Eric Rudolph led authorities to a hidden stash of dynamite in the North Carolina mountains as part of a plea deal allowing him to avoid the death penalty for a series of bombings, including a deadly blast at the Atlanta Olympics.

The Justice Department said Friday that the alleged anti-government extremist will plead guilty to the 1996 Olympics bombing and three other blasts as part of the deal. Two people were killed and more than 120 injured in the explosions.

"The many victims of Eric Rudolph's terrorist attacks ... can rest assured that Rudolph will spend the rest of his life behind bars," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in a statement from Washington.

How ironic, considering that as Governor George W. Bush's counsel in Texas, tasked with the job of evaluating clemency pleas from death row inmates, Gonzales didn't break a sweat about it:

As chief legal counsel for then-Gov. Bush in Texas, Gonzales was responsible for writing a memo on the facts of each death penalty case – Bush decided whether a defendant should live or die based on the memos. An examination of the Gonzales memoranda by the Atlantic Monthly concluded, "Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." His memos caused Bush frequently to approve executions based on "only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute." Rather than informing the governor of the conflicting circumstances in a case, "The memoranda seem attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration—one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions."

In all but one out of 150 cases, Bush allowed the execution to proceed, and the first 57 of those were based on Gonzales' information.

Apparently, being an radical anti-government right-wing terrorist, Rudolph merits a certain modicum of consideration and compassion that all those other murderers didn't deserve.

But, then, law enforcement officials seem uncommonly attuned to Rudolph's particular likes and dislikes:

AP: That may be the harshest punishment of all for a man who thrives in the outdoors, said Charles Stone, a retired Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who helped oversee the bombing probe.

"He'll be caged for the rest of his life, and from a retribution aspect, that's probably worse than a death sentence for him," Stone said.

I guess all those Texas murderers Bush allowed to be put to death all really enjoyed living indoors in a small cell, and wouldn't have been sufficiently punished if they weren't killed by the state.

Maybe Gonzales was influenced by some of Rudolph's finer points:

AP: Rudolph, believed to be a follower of a white supremacist religion that is anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-Semitic, was charged with carrying out bombings in Georgia and Alabama over three years ending in 1998.

Anyone who's anti-abortion and anti-gay is surely part of the culture of life, and can't be all bad. I'm sure he richly deserved any special consideration he may have received from our Attorney General.

I suppose opponents of the death penalty should be heartened that the AG has apparently joined their cause, except that only a fool would look for any moral consistency from Bush's bunch of two-faced hypocrits.

As usual, there's a political consideration at work:

AP: The former soldier and survivalist evaded capture for more than five years, hunkering down in the woods of North Carolina and living off the land as federal agents carried out a massive manhunt. ...

[...]

After the bombings, someone sent letters claiming credit for the blasts on behalf of the "Army of God," a shadowy group that opposes abortion. Two witnesses spotted Rudolph's truck in Birmingham after the clinic bombing, but authorities couldn't find him until 2003.

In the interim, Rudolph became an almost mythic figure to some residents of the region. A search across 550,000 acres of Appalachian wilderness at one time involved 200 agents.

Yet many mocked the government's inability to root Rudolph out, and he inspired two country-western songs and a top-selling T-shirt that urged: "Run Rudolph Run." A $1 million reward offer from the government went unclaimed.

Investigators suspect sympathizers may have assisted Rudolph during his time on the run, but no one was ever charged.

Can't expect the administration to alienate those "sympathizers" now, can we?

after a Slovenian TV program discovered that a fashion model was a genius. The show’s producers intended to mock model Iris Mulej by filming her as she took a series of intelligence tests, but found that her IQ was 156—higher than the nuclear physicist who took the same tests.

The producers obviously need to take a refresher course on how to make "reality" programs. They don't work as well if you don't ruthlessly control all the variables, leaving very little to chance. If you overlook something, actual reality might intrude and stick you with something unexpected, such as a mastermind mannequin.

The courtroom was mostly empty Monday, Jan. 24, 2000. The quiet wasn't remarkable that morning, but five years later, the quiet is what I hear.

A handful of Terri Schiavo's immediate family members and a few close friends sat in the first few dark wooden benches. I was the only reporter there.

There were no cameras, no curious spectators, no protesters.

Nobody accused Michael Schiavo of abuse.

Nobody appealed to the Pope.

Nobody proclaimed that Terri was trying to talk.

No politicians were grandstanding, no special interest groups were shouting, nobody was invoking God's will.

The once-close family had battled about what to do with Terri for years. That's why they were in court, to ask a judge to determine what someone they all loved would have wanted. But no one disputed that they all loved her.

[...]

Back then, both sides were civil to one another. No one disputed that Terri was in a persistent vegetative state and had been for a decade. Or that an eating disorder probably had led to Terri's cardiac arrest and collapse, not physical abuse by Michael as some now contend.

Nobody was a murderer, an abuser, an adulterer, a fanatic, a liar. They were just family, trying their best to do right by their daughter, wife, sister.

Once the spotlight shone upon them, they started Web sites. They became regulars on national TV. They lobbied the governor, Congress, the president.

Both sides talked about what was best for Terri, but it seemed winning had trumped all.

After all these years, what haunts me is something Terri's brother once said: "If Terri knew what this had done to this family, she would go ballistic."

Excerpting it doesn't do justice to this nice little essay, so be sure to give it a full read-through.

I got to the article through Matt Conigliaro's Abstract Appeal blog, which was a central source for unbiased information on the Schiavo legal case. He's got a good post on the "inexcusable myths" connected to it:

For years now, the most popular myth regarding the Schiavo case was that Michael Schiavo decided what should happen to Terri, and the court system simply enforced his right to make that decision. If you're reading this post, you hopefully know that nothing of the sort happened. (Otherwise, please review this site's Terri Schiavo Information Page, particularly the Q&A section.)

Over time, most of the major media figured out that a trial was actually held between Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers. Most. Not all.

Yet even as much of the country learned that a trial had been held and the judge found the evidence clear and convincing that Terri wished not to receive life-prolonging medical care in this sort of situation, another myth began to emerge. And this one never went away. It did not overtake everyone, but host after host, national news channel after national news channel, editorial board after editorial board -- an astounding number of media figures -- seized on, criticized, lamented, praised, or otherwise discussed something that never, ever happened:

That the clear and convincing evidence of Terri's wishes was just Michael Schiavo's word.

There was talk of how a spouse could be expected to know these things, but then how this spouse could not be trusted. There was talk of how spouses should be believed, but then how "hearsay" testimony from someone with something to gain should be ignored. There was talk of, well, lots of talk. About Michael.

How is it possible that none of these people -- or at least the folks who feed them information -- ever read what the trial judge actually said about the evidence he relied on?

More here.

Debuting in his new role as chairman of the FCC, Kevin Martin told cable operators Tuesday that it could avoid greater indecency regulation by policing itself.

Speaking at the National Cable Show, Martin said, "The cable industry has an opportunity to voluntarily step up" before Congress or the agency acts to extend the FCC's regulation of indecency to cable and satellite services.

The comments in front of a cable industry audience seemed to signal a softer line on indecency than Martin took in the past, when he was often harshly critical of edgy content on the airwaves and over cable.

Asked point blank if he planned to be "proactive" in expanding the agency's role on indecency, Martin said the commission has only the power to react to complaints it receives from the public -- complaints that in number had grown to "a million."

"At bottom, the commission is a creature of Congress," Martin said. "Congress will have to determine whether indecency rules should be applied to cable."

On Monday, House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) took a much harder line, advocating the use of criminal statutes to go after indecency. "For people who are in flagrant disregard of the rules, I think the criminal process is a better approach than the regulatory process," he said.

Sensenbrenner declined to elaborate on how criminal statutes could be used to police indecency. "It's better to aim the cannon directly at the bad actors, without taking a sort of blunderbuss approach with new regulation that will also affect people who are trying to do the right thing."

I wonder under what theory they'll insert themselves into regulating cable, considering a little thing like the First Amendment, and especially when they've been fairly rigorous about unregulating other industries.

But, of course, one shouldn't really expect consistency or even adherence to any particular theory of governing from these folks -- except to the extent that they're consistently corrupt or will consistently pander to the more radical elements of their base. Mostly, they have no overall theory of how to govern, they operate on a strict "need to punish" basis, sort of like organized crime.

Throughout history, one of the first tell-tale signs that a regime is growing corrupt is when it attempts to eliminate that which checks its power. It’s a principle as old as Henry II (“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”) and the neutering of the Roman Senate. It’s also as recent as Animal Farm and Putin’s authoritarian expansion of power at the expense of local government. Unfortunately, it’s also a pattern we’re beginning to see in the era of DeLay.

From an old-school conservative perspective, one of the most troubling aspects of the DeLay era is the leadership’s tendency to lash out at anything that restricts its power. More troubling is the fact that these assaults are not limited to Democrats or the press, but to some of the most basic laws and traditions of our government.

Consider the pattern we’ve seen: (1) The ethics committee chooses to enforce certain ex ante agreed-upon rules that restrain DeLay’s fundraising. So the leadership purges the committee and changes the rules; (2) The Medicare bill doesn’t have the votes, so DeLay – in an unprecedented break with House tradition – prolonged the vote until the very second he had a majority and then closed it; (3) In Texas, DeLay couldn’t get Republicans elected to Congress under the current districting, so he broke the law and tradition to redistrict the state; (4) In the Senate, the GOP leadership can’t get a tiny fraction of its judges approved. For this outrage, they threaten to upend nearly a century of Senate tradition – and one that has protected minority rights (for good or bad) from majoritarian passions for a very long time.

But it’s not just DeLay. The pattern repeats itself in the international realm as well. For instance, the world and the United Nations opposed our war, so we ignored it (along with international law) and invaded anyway. Similarly, the Constitution limited our detention policies, so the executive branch tried to claim that it was above the Constitution and could not be checked. Both of these positions rely on trust. We must trust that America will use its unchecked war power (or detention power) humanely. But trust is precisely what conservatives have (wisely) never had. Unchecked power leads to abuses. It always has, and it always will. That’s the nature of man – that’s why we can’t take the ring to Mordor.

As he points out, we have our system of checks and balances to keep the government in line, but it's clear that when one party controls all branches of the Federal government, and the other party seems (or seemed) not to understand that its role has changed from a partner in bi-partisan governance (either as a senior or junior partner) to being a necessary check on runaway power, you've got a situation ripe for the kind of abuse we're seeing now.

This is why it's vital that the Democrats continue to manifest the spine they've been recently displaying, and why having strong and firm party leadership is so important. It's not just a party matter, or a merely partisan concern either -- a united Democratic party standing in resolute opposition is absolutely necessary for maintaining any semblence of our government's intended balance of power.

If more conservatives saw that, on the basis of experiencing the abuse of power manifested in the Schiavo law, there may actually be some hope of pulling back from the precipice.

[T]he pope isn't actually elected, or at least not by the people. He's selected by a small group of elites with lifetime tenure, most of whom the previous pope appointed. This would like if the president of the United States were selected by the Supreme Court. Oh wait…

Exactly.

He was starting to think again ... in the dirt and sweat world of detailed politics and the knack of leaving an enemy looking less successful, while one's own tattered cause emerged looking as if it had won something.

C.J. Cherryh
Destroyer (2005)

(It was, in fact, reading this last night that jogged me into realizing that I had made an error in criticising Lautenberg's remark about DeLay -- see below.)

So much of the way the world works is about people's perceptions -- certainly in politics and on Wall Street, meeting, beating or missing the expectations set out for a politician or a business is a major part of their success. At some point (such as when the dot com bubble burst) harsh reality must enter the picture, but people (some people at least) seem to actively avoid making hard real-world evaluations for as long as they can, preferring to hold on to their comfortable preconceived notions about the way things are and how they work. In the space that's frequently available between expectations and reality, canny and talented --and deceitful -- people can arbitrage their way to success on the basis of nothing more than manipulation and fantasy; image, persona, expectations, charisma, longing and desire all worked into a lather with deft sleight of hand.

All politicians do it to some extent, since it's part of their survival skills, but we must start doing it better than we do now, because the right has perfected the techniques involved and made of them practically an artform. Still, there's danger there if one doesn't have the goods to support the fluff once the door to the real world is opened, and one's mistakes start to have repercussions and blowback.

Fortunately, we do have the goods: a methodology of dealing with the world that's based on empiricism guided and softened by humanistic values ("the scientific method turned to the social and political world," as my friend Roger Keeling has memorably written), while the right, when exposed by the pure white light of reality, has nothing but dogma crusted over with the greed and excess of the rich and powerful.

That's why DeLay will fall, eventually, and that's why in the meantime (if we're lucky) we'll be able to utilize him to help undercut the carefully grown and maintained facade of the right and expose the dirty reality that lies beneath it.

Terri Schiavo’s life, as distinct from the life of her unsentient organs, ended fifteen years ago. But that did not prevent her from becoming the star of an unusually morbid kind of reality TV show. The show was made possible by two factors. The first was a bitter struggle between Terri’s husband, Michael Schiavo, who wanted to allow her body to die in accordance with what he said, and what an unbroken series of court decisions has affirmed, was her own expressed wish, and her parents and siblings, who wanted to keep her body alive at all costs. The second factor was a set of video snippets, provided by the Schindler family and broadcast incessantly by the three cable news networks—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—which are themselves entangled in a desperate struggle for dominance. Sometimes the snippets are identified by the year of their taping (2001 and 2002); sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are accompanied by inflammatory captions (fighting for her life); sometimes the captions are merely dramatic (schiavo saga). They show Terri’s blinking eyes seeming to follow a balloon waved in front of her; or her mouth agape in a rictus that could be interpreted as a smile; or her face turned toward her mother’s, with her head thrown back, Pietà-like. As neurologists who have examined her have explained, the snippets are profoundly misleading. A few seconds of maximum suggestiveness culled from many hours of tape, they are more in the nature of special effects than of a documentary record. Without them, there would have been no show—and, most likely, no televised vigils outside her hospice, no cries of “murder” from Tom DeLay, the egregious House Majority Leader; no midnight special sessions of the House and Senate; no calling Dr. Frist for a snap video diagnosis; no visuals of President Bush returning from Texas to land on the White House south lawn, striding dramatically across the grass as if it were the deck of an aircraft carrier.

[...]

Terri Schiavo has become a metaphor in the religio-cultural struggle over abortion. This—along with the advantages of demonizing the judiciary in preparation for the coming battle over Supreme Court nominees—explains the eagerness of Republican politicians to embrace her parents’ cause. Her lack of awareness actually increased her metaphoric usefulness.

Mrs. Schiavo's death is a moral poverty and a legal tragedy. This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.

Senator Frank Lautenberg responded to this with a letter to DeLay which said:

"You should be aware that your comments yesterday may violate a Federal criminal statute, 18 U.S.C. §115 (a)(1)(B). That law states:

"Whoever threatens to assault.... or murder, a United States judge... with intent to retaliate against such... judge.... on account of the performance of official duties, shall be punished [by up to six years in prison]"

"Threats against specific Federal judges are not only a serious crime, but also beneath a Member of Congress. In my view, the true measure of democracy is how it dispenses justice. Your attempt to intimidate judges in America not only threatens our courts, but our fundamental democracy as well."

My comment on this was:

DeLay's comments are disturbing, but I very much doubt that are in violation of the law as Lautenberg is claiming.

For the judges involved to "answer for their behavior" could mean any number of things, including impeachment, popular pressure to resign (stoked by the right, of course), or even their ultimate judgment at the Pearly Gates. There's no way that such a vague statement can be construed as definitively threatening murder or assault, so Lautenberg is either reaching, or attempting a purely rhetorical thrust at DeLay.

Let's keep focused on the real evidence against DeLay, and not get sidetracked by rhetorical give and take.

Of course, I was right and wrong at the same time, but, more to the point, I completely missed the point.

Lautenberg's charge, I now realize (or assume, I guess) wasn't a serious assignment of law-breaking to DeLay, but merely following my own prescription of just a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote (following Chris Bowers' lead):

Democrats should take advantage of Tom DeLay's continuing (and growing) ethics and legal problems by using him as the exemplar of all that's bad about the GOP, and in this way nationalizing Congressional campaigns by creating a foil to work against. After an ad campaign to soften up the opposition and raise DeLay's national ID, we should use all the techniques that have worked so well for the right-wing (morphing the local candidate's face with DeLay's, using grainy footage and the least flattering photos available, etc.) to demonize a man who well deserves that fate.

So, here's the correction: I was wrong to criticize Lautenberg, even by implication, when he was just doing his bit to raise the public's awareness of Tom DeLay's attributes: his love of threats, his corruption, his bloated ego, his lack of ethics, and his big fat mouth.

My apologies to Senator Lautenberg, who did good.