Senate Republicans are considering filibustering the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head up the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Whatsoever some might think, given that I’m the one who created this site, I actually end up being a pretty big softie when it comes to the punishment side of these corruption stories. And in that vein, I think Eric Holder’s decision to abandon the Stevens prosecution is a good idea when you put the full context in view.
Stevens is 85 years old. He was tried and convicted. He lost his senate seat and ended his 40+ career in disgrace. Whatever the prosecutors did wrong — and it seems like they did a lot wrong, which we’ll get to in a minute — that doesn’t erase the fact that Stevens got a freebie home renovation from a wealthy contributor whose interests Stevens repeatedly and habitually service in Washington.
In this case, though, the prosecutorial misconduct appears to be of a non-trivial sort. So given his age, the disgrace he’s already suffered and the fact that future prosecution may be fatally undermined by the earlier prosecutorial wrongdoing, setting this whole effort aside makes sense. At least that’s how it seems to me on first blush.
And as long as we’re all in a generous mood, how about we get some justice for former Gov. Don Siegelman and those crook US Attorneys who sent him to the slammer on politically-trumped up charges probably ginned up by Karl Rove and his Alabama pals? And maybe some attention to reform of our national prison system Sen. Webb is pushing, because disgraced senators aren’t the only ones who need some wise exercise of mercy in the administration of justice. And our incarceration policies are a disgrace in themselves.
Let me know your thoughts.
The longest election in Minnesota history — in 16 minutes.
I realize that it doesn’t afford me a lot of opportunities for personal or spiritual growth. But I’m nonetheless comforted by the fact that the Republicans running things in the House GOP caucus are still as clinically insane as in years past. We see today from their House GOP ‘budget’ that their new-found allegiance to fiscal discipline has them lowering the top marginal tax rate to 25% (it’s currently 35%, with the Bush tax cuts), which for anyone who knows anything about the federal budget would pretty much inevitably lead to gargantuan federal deficits and the Treasury exploding probably some time early in the next decade. They manage to still have the deficits coming down by bunch of nonsense hokum about oil rigs and other foolery.
If that weren’t enough. This is the scoring the House Republicans have provided, tracking Democratic budget policy and theirs over the next 70 years. As you can see, predicting ideological stances over as yet unborn Democratic members of Congress, the GOP scoring appears to have us on track for the government owning about 90% of the economy in the early-mid-22nd century, which if I remember is about the time period of the invention of the warp drive. So I don’t know if they’ve figured that in too.
(ed.note: Alas, I’m not the Star Trek aficionado I once was or flattered myself to be, I guess. Turns out warp drive is invented in 2063, almost two decades before the current House GOP budget projections.)
The House GOP budget plan also includes the abolition of Medicare.
We’re not above showing you this slideshow of the Obamas meeting Queen Elizabeth.