the/diseased/republik

Sentence commuted, convicted felon scoots to take care of 250K fine JULY 5--On the same day that President George W. Bush wiped away his 30-month prison sentence, convicted former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby purchased a $250,400 cashier's check to cover fines imposed by the federal judge whose sentence was gutted by the presidential commutation. A copy of the July 2 cashier's check (which you can find below) was docketed today in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.. In April, a jury convicted Libby of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation of the leak of the identity of former CIA agent Valerie Plame. Libby's Bank of America check satisifies a $250,000 fine imposed by Judge Reggie Walton and also covers an additional $400 "special assessment." Supporters of Libby, who served as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, stressed that while Bush's action kept Libby from a prison cell, the onerous s...

Tony Snow returns to work and continues the Republican Ruse. He flat out denies that any of the Bush Cabal tried to link 9/11 and Iraq. Transcript: Q. The message is clear– the administration was not straight with Americans, not about W.M.D.’S, not about 9/11. There it is from the former C.I.A. Chief. Is it time for the administration to come clean, Tony? TONY SNOW: Wait a minute, Chris. The president has been saying exactly that all along. I don’t know what the headline is. As a matter of fact, I can remember right after September 11 sitting here when I was a journalist and some of your colleagues, I believe Charlie Gibson may have been there at the time as well. The fact is the president made it clear before the State of the Union in 2002 that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and September 11. So Im afraid what’s happened there is that George Tenet may have been referring to something that has been misreported or at least twisted by people with political motives, but ...

Over on the O'Reilly Network, there's an interesting piece about how Microsoft tried to hire people to contribute to Wikipedia . Not wanting to do the edits directly, they were looking for an intermediary to make edits and corrections favorable to them. Why? According to the article, it was apparently both to let people know that Microsoft will not 'enable death squads with their UUIDs' and also to fight the growing consensus that OOXML contains a useless pile of legacy crap which is unfit for standardization.

CAMDEN, N.J. April 14 — In his rush to cash in on the Don Imus debacle, Gov. Jon S. Corzine underwent an hour-long operation on Saturday to clean the leg wound he suffered during a car crash on Thursday, and doctors said he was exhibiting signs of improvement that bolstered their confidence that he had escaped any brain or spinal injury. The crash occurred Thursday afternoon on the Garden State Parkway after the Chevrolet Suburban in which the governor was riding was hit by a white pickup truck that had swerved to avoid a red pickup that was driving erratically. The driver of the white truck was not charged. LINK TO STORY>>>