“Now, President Bush got a lot of grief from a lot of different angles for the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War,” Paul said. “But you know what? In both instances, he came to Congress and Congress at least voted on it before we went.”

President Obama sets a terrible precedent with committing to military involvement in Libya, Paul said, and went on to assert the President cares more about the United Nations than Congress.

Even though Congress did vote on military action, many people remain critical of Bush for not asking for a formal Congressional declaration of war. One of the most critical voices of Bush’s handling of the wars in the Middle East has been Sen. Paul’s father, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). In January, at the beginning of the current session of Congress, Congressman Paul entered evidence of alleged war crimes Bush was responsible for into Congressional Record via a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ron Paul’s supporters heckled Vice-President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, calling them “war criminals.”

Bush had to defend himself against Congressman Paul’s consistent criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, as Paul called for a non-interventionist approach. Paul was one of six Republicans to vote against the Iraq Resolution and consistently said both wars were illegal partly because Congress never declared war.

Sen. Paul was speaking at the Iowa GOP‘s “Night of the Rising Stars” event Saturday. The Senator said the most important vote Congress ever takes is whether or not to send armed forces to war, and pledged to fight against it in the coming weeks.

He also told a story about the former owner of his congressional desk, Henry Clay, who was known as the “Great Compromiser.” Paul said there were some deeply held beliefs Congressmen should never compromise on, such as slavery, on which Clay did broker compromises.

“Now some would say the issues we deal with today have no moral equivalency today as slavery,” Paul said. “But I would say that when we think about things, there are questions we should ask. Can a civilization long endure that doesn’t respect life? Will we be judged at some point in time on whether we stood up and said that the law and the land should respect the unborn?”

That remark earned Paul’s most extended round of applause of the night.

He said the country was facing fast approaching a “day of reckoning,” to reach the point when the U.S. can no longer pay its bills and destroy its currency as a result of the deficit and the debt owed to other countries.

Paul pledged deep cuts in the federal budget. He said while Congress debates cuts near $32 billion, people in his home district tell him cutting $500 billion would be “a good start.”

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced Paul and said he’d like to see spending levels back to 2008 numbers, although the federal deficit grew under Bush.

Paul also took a shot at U.S. Sen Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) as he opened his speech, describing a debate he had on the floor of the Senate with him.

He said he told Harkin there could be more investment in infrastructure and education if people didn’t have to pay “Chicago union scale wages” in Iowa or Kentucky, to which he said Harkin told him, “You can’t have any kind of quality products made unless they’re made by union workers.” The crowd groaned, and Paul said you would have to throw out 95 percent of the products you consume if Harkin’s statement was true.

Paul didn’t make any references to his own speculation of a White House run, but said Iowans needed to find the right Republican to run in 2012. Senator Paul will return in the summer for a Faith & Freedom Coalition event, alongside other potential 2012 candidates.

To illustrate its point, the board compared the candidates to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who led an energy task force during the Bush administration that reportedly sought to gloss over climate science in key Environmental Protection Agency reports.

According to the editorial:

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy. [...]

In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed.

The editorial comes just weeks before the November midterm elections. Environmentalists, including the League of Conservation Voters, are aggressively targeting Republican candidates in tight Senate races.

For more, Think Progress has also compiled a list of Senate races with environmental implications.

Both challengers, former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff (D-Colo.) and Republican Ken Buck, a veteran prosecutor, have embraced the image of the outsider, employing it for all its got in bitter races with few concrete policy differences. But looks, as they say, can be deceiving:

Born in New York and educated at Princeton, [Buck] served as the lawyer for Dick Cheney, then a congressman, during the Iran-Contra hearings and worked three years for the Justice Department. He served 14 years in the United States attorney’s office in Colorado before being elected district attorney of Weld County, north of Denver, in 2004.

“I am not saying I don’t have a lot of connections,” Mr. Buck said in an interview at his Denver campaign office. “I am saying I am not the candidate of Washington, D.C.”

Same goes for the Democratic side:

In a twist, Mr. Bennet, though technically the incumbent, is the only one of the four candidates who has never won election to public office. His appointment by Gov. Bill Ritter to fill the seat vacated by Ken Salazar when Mr. Salazar became interior secretary was a surprise, but he has come to be highly regarded by his Democratic Senate colleagues.

“I spent my entire life outside of politics and never ran for office before,” he said in an interview on Sunday. “I bring a perspective that is different from what a lot of people in Washington bring to the job and what Andrew would bring.”

Meanwhile, over in the Colorado gubernatorial primary, Republican candidate Scott McInnis has reportedly reached a settlement with the Hasan Family Foundation over the $300,000 the group paid him to write a series of articles on water, parts of which McInnis plagiarized from others’ work:

The two sides won’t say what that agreement calls for, but McInnis campaign spokesman Sean Duffy did say it requires the former congressman to repay the entire amount, as the foundation initially requested.

“Scott has reached a settlement with the Hasan Foundation,” Duffy said. “All matters between the foundation and Scott McInnis have been fully resolved to the satisfaction of both parties. That is all the agreement allows in terms of comment on this matter.”

freedomworks.org

Since mid-May, a grinning Glenn Beck has popped up to greet visitors to the FreedomWorks website. Standing in front of his trademark chalkboard, the conservative host is the official face of FreedomWorks’ newest free offering: the “Take America Back! Action Kit.”

[GOP1] Together with a souvenir Gadsden Flag, the Tea Party starter-kit includes an informational DVD explaining the proper “pro-freedom” positions across the wide range of issues on which FreedomWorks is active. This menu of burning concerns, also found on freedomworks.org’s “Issues” page, includes primers on School Choice, Red Tape and Regulation, and even Asbestos Lawsuit Reform. While largely focused with domestic issues, the list also includes subjects of broader scope, such as International Trade and Global Warming.

There is, however, a striking omission in FreedomWorks’ otherwise expansive public agenda: It says nothing about national security or foreign policy. FreedomWorks, the organization most often credited with organizing the revival of an activist conservative grassroots, studiously avoids mention of the country’s two wars, its ballooning defense budget, arms control or the tangle of legal controversy that has outlived the previous administration’s “war on terror”—from Guantanamo to torture.

There is a simple explanation for why FreedomWorks fails to offer a bold new foreign policy agenda alongside its ambitious domestic one. The Tea Party movement for which it claims to speak, despite its sweeping rhetoric of renewal and reclamation, does not appear to have one. Where the Tea Party legions and its spokesmen raucously decry profligacy in domestic spending, they fall silent on the defense budget’s role in fueling deficits in recent years. While the highest-profile Tea Party-approved candidates and politicians agitate for radical redirection on social spending, taxes and the deficit, this boldness stops abruptly at water’s edge.

“My understanding from talking to Tea Party leaders who contact us regularly is that the overriding concerns at this time focus on spending, mounting debt and expanding role of government,” said Bridgett Wagner, Director of Coalition Relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that advocates for a strong defense and an internationalist foreign policy. “The [Tea Party activists] are definitely patriotic and concerned about security and foreign policy issues, but these are not top-tier issues for them at this time.”

To the extent that the diffuse Tea Party movement has a foreign policy vision, there is little to distinguish it from the mainstream Republicanism of the last decade it claims so heartily to disdain.

The campaign platform of Pat Toomey, a Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania backed by local Tea Partiers, offers the homiletic belief that America “must have the strongest defensive capabilities in the world.” Without mentioning Iraq or Afghanistan, it goes on to state, “We should not hesitate to take action in defense of our freedom and our American way of life.”

That’s more than interested voters will find in the public platform of Tea Party darling and Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, which lacks even a perfunctory section on foreign policy or national security.

“There’s no question that the most pressing issues right now are domestic,” said Alex Burgos, a Rubio spokesman. “We’re talking to an electorate with a 12 percent unemployment rate, so the most dominant topics are going to be jobs, debt and the deficit.” Burgos noted that this does not mean that Rubio does not take foreign policy seriously. “Marco has spoken out on the issues,” added Burgos. “He supported the surge in Afghanistan, opposed canceling missile defense installations in Eastern Europe and supports Israel, as well as tough action against Iran.”

The foreign policy platform of Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul likewise reflects the conventional wisdom of strong-defense conservatism, and fails to approach the radicalism of his domestic policy suggestions. In Arizona, Tea Party-supported Senate hopeful J.D. Hayworth offers a hawkish foreign policy line that could have been written by Dick Cheney. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Glenn Beck’s favorite senator, is yet another new-breed conservative who argues for breaking with the recent Republican past on domestic and economic issues, but on foreign policy sounds like any Bush-boosting Republican senator circa 2005.

When Tea Party heroes do wade into foreign policy issues, they do so at risk of exposing rifts within the ranks. After Sarah Palin began giving speeches under the Tea Party banner that smacked of Cheneyism, many of the Tea Party old guard felt betrayed. The Tea Party activist-theorist A.C. Kleinheider, who had joined the nascent movement as it first began coalescing in the Ron Paul campaign, was just one of those to resign from the movement in disgust.

“The tea party movement is dead, and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart,” Kleinheider wrote following Palin’s keynote to the National Tea Party convention. “The tea party I’m familiar with was concerned more about the collusion of big business and big government than the War in Iraq. The tea party I’m familiar with was more concerned about rejecting the bailout of Wall Street while looking for ways reinvigorate the economy of Main Street than looking for Al-Qaeda. The tea party I’m familiar with seemed more concerned about restoring the Republic at home than Democracy abroad.”

No wonder, then, that groups like FreedomWorks prefer to avoid the subject altogether.

According to an “NSA spokesperson” who insisted on anonymity — you would think the job of a spokesperson is to speak openly to the media, but that’s NSA for you — Vito Potenza, the NSA’s last general counsel, retired from the agency in October 2009.

If Potenza’s name makes you say, “Don’t I know that guy from the sordid history of the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic surveillance programs?” then you might be a particularly attentive reader of Bart Gellman’s book Angler, an investigative biography of Dick Cheney’s vice presidency. One particularly vivid section of the book recounted the aftermath of a December 2003 request from Potenza, then the agency’s acting general counsel, and the agency’s inspector general to review the legal documentation undergirding the controversial surveillance activities. David Addington, then Cheney’s lawyer, actually screamed at the guy.

So Potenza has been out for the past nine or so months. I didn’t get an answer about the circumstances surrounding his retirement. But since he’s been gone, “the duties of the general counsel have been covered by seasoned, senior attorneys in NSA’s Office of the General Counsel,” the spokesperson said. And presently, “NSA is conducting a comprehensive search for stellar candidates who embrace its mission to protect America’s national security systems and produce foreign signals-intelligence information.”

As a veteran intelligence observer told me yesterday:

“The absence of a general counsel introduces a shade of uncertainty into the process which needs to be correct,” said Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “NSA operations are law-intensive activities. They don’t make a move without clearing it with their legal people.”

The spokesperson did not address a question I had about whether and how the absence of a general counsel affects day-to-day surveillance activities by the agency.

But considering the flood of liability claims and congressional inquiries facing BP and the contractors who worked on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig, their existing K Street help is sure to be followed by high-powered legal teams. And as the National Law Journal reported on Tuesday, the corporations on the hook for the Gulf disaster are hiring lawyers with high-level bipartisan political connections.

BP has signed up Jamie Gorelick, the Department of Justice’s No. 2 official during the Clinton administration and a former member of the 9/11 Commission. Gorelick, also a registered lobbyist with Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Door, told Greenwire that her duties would focus on responding to congressional requests rather than “advocat[ing] for any position.” Still, her status in the capital — Gorelick was said to be in the mix as a possible Obama Attorney General — makes her an invaluable ally for the beleaguered oil giant.

Cameron International Corp., the contractor that manufactured the “blowout preventer” that failed on the Deepwater rig, has signed up Williams & Connolly counselor Emmet Flood, according to the Law Journal. Flood is best known for serving as special counsel to then-President George W. Bush, when he was a leading player in the complex negotiations over which high-ranking White House officials would agree to testify about the U.S. attorney firings scandal. Flood’s official biography notes that he also represented Vice President Dick Cheney in the civil lawsuit filed by outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial.

Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater rig, has anted up by retaining John Beisner of Skadden Arps. Beisner is currently a registered lobbyist on judicial issues for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but the Law Journal points out that his most significant experience lies in high-profile corporate liability cases:

A decade ago, when Beisner was an O’Melveny & Myers partner, he represented Ford Motor Co. regarding defects in more than 60 million tires, and he was part of the legal team in 2007 for Merck & Co. in litigation over its prescription pain killer, Vioxx.

Halliburton, another contractor on the Deepwater rig, has turned to a counsel with less time in the corporate misconduct trenches and fewer political connections but a strong background in the oil industry. Jeffrey Turner at Patton Boggs, reported as Halliburton’s point man on the Gulf spill, currently lobbies for the Ad Hoc Deep Water Exploration and Production Coalition, a group of oil companies (including BP) that has spent years fighting congressional attempts to rewrite offshore drilling royalty contracts that helped corporations reap a windfall during the Bush administration.

• Earlier in the year, long before the allegations had been made public, Massa had called me with a potentially huge story: Four retired generals — three four-stars and one three-star — had informed him, he said, that General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, had met twice in secret with former vice president Dick Cheney. In those meetings, the generals said, Cheney had attempted to recruit Petraeus to run for president as a Republican in 2012.

• The generals had told him, and Massa had agreed, that if someone didn’t act immediately to reveal this plot, American constitutional democracy itself was at risk. Massa and I had had several conversation on the topic, each more urgent than the last. He had gone to the Pentagon, he told me, demanding answers. He knew the powerful forces that he was dealing with, he told me. They’d stop at nothing to prevent the truth from coming out, he said, including destroying him. “I told the official, ‘If I have to get up at a committee hearing and go public with this, it will cause the mother of all shitstorms and your life will be hell. So I need a meeting. Now.’”

• Massa eventually came to the Esquire offices in New York to tell us the Petraeus story. He spoke with the bluster and hyperbole I had seen in him at stump speeches, but he had credibility on this matter — twenty-four years of active service in the Navy, a seat on the House Armed Services Committee, and an increasing voice in the media as a Democrat who would speak with authority about military issues. Still, when he called the possibility that Petraeus could beat Obama in an election a “coup” and “treason,” the characterization seemed odd. “If what I’ve been told is true — and I believe it is,” he told myself and two colleagues, “General David Petraeus, a commander with soldiers deployed in two theaters of war, has had multiple meetings with Dick Cheney, the former vice-president of the United States, to discuss Petraeus’s candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And in fact, that’s more than a constitutional crisis. That’s treason.”

Do I need to write a punchline? This is bark-at-the-moon stuff. Feel free to speculate in comments about how I’m part of the cover-up for the impending tickle-driven coup d’etat.

Thanks to Noah Shachtman’s Twitter feed.

Judge Walker did not directly address the legal arguments made by the Bush administration in defense of the N.S.A. program after The New York Times disclosed its existence in December 2005: that the president’s wartime powers enabled him to override the FISA statute. But lawyers for Al Haramain were quick to argue that the ruling undermined the legal underpinnings of the war against terrorism.

One of them, Jon Eisenberg, said Judge Walker’s ruling was an “implicit repudiation of the Bush-Cheney theory of executive power.”

“Judge Walker is saying that FISA and federal statutes like it are not optional,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “The president, just like any other citizen of the United States, is bound by the law. Obeying Congressional legislation shouldn’t be optional with the president of the U.S.”

Marcy thinks the Justice Department will decline to appeal, thereby letting Judge Vaughn Walker’s determination of illegality stand, but will also keep “details of how and what it did secret” and forestall a challenge on the limits of the government’s authority to determine whether certain disclosures jeopardize national security. (The so-called ‘State Secrets’ doctrine.) Her argument has the virtue of providing the administration with a political setback for its resurgent adversaries from the Bush era — who are fighting to stop the closure of Guantanamo Bay or link it to the abandonment of civilian trials for terrorists — while preserving its own legal authority.

The Worst

5. Idaho
Although few outside of Idaho talk about Idaho now that Larry Craig isn’t toe-tapping in a wide stance in the Minneapolis airport, times were tough in Idaho last year! The Spud State was more of a dud state, with a 4.1 percent decline in per capita income, an 8 percent average unemployment rate (better than the national average!) and a 6.6 percent decline in home values.

4. Arizona
John McCain’s home state didn’t see an end to its troubles in 2009, as the Copper State’s per capita income went down by 4.1 percent even as actual copper prices went up. Housing prices were down 13 percent and the unemployment rate was 9.1 percent.

3. South Dakota
Although no one is loudly contemplating the addition of Ronald Reagan to Mount Rushmore anymore, the Mount Rushmore State had bigger problems in 2009, as per capita income fell by 4.4 percent. Somewhat protected from the unemployment plaguing much of the rest of the country, an average of only 4.4 percent of South Dakotans were unemployed. Better yet, it was one of 18 states that didn’t see a decline in housing prices, as they went up by 1.6 percent in 2009. Still, it’s a fair bet that the winter was miserably cold.

2. Nevada
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, as the saying goes, but neither money, jobs nor housing prices stayed in Vegas in 2009. Unlucky Nevadans saw per capita income drop 5.8 percent, the unemployment rate skyrocket to an average of 11.8 percent and housing prices fall like a lead balloon a grand total of 17 percent. Lady Luck apparently found a new watering hole.

1. Wyoming
Per capita income in Wyoming dropped by 5.9 percent and housing prices plummeted by 6 percent. The average unemployment was only 6.4 percent, but the state’s most famous jobless resident — the ex-VP — decamped for a secret bunker elsewhere.

The Best

4. Maryland
Terps fans might not have a lot to cheer about, but in this economy, a 0.3 percent increase in per capita income was cause for celebration. Housing prices are down 5.5 percent, but average unemployment at 7 percent was under the national rate.

3. Vermont
Vermonters were able to crack a smile over something other than delicious ice cream or flavorful cheddar: Per capita income was up a whole half percent in 2009. As in Maryland, average unemployment was under the national average at 7 percent, and housing prices dropped by only 1.3 percent. Looks like it’s time for a little spoonful of celebration.

2. Maine
Residents of the Pine Tree State had reason to smile in 2009: a 1 percent increase in per capita income and a 1 percent increase in home values. At 8 percent, unemployment, too, was slightly below the national average.

1. West Virginia
Although West Virginians are not often at the top of lists, they are when it comes to income increases in 2009, and their 1.8 percent increase in per capita income won out. Housing prices were down 2.7 percent — hardly the steepest decline — and unemployment was under the national average at 7.9 percent. Not a bad showing for the Mountain State!

I’m a lifelong conservative, and I can tell the real thing when I see it. I have looked at the records of both candidates in the race, and it is clear to me that Trey Grayson is right on the issues that matter – both on fiscal responsibility and on national security.

Worth remembering: in the Texas gubernatorial primary, Cheney endorsed Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) while Sarah Palin endorsed the winner, Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas). Palin, famously, has endorsed Rand Paul.