Here’s the transcript of today’s mind-blowing press conference. The doctor’s warned me about that forehead-banging and screaming thing, so I can’t analyze it in detail.

If you want to get an excellent reading on the state of the Republic, go and read it. I’ll wait.

[Reach me that bucket, wouldja hon?]

Here’s what caught my eye:

Maybe we can hope that thepress has, finally, graduated as The Class Of 2007:

Q No, you’re trying to take the logical and change it around and make — you’re insulting our intelligence.

MR. BLOW: No, I don’t think so. What I’ve tried to do is to insert a little nuance into a conversation that continues to try to create broad generalizations that can be used, frankly, to twist the case out of context.

Isn’t Pony good? Seriously, we’ve had a Department of How Stupid Do They Think We Are in The Mighty Corrente Building for quite some time, and any one of our uniformed, courteous citizen representatives will be happy to point it out the odd member of our famously free press who happens to wander in or, if necessary, present them with a complimentary rotogravured floor plan with exciting coupon offers on the back.

Anyhow, this interchange is my favorite, of the many, many candidates:  Read more 

Regarding the political economy …
It started a while ago when they deregulated the markets . The full court press started with the dot.coms. The introduction of the internet into the fabric of everyday life created the habits, infrastructure and mechanisms, to have a market that radically redistributed wealth from the general populace to a few very well placed elite. “Market Fundamentalism” is as detrimental to our well being and way of life as Islamic fundamentalism.  Read more 

I’ve been dorking around at the Crack Den while trying to get through to various offices (all the lines are busy, good job, shrill ones!) and poster Roddy made this interesting point:

Here’s the thing. Bush didn’t do this out a any sense of personal loyalty or to reward Scooter. That’s not his thing. For him to do something like this — something that could very well tip the scales toward impeachment — most likely means that Scooter knows something very big and very ugly.

About Bush, Cheney, and many others I’m sure. I’m not holding my breath, but I wish Democrats would take this line of reasoning and apply it to some under oath hearings. FDL says Conyers will be holding some soon, so we’ll see.

I don’t believe it. I mean I do but … damn. He’s loyal to his serfs – I’ll give him that.

President Bush spared former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby from a 2 1/2-year prison term in the CIA leak case Monday,  Read more 

What the real Glenn said:

The reason Bush officials have believed they can simply break the law with complete impunity is because the Beltway culture in which they operate believes that. Most importantly, our media stars absolutely believe that, that lawbreaking by the most powerful [Republican, eh?] political officials who rule their world is not real lawbreaking, even when they are convicted in a court of law — after ample due process and with the best legal defense team which Marty Peretz and Fred Thompson could help pay for — of committing multiple felonies.

Bingo.

These guys are Banana Republicans. This country could turn into Argentina or Guatemala for all these guys care, so long as they hang onto their privileges, or manage to scuttle away with a big bag of loot over their shoulders:  Read more 

Emptywheel sounds the warning:

How appropriate that Robert Bork would weigh in on the Libby conviction to assert that Fitzgerald’s appointment might not be constitutional. Over thirty years later and he’s still trying to fire the guy investigating the Republican Administration.

Mind you, Bork is not alone. Vikram Amar, Randy Barnett, Alan Dershowitz, Viet Dinh, Douglas Kmiec, Gary Lawson, Earl Maltz, Thomas Merrill, Robert Nagel, Richard Parker, and Robert Pushaw. Some interesting in names in that list, from a fwe good liberals, to architects of unitary executive, to Dershowitz, who served as such a nice liberal voice justifying torture.

The worst of the worst. Read the whole post for the legal arguments, which are beyond my ability to summarize. But here’s the bottom line:

Bork is not just trying to get Fitzgerald fired. He’s trying to get the next Special Counsel—the one investigating BushCo constitutional violations—fired.

Bingo. No doubt the Libby slush, er, defense fund will help them with their funding, eh?  Read more 

Well, if not “people,” Podwhoretz. See if you can follow this logic:

Bush won’t leave office without issuing [Scooter’s] pardon.

Why? Because if Bush fails to pardon Libby, he will implicitly be accepting the contention that Scooter Libby was part of a White House conspiracy at the highest levels to destroy the career of a CIA agent whose husband had proved Bush & Co. had lied us into the Iraq War.

Um, doesn’t pardoning Scooter explicitly accept the conspiracy? By letting the guilty get away clean?

Oh, wait. I’m forgetting the authoritarian mindset: “Befehlsnotstand (blind obedience), where “the Fuhrer’s word is law.” See, if Der Decider says there was no conspiracy, then Abracadabra! There is no conspiracy!  Read more 

Today’s word: Befehlsnotstand.

Because when conservatives say “pardon,” they mean “Befehlsnotstand.”

WaPo gives the historical background:

Pardons in recent times generally have been granted to people who were convicted years earlier — not of violent crimes — and who have completed their sentences and redeemed themselves. Bush has granted 113 pardons over six years, nearly a modern low, and has never pardoned anyone who had not been released from prison. He has commuted the sentences of three others.

What the conservatives want is for Bush to “pardon” Libby immediately after the jury’s verdict—if not sooner.

“Our number one goal is to see Scooter’s conviction wiped out by the courts and see him vindicated,” attorney William Jeffress Jr. said in an interview. “Now, I’ve seen all the calls for a pardon. And I agree with them. To me, he should have been pardoned six months ago or a year ago.”

I can’t think of a precedent for a “President” simply setting aside a court verdict right after the decision came down. Even Bush I waited a decent interval before pardoning the Iran-Contra felons.

Where does it ever stop with these guys? What next? Bush gets an automatic signature machine like the one Rummy used to sign condolence letters to the troops, and starts churning out pardons on a daily basis?

Anyhow, Befehlsnotstand:  Read more 

Color me annoyed. Plenty of links if you’d like to chase down all the other legal opinions out there, but I get really down on the “justice” system if the best Fitz is going to be able to get for Libby is a couple of years. Let’s not forget all the poor, black and brown kids rotting away in our jails, locked up for life, thanks to racist ’three strikes and your out’ drug laws. Libby didn’t sell rock; he covered up the treasonous actions of the Vice President as they consipired to lead this country to an illegal war of choice. He deserves the full sentence of 25 years.

This is why the Republicans act in the ways they do. They know that the years of investigation into their activities will likely last longer than the time they’ll spend in jail, should they get convicted. And time served in a posh Federal pen with tennis courts and pool tables, that is hardly something to fear. Our system is deeply flawed.

Watch the skies… At FDL, of course (though, as Eschaton says, no direct links so their servers don’t crash).

UPDATE Man, I’m watching FDL and imagining what the server usage graphs are looking like. The admin is shutting down feature after feature just to bring us the one or two words of the verdict… The JPGs just went… Now it’s down… Now up… Atrios is live-blogging….

UPDATE (Cf. Amos 5:24).

 Read more 

I’m days and days behind on my reading (but I’ve got two shiny new hardwood floors to brag on!) but this WaPo piece felt like disinformation to me. This part made me laugh out loud:

“Dick was always very realistic,” said Kenneth L. Adelman, the Reagan administration arms-control official who has known Cheney for more than three decades. “I don’t really understand how month after month he gets briefings showing Iraq’s getting worse and worse, and he engages in all this happy talk. Bush has become more realistic. Certainly [Defense Secretary Robert M.] Gates is more realistic, so the happy talk from the Pentagon is over. Yet Cheney is still stuck in the mold.”  Read more 

Republicans are such crooks:

From Brent Budowsky
February 18, 2007
To: Robert Kaiser, Washington Post

Mr. Kaiser, I am forwarding below the note I wrote to Messrs. Graham and Hiatt about Outlook’s Victoria Toensing piece today.

With all due respect [snicker], I have long admired your work, but that piece today was the most egregious attempt at jury tampering that I have ever seen in this or any other town.

I spent six years at the core of the group writing the CIA Identities Law with its original sponsor, Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Setting aside my great differences with both Editorial and Op Ed pages at the Post on this case and Iraq in general, this piece was different. It was a clear attempt to influence the jury, after the defense rested and before the jury is given the case.

I predict the Judge will not be a happy camper, but beyond this, the piece was a shameless attempt to present a nullification defense to the jury, by an officer of the court who has worked for the Departement of Justice. It is attempt to bypass the judge and jury and present arguments to the jury, through the Post, that would not be admissable for law or fact, which also included factual inaccuracy.

This is the functional equivalent of the Post editorial board and the Libby defense team standing outside the jury room, handing the jurors leaflets, ignoring the judges instructions, and handing the jurors inadmissable evidence and telling them to vote not guilty.

I believe the Post owes its readers an alternate viewpoint, presented with the same visibility as Ms. Toensing’s piece, though the ridiculing artwork will not be necessary and the tone of prosecution is more worthy of a second tier blog than the paper of record for this Capital.

Please, can we just keep Froomkins, Walter Pincus, and Dana Milbank, and bulldoze the rest of Pravda into the Potamac?  Read more 

Joe has one of the clearest and most concise PlameLibby pieces I’ve read in a long time.

At long last, the fog of mystification generated by the Bush administration and the Washington media is lifting, so that everyone can see clearly why I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby is on trial and why his prosecution is important. Whether the jury eventually finds the former White House aide innocent or guilty of perjury, the evidence shows that his bosses George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have misled the public from the very beginning about the vengeful leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson’s C.I.A. identity.

The question that now hangs over the President and the Vice President is whether they lied to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald—the same crime for which their fall guy Scooter now faces possible imprisonment and disgrace. According to published reports, the special counsel interviewed both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney during the summer of 2004. The only way for them to dispel the suspicion that they may have lied to him is to permit full disclosure of those interviews.  Read more 

So I’d rather eat glass, take a bath in acid, walk across an electrified grid barefoot, etc., than watch CNN. But hey, look what I just learned. Guess who has a dad on the Advisory Board of the Libby Legal Defense Trust? Bowtie Carlson! Has he mentioned that yet, in his coverage of the trial?  Read more 

I’m not closely following the Libby trial because it’s too easy to spend a great deal of time reading about all the many details of the process. Basically, I’m in the “call me when there is a verdict” group. That said, I’m very glad some people are paying close attention, because in this age of Kremlinology, one never knows what may come out in the various testimonies and senior moments and whatnot. So like Ms. Rozen, I wonder about this moment that ’floored’ Swopa, who happens to be in the courtroom.

It happened when special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was arguing to submit as evidence an October 12, 2003 Washington Post article that Libby had saved in his files — and even underlined passages alluding to the alleged 1x2x6 leaks. Scooter’s lawyer stepped up to the podium and said, but we think those claims are entirely false, so why should Libby be accused of being worried about them? Fitz replied, no, we think there’s some basis to believe the claims might be true. “Tell us what,” said Team Libby, and I think the judge concurred.

At this, the unflappable, eternally prepared, ever-articulate Fitz basically lost all bladder and bowel control. He stood there, silent, for what seemed like ten seconds or more.  Read more 

Start your clocks, moonbats. It will be only a matter of seconds before he perjures himself. We’ll see who wants to follow that rabbit  Read more 

Re the details about the Libby trial, and what’s being said over there about who is the scapegoat and who is the bacon to be saved, Digby notes:

And here I always thought the VP’s office was part of the White House.

I suspect that when the history is written we will find more and more proof that Vice President Cheney has been running a shadow government from the very beginning and that much of the malfeasance of this era is a result of incompetent and competing power centers vying for supremacy. It begins to explain the unprecedented level of faulty reasoning and epic mistakes coming from the one administration.

It’s kind of funny that Cheney is calling Rove incompetent in this matter. When it comes to lying and obstruction (the skills required for this cover Cheney’s ass operation), Karl Rove is a consummate professional and Scooter Libby is a joke.

This has been what I have thought for years now.  Read more 

According to Investor’s Business Daily, that is. Where do I sign up for a subscription? Because any publication that writes like this is one I need to have:

Justice: Like the Duke lacrosse players, Scooter Libby faces jail for alleged involvement in a crime that was never committed, pursued by a vindictive prosecutor. And also like the Duke case, it’s a national disgrace.  Read more 

Interesting list of Bad Thoughs & Opinions which will get you kicked out of the jury pool for the upcoming Scooter Libby perjury trial. Per NYT this morning:

The perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. began Tuesday with his lawyers trying to eliminate as jurors anyone who might have strongly negative feelings about the Bush administration in general and Vice President Dick Cheney in particular.

Snicker. Snort. Guffaw.  Read more 

Oh, I’m so sad. It looks like Libby Wibby dinnit tell the Whole Truth, and now Daddy Fitz is angry:

A former White House aide, I. Lewis Libby, may have disclosed conclusions from a highly classified government report on Iraq to journalists before the report was declassified by President Bush, federal prosecutors said in a new court filing.  Read more 

Or something:

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Monday, July 3, 2006

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president’s statement.  Read more