It’s a fallacy that there’s a morally or legally significant difference between what Robert Halderman stands accused of doing, and what agents and lawyers do all the time. Halderman had a marketable story to sell. Just because most agents and lawyers wouldn’t go to David Letterman’s house doesn’t mean that going to Letterman’s house is a criminal act. It’s not unlawful to sell a story without using an agent or a lawyer, and making a proposal to someone who might be embarrassed by the dissemination of a story isn’t prohibited.
In his interview with Roland Burris Wednesday, Chris Matthews conducted himself not as a fair-minded journalist but a prosecutor who believes it’s okay to conceal exculpatory evidence to win a case. Like everyone else who has been sucked in by a lynch mob mentality at Burris’s expense, Matthews simply ignored that it was completely routine for Robert Blagojevich, brother of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, to have sought a campaign contribution from Burris in a telephone conversation.
The media continues to exaggerate evidence of malfeasance on the part of Roland Burris. As if it would have been criminal for him to do what he didn’t do anyway, Monica Davey and Ann Cullotta claim in The New York Times that “Mr. Burris had promised to send a personal check” to Gov. Rod Blagojevich [...]
Although today’s decision by the California Supreme Court is understandably disappointing to proponents of same sex marriage, it should not be interpreted as any sort of disrespect to gays and their rights. Indeed, this is the very same court which last year ruled that gays do enjoy the right to marry under the California Constitution.
Some Huffington Post commenters who admire Code Pink’s moxie think the mere willingness to insult Donald Rumsfeld to his face is a great accomplishment. It is not. It trivializes his alleged crimes to showily spew inane jargon, especially when nothing else is included in the presentation.
It’s not as if it would be overly burdensome to [...]
On Wednesday I admonished a Code Pink protester for her melodramatic “attempt” to arrest Donald Rumsfeld. My post (published here, here and here) was not a rebuke so much as a practical call for more advanced operations. Nonetheless, so-called progressives - including David Swanson, whose After Downing Street website is largely dedicated to the torture scandal - told me I had crossed some line.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
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