The former U.S. attorney in New Orleans, Jim Letten, who is now a dean at the Tulane Law School, absolutely loses it when confronted on campus by James O’Keefe and a camera crew.
One more point on the latest James O’Keefe shenanigans.
There’s a lot of backstory here, not least of which is that Jim Letten’s office prosecuted O’Keefe and his posse for their 2010 “prank” on Sen. Mary Landreiu’s office in which they gained access by posing as telephone repairmen.
But the main thing to keep in mind in gauging Letten’s reaction is that Letten probably couldn’t care less whether O’Keefe is operating as a conservative activist (the term of art Letten uses in the video is “political extremist nutjob”) or as the journalist speaking truth to power that he fancies himself to be. As a career prosecutor, Letten is indifferent to which of those boxes O’Keefe fits in.
In his mind, O’Keefe is a former criminal defendant who showed up at Letten’s home and talked to his spouse. That taps into the deepest, darkest fears of prosecutors. It’s in a different category than the usual O’Keefe on-camera gotcha and may explain in part why the man who took down Edwin Edwards is so livid in that video.
Where there is impeach Obama fever, there is someone trying to make a buck. Guess who?
Since last week upwards of 200 marriage licenses and counting have been issued to same-sex couples in New Mexico, where same-sex marriage has neither been explicitly legalized nor explicitly banned. The existing law there is gender neutral: “Marriage is contemplated by the law as a civil contract, for which the consent of the contracting parties, capable in law of contracting, is essential.” Read More
You already know how the Affordable Care Act failed to provide funding for the federally run health insurance exchanges. These are the exchanges HHS is setting up in states that refuse to set up their own, which contrary to initial predictions ended up being over half the states. HHS has been scrambling to find the funding to run these exchanges (the GOP House has refused to help fix the error and allocate additional funding). Read More
News this morning that Entergy will close and decommission the 40-year-old Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. A hugely controversial plant — even as the politics of nuclear power has changed a lot in the last four decades — and in the end it sounds like economics as much as political opposition contributed to its closure.
The former intern who helped save Rep. Gabby Giffords when she was shot in the head is now being targeted with an anti-gay smear campaign.
The lawyer for a fired Fox News executive says the network’s chief Roger Ailes should fear his client.
Pat Robertson: San Francisco gays wear special sharp-tipped rings contaminated with AIDS that deliberately infect unsuspecting believers with a mere handshake.