperial presidency' in cases dating to the Nixon and Clinton presidencies."

"A jury has awarded $70 million to a Houston man who claimed that Halliburton and another oil company cheated him out of the chance to develop an oil field in Kazakhstan in the late 1990s... Scott Van Dyke and his company, Anglo Dutch Tenge, sued the Halliburton and Ramco Oil in 2000. A jury found in favor of Van Dyke's company on Friday. Van Dyke's attorney John O'Quinn said his client was promised a concession for an oil field near the Caspian Sea when he met the Turkish president. When he was unable to fund development of the field, Van Dyke sought out an equity partner. Halliburton contacted him in 1997 and signed a confidentiality agreement not to disclose data that Van Dyke allowed the company to review, O'Quinn said. After opting not to invest, Halliburton located another company with ties to the Kazakhstan government and bought the field out from under Van Dyke, according to the lawsuit." Cheney was CEO of Halliburton at the time.

AP: "Records of Vice Resident Dick Cheney's energy task force should remain confidential, the Bush administration told the Supreme Court on Tuesday, arguing that demands for disclosure present serious constitutional issues. In a 25-page filing, the [Perjurer] general urged the Supreme Court to consider 'fundamental separation-of-powers questions' raised by a federal judge who says the Cheney panel should produce information about its operations. The conservative Judicial Watch and an environmental organization, the Sierra Club, have filed suit, alleging that corporate executives and company lobbyists in effect became members of the Cheney panel that formulated the Bush administration's energy policy in 2001. Legislative power and judicial power cannot extend to compelling the vice president to disclose ... the details of the process by which a president obtains information and advice from the vice president,' [Perjurer] General Theodore Olson argued."

"The Bush administration signaled its intent on Tuesday to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling requiring Vice Resident Dick Cheney to divulge information about his energy task force. ...Cheney's Justice Department lawyers said they intend to file a petition with the Supreme Court no later than Sept. 30. Last week, the appeals court refused to reconsider its previous ruling against Cheney, leaving him with the option of appealing to the Supreme Court or complying with a lower court order to release information about his task force's contacts with the energy industry while drafting policy in 2001.... One of the groups suing for the information accused the administration of delaying tactics. 'At some point, the Bush administration is going to have to realize that the American people want to know what kind of influence energy corporations had over America's energy policies,' said David Bookbinder, senior attorney for the Sierra Club."

"Vice Resident Dick Cheney, a former CEO of Halliburton Co., has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company since taking office while asserting he has no financial interest in the company, Senate Democrats said Tuesday. The Democrats demanded to know why Cheney claimed to have cut ties with the oil services company...when he was still receiving large deferred salary payments. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Sen. Frank Lautenberg said the revelations reinforced the need for hearings about the no-bid contracts Halliburton received from the Bush administration. 'The vice president needs to explain how he reconciles the claim that he has 'no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind,' with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred salary payments he receives from Halliburton,' Daschle said. On NBC's "Meet the Press" program on Sunday, Cheney [said,] 'I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years.'"

A BuzzFlash News Analysis: "How stupid does Cheney think we are? Apparently, pretty stupid. And maybe we are. Under any normal circumstances (not being ruled by a Republican one-party state), he should have been impeached - and perhaps imprisoned - a long time ago." Check out these excerpts from today's "Meet the Press" and marvel at the limitless breadth of Cheney's knowledge! "We don't know. ... Well, some of those questions are unknowable at present, Tim. ... I don't know. ... We didn't know. ... Well, that might have been, but I don't know what his basis was for making that judgment. ... I don't have a final dollar figure. We don't know who will ... I have no idea. ... I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that, but Halliburton is a fine company. ... Yeah. I did misspeak. ... No. I don't know Joe Wilson. ... I don't know who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back."

From Reuters: "A federal appeals court on Thursday refused to reconsider its ruling against Vice Resident Cheney in his effort to keep secret the documents of his energy task force. The U.S. Court of Appeals voted 5-3 against rehearing the case, leaving Cheney and his Justice Department lawyers with the option of either appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court or complying with a lower court order to release information about White House contacts with the energy industry. 'We're going to review it and make a determination what our next step will be,' a Justice Department spokeswoman said of the ruling."

John Dean: The new GAO report "very strongly implies that Vice President Dick Cheney lied to Congress.... To fulfill its statutory responsibility, GAO sought documents from Cheney relating to Energy Task Force expenditures. But in a literally unprecedented move, the White House said no. Amazingly, it did so without even bothering to claim that the documents sought were covered by executive privilege. It simply refused.... The Report shows that Cheney's claim to Congress, in the August 2, 2001 letter, that responsive documents were provided to GAO, was plainly false.... Moreover, the documents that were turned over were useless: 'The materials were virtually impossible to analyze, as they consisted, for example, of pages with dollar amounts but no indication of the nature or purpose of the expenditure.' They were further described as 'predominantly reimbursement requests, assorted telephone bills and random items, such as the executive director's credit card receipt for pizza.'"

John Dean writes: "This month, the General Accounting Office (GAO) - the investigative and auditing arm of Congress - issued a report that contains some startling revelations. Though they are couched in very polite language, they are bombshells nonetheless. The report - entitled 'Energy Task Force: Process Used to Develop the National Energy Policy' - and its accompanying Chronology strongly imply that the Administration has, in effect, been paying off its heavy-hitting energy industry contributors. It also very strongly implies that Vice Resident Dick Cheney lied to Congress."

Reuters reports: "Congressional investigators said Monday that Vice Resident Dick Cheney had stymied their investigation into his energy task force by refusing to turn over key documents. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said it was impossible to tell how much energy companies or industry groups may have influenced the task force's 2001 report because the administration withheld important records."

WashPost reports: "The White House collaborated heavily with corporations in developing Resident Bush's energy policy but repeatedly refused to give congressional investigators details of the meetings, according to a federal report issued yesterday. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in the report that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham privately discussed the formulation of Bush's policy 'with chief executive officers of petroleum, electricity, nuclear, coal, chemical and natural gas companies, among others.'"

Tom Fitton writes for Judicial Watch: "Here is the smoking gun pointing directly to Vice President [sic] Richard Cheney's secret energy company meetings held at the White House in early 2001. Some of the documents of the meetings reveal charts of 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts' and a 'map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals' ... Congress and the press should immediately and thoroughly investigate any linkage between the secret White House deals, the fake California energy crisis, the Enron collapse, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The question to ask is: Did the White House sell US foreign policy to the highest energy company bidder?"

"Documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.' The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org. The Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) documents likewise feature a map of each country's oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the projects, costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date. Judicial Watch has been seeking these documents under FOIA since April 19, 2001." Now repeat after Bush: "It Was NOT About Oil! It Was NOT About Oil!"

WashPost reports: "A federal appeals court today rejected Vice Resident Dick Cheney's bid to keep secret the workings of his energy task force, saying sufficient safeguards were already in place to prevent the disclosure of genuinely privileged information. The 2-1 ruling, by a panel of judges from the Court of Appeals, does not in itself order the release of specific information, but it affirms the lower court judge's order seeking documents that would shed light on the membership of the Cheney group. Drawing on two rulings rendered by the court against President Clinton, Judge David S. Tatel said that the Cheney group had not shown that irreparable harm would be done if the lower court were allowed to proceed. Tatel, a Clinton appointee, was joined in the ruling by Judge Harry T. Edwards, a Jimmy Carter appointee. Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, dissented."

The UK Sunday Telegraph reports: "On the shores of the Dead Sea at the World Economic Forum, Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of Vice Resident Dick Cheney, emerged Saturday as the Middle East's new pinup. She has been armed with a budget of more than $100 million and charged with sparking an Arab renaissance to undermine the influence of extremists and to encourage democracy and equality for women. Cheney, 36 and a University of Chicago Law School graduate, was singled out as the official to get to know by many of the 2,000 delegates attending the World Economic Forum in Jordan. Cheney is officially the deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East." We'll see how successful she is... is she going to fight for women's rights in Saudi Arabia?

"Dick Cheney confirmed...that when...Bush stands for re-election next year, the most powerful but least visible vice-president in US history will be standing by his side... Back in 1992, when Mr Cheney was defence secretary, he asked his two hawkish policy aides, Mr Wolfowitz and Mr Libby, to draw up a long-term vision for national security, known as a defence planning guidance document, which stated that the world's only superpower should not be cautious about wielding its authority. 'Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,' it said, and played down the role of the UN in global management: 'The world order is ultimately backed by the US.' The document, when leaked in 1992, caused embarrassment for the elder Bush and was toned down. But it has been reborn in its original extra-strength version in the younger Bush's doctrine of strategic pre-emption." We wager that if Dick ever steps down, a VP without Presidential ambitions will be picked.

AP reports: "Dick Cheney is on board as President [sic] Bush's running mate next year, filling the top slot in a re-election team the White House quietly has been assembling for months." We wager that Cheney is the running mate...so that Jeb will lead the ticket in '08. If Cheney should ever step down, another VP will be picked -- who doesn't have ambitions to run in '08.

Paul Krugman writes, "They considered themselves tough-minded realists, and regarded doubters as fuzzy-minded whiners. They silenced those who questioned their premises, even... the government's own analysts. They were supremely confident - and yet with shocking speed everything they had said was proved awesomely wrong. No, I'm not talking about the war; I'm talking about the energy task force that Dick Cheney led back in 2001... Pundits are wondering how Mr. Cheney - who confidently predicted that our soldiers would be 'greeted as liberators' - could have been so mistaken. But a devastating new report on the California energy crisis reminds us that Mr. Cheney has been equally confident, and equally wrong, about other issues.... Cheney [has] gotten it wrong again and again - on energy, on the economy, on the budget. But political muscle has insulated them from any adverse consequences. So they, and the country, don't learn from their mistakes - and the mistakes keep getting bigger."

Talk about a pResidential PR nightmare!! The London based Arabic daily Al Quds Al Arabi is reporting that Dick Cheney is headed to the Jordanian capital of Amman to talk his daughter Mary out of her decision to go to Baghdad with a group of volunteers who want to form human shields against the US led attacks on Iraq. Memo to Dick: if you want this diplomatic mission to succeed, keep Rummy - and Lynne - as far away as possible!

Lest we forget Dirty Dick, the company he is vastly enriching with war contracts still can't afford to pay its retirees. According to an account in the New York Times, employees of the Dresser-Rand Co. began receiving puzzling letters this summer that they had become eligible for retirement benefits even though they were still working. To get their money, all they had to do was call the Halliburton Co., which had bought Dresser-Rand four years ago and then sold it a bit later. As the employees called Halliburton, they discovered that early retirement money was really a reduction in their pension benefits. According to the Times, the workers have 90 days to sign up for a much smaller payment than promised earlier or forfeit their right to a lump sum pension payment forever.

CorpWatch writes, "As the first bombs rain down on Baghdad, thousands of employees of Halliburton, Dick Cheney's former company, are working alongside US troops in Kuwait and Turkey under a package deal worth close to a billion dollars. They are building tent cities and providing logistical support for the war in Iraq in addition to other hot spots in the 'war on terrorism.' While recent news coverage has speculated on the post-war reconstruction gravy train... Halliburton is already profiting from war time contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars... Cheney still draws compensation of up to a million dollars a year from the company... In December 2001, Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, secured a 10-year deal [for] a 'cost-plus-award-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity service' which basically means that the federal government has an open-ended mandate and budget to send Brown and Root anywhere in the world to run military operations for a profit."

BuzzFlash writes, "You wouldn't think that Dick Cheney or his wife, Lynne, spend their leisurely hours patrolling the Internet, but they apparently have more time on their hands than you would suspect. That's what became clear to John Wooden, creator of WhiteHouse.org, when he received a letter from Dick Cheney's White House Counsel. In legalese, Cheney's taxpayer salaried lawyer, warned Wooden to stop using photographs of Lynne Cheney and her 'name' in his satire. The White House attorney also told Wooden that he couldn't use the presidential seal, even though the seal on WhiteHouse.org has a vulture in the center of it, rather than an American eagle. Wooden responded by putting a red clown's nose on Mrs. Cheney's photos, posting a satirical statement from Cheney... Subsequently, the ACLU of New York, where Wooden lives, took up his case, the Vice President backed down, and thousands and thousands of new readers visited the site due to all of the publicity." Read the interview.

UK Guardian reports, "Halliburton, the Texas company which has been awarded the Pentagon's contract to put out potential oil-field fires in Iraq and which is bidding for postwar construction contracts, is still making annual payments to its former chief executive, the vice-president Dick Cheney. The payments, which appear on Mr Cheney's 2001 financial disclosure statement, are in the form of 'deferred compensation' of up to $1m a year... Halliburton is one of five large US corporations invited to bid for contracts in what may turn out to be the biggest reconstruction project since the second world war." Impeach Bush and Cheney!

"Mrs. Cheney's husband wishes you to be aware (See Letter and Statement) that some/all of the biographic information contained on this PARODY page about Mrs. Cheney may not actually be true. Indeed, it may all be lies propagated by the many people whom she rubbed the wrong way during her long and still-unfolding life as a controversial public figure. You know how political vipers gossip! Besides, how on earth is one to know whether an interesting tidbit arises from fact or from the seamy whispers of mendacious Chatty Cathys? That said, the editors of Whitehouse.org are confident that any rumors about Mrs. Cheney formerly being a crystal meth pusher are 100% likely to be absolutely untrue. Similarly, any stories about her penchant for licking Brandy Alexanders off the hirsute belly of her spouse are all lies, lies, lies!" Read the parody and the letter from Cheney's attorney demanding that 'adjustments' be made!

"Threats by Republicans to cut the General Accounting Office (GAO) budget influenced its decision to abandon a lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney, The Hill has learned. Sources familiar with high-level discussions at the GAO said Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, met with GAO Comptroller General David Walker earlier this year and - unambiguously - pressured him to drop the suit or face cuts in his $440 million budget... Walker did say, however, that several lawmakers have threatened in the past year to cut agency funding if it persisted with the controversial lawsuit. He also said the budget threat was among a number of factors that tipped his Feb. 7 decision to halt litigation." Defeat ALL Republicans!

"Walker gives at least a clue to what GAO's real thinking may be. He notes, at the start of the statement, that he has made the decision not to appeal after, among other things, 'extensive outreach with congressional leadership and others concerning various policy matters and the potential ramifications of the court's decision....' This reference to 'extensive outreach' is disturbing, and betrays a misconceptualization of GAO's proper role...Indeed, I suspect Walker did tell the Republican leaders that going on with the lawsuit was in GAO's, and Congress's, best institutional interests. But they probably told him, in response, to shut down the lawsuit. Of course, no one other than Walker, his principal aides, and few members of Congress, really knows what conversations went on. And none of them are talking. But the reference to 'extensive outreach' - whatever that bureaucrat-ese language means - is far from comforting." Impeach BushCheney!

The GAO "said today that it would not appeal its lawsuit against Vice President Cheney, handing the Bush administration a complete victory in its effort to keep confidential the identities of private groups that provided advice in forming a national energy policy. The decision is a major retreat for the General Accounting Office, which filed the unprecedented lawsuit after the vice president's office refused to turn over the information sought. GAO recently lost a decision in federal district court [handed down by Federalist Society member John Bates], and the shift in control of the Senate to Republican hands meant that the majority party in both chambers opposed the GAO action." Bush-Cheney's secret government is intolerable and un-American - Impeach Bush Now!

Business Week reports, "Beth Osborne Daponte was a 29-year-old Commerce Dept. demographer in 1992, when she publicly contradicted then-Defense Sec. Richard Cheney on the highly sensitive issue of Iraqi civilian casualties during the Gulf War. In short order, Daponte was told she was losing her job. She says her official report disappeared from her desk, and a new estimate, prepared by supervisors, greatly reduced the number of estimated civilian casualties. Although Cheney said shortly after the 1991 Gulf War that 'we have no way of knowing precisely how many casualties occurred'... Daponte had estimated otherwise: 13,000 civilians were killed directly by American and allied forces, and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric power grid, and the water system. In all, 40,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict, she concluded, putting total Iraqi losses from the war and its aftermath at 158,000."

Joshua Micah Marshall writes that Dick Cheney has produced one policy disaster after enother. So why "has the press failed to grasp Cheney's ineptitude?... Cheney's reputation as the steady hand at the helm of the Bush administration--the CEO to Bush's chairman--is so potent as to blind Beltway commentators to the examples of vice presidential incompetence accumulating, literally, under their noses. Though far less egregious, Cheney's bad judgment is akin to Trent Lott's ugly history on race: Everyone sort of knew it was there, only no one ever really took notice until it was pointed out in a way that was difficult to ignore. Cheney is lucky; as vice president, he can't be fired. But his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see."

"A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by 32 lawmakers who wanted to stop Bush's withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The plaintiffs had contended the withdrawal, which took effect in June, was unconstitutional because Bush had not sought Congress' approval. U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled Monday that the lawmakers lacked standing to bring the case, and the withdrawal from the treaty was a political matter, not judicial." Bates is the former Starr Deputy who dismissed the GAO suit against Cheney that sought information from his secret Energy Task Force meetings.

Cheney has now gone from cowering for months at a time in an "undisclosed" bunker to being attended not just by secret service folk but by police, Army rangers and rooftop snipers! When amateur photographer Mike Maginnis snapped photos of the bizarre "commando movie-like" scene, he was confronted by police, thrown to the ground, arrested, and his camera and film confiscated. The website that published Maginnis's account checked out his story when readers expressed disbelief. The evidence indicates Maginnis's story is, alas, true.

The Financial Times has determined that Dick Cheney's Halliburton (dba also as Brown & Root) did more business with Saddam than any other contractor, at an estimated total of at least $73 million in goods and services while Cheney was chairman and CEO of the Dallas-based company. In 2000, Cheney lied ON RECORD about the connection. Though he admitted doing business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, he claimed he had a "firm policy" against trading with Iraq. I.e. He lied. "Two former senior executives of the Halliburton subsidiaries say that, as far as they knew, there was no policy against doing business with Iraq. One of the executives also says that although he never spoke directly to Cheney about the Iraqi contracts, he is certain Cheney knew about them."

Dictators with abysmal histories of human rights violations are Dick Cheney's favorite people to do business with - through Halliburton or through any of its many "money laundering" subsidiaries, such as Brown and Root, Ingersoll-Rand, Dresser, et al. Cheney has made millions in Vietnam, Libya, Somalia, Burma, Iraq. He really cleaned up rebuilding Kuwait and Iraq-- after pushing for the war that made rebuilding necessary. In August 2000, in fact, Cheney lobbied to ban restrictions on American corporations in countries listed by the government as sponsoring terrorism. Halliburton racked up $23.8 million in sales to Iraq in 1998 and 1999, slipping past public scrutiny by using two European subsidiaries to broker the deals. And this is the man who represents America?

"Dick Cheney's old company, Houston-based Brown & Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton), has given new meaning to the term 'military cuisine.' Within the past few weeks, U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan and Kuwait have fallen ill from food prepared by cooks working for Brown & Root, which interestingly enough, managed to get the contracts to perform various logistics services for U.S. troops engaged in both the 'War on Terror' in Afghanistan and the 'War on Iraq' in the Gulf region. Brown & Root also has locked up the logistics services contracts for U.S. military bases from Bosnia and Kosovo to the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Brown & Root's latest food poisoning incident occurred on December 11 at Oraifijan Camp, 35 miles south of Kuwait City. Over 250 soldiers, sailors, and airmen were sickened after partaking of Brown & Root's tainted chow, 13 so severely they required hospitalization." So reports Online Journal.

"Brown & Root is a subsidiary of the Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services conglomerate that, until July 25, 2000 employed Dick Cheney as chairman of its executive board and CEO. Like LBJ before him, Cheney has used his association with Halliburton and Brown & Root to enrich himself and gain political power. In August, Halliburton announced that it was giving Cheney a retirement package worth more than $33.7 million. That comes on top of more than $10 million Cheney has earned in salary, bonuses and stock options at Halliburton since 1995. In return for his pay, Cheney has helped the company attract government contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars." So reports Robert Bryce. Demand a Tribunal!!

At Google.com, if you put in "Sierra Club versus Cheney" or "Judicial Watch versus Cheney," this comes up first: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32665-2002Dec9.html, which has nothing to do with the Sierra Club/Judicial watch suits. It tells you all about the GAO case and its dismissal by rightwing judge John Bates. There seems to be no other case. Even Dem.com readers have been confused, wondering why we ran a piece about rightwing judges Edwards and Sentelle's rulings in Cheney's favor. The fact is, the two cases have been ruled on back to back, with the Sierra Club case granting Cheney, essentially, "forever" to keep his info secret, and the GAO case doing the same, but with long-term anti-Constitutional implications. Yet the GAO case is being given huge play, with the Sierra Club case hardly any. Why? Because the two, taken together, show a clear pattern of subversion of justice by rightwing judges.

"A federal judge on Monday rebuffed congressional efforts to gather information about meetings that Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force held with industry executives and lobbyists as it was formulating the administration's energy plan. U.S. District Judge John Bates said the lawsuit filed by Comptroller General David Walker against the vice president is an unprecedented act that raises serious separation-of-powers issues between the executive and legislative branches of government. 'No court has ever before granted what the comptroller general seeks,' wrote Bates, an appointee of Bush. The judge said that the comptroller general, who runs the General Accounting Office, 'does not have the personal, concrete and particularized injury required' under the Constitution and that 'his complaint must be dismissed.'" John Bates served as Deputy Independent Counsel under Ken Starr.

"Why is Bush in a rush to have his Federalist Society judges confirmed? The answer is simple: By packing the Federal Courts, the Bush Administration can control two branches of government. Take the current case of the GAO vs. the White House as an example. Who is legally defending Cheney's untenable position of keeping secret the names of people who participated in the Cheney energy task force? Why it's none other than Ted Olson, Now, Ted is not on the bench, but he's well connected, so to speak, with the Federalist judges currently wearing robes in U.S. Courts....The GAO case has been assigned to none other than a Ken Starr protege, Federal Judge John Bates. According to columnist Joshua Micah Marshall, 'Judge Bates served as Deputy Independent Counsel under Ken Starr from September 1995 until leaving in March 1997. That year Bates argued the case in which an appeals court ruled that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton had to turn over notes of conversations about Whitewater.'"

If Cheney had been Martha Stewart, an activist trying to board a plane, or Bill Clinton playing footsie with a secretary, you can bet your sweet bippy we would have seen fast relentless action. He'd be impeached by now, sans doubt! Instead, two years of foot dragging have crawled by. The GAO made a bogus demand for the info, then did nothing, acting as if it were powerless, rather than one of the only government offices that CAN demand accountability from the White House. So Cheney continues to arrogantly thumb his nose at the American people and their laws to protect his oil buddies. But there's a ray of hope -there are a few honest judges left. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan denied Oily's appeal and ordered him to turn over the "secret energy task force" material within two weeks - or else. Or else what? That's the problem here!!!

David Lazarus writes, "Last year, [Halliburton subsidiary] KBR was one of a number of defense-industry heavyweights handed a $5 billion government contract to dispose of outmoded weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. In March, KBR received an almost $47 million contract to provide support services at the Naval Air Facility in El Centro... A team of companies led by KBR received a $725 million, five- year contract to provide maintenance services at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico... Cheney reported on his 2001 tax return that he received nearly $1.6 million in deferred compensation from the company. Cheney is still receiving deferred compensation from Halliburton... cash that Halliburton is accruing in part from its activities in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan. 'He's receiving money from the government and money from a private-sector company with government contracts. Whose payroll is he on?' The answer: Both of them. And that couldn't be right."

AP reports, "U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered task force documents to be made public by Nov. 5 and said he was shocked the Justice Department attorneys had not examined all the documents after asserting for more than a year that each of them involved confidential information. 'That is a startling revelation,' Sullivan said, after rejecting the Bush administration's claim that he lacks authority to order the release of the task force papers. The judge directed the government attorneys to either produce the documents or supply a list of each one being withheld, and an explanation of why it is so sensitive... The judge said he wanted the documents or the list by Nov. 5 - Election Day - but gave the government an opportunity to first file objections. He set another hearing for Oct. 31, but acknowledged a federal appeals court may end up deciding the issue." Update from the AP, 10/21/02: "The Justice Department on Monday sought to delay [the] court order [by Sullivan]."

As Defense Secretary back in 1991, when Saddam actually WAS in attack mode, Dick Cheney pushed NOT to remove Saddam. He has kept very quiet publicly about Iraq for years since. But now he wants a preemptive, unilateral attack on a nonaggressing nation. What's going on? Says MSNBC: "Chatterbox won't dispute that life has changed in many ways since 1991. Back then, it seemed reasonable to assume that Saddam had no future in Iraq. By 1996, though, it was clear that Saddam had consolidated his power. He hadn't yet expelled the U.N. weapons inspectors -- that occurred two years later --but he wasn't being especially cooperative, either. Why was invading Iraq at the bottom of Cheney's agenda back then, but at the top of it now?"

NY Times reports, "Lawyers for the General Accounting Office and Vice President Dick Cheney clashed today before a federal judge over which branch's claim is paramount -- the executive power to keep records confidential or the legislative right to investigate how public money is spent. For the first time in the 81-year history of the agency, the comptroller general of the United States went to Federal court today to ask a judge to order a member of the executive branch to turn over records to Congress... Carter G. Phillips, a lawyer for the G.A.O. and a partner in the Washington law firm of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, argued that if Judge Bates sided with the administration, the decision would have a 'devastating' effect on 'the G.A.O.'s ability to do its job.' 'It would have an extraordinarily sweeping effect and would significantly halt the Congress's use of the General Accounting Office to conduct nonpartisan investigations,' Mr. Phillips told Judge Bates."

USA Today reports: "Cheney, whose travel this year has been mainly trips to 'secure undisclosed locations' and GOP fundraisers, has exceeded his travel budget and is asking Congress to approve shifting $100,000 from other White House accounts to cover the tab. Congress approved... a total of $436,000. So far, Cheney's travel costs for the year total $432,000...Last year, Cheney spent $287,000 on travel... Most of the vice president's travel since January has involved fundraising events for Republican candidates. The party or candidate pays part of the cost of political trips, but travel by the vice president involves staff, security and other trappings covered by the taxpayer... David Sirota, a Democratic spokesman complained, 'The president and vice president need to realize they are public officials at a time of war, not a pair of playboys who can jet-set around every night doing cocktail party fundraisers on the public's dime.'"

Chickenhawk Cheney (who had "other priorities" when our nation needed him to serve his country) urged a congressional district's voters to support the Republican candidate, because he supports Bush on the issue of making war. The Dick, attempting to gain war support by frightening his listeners, said we "must not look the other way as threats gather against the American people" and that the "entire world knows beyond dispute that Saddam Hussein holds weapons of mass destruction in large quantities." He did not explain why the Bush administration racheted up the ante by demanding a new UN resolution after Hussein agreed to comply with inspections -- for which preparations are now progressing. Nor did the Vice Chickenhawk explain the reason for taking up the issue now, since there is no other documented urgency, other than the mid-term elections. Senator Daschle (D-KS) remarked, "If that doesn't politicize this war, I don't know what does."

Mediawhoresonline.com writes: "After confirming that he would defile today's anniversary of the terrorist atrocities by appearing on the Rush Limbaugh program, Vice President Dick Cheney, under intense political pressure from shocked Americans, cancelled his appearance. Cheney cited his removal from public view to a 'secure location,' under the raised state of alert declared by federal officials, as the reason for his no-show. Were Limbaugh's program a television show, all of this would be completely plausible. But Limbaugh is on radio. And all along, it seems, Cheney was due to 'appear' via phone. Limbaugh even boasted - and was still boasting today - that his show was the ONLY radio show Cheney had agreed to show up on on 9/11. Excuse us for asking, but are there no telephones, with secure lines, down in Cheney's bunker? Wouldn't it have been just as easy for Dick to talk to Rush from his 'secret undisclosed location' as it would have been from any phone booth in America?"

CNN.com reports: "Dick Cheney defended his management of Halliburton Co. Sunday, saying he had assumed the oil giant's insurance would shield it against asbestos lawsuits that have cost it hundreds of millions of dollars and helped devalue its stock. The $7.7 billion acquisition of rival Dresser Industries Inc. in 1998 - when Cheney was chief executive - doubled the Texas company's size overnight and allowed it to claim the title of the world's leading oilfield services company. Most of Halliburton's current asbestos claims were inherited from Dresser… 'Our experience with asbestos at Halliburton was that we were insured, we were indemnified,' Cheney said. 'We had a track record, in terms of what settling asbestos claims cost.' In Cheney's time, Halliburton settled cases for modest sums - 214,000 claims for $173 million, including $101 million paid by insurance, leaving Halliburton's out-of-pocket cost at $336 per claim."

Mark Morford writes, "We have a war-crazed vice president. An addict, a verifiable military junkie. Many of us perhaps do not fully realize this. We are very unfortunately saddled with one of the least charismatic least interesting most intellectually acrimonious and most desperately hawkish, violence-hungry, soulfully inscrutable vice president in decades, and he wants this country at war, now and always.. Here is Cheney, pounding his tight little fist on the podium and scowling hard and.. trying not to get too agitated lest the defibrillator kick in... Dick shall not be deterred. He knows no other way. He is a military-manic businessman who made millions from Halliburton's oily deals with Iraq not so long ago and he knows the possibilities. Dick bleeds slippery military-industrial blood, eats dove ideology like raw jerky, dreams in Technicolor explosions. This is our vice president. And he does not really care what you think."

According to Judicial Watch, VP "Cheney refused to produce documents pursuant to a federal court order in the ongoing Judicial Watch lawsuit concerning his Energy Task Force. Discovery responses were due from the Vice President yesterday per a court order, yet the Vice President, through Justice Department lawyers, filed a last minute motion for protective order seeking exemption from discovery on 'constitutional grounds'... 'Judge Sullivan made it clear that he would not tolerate this type of gamesmanship. In fact, the Bush-Cheney Justice Department was already admonished by Judge Sullivan for lying to him about the law. And now the Vice President's shows contempt for the Court's orders by refusing to produce documents as directed by the court. We will seek sanctions and other appropriate relief for this contempt for the law," said Larry Klayman. Give 'em hell, Larry!

Molly Ivins writes "Excuse me: I don't want to be tacky or anything, but hasn't it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Vice President Dick Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a 'murderous dictator' is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy? When Dick Cheney was CEO of the oilfield supply firm Halliburton, the company did $23.8 million in business with Saddam Hussein, the evildoer 'prepared to share his weapons of mass destruction with terrorists.' So if Saddam is 'the world's worst leader,' how come Cheney sold him the equipment to get his dilapidated oil fields up and running so he to could afford to build weapons of mass destruction?"

Skip Fox writes, "1. Halliburton's audits which overstated revenues, i.e. creative bookkeeping. 2. Halliburton selling Oil Equipment which can be used for development of nuclear weapons to Libya and Iraq during U.S. sanctions. 3. Halliburton selling Oil Equipment to Libya and Iraq through subsidiaries after sanctions and profiting from Iranian Oil 4. Cheney becoming CEO of a company which he had rewarded as Secretary of Defense and granting large contracts to Halliburton after becoming Vice President. I.e., the revolving door of power and money and power and 5. Cheney making millions from sale of Halliburton stock prior to stock losing 75% in value. Although Cheney HAD to sell the stock when he did, the bad financial information was not made public until after he sold his stock. 6. Halliburton overbilled government. 7. Halliburton's contributions to co-sponsors of a House and Senate bill, labeled "highly controversial" by many, to limit asbestos liability."

Robert Scheer writes that in Dick Cheney's nightmares, "he is led off in handcuffs, accused of crimes committed while CEO of Halliburton, securing that company's place in the ever-growing pantheon of post-boom corporate fraudsters... A typical American POW these days is a captain of industry who played loose with his company's books, and both Cheney and his alleged boss ran with that crowd. [A poll shows only 11% of Americans believe Cheney is telling the truth about Halliburton.] Imagine what a field day a Democrat-controlled Congress would have looking into how Cheney [cashed out of Halliburton, and Enron's role in Cheney's energy policy.] Maybe the elusive Cheney has a bunch of good explanations for all of this bad-smelling stuff. Until he decides to publicly share them, however, his passion on Iraq will remind many of us of the old saying that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels."

Until VERY recently, Cheney couldn't do enough to keep his ole buddy Saddam happy. Here's a 2000 report from an UN correspondent: "Millions of dollars of US oil business with Iraq are being channeled discreetly through European and other companies, in a practice that has highlighted the double standards now dominating relations between Baghdad and Washington after a decade of crippling sanctions. Though legal, leading US oil service companies such as Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount and others, have used subsidiaries and joint venture companies for this lucrative business, so as to avoid straining relations with Washington and jeopardising their ties with President Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad." Guess it's cheaper just to go in and seize the oilfields at taxpayer expense, eh Dick?

NY Times opines, Dick "Cheney has rationed his public appearances of late, showing up mostly at lobbying sessions on Capitol Hill or Republican fund-raisers. When he takes questions from the public on Iraq or Halliburton, the troubled energy services company he once headed, Mr. Cheney demurs. He may be an insider asset to Mr. Bush, but outside his value is tipping from positive to negative... Mr. Cheney does not serve Mr. Bush well by dodging questions about Halliburton, or repeatedly declining to identify the people who were consulted by his energy task force last year. At a moment when Americans are looking to the government to help remedy the nation's economic ills, Mr. Cheney looks more like part of the problem than the solution." Cheney isn't just part of the problem - he IS the problem. Impeach Bush and Cheney!

Arianna Huffington writes that under Cheney, "the number of Halliburton subsidiaries registered in tax-friendly locations ballooned from nine in 1995 to 44 in 1999. The result? A dramatic drop in Halliburton's federal taxes, which fell from $302 million in 1998 to less than zero -- to wit, an $85 million rebate -- in 1999. At the same time they were hard at work stiffing U.S. taxpayers, Cheney and Halliburton were happily feasting at the public trough -- the company received $2.3 billion in government contracts and another $1.5 billion in government financing and loan guarantees... Cheney's reluctance to talk to reporters is understandable, given ... the questionable accounting, the offshore subsidiaries, and the revelation that the company did business with Iran, Libya, and -- despite Cheney's denials -- Iraq. Call this his 'Axis of Profits.'"

MSNBC reports, "Hecklers disrupted a speech by Vice pResident Dick Cheney Wednesday, chanting 'Cheney is a corporate crook', as both the vice pResident and Bush went on the offensive regarding the economy and continuing corporate scandal saga... Cheney, the former chief executive of oil services company Halliburton, was disrupted by a group of hecklers in the back of the room chanting 'Cheney is a corporate crook' as he began delivering his speech to the Commonwealth Club of California. Halliburton is currently being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for potential accounting irregularities that occurred during Cheney's tenure with the company. During a question-and-answer period, Cheney side-stepped inquiries about his role at Halliburton, saying he could not discuss the situation during an ongoing SEC probe." What a coward! Hey Dick - what corporate crimes are you hiding?

When Dick Cheney's Halliburton bought Dresser Industries, Cheney did not warn stockholders of the potentially huge asbestos liabilities they were getting as part of the "bargain." Why not? Perhaps because Cheney was planning to prevent asbestos victims from suing companies like Dresser. Under Cheney, Halliburton "contributed more than $150,000 to members of Congress who sponsored legislation that would limit the ability of workers to sue companies for asbestos exposure... Cheney, as an individual, donated $12,500 to members who sponsored or co-sponsored the asbestos bills." Impeach Cheney Now!

The Smoking Gun writes, "Meet Robert Howard Kirkpatrick. He's serving 35 months in Ohio's Belmont Correctional Institution for drug possession. But that didn't stop Vice President Dick Cheney from inviting the 35-year-old felon to a June 19 dinner featuring George W. Bush and his wife Laura. As first reported by Cleveland's Plain Dealer, the below invite was recently mailed to Kirkpatrick at his Ohio state lockup and actually included Kirkpatrick's inmate number in the address. Unfortunately for the pResident and First Lady, they will have to do without Kirkpatrick's company at the $2500-a-plate GOP fundraiser. But he will be available in February 2004" - just in time to help BushCheney steal a second term...

AP reports, "Since Dick Cheney became VP, a subsidiary of his former company was chosen the exclusive contractor for overseas Army troop support and Navy construction despite being under federal investigation for fraud. The Navy contract went to the Halliburton Co. subsidiary, Brown & Root Services, despite a recommendation from the auditing arm of Congress that new bids be solicited for the construction contract. That recommendation was ignored. The Army deal is unusual because its stretches 10 years and has a payment structure that critics say encourages Brown & Root to spend whatever it takes to keep the troops happy. Halliburton officials say Cheney played no role in the selection of Houston-based Brown & Root for the two contracts, potentially worth billions of dollars over the next decade. [Yeah right!] ... [GWU Professor Steven] Spooner said government contracts for services almost never exceed five years." We demand a Special Prosecutor!

Jefferson Morley writes "With its clips of Vice President [sic] Dick Cheney testifying to the merits of the disgraced [Arthur Andersen] accounting firm, the tape made partisan hearts in Washington go pitter-pat... Democratic strategists are dreaming of using a snippet from the tape in fall election ads. The White House, meanwhile, objected to Andersen's identifying of Cheney on tape as 'vice president'... 'I get good advice [on] how we're operating over and above the normal, by-the-book auditing arrangement,' Cheney says. When taking that 'over and above' advice, Halliburton overstated its earnings and attracted the attention of SEC investigators... In short, the tale of the tape is Andersen's influence on American business -- how shoddy business practices spread."

"Dick Cheney conceded Monday that corporate scandals have shaken confidence in the economy but said reforms will 'bring out the best of the free enterprise system... 'When there are reports of corporate fraud the American people can be certain that the government will fully investigate and prosecute any wrongdoers,' Cheney said. 'That system will be stronger and better'... Cheney did not refer to questions that have been raised about his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co. The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation into accounting issues at Halliburton during that period, and investor lawsuits have accused Halliburton of accounting gimmicks similar to those used by the failed energy trader Enron Corp. Scandals at Enron, WorldCom and others have been blamed for shaking investor confidence and causing the plunge in the stock market." And BushCheney have done NOTHING to stop these scandals, because their cronies are getting rich!

As of April 30th, Kellogg Brown and Root, a unit of Cheney's Halliburton, billed the Federal Government $19 million for operations and $34 million for construction to house the 600 high security detainees in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay - without charges or access to lawyers. That's more than $88,000 per person going to Cheney's old company. Current plans include expansion of the facility for another 200 detainees, and could eventually expand to a capacity of 2,000. We demand an investigation!

"Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes public corruption, today reported that security staff at The White House threatened a process server with arrest over his attempt to serve Vice P-resident Cheney with a complaint filed against him by Judicial Watch on behalf of shareholders of Halliburton. It is a crime to interfere with service of process... 'We have served many a lawsuit on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton when they were in The White House. The Clinton White House accepted the papers. Never before have our process servers been threatened with arrest. If this Bush-Cheney White House is serious about corporate corruption and responsibility, it would not allow the VP to improperly hide behind White House security to evade service of process in the Halliburton securities fraud litigation, and it would not threaten the process server with arrest,' stated Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman." Impeach Cheney for obstruction of justice!

"Cheney, the administration's indispensable damage-control point man, has muzzled himself - with the reluctant approval of his boss. Sources told the Daily News yesterday that with the urging of his lawyers, Cheney has scaled back his crucial public cheerleading role until a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Halliburton's accounting practices while Cheney was chairman and CEO has been resolved...His handlers have alerted local Republican organizers that Cheney won't be holding any 'press avails' and have instructed his advance staff to make sure his movements don't bring him near the media. Yesterday, Cheney was in Florida touring the Wyoming, a nuclear submarine named for his home state. The event didn't appear on his schedule and was closed to the public and press." As reported on Mike Malloy's show (ieamericaradio.com), the sub did not have the usual mast raised to indicate a test exercise.

"Rep. Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who was one of the earliest members to begin investigating the collapse of the Enron Corp., said yesterday that he has directed his staff to begin investigating Cheney's involvement with Halliburton. Waxman called on Cheney and Bush to serve as 'role models' and to donate substantial amounts of the money they received while serving as executives to workers who were displaced when their companies foundered after accounting irregularities were discovered. The vice president [sic], Waxman said, 'has a moral responsibility to step forward and - as the president [sic] says he would like corporate executives to do - take some personal responsibility.' Cheney has not spoken publicly about Halliburton. Nor has he joined Bush in calling for aggressive measures to crack down on corporate executives who engage in deceitful accounting. A White House official said that Cheney was not commenting publicly...because the SEC is investigating the matter."

The WP writes "People say that Harvey Pitt... damages the president's [sic] post-Enron credibility. On Wednesday, however, it was the president who damaged Mr. Pitt's credibility. At a news conference with Poland's president, Mr. Bush was asked whether he was confident that the SEC's current investigation into Halliburton Co. would exonerate Vice President Cheney, who used to run that company. 'Yes, I am,' the president replied. This sort of comment is almost enough to kindle nostalgia for the old days when independent counsels investigated top government officials." Why be nostalgic? Let's demand a Special Prosecutor for Halliburton - and Harken too!

"President [sic] Bush came to his vice president's [sic] defense Wednesday, calling Dick Cheney a fine business leader and predicting he would be cleared in a federal probe of accounting procedures at Texas-based Halliburton Corp. Democrats and other critics immediately attacked the president [sic] for speaking out during an open investigation, potentially influencing the outcome. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into Halliburton's decision -- made when in the late 1990s when Cheney was chief executive -- to count as income disputed payments it had not received...Cheney's stewardship of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000 has come under attack from some analysts and former employees, who say his decision in 1998 to merge with Dresser Industries proved financially disastrous...When he left Halliburton to become Bush's running mate in August 2000, Cheney received a package of stocks and stock options worth $34 million."

"In his first extensive interview on Cheney's tenure, Halliburton CEO David Lesar defended the firm's bookkeeping and said Cheney was aware that the firm was counting projected cost-overrun payments as revenue. 'The vice president was aware of who owed us money, and he helped us collect it,' Lesar told NEWSWEEK... Cheney, as CEO, signed Halliburton's 1998 and 1999 financial statements, which is why he may find himself chatting to the SEC someday. (His staff says he hasn't been contacted.) Cheney's stint at Halliburton offers a glaring example of how CEOs can make tons of money while shareholders lose out. Cheney averaged about $2 million a year in salary and bonuses. But, like other CEOs, he made the real big money from Halliburton stock. By NEWSWEEK's count... Cheney made about $45 million in just under five years at Halliburton."

"The Halliburton Company, the Dallas oil services company bedeviled lately by an array of accounting and business issues, (including an investigation by the SEC into its accounting practices back when Vice President [sic] Dick Cheney ran the company) is benefiting very directly from the United States efforts to combat terrorism... The Pentagon is increasingly relying on a unit of Halliburton called KBR, sometimes referred to as Kellogg Brown & Root... KBR is the exclusive logistics supplier for both the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation and fuel transportation. The contract recently won from the Army is for 10 years and has no lid on costs... The Army contract is a cost-plus arrangement and shrouded in secrecy... The contract awarded last December by the Army's Operations Support Command, is 'open ended' with 'no estimated value,' said Ms. Smith, the command's spokeswoman." We demand an investigation!

The Daily Enron reports, "Since 1998 no fewer than 86 US companies have violated the Trading With The Enemy Act, a US law that bars companies from doing business with declared enemy nations Iran, Iraq, Cuba, and North Korea. The companies were fined a combined total of $5.8 million. Conspicuous by its absence was any mention in the Treasury documents of Halliburton Co., the Dallas-based oil-services company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton opened an office in Tehran in 2000, while Cheney was chief executive officer. As has been the case with other potentially embarrassing public documents, the Treasury Department settlements were released only after a fight. The documents were released as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act filed by Public Citizen and the Corporate Crime Reporter, a newsletter."

Here are the numbers on Dick Cheney: Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635 ... Increase in government contracts while Cheney led Halliburton: 91% ... Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars) ... Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7: "Cheney claimed that he supported the U.S. sanctions on Iraq, but the Financial Times of London reported that through foreign subsidiaries and affiliates, Halliburton became the biggest oil contractor for Iraq, selling more than $73 million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's regime".... Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give congressional investigators: 13,500 ... Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign: $1,800,000 ... For an in-depth factual profile of the man behind the curtain, check out "Who is Dick Cheney" from Moveon.org.

Steven Leser writes, "The revelations of allegations regarding wrongdoing by Halliburton and Vice President Cheney during his tenure as Halliburton CEO put an interesting spin on the massive quantities of money that Cheney made at Halliburton, and his rather smug comments to Senator Lieberman during the 2000 Vice Presidential debate. During the campaign, Cheney and Bush made continual references to character and integrity, references they continue to make today. What do these statements mean in light of continued evidence of wrongdoing by these men and in Bush's case, his adult family members? It means that in their opinion laws, scrutiny, punishment and consequences are only for Democrats and average Americans, but not for them, Republicans and their corporate officer and millionaire/billionaire buddies/contributors."

Arthur Andersen helped cause the collapse of half a dozen enormous companies, the loss of billions of dollars by investors, and a huge drop in the entire stock market. But who appeared in a commercial singing the praises of Andersen? None other than Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton - who followed Andersen's advice to defraud stockholders and to make himself rich. Impeach Bush and Cheney Now!

"Judicial Watch, the group that investigates and prosecutes corruption by government officials, announced today that it is filing a shareholders suit in Dallas, Texas, against Vice President Dick Cheney and the other involved directors of Halliburton, as well as Halliburton itself, for alleged fraudulent accounting practices which resulted in the overvaluation of the company’s shares, thereby deceiving investors and others... 'Judicial Watch has already sued Democrat and Republican officials in the Enron and Global Crossing scandals. To look the other way for the Vice President would be to set a precedent that the Washington elite are above the law. This cannot be permitted if our democracy is to survive,' stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman." In the Paula Jones case, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that President Clinton could be sued for actions taken BEFORE he became President. Could Larry Klayman become Cheney's Paula Jones? Stay tuned!

In a sweeping decision undermining worker rights, the corrupt Texas Supreme Court upheld Halliburton's controversial policy of forcing its employees into binding arbitration to resolve discrimination claims -- a policy adopted under then-CEO Dick Cheney.

CNN reports, Bush "will undergo a colonoscopy - a diagnostic examination to check for early signs of colon cancer - and will transfer power to Vice President Dick Cheney during the procedure. 'It is the third such procedure I've had,' said the president [sic]. 'The doctors recommended I have another because the last time they found some benign polyps... This is a routine physical examination that will be done at Camp David. I'm going to be sedated for a period of time and will transfer power to the vice president during that time,' he said... Asked about the decision to transfer power, Bush said, 'I did so because we're at war, and I just want to be super cautious.' Bush said he and his staffers had discussed the issue and 'looked at precedent' before he decided on the transfer of power, which is authorized under the 25th Amendment." Or maybe they just decided to stop pretending Bush was 'President', and Bush will go AWOL - like he did in 1973 - to let Cheney run the show. Stay tuned..

Jackson Thoreau writes in Online Journal, "Let me say it because most will not: Dick Cheney is evil. There is a bit of evil in most human beings, but in Cheney it is easy to spot, although most people don't have the guts to say it. I especially hate it when I see Cheney on some Sunday morning media show talking like he's an authority figure and no one has the guts to question him. Can't they see through his BS?... Cheney is smarter, more experienced, and more dangerous than Bush. He's known as the enforcer on Capitol Hill, with his office known as the torture chamber. There is a reason for those nicknames, and it's not something I would be proud of, but Cheney probably is. It's obvious Cheney really thinks Bush is a lightweight and deals more with Bush Sr., who is running more of this show than many think. Cheney's CIA connections are long, including with his private firms and Defense Department position... Cheney is evil, I tell you. There's no other way to put it, in my book."

"Dick Cheney called his years at the helm of Halliburton 'a great success story.' Today, (Halliburton)...struggling. The Securities and Exchange Commission is examining accounting practices at the company when Cheney was CEO. A merger that Cheney championed ended up exposing Halliburton to asbestos liability claims. The company's stock price has dropped by two-thirds since Cheney left to run for vice president...'Halliburton is the first test case of Bush's call for corporate responsibility,' says Bill Buck, a spokesman for the DNC. 'It would seem, under Bush's proposal,...Cheney should be held responsible to Halliburton stockholders.'...Cruikshank, who recruited Cheney…says he wasn't looking for someone to focus on the day-to-day operations. 'We had people who could handle the details. That's not what we wanted him for...' Now his White House aides decline to discuss his experiences at Halliburton. They turned down a request to interview him on the subject."

Molly Ivins writes that the SEC is investigating Halliburton "for accounting irregularities. What took so long? Dick Cheney's record at Halliburton is one of the most under-covered stories of the past three years. When you consider all the time and ink spent on Whitewater, the neglect of the Cheney-Halliburton story is unfathomable. The proximate cause of the SEC investigation is an 'aggressive accounting practice' - [counting $100 million of phony revenue to cover up losses. Cheney wanted restrictions lifted on American corporations in countries that sponsor terrorism. Hey, that was then, this is now]. Cheney led Halliburton into the top ranks of corporate welfare hogs, benefiting from almost $2 billion in taxpayer-insured loans [and $2.3 billion in government contracts. Most of the work was done by Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root], thus reinstating a fine old Texas tradition. Brown & Root was Lyndon Johnson's major money source: It was to LBJ what Enron was to George W."

Frank Rich writes, "No one seems to remember anymore that President [sic] Bush put Mr. Cheney in charge of not one but two task forces last year... On May 8, 2001, the president charged Mr. Cheney with overseeing a 'national effort' to coordinate all federal programs for responding to domestic attacks... Did Mr. Cheney take on that responsibility with the same urgency with which he met with Enron executives to develop energy policy? [After 9/11, The Washington Post reported] that the government-wide review that Mr. Bush had entrusted to Mr. Cheney had never taken place... Were the vice president to be quizzed about his pre-Sept.-11 efforts at preparedness, he'd likely either invoke secrecy or impugn the questioner's patriotism. [The cure Mr. Bush now proposes for such ailments is still another avoidance of accountability that reshuffles the same deck of lightweights we have now]. These days that's a sure sign that the buck-passing will never stop."

"Every action the Vice President takes should be under scrutiny, shouldn't it? We were all told about Vice President Gore's fundraising methods, ad nauseum. Every time Mr. Gore sighed, or told an anecdote, he was called a liar and a phony and worse. Why isn't the same level of scrutiny applied to Vice President Dick Cheney? ... Mr. Cheney, for the stonewalling of your energy commission documents, for your decision not to tell investors about Halliburton's accounting practices for a year, for the double dealings on Iraq through Halliburton's subsidiaries, for firing 10,000 workers after lining your own pockets with ill-gotten gains, for all the asbestos litigation cases that you made Hallibuton a part of, and most of all, for all the times you've falsely invoked patriotism to cover your old, unethical behind, for the good of America Mr. Cheney, please resign immediately." So writes Richard Prasad in Democratic Underground.

"In his campaign for VP, Cheney touted his leadership of the 85,000-employee Halliburton Corp. But since then, the firm's fortunes have faltered dramatically... The company's stock valuation today might be as high as $18 billion -- instead of the current $8 billion -- were it not for the potential liability shouldered after the Cheney-engineered 1998 merger between Halliburton and Dresser Industries. The asbestos liability is not the only concern. Last week, the company revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a preliminary investigation into an accounting practice -- adopted when Cheney was CEO -- in which unapproved billings were counted as revenue... The [Dresser] merger 'was probably one of the most foolish decisions Halliburton ever made,' said lawyer John Wall of Houston... 'Cheney would have had to know' about the potential asbestos liability. 'That would be part of his due diligence. If he didn't know, that would be total incompetence.'"

Michael Kinsley writes: "Halliburton is a special case, because its CEO during most of those Accounting-a-Go-Go years that climaxed with the Enron scandal was Dick Cheney. Cheney now runs the country, they say, adopting the role of mild-mannered vice president to disguise his superpowers…Halliburton revealed that its accounting practices beginning in the Cheney era are under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission… [In] 1998,…Halliburton… began guessing how much of a disputed surcharge would ultimately get paid, and crediting itself in advance… And where was Arthur Andersen while its client Halliburton was sautéing the spreadsheets?… And where was the future vice president while this was going on? The company insists, graciously, that a mere $100 million flyspeck on the company accounts (1999 income: $438 million) was beneath the notice of a busy CEO such as Dick Cheney… " Who will stop these career white collar criminals???

"Halliburton said the SEC was investigating a change in its accounting practices that enabled the company to postpone possible losses of hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars. Halliburton did not reveal the change to investors for more than a YEAR after instituting it… Whether the SEC inquiry will reach Mr. Cheney, who as chief executive had final responsibility for Halliburton's books, is unclear. In a memo in 2000 to his colleagues at Arthur Andersen, which was Halliburton's auditor, the partner who managed the Halliburton account boasted of his close relationship with Mr. Cheney… Seth Taube, former director of enforcement for the NY office of the SEC, said he believed that the SEC would not shy from investigating Cheney's role in Halliburton's accounting practices… "The SEC has a history of investigating administration officials as much as the party out of office," Mr. Taube said. "If the investigation leads to Cheney, I believe the staff will pursue it." Yeah, sure. Impeach Cheney Now!

"During...Dick Cheney's tenure as its CEO, the Halliburton Corporation altered its accounting policies so it could report as revenue more than $100 million in disputed costs on big construction projects, public filings by the company show. Halliburton did not disclose the change to investors for over a year. At the time of the change… approved by Arthur Andersen, the company's auditor at the time, Halliburton was suffering big losses on some of its long-term contracts, according to the filings. Its stock had slumped because of a recession in the oil industry. Two former executives of Dresser Industries, which merged with Halliburton in 1998, said that they concluded after the merger that Halliburton had instituted aggressive accounting practices to obscure its losses... Accounting specialists said that the change stretched and may have broken accounting rules." In other words, Cheney broke federal securities laws - just like Bush at Harkin Energy. Impeach Bush and Cheney!

"Employees of Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of the Dallas-based Halliburton Corp. (once run by Dick Cheney), are scheduled to arrive at the Bagram air base in southern Afghanistan to take over the day-to-day support services at the Force Provider camp starting in late April or early May... 'The Bush-Cheney team have turned the US into a family business,' says Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War... 'That's why we haven't seen Cheney – he's cutting deals with his old buddies who gave him a multimillion-dollar golden handshake. Have they no grace, no shame, no common sense? Why don't they just have Enron run America?'… 'This is a company that has more experience with insider dealing and corruption than with efficiency,' The World Policy Institute's Hartung said. 'During the Second World War, there was a Senate committee on war profiteering. Personally I think we should set it up again and investigate Brown and Root,' he says." So writes Pratap Chatterjee.

With $10,000 in donor financing, GWBush.com has produced a radio ad exposing the illegal business with Iraq that Cheney engaged in at Halliburton. This effort represents the beginning of the site's "open media project that will enable people WHO ARE NOT REPUBLICAN BILLIONAIRES to produce and air issue ads."

"As he helped the Bush administration write its national energy report last year, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham heard from more than 100 energy industry executives, trade association leaders and lobbyists, according to documents released by the Energy Department. Mr. Abraham did not meet with any representatives of environmental organizations or consumer groups, the documents show. In a press release on Monday night, the Energy Department summarized the secretary's calendar by saying that Mr. Abraham met with 36 industry representatives on task force matters. Most news organizations reported that figure today. But Mr. Abraham actually met with 109 representatives of energy industry companies and trade associations... 18 [of which] contributed a total of $16.6 million to the Republican Party since 1999, nearly three times what they gave to the Democratic Party." So reports the NY Times. We demand ALL of Cheney's Secret Energy Task Force documents!

The Washington Post reports, "Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met with 36 representatives of business interests and many campaign contributors while developing President Bush's energy policy, and he held no meetings with conservation or consumer groups... A first review of the 11,000 pages of documents bolsters the contention of Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups that the Bush administration relied almost exclusively on the advice of executives from utilities and producers of oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy while a White House task force drafted recommendations that would vastly increase energy production... Of the corporations that met with Abraham, all but a few were large contributors of unregulated soft money to the Republican Party during the 2000 election cycle. A dozen of the companies that had meetings with Abraham contributed $1.2 million to the GOP, mainly for Bush's election." Thousands of additional pages were withheld - we demand a Special Prosecutor!

In the "lest we forget" department: While Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the company helped build the notorious Yadana gas pipeline in Burma, using slave labor and systematic brutality. A U.S. federal District Court concluded that the Yadana pipeline consortium knew of and benefited from forced labor and other human rights crimes committed by the Burmese military on behalf of the project. "Halliburton's involvement in the Yadana project is a classic case of 'destructive engagement,'" said Katie Redford, Co-Director of EarthRights International. "To be involved in the Yadana pipeline is to knowingly accept brutal violations of human rights as part of doing business." An EarthRights report, "How Dick Cheney And USA-Engage Subvert Democracy At Home and Abroad," documents how a joint venture of Halliburton subsidiary European Marine Construction laid the offshore portion of the Yadana pipeline in 1996-97.

For the second time in a month, the Bush administration was ordered by a Federal judge to turn over documents about Cheney's Energy Task Force. Judicial Watch sued the administration on 5-9-01; on 3-5-02, Judge Paul L. Friedman ordered thousands of pages to be turned over by March 25. This lawsuit complements a separate Judicial Watch lawsuit, before Judge Emmet Sullivan, against the Vice President and the Task Force seeking to apply the open meetings law known as the Federal Advisory Committee Act to the Cheney Task Force directly. "The stone wall is beginning to crumble. The Court's ruling is a victory for openness in government and defeat to the Bush Administration’s efforts to delay release of these Energy Task Force documents," stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman.

On February 26, Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root Services received a $16 million contract to build 408 MORE cells at Guantanamo Bay. Were Afghan prisoners transported halfway around the world to make Cheney's friends rich? And why are MORE cells being built? Join in the discussion (registration required).

"To: The Honorable Thomas F. Hogan, Chief Judge, United States District Court of the District of Columbia: We, the undersigned citizens of the United States of America, respectfully request that Judge John D. Bates be disqualified from the following civil action now before the Court: Case No. 1:02cv00340 David Walker, Comptroller General of the General Accounting Office v. Vice President Richard B. Cheney. We come before you with this request based upon the following factual data, which we believe disqualifies Judge Bates from hearing this case. 1) President Bush appointed Judge John D. Bates. 2) Judge Bates contributed $1000 to the Bush campaign in 2000. 3) Judge John D. Bates served two (2) years as a Deputy for the Office Of Independent Counsel under Kenneth W. Starr..." Sign the petition!

Ari Fleischer (supposedly) writes: "Dear members of the media: Thank you for checking in daily to find out which stories you should and should not report. Today's DO NOT REPORT story has to do with Vice President Dick Cheney's support for two members of the axis of evil. So far the story has only been reported once, several months ago, in the Financial Times of London. As you know, the Bush administration has scheduled two more wars against Iraq and Iran, respectively, to begin each time the president's approval rating dips below 70%. So it is very important that you do not report this story: Halliburton, the largest US oil services company, is among a significant number of US companies that have sold oil industry equipment to Iraq since the UN relaxed sanctions two years ago."

Anthony York writes, "You know that if DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe and the National Review agree about a Bush administration policy, the White House is probably in real trouble. But the unusual coalition leaning on the White House to come clean about the energy task force" also includes Judicial Watch, the Sierra Club, and Arianna Huffington - plus U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler. Kessler issued a ruling Wednesday ordering the Department of Energy to hand over more than 7,500 pages in documents related to the energy task force to the National Resources Defense Council. Democrats realize that the administration's pattern of stonewalling the public is a good populist issue, and have been quick to blast the Bush administration for its penchant for privacy. The DNC has started sending out daily briefings: "A daily review of the White House's attempts to keep America from learning their secrets." Earlier this week, the DCCC relaunched a Web site called DiscloseTheDocuments.org.

Imagine if VP Al Gore had created a job at EPA for his eldest daughter Karenna to oversee work on global warming. We would never have heard the end of it, right? Well, Dick Cheney is creating a job in the State Department for his daughter Elizabeth to oversee Middle East oil. Remember, it's YOUR money. Where is the outrage???

"Interviews and task force correspondence demonstrate an apparent correlation between large campaign contributions and access to Mr. Cheney's task force. Of the top 25 energy industry donors to the Republican Party before the November 2000 election, 18 corporations sent executives or representatives to meet with Mr. Cheney... or members of the task force and its staff. The companies include the Enron Corporation, the Southern Company, the Exelon Corporation, BP, the TXU Corporation, FirstEnergy and Anadarko Petroleum... 'It's this bunch of guys in energy who say, 'Boo! We don't like this,' and the Bush administration says, 'Well, they elected us,'' said Eric Schaeffer, who was chief of regulatory enforcement for the EPA until his resignation on Wednesday. 'This is a natural alliance. The administration didn't need a lot of persuading.' Mr. Schaeffer, who worked at the EPA for 12 years, resigned over what he called lax enforcement of clean air laws." So reports the NY Times.

"A Secret Service document detailing security arrangements for Vice President Dick Cheney at the Olympic Closing Ceremony was left at a Salt Lake City store Sunday afternoon by two agents shopping for Games souvenirs. The agents were at Traps, which sells skateboards and apparel near the University of Utah, when they apparently forgot the sensitive document titled 'site post assignment log.' 'It had a pretty detailed description about what was going on,' said Clayton Greenhalgh, the store owner who discovered the document lying on a counter after the agents each purchased an $11 Olympic souvenir hat." So reports the Salt Lake Tribune.

Cheney will fight to the death before releasing details of his Energy Task Force. But here's a glimpse at one key decision, approving oil drilling off Florida's West Coast. In Feb. 2001, just 3 weeks after stealing the White House, Cheney met with the Chairman of Shell Oil, Steven Miller, and the Chairman of Andarko Petroleum, Robert Allison Jr. How did they get access to Cheney so quickly? "Allison gave $150,000 to the Republican Party; Miller gave $10,500 to the party and $1,000 to Bush's presidential campaign." Moreover, Lynne Cheney made $250,000-$500,000 when a company on whose board she sat, Union Pacific, merged with Andarko. In May, Cheney told Florida's Congressional delegation "the administration would not agree to a ban on new offshore drilling in the Gulf." In July, Cheney approved the lease of 1.5 million acres. "In a December auction, Anadarko and Shell won the right to develop several prime sites." This is blatant corruption. We demand a Special Prosecutor!

The last time Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) got military a contract, it fraudulently overbilled by $6 million, according to whistleblower Dammen Gant Campbell. Ashcroft's Injustice Department settled for $2 million, letting Halliburton keep $4 million that it stole of YOUR money. But that settlement was not reached until 2/8/02. So how did Halliburton get a new 10-year military contract on 12/17/01 that is worth untold billions? We demand an investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General!

According to Joshua Micah Marshall, the federal judge assigned to Walker v. Cheney is John Bates, who was Deputy Independent Counsel under Ken Starr from 1995-97. Bates "conducted and supervised sensitive grand jury investigations" - which leaked like a sieve, and the individual responsible should have been prosecuted, but never was. Bates never criticized Starr's prosecutorial misconduct; instead, he vigorously defended Starr's all-Federalist Society team. "These individuals are not partisans who are on a mission but rather professionals who take their jobs and obligations seriously." This is an outrage! Once again, we demand a Special Prosecutor!

Here's a mega-scandal we somehow missed. According to the Institute for Southern Studies, "Last December, the US Department of Defense made a no-cap, cost-plus-award contract to Halliburton KBR's Government Operations division. The Dallas-based company is contracted to build forward operating bases to support troop deployments for the next nine years wherever the President chooses to take the anti-terrorism war." This explains why BushCheney want PERMANENT war. It also positions Halliburton perfectly to go after oilfield services contracts near US military bases - especially all the new bases around Afghanistan in Caspian oil country. When this deal was negotiated, Halliburton was facing possible bankruptcy over asbestos lawsuits. Did Halliburton get the BushCheney bankruptcy bailout that Enron was allegedly denied? We want to know more, but the Pentagon scrubbed the contract from its Web site. We demand a Special Prosecutor!

After trying to negotiate with the White House for a year, the GAO was finally forced to file an historic lawsuit, Walker v. Cheney. Dictator Bush is rolling out his heaviest legal artillery - led by Election 2000 Lawyer-in-Thief Ted Olson - to remove "any question about how seriously we take this principle." What principle, exactly? The principle that Bush is America's Dictator, and cannot be questioned by anyone. Of course, this comes as no surprise to those of us who have been protesting his Theft of the Presidency since 11-8-00. At this point in Bush's power-grab, there are two solutions: 1) Congress should demand that the Justice Department appoint a Special Prosecutor (with clear subpoena power) to expose the truth about Enrongate; and 2) Americans must elect a Democratic House in November in order to begin impeachment proceedings.

In The Nation, Nate Blakeslee writes: "Congress's effort to obtain records from Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force has now reached the boiling point. The Enron collapse has only made Cheney dig in his heels even harder, such that the whole country is now wondering just what Ken Lay asked for--that is, recommended--at those meetings, and what Cheney delivered. But is it Enron's dealings with the task force Cheney is trying to hide, or Halliburton's? The huge Dallas-based oilfield services conglomerate, for which Cheney served as CEO from 1995 to July 2000, may yet become Cheney's own poison pretzel." Blakeslee suggests two possible "favors" sought by Halliburton: 1) lawsuit restrictions to limit asbestos lawsuits, and 2) lifting of sanctions on "evil" Iraq, where Halliburton is the biggest US contractor.

Columnist Marianne Means writes, "Incredibly, Fleischer recently defended the White House insistence on keeping the names of the participants in VP Dick Cheney's energy task force a secret by claiming that the precedent for such arrogant behavior was set by the drafters of the Constitution...'The very document that protects our liberties more than anything else, the Constitution was, of course, drafted in total secrecy. The founders ... recognized that in order to make careful decisions, they wanted to set forth a deliberative and thoughtful process and they concluded to do so quietly.' Good grief!... The Founding Fathers flooded the country with the records they had kept of their debates, copies of letters they had written to friends, philosophical arguments over the wisdom of their actions -- anything to spread the word about the content and purpose of what they had done... The White House handling of the cowardly Cheney task force is the antithesis of this openness."

"Only the president has the right to executive privilege, not the vice president. It's never gone that far. It's really a uniquely presidential privilege, and the president himself must invoke it, and there has be no invocation of executive privilege here. What they've said is, we challenge GAO's authority to even ask for this information. That's different than executive privilege. What this appears, Paula, to me to be is the first step of a cover-up. This is the way you start it. You stall, you stall, you stall. You try to get something like this to go on until it is no longer an issue, until something intervenes and replaces it, or the issue becomes moot for some other reason. That's the early signal here... Certainly the way we did during Watergate was to try to stall everything, and this is a stalling action." So says Nixon White House counsel John Dean.

Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, will pay $2 million to settle accusations that it defrauded the government. "Kellogg Brown & Root, a Houston subsidiary of the multinational energy services corporation Halliburton, was accused of inflating contract prices for maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord, a military base, now closed, near Monterey, Calif... The suit, filed in Sacramento, said the company submitted false claims and made false statements in connection with 224 delivery orders between April 1994 and September 1998... Cheney was Halliburton's chairman and chief executive when the government says Kellogg Brown & Root made the false claims and statements, but no evidence has surfaced that Mr. Cheney knew of them. A Cheney spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking comment today." Why wasn't Cheney subpoenaed by the grand jury and required to testify under oath? We demand an investigation!

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Thursday ordered Dick Cheney to explain the constitutional argument behind its refusal to release details of its meetings by Tuesday, February 5. The order came in response to the lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, one of 4 lawsuits against Cheney's stonewalling. Judicial Watch will then respond by Feb. 8, and a hearing will be held on Feb. 12. If Cheney thinks he can stonewall until Election Day 2004, he's in for a big surprise!

Nixon White House Counsel (and Watergate whistleblower) John Dean says the GAO's legal case against Dick Cheney is a slam-dunk. So why is Cheney fighting an impossible battle? "For the Vice President to prevail would only require the support of the same five conservative justices who put the Vice President in his current job with their ruling in Bush v. Gore... Osama bin Laden himself could not concoct a more hurtful blow to our democracy... If Vice President Cheney were to prevail in such a suit, the high Court will have decided that Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch is limited to only what the President and Vice President are willing to permit. This would be an awesome realignment of power in Washington. Before Bush v. Gore, I would have said such a ruling would be impossible. Today, all I can say is it is a time for vigilance." All we can say is - Impeach the Felonious Five!

During the 2000 "presidential campaign, Richard B. Cheney acknowledged that the oil-field supply corporation he headed, Halliburton Co., did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries. But he insisted that he had imposed a 'firm policy' against trading with Iraq. 'Iraq's different,' he said. According to oil industry executives and confidential United Nations records, however, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based company. Two former senior executives of the Halliburton subsidiaries say that, as far as they knew, there was no policy against doing business with Iraq. One of the executives also says that although he never spoke directly to Cheney about the Iraqi contracts, he is certain Cheney knew about them." So reports the Washington Post - remember this when Bush talks about the "Axis of Evil."

"There is a fine line between looking prudent and looking nervous and vulnerable, and Mr. Cheney's continued cave-dwelling — while the president is urging the rest of us to go about our lives — is starting to appear like the latter. It's bin Laden and his gang who are supposed to be on the run, not our vice president. I think it's symbolically important that Mr. Cheney return to a normal life and routine in his well-protected residence — before bin Laden is captured in his cave or confirmed dead. I would hate to see us sound the all-clear for Mr. Cheney only after bin Laden is killed." So writes NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

"A top House Democrat, annoyed that Vice President Cheney won't detail what contacts his energy task force had with Enron, set up a hotline yesterday seeking dirt on Cheney's dealings with the collapsed energy giant. An aide said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) put the tip mechanism on his Web site after writing Cheney on Tuesday seeking information on 'secret contacts your energy task force had with Enron Corp.' Cheney has refused to release information on industry lobbyists and executives consulted by the task force that he headed while formulating a Bush administration energy plan this year. 'We urge Enron employees who have information about the meetings with Vice President Cheney to share it with us, as well as relevant information about [any] improper activities by Ken Lay and others,' Waxman aide Phil Schiliro said." You go, Henry!

"Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said Enron executives who contributed heavily to President [sic] Bush's campaign may have exerted 'significant influence' on the energy plan formulated by Cheney's task force last spring. In a dispute that began in April, Cheney has refused to tell congressional Democrats which power industry executives and lobbyists met with the task force. The panel recommended expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and a rejuvenated nuclear power system. 'In light of Enron's financial failure, you should reconsider your insistence on secrecy,' Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, wrote the vice president. 'It is appropriate to ask whether Enron communicated to you or others affiliated with your task force information about its precarious financial position," Waxman wrote. "This is especially important since this information was apparently hidden from investors and the public until quite recently.'"

"A conservative academic group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, fired a new salvo in the culture wars by blasting 40 college professors as well as the president of Wesleyan University and others for not showing enough patriotism in the aftermath of Sept. 11. 'College and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response to the attack,' say leaders of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in a report being issued today. The report names and criticizes professors for making statements 'short on patriotism and long on self-flagellation.' Several of the scholars singled out in the report said yesterday they felt blacklisted, complaining that their words had been taken out of context to make them look like enemies of the state. 'It's a little too reminiscent of McCarthyism,' said Hugh Gusterson, an associate professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

Since Bush returned to the White House on September 13, Cheney has been hiding in a secret bunker. Still, Cheney's bunker has full communications capabilities, and he continues to exercise complete control over the U.S. government, including scripting Bush's appearances. Last Friday, he made a rare appearance at the White House, but then returned to his bunker. Karl Rove and Karen Hughes have kept the cameras away from Cheney since his command performance on the Sept. 16 Meet the Press, when he proved beyond any doubt that he's "in charge," as Al Haig famously proclaimed. But on Friday, RoveHughes will let PBS' Jim Lehrer visit Cheney's bunker for his first interview in 26 days. Don't miss it!

Lynne Cheney joined right-wing ideologues in undermining our national unity, by attacking educators who emphasize multiculturalism in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. NYC Schools deputy chancellor Judith Rizzo recently said, "Those people who said we don't need multiculturalism, that it's too touchy-feely, a pox on them. I think they've learned their lesson." But not Cheney, who twisted Rizzo's remarks into blaming "our failure to understand Islam [for] so many deaths and so much destruction." Hey Lynne, that's NOT what Rizzo said. The world is changing rapidly, and if we Americans don't make an effort to understand the aspirations and struggles of the nearly 6 BILLION people outside the US, we will be incapable of explaining our views - and defending American interests. And we will soon lose our position as the world's superpower.

We consider this highly speculative, but according to CounterPunch, "Before the September 11 attacks, vice president Dick Cheney was set to quit. President George Bush was preparing to nominate Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as Cheney's successor. A prominent Philadelphia businessman and close friend of Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge has been telling friends that in late summer Cheney went to Bush and told the president that his health was so precarious that he would soon be forced to quit the vice presidential post. Bush had thereupon called the Pennsylvania governor and told him that when Cheney stepped down he wanted to nominate Ridge to the US Senate for confirmation as the new vice president." That might explain Bush's appointment of Ridge to head the powerful new Office of Homeland Security...

GAO Comptroller General David M. Walker is a conservative with a major handicap: He has a conscience. So now, with Cheney STILL refusing to turn over the secret list of energy task force members, Walker is finding himself, as a man who believes the law is more sacred than political interest, in the position of having to sue the White House to uphold that law. In this respect, Walker is reminiscent of GOP Congressman Bill Cohen back in 1974, who was the first of either party to formally speak out against Nixon's actions in Watergate. Like Jeffords and Cohen, Walker may soon be proving once more that integrity has no party. Meanwhile, in stark contrast, Ari Fleischer's defense of Cheney's actions seem pitiful indeed: "is not a matter of public purview for each and every meeting, for each and every minute of the president and vice president each and every day to be reported publicly."

"The White House on Thursday rejected a demand to turn over documents sought by Congress in an inquiry into how the Bush administration's energy policy was formed. Vice President Dick Cheney's spokeswoman, Juleanna Glover Weiss, said the White House was confident in its position that the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, did not have the legal authority to request the information. The GAO had demanded the White House respond by Thursday or face a lawsuit. Cheney has provided some information to the GAO but not meeting records of President Bush's energy task force, which was headed by Cheney...Critics have charged the Bush energy policy was the product of closed meetings involving energy industry officials with little input from environmentalists and other concerned groups." Whatever happened to Bush's campaign talk that campaign finance restrictions could be eased, as long as there was "full disclosure?"

Here's a perfect Bu$hCheney story: first, the Navy sends out a submarine to take wealthy donors on a joyride. (The group were GOP/Bush contributors and mostly Texas oilers -- including members of a foundation chaired by Bush Sr.!) In a rush to get home, the submarine surfaces too quickly and sinks a Japanese fishing boat, killing 9, including 4 teenagers. So who gets the $40 million contract to salvage the boat? Cheney's former employer, Halliburton, owner of the Rockwater 2! And when they run into problems along the way, who profits from the cost overruns? You guessed it! Where is the outrage?

Catharine Kelley described Cheney's stop in PA to sell his energy plan to "In Pittsburgh's" Marty Levine: On Cheney's performance: 'It seemed like his laryngitis got a little worse for some questions and a little better for others,' she ventures. She was horrified by Cheney's shrugging response about the necessity of insurance for nuclear power plants ('You don't need special insurance for a windmill -- it's not going to explode,' she muses) and very disappointed that nothing cleaner than "clean coal" was addressed, save a new hybrid car fuel. Kelley isn't certain what the energy future may hold, but she is sure of one thing: Cheney spokesperson Mary Matalin is 'horrible. She does not open her mouth when she speaks. She had a diamond ring that flashed so brilliantly that you had to look away.' (It's probably contributing to the carbon overload in the environment!). Kelley's story is third one down.

Where was Gary Condit when Chandra Levy left her apartment on May 1 at 1 pm? Meeting with Dick Cheney! Cheney has been withholding this information from the media and the police for weeks. We demand an investigation of Cheney's failure to assist the DC police! In addition, what WERE Cheney and Condit discussing? Was Cheney blackmailing Condit over his affair with Chandra? Was Condit revealing confidential Democratic information to Cheney - in other words, spying?

In an interview with the far-right American Spectator, Dick Cheney rejected the worldwide scientific consensus that human activity is the cause of global warming. "There seems to be no doubt that there is global warming going on. It shows up a lot of different ways. The question is whether it's a result of centuries-long natural cycles or whether man's activity over the last 50 or 60 years has contributed to it." Hey Dick - only the scientific whores of energy companies deny that burning of fossil fuels is the principal cause of global warming. Have you read the definitive report of the International Panel on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/spm22-01.pdf) - the evidence of human responsibility is now beyond any doubt! Asked about European anger over Kyoto, Cheney contemptuously said, "They'll get over it." No Dick, Europeans - and Americans - will never get over the crimes you committed before the election - and after it.

For the first time in history, the General Accounting Office (a non-partisan auditing arm of Congress) has issued a "demand letter" to a Vice President. The GAO wants details about Cheney's secret energy task force, but Cheney refuses to reveal how our taxpayer dollars were spent. If Cheney continues to stonewall, the GAO will be forced to sue. "The White House should simply try telling the truth on the task force's activities and stop hiding information that Congress and the public have a right to see," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). "The vice president should tell his office to end this arrogant and unnecessary confrontation with GAO and accept the fact that he and the president are accountable to the Congress and the American people."

There are some comments that are so outrageously hypocritical, so full of bull and so born of desperation that they require no commentary. This one, in fact, demands special recognition for combining sleaze with surrealism in a manner even Fellini would be hard-pressed to rival. In response to Rep. Henry Waxman's suggestion that Karl Rove be investigated for financial and ethical infractions that make Whitewater look like a paddle boat ride, Cheney Aide Mary Matalin said (and we are NOT making this up), "The Democrats have continued on their course of the politics of personal destruction. They ought to stop wasting taxpayer money on phony investigations and start working on the energy policy we sent to the Hill." We hear Matalin has already received attractive offers from the Firestone public relations people...

Thanks to his own energy policies, multi-millionaire Dick Cheney can't afford his electric bill. So he did what any right-wing Republican would do - told the Pentagon to pay for it! Hey, if it's good enough for Dick Cheney, why not the rest of us? Send your electric bill to Vice Resident Dick Cheney, Observatory Lane, Washington DC 20007, and tell him to forward the bill to the Pentagon for payment. Tell him you expect prompt action, just like he gives his oil & gas buddies!

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against VP Dick Cheney for denying the public information about the activities of a White House energy task force that he led. Judicial Watch said the energy task force was not in compliance with the Federal Advisory Commission Act or the Freedom of Information Act, which require that documents, task force members, meetings and decision-making activities be open to the public. The General Accounting Office (GAO), at the request of Democratic lawmakers, is trying to establish who met with the White House panel and how much money was spent by the task force. The White House has refused to provide the list of names and has questioned the authority of the GAO to even investigate the task force.

This press release announcing the availability of a photo of Cheney fishing is telling for two reasons. First, it is titled "Photo Advisory." Does this mean that Bush and Cheney are relying so desperately on photo-ops to shore up their sagging images that they have to herald such events with the sort of heading usually reserved for tornadoes and escaped convicts? Second, it refers to a carefully staged shot of the VP standing up in a boat fishing, looking uncomfortably stiff (as if he had been precariously propped up with one pole in hand, the other duct-taped to his back and holding him upright). Meanwhile, in Maine, Bush was also soaking up the fishing photo op bit, showing off his catch, a clearly rightwing bass who had eagerly taken the bait and swallowed his hook.

Even columnist Arianna Huffington, who tries VERY hard to put a positive spin on the GOP, is skeptical of just how "minor" Cheney's latest surgery really was. "The cheery spin being put on Vice President Cheney's latest health crisis has been enough to turn even the most diehard Panglossian into a jaundice-eyed cynic. The merry medicos, who seemed to have prescribed some happy pills for themselves just before the briefing, did everything they could to make the 90 minutes Cheney was under the knife sound like a perfectly relaxing way to spend a Saturday morning...I know that when I'm feeling sort of tense, there is nothing more soothing than having a couple of wires threaded through the veins leading to my heart, and a device the size of an electronic garage door opener inserted into my chest. Either that or a latte. The vice president's prognosis is terrific,' chirped Reiner. 'He felt great when it was over.' So how does the V.P. describe days when he doesn't undergo heart surgery? Orgasmic?"

According to Salon, "Several critics of managed care say that, had Cheney been an ordinary cardiac patient enrolled in an HMO, he would have had to wait or fight or both to receive the ICD that now regulates his cardiac arrhythmia. Cheney has insisted at press conferences that the implant wasn't a life-or-death matter, but merely 'an insurance policy.'" HMO's routinely deny expensive care that they deem non-essential. The Democratic-sponsored Patients' Bill of Rights seeks to fix that situation, but Cheney's puppet Bush has threatened to veto the bill.

Guess who picks up the tab for Dick Cheney's extremely expensive medical procedures, not to mention medical personnel on round-the-clock stand-by just in case his "tendency to sudden death" threatens to kick in? The same folks who pay for all VPs: the American public. The same American public who cannot get medical coverage at all if they are afflicted by far less serious woes. The same American public who by a broad margin support the patients' rights bill Bush stands poised to veto. This is just like the feudal baron days when the peasants went hungry so the lord of the manor could have daily feasts. The American public should not pay for Dick Cheney's preexisting and serious health problem, and legislation should be passed to ensure taxpayers never get stuck with such bills again!

We find it odd that in a nation where the government must certify that even army privates are free from so much as a heart murmur, that the second in command of the entire country is permitted to shuffle in and out of hospitals having his heart tinkered with every few months. While Private X would be given an immediate medical discharge for far lesser troubles, VP Cheney is kept on the job by his spin doctors, who would have us believe four heart attacks, a stent and a pacemaker are "no big deal." Some medical experts are more skeptical. Dr. Thomas Graboys of Lown Cardiovascular Center in Brookline, MA, says the ICD implanted in Cheney is usually reserved for patients with more serious problems than Cheney purportedly has. MA General's Dr. Jeremy Ruskin, however, reassures us that the ICD is "very effective at preventing sudden death." Hmmm...tendency to sudden death doesn't seem like a stellar qualification for a world leader, does it?

Cheney is stonewalling for all he's worth to keep the public from learning the names of the secret task force that crafted the Shrubcheney Consortium's hated national energy plan. There must be some damning revelations there, or he wouldn't be so determined. But the General Accounting Office is just as determined and is prepared to file a civil action to obtain the information. Here's a few names we expect to see on the list: Kenneth Lay, James Baker, Edward L. Morse, Adam Siemenski, and Chuck Watson (all major oil/energy co. players). But the name we suspect Cheney is most determined to hide is HENRY KISSINGER - especially in light of recent developments (scroll down to earlier Kissinger story below). Kissinger is, historically, up to his armpits in oil and blood. We shall find out...sooner or later.

"In a meeting [with mostly California Democrats]…the temperature began to rise in the room as it became clear that Cheney, aside from spending the hour, planned to offer nothing to ease the energy situation in California. 'We're not asking for anything the law doesn't provide for, and we need to have our citizens paid attention to,' declared Rep. Anna Eshoo, her voice reasonably toned but with evident emotion. Cheney responded with what some in the room interpreted as a condescending tone…Eshoo tried to follow up. She got as far as 'Mr. Vice President, with all due respect ...' 'Stop it. You're being very rude. You’re interrupting,' Cheney snapped, cutting off his questioner the way a headmaster might handle an unruly student. This was a side of the vice president that even veteran lawmakers had never seen. 'This was beyond hair-trigger,' says Rep. Ellen Tauscher. 'This is somebody who has such a visceral reaction to anybody questioning him that he just flattens you.'"

"During last year's presidential campaign,…Cheney acknowledged that the oil-field supply corporation he headed, Halliburton Co., did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries. But he insisted that he had imposed a 'firm policy' against trading with Iraq. 'Iraq's different,' he said. According to oil industry executives and confidential United Nations records, however, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer…One of the executives also says that although he never spoke directly to Cheney about the Iraqi contracts, he is certain Cheney knew about them." There also remain serious questions about what Cheney knew about Bush Sr.'s Iraqgate scheme that covertly armed and financed Hussein's military right up to the Kuwaiti invasion -- and George W 's business deals in the Gulf (Enter 'iraqgate' in our .Compass search engine).

Cheney is so determined to jack up gas prices he's now lying, not just to the public, but to people who KNOW he's lying. Last week, Cheney told OPEC the U.S. would not seek an increase in the cartel's production of crude and would instead support a cap. Cheney lies and claimed a boost would only temporarily reduce gas prices, which would soon rise again. "Who's he kidding?" said Leo Drollas, chief economist at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, "Of course it will help!" Drollas says increased crude supplies would insure plenty of cheaper gas in the crucial summer months. When a candidate, Bush PROMISED voters he'd use his oil co. pull to make OPEC "open your spigots." Now that Cheney's the real boss and sees a chance to stick it to the public big time, he's going for it, no matter what!

It is Dick Cheney who is running this country, make no mistake about it. As the chief rep. for the energy industry, especially big oil, Cheney makes sure he has control of every inch of the White House, every GOP "show dog" (heel!) and even the Pentagon. Bush has his own odious vices - he's ignorant, vain, arrogant, and (like anyone who becomes a puppet), is incredibly weak. But Cheney is using all of these vices to his own advantage. "He's not just overlord of the administration's new energy plan; he's everywhere and into everything... to a degree not seen before and... not likely to be seen again," writes Francine Kiefer of The Christian Science Monitor.

The billions and billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies Cheney showered on the oil, gas, and nuclear industries while he was in Congress really helped improve the energy situation, didn't it? Now he wants us to feed them billions more! Any sane person would want to know where the first few billion went before shelling out another dime. It sure didn't benefit the consumer in any way, shape, or form. But like any greedy blackmailer, the industry (of which Cheney is a kingpin) wants more this time - now they want us to throw in our intangible goods, too - our wildlands. At least we could someday hope to replace the cash handout. What will we gain for this extortion? Same thing we got in exchange for Cheney's other giveaways: NOTHING

If reason and science were in charge rather than money and politics we would be moving as quickly as possible to a distributed and environmentally appropriate generating paradigm - most buildings making their own clean, safe and reliable power on location. The technology for doing this is already in an advanced state of development. They are called fuel cells (FCs). Instead, we have to suffer the embarassment of a Vice President using his position to lobby for the interests of the big power producers in their attempt yet again to impose a discredited, centralized, bureaucratized approach to meeting the nation's energy needs. It wasn't even a tough one for Dick. He's going to choose the industry's needs over the obviously conflicting interests of the citizens and consumers he supposedly works for.

Cheney's faulty heart (does he really have one?) must be depriving his brain cells of oxygen. Or, maybe he really IS just a truly stupid, colossally greedy old man. In any case, his energy act didn't play too well in Toronto. The Canadian take is that Cheney's sole goal "is to provide Americans with enough oil to power their SUVs now and forever... the former oil executive left little doubt where he stood: Guzzle it and we'll drill from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico." Cheney wants to build 1,300 new power plants, mostly coal-burning (we need more acid rain!) - yet the DOE itself says simple conservation measures could save the same amount of energy put out by 610 new plants. CHUCK CHENEY OUT! Or at least put him on some O2!

"Tip No. 1: Replace incandescent bulbs with much brighter incandescent bulbs. A 250-watt bulb burns brighter than a 100-watt bulb: a lot brighter. Don't listen to the "dim bulbs" who insist that lower-wattage light bulbs are somehow more energy efficient. There's nothing efficient about staggering across a dark room bumping into furniture. Also, remember that 30 percent of the energy consumed by a light bulb is expended when the bulb is switched on. Keeping your lights on all the time is a simple but effective way to conserve energy." So writes Tom McNichol in Salon.com

"The dirty secret is that the Texas oilmen in the White House like the price of foreign crude to be very high. That justifies increased U.S. production, even in pristine lands, and boosts energy profits, which doubtless will fatten the coffers of Republican candidates in the next election. You can't say we weren't warned. Put two Texas oil guys in the White House, and they are going to seize any opportunity to grease the palms of their big oil backers while raping the environment." So writes Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer.

Gov. Gray Davis (D-CA) took dead aim at the Bush administration Tuesday, asserting that it has "utterly failed to discharge its responsibility" in the energy crisis and that Vice President Dick Cheney is "grossly misinformed" about California's efforts. The Democratic governor's rough rhetoric, released in a prepared statement in response to statements Cheney made on television, marked the second time in two days Davis has blasted Republicans over the state's power woes.

Cheney now plans to shove ahead with his greed-driven plan to build scores of fossil-fuel-burning power plants for his coal and oil buddies. Got a problem with that? Too bad! He's also pushing for the right to seize private land if necessary. To top it off, the evil duo is also predicted to scrap Clinton's demands for more pollution controls on existing plants and to demand the power to bypass regulations to speed the construction process for new ones (i.e., they want right to ram them down our throats before we can stop them). In exchange we're supposed to be thrilled by the offer of tax credits for buying fuel-efficient hybrid cars - the same alternative cars Bush is trying to elimate research funds for. What's next - a modest tax break in exchange for letting them dump nuclear wastes in our front yards?

When Shrub's 1976 DUI arrest was revealed a few days before the election, we soon learned that Shrub had been arrested twice before, while he was a student at Yale. Now we're learning that Cheney was twice convicted of DUI in Wyoming in his early 20's. Why didn't the media report this during the campaign? We demand an investigation!

Diane Rehm hosts one of the more intelligent radio talk shows. Her guest on Wednesday from 10-11 am is Dick Cheney, who rarely - if ever - answers questions from the public. So if there is anything about the Bush administration that concerns you, prepare an intelligent - but unhedgeable - question, and tune in for the show.

Robert Novak, dean of the conservative columnists, is speculating that Colin Powell would be the first choice to replace Dick Cheney if he had to resign for health reasons. It is interesting to note that the conservative press is taking Cheney's health problems seriously, unlike the public positioning of the White House.

We wish Dick Cheney good health, honestly. But, in a bizarre, perverse sort of way, we also really need him. After all, if anything happens to Cheney, then Bush becomes President -- and it could get worse, as hard as that is to believe. Aside from these considerations, weren't we lied to about Cheney's health during the campaign? And the public still hasn't seen his medical records.

"On Monday, Cheney spokeswoman Mary Matalin assured us that the vice president had checked himself in to the hospital for 'a non-emergency precautionary procedure' after experiencing 'two brief, mild episodes of chest discomfort' over the weekend. By Tuesday that had doubled to four episodes of chest pain. Wasn't this the administration that was going to 'restore honor and dignity to the White House' and put an end to linguistic hairsplitting? I guess it's just a question of subject matter: New Democrats lie about sex; aging Republicans lie about their cholesterol count." So writes Arianna Huffington in Salon.

Cheney should resign immediately. He's not physically fit enough to assume the Presidency - which is the reason why we HAVE a VP. In addition, he's been lying about his health - breaking the "honesty" pledge that brought Bush within 540,000 votes of the real president, Al Gore.

Right-wing columnist John LeBoutillier has begun speculating on who would succeed Cheney if he can't "finish his term" (how genteel!) LeBoot floats former Sen. Alan Simpson (WY), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Simpson would be vetoed by the Council on National Policy because he's pro-choice, and Powell would be vetoed for supporting civil rights. Rumsfeld has no political skills. The obvious choice is JEB - the man who stole the election for Bush the Dumber, and who will never get re-elected in Florida as a result.

"Seven vice presidents have died in office, all of them from natural causes. Most were frail to begin with." So writes the Associate Press.

Dick Cheney has repeatedly refused to release his full medical records. Obviously, his health is worse than the White House wants the public to know. That's why they keep lying about his treatment, using "fuzzy medicine" terms like "precautionary measure." What is Cheney hiding in his medical records? And how long before the media starts demanding answers about the man who is keeping Bush the Dumber one heartbeat away from the Presidency?

Slate's Timothy Noah predicts Tom Ridge gets the title of Veep, but he was already vetoed once for being pro-choice, so he's out of the game. But Noah is more interested in who would be the "Shadow President" - the person who makes all the important decisions, regardless of their title. Noah picks Rumsfeld, but he's missing the real power players - Papa Bush, Jim Baker, Karl Rove, and Karen Hughes. The Bush team is like the grey-suited pallbearers in Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There" - no one stands out, but together they run the show.

Vice President Dick Cheney was hospitalized at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington after feeling chest pains over the past two days. Doctors are planning to perform a "repeat catheterization." After Cheney's fourth heart attack in Novemeber, Cheney said he would "absolutely" step down if he or his doctors had any concerns his health would impair his ability to be vice president. Cheney's wife and daughter lied to Bush and the public and denied his fourth heart attack. Cheney lied to Wolf Blitzer on Sunday and said he felt fine.

Dick Cheney's former company Halliburton Co. has opened an office in Tehran, Iran. Although the office is under a foreign subsidiary registered in the Cayman Islands, Halliburton's Iranian operations could violate US sanctions. The law states that "no U.S. person may approve or facilitate the entry into or performance of transactions or contracts with Iran by a foreign subsidiary of a U.S. firm that the U.S. person is precluded from performing directly. Similarly, no U.S. person may facilitate such transactions by unaffiliated foreign persons." The brochure of the Halliburton subsidiary states that it has provided services for two drilling projects in the Iranian sector of the Persian Gulf. How recent were these projects? Cheney left Halliburton just last July. In 1995 President Clinton signed an executive order prohibiting "new investments [in Iran]", or providing services "that would benefit the Iranian oil industry". Punishment for such offenses is up to $500,000 for companies, and up to 10 years imprisonment for individuals. We demand an investigation!

Ten years ago, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney cancelled the A-12 stealth fighter program after the Reagan-Bush administrations wasted $3 billion on the program without receiving a single plane. But Cheney did such a sloppy job of cancelling the program that a judge has ordered the federal government to pay $2 billion in damages to the contractors, General Dynamics and Boeing. When will the Sunday gasbags tart asking Cheney, their paragon of wisdom and virtue, some tough questions?

The legal challenge to the 32 Electors from Texas was set back once again by Republican judges who believe Cheney's hasty paper change of address was legal. Thursday's ruling was by 3 judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, one appointed by Reagan-Bush and two appointed by Bush-Quayle. Next stop is the Supreme Court, which means the 99.9% of Americans who are currently unaware that the 32 Electoral votes for Bush in Texas are illegal are in for a great big surprise. Remember, you read it here first!

With the help of Democrats.com, Attorney Phil Berg filed a class action lawsuit in Austin challenging the certification of the 32 Electors from Texas. "We believe Bush is from Texas and Cheney is from Texas. Cheney does not meet the residency requirements of the state of Wyoming," according to Berg. A similar lawsuit, filed by three Texans in Dallas on Nov. 20, is exposing crucial details about Cheney's fraudulent change of residence.

In Lynne Cheney's re-released novel "Body Politic," the fictional Vice President dies of a heart attack while cheating on his scheming and ambitious wife. The VP's wife lies to the President and the public for 6 weeks, pretending the VP is still alive. Last week, Lynne Cheney really lied to George W. Bush and the public, pretending that Cheney did not have a heart attack. So what would the real Lynne Cheney do if her husband actually died? We are left to wonder - was that *really* Dick Cheney who left the hospital?

A Wyoming State Representative faced felony charges of false swearing and false voting for lying about her address on an absentee ballot application and a candidate registration form. Prosecutors should examine Cheney's voting documents to determine whether he too broke the law.

I grew up in Wyoming like Dick Cheney, and like Dick Cheney I haven't lived there for years. Unlike Cheney, however, I don't claim to be a resident of the state while I am living somewhere else. This little deceit about which state he lives in is a major constitutional problem for the Republican presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and vice presidential candidate, Dick Cheney.

Who speaks for the Bush administration? It appears that the Bush administration is secretly being run by Lynn and Elizabeth Cheney. Isn't it time reporters confronted the Cheney women to demand the truth?

Early this morning, Dick Cheney was hospitalized as a result of chest pains. After extensive tests, it was determined that Cheney had a slight heart attack. Cheney has had three previous heart attacks and had bypass surgery in 1984. Cheney will remain in the hospital until Saturday.

Cheney has two drunken driving arrests on his record, while Dubya only has one. That gave Cheney bragging rights to praise Dubya for his "forthrightness"in handling the DUI story. In the GOP lexicon, forthrightness must mean lying. Otherwise Dick's comment doesn't make any sense since George lied about the DUI arrest until a news report exposed him. In any case, the Bush/Cheney, with its three DUI's, can now run as America's first AA Reunion ticket!

It's amazing that some people are voting for Bush because they say that they can't trust Gore. Here is a GOP ticket that has as its main candidate a guy whose whole manufactured image is belied by his record and his personal past. As their vice presidential candidate, they have a guy who has a scandal a day. You have to hand it to the Bush campaign. They would be very good at rehabilitating the images of released convicts too.

Oh Dick, count the ways you are an unethical businessman. Rant and wave all you want about the government being too large, you've done quite well feeding (and we might say it shows) at the public trough. Everyday, one more scandalous story emerges about your business affairs. Today we learn that you used people in U.S. embassies to help in your business dealings. Isn't it great to become a multi-millionaire at taxpayer expense?

See a side of Dick Cheney that you've never seen before. He's got a wild streak, Dick does. Catch the latest rage: the "Slim" Cheney rap dance!

Cheney wants to reduce the size of government, but his company made bucket loads of dollars off of government contracts. Now the Feds are investigating Dick's oil services company for defrauding the taxpayers, so to speak. Of course, Dick and George W. are staying mum about the whole thing. Oh, Dick, there's nothing like "Wealth"fare fraud, is there now?

Trumpeted as the foreign affairs heavy on the Bush ticket, Dick Cheney has a bit of a judgement problem. It seems that he cozied up to some of the world's top tyrants in order to rake in more dollars for his oil company. Take a look at his role in Burma, for instance.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Dick Cheney says the government had nothing to do with his business success. The record shows, however, that Cheney used his political connections to more than double the amount Haliburton gets from Uncle Sam than it did before he started there, and that it doubled its political contributions at the same time

Ross Perot promised us that NAFTA would produce a “giant sucking sound” of jobs moving to Mexico. Well it turns out that the sound and the direction are about right, but the source is Dick Cheney embarassing all of us by sucking up to his titular superior and intellectual inferior, George W. Bush. Watching Cheney try to make us believe that George W. Bush is qualified to be president of the United States is one of those awful vulgar spectacles that you can’t help but watch, even though it makes you squirm.

Tonight Joe Lieberman gets his chance to show the American people he is ready to be president. The vice presidential sideshow is mostly entertainment but for that one crucial fact. If Lieberman is smart – and you can count on that – he’ll just gingerly step around Cheney and not let him get in the way of his dialogue with the American people.

Get in the swing with the latest Republican fad, the "Slim Cheney" rap dance. After you see this, you will never think of Cheney as dull anymore.

In 1975, as an apparatchik in the Ford administration, Dick Cheney successfully urged a hike in oil prices. Of course, that meant consumers paid more. But, what's the problem, Cheney's oil baron friends made out like bandits. That's what friends are for.

Please Dick, don't jump! We need you desperately. You are more fun than Dan Quayle and a barrel of laughs. What would Leno and Letterman do without you? As for us, we would be forlorn, stripped of our daily chuckle over your latest embarrassment if you jumped ship. So, please, please, say it ain't so!

It looks like everyone had to fill out a vetting questionnaire for the GOP Vice Presidential spot except, you guessed it, Dick Cheney. The Bush camp won't fess up to the nine millionth Cheney ethical lapse, but they aren't denying it. But don't ask Dick, he's too busy considering his "options." You can't keep a well fad oil man away from his money for too long.

No one ever said that Dick Cheney's favorite musical piece was "Fanfare for the Common Man." As head of Halliburton, our man Dick argued that higher oil prices were good for America. Of course, they were good for greed. Thanks Dick for thinking about the common folks forking over the bucks at the pump.

Here's the latest on our main man, Dick Cheney. Although he only voted in 2 of 16 elections in the last few years, he wasn't neglectful when it came to writing out checks to right wing candidates. Big oil, big lies, and checkbook democracy. Way to go Dick!

Readers of BuzzFlash.com came up with plenty of reasons that Dick Cheney should not be a heart beat away from the Presidency. But the contest only asked for the top five, making it difficult to choose among so many Cheney negatives. The winners covered both serious and humorous ground. The top four were announced today.

Do we pick on Dick Cheney? The guy is like a treasure chest of foibles. How can you resist sticking your hand into the daily news and coming up with the latest Cheney knucklehead story. Well, today Cheney is blaming the media for trivializing the campaign. He claims that he and the Gov are talking about serious issues, but are being roundly ignored. Poor man, he needs someone to stroke his sense of self-importance. After all, everyone is out to get him --and he's fighting for the average multi-millionaire with all his heart and soul.

Just after being nominated for Vice President, our main man Dick Cheney cashed in a few of his options. Unlike the everday stock investor, Cheney made an $18.5 million windfall profit. "Big Oil has obviously made a big investment in the Bush-Cheney ticket," said Gore campaign spokesman Doug Hattaway. "When it comes to choosing between consumers and the oil industry, we know which side they'll be on."

Thank you Dick Cheney. Just when we thought we would run out of embarrassing tidbits about you, the well is replenished. The latest Cheney black eye is that Halliburton, his oil company, maintained separate washrooms overseas for foreigners. Ironically, some Republicans, who are never short of shameless hypocrisy, are urging Cheney to attack Gore harder on the integrity issue. Why don't they just nominate Newt Gingrich for President, since they don't seem to care about morality, decency or ethics when it comes to their own candidates? If Cheney were a Democrat, they would have burnt him at the stake by now.

There he goes again. Dick Cheney is keeping up his record of at least five embarrassing details a week. The latest, if you can keep up with them, is that he only voted 14 out of 16 times in elections since he registered in Dallas in 1995. He didn't even vote for Bush in the Texas primaries. If this guy had an ounce of integrity, he would throw in the towel now. About the only reason anyone would vote for him is that he will protect the interests of rich white balding males. If Cheney has the audacity to once more accuse Gore of lacking integrity, God should strike the oil exec with a plague of frogs.

Is this guy a Pandora's box of political liabilities, or what? Almost every day, he's good for a problem that throws the campaign off message. Today, the image challenge is that Dick is quite cheap when it comes to giving to the less fortunate. Cheney's a tightwad, what can we say? Who said this guy brought gravitas to "Dubya's" ticket? But then again, maybe this kind of stinginess appeals to Republicans.

Multi-millionaire Dick Cheney finally took the hint from the powers inside the Bush campaign. He agreed, in theory, that he would forgo $3.6 million (current value) in stock options if elected Vice President. We want Dick to be a happy man and, come the election, be able to keep his options. All he has to do is be defeated. And he's been doing a great job toward achieving that goal. Enough said.

Multi-millionaire Dick Cheney finally took the hint from the powers inside the Bush campaign. He agreed, in theory, that he would forgo $3.6 million (current value)in stock options if elected Vice President. We want Dick to be a happy man and, come the election, be able to keep his options. All he has to do is be defeated. And he's been doing a great job toward achieving that goal. Enough said.

Okay, we've made it clear that we think Dick Cheney is a hopelessly conflicted, "roll-back-the-clock" choice for V.P. Now, it appears, even the stalwart GOP cheerleaders are down on the "Options Make Me Rich" guy. Robert Novak, of all people, is accusing Cheney of being ineffectual and unprepared on the campaign trail. Of course, we agree.

The danger of Dick Cheney is that this guy is so unrepentantly full of ethical conflicts, oil industry loyalty, and greed that people may become numb to his unerring sense of self-interest. His attitude seems to be: "I'm rich. You're not. Take it or leave it." Now, the Washington Post is reporting that Cheney liked to lavish huge golden parachutes on other executives just like himself. The guy's got a heart of gold.

Monday must be Dick Cheney Day at Democrats.com. We just can't get enough of his self-serving audacity. A New York Times Editorial called on Cheney to do the right thing and give up his Halliburton options. The NYT argued that this would help the Vice-Presidential candidate avoid a conflict of interest. But not Dick Cheney. Greed is good for the man, but ethics are a bit of a stretch for him.

Over the weekend, while Bush napped in Texas, Cheney was put on the Sunday talk shows to draw some blood. The agenda was to toss an explosive accusation out and hope that the Bush team could maul its way out of its current defensive posture. But calling Al Gore, a Vietnam Veteran, "AWOL" on military issues is a bit hard to take from Cheney. While others served in Vietnam, Cheney successfully sought deferments. Does the phrase "Draft Dodger" come to mind? But the Republicans who called Bill Clinton a "Dodger" are staying curiously mum about their own Dick Cheney. That's enough to make Mr. Cheney our top dog hypocrite of the week.

Poor Dick Cheney. He has made millions off of big oil, but some of his stock options may not be immediately redeemable. What's a multi-millionaire to do? Boy, the GOP V.P. candidate must really be able to empathize with the common man and problems like being able to afford prescription drugs.

It's getting to be harder and harder for the GOP ticket to claim that they can relate to the average American. George W. Bush got a sweetheart deal from the Texas Rangers that made him a multi-millionaire after a series of failed business dealings. Now, the NYT reveals that Dick Cheney recently received a $20 million retirement package from his oil company.

If you're thinking that the Cheneys love their daughter "despite" her open lesbian lifestyle, that's what most gays are thinking too. It's not enough for George Bush to take a few photos with blacks to get the African-American vote. And apparently, gays don't plan on voting for the Bush-Cheney ticket just because Mary Cheney happens to be a lesbian. In an ongoing Internet poll conducted by Advocate magazine, up to 90% of the respondents indicate Bush won't be getting their votes come November.

Like many conservative Republicans, Cheney supported the apartheid South African government as it fought to suppress the forces of change. Now, Cheney is trying to whitewash his record. But it was what it was, the GOP Southern strategy playing itself out by supporting a white supremacist regime on the African continent.

Dick Cheney might as well have been a ribeye steak at a Texas barbeque, given the grllin' he got on the Sunday morning talk shows. Confronted with a fringe voting record by the likes of Sam Donaldson, Cheney took refuge in attacking the questions themselves. When your Congressional voting record makes Tom DeLay look like a liberal, maybe your only recourse is to go after the media. After all, you can't really explain supporting cop-killer bullets and keeping Nelson Mandela in jail.

Next time you pay for gas, don't complain. Dick Cheney wants you to know that high prices at the pump are good for America. Of course, they are also good for Cheney's Halliburton Company stock portfolio.