Never heard of it...Treason in high places...DNC donates surplus

Good Morning....in a feeble attempt to justify domestic spying, the Bush "administration" has come out with the news that a major terrorist attack on LA was foiled in 2002. The problem with that is the Mayor of LA never heard of such a thing. Think somebody pulled that out of their arse?

LOS ANGELES - Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Thursday he was blindsided by

President Bush's announcement of new details about a purported 2002 plot to crash a plane into a downtown skyscraper.

But the White House and state officials said the mayor's office had been contacted beforehand.

"I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the Democratic mayor told The Associated Press. "I don't expect a call from the president — but somebody."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Los Angeles officials were told Wednesday about the president's planned remarks.

"And the word I heard was that there was great appreciation for the notification that we provided," he said.

Bush has referred to the 2002 plot before, but he publicly filled in the details Thursday.

Bush said terrorists had begun planning to fly a commercial airplane into the tallest skyscraper on the West Coast, the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles. He said the plot was derailed when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al-Qaida operative.

The mayor said he was watching Bush's speech on television Thursday when he first learned of the new details about the hijacking plot.

"I would have expected a direct call from the White House," Villaraigosa said at a City Hall news conference.

Meanwhile, new revelations are coming out in the Plamegate spy scandal. Scooter Libby has pointed the finger squarely at Darth Cheney...apparently he authorized Scooter to leak sensitive and classified information to the media. In another time and place, that would have gotten you shot. The best we can hope for today is an indictment.

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff testified that his bosses instructed him to leak information to reporters from a high-level intelligence report that suggested Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction, according to court records in the CIA leak case.

Cheney was one of the ''superiors" I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby said had authorized him to make the disclosures, according to sources familiar with the investigation into Libby's discussions with reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. But it is unclear whether Cheney instructed his former top aide to release classified information, because parts of the National Intelligence Estimate were previously declassified.

The disclosure in a legal document written by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald demonstrates one way in which Cheney was involved in responding to public allegations by Plame Wilson's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the administration had exaggerated questionable intelligence to justify war with Iraq.

In a letter written in January and released in court papers filed by Libby's defense Monday, Fitzgerald wrote that Libby testified that his ''superiors" authorized him to disclose information from the National Intelligence Estimate to reporters in the summer of 2003. The National Journal first reported on its website yesterday that Cheney had provided the authorization. The intelligence estimate is a classified report prepared by intelligence officers for high-level government officials, and some parts are declassified in a summary and available to the public. (Continued...)

And lastly this morning, in a clear indication of the difference between Republicans and Democrats...the DNC has donated $4m in surplus from the convention to a host of local charities. You can be sure that any such surplus from the RNC was donated to a host of special interest's wallets.

BOSTON --The committee that organized the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston gave its $4 million surplus to 32 charities and nonprofit organizations on Thursday, including some to the city's top cultural institutions.

The Institute of Contemporary Art and Zoo New England received the largest grants, $400,000 each. Other organizations, including the Boston Center for the Arts, the Museum of Science and the JFK Library Foundation, received donations of between $25,000 and $300,000.

The convention cost more than $100 million to stage. The federal government paid security costs of about $40 million, while the Democratic National Committee spent $14.9 million in federal funds to run the convention itself.

The Boston 2004 committee raised $56.8 million from private donors, about $6.4 million more than they spent. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was nominated at the convention, then eventually lost the election to Republican incumbent George W. Bush.

The committee has already given away $1 million to the Rose Kennedy Greenway and another $1 million to a trust fund to improve city parks.

The organizers wanted to distribute the rest of the money to groups whose missions are similar to the convention committee's goal of enhancing the city and promoting tourism and business development, said president David Passafaro.

So, it's another Friday after another long week....we've got snow coming this weekend, maybe a foot or more. Time to break out the sleds!