heres the results
- bill 3-06-2007 8:10 pm

Without having read anything yet I'd like to offer my initial reaction: w00t!

Still, what happens now? He gets pardoned and them comes back in Jeb Bush's 2012 administration?
- jim 3-06-2007 8:16 pm

Arrogant prick (and bad writer) gets his due. The aspens turn in clusters.
- tom moody 3-06-2007 8:18 pm

w00t^2.

Will he wait it out for the pardon, or will he turn?

Given the pace of the wheels of justice he might have to suffer only a few months in the Federal Tennis Camp and Reformatory for White Collar Criminals before the end-of-term pardon.
- mark 3-06-2007 8:27 pm

accepting a pardon is accepting a guilty verdict.
- bill 3-06-2007 8:32 pm

heres where i go to cnn day time tv viewing. great press conference now.
- bill 3-06-2007 8:57 pm

“There is a cloud over the vice president,” the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, told the jury in summing up the case last month.

Mr. Cheney was not charged in the case, cooperated with the investigation and expressed a willingness to testify if called, though he never was. Yet he was a central figure throughout, fighting back against suggestions that he and President Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of flawed intelligence, showing himself to be keenly sensitive to how he was portrayed in the news media and backing Mr. Libby to the end.

too bad that cloud isnt filled with mustard gas.
- dave 3-07-2007 4:36 pm

heres a laffer from ana marie cox (nee wonkette) who made her career on promoting frivilous washington gossip:

So at the moment the White House was assiduously touting the imminence of a massive terror threat in Iraq, they also appear to have mobilized much of its senior staff in a campaign essentially to tar Joe Wilson as a wimp. And in that is the sobering message beyond the Libby trial's legal minutiae: The same wise men who were assessing a phantom threat to America's domestic peace were the same people taking minute note of their own PR. Perhaps the larger moral here is that had Washington torn itself away from the petty melodramas such as who dissed whom on Hardball — or in the pages of TIME — perhaps there would have been more scrutiny of the intelligence that led the nation into Iraq in the first place.

"Yet he was a central figure throughout, fighting back against suggestions that he and President Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of flawed intelligence..."

is cautious press-speak for:

"fighting back against the widely-recognized truth that he and President Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of cooked intelligence"
- tom moody 3-07-2007 4:43 pm

from the digby post comments :

Interesting. Chris Matthews talked about Sullivan's comment tonight on his show. Matthews is starting to do the Special Comments bit too -- tonight he said he is convinced that Cheney DID get Wilson's report, that he discounted or ignored it, and then he encouraged Bush to put the yellowcake reference into the State of the Union to scare people into war.
If true, this would explain why they were so anxious to discredit Wilson.

how do you appeal your case and accept a pardon?

Those regulations, which are discussed on the Justice Department Web site at www.usdoj.gov/pardon, would seem to make a Libby pardon a nonstarter in George W. Bush’s White House. They “require a petitioner to wait a period of at least five years after conviction or release from confinement (whichever is later) before filing a pardon application,” according to the Justice Web site.

Moreover, in weighing whether to recommend a pardon, U.S. attorneys are supposed to consider whether an applicant is remorseful. “The extent to which a petitioner has accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made restitution to ... victims are important considerations. A petitioner should be genuinely desirous of forgiveness rather than vindication,” the Justice Web site states.

Somehow I don't think Bush is going to be constrained by these guidelines. And the democrats won't care because they'll all be thinking "it could have been me."
- jim 3-08-2007 4:54 pm