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Sunday, October 23, 2005

It's Getting Hot in Here



The perps are starting to sweat. Does Arthur Murray teach the frogmarch?

. Over at the BooMan Tribune, Susan Hu lets us know that NSC chief Stephen Hadley -- whom Larry Johnson says fully expects to be indicted -- is looking to get the heat off himself by engineering regime change in Syria. When in doubt, start a war.

. Howard Dean kicks it up a notch on This Week with George S.: "If [Fitzgerald] finishes his investigation without bringing indictments and without issuing a final report, will you accept that as the end of the matter?"

"No," Dean shot back. "Because I fundamentally don't think these are honest people running the government."

. At the WaPo, they speculate about why exactly Fitzgerald's new web site threw up a letter from February 6, 2004 from his then-boss James Comey, re-asserting his authority to prosecute "crimes committed with intent to interfere with your investigation:"
"The fact that he [Fitzgerald] asked for authority that he probably already had, but wanted spelled out, makes it arguable that he had run into something rather quickly," Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris said yesterday.
You think this means BushCo. Bandits went in there and started lying right off the blocks? Wow, I would be shocked. Shocked I tell you. Can we hear another chorus from the "no indictments will be handed down" choir?

. Newsmax offers us more of their unbiased reporting:
Born of working class immigrant parents and raised in heavily Democratic Brooklyn, New York, Fitzgerald was educated in liberal bastions like Amherst College and Harvard University.
Footnote to that newswire: "Preferable for distribution in markets where residents have no idea what either Amherst College or Harvard University actually are."

. SF Chronicle has an article on Fitzgerald, where they allow Victoria Toensing to freely spin her own special brand of bullshit:
"Lots of witnesses want to put out their own spin'' after appearing before grand juries by talking to the media. "But Fitzgerald has been tougher, almost scaring the witnesses'' not to talk. "It's rare for a prosecutor."
Right. And she knows this how? Oh I forgot, she's been in on all grand jury testimony. She's that big, ugly spider handing from the ceiling.

. Armando has a good rundown of Press the Meat this morning, and says Pumpkinhead actually did his job for a moment on Traitorgate. Not in a "let me tell you what I myself did" kind of way, but in a "let me tell you what the other guy did" kind of way. Many amusing comments about Timmeh ensue.

. Lawrence O'Donnell at the HuffPo brings up an excellent and oh-so-amusing point about Rove's odds at conning the grand jury:
A typical Washington, D.C. grand jury is about 75% African American. Fitzgerald’s is slightly more than that. This is not the kind of group Karl Rove feels at home with. He has no professional experience trying to appeal to a group like this. He has been so unsuccessful at it that his boss’s job approval rating with African Americans is now 2%, which, factoring in the margin of error, could actually be zero. To make matters statistically and demographically much worse for Rove and Scooter Libby, only 12 of the 23 grand jurors have to agree to indict them.
Zero. Think about it. You know Unka Karl did

. Rep. Gerald Nadler is calling for Firzgerald to expand his investigation "to examine whether the President, the Vice President, and members of the White House Iraq Group conspired to deliberately deceive Congress into authorizing the war in Iraq." It would be lovely, but I think he may have his hands full right about now.

And I just don't think I could handle it if he took another year to start passing out indictments. As John at AmericaBlog says, "It's like the
best-sex-ever going on a bit too long."


(graphics love to 2 political junkies via Mark Kleiman)

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