Former French president Jacques Chirac is being tried on corruption charges stemming from misconduct as mayor of Paris.

Steve Benen is scratching his head over WaPo’s disparate treatment of two political scandals. According to a Nexis search, the newspaper has run 26 stories that mention Eric Massa since March 1. Some of those articles were Style-section pieces that mentioned Massa in passing, but most are substantive news stories — some on the front [...]

In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court today ruled that the right of corporations to engage in political speech, including campaign and issue advertising,  is protected by the First Amendment. AP, “Justices Block Key Part of Campaign Law” The Supreme Court threw out a 63-year-old law designed to restrain the influence of big business and [...]

Glenn Beck has a plan.  Actually, the Plan.  Which he reveals on his website. Today, I have stopped looking for a leader to show us the way out because I have come to realize that the only one who can truly save our country…is us. To change America’s course we need to change ourselves, our [...]

A USA Today report that “Nearly a year after he was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington, Obama also has taken a cue from his predecessors and appointed fundraisers to coveted ambassadorships” and in fact has done so at “a rate higher than any president in more than four decades” combined with  [...]

Well, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has said that a third of the counted votes in the Afghanistan election were fraudulent and ordered a run-off between Hamid Karzai and second place finisher Abdullah Abdullah.  Karzai looks unlikely to comply and nobody really wants a run-off, anyway. So, as I write in my New Atlanticist essay, [...]

A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions. The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and [...]

Yes, that headline is not an exaggeration. The Chief of the Jericho Fire Department went to court and was shot by the police for disputing two tickets requiring two trips to the court house. JERICHO, Ark. — It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet [...]

Here is a good example of how being an “LEO” (Law Enforcement Officer for those of you not in the know) means getting treated differently than the rest of us. If one of the non-LEO readers here were to have allegations of sexual assault leveled against him by two separate women he’d likely be arrested. [...]

There’s been a meme circulating the Internets the last couple of days that the 789 Chrysler dealerships that were suddenly closed were (1) hand selected by Barack Obama’s “car czar” and (2) overwhelmingly owned by Republican donors. Doug Ross, who dubs it “dealergate,” seems to have been the chief initiator of the argument.  He cites [...]

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin thinks Senator Mark Begich, who narrowly defeated incumbent Ted Stevens last November shortly after the latter was convicted on corruption charges, should step down and agree to a rematch now that the Justice Department has decided to drop the case against Stevens. Palin’s call came after a reporter at the Fairbanks [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped the case against Ted Stevens, NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports. A jury convicted Stevens last fall of seven counts of lying on his Senate disclosure form in order to conceal $250,000 in gifts from an oil industry executive and other friends. Stevens was the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, however, [...]

Dave Schuler laments yesterday’s conviction of a Chicago city official on federal mail fraud charges.  Said official was bewildered, saying, “I just did my job the way I was supposed to do it. I guess it’s a federal crime.” As Dave notes, the man has a point: “Corruption isn’t a perversion of the system here. [...]

Timothy Geithner may be our new Treasury Secretary but that doesn’t mean bloggers can’t still make fun of him. Pejman Yousefzadeh, writing at something called The New Ledger, toasts “The Indispensable Mr. Geithner.” In urging Geithner’s confirmation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offered his entirely nonpartisan opinion that “This powerful economic storm demands strong, decisive [...]

Dave Schuler’s arguments and his responses to my cross-examination questions highlight three critical failings in his argument. These flaws are his preference for inertia over strategic assessment, overweighing ambiguous evidence that marginally supports his case while ignoring compelling evidence that refutes it, and a failure to account for what might be called “conditions on the [...]

Monkey Cagers John Sides and Lee Sigelman rank the states on corruption and, as expected, Louisiana is at the top.  Surprisingly, Illinois is a relative piker, coming in 6th place but only 61 percent as much corruptitude: Matt Yglesias is convinced.   The problems, however, with the rankings are manifold. The measure being used is “the [...]

Questions regarding the Blagojevich scandal. President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, refused to take questions from reporters this morning about whether he was the Obama “advisor” named in the criminal complaint against Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The complaint states Blagojevich wanted a promise of a high-level appointment or some other reward for Blagojevich in [...]

On January 23, 1980 President Jimmy Carter enunciated what became known as the Carter Doctrine. He stated, “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by [...]

Dan Rostenkowski, the Chicago politician forced out as Ways and Means chairman after a corruption scandal, says that we shouldn’t tar a whole city because Rod Blagojevich is a crook. I’m particularly amused by this paragraph: As a politician who more than a decade ago was disciplined for breaking the rules, I’m still uncomfortable writing [...]

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 [...]

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has been taken into Federal custody. Authorities in Chicago have arrested Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich on federal charges. U.S. Attorney’s office spokesman Randall Samborn says both Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris were arrested Tuesday. Federal prosecutors have investigated Blagojevich’s administration for at least three years. They’ve been looking [...]

Senator Ted Stevens, who looked to have narrowly won re-election to the Senate weeks after being convicted on felony corruption charges, has now apparently lost as absentee ballots are slowly counted. Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history, narrowly lost his re-election bid Tuesday, marking the downfall of a Washington political power [...]

While neither AP nor the networks have yet called it, convicted felon Ted Stevens has almost certainly been re-elected to the Senate from Alaska. Alaskans will have to wait a little while longer to find out if Senator Ted Stevens has been re-elected just days after becoming a convicted felon.  The Republican held a slim [...]

We’ve reached the seemingly inevitable part of the campaign where the trailing candidates start hurling charges out of desperation and the leader responds in kind. In the closing days of 1992, President George H.W. Bush, ordinarily among the most decent, genteel fellows you’d ever meet, was running around calling Bill Clinton and Al Gore “bozos.” [...]

The McCain campaign has launched two new ad videos in consecutive days under the titles “Broken” and “Family.” I find the juxtaposition amusing.  The spots themselves strike me as weak but, as I keep reminding myself, I’m not the target audience. “Broken” Washington’s broken. John McCain knows it. We’re worse off than we were four [...]

Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens has been indicted for concealing payments from his financial disclosure forms. The indictment accuses Stevens, former chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, of concealing payments of more than $250,000 in goods and services from an oil company. The items include home improvements, autos and household items. The Alaska oil firm, Veco, [...]

President Bush had a minor language gaffe during a light and amiable luncheon with the other G-8 leaders: The life-of-the-party president, mingling before the meal, chatted animatedly about his parents’ health, his birthday and the corruption charges facing one of his best buddies in Europe, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. “Amigo! Amigo!” Mr. Bush [...]

Matt Yglesias is befuddled that Michael Bloomberg is ineligible for re-election as NYC mayor: It really does seem a bit odd that a mayor with a 67 percent approval rating should be forced from office because of a term limits law. I suppose I understand the theory that presidential-level term limits serve as a check [...]

Michael Kinsley hopes that Swift-Boating, a combination of smear and truth that “exploits its own complexity and the reluctance of the media to adjudicate factual disputes” and thus sticks, will not reappear this election season. The raw material for swift-boating this year is already apparent. There is Obama’s loony pastor, his friendship with a former [...]

That’s the central claim of David Ignatius’s column in the Washington Post this morning: So imagine that you are Qassem Soleimani, commander of a covert Iranian army deployed across the Middle East: You doubt the Bush administration would run the risk of a military strike against Iran, but you can’t be sure. You think America [...]

Yesterday’s exchange with Thers over the state of conservatism reflects a major defect in the blogging medium. For the most part, we write blogs in serial fashion, as a conversation with our readers, and presume that recent posts on the same subject have been read. Most blog readers, on the other hand, parachute into posts [...]

It’s not exactly news that the Republican Party is in the doldrums at the moment. It lost control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, its president is at historic lows in the polls, it has lost a string of special elections and its incumbent Congressmen are retiring in droves, and the odds [...]

Prosecutors in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s ongoing corrpution case have added taking cash bribes from a U.S. businessman to Olmert’s ever-expanding list of allegations: State Prosecutor Moshe Lador, speaking at a Supreme Court hearing, said investigators suspected New York businessman Morris Talansky had given Olmert “dollars, in cash and in envelopes, during brief meetings [...]

Today’s Christian Science Monitor features two profiles of incoming Russian president Dmitri Medvedev. For whatever reason, both emphasize his love of rock and roll. Fred Weir weighs in with “In Putin’s shadow, Russia inaugurates Medvedev: The new president, a savvy lawyer who likes Led Zeppelin, faces rising corruption and decaying national infrastructure.” Not to be [...]

Three Members of Congress are claiming that the NCAA Bowl Championship Series is illegal and demanding a playoff. Forget government corruption or corporate fraud. Three members of Congress want the Justice Department to investigate whether college football’s Bowl Championship Series is an illegal enterprise. Reps. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., and Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, [...]

Bernard Finel quips that, “The ‘success’ of the surge is like winning a pie eating contest where is the prize is… more pie.” That’s a good line, regardless of where you stand on Iraq. More seriously, he tries to come up with metrics for defining “success” and observes, We are now precisely back where we [...]

General David Petraeus’ testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today was cautious and somewhat predictable. Key quotes follow with bold emphasis mine in all cases: Since Ambassador Crocker and I appeared before you seven months ago there has been significant but uneven security progress in Iraq. Since September, levels of violence and civilian deaths [...]

The Mahdi Army controls Basra and four days of intense fighting there has been punctuated with the bombing of one of Iraq’s two main oil pipelines.* U.S. officials are painting this is a success story. Karim Kadim/Associated Press via NYT The Pentagon on Wednesday said an eruption of violence in southern Iraq, where US-backed government [...]

President Bush said he was envious of our troops in Afghanistan and would love to be there if he were only younger and not otherwise engaged being president. In a videoconference, Bush heard from U.S. military and civilian personnel about the challenges ranging from fighting local government and police corruption to persuading farmers to abandon [...]

New York Governor Elliot Spitzer is “involved” in a prostitution ring. Details are still sketchy. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning. Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides inside his Fifth Avenue apartment early [...]

The hubbub caused by the New York Times‘ front page allegations that John McCain had an improper relationship with a lobbyist took a bizarre new turn today, with editor Bill Keller saying the paper’s readers misunderstood the story and public editor Clark Hoyt mystified that the story was published at all. BILL KELLER, the executive [...]

Megan McArdle explains why she prefers Barack Obama to John McCain despite the former’s protectionism and “his insanely bad economic ‘patriot act.’” I might not vote for Obama; I will not vote for McCain. There are some things more important than the economy, and free speech is among them. Yes, I don’t like Obama’s stance [...]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer managing editor David McCumber “chose not to run the New York Times story on John McCain” in his paper even though it subscribes to the New York Times News Service. He explains: To me, the story had serious flaws. It did not convincingly make the case that McCain either had an affair with [...]

The New York Times today fronts a long exposé on John McCain, which the campaign describes as a “hit-and-run smear campaign,” under the headline “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk.” The piece alleges that McCain did favors for a female lobbyist nine or more years ago and insinuates that they were romantically [...]

Matt Welch has an excellent, link-filled article asking newspaper editorial boards to, if they are going to endorse McCain, endorse the real McCain, rather than the “straight-talking”, “maverick”, “Iraq war skeptic” that newspaper editorialists tend to tag with the name “McCain”. Considering that McCain in New Hampshire this month railed against “negative ads” while running [...]

The New Orleans city council today defied protestors and voted unanimously to tear down the first of four remaining major housing projects in the city to make way for mixed-income housing that will accommodate some, but not all, of the pre-Katrina public housing population. Needless to say, the self-appointed community activists were displeased: The scene [...]

John McCain has received all the key newspaper endorsements for the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, despite being a non-factor in the polls in the former and trailing in the latter. The Des Moines Register backed McCain despite his being in 5th place in their own polls; apparently, they’re not so much trying to [...]

The U.S. military has rejected the advice issued three months ago by an independent commission, deciding that the Iraqi national police force is salvageable. U.S. military commanders in Baghdad have concluded that Iraq’s 27,000-member national police force has made progress in weeding out officers involved in sectarian violence and should not be disbanded, countering the [...]

While the right side of the blogosphere busied itself with outrage over planted questions in the YouTube debate, our counterparts on the left were exulting over news that Rudy Giuliani billed New York City taxpayers for security services and travel expenses for his then-mistress (now wife) back in 2000. TPM’s Josh Marshall has dubbed this [...]