Crikey, there’s some scared mofos on the right, bashing Marsh because of her (appropriate) downplaying of the JFK “plot”. One commenter insisted there have been “thousands” of Americans killed by “hundreds” of terrorist acts, an exaggeration implying once their lizard brains are stoked with adrenaline, there’s no coming back from round the bend.

What’s the word for people thinking they can control their environment by eliminating anyone “different”, in many cases by linking them to “terrorism”?

1. Even though it was what the whole investigation was all about, there should be absolutely no mention of the fact that two reporters testified in open court that Scooter Libby betrayed Valerie Plame’s identity to them. This information will drawn attention away from the “no underlying crime” talking point.

2. State that the sentence was unnecessarily harsh, even though it was at the low end of the suggested range. In fact, you probably shouldn’t distract readers with the whole issue of sentencing guidelines. Just say that Libby could have gotten probration, but he got 30 months of jail time instead.

3. Describe Libby as “respectful” as opposed to “remorseless”.

4. Mention that the judge is African-American but leave out the part about how he is very conservative and was appointed by George W Bush. Bonus points if you can use the phrase “legislating from the bench”.

5. Talk about all of the letters of support that Libby got. Do not mention that any of the authors have themselves “resigned in disgrace”. The phrase “fucking stupidest person on the face of the earth” should be edited down to “superlative with respect to his abilities”.

Get to it, Fred. We’re expecting a barn-burner!

Fern @ 271

Tried to play the archived session from this morning, and Firefox didn’t recognize the file format. I would like to see this – any suggestions?

C-Span 1.

I’m watching it now on CSPAN-1….

I too was thinking that, best case scenario, he has an “ah-ha” experience, decides he really is facing jail in 45 days, gets yelled at by his wife for the next two days (”so, if Dick jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?”), and makes a complete 180 to be a model citizen, rat out half the top people in the Bush administration, get lieniency from Reggie, and slither away from politics to pursue his literary career.

Probably won’t happen, unless one believes in the “Many Worlds Interpretation” of quantum mechanics.

Schlozman testified that Donsantos gave him the go-ahead.

The funny thing is – Donsantos wrote the Red Book, which explicitly says ‘Thou shalt not indict immediately prior to an election.’

Schlozman looks a lot like a political hack. My guess is that he had No Idea what was in the Red Book, and wouldn’t know what to do even if he did read it. Hence, the calls to Donsantos for ‘guidance.’

Schlozman even went so far as to attribute to Donsantos the remarkable statement that the ‘policies’ in the Red Book were simply informal – despite Whitehouse reading the official language in the introduction saying that the Red Book represented a collection of formal policies for USAs to use as guidance.

So, either Schlozman *lied* about Donsantos giving him the go-ahead, or Donsantos has *gone crazy* and invalidated his own book.

The econ-o-sphere gets active now and then on the degree and the sources of economic inequality. There is almost no argument left about whether income inequality has increased in the U.S., but there’s plenty about the role of education, changing technology, trade globalization, and government policies (like tax cuts) and institutional factors.

In this post from Mark Thoma you can get an overview of who has been saying what recently on the subject. Also, here’s a recent post about a Krugman column on the promotion of our new Gilded Age under Republican tax policies. There are many more relevant articles under Thoma’s “Income Distribution” subject heading.

Another way to assess inequality in this country would be by comparison with other, economically similar countries. In this post, Kash Mansouri discusses a study that reports the inequality trend in the U.S. to be much different than in countries like Canada or Germany —we of course have had a sharp increase in inequality, while most others have not (UK is sort of an exception). But all the countries had the same experience with changing technologies, and many have developed an educated class of techies during the same time, so the case for educational all-stars being the cause, which many economists do not believe, doesn’t get much support from this study. The authors of the paper, Brandolini and Smeeding, come to some political conclusions that won’t shock anyone here.