AddieStan

White House photo by Chris Greenberg President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush sit with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his wife, Rebecca, during a visit Sunday, Aug. 26, 2007, at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. Well, you can't say it's been a boring summer here in Our Nation's Capital, mes amis . New York may be empty while tout le monde vacays in the Hamptons, and the population of D.C. maybe reduced to the people who actually live here, but the White House keeps churnin' out the hits: the Libby pardon, the Rove resignation and, now, Fredo 's farewell. Over at his dashing, redesigned blog, the Media Consortium's Brian Beutler examines the irrelevance of the label "Washington insider" when assessing a bureaucrat's virtues. Alberto Gonzales , of course, was a Washington outsider, but too much of a parent-pleasing, White House insider to do his job properly. Your blogstress, however, cautions her devotees not to fall for ye...

Our dear leader, loath to impose excessive sentences on anyone, as demonstrated in his commutation of the sentence of I. Lewis Libby , apparently has no such concern for the innocent Pashtun goatherd caught up in the War on Terror net that dropped him in Guantanamo, where he awaits notification of the charge on which he has been imprisoned, lo, these past five years. Or, as Phillip Carter recently reminded your blogstress, death was rarely deemed too excessive a sentence for those condemned during George Bush 's capital campaign as the chief executive of the great State of Texas. Here's Carter in 2004 in Slate : The state of Texas executed 150 men and two women during Bush's six-year tenure as governor--a rate unmatched by any other state in modern U.S. history. As governor, Bush had statutory power to delay executions and the political power to influence the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute them entirely, where there was a procedural error, cause for mercy,...