Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald will decide Karl Rove’s fate in the next two to three weeks, The New York Times reported.
And Rove may be more worried than he’s letting on. Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin rounded up up some of the recent reporting on the case, quoting David Shuster of MSNBC:
“While his supporters continue to put a good face on his lengthy grand jury testimony, other sources close to Karl Rove say the presidential adviser is now more worried, not less, that he’s going to get indicted. The sources say Rove was surprised by some of the questions he was asked, and by the fact the session stretched on for three and a half hours.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman says she has voted for John Kerry six times, but her reaction to his recent flurry of commentaries and interviews is this: “Stop him before he kills (the Democrats’ chances) again.” As Kerry acts like he’s warming up for 2008, she writes, “what the Democrats need this time out is not a messenger honed to squeak on the margin of undecideds, but a vision of what’s gone wrong and how to right it.” If Goodman has a visionary picked out, she’s not saying yet.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It was fine when the anti-pornography group Operation SouthWind gathered enough signatures on petitions last year to convene a grand jury to investigate local sex shops. Porn stores need monitoring. But now that the group has filed petitions (which the Sedgwick County election office recently certified) to convene another grand jury, it’s getting annoying. After all, the first grand jury resulted in one misdemeanor charge to one store for selling one video that is available on the Internet. Is Operation SouthWind going to keep forcing grand jury investigations at taxpayers’ expense until it gets a decision that it likes (which likely would be one that would get tossed out by the courts as unconstitutional)?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Proof that Hollywood and conservative Republicans can work together in a productive way: Actor and liberal activist George Clooney appeared with Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas Thursday to call for an end to the ongoing genocide in the Darfur area of Sudan, where in recent years hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or displaced by government troops and allied Janjaweed militia.
Clooney reported that in a recent trip to Sudan, a young girl asked him, “When will you come back? When will you stop this?” When he said “soon,” she replied, “That’s what you always say.”
Brownback added, quoting Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel: “What hurts victims the most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.”
It’s time for international action to stop this tragedy.
posted by Randy Scholfield
Even a Harvard Law School professor suggested last week that the two state senators and one Kansas Supreme Court justice who discussed school finance over lunch all should have known better. That goes without saying by now. That said, is rhetoric such as this from Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, really necessary? “Evil prevails only when good people are silent.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The Kansas Senate’s three-year, $466 million school funding plan, approved Thursday, is a reasonable response to the Kansas Supreme Court’s order to suitably finance public education. Now, lawmakers need to responsibly reconcile the Sentate bill with the $633 million House plan — not cut the Senate bill by $65 million, as a House committee did Saturday. Once a new finance plan is passed and signed, it then will be up to the high court to decide if it is acceptable (can you really phase in a constitutional requirement?) or if, heaven help us, there will have to be another special session.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
