“Mr. Libby was tried by a jury of his peers and was convicted of a felony, ” Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) said in a statement. “The fact that Mr. Libby committed this crime while serving as a public official makes it all the more egregious. Excessive or not, Mr. Libby’s sentence should be respected.”
UPDATE: The Washington Times says it does not agree with Bush’s decision.
Andrew on Scooter, Bush, and Marty Peretz:
Marty is a great friend. I have no doubt he is sincere in defending Libby. I have no reason to doubt that Libby is a very nice man, for a perjurer and a smear artist for the powerful. But the law must always count for more than mere friendship. Libby broke the law and undermined the judicial system; and Bush’s commutation of the sentence is a clear declaration that the rule of law ends at the administration’s edge. Thousands of other perjured felons could get a commutation, but they’re not friends with George W. Bush and Marty Peretz. And so they have no chance. The bottom line for Americans is this: George Bush’s friends do not go to jail. Your friends do.
Well said. Bizarrely, The Washington Times seems to get this even if none of the rest of the conservative establishment does.
I think I’ve never blogged this story before, and it’s pretty funny. I was in Russia during the summer of 1998 on a program involving maybe a dozen other American high school kids. We were all living with Russian families that had kids enrolled in the advanced English class in this one high school in Nizhny Novgorod. For several days in early July, the Americans were all sporadically busy thinking about how we would mount a July 4 celebration. Eventually, we found some sparklers, some peanut butter, and I guess maybe some stuff from McDonalds.
It was only near the last possible moment that this one Russian dude got to asking what it was we were celebrating. “Thees fourth July is for eendependence day?” Yes, of course. “Eees eeemportant holiday in U.S.?” Yes, of course. “Americans make eemportant day for movie? Will Smeeth fight the aliens.”
Tyler Cowen explains why freedom is good for prosperity. One might add that prosperity is good for freedom, as well.
I attended a secret Midcoast Blogger Summit yesterday in Ellsworth, Maine with two of the FreeDarko crew who are up in the Mount Desert area at the moment. Talk naturally turned to How to Save the NBA. Unfortunately, I forgot to present my actual idea on this before leaving. My thought, though, is that the intrinsic competitive imbalance problem driven by the short supply of tall people (see also here or, more briefly, the reason you pick Greg Oden with the number one pick) would best be addressed by adopted a European-style system of having multiple tiers of play with teams promoted or demoted according to how they fare.
Obviously, the details could go in a few different ways, but in broad outline you might do three different divisions — Division A, Division B, and Division C — each with 12 teams. At the end of the season, the two worst teams in Division A would get demoted to Division B for the next year. The two worst teams in Division B would be demoted to Division C. But Division C’s two best teams would get promoted to Division B, and Division B’s two best teams would get promoted to Division A. The result is that almost every team would have “something to play for” throughout the season.
I don’t watch the Beinart/Goldberg diavlogs because they appear to involve the premise that Jonah Goldberg is a person you should debate seriously, but I found myself reading a James Kirchick post that begins “Given Peter and Jonah’s discussion today about whether or not liberals are ignoring the attempted bombings in London and Glasgow last week, the first thing that came to mind when I heard about the failed bombs was a warning delivered by the British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell almost two years ago to the day.”
I’m pretty sure I haven’t been “ignoring” the bomb attempt, but I’ve certainly said less about it than, say, the NBA draft. That said, I find there to be two curious presumptions built into the question. One is that “you’re paying less attention than you should to failed bombings in a foreign country!” is framed as some kind of cutting accusation. Second, is that it’s taken as a given that hyping-up the threat of terrorism is something conservatives will want to do whereas downplaying it is something liberals will want to do.
It’s interesting because on another level if a liberal wants to make the case that Bush has been a horrible president implementing horrible policies, probably the most natural response is to say “look, some of what you say is true, but at the end of the day there haven’t been any more attacks since 9/11.” At that point, it falls to the liberal to point to all this international data indicating a substantial surge in Islamist violence during the Bush years as evidence of the administration’s failures.
“Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who as Massachusetts governor refused to pardon an Iraq war veteran’s BB-gun conviction, on Tuesday called President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence ‘reasonable.’ … During the four years Romney was in office, 100 requests for commutations and 172 requests for pardons were filed in the state. All were denied.”
Brad DeLong analyzes the torments of an honest man who goes to work for George W. Bush. To make a long story short, honesty gets compromised and he’s not working for Bush anymore anyway.
A July 4 question: Why do you hate America? I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I think the main reason I hate America is that I’m a fascist. What I can’t quite decide is whether I’m a fascist because I’m a liberal, or if I’m a fascist because I sometimes shop at Whole Foods.
The economic American dream “that children would be more prosperous than their parents, is in question as perhaps never before.” Since 1973, “median family income has been essentially flat,” and men in their 30s “earn roughly $5,000 less than their father’s generation.”
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton believes that President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison term may also wipe out his two-year probation. “Strictly interpreted, the statute authorizing probation indicates that supervised release ‘should occur only after the defendant has already served a term of imprisonment,’” Walton wrote.
The Fourth of July is the peak season for purchasing American flags. In 2006, $5.3 million worth of U.S. flags were imported from other countries, mostly from China. Now, a “move is on in state legislatures to ensure that the flags folks will be flying and buying this Independence Day were made on this fruited plain.”
More than 180,000 civilians are now working in Iraq as U.S. contractors, exceeding the number of U.S. troops. The “death toll for private contractors in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has topped 1,000,” with 13,000 wounded.
193,000: Number of employees the U.S. government needs to hire in the next two years, facing “a difficult task competing with the private sector for qualified employees.” Around “480,000 federal employees expected to retire or resign in the next five years.” Read more
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