kerik guilty

* nyt via tpmm:

"Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, is close to reaching an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to having accepted improper gifts totaling tens of thousands of dollars while he was a city official in the late 1990's... (Kerik) will not face jail time, but is expected to pay a substantial fine"

yay, boo. now - if we can only get chertoff...

* juan cole:

"The lack of choke points in cyberspace means that people like Kos can't just be fired. How then to shut them up? Why, you attempt to ruin their reputation, as a way of scaring off readers and supporters. This technique, as Billmon points out, does not usually work very well in cyberspace itself, though it can be effective if the blogger moves into a bricks and mortar institutional environment where big money and chokeholds work again. A political party is such an environment.

Cyberspace itself, though, is a distributed system, not a centralized one. That is why the charges against Kos are so silly. In essence, creatures of the old choke-point hegemonies are projecting their own hierarchical system inaccurately on Kos. Of course you wouldn't expect people like Peretz or David Brooks to understand what a distributed information system is, dinosaurs as they are, of both politics and media."

* aravosis:

"But note one thing. The Supreme Court is now 7-2 Republican to Democrat. The court is even further to the right than it was when Bush took office since he replaced Sandra Day O'Connor with Alito, who is far to the right of her.

That means that even with the most conservative Supreme Court in decades, Bush still got slapped down for his handling of civil liberties under the war on terror. Enough of this "activist judges" bs. Even the Republican-run court slaps down Bush (and apparently the legislative branch gets slapped too)."

* tpmm:

"Bill Lowery's in trouble.... Lowery signed the three disclosures which failed to report nearly $300,000 from Brent Wilkes' ADCS, affirming that ADCS paid less than a tenth that amount."

* emptywheel makes a really good case that cheney told libby to leak the plame info. (see here but you'll have to scroll up for context.) The story before now was that cheney had asked libby to leak the NIE - but if what EW says is true, the timelines dont make any sense - the plame outing was separate. (i presume that when EW says "July 25: Leak NIE to Woodward" she actually means "June 25: Leak NIE to Woodward"). This is most significant. Apparently Libby leaked the NIE with nary any pushback - but he was most tentative about leaking the Plame info - and called addington for a 2nd opinion. why would he be nervous? because it's a crime to knowingly out a NOC - which means that Libby is demonstrably in line for an IIPA charge.