Ta Ta For Now...
I'm deep in the middle of buying my first house. Cue stress, panic, uncertainty, confusion, fear, and hope... in that order.

So while I'm taking care of that, and trying to keep up with work, I'll be taking a break from blogging. We close August 27th, and I doubt I'll be rational again until it's all over. Once things have settled down I'll be back.

Cheers!
Celeste

It's all about the percentages
The Clintons have lost their request that the government reimburse them for the 3.58 million dollars in legal fees they racked up defending themselves during the Whitewater probe. The panel did say they should receive $85,312 to pay for the cost of responding to the Independent Counsel's report. The Post drags out the expected 'experts' who claim to be surprised that the Clintons lost:

The panel's decision appears to divert dramatically from past practice, according to a law professor who is a former Iran-contra prosecutor and an expert on the independent counsel law. John Q. Barrett, who was an associate counsel for independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, said federal courts have been generous in reimbursing legal bills and have avoided drawing conclusions about whether the subject otherwise would have been investigated.

"Before today, the court was generally generous and, for whatever reason, today took a dramatically different approach," Barrett said. "Many suspect a political motivation in this case. I don't necessarily subscribe to that, but it is very different."

And the Clintons are complaining about it too:

The Clintons complained through their attorney yesterday that two former Republican presidents fared much better in securing repayment of their legal bills in the Iran-contra investigation. George H.W. Bush was awarded $272,000, or 59 percent of the reimbursement he sought, and Ronald Reagan was awarded $562,000, or 72 percent of his request.

Okay, so the former presidents you're referring to received a combined $834,000 in repayments from the government. Since you're stressing the percentage of their legal bills that were repaid, here's a figure you could bring up as well: $834,000 is 23% of $3,580,000, which is the amount the Clintons are requesting from the government. The Clintons may be only getting 2% of what they asked for, but they're asking for more than four times the amount of money that was distributed to Reagan and Bush. Perhaps that has a lot more to do with the denial of their request than any shadowy political conspiracy.

Teach your children well...
I was reading Best of the Web for today, and some twit junior college instructor thought it would be a good idea to have his students send emails to elected officials containing the words "kill the president"...

Michael Ballou, a part-time lecturer who teaches an "Introduction to U.S. Government" course at the college's Petaluma campus, intended the assignment to be an "experiential exercise that would instill a sense of fear so they would have a better sense of why more people don't participate in the political process," said Doug Garrison, the vice president and executive dean of the Petaluma campus. ...

It is appropriate to fear participation in the political process, if your participation is limited to making death threats against the president. That isn't the reason 'more people don't participate in the political process', and saying that just makes Garrison look like a dumbass. Does he think that a good 'experiential exercise' that would instill a better understanding of why women don't like to walk alone at night would be to rape his students?

Most of the 30 students in the class dismissed the June 25 assignment as a joke, but after it was repeated at a subsequent class, one student did send the e-mail to U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Napa Valley) on July 5. ...
Making a threat against the president is against the law and subject to up to five years in prison.

People like this are why I would never teach my (hypothetical) children to blindly obey their superiors.