Go-ll-e-e-e-eee... ANOTHER suicide that I somehow don't believe is one...

there's an awful lot o'suicidin' goin' on...

jonathan turley...

There is some more bad news for the D.C. bar this afternoon. Legal Times is reporting that Mark Levy, a well-known lawyer who headed the Supreme Court and Appellate Practice section of Kilpatrick Stockton has killed himself in his office — reportedly by a gunshot of a .38 calibre handgun to the head. The firm had told Levy that he was about to be laid off with a number of other lawyers due to the economy.

yeah, well, whatever... maybe so, maybe no... i'm inclined to doubt almost any and every story of current and former top officials committing 'suicide'... it's just too easy a way to get 'em to STFU...

wapo...

Based on detectives' interviews, police learned that Levy had been told he was among those being let go, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the case. Kilpatrick Stockton's Web site says Levy was head of the firm's Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Practice. He argued 16 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court during his career, it says.

Another source familiar with the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is not complete, said that yesterday would have been Levy's last day at work and that he was given four months of severance pay.

see anything wrong with this picture...? hmmmmm...? how likely is it that a major law firm in washington d.c. would lay off a former deputy assistant attorney general and the HEAD of its supreme court practice...? hmmmmmm...?? bloody UNLIKELY, i say...

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Obama and Web 2.0 - up until now "American politics had been dominated by rich old cranky white people"

juan cole...

I think it is more significant that Obama is the first major party candidate for president who got where he is through the current iteration of the World Wide Web, which includes the blogging world, distributed information networks, social networking, and video sites such as YouTube (i.e. Web 2.0). That is, the Iowa breakthrough was iconic of Obama's success, because youth, progressivism, metro-racialism and independent politics are all tightly interwoven with Web 2.0.

Ironically, Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992 was the first to use email extensively to shape the news cycle and contact supporters, but Hillary Clinton's people did not seem as good (or maybe as interested) in being on the vanguard of communications technology.

Among the more important capabilities bestowed by the Web 2.0 has been a new model of grassroots fundraising. American politics had been dominated by rich old cranky white people, because they had the money and they voted. They gave us all those Republican administrations and they shaped the Clinton administration as essentially neo-Eisenhowerism. Obama really does have an opportunity to accomplish some new things in American politics, and to avoid slavish adherence to Lobby politics, precisely because he has a different economic base. People younger than 65, and people for whom certain racial categories are not the most important thing in the world, might finally have a voice. In the past, the promise of the youth vote has always faltered when it comes to the November elections. If people in their 20s, 30s and 40s really want change (and with Iraq, the economy, etc., why would they not?) they have to go on organizing, canvassing, giving and above all voting. It is in your hands, O Generation of Web 2.0.

interesting thoughts... no argument here...

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Fine... Do it... Let's get it ALL on the table...

as a concerned citizen who has watched my country progressively going downhill for a long, long time, well before george and bill, i say, go for it...

"As Democrats gear up for a broad investigation of Republican e-mail accounts, GOP staff warn that the issue could come back to haunt Democrats, as the minority is looking for ways to extend the issue into Democratic e-mails as well," Paul Singer and Rachel Van Dongen write for Roll Call.

The paper reports, that "Brian McNicoll, a spokesman for Oversight and Government Reform Committee Republicans, warned that if Democrats want to broadly investigate the use of party e-mail accounts by administration officials, Republicans could extend this investigation back to the end of the Clinton administration as well."

"If you can go back through five years of e-mails, you can go back 10 years of e-mails,” McNicoll is quoted as saying. "The Clinton administration was doing this too — they were using e-mail accounts that were outside the presidential records system."

of course this was issued as a threat but i think it's a wonderful idea... if we're going to undertake the national cleansing we so desperately need, let's do it right and let the chips fall where they may...

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After posting about Dem lackeys and enablers, here's two more

here's somebody else in the democratic leadership supporting infrastructure who refuses to entertain the notion that the vast majority of the american people don't agree with his bullshit, but is definitely not going to let THAT FACT stop him from smearing it all over the walls... nor will it stop the consistently bushco-enabling wapo from headlining it on page one...

William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, a Clinton administration domestic policy adviser and an early opponent of the Iraq war, said his party should note that voters appear just as worried that Democrats would withdraw from Iraq too quickly as they are concerned that Republicans would stay there too long.

"I think it's important to distinguish between the desire to bring this agony to an end and the consequences of bringing it to an end in the wrong way," he said. "I can't prove this, but I believe Democrats will be held responsible if they are seen as advocating a course of action that doesn't take the consequences of failure into account. We cannot afford as a party to be either silent or blithe about the consequences of rapid withdrawal."

there's an even more insidious line of crap embedded in this front-page story...

[T]he war is not the only area in which the candidates are at opposing poles of the debate. On issues such as taxes and spending, health care, and education, candidates are mostly taking their cue from -- or trying to cozy up to -- their respective ideological bases. In doing so, they risk embracing positions that could complicate later efforts to win the support of independent voters, whose votes will be crucial in November 2008.

read the above carefully... what picture does it conjure up...? that's right... two fringe groups, one parked on the far left and the other parked on the far right, both labeled as "ideological bases" with this vast white space labeled "independent voters" in between... this completely fails to take into account that the vast majority of that white space just so happens to support the very positions that are being ascribed to the far left fringe, however, no surprise to anybody, it's the "activists," as always, who are the ones making the most noise... seriously, i don't know how out of touch it is possible for mr. galston and the washington post to be and to still be citizens and residents of the united states...

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"If you're looking at legacy..."

but, if you're looking at accountability...? if you're looking at ethics...? if you're looking at criminal offense...?

"This has been a huge cloud over the White House," said Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist close to the Bush team. "It caused a lot of intellectual, emotional and political energy to be expended when it should have been expended on the agenda. They're never going to fully recover from this. If you're looking at legacy, this episode gets prominently mentioned in every recap of the Bush administration, much like Iran-contra and Monica Lewinsky."

what the libby case revealed as much or more than anything else, was how much "intellectual, emotional and political energy" was expended on trying to smear your critics to protect yourselves from having the lies you told from being exposed...

of course, leave it to cheney's vicious she-wolf, mary matalin, to put things in their proper context, namely, that the clinton administration was worse...

"Scooter didn't do anything," said former Cheney counselor Mary Matalin. "And his personal record and service are impeccable. How do you make sense of a system where a security principal [former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. Berger] admits to stuffing classified docs in his pants and says, 'I'm sorry,' and a guy who is rebutting a demonstrable partisan liar is going through this madness?"

i just love the way she characterizes joseph wilson as a "demonstrable partisan liar" and the act of smearing him and outing his covert CIA operative wife as mere "rebuttal..."

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