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William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t, July 3, 2007

Let me get this straight.

Like a thief in the night, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He made no public appearance to announce the decision, but instead air-mailed a written statement after 5 p.m. at the outset of a midweek holiday. The statement praised Patrick Fitzgerald as “a highly qualified, professional prosecutor who carried out his responsibilities as charged.” As for Libby himself, the statement noted that “the consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.”

Not 24 hours later, Bush delivered a stammering, vacillating, nervous public statement defending his decision to commute Libby’s prison sentence. During his statement, Bush made it clear that a full and complete pardon for Libby was still very much on the table.

Quite the boomerang, yes? Bush respected Fitzgerald, the truth, the jury and the rule of law on Monday night, but didn’t respect these things in the morning. Mr. Bush, in doing so, has proven himself once again to be a quintessential moral philanderer, screwing around with justice at a whim, a serial cheater and a man who absolutely cannot be trusted.

Libby was part of a White House plot to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose early criticism of the administration’s Iraq claims were deemed a grave threat to the policy. The White House attacked Wilson by exposing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a deep-cover CIA operative. This exposure destroyed the intelligence network she had created to track any person, nation or group that might give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Libby lied under oath and obstructed justice to cover up these White House activities, and to protect Vice President Dick Cheney from scrutiny and censure for his direct role in the plot.

Despite these serious crimes, Libby will spend less time in prison than Paris Hilton, Martha Stewart and Susan MacDougal. The same Republicans who championed the impeachment of Bill Clinton now celebrate Libby’s liberation from the consequences of the very same acts they accused Clinton of committing.

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Michael Kranish, The Boston Globe, July 4, 2007

WASHINGTON — The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight — asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system — he telephoned Nixon’s lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, “At That Point in Time,” Thompson said he acted with “no authority” in divulging the committee’s knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon’s resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson’s actions.

“Thompson was a mole for the White House,” Armstrong said in an interview. “Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was.”

Asked about the matter this week, Thompson — who is preparing to run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination — responded via e-mail without addressing the specific charge of being a Nixon mole: “I’m glad all of this has finally caused someone to read my Watergate book, even though it’s taken them over thirty years.”

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Bob Geiger, July 05, 2007

Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) was aghast. He was indignant as hell about how having a high public official involved in something like perjury and obstruction of justice can damage the very foundation on which our nation was built — and he had the harsh words to show for it.

“By his words and deeds he chose to place himself above the law. By his words and deeds he has undermined the rule of law in America to the great harm of this nation,” the Kansas Republican said. “By his own words and deeds, he has undermined the truth-finding function of the judiciary, at great harm to that branch of our government. By his words and deeds, he had done great harm to the notions of honesty and integrity that form the underpinnings of this great republic.”

And here’s the Brownback kicker: “We have lost many things over the past few months: trust in public officials, respect for the rule of law, confidence in the truth of the White House’s public statements. But perhaps the most tragic loss has been the steady erosion of our societal standards.”

That’s Brownback in his closed-door impeachment statement on President Bill Clinton, that was read into the Congressional Record on February 12, 1999.

You didn’t get all excited thinking he was commenting on that Scooter Libby thing, did you?

I can understand if you did. After all, Libby was convicted of those same charges and sentenced within federal guidelines to a 30-month prison sentence, only to have his friend George W. Bush decide on Monday that anything over, well, zero days in jail was “excessive” when it comes to a White House crony.

But then again, Brownback is hardly alone in the hypocritical silence being shown by the very same Republican Senators who in 1999 voted guilty on both the perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Clinton. The vote took place on that February 12, with the Senate acquitting Clinton of both articles of impeachment — the perjury charge got 45 guilty votes while the obstruction-of-justice article resulted in a 50-50 split.

Of the 25 Republican Senators still in the Senate and who voted that day to convict Clinton on both articles of impeachment, not one of them has issued a public statement on the Libby sentence commutation in the three days since it occurred.

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Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, July 4, 2007

Hillary looks over at her husband.

He’s in a pretty good mood. He just finished a grilled chicken sandwich from the Dairy Queen near Grinnell, and as a reward for eating healthy, she gave him a bite of her Snickers Blizzard. Crowds all over Iowa have been clamoring for him. Here in the privacy of their black S.U.V., driving through flat Iowa farmland with the press bus trailing, she senses an opportune moment to iron out a few wrinkles.

As Bill works on The New York Times crossword puzzle, Hill tugs on the sleeve of his black shirt in what she hopes is a playful manner.

“Sweetie,” she says, smiling brightly. “Everything’s going really well. You abide by your five-minute limit and talk only about me. You’re still having a little trouble getting that adoring smile down. In fact, on our first stop you actually looked bored and fidgety while I was talking. But I think we solved that problem today by having you leave the stage as soon as I start speaking. If you can just refrain from looking so longingly at the microphone, our pas de deux will be perfect!”

Her smile fades. “Of course,” she frowns, “there was that awkward moment when I said Bush should not have commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence because he was elevating cronyism over the rule of law, and there you were, Mr. Elevate-Cronyism-Over-The-Rule-of-Law, sitting on a stool right behind me in that look-at-me Crayola yellow shirt, reminding everyone of that passel of pardons you sneaked in under the wire, including one for that fugitive tax-evader Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was your fund-raiser and whose lawyer was – can it get any worse? – Scooter Libby! And as soon as we get out of cow country, you’ve got to start dialing for dollars. How could that pest Obama outraise us by $10 million?”

Bill looks dolefully at her, his pen poised in midair. “What’s a seven-letter word for ball-and-chain,” he asks. “Hillary?”

” ‘Partner,’ ” she replies briskly. “Now listen, Bill, this is important. Everyone’s asking what your role in my administration will be, and I think it’s time we figure that out.”

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Tim Grieve, Salon, July 3, 2007

The Department of Justice maintains published standards for clemency orders like the one George W. Bush gave Scooter Libby Monday.

Under those standards, a request for commutation is supposed to go the Department of Justice’s “pardon attorney,” who “initiates and directs the necessary investigations and prepares a report and recommendation for submission to the president in every case.” As part of those “necessary investigations,” the pardon attorney “routinely requests the United States Attorney in the district of conviction to provide comments and recommendations” on the case. As the DOJ standards explain, “The views of the United States Attorney are given considerable weight in determining what recommendations the department should make to the president.”

The standards also state that that the pardon attorney “routinely requests the United States Attorney to solicit the views and recommendation of the sentencing judge.”

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Brought To You Bartblog, DonkeyDigest, Former President Clinton, and Current Democratic Presidential Frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, July 2, 2007

What do you get when you cross a Mafia don with a bond salesman? A dealer in collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.’s) — someone who makes you an offer you don’t understand.

Seriously, it’s starting to look as if C.D.O.’s were to this decade’s housing bubble what Enron-style accounting was to the stock bubble of the 1990s. Both made investors think they were getting a much better deal than they really were. And the new scandal raises two obvious questions: Why were the bond-rating agencies taken in (again), and where were the regulators?

To understand the fuss over C.D.O.’s, you first have to realize that in the later stages of the great 2000-2005 housing boom, banks were making a lot of dubious loans. In particular, there was an explosion of subprime lending — home loans offered to people who wouldn’t normally have been considered qualified borrowers.

For a while, the risks of subprime loans were masked by the housing bubble itself: as long as prices kept going up, troubled borrowers could raise more cash by borrowing against their rising home equity. But once the bubble burst — and the housing bust is turning out to be every bit as nasty as the pessimists predicted — many of these loans were bound to go bad.

Yet the banks making the loans weren’t stupid: they passed the buck to other people. Subprime mortgages and other risky loans were securitized — that is, banks issued bonds backed by home loans, in effect handing off the risk to the bond buyers.

In principle, securitization should reduce risk: even if a particular loan goes bad, the loss is spread among many investors, none of whom takes a major hit. But with the collapse of the $800 billion market in bonds backed by subprime mortgages — the price of a basket of these bonds has lost almost 40 percent of its value since January — it’s now clear that many investors who bought these securities didn’t realize what they were getting into.

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Interesting bit sent to people organizing to pass FairTax legislation:

WE ARE OFFENDED THAT:
• It has been reported (by World Net Daily) that President Bush made an agreement with the heads of Canada and Mexico in 2005 to implement an EU-type superstate (a North American Union) with it’s own currency, it’s own militia, and it’s own super court that, in some instances, will have authority over our own supreme court, without a proper treaty, and that workgroups continue toward that end without Congressional oversight or approval!
• Even though the Constitution states that “Expenditures of ALL public Money must be published…” (Art. I, Section 9, para. 7), some items are declared ” off budget” (such as Post Office and Social Security) to obscure the true cost of government.
• The Supreme Court uses precedent, rather than the Constitution, in their decision making.
• The 1960 Supreme Court ruled in Nestor Vs. Flemming that, after having our money forcibly confiscated from us and put into a non-existent trust fund, we have no legal right to that money. (Future Congresses are not bound to the decisions of a prior Congress.)
• The politicians are spending us into oblivion and lying about it (the accumulated debt is not the advertised $8.8 trillion, but estimated by David Walker, head of GAO, to be over 50 trillion (throw in contingent liabilities and it may be as high as 80 trillion).
When I wore a little brown suit delivering little brown packages for a big brown company, I always delivered those packages with a sense of urgency. I approach the passage of the Fair Tax with that same sense of urgency, and appreciate your sense of urgency as well.