Yesterday's Leftovers
Some three-dot monte to start the day.
*How is it that Ronnie Earle's pointless, partisan prosecution of once and future House Majority Leader Tom DeLay hasn't been summarily and snickeringly dismissed?
Like Tom Bevan I am neither an attorney nor a legal expert, but didn't Earle taint the third grand jury with the opinions of the first precisely because the second GJ didn't give him the money-laundering indictment he wanted? How can the subsequent trial be allowed to go forward under such a miscarriage of justice?
*Former FBI Director Louis Freeh penned an op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal making the basic point that Able Danger and the coverup by the so-called 9/11 commission of the Clinton administration's serial GWOT derelictions is the scandal that should be inundating the nation's capital, not all this phoney, fabricated, despicable "Plamegate"/"BUSH LIED!!!!!" horse hockey. Which, of course, is precisely why it isn't.
*Mark Krikorian argued on NRO yesterday that unless the federal government gets serious about cracking down on illegal immigration and restricting the legal variety, some version of France's present will be America's future. It does come across as a worst-case scenario, as well as an opportunistic exploitation of current world events, but then again no Frenchie would have predicted twenty or thirty years ago that their country would be submerged in a sea of flames, explosions, and hostile alien insurrection, either.
If those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, how much more so those who willfully try to re-write it to their personal/political inclinations?
Makes you wonder what George Santayana would think of today's juncture of history - and guess that he'd express his relief that he did not, in fact, live to see it.
*How is it that Ronnie Earle's pointless, partisan prosecution of once and future House Majority Leader Tom DeLay hasn't been summarily and snickeringly dismissed?
Yesterday in court papers filed in Austin, Earle's office admitted that in the two days following the second grand jury's decision to issue the no-bill on Friday, September 30, "an investigator with Earle's office telephoned several members of the first grand jury, which had been dismissed, and asked whether the evidence they heard would have warranted a first-degree felony charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering."
The Austin American-Statesman (reg req) also reports that, "the opinions of the former grand jurors might have been shared with a third grand jury on October 3, but jurors were told nothing of the secret deliberations by the previous grand jury. On the first day of its term, the third grand jury returned the first-degree felony charges after hearing evidence for a few hours."
Like Tom Bevan I am neither an attorney nor a legal expert, but didn't Earle taint the third grand jury with the opinions of the first precisely because the second GJ didn't give him the money-laundering indictment he wanted? How can the subsequent trial be allowed to go forward under such a miscarriage of justice?
*Former FBI Director Louis Freeh penned an op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal making the basic point that Able Danger and the coverup by the so-called 9/11 commission of the Clinton administration's serial GWOT derelictions is the scandal that should be inundating the nation's capital, not all this phoney, fabricated, despicable "Plamegate"/"BUSH LIED!!!!!" horse hockey. Which, of course, is precisely why it isn't.
*Mark Krikorian argued on NRO yesterday that unless the federal government gets serious about cracking down on illegal immigration and restricting the legal variety, some version of France's present will be America's future. It does come across as a worst-case scenario, as well as an opportunistic exploitation of current world events, but then again no Frenchie would have predicted twenty or thirty years ago that their country would be submerged in a sea of flames, explosions, and hostile alien insurrection, either.
If those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, how much more so those who willfully try to re-write it to their personal/political inclinations?
Makes you wonder what George Santayana would think of today's juncture of history - and guess that he'd express his relief that he did not, in fact, live to see it.
posted by JASmius at 9:16 AM
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