perfidy

Anything I might have cared to say about the distinguished- and empahatically hetero- Senator from Idaho was published years ago.

Gad, I hate to seem to mimic the style of the "lovely and talented" John Edwards' campaign, but my reaction to this morning's news that Alberto Gonzales is resigning (WSJ - subscription) was, roughly, "What took so long?".

No shock, but he's being run out of town on a rail. Not alone among those with an opinion on the matter, I only think it's a shame that he's being run out for all the wrong reasons. The US Attorney firings? Pfft. Not a big deal - he, and the White House, have been well within bounds on the firings themselves, as previously discussed. Severe missteps, such as the McNulty Memorandum, should be considered embarrassments to him and the department, but are just horrifically bad administration, not criminal acts. As also previously discussed, his timid, goofy, and cackhanded defense of his boss, his office, and himself has been so inept that it's been embarrassing to watch.

Never one to favor viewing people humiliating themselves (and thus, my aversion to most forms of reality TV), it's been a cringeworthy handful of months, and the ordeal will soon be over.

Based on the WSJ story linked above and other sources, it seems there's a race to the bottom of the barrel in search of his replacement. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff? What an awful choice he'd be, and not just because he looks like a character who could have played alongside Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice. He's not obviously competent, and while that would make him a perfect stand-in for Gonzales, it would seem that now, in the last 17 months of the Bush administration, they ought to attempt to at least raise their game at the Justice Department.

Chertoff, far more so than the other choices mentioned in the WSJ article (Mueller, Johnson), strikes me a choice only slightly better than dragging Harriet Miers back out of mothballs and propping her up for yet another position beyond her scope.

Also odd, there were several names in the version of the WSJ story made available this morning (the link above is to a front-page version in tomorrow's print edition, but earlier today it was the breaking news version). Louis Freeh and Ted Olson were both mentioned, and either of them strikes me as a potentially apt choice, so it comes as no shock to find them no longer on the list, as reported by the WSJ. The IHT version of the story, available here, retains mention of Olson, but also omits Freeh.

Like Rove's resignation, the Democrats seem to have plans to continue their chase, harrying him as best they can in search of crimes not committed. Life would, I think, be far easier for the Dems if they just took what Bushies hand them on a silver platter (incompetence, ham-fistedness, PR stone-deafness) and ran with it, rather than inventing new crusades on which to wander. But that's just me.

A: Because the muslims just won't stop coming!!!

So, check out this utterly entertaining tale from Britain's Independent of one journalist's voyage on the National Review's recent reader cruise. Every sentence contains a new nugget of outrageousness that should have sprung from the pen of a young Tom Wolfe, or T. Coraghessen Boyle, or any other fiction writer whose stock in trade is wacky cruelty, not from a publication that despite its biases still must cling to some version of reality-as-lived.

The set-pieces are iconic: William Buckley, the founder of the magazine and grey eminence of American Conservatism, sulking shunned and mocked in his cabin as his movementarians flock around the spittle-flecked beard of Norman Podhoretz. The leggy blonde suntanner advocating gassing a few liberals to show them the consequences of treason, in the same distracted way as one might wonder if they could go for a nice mojito right about now. Mark Steyn at a table of admirers, holding forth on the brown tide threatening to subsume the white purity of Albion, and the rest of Europe too.

Go read this, and get a glimpse of a world in which George Bush is a steel-spined visionary hero, ululating hordes of sandaled beasts spit Betel nuts (or date pits... it's so hard to know what these brown people chew... do they chew Betel nuts or is that hashish?) at the very feet of l'Arc de Triomphe, and American liberals wake every morning with their hearts rising toward Mecca, fresh for another day of materially supporting America's sworn enemies.

I just heard him on On Point via public radio, WAMU in DC.

I was really stunned and impressed at his enthusiasm, optimism and outlook. I don't think I have heard such an uplifting guy in politics since the OTHER guy from Hope, AR.

You gotta love a guy that lost over a hundred pounds. That's transformation.

Politically speaking, I am not wild about Mike Huckabee at all. He's pro-life and frankly I'm enough of a one issue voter that there's NO FREAKIN' WAY I'd vote for him because of that position alone. But I found him remarkably in line with my thoughts about the stupidness of the creation/evolution debate. His feeling is that he takes his kids to church to indoctrinate them about religion and doesn't expect school to align with religious views because kids learn a great many things at school but do not take all of them to heart. HEAR HEAR. Give your kids some credit and let them think on their own about God! After all the beauty of God's gift of free will is that when faced with the notion that God perhaps didn't create the world exactly as we know it, you can either reject or accept it.

All of his kids went to public school for all twelve years. He's a guy who puts his money where his mouth is and I'm all for that.

I didn't listen to all of it in detail because I was busy doing some other blogging, but the parts I did hear left me with a good impression. I mean, if I have to choose between evils, the guy is looking pretty good.

So Scooter Libby, convicted by a jury of his peers, has been unconvicted by El Presidente. The ability of the President to pardon is enshrined in the constitution, and is generally constrained only by the ethics of the grantee of the power. Bush, determined to break down the agreements and conventions that have kept the country running for hundreds of years, has begun to pardon his inner circle. Under the Bush theory of the Presidency, any subordinate can commit a crime and be "pardoned", or have his or her sentence commuted in advance. This leaves us with the uncomfortable situation of having a rather unconstrained executive branch, to say the least. Near as I can tell there is only ONE remedy for a President that abuses his authority in this fashion: Impeachment.

The President can pardon like mad unless Congress decides to remove him from office; I wonder what it would take to begin the process. I've been curious about how the GOP intends to shield its minions from a pissed-off inbound executive. Pardons can only happen if a prosecution has taken place, so unless they get those prosecutions cracking now, they're going to be unshielded later on.

This is one of the highest profile cases on record that quantifies exactly how the dual system of justice in this country works.

Colleague Patton wrote not too long ago on this very topic, so I guess you could say that we disagree. The question remains: Where is the check and balance on the Executive when it comes to pardoning his own inner circle?

And just so we're clear, I believe that the GOP has, in this round of administration, done nothing less than break down the barriers between church, state AND party. When members of the executive are emailing each other on their GOP party accounts discussing the introduction of the church into policy, you've got quite a trifecta underway.

I bring you David Gross of San Francisco, who not only:

...asked his bosses for a radical pay cut, enough so he wouldn't have to pay taxes to support the war.

but

In any event, his employer turned him down and he quit.

Which, I guess, good for him, standing up for his convictions that way and all. Left unanswered, at least for now, is whether federal taxes are levied on the wages of "guests of the Federal Government". Why would I be curious about that? Because

Gross, 38, now works on a contract basis, and last year he refused to pay self-employment taxes.

All by itself, that doesn't distinguish him from a lot of people. The AP story notes that between 8 and 10 thousand people fail to pay their taxes for reasons similar to those of Gross. Contained in the story, at a meta-level, is the fact that this particular non-Rhodes Scholar allowed the AP to write a story about him evading taxes. Nothing like calling out the IRS by name to get them to leave you alone. Posing in two pre-mug shots for the story? A priceless addition, though I'm sure the Feds could already have found him whenever and wherever they needed to.

Of course, these days, he won't end up becoming a guest of the Federal Government:

Unlike the days when Thoreau was sent to prison in a tax protest against the Mexican-American War, modern war tax protesters rarely go to prison, according to tax resisters. The IRS may take their money from wages and bank accounts - with penalties and interest - after sending a series of letters.

"They're very polite, which makes it a little boring," said Rosa Packard of Greenwich, a longtime anti-war tax protester.

But if he thinks he is going to avoid collection of his taxes owed, by hook or by crook, after having trumpeted his resistance on a national newswire, he's perhaps not smart enough to be gainfully employed, as a contractor or otherwise.

Will his protest, and others like his, have the desired effect? As James Taranto said in the OpinionJournal piece where I first saw this story, "Something tells us the economy will survive."

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

Given even the slightest chance, the Bush administration has shown an amazing ability over the past several years to choose the worst of all possibilities presented to it in any given circumstance.

However, with last evening's commutation of prison sentence for Scooter Libby, they appear finally to have gotten one right.

Libby's head was hung on a pike for public political enjoyment (and no, I neither have time nor feel like going into the details), and his case has not reached even its first appeal. The happy dance so far engaged in by the judicial class in Washington DC has served to do nothing but continue the political theater and public shaming of Libby. The courts' having ordered him to begin his jail term with his appeal in process, while not unheard of, is far outside the bounds of standard practice in these matters.

For anyone who might disagree with that characterization, I've got two words for you, words that in any rational comparative world would cause snickers and insistence that Libby receive full exoneration and the apologies of the government for its having hassled him: "Sandy Berger". And the fact that they both have little-boy first names is only a coincidence.

Back to my point - Bush had several choices which would have made a hash of this matter, including doing nothing (wrong, not because it might have upset "the base", but wrong because loyalty and fairness dictated action of some sort), and issuing a full pardon (wrong, because he was convicted, however potentially wrongly, and his appeals have not yet run their course).

Deft handling of the matter, via a focus on the one ragingly unfair portion of the story - the immediate incarceration, was as welcome to see as it was surprising. I've come to expect the Bush administration to regularly puke in its own lap, and this time, they didn't.

The fine stays in place, along with the probation, all pending completion of the appeals process. If those appeals are unsuccessful, for the record, I'd react badly to an end-of-term full pardon, just so we're clear on things. Based on what I've seen of the judicial process so far, however, I expect Libby to eventually clear his name in the courts. Allowing him to do so outside of the Graybar Hotel seems quite fair to me.

For the first time in quite a while, then, I'm in a position to compliment Bush for not fucking up something simple. Which is a blessing and a shame, now that I think about it.

Presented without comment, really good (or really bad) advice to America's youth.

[wik] Video, and the domain it was hosted on, are long dead. C'est la Vie.

My boy will say to me, one day in the not to distant future, "Daddy, what is your opinion of George Walker Bush's presidency and the legacy he left for the nation and the Republican party?" And I'll pick him up, dandle him on my knee (for he'll be preternaturally articulate and world-aware, like some real life version of Dawson's Creek), and say to him, "Son, it's like Tim Dickinson wrote in Rolling Stone: He was 'not much of a Republican at all – more like a retarded Christian AA version of Woodrow Wilson. He spent like crazy and he got America involved in these crazy 'let’s export the wonderfulness of us' adventures."

And then we'll both toast the good old days when the worst you could say about our President was that from time to time he mistook vaginas for humidors and had a tenuous relationship with the word "is."

Several of our Ministers have, on occasion, used this forum to express a rabid, unthinking and vicious hatred of the traditional and sacred art of gerrymandering congressional districts. Now, if they only knew how difficult it is to balance out all those competing interests, they'd make less fun of all the funny shapes. But wait! Now they can know how difficult it is, by playing the magical interweb gerrymandering game! How fun is that? Actually, more fun than you'd think, and rather tricky until you get to the sucker bit at the end where they try to foist redistricting reform on you. That part's easy.

I found this over at the Llamabutchers, after I did my Harry Reid post over at Murdoc's. This is makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Subject? Supreme Court rulings. Found in today's news, a story about the several decisions just handed down by our benign judicial overlords. The first two cases on which they ruled are interesting, but not part of the current exercise.

The case in question, Brendlin v. California, is covered in a Washington Post story entitled "Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Car Passengers". The heart of the case?

The court decided that when police stop a vehicle, passengers are "seized" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment and -- like drivers -- can dispute the legality of a search.

The ruling overturned a California Supreme Court decision in the case of Bruce Edward Brendlin, who was arrested on parole violation and drug charges after a November 2001 traffic stop in Yuba City, Calif. Brendlin, who subsequently was sentenced to four years in prison, appealed his conviction on the grounds that the drug evidence should have been suppressed because the traffic stop amounted to "an unlawful seizure of his person," according to today's ruling.

Although the state acknowledged that police "had no adequate justification" to stop the car, in which Brendlin was a passenger in the front seat, it argued that he was not "seized" and thus could not challenge the government's action under the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure protections. Government lawyers also argued that Brendlin could not claim that the evidence against him was tainted by an unconstitutional stop, according to the ruling.

California, in this case, was clearly and deeply wrong, and it's good, if unsurprising, to find the Supremes coming down unanimously in Brendlin's favor.

So, what's wrong with the story, you might ask? Well, not so much the story as the storyline - The WaPo story didn't cover this angle, but in the Wall Street Journal version of the story (subscription), I found this nugget:

The American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP backed Mr. Brendlin, arguing that a ruling in the state's favor would encourage police to conduct arbitrary traffic stops to target passengers, especially minorities, who lack the same rights as drivers.

Left unspoken is the irrelevant fact of Mr Brendlin's minority status, but I'll assume he's black. He could have been chartreuse without having any impact at all on this case, for all it would have mattered.

So Brendlin got the precisely correct result from the Court, for what I think hope are the right reasons, including the prima facie absurdity of California's position on the case. But the underlying theme, when the NAACP's and ACLU's involvement, their raison d'etre in this case, seems to indicate that absent some racial grievance, the alternative result would have occurred.

I have zero concern about the involvement of those two august organizations in providing Brendlin the legal and financial support in his battle, and good for them. Couching this as an issue that only or primarily resonates for minorities? That, I think, is a problem

Via CNN: Congressman indicted in global corruption case

Story Highlights

• William Jefferson faces 16 charges of bribery, obstruction, racketeering
• Louisiana Democrat's schemes reached across Atlantic, prosecutors say
• Investigators found $90,000 in Jefferson's home freezer
• Search of Capitol Hill office prompted constitutional questions

I hope that the long time between the refrigerator raid and the indictment helped the Feds guarantee this smug, smarmy, thieving fuck does hard time for the rest of his life.

I love a good sex scandal, probably way more than the next person.

I had to hear about Jessica Cutler from an Assistant Attorney General outside of the United States. Sex blogging is more his thing than mine (Reading them, not writing them) and he's the kind of naughty boy who'd get sucked into this sort of tale. (No pun intended.) We love public drama overspill like this. We're terrible people, which is what makes us so fun.

Anyhow, apparently she's filed for bankruptcy because she struggling to pay her bills due to a $20 million dollar lawsuit from her former paramour. He's a complete idiot for having sex with her in the first place because she's really kind of ugly. I've seen pugs with cuter faces, but who am I to compare since she's looks like a B or a C-cup in her Playboy shoot and last I checked I'm still wearing a tightly packed A. (And that's only when I'm retaining water like a dyke in the Netherlands.)

She was dumb to use their initials anyway. I give them names like 'The Chemist', 'Valentine', 'Italian Wonder Boy'. It keeps people guessing and makes men paranoid that I'm writing about them. Of course, some I don't make up, like 'Wolf'. (Of course he bites!)

Hat tip to Udandi Andi!

Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.

Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.

So there.

What do these two suits have in common?

"Couple sue Wal-Mart over slip in vomit" 
(AP/Nashville Tennessean)

and 

"ACLU: Boeing offshoot helped CIA" 
(AP/Houston Chronicle) Simple:

• They each have a distinct odor associated with them
• They're both based on slippery circumstances
• They're both as baseless as the day is long

Only one of them, however, appears to have been categorized by the Associated Press as an "Odd Story". So let's look at that one first:

Couple sue Wal-Mart over slip in vomit DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) -- A woman's fall in a puddle of vomit has resulted in a lawsuit against Wal-Mart. June Medema, slipped in the vomit at a Davenport Wal-Mart on June 13, 2005, according to the lawsuit, filed by Medema and her husband, James, in Scott County District Court earlier this month.

Medema claims that she was seriously injured in the fall.

The lawsuit alleges that Wal-Mart's negligence led to Medema's fall, but it does not specifically say how the store was negligent.

John Simley, a Wal-Mart spokesman, decline comment saying he hadn't seen the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims that Medema suffered serious neck and upper back injuries in the fall and has undergone several surgeries and is unable to work.

It's a mercifully short story, so it's included here in its entirety. All you need to know is in that third paragraph - "...but it does not specifically say how the store was negligent." In order to prove negligence, of course, the Medemas will have to prove that Wal-Mart knew the vomit was puddled on the floor. Which will be rather difficult - if they didn't see it, why should Wal-Mart have done so?

As to the second story, I can completely understand the ACLU going after a Boeing subsidiary - They can't sue the US government or the CIA on a classified matter, so they simply picked someone else in the transaction chain to sue.

NEW YORK — A Boeing Co. subsidiary that may have provided secret CIA flight services was sued Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three terrorism suspects who claim they were tortured by the U.S. government. The lawsuit charges that flight services provided by Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. enabled the clandestine transportation of the suspects to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."

The ACLU, of course, has been known to provide valuable legal services. They've also been known to tilt at windmills in pursuit of an agenda that tends to be decidedly leftist. Not "liberal" - leftist. As I said, I can understand their grasping at straws to find someone to sue, because money-grubbers have to go where the money is, even if they expect to get no money out of the matter.

I just can't understand why they think their suit will survive a summary judgment request. Jeppesen Dataplan didn't man the flight, didn't own the plane, and didn't load or unload alleged passengers from the alleged extraordinary alleged rendition alleged mission. Jeppesen provides flight planning services. Logistics.

Undaunted by this bit of reality, the ACLU soldiers on:

The ACLU said the company "either knew or reasonably should have known" that they were facilitating the torture of terrorism suspects by providing flight services for the CIA.

That's one of the ten most absurd things I've read in the last 48 hours. Having been on flights which used the services of flight planning companies like Jeppesen, and having occasionally been with the pilot when he was planning the flight, I'm comfortable asserting that in no case did a flight services vendor demand to know, let alone show even the slightest interest in, what the purpose of the flight was. Which is just as well - it would have been none of their business, and they'd have been told as much.

It occurs to me that there are two other things these two suits have in common - they're both weakly disguised fundraising attempts, and neither one will be successful at anything other than garnering publicity for its plaintiff.

Also posted at issuesblog.com

Competition in the medical system is a Republican plank -- the theory being that normal business competition takes place in the medical sector, yielding market forces that optimize across the board. I don't think that medicine operates the same way as other areas -- normal competitive forces require that the buyer have choices and knowledge of those choices, so better decisions can be made.

I recently had some blood tests done as part of a normal checkup -- right down at the end of the hall, sir! Weeks later some handy information systems that my insurance company provides give insight into the costing side of the medical equation that I haven't really had before. I was stunned to see the lab charges.

I wasn't stunned by the amount that the insurance company had paid on my behalf, which was around $22. I was stunned by the "normal" fee for the service -- over $125! In other words, if someone was stupid enough to go to the doctor and pay fee-for-service, they'd get hijacked (or medi-jacked, if you like) for $100 more!

There's a trend right now for companies to offer their employees medical savings accounts; employees get a pool of money they can use to pay their medical expenses, with some assistance from the company. Leftover money can be rolled over into the next year, and some of it can be kept. The idea is to encourage employees to be smart buyers when it comes to medical expenses, but how can this work if there's such a huge disparity between what's charged to the insurance company and what a normal person must pay? With a medical savings account are those deep discounts still available? And for how long?

The biggest problem Republicans have with the current medical system is that there isn't a liberal in sight they can blame its deficiencies and cruelties on. Republicans continue their efforts to raise simple fear amongst citizens -- fear of drug tampering on medicines from other countries, like…oooo…Canada, with its notoriously dangerous drug supply chain. It's not like medicines in America can be sold to pharmacies by drug distributors dealing from the trunks of their cars. Oh wait…they can and do. Or it's the scary ghost of medical futures that might involve the public sector! My god, its full of stars, and they're falling…

There is exactly one reason why Republicans (and Democrats not worthy of their offices) have been so protective of the current dysfunctional medical system in America. They have contributors who benefit enormously from the current system, and that applecart isn't going to be overturned any time soon.

So smile, citizen, as you pay over twice as much for medical care that doesn't even get you into the top ten outcomes, world-wide. You bought into it, and now you're paying for it. And get ready to pay more -- much more -- if you continue to keep your heads in the sand. I can see the drug companies "researching" a miracle cure now: A drug that will let you keep your head in the sand! Miracles never cease.

The Fred is doing very well in the online GOP straw poll run by, uh, GOP Straw Polls. As you can see if you follow the link, The Fred has been chosen as first choice by over fifty percent of all respondents. Romney and Guiliani are trailing significantly behind, both in the teens, and the ragged rabble of other GOP candidates languish in the single digits. Naturally, this is a self-selected group, and not a scientific poll like those run by the major news organizations. Nevertheless, that's a hell of a lot of support from at least one group of people - and a group of people, moreover, that will have a large effect on the campaign if what we saw in 2004 is any indication of the growing importance of blogging on elections.

We continue our continuing series, "Meet the candidates"

The number of candidates gunning for the highest office in the land continues to grow. Governor Richardson has tossed his hat in, and there are rumors that even our first android-American candidate, Al Gore, is considering making a go of it as well. Of all the candidates, real and potential, only two interest me. One is Hillary Clinton, and the interest comes from a deep and soul-scarring fear. The other is Fred Thompson.

Over the last couple days, I’ve been talking with a new good friend, who – thanks to his position deep in the bowels of politics – shall remain unnamed. And we’ve been talking about Fred.

Fred is different than the other candidates. Romney, Guiliani and their ilk are slick, often witty. They are polished, but polished to a particularly political sameness. Thompson feels different. To be sure, that feel is carefully crafted - the result of his experience as an actor and politician. But he has crafted a persona that looks like it is rooted in his actual character, and that character looks interesting. In that, I think, he's a lot like Reagan - not that he looks or sounds or talks like Reagan - but that he is not trying to look like a "statesman" and as a result actually looks more like a statesman than anyone else on the political scene.

What he looks like is my grandfather - he even has the same cadences in his speech. I’ve watched two interweb videos of Fred recently. One was his response to Michael Moore’s debate challenge. Only 38 seconds long, this is a masterful bit of political jujitsu. Fred’s got style, presence, and a good bit of humor; and manages to slam Moore without making an ass of himself – something that most politicians have a very hard time doing. If this is any indication of how effective a Fred campaign would be, then the other candidates have much to be worried about.

I watched another video, an interview he had where he talked about not watching one of the Republican debates. I was struck by how he accurately communicated his ideas without using political catchphrases, tired metaphors - just clear communication laced with his sense of humor. Looks like he alone of the current crop actually absorbed the lessons of Orwell’s "Politics and the English Language."

Also alone of the candidates, I actually like listening to him. Listening to Bush makes me cringe, has since before he was elected. And that cringing has only gotten worse over the last seven years. Yet I voted for him, if only because the alternative was far worse. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I think Fred would have no real trouble cleaning up his Republican competition – assuming of course that there are no skeletons hiding in his closets, and that he can put together a well-run campaign and pull in the contributions.

But Bush is the albatross that any Republican candidate will have to deal with in going up against the eventual Democratic candidate. And the albatross in chief has certainly not made it easy for anyone to follow him into the White House. Bush’s stark inability to communicate, well, anything has left the impression that the Iraq war is an unmitigated disaster. It isn’t, though problems and casualties have dominated the public perception since about a month after the libervasion began. Four years of not making a sound public case for the sacrifices of our soldiers is a large obstacle for anyone who wants to become the next Republican president.

As well, Bush’s failures to get anything done on the domestic front will be a similar huge obstacle. For years, Bush had a Republican congress and yet was unable to make any progress on immigration, social security, or any number of other issues. Certainly any Democratic candidate will be able to make hay on that.

Who among the currently announced Republican candidates will be able to overcome a Democrat armed with all the weapons that Bush has inadvertently given them? Even the Republicans have grown weary of the feckless Republican leadership in the White House and the Congress. If Thompson could demonstrate that he has feck, (and his absence from elected office recently might actually help there) he stands a chance at retaining current support and winning over the independents. Independents often vote character more than issues anyway. My liberal mom would have voted McCain, for that reason.

Charisma isn't everything - but if Fred puts together an efficient campaign, I could easily see him trouncing all comers on the Republican side. And the guy has style. He’s got charasma. Could he be the second coming of Reagan? I wonder, now. He's got the instincts, it seems; and he's got the gravitas - more than Reagan, even. He's smart not to be jumping in too soon. And more than anyone else, he seems to get how new media (bloggers in particular) can help:

Since the ‘04 Howard Dean campaign, the Internet has been seen as fertile ground for presidential candidates. But the advent of a possible candidacy by former Senator Fred Thompson could take online politics to a new level. In this exclusive article for Pajamas Media, Thompson reveals a respect for the ‘net and its importance to democracy that could only come from a true web surfer. If the six-time weekly winner of the PJM Presidential Straw Poll is actually elected President, are we looking at … the First Blogger?

To PJM and Friends
By Fred Thompson

So, I hear you all have been talking about me.

It seems that I ought to respond, at least briefly, to all those who have expressed confidence in me — both here and in other forums. I do not take that confidence lightly.

The Pajamas Media poll is certainly good news, especially when, for a lot of politicians, encouragement to run from three relatives and an unemployed campaign consultant is considered an unstoppable groundswell. When people are saying nice things about me, I try to remember the proverb that compares flattery to a net at your feet. To be sure, the Pajamas poll results are very flattering, so let me return the favor and throw a net at your feet.

“So, I hear you all have been talking about me” Classic – and, if the other videos I linked above, and for that matter his performances in everything from The Hunt for Red October to Law and Order, are indicative then I think he’s a potential winner. If Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, the only thing that is going to beat her is the kind of humor and common-sense persona that Reagan deployed to such great effect against Carter. I wonder what the “There he goes again” moment will be in this election.

And I'd dearly love to see him destroy Hillary in a debate. I dig the guy. Barring some horrific revelation about his past, or learning that he favors something I detest, I might actually be voting for someone in 2008. And as my friend said:

It’s all about the Feck. The f*ing Feck. Fred has Feck.

[wik] More information on Fred Dalton Thompson can be found here, here and here.

(apropos previous story, below)

Democrats seek "no confidence" vote on Gonzales

As previously covered here, I don't see the firing of the US Attorneys, itself, as an affair worthy of even 10% of the coverage it's received over the past several months.

That said, the fact that the Senate is working to craft and pass a "no confidence vote" on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' tenure in his present office strikes me as far less silly than does the World Bank's dogged (and successful) pursuit of Paul Wolfowitz.

The initial response to the Democrats' concern over the firing of political appointees for (gasp!) political reasons was completely mishandled. Obfuscation, bluster, and confusion were the order of the day. None of this was required, and instead the response should have been to tell the Democrats to get stuffed, as it is the president's prerogative to fire any of his appointees, without regard for the sensitivities of Democrats looking to make political hay out of thin air.

However, once the AG's office acted as though they needed to explain the events, bordering on covering up the facts, it seemed clear that the AG wasn't qualified to handle his office. Subsequent events haven't been kind to his position, because each has seemed to provide yet another opportunity for him to demonstrate his cackhandedness in office.

Among those subsequent events, the May 14 resignation of Paul McNulty, Deputy AG, and the testimony on Tuesday, May 15, of James Comey, describing the attempts by Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales to get John Ashcroft, then in intensive care, to approve of an administration spying proposal.

Using only NPR as a signpost, have a look at the recent progression of this story:

• May 10, 2007 Despite Furor, Gonzales Likely to Stick Around
• May 11, 2007 Gonzales Gets Gentler Reception in House Visit
• May 14, 2007 Deputy U.S. Attorney General McNulty Resigns
• May 15, 2007 Gonzales: McNulty Played 'Central' Role in Firings

Gonzales himself has recently opined that it looked like he'd weathered the storm, even while, in a complete reversal of form for anyone in the Bush administration, he took responsibility for the firings, sort of, -ish.

I continue to believe that nothing wrong was done in the termination of the US Attorneys. Far more important, though, is the focus on how the aftermath-that-shouldn't-have-been was handled, and Gonzales has repeatedly shown himself to be a tone deaf stumbler during his defense.

Such a set of skills seems ill-suited to the highest levels of the Justice Department, and the Democrats (plus either 6 or 11 Republicans, depending on how you count, so far) seem likely to get their vote of no confidence passed, symbolic as it might be. Better still to hope for Gonzales' resignation as a result, though, as a friend pointed out to me yesterday, how hard might it be to get confirmation for a replacement?

[wik] For the record, all the ninnies calling for a wave of impeachments should also get stuffed. Focus on the problem at hand, rather than the problems you want to be at hand, sez me.

[alsø wik] Specter indicates that the pressure may be working. For once, I hope Specter is right. He hasn't been worth much since he created the Wall of Sound, and isn't even competent to hire a decent combination of chauffeur/murder trial witness.