A census worker was found hanged in Kentucky in a bizarre and grisly case.

When Bill Sparkman told retired trooper Gilbert Acciardo that he was going door-to-door collecting census data in rural Kentucky, the former cop drew on years of experience for a warning: “Be careful.”  The 51-year-old Sparkman was found this month hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery with the word “fed” scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.

“Even though he was with the Census Bureau, sometimes people can view someone with any government agency as ‘the government.’ I just was afraid that he might meet the wrong character along the way up there,” said Acciardo, who directs an after-school program at an elementary school where Sparkman was a frequent substitute teacher.

The Census Bureau has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, until the investigation is complete, an official said.

The law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, did not say what type of instrument was used to write the word on the chest of Sparkman, who was supplementing his income doing Census field work. He was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of Daniel Boone National Forest and an autopsy report is pending.

[...]

FBI spokesman David Beyer said the bureau is assisting state police and declined to discuss any details of the crime scene. Agents are trying to determine if foul play was involved and whether it had anything to do with Sparkman’s job as Census worker, Beyer said. Attacking a federal worker during or because of his federal job is a federal crime.  Lucindia Scurry-Johnson, assistant director of the Census Bureau’s southern office in Charlotte, N.C., said law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is “an apparent homicide” but nothing else.

Given the stereotypes about rural Kentucky, this will fuel all manner of speculation.  One presumes it was indeed a homicide and motivated by anti-government sentiment. But, really, we don’t know.

UPDATE: No more news on the investigation but Andrew Sullivan found an old news clip indicating that Sparkman was a cancer survivor who just finished his education degree last year.

When Bill Sparkman earned his teaching degree in February, it wasn’t the usual walk down the aisle to pick up the onion skin. Instead, Sparkman stood in front of his fellow classmates and told his story. What with going back to school at the age of 47, surviving cancer mid-degree and driving through a blizzard to get to the commencement ceremony, Sparkman’s story had the makings of a movie.

In 1993, Sparkman moved to Laurel County as part of an assignment for his job with the Boy Scouts of America. Shortly after arriving, he became a volunteer at Johnson Elementary.  “When I moved here, my son was about to enter elementary school,” he said. “He was having some difficulties.”  Sparkman enjoyed the volunteering and quickly became interested in education. He was eventually offered a position as an instructional assistant, which he accepted.

“For the nine years I did it, I loved it,” he said. “But there were some instructional assistants going back to get their degree to teach.” Sparkman wanted to do the same but, being a single parent to son Josh, he didn’t think it would be possible.  “If I went to school at night, it would take me forever,” he said. “I also knew that I would have to student teach. I wouldn’t have any income for two or three months.”

In 2004, Sparkman discovered Utah-based Western Governor’s University, an online college that would enable him to study from home. In January 2005, Sparkman took on a part-time position with the U.S. Census Bureau.

Andrew concludes “suicide is unlikely” and I concur. He continues, “at some point, unhinged hostility to the federal government, whipped up by the Becks, can become violence.” Which is, of course, true even absent the Becks. And it’s a real possibility that we have an anti-government zealot here. Or a moonshiner or pot grower that Sparkman happened to stumble upon. Or any number of other things.

The OMB statement:

“It’s a tragedy. Our hearts and our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of this worker,” Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry said Thursday morning. He has spoken frequently about the denigration of federal employees. “I’m going to be closely following this law enforcement action. If this is an attack on a federal employee, I can assure you that no resources will be spared to find the perpetrators,” Berry said. “We cannot tolerate essentially domestic terrorism, if that is what this is. But until we understand the law enforcement investigation, we don’t know.”

Threats are more common than actual attacks on federal employees, Berry said. He noted that people regularly threaten federal judges and their families, IRS agents and federal law enforcement officers.

“It’s also a reality for many categories of federal workers so we take any threat of violence seriously,” he said.

UPDATE: TPM’s Zachary Roth points to and ABC News report that confirms I’m not the only one speculating in the direction of drugs:

Investigators are saying little about the crime, but some people wonder if his death in the remote part of southeastern Kentucky known for its meth labs and hidden marijuana fields had less to do with his job than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Chris Battle is surprised how often he hears the question “How many terrorists has the Department of Homeland Security caught?” He argues that DHS’ job is prevention, not apprehension; that’s what the FBI does.

The implication of the question – usually the questioner already knows the answer – is that the failure to catch members of al Qaeda during the fingerprinting processes at the border, or during Border Patrol operations along the southwest land border, or during the student visa process, or during the airport screening process … the implication is that the tactics implemented by DHS are obviously failing. No terrorists.

It is important to remember, however, that we usually won’t know if the efforts are successful – at least from the perspective of stopping the next al Qaeda operative. It should be remembered that most of the September 11th terrorists who entered the United States did so by exploiting our immigration system. For example, Hani Hanjour, one of the men who helped crash a 757 into the Pentagon, entered America allegedly as a foreign student. He applied for and received his student visa, but he never set foot on the school at which he was supposedly studying. In fact, nobody ever heard from him again until that fateful morning of September 11, 2001.

Had the DHS student visa program been in place at the time, Hanjour’s failure to show up at the school for which he was given a visa would have resulted in an alert being issued to US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. ICE would have then investigated the matter. Had they run down Hanjour, he would have been deported.

And he would never have been tagged as a “terrorist.” He would only have been an individual who was caught exploiting the immigration system – like millions of others who do the same.

So, yes, it’s true that few terrorists are “caught” by DHS. It’s also true that few terrorists who are caught will likely ever be known.

That’s fair enough, I think, if the question is being asked as a proxy for “Is DHS doing its job?”

When I ask it, though, I do so as a proxy for “Is this worth the sacrifice in liberty for ordinary Americans?” Chris is right that we’ll never know, for example, how many would-be airline hijackers have been thwarted by the more stringent airport screening procedures implemented after 9/11.  We do know, however, that something like 75 million Americans fly each year and that each and every one of them is inconvenienced.  That tens of millions of man-hours a year are thereby wasted getting to the airport much earlier than would otherwise be required.  That Americans are so frustrated with the new rules that they’ve skipped some 41 million trips that they would otherwise have taken.

Oh, and all of the 9/11 hijackers could have passed through the current screening procedures, albeit possibly not with box cutters.   But there are other weapons that would easily pass through – especially if one includes weapons that could be easily assembled aboard the plane.

None of that matters, though, because of two unarguably useful post-9/11 changes. First, we’ve hardened the cockpit doors and implemented procedures to ensure that they’re not opened — no matter what — in the even of a takeover attempt.  Second, passengers have learned to go Flight 93 on would-be terrorists.  Before 9/11, passengers reasonably assumed that hijackers just wanted to go to Cuba or get paid a ransom or whatever and that the passengers would likely be released unharmed afterward.  Now, as Richard Reid’s almost comical attempt to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb demonstrated, passengers will overwhelm a would-be attacker.

That hasn’t stopped the TSA from making everyone take their shoes off to get through security screening, of course.

Vice President Joe Biden has a bit of a mouth problem, he just can’t shut it, and whatever he thinks tends to come tumbling out. In this case, while speaking before a Law Enforcement group Vice President Biden told the cops present that “Sotomayor has your back”.

Vice President Joe Biden may have crossed the line when he assured national law enforcement groups Monday that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor “has your back.”

The remark quickly stirred criticism in the legal world, since Biden was making a pledge that a fair and objective justice would not necessarily be able to keep.

Biden made the remark at an assembly of eight law enforcement groups after he detailed Sotomayor’s tough-on-crime record in the courtroom.

“There’s a part of her record that seems to be, up to now, been flying under the radar a bit. And that’s her tough stance on criminals and her unyielding commitment to finding justice for the victims of crime,” Biden said.

He then repeatedly said, “She gets it,” and sought to assure the law enforcement groups that she would be on their side.

“So you all are on the front lines. But as you do your job, know that Judge Sotomayor has your back as well,” Biden said. “And throughout this nomination process, I know you’ll have her back.”

In other words, Biden is blabbering on that Sotomayor will go into cases involving the police and civil liberties with a bias in favor of the police. And this is supposed to be a guy from the liberal party?

The problem is that a truly objective judge should go into all cases without a preference for either side. Now the question is, is Biden just shooting his mouth off like a boob, or is he basing this on something? If it is the latter then Sotomayor may not be such a good candidate.

Here is another case where Sotomayor signed on to put procedure ahead of a man’s innocence. Her decision helped ensure that an innocent man spent another 6 years in prison.

Jeffrey Deskovic heard a TV talk show host announce President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court last month, and his mind raced. That name; he remembered that name.

He emerged from bed and riffled through the boxes of motions, appeals and letters he had accumulated in the 16 years he spent in a New York prison for a rape and murder he did not commit.

And there it was, a ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, dated April 26, 2000, and barely two pages long. It was co-written by Sonia Sotomayor.

“We have considered all of petitioner-appellant’s arguments and find them to be without merit,” the ruling said.

Imprisoned at the age of 16 for the killing of a high school classmate, Mr. Deskovic, now 35, filed a habeas corpus petition in 1997 in Federal District Court contesting his conviction. The court denied the request because the paperwork had arrived four days late. Mr. Deskovic and one of his lawyers — who he said had been misinformed about the deadline for filing — appealed the decision to the federal appellate court on which Ms. Sotomayor sat.

Ms. Sotomayor, along with the other judge on the panel, ruled that the lawyer’s mistake did not “rise to the level of an extraordinary circumstance” that would compel them to forgive the delay. There was no need to look at the evidence that Mr. Deskovic insisted would affirm his innocence, they said.

Mr. Deskovic spent six more years behind bars, until DNA found in the victim not only cleared him, but connected another man to the crime.

And this article in the L.A. Times is not encouraging either.

In 1999, Sotomayor upheld the crack cocaine conviction of a New York man despite what she called a “mistaken arrest.” Last year, Sotomayor spoke for a 2-1 majority that upheld a man’s child pornography conviction, even though she agreed an FBI agent did not have probable cause to search his computer.

“I think her experience as a prosecutor balances out her liberal tendencies,” said New York University law professor Kenji Yoshino.

[...]

Gerald Lefcourt, a high- profile criminal defense lawyer in New York, appeared before Sotomayor while she was a federal district court judge. “She always seemed to be leaning toward the government — not outrageously so, but if you look at a lot of her criminal law cases you can see she’s pretty conservative,” he said.

Lefcourt wasn’t surprised. He had faced off against Sotomayor when she was an assistant district attorney.

Sotomayor was “very police-like,” he said. “Dismissive of what the defendant had to say about anything.”

I have to say, it seems like Biden isn’t just shooting his mouth off here. Sotomayor does seem to have a bias in favor of law enforcement.

“Intelligence officials, angry that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had blocked an FBI investigation into Democratic Rep. Jane Harman’s interactions with a suspected Israeli agent, tipped off Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, that Harman had been picked up on a court-ordered National Security Agency wiretap targeting the agent,” CQ’s Jeff Stein reports. “In doing so, the officials flouted an order by Gonzales not to inform Pelosi, three former national security officials said.”

Surely, whether to pursue an investigation is the prerogative of the AG, not bureaucrats in the intelligence community.  The details of the wiretap were classified and Pelosi had no need to know, meaning the leakers committed felonies. [Or maybe not. See update]

UPDATE:  Mike Soraghan, Susan Crabtree, Jared Allen, reporting for The Hill, connect some important dots.

This means the Speaker knew about the wiretap when she decided to stop Harman from becoming chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee.

It also blunts Harman’s (D-Calif.) allegation that her eavesdroppers acted improperly.

Pelosi said it was a “few years ago, maybe three years ago” when she was informed of the recording and noted that leadership is informed when a member is caught on a wiretap. The Speaker added she did not tell Harman of her knowledge because the information was classified.  “When you have a member of Congress who is overheard in a wiretap … the leadership is informed, and that happened at that time,” Pelosi said on Wednesday at a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. “It was not my position to raise it with Jane Harman … All they said is that she was wiretapped.”

It’s unclear whether “leadership is informed when a member is caught on a wiretap” is a custom, a legal requirement, or inartful phrasing on Pelosi’s part.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum observes, “CIA is engaged in some pretty serious message sending against people they don’t like.  My guess: I don’t know how Harman is going to weather all this, but I don’t think it’s going to turn out well for the CIA.  They may have gone a couple of steps too far this time.”

In OTB’s comments below, Bernard Finel counters, “If I were an FBI agent and I saw that kind of borderline criminal behavior from my boss, I’d be tempted to play whistleblower as well. Frankly, we could have used more whistleblowers during the past 8 years, not fewer.”   I’m not unsympathetic to that view.   But I lean more toward’s Drum’s instinct that it’s horribly bad to have our bureaucratic functionaries deciding to use national security secrets to settle political scores.

We haven’t heard to last of this one.

Glenn Reynolds points to a story in a local Chester County, PA paper titled “Breeder Regrets Dog Sale to Biden.”  I clicked the link, expecting to find a story about Biden neglecting the pooch because he’s too busy doing whatever it is that vice presidents do.

Instead, it’s a tale of what a royal pain in the ass it is to do business with a high profile government official.

After the story about the puppy sale ran in the newspapers and on TV newscasts, three dog wardens from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture showed up on Brown’s doorstep for a kennel inspection. And they showed up again and again for four visits over four months.

She said she has also received death threats from animal activists against her and Biden, which were reported to the Secret Service and the FBI. Bob Slama, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Philadelphia field office, said the agency “cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.”  J.J. Klaver, special agent at the Philadelphia field office of the FBI, said his agency is not investigating the matter at this time.

“I thought when Joe Biden bought a puppy from me, what an honor,” Brown said. “Out of millions of breeders in the country, in the world, he picked me.” The glow dimmed almost immediately. Following a story about Brown and Biden in the Daily Local News, readers posted 131 comments, some chiding Biden for having the Secret Service with him when he went puppy shopping and others complaining he did not get the dog from a shelter.

And then PETA got involved . . . .

The Internet has turned virtually everyone into a potential public figure.  Ten years ago, she might have gotten a few nasty letters or a couple of crank calls from people who read about the story in the local paper.  Nowadays, though, hyper-local stories can be nationalized and acted upon by activist groups.

I’ve followed the discussion about the Bill Moyers “scandal” (see, for example, today’s (WSJ piece “Bill Moyers’s Name Is Linked to J. Edgar Hoover’s Abuse of Office”) out of the corner of my eye for the last couple of days  and am having trouble seeing what the big deal is.

Basically, as I understand it:

• Back in 1964, then-30-year-old Moyers was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson who carried out orders to assist in some vague way an investigation by then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about allegations that Motion Picture Association president Jack Valenti was a homosexual.

• Decades later, as a PBS talking head, Moyers is a preening lefty who has “gone on to promote himself as a political moralist, routinely sermonizing about what he claims are abuses of power by his ideological enemies.”

• This constitutes hypocrisy.

Am I missing some key point?

Because, if not, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly big deal.  People’s attitudes change between the time they’re 30 and 70.  They learn from their own mistakes and their other life experiences.  Furthermore, once-respectable views and attitudes become discredited.

In 1964, people trusted government much more than they would a decade latter, owing to Vietnam and Watergate.   So, “trust me, I’m the FBI director and know what’s good for the country” becomes “abuse of power.”

On the issue of homosexuality in particular, I often turn to a single, anecdotal example of how times have changed.   In 1967, lefty folk singer Arlo Guthrie, son of lefty folk icon Woody, released the Thanksgiving classic “Alice’s Restaurant.”  It contained the line, “And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them.”  Within maybe a decade, nobody respectable would use the word “faggot” in public in this manner.  (Although, as frequently happens, the epithet eventually came back into vogue as shock language acceptable for use by people in the targeted group.)

It seems perfectly plausible that young Bill Moyers did something that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time that he’d condemn if it were happening in 2009.

Deborah Howell, WaPo’s outgoing ombudsman, laments the downside of her profession becoming more professionalized.

Journalism is better than it was in my early days, and changes in technology have opened up a new world. My worry is that journalists aren’t as connected to readers as they were in the days of my youth, when the city’s newspaper was the equivalent of the public square. Then, reporters tended to be folks who often hadn’t graduated from, or even attended, college, and they weren’t looking to move to bigger papers. They knew the community well, didn’t make much money and lived like everyone else, except for chasing fires and crooks.

Now journalists are highly trained, mobile and, especially in Washington, more elite. We make a lot more money, drive better cars and have nicer homes. Some of us think we’re just a little more special than some of the folks we want to buy the paper or read us online.

That’s a mistake. Readers want us to be smart and tough and for the newspaper to read that way, but they don’t want us to think we’re better than they are. We need to be worried sick when people drop their subscriptions. We need to think of ways to prevent that.

An unpleasant fact about journalists is that we can be way too defensive. We dish it out a lot better than we take it. It’s not that we have thin skin; we often act as though we have no skin and bleed at the slightest touch.

Journalists need to find ways to be more a part of their communities and their interests — without crossing the line to partisanship — and to engage with readers in improving the newspaper and its Web site to be sources readers can’t do without. If something drives readers nuts, what can we do to help them?

Journalists need to be tough enough to face down a mayor, a police chief or the president of the United States, but we also should be tough enough to respond to honest criticism. The worst part of my job as official internal critic hasn’t been dealing with readers, though that has been both daunting and rewarding. Taking those complaints to reporters and editors has been the biggest challenge. I’m grateful to those here who took them seriously. Some readers had complaints that I just couldn’t get to; I regret that. Some journalists think I have been unfair to them. If I have, then they know how people who believe The Post has treated them unfairly feel.

Politico’s Michael Calderone takes her point but observes, “Howell must run in more well-heeled circles than I do, since a good many journalists I know are barely scraping by or getting laid off — ‘better cars’ and ‘nicer homes’ aren’t the first things on every scribe’s mind these days.” That’s a fair point: young reporters make meager salaries because the supply of quality applicants far outstrips demand.   That said, though, those who are successful do quite well, indeed.

When I was teaching Media and Politics courses years ago, I showed an old program I had taped (perhaps an episode of “Frontline,” but I may be mistaken) that featured an interview with former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, once widely regarded as The Most Trusted Man in America. He lamented that reporters once had lifestyles and attitudes similar to police officers and firefighters and tended to live in the same neighborhoods and drink at the same bars as they did. That’s not the case for the mid-career journalist at major newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets.

But that’s not really surprising. Elite journalists are, at a minimum, college graduates — often from elite schools — and many go on to graduate or professional school. Outside of FBI agents and other federal agents, that’s just about unheard of for cops and firefighters.

UPDATE: A Mark Bowden piece in the July/August edition of The Atlantic illustrates Howell’s point wonderfully.

In those fat and happy days, the glory days of “serious” American journalism, the concepts of objectivity and editorial independence grew into a kind of public religion. The old yellow era of Hearst and Pulitzer, publishers who threw their weight around vigorously and would even instigate a shooting war if it boosted circulation, had given way to a time of more-genteel ownership, often the Ivy League–educated sons and daughters of the press barons. Even the name Pulitzer was expropriated; it became an annual award given to the best examples of serious journalism, and in most newsrooms became a far more coveted goal than increased circulation. There was a high wall, we were assured, between the business side of the newspaper and its editorial staff, and newsrooms were increasingly peopled by a new generation of white-collar journalists, gentlemen (and ladies) of the Fourth Estate, arbiters of style, taste, and decency, who took upon themselves the tasks of keeping government honest and educating the public. (In my 20-plus years as a newspaper reporter, I was always amused when skeptics suggested that I wrote just what the newspaper’s owner told me to write. If only they knew how mightily the newsroom looked down its nose at the business side of the operation.)

This vision of a newspaper, one that prevailed at the highest levels of the craft for decades, ensured that the paper was not just a propaganda mill, the house organ of some rich man or political party, but a community of street-smart shoe-leather scholars who worked as the eyes, ears, and conscience of their city. This was the world of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, of David Halberstam’s and Neil Sheehan’s courageous reporting from Vietnam, and of countless other public-spirited examples of a responsible, serious journalism.

Even literary ambition began to creep into the pages of the great newspapers. At the best ones, when the material justified it, reporters were encouraged to write creatively and at length. A certain kind of reporter—and I was one—competed against others not so much for scoops, but for recognition, prizes, and tenured positions at papers where the rarefied work of “serious” journalism was underwritten. Mine was The Philadelphia Inquirer, where my byline read not “staff reporter” or “staff correspondent” but “staff writer,” and which we writers called, in its heyday, “the greatest care-and-feeding system for journalism ever invented.”

[...]

But while the Web is rapidly destroying the business model that sustained all of the above, it has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust. Instead, the Web gives voice to opinionated, unedited millions. In the digital world, ignorance and crudity share the platform with rigor and taste; the independent journalist shares the platform with spinmeisters and con artists.

Story via memeorandum. Photo by Alex Steffler under Creative Commons license.

In this June 20, 2005, photo, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, D-Ill., speaks as Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., listens during a news conference in St. Louis. Federal authorities arrested Blagojevich Tuesday Dec. 9, 2008, on charges that he brazenly conspired to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder.

It’s safe to say that the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges is inconvenient for President-Elect Barack Obama.  NYT yesterday ran a longish piece headlined “Scandal is an Early Test for Obama Team.”

Exactly what role he or his team played will be a focus of intense scrutiny in the weeks to come after the arrest of Mr. Blagojevich on accusations that he was plotting to trade or sell the Senate appointment. In that sense, the furor could be the first test of the Obama team’s ability to manage a growing scandal in an era when intense media scrutiny and partisan attack machinery can escalate any flap into a serious political problem.

Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he had never spoken with the governor about the seat, and prosecutors have not implicated Mr. Obama or his advisers. At the same time, Mr. Obama’s team has declined for two days to answer questions about what discussions they had about the seat and whether intermediaries had any contacts with Mr. Blagojevich’s advisers.

Republicans have raised questions about Mr. Obama’s refusal to say more and about his past ties with the main characters. Even if Mr. Obama remains untouched by the investigation, it shines a light on the corrupt politics of the state he emerged from and takes attention away from the agenda of change he would rather emphasize.

In a piece called “Obama Was Mute on Illinois Corruption,” WSJ columnist John Fund lays out the connections between Obama and the Chicago Machine:

What remains to be seen is whether this episode will put an end to what Chicago Tribune political columnist John Kass calls the national media’s “almost willful” fantasy that Mr. Obama and Chicago’s political culture have little to do with each other. Mr. Kass notes that the media devoted a lot more time and energy to investigating the inner workings of Sarah Palin’s Wasilla, Alaska, than it has looking at Mr. Obama’s Chicago connections.

[...]

Mr. Obama has an ambiguous reputation among those trying to clean up Illinois politics. “We have a sick political culture, and that’s the environment Barack Obama came from,” Jay Stewart, executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, told ABC News months ago. Though Mr. Obama did support ethics reforms as a state senator, Mr. Stewart noted that he’s “been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state including, at this point, mostly Democratic politicians.”

One reason for Mr. Obama’s reticence may be his close relationship with the powerful Illinois senate president Emil Jones. Mr. Jones was a force in Mr. Obama’s rise. In 2003, the two men talked about the state’s soon-to-be vacant U.S. Senate seat. As Mr. Jones has recounted the conversation, Mr. Obama told him “You can make the next U.S. senator.” Mr. Jones replied, “Got anybody in mind?” “Yes,” Mr. Obama said. “Me.”

[...]

In 2002, Mr. Obama turned up to help Mr. Blagojevich, a staunch ally of Mr. Jones, win the governor’s mansion. Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s incoming White House chief of staff, told The New Yorker earlier this year that six years ago he and Mr. Obama “participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor. We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two [other participants].”

Writing in Politico, Kenneth Vogel and Carrie Budoff Brown offer up “7 Blago questions for Obama.”

1 – “Did you communicate directly or indirectly with Blagojevich about picking your replacement in the U.S. Senate?”

2 – “Why didn’t you or someone on your team correct your close adviser David Axelrod when he said you had spoken to Blagojevich about picking your replacement?”

3. “When did you learn the investigation involved Blagojevich’s alleged efforts to ‘sell’ your Senate seat, or of the governor’s impending arrest?”

4 – “Did you or anyone close to you contact the FBI or U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald about Blagojevich’s alleged efforts to sell your Senate seat to the highest bidder?”

5 – “Did federal investigators interview you or anyone close to you in the investigation?”

6 – “When did you and Blagojevich last speak and about what?”

7 – “Do you regret supporting Blagojevich?”

At this juncture, there’s no evidence or reason to think Obama did anything wrong.  The most damning suggestion is that Obama had reason, beyond press accounts, to think Blagojevich was dirty and remained silent.  Otherwise, we’ve got mere guilt by association: they were part of the same political machine.  That’s mighty thin gruel.

Dave Schuler, Alex Knapp and I talked about the scandal for the first 40 minutes or so of last night’s edition of OTB Radio, “Blagojevich, Obama, and the Return of Chicago Politics“.  Dave, the Chicagoan, is the hardest on Obama of the three.

Photo credit: Cleveland.com

Jesse Jackson Jr. is the infamous “Senate Candidate No. 5,” ABC’s Brian Ross reports.

Chicago Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., is the anonymous “Senate Candidate No. 5″ whose emissaries Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich reportedly offered up to $1 million to name him to the U.S. Senate, federal law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

According to the FBI affidavit in the case, Blagojevich “stated he might be able to cut a deal with Senate Candidate 5 that provided Rod Blagojevich” with something “tangible up front.”

The phrase  “whose emissaries Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich reportedly offered up to $1 million to name him to the U.S. Senate” is amazingly awkward.  One has to read it several times to verify that Jackson isn’t being accused of doing anything wrong.

Of course, one wonders what his “emissaries” did with said offer.

Documents released today by the government offer some strong circumstantial evidence linking Army scientist Bruce Ivins to the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people.

Army scientist Bruce Ivins had sole custody of highly purified anthrax spores with “certain genetic mutations identical” to the poison that killed five people and rattled the nation in 2001, according to documents unsealed Wednesday in the government’s investigation. Investigators also reported tracing the type of envelopes used to send deadly spores through the mails to the lab where Ivins worked.

The scientist, depicted in the newly released papers as deeply troubled, committed suicide last week as investigators were preparing to charge him with murder in the attacks.

The documents were released as the FBI held a private briefing for families of the victims of the episode, and officials said the agency was preparing to close the case.  More than 200 pages of documents were made public by the FBI, virtually all of them describing the government’s attempts to link Ivins to crimes that his lawyer has said he did not commit.  Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance Gainer, who attended a briefing for congressional staff, said FBI agents had told the group there was no evidence that anyone else was involved.

According to one affidavit made public, Ivins submitted false anthrax samples to the FBI, was unable to give investigators “an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours around the time of” the attacks and sought to frame an unnamed co-worker.  He was also said to have received immunizations against anthrax and yellow fever in early September 2001, several weeks before the first anthrax-laced envelope was received in the mail.

I’ve paid only scant attention to the case since reports of Ivins’ suicide Friday.  There’s been quite a bit of conspiracy theorizing on this, especially on the Lefty blogs, notably Glenn Greenwald’s.  My guess is that these documents — or, perhaps, any evidence — won’t dispel that talk.   Given how little lay readers, myself certainly included, understand the science and forensics involved here, the topic virtually defies intelligent public discussion.

This 2003 photo provided by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases shows Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, a bio-defense researcher at Fort Detrick, Md., participating in an awards ceremony. Ivins, the scientist who was developing a vaccine to combat anthrax, died Tuesday July 29, 2008, in an apparent suicide in a hospital in Frederick, Md. U.S. prosecutors investigating the 2001 anthrax attacks were planning to indict and seek the death penalty for Ivins in connection with mailings of the deadly anthrax toxin that killed five people.

(AP Photo/U.S.Army)

Via the LAT: Apparent suicide in anthrax case

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

The story notes that there was some suspicion about Ivins’ statements about alleged decontamination of anthrax spores.

The former official told The Times that Ivins might have hedged regarding reswabbing out of fear that investigators would find more of the spores inside or near his office.

The article also notes:

The family’s home is 198 miles — about a 3 1/2 -hour drive — from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., where anthrax spores were found by investigators.

All of the recovered anthrax letters were postmarked in that vicinity.

The article does directly state, however, that Ivins was going to be arrested for the attacks themselves. I am not sure if that is the result of obtuse writing by the reporter, or hedging based on a lack of full knowledge.

I think that it would be extremely helpful to know exactly what happened with those attacks, as it would help us flesh out how to understand those attacks in the broader war on terror discussion. Indeed, I blame those anthrax attacks, so soon after 9/11 (see this LAT piece for a refresher), for helping to fully catapult the nation into the direction of believing that we really were set to face repeated terrorist attacks from abroad onto the United States itself. Certainly it was one of the pieces of evidence that convinced me, at the time, that a generalized war against terrorist groups made sense. In retrospect, we all read too much into that attack, especially if it can be confirmed that the source of the attack was a mentally unstable government microbiologist.

The WaPo write-up is more explicit about Ivin’s alleged relationship to the attacks: Md. Anthrax Scientist Dies in Apparent Suicide

A federal grand jury was preparing to indict a Maryland bioweapons expert for his role in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and terrorized the country, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

Prosecutors were considering whether to seek the death penalty against Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked at an elite U.S. Army bioweapons laboratory in Fort Detrick. Ivins died Tuesday in an apparent suicide.

The FBI headquarters complex has a wee problem:

“The Hoover Building does not meet the Interagency Security Committee’s criteria for a secure Federal facility capable of handling intelligence and other sensitive information,” the Senate Appropriations Committee observed in a new report on the 2009 Commerce, Justice and State Appropriations bill.

“The Committee finds these conditions unacceptable and directs the Government Accountability Office [GAO] to review the Hoover Building and associated off-site locations, and provide a analysis of the FBI’s ability to fulfill its mission and security requirements under the present circumstances,” the report said.

Given that the FBI is the lead agency in domestic counterterrorism, either the rules or the building need changing, stat.  Steve Aftergood reports that they’ve come up with a bizarre work-around:

The FBI is in the process of constructing a Central Records Complex outside of Washington, DC. When completed, it will provide secure, centralized storage for classified intelligence, consistent with the security requirements of Director of Central Intelligence Directive (DCID) 6/9 and related guidelines.

Now, I’m all for moving sensitive information and, indeed, most federal bureaucratic activities, outside DC and, preferably, the National Capital Region for reasons I won’t get into here.  But one would think the FBI headquarters building ought to be properly equipped to handle classified information.  Alternatively, if there is no reason to think that it isn’t, then we should quit inventing arbitrary rules that require massive expenditures to achieve unnecessarily restrictive standards.

Remember the good old days when everyday events were coordinated by Karl Rove? Today could have counted as one but, alas, Karl Rove is nowhere to be found.

Child rapists can’t be executed, Supreme Court rules
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that child rapists cannot be executed, concluding that capital punishment for crimes against individuals can be applied only to murderers.

Patrick Kennedy, 43, was on Louisiana’s death row after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

The ruling stemmed from the case of Patrick Kennedy, who appealed the 2003 death sentence he received in Louisiana after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that execution in this case would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, citing “evolving standards of decency” in the United States.

FBI arrests hundreds in child sex crackdown
In a series of raids, authorities have arrested more than 300 members of prostitution operations and removed 21 juveniles from sex-selling rings, the FBI announced Wednesday.

FBI Director Robert Mueller announces the arrests of hundreds suspected in child sex rings.

The sweeps were conducted in 16 cities nationwide over the past five days, authorities said.

“Our top priority in these cases has always been to identify children victims and move swiftly to remove them from these dangerous environments,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

Mueller said this week’s sweeps bring to 433 the number of child victims recovered in the five years since the FBI began its Innocence Lost initiative. The program was designed to combat a growing problem of underage prostitution.

That makes for an interesting contrast: the executive branch (currently controlled by Republicans with an FBI head appointed by President Bush) is busting up child sex rings and protecting children while those latte-sipping libruls on the Supreme Court are sparing the most gruesome child rapists. Sadly, the left is but a shadow of its old self these days without Rove to play off of, so this story is not getting the exposure it deserves.

As far as the death penalty goes, I’m mildly against it. I don’t favor it and would vote against it at a state level if given a chance, but am strongly opposed to SCOTUS getting involved and overruling the desires of state residents. Allah goes into more detail about that here.

Larry Johnson’s propaganda effort has worked. His promise to produce a “stunning” and “dramatic” video of Michelle Obama ranting about “whitey” has overloaded his servers. The revelatory post is supposedly here; at least that’s headlining memeorandum at the moment. I can’t get to it at the moment.

BooMan claims a transcription will say:

Why’d he cut folks off medicaid?
Why’d he let New Orleans drown?
Why’d he do nothing about Jena?
Why’d he put us in Iraq for no reason?

The antecedent to “he” is supposedly George W. Bush. Purportedly, Michelle Obama pronounces “Why’d he” as “Whitey.” Given that I haven’t heard the slur “Whitey” since the heyday of “The Jeffersons,” this strikes me as quite plausible. I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve heard the video.

UPDATE: It’s 0906, six minutes past 0900 by my calculations, and still no tape. The above link is actually to a report from Johnson’s colleague SusanUnPC that Fox News has the video in question, not the promised video. My BS detector, already pegged like a pony on this one, is about to melt. That “Republicans who have seen the tape of Michelle Obama ranting about ‘whitey’ describe it as “STUNNING” does not ease my worried mind.

UPDATE: 1058. Still no joy.

UPDATE: 1138. The blog hasn’t been updated since 0743. Has Michelle Obama had Larry Johnson assassinated? That would truly be both stunning and dramatic.

UPDATE: 1241. FBI, CIA, if they’ve seen it, they ain’t saying. No news. Still no news.

Well, actually, there’s some news. Call it the dog that didn’t bark.

FYI, for those expecting to SEE the tape, GET REAL. Read Larry Johnson’s description of what is ON the tape. That is the story.

Except that, well, we were kinda promised we’d, um, see the tape.

UPDATE: Oh, and apropos the “rock like a pony” theme that I’ve been developing, this pitch in Johnson’s sidebar is quite amusing.

A new report by the Department of Justice alleges that soldiers at Guantanamo Bay engaged in abuse against Chinese nationals in order to “soften them up” for the arrival of members of Chinese intelligence.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China’s ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

[...]

According to Fine’s report, the FBI agent said the Uighur detainee told him that the night before his interrogation by Chinese officials, “he was awakened at 15-minute intervals the entire night and into the next day.” The detainee also allegedly said he was “exposed to low room temperatures for long periods of time and was deprived of at least one meal.”

“The agent stated that he understood that the treatment of the Uighur detainees was either carried out by the Chinese interrogators or was carried out by U.S. personnel at the behest of Chinese interrogators,” the report by the Department of Justice inspector general stated.

What can I say now that hasn’t been said about this sort of thing already? Bad enough that the United States of America is torturing and abusing its prisoners of war. Now we’re assisting the Chinese in their campaign of repression against the Uighurs? I’m just speechless at this point, so let me just close this with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt in response to allegations of abuse and torture by American troops in the early part of the 20th Century:

“Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army.”

If only we still upheld that principle.

(link via Matt Welch)