Rep. William Jefferson’s (D-LA) former aide sentenced to eight years in prison.

Todd Gitlin on David Broder versus the Clintons.

As a relatively junior member of our fair nation’s punditocracy, I face these little dilemmas in life. Jacob Weisberg is the editor of Slate. I see myself as the kind of guy who might write for Slate. Do I point out that he’s being ridiculous here? I think that I do, but how’s that going to work out for me in the long-run?

Let me also note that the basic premise of all these politicians’ iPod articles is pretty odd. There are 5,171 songs on my iPod at the moment — I couldn’t possibly name them all in an interview, nor could anyone else using their device properly. For the record, though, I have Rolling Stones songs and Beatles songs, which Weisberg appears to believe could not possibly represent anyone’s authentic tastes. Intriguingly, Tim Lee points out that according to the RIAA President Bush, Senator Clinton, and everyone else who’s ripped a Beatles CD and put it on their iPod is a criminal.

To talk, or not to talk? Apparently, at least some members of the administration are contemplating a rational Iran policy, though naturally Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are opposed.

Give Jamison Foser’s long, well-argued rant about the media a read.

Via Greg Sargent.

Signing off.

Well, folks, it’s time for me to go and head off for a long weekend on the North Carolina coast. Hopefully Josh will return from his vacation with a post or two for you later today. It’s been a real pleasure to write for this audience, read all your emails, and even get a chance to respond to a few of them. Apologies if I didn’t manage to get back to you on something or other — the volume of correspondence TPM generates gets a bit frightening at times and I’ve been trying to hold down my day job.

Ordinarily, you can find me both at The American Prospect in various forms and TPM Café.

To sum up my main points over the past week — peanut butter is bad, invading Iran would be bad, all these dudes telling lies to try to get us to go to war with Iran are bad, global warming is bad, exaggerating the difficulty of stopping global warming is bad, the government of Tunisia is bad, nativists are bad, and letting telecoms run amok is bad. Massive corruption is also bad, but we leave that up to Paul and Justin.

I’ll try to return from vacation with some local color from Red America. I hear they hate George W. Bush down there, too, these days.

Many thanks to Matt Yglesias for filling in for me while I was away. If you’ve become an addict, you can find Matt’s regular blog at TPMCafe.

Now, when I was away, I kept a bit abreast of the news. And the story that really caught my attention was the quickly-debunked story claiming that Iran was about to institute a mandatory dress code for Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians. As you probably already know, the story was false. And the origin of it, from what I can tell, all stems from Amir Taheri, NY Post columnist and member of the Benador Associates stable.

Reading over the various dissections of what happened, I’m still unclear about the relationship between Taheri’s column in the Post and the article in Canada’s National Post which fronted the story. This article in Jewish Week explaining the hoax, calls that Benador Associates, the PR firm-cum-speakers bureau which reps Taheri and most of the rest of the name neocons, “the public relations agency that placed the story with The National Post.” But I’m not clear whether that is supposed to mean that Benador attempted to place Taheri’s column with the Post or that they pitched the story to them. The National Post’s news story, since retracted, appeared on May 19th while Taheri’s Post column appeared on the 20th.

Another question, which reporters floated the story in questions to the Canadian and Australian Prime Ministers?

In any case, murkiness about the origins of the canard is another tell-tale sign of what this very much appears to be: part of an orchestrated disinformation campaign, launched by persons or parties unknown but not too hard to guess.

You can see Taheri’s game effort to sorta-kinda walk the story back here. It’s really a study in mendacity. Taheri says news outlets that picked up his claim “jumped the gun.” Presumably, jumped the gun in assuming there was any factual basis for what he alleged. Taheri then tries to suggest that his report of a Nazi-reminiscent dress code for Jews was just a secondary part of the story, not certain to come to pass, etc. And yet he “stands by” the story in as much as he has secret sources who say that people in Iran somewhere were thinking about it.

Then he adds this confection: “I raised the issue not as a news story, because news of the new law was already several days old, but as an opinion column to alert the outside world to this most disturbing development.”

So he didn’t really report it as news because it was already news even though he was the first to report it.

Let’s face it. As we gear up for the mix of agitprop and disinformation aimed to lay the groundwork for war with Iran, few claims could be more incendiary than alleging that Iran was recapitulating one of Nazi Germany’s steps as it built toward the Final Solution. For the war party, such a development would be so good that, as the phrase goes, if it hadn’t existed it would have to have been invented. And since it didn’t exist, it was.

There’s a tale here that’s yet to be told.

Another question: over the course of the week I was away, quite a number of people appear to have accepted it as a given that at a minimum grave constitutional issues were raised by the Justice Department executing a search warrant to search a congressional office.

But why exactly?

It’s really not clear to me that there’s any constitutional issue raised at all.

Many parliamentary democracies have laws that grant legal immunity to lawmakers — the generous rationale being that the government could abuse its law enforcement powers to intimidate or punish the parliament. But US lawmakers have never enjoyed such an immunity.

If the Feds can raid a congressman’s house, it’s not clear to me why they can’t raid his office. Sure, there’s some room for prudential restraint and a respect for comity. But if the DOJ can’t search a congressman’s office, then the power to investigate and prosecute close to falls apart since that creates a safe harbor for incriminating information. Any serious claim that the functioning of Congress falls outside the bounds of the DOJ would apply to acts as well as work product. And that means that any bribery prosecution is impossible since official acts are an element of the crime.

The constitutional peg for all this speculation comes in Article I, Section 6, which states that Senators and Reps …

shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.

A textual and historical analysis points to a clear meaning and intent behind this passage. The executive is not permitted to arrest or imprison members of Congress to manipulate or prevent Congress from functioning. President Bush can’t put Sen. Feingold in the slammer to shut him up. They also can’t held to account for what things they saw on the floor. But the text clearly spells out the exception of serious crimes, i.e., “felonies.”

All this analysis aside, the real issue is what’s coming down the pike. There are probably a dozen or more members of Congress under federal criminal investigation of one sort of another. (Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who a lot of have long suspected was tied up in Duke’s wrongdoing, is apparently the latest.) And most all of them are Republicans. Denny Hastert says that he wants “to develop reasonable protocols and procedures that will make it possible for the FBI to go into congressional offices to constitutionally execute a search warrant.” I’m sure he does. But he shouldn’t be able to use bogus constitutional arguments to keep covering for the corrupt practices which have blossomed on his watch.

Sad.

Prime Minister Tony Blair caved in to White House pressure by sharpening language on Iran and softening it on global warming in a speech he delivered Friday at Georgetown University, according to a British press report Sunday that Blair’s office immediately denied.

But we’re past that, right?

A number of readers have written in taking umbrage or exception at my suggestion that there really are no constitutional issues raised by the FBI raid on the office of Rep. Bill Jefferson (D-LA).

A number of those emails, candidly, have been a lot of rhetoric and huffing and puffing without much solid argument.

Others make a different argument. We shouldn’t see this incident in isolation but rather in the broader context of the White House’s disregard for the role of law and repeated assertions of constitutionally dobious executive power. This strikes me as a stronger argument. But it’s not clear to me that the decision to mount this raid or seek the court approval for it came out of the White House, let alone from the president. (Since I’ve been away for a week, I’m at a bit of a disadvantage. Did I miss some evidence or reporting that pointed in that direction.) At least from a distance, the impetus for this appears to come out of the much more aggressive tactics of the Public Integrity section of the Justice Department — something that’s caused the White House a lot of grief. And all that aside, this still leaves unaddressed what specific constitutional impediment there is to executing a search warrant.

Yet another argument is the novelty of the case. In almost 220 years of American history there’s never been a law enforcement raid on a congressional office. That certainly raises some questions. But I think part of the answer may come from looking at how many bribery investigations and/or indictments there have been of sitting members of Congress. If anyone has an exact or even a rough number I’d be obliged if you could send it along. But I suspect it’s quite small. And a good part of the reason may be the degree to which Jefferson has resisted cooperating with the investigation. On this last point I’d like to hear more. But I remain unconvinced.

So again, any good arguments on this one? And is anyone prepared to make a specific and serious argument that this raid may have been unconstitutional on separation of powers grounds?