As I wrote yesterday, I think Eric Holder made the right decision, taking all the facts into account, in abandoning the prosecution of now-former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK). But as Zack Roth reports in this new post at TPMMuckraker, we’re now in the midst of an outpouring of tributes to Stevens claiming that the effective dismissal of the case makes Stevens an aggrieved victim and confirms that the prosecution never should have been brought in the first place (see this post for a list of encomiums). In other words, they seem to have mistaken him for Don Siegelman, who’s still looking at a lengthy prison term. I can only think these people are either blinded by affection and insiderism or simply haven’t reviewed the facts of the case.

But let’s remember that none of the misconduct on the prosecutors’ part, which was serious, touched upon or minimized Stevens’ basic bad acts. In the course of advocating for the interests of a major political contributor in his state, Stevens accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods and services from that contributor.

Our ethics and corruption laws, in certain areas, are so tight these days that politicians often get tripped up for accepting box seats at sporting events or fancy meals. But what Stevens did is like a textbook case of being on the take. Stevens had Bill Allen hire contractors to take his Alaska home, slice it up off the ground and add a whole new floor to it — in addition to various new goodies and emoluments.

Quite apart from whether the DOJ should refile the charges and even whether the acts can be fit into the criminal statutes, beyond a reasonable doubt, those facts were true and widely reported on long before the charges were ever brought. And the behavior was disgraceful.

It’s always easier to forgive or contextualize or downplay bad behavior when we know the people as actual people rather than names or numbers or two dimensional cardboard cutouts we’re happy to ship off to years or decades of rotting in prison — a fact we should take more deeply into account when we revisit our entire system of criminal justice. But context and forgiveness or just plain mercy isn’t the same as simple denial — which seems to be the order of the day today in our nation’s capital.

Jon Stewart bids El Rushbo farewell as Limbaugh announces he’s leaving New York City.

To hear the folks at AIG describe it, it’s in our interest to pay out all this money to their CDS counterparties and keep the bonus money flowing because — in addition to not destroying the global banking system — we’ve got to maintain the value of all the good parts of AIG that we’re going to sell off and get our money back.

But there are disturbing reports emerging that outside of AIGFP, where everyone is getting paid out at full dollar value, at the tried and true subsidiaries they’re stiffing people they owe money to and letting whole operations basically drive into the ditch.

Here’s one example we’ve unearthed with AIG’s real estate unit basically walking away from one of their ill-advised mega-deals for some sixteen thousand residential apartments. It makes this part of AIG look like the corporate equivalent of one of those trashed and abandoned subdivision homes now gone to seed because the owners have walked away from it when they couldn’t pay the mortgage.

Whether this is representative of the rest of the company is not at all clear. But it suggests at a minimum that we — as owners of the company — need to be asking a lot more questions about just how this behemoth is being run.

The Alaska GOP is making the incredible claim that Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) should resign so that a new election can be held free from any taint by the Bush-era Justice Department.

Facing a primary challenge will make you do strange things. Today Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) voted for Sen. John McCain’s proposed spending freeze, just seven weeks after he voted for Obama’s stimulus package.

As election results in New York’s 20th Congressional District are checked and rechecked, Republican Jim Tedisco, who trailed on election night by 65 votes, was briefly ahead of Democrat Scott Murphy this afternoon by 12 votes, according to a New York state political blog.

But we just checked with the state election board, and the latest tally has Murphy back in the lead — by 6 votes. We’ve been looking into it, and it’s not entirely clear whether everyone is working off the same data set. But for now, the official state tally has Murphy ahead by half a dozen votes.

This is before all the outstanding absentee ballots have been counted — which will ultimately decide the winner. We’ll have more on those shortly.

A federal grand jury in Chicago has handed up a 16-count indictment of former Illinois Gov. Rod “Nothing But Sunshine” Blagojevich, his brother Rob, two former chiefs of staff, a former Blago fundraiser, and an Illinois capital mover and shaker.

Here’s U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s detailed press release (.pdf) on the new indictment. Keep in mind, this indictment takes the place of the original complaint the feds filed against Blago last December — and it adds new and additional allegations, including the attempted extortion of an unidentified U.S. congressman.

Also worth noting that Fitz introduces Blago to RICO:

The RICO conspiracy count alleges that Blagojevich personally, the Office of the Governor of Illinois and Friends of Blagojevich were associated and, together, constituted the “Blagojevich Enterprise,” whose primary purpose was to exercise and preserve power over Illinois government for the financial and political benefit of Blagojevich, both directly and through Friends of Blagojevich, and for the financial benefit of his family members and associates. Blagojevich and Kelly, the only RICO conspiracy defendants, allegedly conspired with Monk, Cellini, Harris, Robert Blagojevich, Rezko and previously convicted cooperating defendant Stuart Levine, to conduct the Blagojevich Enterprise through a pattern of multiple acts of mail and wire fraud, extortion, attempted extortion and extortion conspiracy, and state bribery.

Running state government as a criminal enterprise. Blago didn’t mess around.

Another day of world-potentate-apalooza at the G-20 Summit.

The latest numbers, as of late this afternoon, had either Murphy up by six votes or Tedisco up by 12, depending on which source you asked (see here for an explanation of the discrepancy). In other words, about as close as you can possibly get to not just a rough tie but a literal tie.

So to try to shed a little more light on the situation Eric Kleefeld (TPM’s resident analyst of ridiculously close elections) and TPM intern Versha Sharma canvassed the different counties in the district to get data on the number and the party affiliations of the absentee ballots that were actually returned — as opposed to those requested.

Obviously, reasoning from location and party affiliation only gets you so far. But using a conservative methodology and a minimum of debatable assumptions, you can make some rough approximations about who is in a better position. And after running the numbers through the Kleefeldizer that proved to have such a good track record in Minnesota and the absentee ballots point to … another statistical tie.

So this one might be going on for a while.