This has been a major weakness of Mayer’s excellent reporting to begin with. CIA sources that she needed were pushing the “we had no idea how to do interrogations so we borrowed from the uncivilized wogs” line, and she transmitted it.

It’s even less forgivable with named sources, but at least it permits open argument with counter-evidence that puts big smudges on those white hats, such as your comment here.

can one of you brilliant lawyers opine on this?

my dear friend in MN gave me some insights on the coleman/franken mess yesterday, not anything any of us does not already know, but her sense is that coleman has only dug his political grave forever with his obstruction of all this. he’s totally sunk if he calls for a special election; he’ll be humiliated.

this will take a lot of time, and who knows, ANOTHER recount??? given how deeply the RNC is lining his pockets to keep this fight going, and clearly all to keep the dems down to 58 in the senate.

so, i was wondering about the legal recourse the people of MN might have in the courts themselves. is there a class action here to sue coleman and the RNC and the MN repugs for purposely preventing the people of MN from having their full representation in the US senate?

it was in defense of reid’s position on it all, and i’ll say again that i believe he did all he could do. he could NOT just shrug and move along; that would have provoked as much outrage as he got anyway. he had to back down because the IL legislature was not moving fast enough to clear the way for the lt. gov. to get in place and appoint someone else. and yet, i suspect that he suspected (just as i suspected) that burris had come by his seat nefariously, that this would come out in the near future, and he would be removed and they would get what they wanted in the first place.

sometimes the gunslinger is just NOT the way to go. sometimes (and being buddhist i think most times) it’s best to let things unfold as they will. little nudges, not hamfisted smacks.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..67742.html

Not to mention the fact that Blago’s being removed from office in a unanimous vote didn’t seem to bother the people who thought that not seating him immediately, was a threat to modern jurisprudence. They just rolled with the punch, and only now, when all of Burris’ contact and dickering with Blago’s people is coming out, are those people jumping into the dogpile.

1) I wasn’t calling for a trial. I was calling for delaying long enough to investigate serious evidence against him (which has been proven true – he did seek to get money to Blagojevich at a time when he was trying to influence Blagojevich to get him the nomination).

2) There is no damage done by delaying in order to investigate the serious evidence against him. It’s as simple as that. The precedent set by a short delay to investigate is that a future Senate might decide to delay a seating for a short time to investigate. It takes longer to run a special election than it does to issue subpoenas and talk to Fred Lebed, Lon Monk and a couple people at the Christian Industrial League about why Patti got the job.

3) You admitted you don’t know nearly as much about the evidence as people in Illinois who’ve been following it. So why keep blustering?

4) Your patronizing remarks about Illinois voters are idiotic. Blagojevich and Burris have done damage to the state. But not the damage that Bush did to the country. So I guess I could “make a cutting remark about the good people of the US” and imply that you’re one of the idiots who gave us Bush. Go back to where you came from. We got our governor impeached. You helped insure he could commit once last nefarious deed before we got him out. Go to hell.