The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

C'mon, Ty, that just shows that he's A leaker, not THE leaker.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

Sure. Nor did Obama say otherwise (which was how this exchange started).

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

But national security was already compromised by someone else. Scooter (btw, he's such a good guy) didn't even really exacerbate the problem.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

Much as the Clinton investigation stopped after it was clear he had not improperly propositioned Paula Jones.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

He didn't? Then why did he settle with her for $850K?

Speaking of the Clintons, this howler of a quote from Hillary is the best Libby-related response yet:

She had to wink when she said this, right?

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

He got summary judgment. If the 8th circuit was going to reverse, it would have been the first time in years they'd ruled for a plaintiff in any kind of discrim. case.

And he had plenty of donations so that the DNC could move on and put it behind them for 2000.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

he got SJ that assuming he did drop trou on her, legally it still wasn't enough. no one decided he didn't drop trou.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

Fair enough. Still , the case was over.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

In a truly just world, there would be no SoL for rape.

http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/AR...HX_OF_RAPE.jpg

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

If he was leaking after it had been leaked, then it seems to me it was already in the public domain and no longer confidential and therefore not actually a leak. It was also not a violation of any law, as Slave and I have been saying for years now. The only illegality here is the perjury, the punishment for which you apparently do not agree.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

That's crazy. If Spy 1 sells secrets to the Chinese and gets caught, can he get out of trouble by proving that Spy 2 had earlier sold the same secrets to the Russians? Of course not.

Slave was saying that on the basis of facts that Fitzpatrick later contradicted in court filings. For example, he seemed pretty sure that Plame wasn't under cover, but Fitz and the CIA said otherwise. And the fact that Fitz did not bring charges does not mean that no law was broken.

I don't have a problem with the sentence he got. I have a problem with Bush commuting the sentence, less because I care about Libby doing time and more because I'm disgusted by the way that this administration puts itself above the law.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

If it had already been "leaked" then why would he leave out her name when talking with reporters? Put aside whether a specific law was violated (and even the "punishment" for perjury and pardon) -- are you comfortable with the Executive Branch talking about CIA spies with reporters? I'm sure as hell not. Those slopes don't get slippier.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

True.

But that said, no law was broken.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

I know you know what Public domain means, and
so I am really troubled by this response. can you elaborate, or back down?

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

You think that if a journalist knows something, it's in the public domain, but if the Chinese government knows it, it's not? That's weird.

T.S.

1-0

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

no, but if the chinese then publish it in their weekly column . . .


rich

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

of course i'm not. but that doesn't mean it was against the law.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

are you dyslexic? maybe learned to read from Hebrew? it just seems that stuff is often backwards from you.

an Inconvenient Son
 

Al Gore's son was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of possessing marijuana and prescription drugs after deputies pulled him over for speeding, authorities said.

Al Gore III, 24, was driving a blue Toyota Prius about 100 mph on the San Diego Freeway when he was pulled over at about 2:15 a.m., Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino said.

The deputies said they smelled marijuana and searched the car, Amormino said. They found less than an ounce of marijuana along with Xanax, Valium, Vicodin and Adderall, which is used for attention deficit disorder, he said.

"He does not have a prescription for any of those drugs," Amormino said.

Gore was being held in the men's central jail in Santa Ana on $20,000 bail.

The son of the former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee also was pulled over and arrested for pot possession in December 2003, in Bethesda, Md., while he was a student at Harvard University.

http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/US/South/1...y.gore.son.jpg

Of course, the rotten apple doesn't fall far from the tree:


http://www.registeredmedia.com/galle...upinsmoke3.jpg

Six Days of the Condor.
 

It's not just the war. Don't forget "you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!"

Six Days of the Condor.
 

For the record, I was furious.

Six Days of the Condor.
 

of course. the Supreme Ct. had just cheated you out of the election.

an Inconvenient Son
 

Wow!

breaking update is that Al Gore's son was released from the Orange County Jail at 2 p.m. today, after a young man and woman posted his $20,000 bail in cash, sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said.

I guess Edwards was right, "Two Americas", indeed!

http://i11.tinypic.com/4cvm4qb.jpg

Bush and his Terrorist Friends
 

So, for the first time since about a couple weeks after boots hit Afghan soil, all of my relatives who are or were in the military are back home. This led to some interesting discussion around July 4 when the family got together.

The officers were uniformly livid about how many times Bush and Co. talk about al-Qaeda; they are firmly convinced that we are turning local disputes into international ones and building up al-Qaeda; folks like al Sadr apparently have many times the resources of al Qaeda and are potentially much more dangerous, but because we've built up al-Q as the big guys we're afraid of, many smaller groups are driven to allign with al-Q because it helps with recruiting and gets them some more resources. Apparently the army avoids any mention of al-Q in Iraq, and the biggest difficulty is that Bush, Cheney, Condi and others posing for the American media market insist on talking about al-Q in their speaches and press releases.

They're also all convinced that al-Sadr will eventually govern in all or most of Iraq (even including Kurdistan), and that Bush knows this and just wants it to happen on someone else's watch, so right now they feel like they're just playing for time and potentially making the situation worse.

The discussion included relatively high ranking officers - mostly Democrats but there was no argument on these points from the one brother-in-law who is a vocal R or from the guy who's a registered independent and swing voter.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

Blah blah blah... Read your boy Kinsley's Oped in the NYTimes this morning. He nails the Libby/Clinton debacles perfectly. For once, he has my proxy on an issue.

Actually, it's not "my" anything. It's just common sense. And anyone who disagrees with Kinsley is clearly letting his partisan sympathies overcome his rational brain.

Ty's candidate
 

This is such a flailing wild pitch, and such a naked attempt to change the focus of the debate, that I'd swear I wrote it.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

I like that Kinsley's piece, for good measure, criticizes the institution that published his own article.

Six Days of the Condor.
 

The first statement is true. Libby is a unique case which happens to be a political football. Others are not. That's a cruel reality, but not a point for this debate. You could apply that argument to just about every sentencing in the country on any given day.

The second point confounds me. I see the sense in giving Libby a pass, for the same reasons I felt Clinton should not have been impeached and Henry Hyde and Ken Starr should have been prosecuted for abuse of process when they wasted $50 million in tax dollars on that senseless witch hunt. I see no sense at all in giving George Tenet anything but a foot on the ass as he left the office. He was a whore who played along and then afterward tried to rehab himself by crying "I was pushed into it!" At least Kissinger had the balls to take his war criminal status with a laugh and tell his detractors to fuck themselves. And McNamara has since admitted his errors (Fog of War is a brilliant movie).

Tenet was a fucking simp. They ought to heat his medal to 400 degrees and brand his forehead with it, so he can spend the rest of his days ambling Georgetown with the Scarlet Letter his kind deserve.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

Well, that's the Pink Elephant in the corner of this whole mess. That institution I would say aided in killing 3000 US soldiers and 100,000 Iraqis just so it could gin up its advertising dollars.

I may take up arms if that Australian tabloid pimp gets his hands on the Journal. The Times is a shitrag now and as a lifelong reader it makes me pretty sad. The Journal's the last decent paper left, even if the Opeds sometimes practice a whole lotta suspension of disbelief.

Can you say "Quid Pro Quo"
 

I think it's a bit different than this - Libby has bargaining power, because if he plays ball with Fitzy who knows who might go down.

Where, the 20-somethings getting 25 years for quanities of coke no greater than George W once carried while wandering the streets of New Haven have no bargaining power. Perhaps if they'd just hung out a bit more with the twins they'd know something of value.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

I agree almost entirely with Kinsley, whose op-ed is here. I don't understand why you think it's a rejoinder to anything I've said. His point is that newspapers should not have been complicit in spreading Libby's leaks. I agree. The mainstream press was shameful.

Ty's candidate
 

You did say (IIRC) that Libby's prosecution was political, which is absurd. There wasn't a Democrat involved anywhere in the process. At every stage, you had Republican appointees making the decisions. Indeed, the thing was depoliticized by the fact that various political appointees -- Ashcroft, most notably -- had to recuse themselves, letting Fitzpatrick do his job as he saw fit.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

Wait a minute. Kinsley says there is something vague about whether or not outing a CIA agent is breaking the law, and then seems to piece together an analogy that basically says because the Press views the freedom to publish leaks as sacrosanct, there out to be a freedom to leak on the other side, and that putting Libby in a bind where he either had to confess involvement in a (potential crime) or perjure himself was improper.

First, this is crap logic. Second, there is something called the fifth amendment that is basically a get-out-of-jail free card for those caught in a perjury trap. Invoke it, and the prosecutor inevitably offers you immunity so you can tell the truth. There was no trap for dear old Scooter - just a choice between telling the truth about his little cabal who were busily outing a CIA agent for political gain or breaking the law yet again. He chose to break the law yet again.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

I was with him until the last paragraph, which seems to say something like, "He shouldn't have had to face the perjury trap because the press thought what he was doing was okay at the time." Since when are these things decided by what the press thinks is cool? Arrogant conclusion, if you ask me.

eta: Plus, what Greedy said.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

That would be crap logic. I don't think he says that Libby should have been lying. I think he's calling the newspaper (esp. the Times) on their hypocrisy in printing Libby's leaks, refusing to testify about their involvement, and then calling for his prosecution. If they hadn't cooperated with him at the outset, he wouldn't have found himself in the perjury trap. That doesn't mean it was OK for him to lie.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

Kinsley's last paragraph:

• So as much as I dislike the war in Iraq, as much as I dislike President Bush, as much as I expect that I would dislike Mr. Libby if I ever met him, I feel that he should not have had to face a perjury trap: the choice between prison for lying, or prison for his role in a set of transactions that the press regards as not merely O.K. but sacrosanct. In fact, if journalists had a more reasonable view about this, the reporters whom Mr. Libby tried to peddle this story to would have said, “Look, outing C.I.A. agents is bad and we are not going to help you do it anonymously.” I bet that today, commuted sentence and all, Mr. Libby wishes they had done just that.

Kinsley would always rather say something clever and counterintuitive than repeat what someone else is saying, so his angle on this issue is to duck whether the commutation is right or wrong, or whether Libby should have been prosecuted or convicted, and instead to tell reporters that their views that leaking is sacrosanct are unreasonable. Getting the NYT to run it is the icing on the cake.

The change has come, she's under my thumb.
 

Kinsley says about Scooter: "I feel that he should not have had to face a perjury trap: the choice between prison for lying, or prison for his role in a set of transactions that the press regards as not merely O.K. but sacrosanct. " If this means, gee, we guys in the Press shouldn't have asked him questions about classified information, your reading would make sense. But I read it as saying he shouldn't have been put in the "perjury trap" that was not a trap at all, of course, thanks to the 5th Amendment.

Seems to me he's no upset about the traitorous lying weasel getting off.

Can you say "Quid Pro Quo"
 

Do you know how much coke you have to have on you to get 25 years? Are you suggesting W carried a duffle bag full of pure granular cocaine?

Ty's candidate
 

The Democrats pushed the issue to the point that the GOP had to agree to Fitzy doing his thing. That was the beauty of the hit job, afterward, the Dems could offer exactly the defense you did here.

You don't think the Dems kept this non-story front and center for all those months where people were beginning to tire of it?

It was a perfect hit. No prints at all.

Can you say "Quid Pro Quo"
 

As you suggest, he must be failing to distinguish between cocaine and crack cocaine, for which the Sentencing Guidelines make enormous distinctions.

I doubt W did much crack in the early 1970s -- I don't think he was even drinking anymore by the time crack caught on.

S_A_M