EW, You’ll be great on that panel â€Curbing the Imperial Presidency†with John Podesta, John Conyers, Joe Conason and the inestimable Marcy Wheeler. Will we get to see it on C SPAN?

Who knew that Paris Hilton would turn out to be more mature than Scooter Libby?

I was an Obama supporter and donor—but no more. To expect someone convicted of lying and obstruction to serve time for the sentence is not â€mere glibnessâ€, as Robert Bauer suggested.

I am absolutely disgusted by this trial balloon from Obama’s counsel, which speaks volumes about the probable venality and corruption of an Obama Presidency. Disillusioning as this is, I trust my gut feeling on this and have duly un-subscribed from his campaign’s email lists. What a shame.

To be fair to Obama, TPM has his response – that he is against a pardon.

I can’t get on Huffopo to post a comment, but this is what blew me away:

â€So Bush kept clear of the case, as it had nothing at all to do with him.â€

HUHHHHHHHHHHHHH??????????????????

Um – has he forgotten Bush’s role in the â€get it all out there†and his express direction to go ahead and covertly leak classified intelligence information for the purpose of engaging in domestic poltical propaganda?

Perhaps I have harped on these themes before but I think that it is important to understand the principle of â€self-governance†to fully understand the significance of a constitutional republic. At some point in the evolution of human consciousness there become an established understanding of the political risk of inflating the potential of human kind with the expansive and limitless trops of identity associated with the divine. Self governance starts with the bond of individuals who recognize the necessity of personal limitation in order to acheive union. It really is not so much a gesture of sacrifice as it a participation in an archetypal organization of civil refinement. In other words it is an aspect of human potential founded on the principles of experience and the transmital of wisdom through time binding in texts, institutions and education.

Marcy’s commitment to the evidence and the inferences flowing so naturally from the conventions of texts is a kind of commitment to this wisdom. The limitless psychic inflation of imperialism and the ethics of noblesse oblige and sovereign immunity that pave the streets of the faeryland of divine right so favored by the current Republican elite really is nothing less than a reversion to the criminal pretensions to governance so frequently subjected to constraint in the history of modern western civilizaiton. But the most insidious feature is the pretext of democracy. The structure of the constitutional republic in the light of the divinely inflated psyche is seen only as means. The irony though is that the beginning of self-governance is in self-awareness. There is self-awareness available in the body politic for example from the experience of veterans, through to the experience of seasoned United States Attorneys. Wisdom is not obviously exclusive to this group, but these are examples of where the one may turn in understanding the value of understanding in time. The current Republican elite sees this wisdom as an impediment to the exercise of endless power in politics, in economics and in media. Of course this is why they were initially so enamored of the idea of the end of history and and the precipitation in terms of idealogy only of a static geopolitical profile.

The turn away from self limitation born of experience afterall is what Al Gore is getting at in his critique of the one dimensional character of media and his call to a return to the traditions of reasoned dialogue founded in proof and reason. Clearly this is a story founded on an attempted understanding of the value of principle, born of self awareness and leading to the possibility of self-governance. One can only hope more will awaken to this prospect beyond the facile enslave state of the participation mystique toward a rational and self-interested decision to participate.

The significance of this difference is not fully drawn as of yet in the presidential race especially as presidential politics seems to draw to it those enamored of the potential of ever increasing power. One can only hope that a voice will emerge that eschews the mesmerizing media tactics of the status quo and harkens to the potential inherent in the constitutional frame work. Howard Dean had begun to move down this road and this is why he so quickly became a threat to the status quo. But I am hopeful seeing the web log emerge as a forum for dialogue and the pursuit of wisdom out side the one-dimensional drone of the corporate media.

Of course in the science of cycles the grotesque divine and the rational will always dance. It really is a question of where one will cast their psychic tent then.

â€enslaved†even

Obama needs to fire Bauer right not. It was bad enough that he didn’t show for the Gonzo vote. Now his chief council is undermining the execution of justice for Libby?

I get that Obama is running on this end of battleground politics adgenda, but that doesn’t justify running away from honest belief and core value to look moderate. I have the greatest respect for Jimmy Carter, but this is just the kind of gelatinous behavior that cost him a second term.

My guess is that it will cost Obama his first.

Digby’s a woman? I don’t think so, but I’d love it if it were true.

yep, digby’s a woman

emptywheel, ReddHead, Jane, Sara, and a lot of the sane and intelligent voices that contribute to the comments here and at fdl, they’re all women

this kinda fits with a theory I developed back in the early 1990s

short version: we’re letting the wrong gender run the planet

But Big Dick won’t stick his neck out to â€save Scooter,†because as we all know, he is not a real man.

Because he hides all the time.

Wow! this female also thought digby was male. strange. wonder why?

Digby is female, but very different from the ladies at FDL, which may have fooled some people.

Digby is tough and uncompromising. She has a razor-sharp mind and is absolutely devastating when she skewers hypocrisy, especially the elitist variety and the fake maleness that passes for toughness in the TV world. We need all sorts of voices on the left and she is one of the best.

I used to read Digby’s site, but then a bunch of regulars referred to a professional woman as a girl. :pffffft: When I complained about the use of the diminuative, I was made most unwelcome. It was especially provocative given that the site is owned by a woman.

If we don’t treat ourselves with respect, how can we expect men to regard us as equals?

I know about sexual harassment, sexual discrimination, and sexual predation from personal experience. I wasn’t born a feminist, but became one as a survivor. We need to continually stand up for ourselves and for all other women, until sex is no longer used as a tool for dominance. Every time we accept the use of the word girl, we affirm that we are helpless and weak and immature. Bullshit. In the prehistoric past, physical strength may have led to male dominance, but surely in this civilized age, brain power or creative problem solving or invention ought to be the determinant factors! Words have power. Muscle-power dies with the man, but words live for generations and gather more power with each citation.

Atrios often puts up a link to Digby’s latest, but I seldom bother to click over. There are so many well-written blogs that I can choose which communities to frequent. Why associate with people pretending to be children?

Like so many others, I had no clue that Digby is a woman. The obvious reason for the assumption is the photo of Peter Finch at the corner of the Hullabaloo site. Not that that should be definitive, since it’s obviously an image of a guy from a movie, but I guess it sets a tone.

I didn’t believe it even after being told by someone with firsthand knowledge — I assumed it was some form of misdirection. I suspect that Digby may have consciously developed a â€male†writing voice for camouflage purposes.

Don’t know why she wouldn’t have a nice pink site like Harriet Miers…

LOL. After being tipped off, I joked that I couldn’t read Digby’s site anymore without imagining a little heart over the â€i.â€

There was the New Years post where she talked about â€drinking champagne from a fabulous glassâ€. Not very mannish, that.