Scooter Libby has bene indicted on several charges, but with none of them realting to leaking any information and all of them resulting from the investigation itself. Yes, Libby lied, and he should be punished every bit as harshly as Sandy Berger should have been when he stole classified documents from the National Archives, then destroyed some of those documents, and then lied about it. Berger, however, was a Clinton man, so the media let him off. Libby is a Bush man, so nothing short of jail time will make them happy. Bush had promised to fire anyone involved int he leak. There are no allegations from the prosecutor that Libby was involved, so he did not get fired. He did, however, resign. Good for him, showing some integrity in a bad situation.

To sum up, a law may or may not have been broken, revealing the identity of a covert agent who was not covert in any way (and didn't try hard to hide it, seeing as she helped to send her husband on a high-profile trip, she had to know that questions were going to be asked and that her flimsy cover wouldn't hold up when neighbors knew she worked at CIA), and the subsequent investigation failed to find if there really was a leak. Instead we spent millions of taxpayer dollars over two years and counting, and the only illegality found was created by the investigation itself. Let's start investigating Howard Dean. I'm sure he can be caught in a lie or inconsistency at some point, and then we can indict him for lying to a prosecutor, too.

So Libby is probably going to be indicted for misleading a grand jury. This is, of course, a very different charge than leaking the identity of a covert agent. At this point no one on the prosecution has alleged that Libby had anything to do with the leak, merely that he deliberately neglected to mention a conversation he had with someone involved (I forget which conversation is the one that he omitted from his previous testimony). At any rate, there is yet no actual evidence that a leak occurred.

According to this, the economy grew at a rate of 3.8% last quarter, which is great. Compared to any other time in history, but for the tech-fueled boom of the late 90's, this is fantastic!!! I think this is the sort of growth we will see sustained forever (or better) as long as the system continues as it has. Technology will keep fueling that growth and will reach all the dreams of the late 90's and more, but at a natural pace. That pace has been following an exponential curve, so things will be pretty peachy in 20 to 30 years or so. I truly believe I was born at the right time to see humanity change into something completely different in my lifetime. Someone who time travels 50 years in to the future from today may not recognize very much. But I hope we still have football. And Buffy reruns.

Stephen King is writing more of the story of Roland Deschain, the gunslinger. He's focusing on Roland's early years, before the palaver with Martin (or whatever his anme was), and he's doing it with Marvel, which means it's gonna be a comic book! Should be cool.

I still can't help but express disappointment with the last two books of the Dark Tower series. COnsidering it's supposed to be his magnum opus, and he wrote the first four years and years apart from each other, I thought they felt rushed. One thing about The Dark Tower was that each book felt so rich and so different from his other books. He wasn't just churning them out one after another like everything else he writes. He always waited until the time was right. I guess he must have felt the time was right to write the last three in quick sucession, and I suppose feelings of mortality might make one want to finsih their life's work, but that's no reason to crap all over it. Even so, I found the ending to be masterful. It REALLY ticked me off at first, I was ready to go to Maine and punch the jerk, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it had to be that way. Still, I wish he'd actually done something with characters like Jack Sawyer. What was the point of Black House? It was a decent story, but he filled it with all this interweaving with the Dark Tower, and foreshadowing, and then didn't follow up at all.

Two very good things so far today for conservatives. One, Harriet Miers has withdrawn herself from consideration for the Supreme Court. Now hopefully Bush will pick someone who makes sense for the position, and has valid strict-constructionist credentials. And item number two is that Bush has pledged to do a bunch of budget cuts. I doubt he'll come anywhere close to doing what a fiscal conservative President should be doing, but I can hope he'll make some sort of headway. I wonder how much campaigns like Porkbusters influenced this. Of course talk is cheap, let's see what the action is.

Some decent poker results the last couple of days. I finished int he money in a $30 tourney Tuesday, and got 2nd in a $1 yesterday. The 2nd would have been 1st, but the prize difference was small, and Veronica Mars was just about to start, so when it got to head's up I went all-in on every hand until I was out.

More U.N. BS. Those guys are all about lying and stealing while promising to bring peace to the world. Rmember the Lebanese guy that was assasinated a time ago, with all the suspicion being on Syrians? Well the German guy that investigated it came to the conclusion that several very specific people were involved, and he named names. Kofi Annan promised not to alter the report at all. Funny thing is, the U.N. people posted the report online, and forgot to run off the feature that makes it so you can see editing changes. The time stamps on the changes reveal that the editing began about 5 minutes after Annan's office received the report. What was edited? Names! Every single name of a suspected backer of the assasination was removed, and changed to "senior Syrian government official" or somesuch crap like that. One of the name, incidentally, belongs to the brother of the ruler of Syria, that Assad guy.

Why are Annan and the UN protecting these people? Who knows, but maybe it has something to do with the U.N.'s love for dictatorships.

A while ago I mentioned that the same guy that came up with the comic book character Green Lantern also invented the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man. Well now I got more of the same. The guy that came up with the hole card cam that basically made poker into a TV powerhouse (before that cam, you didn't know what cards the players had and it was a lot less interesting), also invented the Transformers toys.

Back to Plame. I'm having trouble with the new meme that Cheney was involved and is the "source." Before, when Libby was thought to be the source, no one seemed to have a problem with Libby knowing what he knew, they just were upset that he allegedly told a reporter. That implies to me that Libby must have the sort of clearance to know that sort of thing, which makes sense since he is a White House staffer and all. Well Cheney for sure ahs at least the same security clearence, so if one person with classfied status tells secret information to another person with classified status, how is that a leak? Wouldn't it only be leak if Cheney had told his grocery store clerk or someone else without classified status?

Geoegia Tech just got another commitment for basketball for 2006-7. Now we will have two freshmen next year that would have probably gone straight to the NBA if not for the new age rule they have. I think that age rule will be good for the college game, but it could also lead to a lot less parity. There were never that many kids that could make the jump from high school to the pros, and whenever one of those kids went to college, they through off the balance of power a bit. Now they're all going to college, and one wonder whether the teams that get those probably 1st rounders will be able to dominate in terms of talent. Not that I'm complaining if that's the case, seeing as Tech has two of them now.

For such a stupid, unimportant story, this Plame thing is getting ridiculously complex. There's some funny blowback on some of it. The New York Times has been doing its best to discredit Judith Miller, because now she's making them look bad, and the left is helping the "paper of record" smear Miller, but now that people have so little faith in her, the value of her potential testimony to a grand jury has sunk. The New York Times itself may have killed off the best chance of Rove and Libby getting indicted. I guess that's what happens when you turn on one of your own.

The Coburn thing has been on my mind. It's sickening how Congress (both sides are equally culpable for this) has spent and spent and spent, and refuses to cut any pork, which they seem to see as their entitlement. Now they've rejected several bills to cut some of this spending. These weren't even huge projects that were up for cutting, they were almost like a sop to the mass of Porkbusters out there, but they wouldn't even do that. I wish we could start a new national campaign to convince people not to elect a single incumbent except ones that ahve cut spending as much as possible. Start afresh with an entirely new lineup, and a warning: The people will no longer be complacent, if you do not govern and spend out tax money in a responsible manner, then you will no longer govern, period!

Cindy Sheehan and the communist nuts and anti-American jerks that are trying to capitalize on her fame have some big protest of some sort planned for when we hit 2,000 casualties in Iraq. The problem is that we've been stuck at under 2,000 for several days now and it is starting to ruin their plans. The only way their protest will come off is if more Americans die. They are probably sitting around right now praying for more dead American troops. Whatever your feelings on war are, don't you think it's backwards to hope that more of your countrymen die? Seems traitorous in spirit if not in deed.

I waded through 1423 other players on the PokerStars blogger tourney, and managed to lose on a really harsh hand. I picked up pockets 5's on the BB, this guy in middle position raises about 4xBB, and everyone folds to me. This guy has been raising every other hand since I got to this table, so I figured I was probably good. I raise him 3x what he had put in, he goes all-in, I call. He's got me covered in chips, and shows AK. I don't remember the exact order of the cards, but suffice to say the turn and river both paired the flop, rendering useless my precious 5's and knocking me out in 50th place. For that I get a PokerStars t-shirt and hat. 36th would have gotten me an I-Pod Nano, 16th for an XBox360, 6th for a 23" LCD monitor, and a $10k entry plus $2k for travel to a tourney in the Bahamas. I was going for a monitor, so I feel like I had to take the chance against a loose player with the 5's. The guy that beat me finished in the I-Pod range.

Overall it was a great experience, and I hope they do it again. Go sign up for to make it worth it for them to have these things.

I'm playing in the Poker Stars Blogger Tournament right now. Doing pretty well with about twice the average with 60% of the people out already.

This site warns of the dangers inherent in the chemical compund dihydrogen oxide. You probably drank some today along with other liquids. Call your poison control center!

The Coburn Ammendment to take away funding from the Alaskan bridge to nowhere failed 85-15 or something like that in the Senate. What does this mean? only 15 of our Senators give a crap about our tax money, the rest feel it's their entitlement to spend as they want, the public be damned. Time vote them all out of office, democrats and republicans both, and find some people who are going to use our dollars wisely and for what's best for the country, not just for their own pocketbooks.

I'm sure I've mentioned the infamous Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere" on here. It's become the posterchild for wasteful spending and obstinate congressmen. The bridge is planned to serve an island of 50 people for a cost that would pay for Lear jets for each and every one of those 50 people. Don Young, the Senator from Alaska behind the bridge, claims it's essential, and won't give it up to help fund Katrina relief. Senator Coburn (Oklahoma?) has put in an ammendment to the transportation bill to move that money away from the bridge in Alaska to rebuilding a bridge in Louisiana. He's facing heavy opposition from the rest of the Senate, who seem to think the bridge in Alaska is more important.

I just finished writing a note to both of my senators (Isakson and Chambliss) and my representative (John Lewis), asking them to support Coburn and to go further with becoming fiscally responsible and stop wasting our money.

I'm getting more and more inclined towards the exponential theory of development that some, including author Ray Kurzweil, support. The idea is that technology has developed slowly over human history, but has gotten faster and faster over the last few centuries, almost like the slope of an exponential curve. Think how much our daily lives have changed since the advent of the internet and the world wide web. We communicate with it, we use it to shop, a lot of people use it to work. I still get up and go to work in the morning, but even my job duties include a lot of online time. Anyway, the question is what happens when we get to the part of the exponential curve that points almost straight up? I don't know, and maybe it's wishful thinking, but I think we're close enough that I may see it in my lifetime. If I do, then who knows? Maybe my lifetime won't end for a long, long time.

I'm going to start a campaign against the requirement to show I.D. to buy alcohol in Georgia. It's just too hard for the old and infirm and poor to get an I.D., and thus the law requiring that a seller of alcohol see an I.D. before selling is discriminatory.

I wonder why judges are allowed to use that excuse to knock down the I.D. requirement for voting, but would never consider it for drinking.

Anyone know anyone who works for Anheiser-Busch (the Budweiser people)? I have to do a group project in my microecon class, and the professor assigned us industries. The beer industry was picked for me, and we decided to focus on Anheiser-Busch.

I ahven't read Kurzweil's new book (nor his first, though I mean to get to them both), but if what my roommate is telling me, and what I've read about it online are accurate, then it's a pretty mindblowing read. Not only that, but if Kurzweil's predictiosn are true, heck even if he's too optimistic about the speed at whcih we reach singularity, most of the problems we whine about on blogs and protest and talk about will be irrelevent. Pollution? Send in the nanobots. Got cancer? Send in the nanobots. Medicare is growing really fast? Who cares, the economy is growing like 10% per year. Actually a lot of that stuff will be an anachronism. Who needs medicare when we're all healthy all the time? I need to read the book. So do you.

Check this out. BlackEnterprise.com, whcih I'm assuming is the web site for Black Enterprise Magazine, endorses the Fair Tax, and says that critics who say the plan hurts the poor haven't actually bothered to read about the plan, as it protects the poor far better than the current system.

Read this one for a quick synopsis of the Fair Tax plan. Thanks to Boortz and Linder's book, this idea finally has a national following. There's still a long way to go, but hopefully it will win out in the end.

I learned another lesson today, one that I probably should have learned long ago. Never send out an email if you are scared of what the response might be. That sort of thing is much better done by phone.

Last week Boortz made a comment to the effect that if you have to choose who to rescue in a natural disaster, you should go for the richer people, as they contribute more to society. This of course set off a firestorm. I decided to read the Democratic Underground thread about it. These people are crazy!! They totally misinterpret everything, and take statements out of context, and then pat each other on the back for proving to the world that Boortz is evil. At one point someone wondered how those rich would fair if an area was set aside where only rich people could go, and they had to do all the jobs, cleaning floors, nursing, etc. Most of the crowd in that forum laughed about it and said they'd all fail, blah blah blah. None of them bothered to think of the corollary. If all the rich people are off in a state together somewhere, who is going to pay everyone else for their jobs? Without all the rich people, who will own the companies that give everyone else a livelyhood? There's no doubt in my mind that the average rich person could learn to mop a floor quite well with 5 minutes of instruction, but if you put the average poor person in charge of a large corporation, it will fall apart in a very short time. There are plenty of rich people who got there by inheriting money, but far more of them are Ayn Rand's producers, and got there by working their asses off, and not making stupid decisions like having a kid at 16. Those people are definitely more valuable to society than a poor person on welfare who dropped out of high school at 16 to become a street corner drug dealer.

Today I learned a very important lesson. If your dog bites you, don't bite him back. You just end up with hair in your mouth.

More reasons why our educational system is failing our children and future of the country. As if more reasons were needed to prove the case....

I often get accused of never criticizing Bush or the GOP, which is ridiculous. I criticize them every time I think they've done wrong, and if you search through my archives (which might not be working right now), you'll find plenty of instances. Just recently I criticized Bush for his nomination of Miers to the Supreme Court. He followed up a sublime choice in John Roberts with his female lawyer buddy. Smacks of cronyism just a tad. Now I want to criticize the GOP people who are whining about Miers for a different reason. They won't get upset about cronyism because htey (and all politicians) do it themselves. I don't remember Democrats getting up in arms about Clinton having his wife try to reform national health care, despite that being full of nepotism. Hillary's only qualification for that one was that she's his wife. Anyway, the GOP people who are all about "We don't know enough about Miers, We need to find out her stance on various issues," etc. Somehow that argument sounds strange coming from them after they bashed the lefties for making the same arguments regarding Roberts. I guess all politicians are hypocrites, left and right.

There were riots in Toledo this weekend. As far as I can tell, a bunch of neo-Nazis decided to have a march. That's fine, I don't like them, but they do have the right to assemble and speak. Well a lot of people didn't like that. They fell right in to the trap set by the neo-Nazi's. The skinheads kenw they were being very provocative, and the black people in the area decided to start rioting. WHy skinheads being assholes justifies throwing rocks at ambulances, attacking police officers, and other violent actions, I'm not sure, but they did it.

If everyone had just ignored the skinheads, no one would have cared about this march, it wouldn't have made the national press and given them a lot of free P.R. Now people out there who were on the edge of racism already just got pushed further along that road, since the actions of the rioters probably only reinforced a racist's view. The people that rioted did exactly what the skinheads wanted them to do in every respect. It's sad that people aren't informed enough to know that the skinheads had every right to march, and intelligent enough to realize that starting a riot over it is the absolute stupidest thing possible.

Check this out. Notice especially the part towards the end where it is mentioned that Congress' intelligence report on Iraq basically says that everything Wilson said about his trip was backwards from what the intelligence revealed. I've pasted the entire section at the bottom of this post. I'm not saying that it's right.... From the intelligence that Wilson gathered on his trip, Congress came to the opposite conclusion than Wilson did. I don't know that Conrgessmen are better at interpreting diplomatic talk than Wilson is, but it certainly lays to rest the statements from left wingers that Wilson's report was conclusive. If it's so conclusive, then why doesn't Congress agree? Another thing that Otto Man over on "The Truth by Scott" should apologize to me for.

"As I say, seemingly exhaustive. But there is one curious omission: July 7, 2004. On that date, the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. The Senate report includes a 48-page section on Wilson that demonstrates, in painstaking detail, that virtually everything Joseph Wilson said publicly about his trip, from its origins to his conclusions, was false."

Daily Kos has an article about how the Bushies are treasonous because they outed a spy during a war. Several things wrong with that. One, no one has ever said she was a spy. She was secret or whatever, but it's tough to actually be a spy when you've spent at least the last five years working a desk job in D.C. Who was she spying on, the cleaning staff? Two, Judith Miller's recent testimony makes it even less likely that any Bushies leaked anything on this subject. Three, where was Daily Kos when Americans were holding up signs supporting the people we are warring against? Is that not aid and comfort the enemy, which strikes me as more treasonous than outing someone who had little or nothing to do with the war anyway? It's all well and good to accuse people of treason, but not if you only do when it's someone on the other side. As yet I've seen no right wingers supporting the enemy in any way, but you can't say the same for left wingers. Not that I'm saying all left wingers are traitors, far from it. Very few are nutty enough to actually support the killing of American soldiers by Muslim Islamists, but there are some out there, and those people are traitors in spirit if not in action.

Unless my sources are complete morons who utterly misunderstood what was said, it looks like Judith Miller's testimony on the Plame thing completely exonerates Libby as having leaked anything about Plame's job. I wonder if Otto Man over on "The Truth by Scott" will apologize for insulting me for disagreeing with him on this issue? Somehow I doubt it.

I have registered to play in the
Online Poker Blogger Championship!

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 9366891

Figured I'd repost this since the whole point of a free entry to this tournament is marketing, and I certainly don't mind sending people to PokerStars. Granted, I typically play on another site, but if you want big bucks, go to PokerStars. More fish there, too. So sign up and go play poker!

Check out this new Michelle Malkin column. She does raise some interesting points. Is the media deliberately trying to hide the facts, or are they doing unintentionally, because deep down they don't want it to be true, or are they just that dumb? Only time will tell.

Read this! It's a letter from Al Queda #2 overall to the #1 guy in Iraq. In it is reinforced basically every point that the right has made about Iraq. The extreme violence of the foreign Islamists is hurting their cause, the real war is in the media, that they should look to Vietnam as their example, and use thoughts of Vietnam to turn the American people away, etc., etc. These murderers basically say that they consider the left wing in the U.S. and the media here to be their allies. I'm sure Howard Dean is proud! At any rate, the terrorists think of the war like the right wing does, a struggle of democracy against Islamist totalitarianism, and the bad guys know htey can take advantage of the fact that half the U.S. incorrectly thinks of the war as US imperialist agression, having nothing to do with a group of people that want to slaughter everyone that will not bow to their rule.

Remember the Patriot Act? What it did for wiretapping was basically extend something that enforcement agents previously could do in criminal investigations to terror investigations. Depsite the uproar, all that means is that we can tap the lines of suspected terrorists, too, whereas before we could only tap the lines of suspected criminals but had to leave the terrorists alone. Not really such a big deal, in fact it seems smart considering how may Americans have been killed by terrorists, but the left and the center were up in arms about the non-existent erosion of civil liberties this meant, despite the fact that not a single person has ever given me an example of a civil liberties breach due to the Patriot Act. Many of these people were so upset that they claimed they wanted to move to Canada, which has now demanded that telecom companies alter their infrastructure so that the government can do wiretaps. So when are we going to start hearing about Canadians wanting to move to the US? Oh wait, that's been going on for years for many souls who don't want to deal with their crappy state-run health system and roads that are always full of potholes. Anyway, Canada is supposedly a lefty's paradise, so this new wiretapping scheme fits right in with all the other left-wing utopias, from Cuba to China to the U.S.S.R to East Germany, whose residents loved left-wing ideals so much that they broke down a wall to get out. Anyway, next time someone tries to tell you how much more free people are in Canada, tell them they are ignorant and show them the truth. There is no country on Earth where people are more free and have more chances to succeed in life than here in the United States!

I also read something about France today that had me in stiches. They are having A nationwide strike right now, in reaction to moves the government has made to try to fix the moribund economy. And the strikers are also demanding higher pay. Do they not ever think about the future? Or maybe they look forward to a future where they are all guaranteed high paying jobs, but 90% of their pay goes to taxes to pay for other people's high paying jobs, the economy can't grow because employers ahve to pay all their money to their strike happy employees, etc. etc. etc. I'm no economist, so I don't know where this road might lead, but the people of France seem determined to find out.

A hurricane hit central America a few days ago, and the death toll estimates for this weaker than Katrina storm are higher than in New Orleans, where an entire city flooded. What does this mean? Between this and the Pakistan earthquake and the tsunami last year, the U.S.'s response to its own disaster was far and away superior to everyone else's, and all those people who think Bush just let 'em die cuz they're black can go fuck themselves. Our emergency response may not have been perfect, but it was about as good as you can expect when a region the size of the U.K. is blown over with a major city flooded. If this had been Pakistan, or Central America or Europe (remember how the French let thousands of elderly citizens die a few years ago during a heat wave while the younger folks were all on their yearly 2 month vacations?), far more people would have died. FEMA, the Coast Guard, and other responders deserve our thanks, not our disdain.

This is an extremely interesting and comprehensive look at the Arab/Israeli conflict int he Middle East, covering the origins and the reasons why it has gone on so long. Especially interesting to me was the discussion of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Just about as mnay, maybe more, Jews were expelled from Arab lands since the formation of Israeli as Arabs that fled from Israel, rejecting offers to stay and live peacefully. WHy does the world seem to care about the Arab refugees and ignore or disdain the existence of Jewish refugees? Is it anti-semitism, or simply the fact that the surrounding Arab countries have kept the refugees in camps for 60 years instead of resettling them? The article mentions estimates of as high as $80 billion lost by the Jews that were forced to leave their ancestral homelands in Arab countries, and a somewhat underwhelming $2.5 billion for the Arabs that chose to leave Israel. Yet somehow the Palestinians' nascent government is given billions every year by foreign governments who then condemn the Jews. At any rate, this article explodes a lot of the myths and lies surrounding the whole affair, and makes for good reading. It's in .pdf format, so you'll need Adobe [Mom, I think Dad already has it installed, if it doesn't work, ask him to install it for you later, or call me and I'll walk you through it].

Incidentally, congrats to my Mother, who is one of the proud few in her circle of female friends who can actually use a computer and write email and such!

Someone wrote in to the AJC today to talk about how the networks and news stations ought to devote some time to telling us about the Nobel Prize winners. Why? I'll grant you that most of the winners in the sciences rpobably deserve it, but peace is what gets people up and excited, and that one usually goes to someone who has done little to actually spread peace. Jimmy Carter is a prime example. Sure, the guy talks about peace, and he flies around the world bashing Bush and overseeing elections, but most of those elections end up tainted anyway. Can anyone name one time when he undeniably helped bring peace to an area, and provide reasonable proof?

One more thing.... Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize. 'Nuff said.

Bush has done it again. His mishandling of FEMA and refusal to sign the Kyoto Accords have caused the deaths of at least 42,000 people in Pakistan.

Seriously, though, the people caught in the earthquake region are upset because they aren't being saved quick enough. I guess Pakistan must be racist against the racial group that lives in this area, which is the same as the ones that live most everywhere in Pakistan. Racist, self-hating bastards! Anyway, the fact that country that is not the U.S. was not able to have everyone involved hunkering down on a bearskin rug in front of a nice fire 3 hours after it happened only underscores how ridiculous attacks on FEMA and the Katrina respone have been. In the context of every other distaster on that scale ever recorded, most of our government performed admirably. Only in the context of fantasy, where no one has anything to do but sit around and wait for a disaster to happen so they can go rescue people, was the response lacking.

That said, I encourage you to donate to Pakistan relief funds, though I must admit to being about out of monetary charity. I don't have much money in the first place, so I can't afford too much to send over to a country that has carried the "U.S. is Evil" placard before.

In interesting poker news, Party Poker has seperated from its skins. Party was the largest poker network, by far, and one way they got they way was through letting other companies use their network. I could be playing on Eurobet, but against players that are on Party (and other skins). Eurobet, and other companies running skins, are basically just marketing companies. They advertise, give away bonuses, stuff like that, and then they have to give Party a cut of the rake. I don't know what size the cut is, I have no idea how these deals are set up.

So what does this mean? Probably good things for me. Party is the largest site by far, but a lot of those people are on skins. Since they won't be on the network anymore, I imagine a lot of the people on the skins will look for other places to play, and maybe they'll come to my personal playground, Full Tilt Poker.

The Tom Delay money laundering indictment is full of holes a mile wide, and what looks like a conspiracy to indict. The first grand jsury would not indict on the original conspiracy charge because what Delay did was not against Texas law at the time. The second grand jury was asked to make an indictment for money laundering, and they did not see sufficient evidence to indict. My understanding of the legal process is limited, but what happened next is what makes this look very suspicious. When a grand jury refuses to indict, then a judge is supposed to sign something called a "no-bill" which is then made public, basically saying that there was not enough evidence for an indictment. The 2nd jury had made their decision on a Friday, yet somehow no one bothered to get a judge to sign the no-bill. This is supposed to be an immediate thing. So on Monday, knowing that the information that the jury refused to indict was not released publicly, the D.A. quickly got yet another grand jury together and got them to indict. Do you think some of them might have been had a different mindset had they known that the previous jury refused to indict, which is a fact that they are legally allowed to know, assuming the no-bill was signed? And furthermore the foreman of the jury said in a statement to the press that he had made up his mind to idict before he stepped in the courtroom because he didn't like campaign ads that Delay had run. Sounds to me like the D.A. is trying to cheat the system to get himself in the news, and the indictment should be thrown out since the foreman admitted that he had prejudged the case.

Delay might be scum, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was laudnering money, but our legal system still has rules, and the other side is not following them.

I only played a bit of poker last night, but you could say it went well. I sat down at a $.25/.50 NL 6max table. Folded the first hand. Raised the 2nd with pocket queens. Some reraised, and we ended up with 4 people in for $3 to see the flop. The flop was QQ4!!! First guy checked, I check, next guy raises, guy after that calls, first guy folds, I raise. One guy calls, other folds. Don't remember the rest of the cards, but suffice to say, I got him all in and won with my quad queens. Next hand I end up with a king high flush and took all of someone else's money. In three hands I went from $20 to $71. Nice for five minutes work.

Did you see Lost last night? How cool was that? And next week we find out that Jin speaks English, HOLY CRAP!!!

Now it seems that even the Washington Post and the Governor of Louisiana are partially blaming the media's reporting of rumor as fact in the post-Katrina days as a major factor in slowing the response and search and rescue operations. One must wonder, if it turns out the media was dead wrong there, then it ought to lend a lot more credence to those who say the media is giving a completely incorrect picture of what's going on in Iraq. Perhaps the soldiers and officers that keep saying that the situation is vastly improving over there are right, and the media people who rarely leave their Baghdad hotels are simply reporting what's happening through their biased filters and what they want to happen, since it makes Bush look bad. I mean if a major news outlet can't get a story that takes place in their own country anywhere close to correct, why do we expect them to be right about something happening half the world away? Their bias has been revealed time and time again (the memo scandal last year, for instance), and I imagine in 10 or 20 years historians will look back on this as a dark age of news reporting, when the news was more PR for the desires of the storyteller than the actual truth.

Where's the accountability that they demand of everyone else? Almost every single major news outlet reported fiction as fact, and few have acknowledged it in any way. The arrogance of some in the media is astounding. Paul Krugman of the New York Times, for instance, flaunts his refusal to follow his own paper's corrections policy. In one particular case he said he's tired of dredging up the same old stuff on the mistakes he made in a column. Ironically the column dredged up the same old tired story from the 2000 election in which Krugman continues to claim that Gore should have won, and the correction he refuses to admit regards the false statistics he used to support his position. The media is slowly lying itself in to oblivion.

Edit: Actually it seems a lot of media outlets are now saying they were dead wrong. At the same time I don't think there's much navel gazing. They seem to think an apology is enough, and they can go back to lying the next time something big happens. I wish they be a little more introspective, and start thinking about other things they are getting wrong, but I think the problem is that with a lot of issues (Iraq, anything related to Bush) they don't want to tell the truth, they just want to tell the story in a manner that reflects their own views.

Louis Farrakhan is planning some sort of anti-Bill Bennett protest in reaction to Bennett's remark about aborting black babies. Since Bennett said such a plan would be morally repugnant, and Farrakhan is protesting his comments, does that mean that Farrakhan thinks aborting black babies would be a good thing?

Ever heard of the Rosenbergs? They were Americans who were spying for the Russians. For many years the "left" refused to believe it, and once incontrovertible evidence showed up that they were spies, they were defended on the grounds that they had anti-fascist motivations. A book was just relased that basically says they felt they were Russians working undercover to defeat the enemy, the U.S. Like McCarthyism, it turns out that a lot of the hysteria over these two was more than justified, and once again the far left backed up the people who want to destroy America.

Why was the left so pissed off about some minor, and mostly unintentional damage to Korans, but no one seems upset about the nearly systematic extinction of gays in Iran? I guess because the former makes Bush look bad, and the latter helps justify our intervention in the Middle East and also props up a basically evil regime. The left has rarely seen an evil regime they didn't love.

It seems that Floyd Abrams, Judith Miller's former lawyer, said yesterday that the reason Miller sat in jail despite having a waiver from Libby to testify about their conversations was because she did not want to have to answer any questions about her other sources. Somehow she got a deal done with Fitzgerald where he will only ask her about Libby. What does this mean? To me either Fitzgerald really wants to fry Libby and the administration, a possibility which I tend to doubt, or he knows there was no crime committed and he just wants to get it over with.

SOmeone asked me yesterday why Fitzgerald has spent a year investigating this if there was no crime. Well the only people that have alleged a crime are the media and Bush's political enemies. Fitzgerald is an investigator. An investigator investigates, first to see if a crime was committed, and then to find the culprit. This a pretty subtle crime to discover, with a lot of minor details that beocme very important in decided how to apply laws and statutes. It's not unreasonable to think that it's tkane him a year to get all the facts and decide there was no crime.

On the other hand, we may discover I'm totally wrong. The one thing I do know is that all the speculation doesn't mean anything until Fitzgerald talks.

There are now rumors coming out that the guy who quit as an investigator on Volcker's Oil-for-Food group in protest has handed over documents showing that the committee decided to softball any wrongdoing by Annan so as to save the U.N.'s reputation. Gosh, I can get over the systematic rape and pimping of 13 year old girls by U.N. peacekeepers, but if that Kofi was involved in stealing money, well that's just wrong!

Now that they can no longer blame the Jews for their situation in Gaza, the Palestinians have turned on each other with the worst infighting since 1966 (according the account I read). A group of Hamas militants broke into a police station and shot it up, and I would assume they killed some cops, too. In reaction, a bunch of cops stormed Parliament to demand that they do something about all the militants running around.

I guess this is an example of people living up to expectations. Too bad, despite my expectations, it sure would have been nice if, after Israel pulled out of Gaza, things had just become peaceful over there. The entire concept of a Palestinian state is an exercise in wishful thinking and, so far, futility).

My guess is that, unless they make some big changes in their spending policies, the Republicans are going to lose power. You'd think they would have learned from hsitory. The Democrats lost power after 1992 and 1993 because they spent too much money, and left the door open for the low spending, low tax GOP. Once in power, the GOP has proceeded to do the exact same thing. They've spent so much damn money that even die-hard Republicans are contemplating third parties. It's ashame, because they had the right idea when they first took over, but they haven't followed their own philosophies. I guess that's the difference between a conservative, and a politician. The politicians only act conservative to get votes, and once in office they do what they think will win them office again. Stupidly for some reason they thought buying votes would work, when a little fiscal responsibility was all they needed. I really hope this Porkbusters campaign has some impact.

Back to cronyism. Whoever I read that said Miers barely knew Bush was wrong. She was his personal lawyer in Texas, so I doubt she barely knew him.

Bad choice, IMHO.

Maybe cronyism isn't the answer on the new SCOTUS nomination. It seems the woman has only rarely had contact with Bush, and doesn't really know the guy.

FYI, I'm home waiting for a doctor's appointment. I think I have pinkeye. I sure hope I won't have to miss class tonight.

Plame Plame Plame.... What a stupid controversy. Rove mentioned her to Novak, who alreayd knew who she was. Don't know what Libby did, but since he gave Judith Miller a waiver to allow her to discuss whatever they talked about, and she sat in jail for three months anyway, either she's dumb as a rock, or there's more to the story than we know. That's backed up by the fact that special prosecuter Fitzgerald has never said who or what exactly he is investigating.

The facts about Plame herself is that she hadn't had an undercover assignment in at least 5 years, which means it's not illegal to leak her name. In addition, she's got a couple of young kids to raise, so I doubt she was going to go on anymore assignments. If she was planning to go on another undercover assignment, she's not a very good mother, as those sort of tasks usually have some amount of danger attached. Several people like to spout that the "leak" endangered Plame and our national security. If that's so then don't you think she might be dead already, seeing as she's did the talk show circuit and was on the cover of Vanity Fair? And national security? Please! If it did endanger security, then the whole thing would have been quashed and she would not have been on the cover of a major magazine.

One also has to wonder where the outrage on the left was when Sandy Berger committed a felony by stealing documents from the archvies, lying about it, and shredding some of them, and got merely a slap ont he wrist from the State Department. Both could, and probably should, be seen as unimportant non-stories. The difference is that in one case there's a possibility of making the administration look bad, and in the other there's a possiblity of making Clinton's administration look bad. Two guesses which one the left is more upset about.

Bush has nominated a White House staff counsel to the Supreme Court. As yet we know little about her, though since Bush nominated her, she's probably conservative. To be honest, it smacks of cronyism, which seems pretty silly since the Mike Brown controversy. Hopefully I'm wrong and she's very well qualified. I don't think a Supreme Court justice need have been a judge previously, as several of our greatest justices had no judicial experience, but as yet I don't have a lot of confidence in this nomination.

I suppose it's possible he nominated her knowing that her lack of a judicial paper trail would make it tough to filibuster her, but she's already 60, which seems old for a new justice.

I had a great day at the poker tables yesterday. I hadn't played in over a week simply because I was on a losing streak and had aken so much money out of my bankroll that it was now empty. Smiley had just made a deposit, so I asked him to stake me in a $10 multi-table, in return for 1/3rd of the profits. I won it for $477, $150 of which went to Smiley, and the rest will hopefully win me some more money.