Mick Arran

CANDORVILLE - Darrin Bell (Click to enlarge)

So let’s see if I’ve got this straight:

1. A Mayor announces publicly that he’s given himself the right to walk into any house in town and go through anybody’s personal effects, without permission from either them or a court, if he thinks they might be involved in criminal activity.
2. A number of prominent members of the Mayor’s opposition, along with critics of his policies, notice shortly thereafter that someone broke into their homes and searched them. They call the police.
3. The police investigate but when the homeowners try to find out what the evidence shows, they discover that the Mayor has declared the evidence “secret” on the grounds that releasing it might tip his hand to criminals, and he refuses to allow it to be seen by anyone except himself, select members of his re-election team, and police officers loyal to him.
4. The homeowners bring suit against the Mayor on the grounds that they have “a reasonable expectation” that the Mayor was the one who broke into their homes, seeing as how he announced that’s what he planned to do, and ask the court to declare the Mayor’s assumption of such powers to be illegal - which, absent the Mayor’s solo declaration that it isn’t, it is.
5. The Judge agrees with them, but when the Mayor appeals to the City Superior Court - where, of the three judges, two are loyalists of his party and one of them was appointed by him - the Superior Court overturns the Judge’s ruling because the plaintiffs can’t prove it was the Mayor (what with the evidence being locked up and all) and therefore “have no standing” - ie, they can’t prove that a) “they were harmed”, or b) the Mayor was the one who did it.

That’s essentially what just happened in the 6th District Court of Appeals over the ACLU’s wiretapping suit.

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Dan Wasserman

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

Probably not, but his latest column does illustrate perfectly how otherwise intelligent liberals can get trapped into saying incredibly stoopid things.

One of the characteristics that sets liberals and progressives apart from conservatives and of which we are most proud is our willingness to listen. Being a conservative means never having to say you’re sorry, never having to admit you’re wrong about anything no matter what the facts say, and never again having to actually listen to anybody who disagrees with you. You just memorize a few of the standard slogans and shout them as loud as you can, loud enough to drown out critics - and facts. It’s easy.

Left-wingers, otoh, have taken a blood oath of fairness, and they’re just as rigid about its application as conservatives are in despising it. Lefties will listen to anyone with respect, even if they are obviously raving lunatics frothing at the mouth and falling over backwards. And not just listen, mind you, but try to understand their point of view.

It’s all very fair and balanced but it can lead to precisely the same disregard of the truth as he said/she said journalism when you bend over so far to be “fair” that you give the same weight to a lie as a fact just because it comes out of your opponent’s mouth. For instance, Kinsley claims that Libby’s trial came about through a “perjury trap” similar to the one Ken Starr used on Bill Clinton.

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The Rittenhouse Review’s Jim Capozzola died Monday. He was one of only two or three bloggers who could legitimately be considered a pioneer, and there are a lot of posts around expressing gratitude for his generosity and appreciation for his talent.

Unlike the others who are writing postmortems, I didn’t know him personally, I never corresponded with him, and as far as I know, he never had so much as an inkling that I existed. So I wasn’t going to write anything about him, figuring it wasn’t really my place.

Then I read this short eulogy by Anthony Cartouche, who’s subbing for Roger Ailes this week, and when I read the last graf, I realized that Mr Capozzola had after all influenced me in a significant way that I had almost forgotten.

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Tom Toles

If Bush’s pardon “commutation” of Libby’s sentence did nothing else, it seems to have awakened our sleeping press corps for a moment or two. In a contentious press briefing yesterday, Tony Snow unsuccessfully tried to dance a tightrope under a barrage of questions that were insistent and even incredulous. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank compared his performance to Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock.

Logic suffered a…serious challenge when Bush press secretary Tony Snow, in his briefing, made the following points about Libby’s case:

· That Bush wasn’t “granting a favor to anyone” but that the case got his “special handling.”

· That it was not done for “political reasons” even though “it was political.”

· That it was handled “in a routine manner,” yet it was also “an extraordinary case.”

· That “we are not going to make comments” on the case, even though Bush had already issued a 655-word statement commenting on the case.

And if that makes sense to you, beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.

“You’re insulting our intelligence,” one of the reporters advised Snow.

“How can you stand there with a straight face?” queried CBS News’s Bill Plante.

Good question.

I’m including a video so that those of you who came of age after 1985 can see what the press used to be like before Ronald Reagan used his Everybody’s Granpaw image to turn them into weenies. There was a time once in the dim and distant past of legend and song when contentious briefings like this were standard, not isolated incidents fueled by outrageous political twisting of the justice system.

Now, if only they’d treat Bush himself with a similar unwillingness to accept transparent rationalizations and pretzel logic, we might actually consider that we’re getting somewhere.

Meanwhile:

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As predicted by almost everyone, including me, Scooter will not spend a single day in jail.

President Bush commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby yesterday, sparing Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff 2 1/2 years in prison after a federal appeals court had refused to let Libby remain free while he appeals his conviction for lying to federal investigators.

Bush, who for months had sidestepped calls from conservatives to come to Libby’s aid, broke his silence early yesterday evening, touching off an immediate uproar from Democrats who accused the White House of circumventing the rule of law to protect one of its own.

The president announced his decision in a written statement that laid out the factors he had weighed. Bush said he decided to “respect” the jury’s verdict that Libby was guilty of four felonies for lying about his role in the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity. But the president said Libby’s “exceptional public service” and prior lack of a criminal record led him to conclude that the 30-month sentence handed down by a judge last month was “excessive.”

“Excessive”. For protecting the people who blew an undercover agent’s status and career by lying and destroying evidence, 2 1/2 yrs - out in a year or so on parole - was “excessive”. And this from the man who laughed about signing death sentences in Texas - 152 of them - the leader of a so-called “law-and-order” party.

Zero jail time and two years’ probation for the man who covered up for traitors. I guess we know now that to Bush and the rest of the GOP, “law and order” is just the title of a tv show.

Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University who is an expert on federal criminal sentencing policies, said it is “hypocritical and appalling from a president whose Justice Department is always fighting” attempts by judges and lawmakers to lower the punishment called for under federal sentencing guidelines. Berman said Bush’s message amounted to “My friend Scooter shouldn’t have to serve 30 months in prison because I don’t want him to.”

That about sums it up.

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The WaPo’s Peter Baker seems to be bidding fair to replace Elizabeth Bumiller as Biggest Bush Sycophant Journo of the Week, and considering the competition, that’s saying something.

On Friday, Baker tugged at our heartstrings with a moving narrative about a beleaguered president who, though once jaunty and good-natured, now faces depression and defeat. I tell you, I had all I could do to fight back the tears as our plucky Hero bravely faced his destiny.

He looked uncharacteristically dejected as he approached the lectern, fiddling with papers as he talked and avoiding the sort of winking eye contact he often makes with reporters. And then President Bush did something he almost never does: He admitted defeat.

***

[F]or a president who makes a point of never giving in, even when he loses, it was a striking moment, underscoring the depth of his political travails. It took almost two years before Bush acknowledged, just months ago, that his effort to reshape Social Security had failed. Now he has surrendered in what was probably his last chance of securing a legacy-making second-term domestic victory.

The desultory appearance in a college hallway here after a speech on Iraq may have marked the death of ambition in Bush’s legislative agenda. The paradigm shift that senior adviser Karl Rove saw after the 2004 election has now proved illusory. The Ownership Society that Bush promised to build in 2005 is rarely mentioned these days. Even the hope-against-hope optimism of finding bipartisan common ground after the 2006 elections has officially evaporated.

Cue the violins.

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I forgot to mention yesterday that in response to the criticism of Luntz’s hiring (which came, so far as I am aware, from the blogosphere exclusively - I’ve seen not one comment against it in any of the mass media organs I look at every day), PBS announced that he will not, after all, be taking up a Friday night slot on Tavis Smiley’s show to bash Democrats and sell his latest ultraconservative frames (via Avedon Carol).

The Good News about the CPB Board is that a) it has enormous overall influence but no day-to-day supervisory control, and b) its members seem to be aware - or at least to believe - that they’re behind the lines in enemy territory and have to be careful lest their cover be blown to smithereens.

As Digby’s comment shows, even otherwise smart, savvy, highly-informed liberal critics remain largely unaware of the changes on the CPB Board and the rightward drift of PBS programming that began under Clinton not long after the Republicans took control of Congress in ‘94. As we reach the point - which we’re now doing - where that drift becomes more obvious and less ignorable, those critics are bound to catch on. If they then succeed in convincing the largely liberal-leaning PBS audience that its favorite news outlet has become little more than a FoxLite shill for conservative talking points, there could very well be a rather nasty backlash. The Movement Cons now dominating the Board would no doubt like to avoid that contingency.

One of the ways the Board has been able to use its power without exposing its positioning is through the use of “beards” - token appointments of people who may be sympathetic to right-wing thinking or at least have no open antipathy toward it, and who in any case don’t have enough influence to sway the decisions of the dominant neocons.

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