When a federal judge deploys an exclamation point in an opinion, you know something unusual is going on. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon tried to dispense of a case entitled Akins v. Federal Election Commission. The excruciatingly long-running case really involves, though, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AKA AIPAC.
A number of former ambassadors, congressmen and government officials critical of the pro-Israel lobbying group sued the Federal Election Commission after the FEC declined to regulate AIPAC as a political commitee. The date of that original lawsuit? 1992.
Political Glance
Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her.
Top aides to President George W. Bush seemed unconcerned amid multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve, according to an extensive review of records set for release Monday.
After a six-year investigation, the Justice Department ended its probe into former House majority leader Tom DeLay’s relations with convicted ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, without bringing criminal charges. The announcement did not come from the Justice Department, which typically does not comment on investigations that do not result in charges, but from Mr. DeLay’s legal team, as reported by Politico.
Longshot Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alvin Greene was indicted Friday on two charges, including a felony charge of showing pornography to a teenage student in a South Carolina college computer lab. Greene surprised the party establishment with his primary victory in June. His arrest in November was first reported by The Associated Press the day after he won the nomination.
But it is not just intolerance that is the hallmark of today's conservatives. They have become little more than the sum of their fears and their hatreds. What they fear most is the modern world and its pace of change. For them, the natural order of things is a country run by white, Protestant males.
Oil runs so deep in American life that when President Barack Obama formed an independent commission to investigate the Gulf spill, he ran into something of an oil patch of his own.





























