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No links, because they are out there and y’all can find them, but this is too annoying not to comment.

Mrs. Alito “bursts in tears” because the bad old Democrats are picking on her husband – except, she did it while her husband was being questioned by Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, her husband’s “drama coach”. What was Graham doing coaching a man who was going to testify before the Judiciary Committee? How is this ethical? Did Graham “coach” Mrs. Alito on bursting into tears?

Ted Kennedy was being uncivil to Arlen Spector? Kennedy sent Spector a request to look at certain documents and the documents hadn’t been received. Spector goes off on a riff about just because Kennedy sent the request, doesn’t mean that Spector received it – except Kennedy had Spector’s response to the request in his pocket, so he knew Spector received the request.

These melodramatic flourishes by the Republicans add nothing to the business of the republic and are, frankly, sophomoric. This smells of Rove. The world will be a better place when Fitzgerald reserves Karl’s place at a federal gray-bar motel.

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Apparently political leaders were “shocked” to learn than Jack Abramoff had committed untoward and illegal actions as a lobbyist. Obviously something needed to be done to prevent this unprecedented¹ behavior.

Following the usual pattern I expect the Congressional Republicans to put forth a new law, that should be called the Jack & Tom Law to “prevent this problem from recurring”. This is SOP [standard operating procedure] for politicians: pass a law to convince people they take the problem seriously and have done something.

Laws don’t make people honest and decent, they punish people who aren’t. Laws are totally worthless unless they are enforced. We don’t need more laws; we need more law enforcement. What occurred was illegal, so a new law won’t help. There are plenty of ethics rules in Congress, but as CNN notes: Mum’s the word for ethics committee. This shows how little regard the current Republican controlled government has for ethics or the rule of law.

1. Jack has a quick rundown of some of the other “unprecedented” behaviors in the past.

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