Republicans to Americans: It's Okay to Lie Under Oath in a Criminal Investigation!

Hilarious.


Free Lil' Kim!

The Office

I'm quite enjoying NBC's version of the Office. I think it started out a bit milder and a bit less on target than the BBC version. There's probably no way Steve Carrell could really match the character created by Gervais in part because I'm not sure there is a perfectly analagous US archetype. But the writing this season has been really good, and the last show especially, with the fire, was hilarious.

Check it out if you haven't, and take a look at the BBC version also...

Pumpkinhead

Apparently it is no longer the job of the press to tell us what they know.

Good Sport

A few days Sherrod Brown took out a fairly big blogosphere buy trumpeting his campaign. This is a good moment to remind people that ads are not editorial, anything roughly work safe and not obviously fraudulent is fine with me. I tend to shy away from primaries for a variety of reasons.

In any case, Brown shifted his ad (see top left) to direct people to Act Blue's general election fund. The money will go to whoever wins the primary and not to any particular candidate's primary fund. That's a class move.

We've Been Here Before

Quindlen:

During each election cycle, we ponder the question of whether character matters. Of course it does. Does anyone doubt that the continued prosecution of this war has to do with the personality of the commander in chief, a man who is stubborn and calls it strength, who wears blinders and calls it vision? When he vowed to invade Iraq, the advisers he heeded were those who, like him, had never seen combat. The one who had was marginalized and is now gone. The investigation of who leaked what to whom, of what the reporter knew and how she knew it, may be about national security and journalistic ethics, but at its base it is about something more important: the Nixonian lengths to which these people will go to shore up a bankrupt policy and destroy those who cross them on it.

...

"In Vietnam we didn't have the lessons of Vietnam to guide us," says David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of that war. "In Iraq we did have those lessons. The tragedy is that we didn't pay attention to them." Or maybe only our leaders did not. The polls show the American people have turned on this war much more quickly than they did on the war in Vietnam. Of course, they are the ones who pay the price.

...

"In Vietnam we didn't have the lessons of Vietnam to guide us," says David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of that war. "In Iraq we did have those lessons. The tragedy is that we didn't pay attention to them." Or maybe only our leaders did not. The polls show the American people have turned on this war much more quickly than they did on the war in Vietnam. Of course, they are the ones who pay the price.

Happy Holidays from Larry Johnson

It isn't quite Fitzmas, but it's close.

Miers

Of the offenses listed, to me only the 4th one is really troubling (first two not so, third somewhat troubling). But, when people have been derailed from higher positions for failing to pay a nanny's social security taxes (and, no, I don't mean Kerik)...

Open Thread

Leaving all the changes far from far behind. we relieve the tension only to find out the thread's name.

Open Thread

There'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify. Political threads of sad remains will die.

War Pigs

No matter how low I set the bar, they always manage to limbo under it.

Open Thread

What you gonna do when the thread strikes and hits you?

Fitzed

heh-indeedy:

Weeks after he took over the investigation 22 months ago into the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA operative's identity, special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald got authority from the Justice Department to expand his inquiry to include any criminal attempts to interfere with his probe, according to a letter posted Friday on Fitzgerald's new Web site.

Fitzgerald is nearing a decision on whether he will prosecute anyone when the federal grand jury term ends Friday. The letter specified that he could investigate and prosecute "perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence and intimidation of witnesses."

According to a lawyer familiar with the case, the current speculation about such charges eventually arising appeared to have occurred to Fitzgerald in the first months of his inquiry.

In a letter dated Feb. 6, 2004, then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey said that he was clarifying, "at your [Fitzgerald's] request," the added authority to investigate and prosecute "crimes committed with intent to interfere with your investigation." Fitzgerald's appointment as special counsel on Dec. 30, 2003, after then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft recused himself, gave him specific authority to investigate "the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity," according to another letter from Comey posted on the Web site.

"The fact that he [Fitzgerald] asked for authority that he probably already had, but wanted spelled out, makes it arguable that he had run into something rather quickly," Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris said yesterday.

Open Thread

your eyes.

Open Thread

If we reason with destiny, gonna lose our touch. Don't kill the thread.

Open Thread

Distant as the distant thunder Where equal threads will rent asunder.

Open Thread

There's a thread and the thread is now and it's right for me.

Open Thread

Threads speak much louder than words.

My Blog Traffic, in Perspective

From Harper's:

Number of erotic Harry Potter fan-fiction stories posted on a website run by an Illinois woman: 1,750

Average number of hits the site receives each day: 198,000

Wanker of the Day

George Packer.

Judy Judy Judy

Timeswar continues:

Ms. Miller said in an interview that Mr. Keller's statements were "seriously inaccurate." She also provided The Times with a copy of a memorandum she had sent to Mr. Keller in response.

"I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him," she wrote to Mr. Keller, referring to Mr. Taubman.

She wrote that as she had said in an account in The Times last Sunday, she had discussed Mr. Wilson and his wife with government officials, but "I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it."

She added, "As for your reference to my 'entanglement' with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social, or other relationship with him except as a source."

I didn't think Keller meant the word "entanglement" to imply what Miller is taking it as, but nonetheless I find her assertion about not having any relationship with him to be rather odd given this claim:

One lawyer familiar with Miller's testimony said the reporter told prosecutors at first that she did not believe the June meeting would have involved Plame. Miller said that, because she had just returned from covering the Iraq war, she was probably giving Libby an update about her experiences there, the lawyer said.

Is this a typical source relationship? For what possible reason would Miller just drop by the White House to update her "source" about her adventures in Iraq? And, yes, I know this is probably just some bullshit claim to cover for her apparent memory lapse over the June meeting but could we at least have a little consistency in our bullshit?