This is hardly a testimony for equal justice, but I’m thinking the alleged victim in this case didn’t suffer as much “harm” as the victim in this incident, if you know what I mean.
Should that be a factor in sentencing?

Herbert:

There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence. In the Bush administration, that mixture has been explosive. Forget the meant-to-be-comforting rhetoric surrounding Mr. Gonzales’s confirmation hearings. Nothing’s changed. As detailed in The Washington Post earlier this month, the administration is making secret plans for the possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists who will never even be charged.
Due process? That’s a laugh. Included among the detainees, the paper noted, are hundreds of people in military or C.I.A. custody “whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts.” And there will be plenty more detainees to come.
Who knows who these folks are or what they may be guilty of? We’ll have to trust in the likes of Alberto Gonzales or Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush’s new appointee to head the C.I.A., Porter Goss, to see that the right thing is done in each and every case.
Americans have tended to view the U.S. as the guardian of the highest ideals of justice and fairness. But that is a belief that’s getting more and more difficult to sustain. If the Justice Department can be the fiefdom of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales, those in search of the highest standards of justice have no choice but to look elsewhere.

Krugman:

Apologists for the administration would like us to forget all about the Kerik affair, but Bernard Kerik perfectly symbolizes the times we live in. Like Rudolph Giuliani and, yes, President Bush, he wasn’t a hero of 9/11, but he played one on TV. And like Mr. Giuliani, he was quick to cash in, literally, on his undeserved reputation.
Once the New York newspapers began digging, it became clear that Mr. Kerik is, professionally and personally, a real piece of work. But that’s not unusual these days among people who successfully pass themselves off as patriots and defenders of moral values. Mr. Kerik must still be wondering why he, unlike so many others, didn’t get away with it.
. . .
As White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales was charged with vetting Mr. Kerik. He must have realized what kind of man he was dealing with – yet he declared Mr. Kerik fit to oversee homeland security.
Did Mr. Gonzales defer to the wishes of a president who wanted Mr. Kerik anyway, or did he decide that his boss wouldn’t want to know? (The Nelson Report, a respected newsletter, reports that Mr. Bush has made it clear to his subordinates that he doesn’t want to hear bad news about Iraq.)
Either way, when the Senate confirms Mr. Gonzales, it will mean that Iokiyar remains in effect, that the basic rules of ethics don’t apply to people aligned with the ruling party. And reality will continue to be worse than any fiction I could write.

Indeed.

Q & A with Bill Gates:

[Q] In recent years, there’s been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, “We’ve got to look at patents, we’ve got to look at copyrights.” What’s driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
[Gates] No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.

Right. People who don’t agree that US corporations should have copyright protection for 100+ years (it keeps getting extended) are “communists.” I’m very surprised that the leader of Microsoft doesn’t have a higher regard for promoting competition. Shocking.

Knoxville doesn’t appear in Men’s Fitness magazine’s lists of America’s top 25 fattest and fittest cities. Memphis earns the honor of 4th fattest city. Nashville is the 25th fittest city. The ranking indicates that:

Almost 9 out of 10 Tennesseans get so little exercise that they risk health problems, according to a study by the CDC. In fact, in the same study, one out of three people hadn’t gotten any physical activity in the past month.

Curiously, in the report card Environment section under “Air” Nashville receives a “B,” while Memphis gets an “F.” In contrast, for “Climate” Memphis earns a “B,” while Nashville gets a “D.” Are these two cities, 200 miles apart, that much different with respect to air quality and climate? I haven’t spent a lot of time in either, but I would have guessed that if there was a difference between the two cities, it would have run the opposite way–air quality worse in Nashville, climate worse in Memphis.

Josh Marshall nails the ongoing White House Social Security con job:

So now you can see from memos emerging from the White House itself that this isn’t about ‘saving’ Social Security. If it were, what would that sentence mean — (“For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win”)? The first time in six decades they can save it?
Clearly, this isn’t about ‘saving’ Social Security. It is a battle to end Social Security and replace with something that Wehner clearly understands is very different, indeed the antithesis of Social Security.
This entire debate is about ideology — between people who believe in the benefits Social Security has brought America in the last three-quarters of a century and those who think it was a bad idea from the start. There is an honest debate to have on this point, a values debate. Only, the White House understands that the belief that Social Security was always a bad program isn’t widely shared by Americans. So they have to wrap their effort in a package of lies, harnessing Americans’ desire to save Social Security in their own effort to destroy it.

Yep. We’ve seen them follow this misdirection play on issues concerning regulation, the environment, even Iraq. This time they may have gotten too greedy. I think it’s time for them to go down in flames.