Uncertainly Not!

Scooter gets a semi-free pass.

Still gonna cost him a few bucks, but maybe all those folks who were clamoring for his release will pony up the quarter million he owes in fines. The New York Times is all sad, but still thinks this was fair.

Poor wittle baby.

Shrub commutes Scooter's sentence to time served (none) and a fine, plus his felony conviction still stands. Which is good, maybe he won't be able to vote wherever he lives. Or something. Disbarred, one hopes. He'll have to make some sort of honest living.

Or else become a political consultant or lobbyist. (which one do YOU think is more likely?)

IdiotLand

Elsewhere the spin machines are in overdrive, the US Attorneys' scandal is now moving into the sixth or so month of controversy, and the phrase Executive Privilege is being tested for all it's worth in the newspapers of record. Hillary Clinton has said we're safer since 9/11. Barack Obama has stated with a straight face that the Bush administration has not yet done anything worthy of impeachment.

Do these people read the paper?

SiCKO

Michael Moore's film has started to make a fairly large splash. He reports on his website that the distribution company is letting it into at least 200 more screens. Moore may be strident, and a bit of a blowhard some times, but what he's talking about in SiCKO is where this country should have gone years ago. We're very low-ranked in terms of the health of our citizenry, and I suspect that part of the reason for this is how low-ranked we are in the intelligence of our citizenry. An uninformed, uneducated citizenry believes everything they tell us, no matter how transparently false it may be. And we've been sold, year after year, about the inefficiency of government-run anything. Except, of course, in places where these sorts of things actually work (France, England, Canada), or when perhaps the country doesn't spend every available bit of capital on new and better guns, planes, tanks and bombs.

We spend 43% ($420 billion) of our Gross Domestic Product on the military. The next highest spender is China, at 6% ($62.5 billion). They have about triple our population. For those leftos who want to protest the war, or protest the warrantless wiretapping, or anything else for that matter, protest this first. No country should spend this much of their capital on the machines of death, least of all when constantly talking about spreading peace.