We’ve forgotten that our entire republic depends on high levels of individual virtue. Virtue is the basis for individual responsibility which provides the very foundation for freedom. The alternatives to self-regulating people are autocracy and despotism.

The only way people self-regulate to enhance the general welfare and sustain freedom is by an embrace of virtue, itself based on a moral code. When a public figure violates the most basic moral code and lies about it for two years, it erodes our foundation and saps our strength.

John Edwards’ violation wasn’t simply a mistake or bad judgment. It was a purposeful and destructive act. It inflicted compound injury, given his many lies and efforts to conceal, on both his family and our national persona.

They say the mother’s milk of politics is money. I disagree. I think the mother’s milk of politics is trust. I could never trust Nixon after Watergate, can’t trust Bill Clinton whatsoever, and now, will never trust John Edwards either.

Writing for Townhall, columnist Chuck Norris poses these thoughtful questions — do we care, and do we know why we should care?

Now that John Edwards has admitted to his affair with 42-year-old Rielle Hunter, the big test looms again before the American public: Do we care? Do we think it matters? Do we believe that there should be any code of conduct or moral standard for those in public office, even if it is the highest one in the land?….

I believe leadership should be above reproach. I believe those who govern should lead also in civility and decency and that their character should be congruent with their call to office. Like parents to children, a nation’s politicians’ integrity and character should supersede its citizens. But as long as we the people tolerate leadership immorality and elect corrupt politicians, we cannot expect the heart and character of our nation to improve….

In his article, Norris points to this quotation from founding father John Adams:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

By now everyone knows that former presidential candidate John Edwards had an affair with a blowsy bleached campaign video producer while his wife battled cancer. What a loser! What a schmuck! But to Washington insiders, the sorry parade of politicians who can’t keep their pants zipped up is old news. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s official mistresses to JFK’s legendary two-at-a-time late night “secretarial support,” from Bill’s “first humidor” to Eliot’s fatal fling, we are used to their steamy exploits. The real story has been the media coverage, or lack thereof.

We first noted this in our post The Silence of the Media Lambs and again in our follow-up post Update on “The Silence of the Media Lambs”. Now others are catching on.

One Los Angeles Times writer sees this as a landmark in the relative roles of old and new media (that’s Internet speak for traditional newspapers and bloggers):

Old media dethroned
Tim Rutten  |  August 9, 2008

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it — reporting that turns out to be largely correct — and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion….

So far, so sordid.

But what’s really significant here is the cone of silence the nation’s major newspapers — including The Times — and the cable and broadcast networks dropped over this story when it first appeared in the tabloid during the presidential primary campaign. Next, the Enquirer reported that the unmarried Hunter was pregnant. Still no mainstream media interest. Indeed, never in recent journalistic history have so many tough reporters so closely resembled sheep as those members of the campaign press corps who meekly accepted Edwards’ categorical dismissal of the Enquirer’s allegations….

[When Edwards admitted his deception], the illusion that traditional print and broadcast news organizations can establish the limits of acceptable political journalism joined the passenger pigeon on the roster of extinct Americana.

Note the reference to the media as “sheep” in this article! You heard it first here.

And while we’re on this subject, that queen of peerless prose — Maureen Dowd — does a wonderful job of deconstructing Edwards’ self-diagnosed narcissism. It’s your day off. Have some fun and read the whole thing. Here’s a bit:

John Edwards’s confession was a little bit breathtaking.

Not the sex stuff. That happens here all the time.

And certainly not covering up the sex stuff. That happens here all the time, too….

The stunning admission Edwards made … was that he’s a narcissist.

He admitted that wallowing in “self-focus” out on the trail and thinking you’re “special” can result in a solipsism that “leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you’re invincible and there’ll be no consequences.”

Auto-psychoanalysis by the perp. That’s really rich….

Well, as Tim Rutten so astutely observed, the old media is dethroned. But the definitive point that started their long downhill slide occurred in the fall of 2004. The bloggers exposed the TANG memos touted by Dan Rather as computer-generated forgeries, affecting the outcome of the presidential election.

Another memorable haymaker was landed by the bloggers when the Canadian Liberal government tried to silence their press and cover up a kickback scandal in April 2005. That episode produced this wonderful editorial cartoon, which applies equally well to the present situation:

Related:

CNN — Edwards could face political free fall from affair

John Edwards, who made his marriage a central part of his overall message during the 2008 Democratic primaries — was dealt a political blow Friday after admitting to having an extramarital affair….

CNN contributor James Carville, a former aide to Bill Clinton — who acknowledged an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky in his second term — said Edwards’ career is in dire straits.

“Certainly, his political career is in shambles. It’s not going to come back.”….

The former North Carolina senator, who was often mentioned as a possible candidate for Obama’s vice presidential pick, does not believe that his admission will have a long-lasting impact on his career….

The Caucus — The Early Word: Examining the Edwards Delay:

As he admitted to an extramarital affair, John Edwards released a deeply self-reflective (or, as The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye put it, “excruciatingly personal”) statement on Friday. But today, the media are taking to self-reflection in discussing why a story that had been floating around for ten months, broken by a tabloid, was all but ignored by mainstream news organizations.

The Times’s Richard Pérez-Peña and Bill Carter look into why many news organizations, including this one, did not devote major resources to pursuing the story…

Stop The ACLU Blog — Elizabeth Edwards speaks. Predictably, Elizabeth Edwards vows to stand by her man. And she does what all professional politicians do when caught in wrong-doing. She blames the media for reporting it (at long last):

Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some most recently caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences….

John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me…. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well.

Is this disingenuous or what? “I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage…” They both knew about this before he ran in the presidential primary. Oh, well, she is a lawyer too.

Despite all the publicity, fawning and palm branches that his supporters, and that includes most if not all of the so called “mainstream media,” cast at his feet, Obama will not be the next President of the United States.

The situation may be historic and one should respect the right of those who choose to place him on a pedestal, albeit one that is largely a product of his oratorical skill — not his experience, not his knowledge, not his ability to run a business, not his accomplishments, not his demonstrated patriotism, and not his contributions to this country; but his ability to expertly read a speech.

One should read if one has not, “The Making of A President.” It is a 1960′s book turned into stage play. The Democrats have evidently taken the script and applied it to the Obama Campaign; in a nutshell it’s all about image.

If one wants to see:

• “the economy totally changed” (that’s a scary prospect. Wonder what he meant? I think I know)
• punitively high gas prices so that we can make more available to folks in developing nations (You understand, “the US is 3% of the world’s population but consumes 25% of its resources,” obviously a bad thing if you are Obama and other leftists.)
• taxes so high that instead of devoting 74 days to “federal tax freedom day,” it will take between 180 and 365 and that would level the playing field except for elitists, and make this a socialist/communist nation
• more government control over your life, your family, whether or not you can have children, even when it is time for you to die, that is, if your medical expenses reach a predetermined level you would be denied further treatment even if it kills you
• sexual perverts serving openly in the military, with special exemptions, “protections” and privileges
• abortion on demand (making promiscuity abound even more)
• more vulgarity and less morality
• a marked reduction in your quality of life (because of the added tax burden and an Obama Administration that would be consciously aiding and abetting the escalation in crude oil prices)
• nicely cloaked, but hate-America-first speeches becoming commonplace as he and his leftist supporters describe mainstream America as: “…cling(ing) to guns or religion or (have) antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or (have) anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” anything and everything that stands in the way of his socialist agenda
• giving up Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel without firing (except his mouth) a shot in their defense
• oil that will become so expensive (to save the planet and help reduce the ratio of US to undeveloped country usage) that consumers are denied thousands of commonplace products
• the War on Terror being reversed resulting in increased attacks being all but invited on US interests around the world by Muslim extremists and/or any other fruitcake dictator with an axe to grind
• the armed forces of the US being gutted to fund more minority social programs,
  universal housing, universal medical care, and guaranteed annual income for all people, including illegal immigrants
• enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment (that proponents will then use to demand laws requiring exact representation in proportion to ethnic and social status. i.e. 51% females and 49% males, but then it starts getting complicated. For example, of the nation’s approximately 2% sexual perverts there would have to be proportional representation of all ethnicities complicated by the fact that among sexual perverts gender is irrelevant. Etc. and etc.)
• increased taxpayer funded and already failed government benefits and programs targeted primarily at those who prefer to be spoon-fed rather than earn their bread, but in the guise of a “safety net”

be sure to vote for Obama. And if one wants to see (the following items are paraphrased from an email that is making the rounds and is appropriate to this essay):

• freedom of speech as long as nobody is offended by it
• people who can’t tell us if it will rain on Friday telling us that the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if we don’t start driving a Prius
• no concern about the slaughter of millions of babies so long as we keep all death row inmates alive
• businesses not being allowed to make a profit for their owners. [Business needs only to break even (after all, their function is to provide jobs, not make a profit) and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as the GOVERNMENT sees fit]
• three or four pointy headed elitist liberal judges who feel a need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who would NEVER get their agendas past the voters
• that terrorists don’t have to hide from us over there, and when they come over here we don’t want to have any guns in the house to fight them off with
• being able to marry whatever I want. I’ve decided to marry my horse
• oil companies’ profits of 4% on a gallon of gas as obscene, but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn’t

be sure to vote for Obama.

Semper Fidelis

The real scandal is the lack of appropriate media coverage, and not the alleged love child sired by former presidential candidate John Edwards. Two new items:

First, a mainstream media outlet has finally mentioned the affair. Fox News has a report from the scene at the hotel:

A Beverly Hills hotel security guard told FOXNews.com he intervened this week between a man he identified as former Sen. John Edwards and tabloid reporters who chased down the former presidential hopeful after what they’re calling a rendezvous with his mistress and love child.

The Beverly Hilton Hotel guard said he encountered a shaken and ashen-faced Edwards — whom he did not immediately recognize — in a hotel men’s room early Tuesday morning in a literal tug-of-war with reporters on the other side of the door.

“What are they saying about me?” the guard said Edwards asked….

As recently as last month, individuals vetting vice presidential candidates for Barack Obama had listed Edwards as a potential running mate. Edwards was viewed as a candidate who could help Obama appeal to white, working-class voters who had favored Hillary Clinton in the primaries….

At Stop The ACLU Blog, John Stephenson comments:

Everything will eventually unravel…. We’ll know eventually. One thing is certain…he will not be Obama’s VP pick.

And that, rather than the titillating details, is one point of the coverage.

From October through last week, the mainstream media kept a lid on this story. The only commentary, and not a lot of that, was in the Blogosphere. Since we were considering during much of that time a candidate for the presidency, that is a failure of the MSM to properly serve the public. But it gets worse, which brings us to our second update item.

A collection of widely read blogs is sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. Mickey Kaus, a blogger at Slate, discovered that the LA Times issued a gag order to its bloggers:

In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers , including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don’t-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so.

Kaus also obtained a copy of the memo:

From: “Pierce, Tony”

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News observes:

Today, the Los Angeles Times ordered its bloggers not to talk about the story….

Mickey Kaus thinks this is a mixture of the MSM trying to protect an ideologically sympathetic Democrat, and the MSM trying to play the “outmoded” role of gatekeeper, to keep the public from learning iniformation it otherwise would. I suspect Kaus is right….

If ordinary citizens want to demonstrate irresponsibility, disloyalty, lack of self discipline, betrayal of trust, and moral deficiency, that is their private business. But when we are evaluating the credentials of a candidate for president, or vice-president, or for that matter any public office above the rank of dog-catcher, the public is best served when all available information about the character of the person is on the table.

Concerns about the credibility of the material are not a justification for suppression. In the Blogosphere, with millions of subject matter experts parsing through the finest details, fabrications will be quickly exposed. Bloggers are a mutually reinforcing AND mutually vetting research tool. The fastest way to get at the truth nowadays is not through the MSM. It is through throwing everything before the bloggers and letting them tear it apart or prove it.

Finally, what will this do to the credibility of the LA Times bloggers, good folk who have been laboring for the benefit of that newspaper? Will we always have to wonder, whenever they write from now on, what role censorship played in their product?

John Edwards has been caught in a sex scandal fathering a child out of wedlock with a blonde divorcée who did video work for his campaign.

Apparently men of influence have a hard time keeping their pants on. All that power goes to — no, not to their heads — to their other member that they do their thinking with.

Now we discover that John Edwards is no exception. You know, the fellow with the faithful and courageous wife who is battling cancer but who still went all out to support her husband as a candidate in the Democratic primary. That one.

And how does he support her in her time of desperate need? How does he express his responsibility for their children, his loyalty and commitment as a husband and father while she is dying? By fathering a child out-of-wedlock with a blonde divorcée. You can’t make this stuff up.

The first hint came on October 10, 2007 when the National Enquirer reported their suspicions:

ALLEGED AFFAIR COULD WRECK JOHN EDWARDS’ CAMPAIGN BID

Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught in a shocking mistress scandal that could wreck his campaign, The NATIONAL ENQUIRER has learned exclusively.

Sources have come forward to charge that the “other woman” previously worked on Edwards’ campaign and followed the 54-year-old candidate on trips across the U.S.

A source close to the woman, whose name is being withheld by The NATIONAL ENQUIRER, says that she confessed to having an affair in phone calls and emails, saying that her work with Edwards soon exploded into romance….

By December 19, 2007 there were more details:

JOHN EDWARDS LOVE CHILD SCANDAL!

The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Rielle Hunter, a woman linked to Edwards in a cheating scandal earlier this year, is more than six months pregnant — and she’s told a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her baby!….

The ENQUIRER has now confirmed not only that Rielle is expecting, but that she’s gone into hiding with the help of a former aide to Edwards. The visibly pregnant blonde has relocated from the New York area to Chapel Hill, N.C., where she is living in an upscale gated community near political operative Andrew Young, who’s been extremely close to Edwards for years and was a key official in his presidential campaign….

This past Monday night a crew of reporters from the National Enquirer caught Edwards having a rendezvous with his mistress and her now-delivered baby in a Los Angeles hotel, and reported the next day:

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT WITH MISTRESS AND LOVE CHILD!

The married ex-senator from North Carolina – whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer — met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21… He didn’t leave until early the next morning.

Rielle had driven to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara with a male friend for the rendezvous with Edwards. The former senator attended a press event Monday afternoon with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the topic of how to combat homelessness.

But a months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER broke the story of Edwards’ love child scandal last year, when Rielle was still pregnant and Edwards was still considered a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination….

Well, so he’s right in there with Strom Thurmond, Jesse Jackson (who was counseling Bill Clinton about the Lewinsky affair!), Lyndon Johnson, and many other inconsiderate hypocrites. What is surprising is how for more than nine months the mainstream media have given him a complete pass on this, while vilifying Larry Craig for his inability to manage his trousers in a bathroom stall.

It’s easy to ignore the supermarket tabloids, but harder to brush off the heavy hitters in the Blogosphere. Even before the Enquirer got on the scent, Sam Stein of The Huffington Post suspected a mystery:

Edwards Mystery: Innocuous Videos Suddenly Shrouded In Secrecy
September 26, 2007

In the summer of 2006, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards commissioned a series of web-based documentary shorts for his pre-announcement leadership PAC, the One America Committee. Within political circles, the videos were regarded as innovative, having successfully painted Edwards in a sympathetic, down-to-earth light.

Now, however, nearly all traces of the webisodes – as they became known – are gone. Links to them on the Internet no longer work. The Edwards campaign won’t release the videos, and the production company behind the films is citing confidentiality agreements in refusing to talk.

This closed-off approach naturally aroused my interest. In the world of politics, rare is the candidate who passes on a chance for publicity. The campaign’s explanation for stonewalling, moreover, struck me as dubious and at times evasive….

Now the story is in the open, and Slate is hammering the subject with frequent and hard-hitting posts.

Edwards, Busted

The National Enquirer catches him.
Mickey Kaus  |  Wednesday, July 23, 2008, at 1:56 AM ET

HuffPo ‘s Sam Stein, who got the story rolling, appears to be vindicated. …

Will this be the first presidential-contender level scandal to occur completely in the undernews, without ever being reported in the cautious, respectable MSM? That’s always seemed an interesting theoretical possibility–a prominent politician just disappears from the scene, after blogs and tabloids dig up dirt on him, but nobody who relies on the Times, Post, network news or Mark Halperin has the faintest idea why….

Why the Press Is Ignoring the Edwards “Love Child” Story

A double standard is at work.
Jack Shafer  |  Wednesday, July 23, 2008, at 7:31 PM ET

Everybody had a good laugh last August when Roll Call broke the story about Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, getting arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for playing footsies in a toilet stall. The late-night talk show hosts mined the material for days; Slate produced a re-enactment of the bathroom ballet; and newspapers, magazines, and cable channels shredded Craig….

When the original Enquirer story about the affair with Rielle Hunter came out, Edwards categorically denied the relationship, stating: “The story is false. It’s completely untrue, ridiculous.” As he rejected the Enquirer’s charges, Edwards was making his wife and their marriage a central component of his campaign….

But if Edwards had an affair and lied about it, shouldn’t he suffer scrutiny akin to that of Craig? At least three-dozen daily newspapers in the United States published the Craig news the day after the Roll Call scoop … but this morning not a single U.S. daily mentioned the Enquirer piece….

Edwards: The Agony of the MSM

Please don’t make us tell you what happened.
Mickey Kaus  |  Thursday, July 24, 2008, at 3:05 AM ET

….As things stand, here’s a rundown of media performance on the John Edwards front:

–The New York Times doesn’t tell you what happened yesterday.

–The print edition of the Washington Post doesn’t tell you what happened yesterday.

–Newsweek doesn’t tell you what happened yesterday.

–Time doesn’t tell you what happened yesterday.

–Katie Couric didn’t tell you what happened yesterday.

–Brian Williams didn’t tell you what happened yesterday.

–Charlie Gibson didn’t tell you what happened yesterday….

The extensive list goes on. But you get the idea. The real scandal is not just one more irresponsible male sowing wild oats. The real scandal is the silence of the media lambs.

Lock Bumping — Our media center has contributors of all professions and ages living all over the United States. So whenever several of them send in the same story, it can be assumed that the subject is a “hot topic.” Today that topic is lock bumping. Before today, most of us had never heard of it.

Wikipedia has carried information about this topic for some time:

Lock bumping is a lock picking technique for opening a pin tumbler lock using a specially-crafted bump key. One bump key will work for all locks of the same type….

The technique involves inserting the bump key into the lock and tapping the key one or more times with a mallet or similar device, while applying a slight turning force (torque) to the key. In some cases, a tap with a finger is all you need. After a little bit of practice, this will open the lock. The skill level required to bump a lock is minuscule compared to other lock picking techniques; bumping is a feasible method for compromising locks by just about anyone….

There’s also a good post on the subject at the weblog Didn’t You Hear?, worth visiting for a very good graphic illustration of the technique, showing key slots and pins.

The current spate of interest results from a video about lock bumping posted on YouTube in mid-January by Memphis locksmith Glen Peifer of Peifer Safe & Lock. And a smart move it was! Tens of thousands of folk are alarmed and looking for ways to upgrade their protection. The video has been seen by almost two million viewers. Ah, the power of the Web.

Glen was interviewed about lock bumping by WMC TV in Memphis. The story is here.

Lock Bumping – Protect yourself

If you think your home is safe just because the door is locked, think again. Bad guys may be able to slip into your house with very little effort, by trying something called “lock bumping.”…

And safety experts say this technique works on more than 90 percent of homes.

“The good guys need to know what to watch out for. The bad guys are gonna find out what to do. So why should the public not know what’s happening?” said locksmith Glen Peifer.

The trick? A special series of cuts on a regular old house key and a tap or a series of taps will do the trick.

Memphis locksmith Glen Peifer says you need to worry about this because it is so easy. Even a ten year-old can do it….

And here is the famous video:

The Blogger Flap — Keeping up with the times, John Edwards hired blue bloggers from the so-called “netroots” community to work for his presidential campaign. Like most of the liberal bloggers, they speak with strident voices. Two of them, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, had made statements critical of the Catholic Church before joining the Edwards campaign.

Earlier this week the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Bill Donohue, called on Edwards to fire the pair. Yesterday during a campaign stop in Charleston, South Carolina John Edwards announced his intention to retain the services of these bloggers.

Donohue’s reaction was described by the Washington Post:

An angry Bill Donohue … criticized Edwards for not firing the two bloggers. Donohue also promised a nationwide public relations campaign in newspapers, magazines and Catholic publications to tell voters what the candidate had done.

“When Mel Gibson got drunk and made anti-Semitic remarks, he paid a price for doing so. When Michael Richards got angry and made racist remarks, he paid a price for doing so. … But John Edwards thinks the same rules don’t apply to him, which is why he has chosen to embrace foul-mouthed, anti-Catholic bigots on his payroll,” Donohue said….

All over the Blogosphere, pundits reacted to this kerfuffle. Dan Riehl has a somewhat chauvinistic take:

As I discovered in college – play a radical feminist just right, and many end up eating out of your hand. I think most of that venom is little more than protection, anyway. Unfortunately, when you grow up, the dysfunction can be a little too much to tolerate.

In a sense, Edwards has solved something of a problem for the Right – better he has to keep an eye on these two, than us. Don’t lose too much sleep over it, John. The campaign fun hasn’t even begun.

Will this be “maccaca” for John Edwards? Or do the same rules not apply to liberals?

Passing — Sadly, the turbulent life of Anna Nicole Smith has come to an end. She collapsed in Florida and and was taken to a hospital, where she died a short time later. Only 39 years old, she survived her beloved son by only a few months. He died last year at the age of 20, while visiting his mother in the hospital as she gave birth to her baby daughter, who is now left without mother or brother.

She began her career as a waitress and topless dancer, achieved fame as a model for Guess jeans, and scandalized the public in 1994 when she married elderly oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II when she was 26 and he was 89. Following his death a year later, she battled with his son by a previous marriage for his estate all the way to the Supreme Court. The son died shortly after the case, which remains unresolved, was sent back to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

There’s a lesson in this. The two parties to the lawsuit have both died, but the lawyers for both sides plan to continue the battle. On Anna’s behalf, lawyers will fight to get a share of the estate for her five-month-old baby girl. That’s what lawyers do.

The “Scooter” Libby Trial — Yesterday the prosecution rested its case in the “Scooter” Libby trial, after lengthy testimony by television journalist Tim Russert. (The Washington Post coverage is here.) Some intrepid souls are still trying to follow the intricasies of the case. The rest of us are just thinking, “Thank God I am not on that jury.”

It has been determined that no crime was committed in the affair about which Libby was originally testifying. So the case that remains is only to determine whether Libby lied under oath while giving testimony about a crime that never took place.

Contrast this with the fact that Bill Clinton lied under oath to a grand jury, and got away with it. Oooops, forgive me, it depends on what you believe the meaning of “is” is. And meanwhile, we simple taxpayers watch these unbelievably self-absorbed Washington politicians wasting our money in endless parsing of their grievances.

It is a special time for Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor. He has been a professional rival of Libby’s for years, and must be savoring his moment in the sun.

Reading the Brain — Well, perjury may not be an issue much longer. The Guardian reports that a team of scientists have the ability to do a brain scan and read a person’s intentions or tell if he is lying.

The brain scan that can read people’s intentions
Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 9, 2007

A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.

The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.

The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way….

In the science and technology department, this is pretty amazing stuff. But to put it in perspective, most mothers with small children learn out of necessity to do the same thing by looking into their kids’ eyes.

Palestinian Deal — The Saudis have brokered a deal between Hamas and Fatah to share the government of Palestine. The New York Times reports:

MECCA, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 8 — The main rival Palestinian factions agreed late Thursday to form a government of national unity aimed at ending a wave of violence between them and an international boycott.

The agreement, signed here in Islam’s holiest city under Saudi auspices, appeared likely to end, at least for now, weeks of fighting that has ravaged the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but it seemed to stop short of meeting the demands of the international community for resuming relations and support for the Palestinian Authority.

The accord, signed by Khaled Meshal, the exiled political leader of Hamas, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president and leader of Fatah, its main rival, is the first time that the two parties have agreed to share authority. It sets out principles for a coalition government, like the distribution of ministerial portfolios….

This is good. One Arab country stepping up to the plate to straighten out another in need of a bit of firm guidance. We don’t have to be everybody’s arbitrator.