I’m not sure exactly how many thumbs it takes to plug a dike the size of the White House but I am pretty sure that bush has only two:

Meanwhile, President Bush has ordered an end to all leaks from administration officials, Knight-Ridder is reporting. But even that order was leaked by a senior administration official to Knight-Ridder.

And, even though,

officials indicate Ashcroft has told his investigators to find the leaker. “He’s angry about this,” one official said.

These same

Officials who spoke with the Times say they worry Ashcroft could be damaged by the impression he is not impartial.

Come on, who would ever doubt ashcroft’s impartiality??
Via Talkleft who has more.

Orcinus teaches us about the concept of jury nullification:

jury nullification — by sitting in judgment not just of the facts of the case but of the laws themselves — arrogates to itself not only the role of the judge but of the legislature, essentially overturning at whim those laws that have been passed through democratic processes. In this sense, jury nullification is a threat not only to the courts, but to the very systems of laws on which the nation rests.

Well, there are quite a few laws on the books that should not be there.
The wise prosecution/defense attorney will not leave me on the jury for certain types of cases. I won’t lie so as to be able to sandbag a jury but they should ask me the right question(s) to assure that I’m ok with the laws relevant to the trial. If they do leave me on a jury the ‘facts’ better be iron clad or I just might be biased by my opinion of the law itself.
Update(10/13): WalterinDenver dissects a Denver Post editorial on jury nullification and provides some counterpoint to Orcinus.

They are fun. However it is a tedious pain to get them set up:

Tuesday Night
1) Getting the preloaded XP OS kickstarted was a breeze
2) Connect to home network. It took a while to remember that the port it was connected to had been used to connect a switch. Finally reconfigured it to connect to a workstation.
3) Loading the near 40 patches M$ had waiting for me was not all that hard it just took time (and that is where things stopped for the evening)
Wednesday Night

(more…)

Or why to read the comments.
At first I thought I had misunderstood bilmon, proprietor of the Whisky Bar, as Ampersand said:

Whisky Bar (which I’ve just added to the moderately right-wing section of my blogroll) links to

and started to write a different post then this.
Then I read the comments where bilmon sets the record straight:

Guess again. I’m a flaming pinko leftist — i.e. I despise Clinton because I think he’s too frickin’ conservative.

And Ampersand apologizes:

Whoops! Sorry, I had taken you for a liberal democrat. Okay-dokey, I’ve reclassified you.

Please proceed to recalibrate your left-right scales: liberal democrat=moderately right-wing.