Bad advice from Alec Baldwin (via Kottke, who gets this wrong too):

Now is a wonderful opportunity to show the country what Democrats/liberals/progressives/unaligned learned from the Clinton era. Whatever personal problems that public officials deal with privately, leave them alone. This could happen to anyone, in any state, regardless of party. Why make the voters of South Carolina suffer while Sanford is skewered? If he wants to resign, so be it. If not, let him deal with it in private.

Kottke goes on to criticize Huffington Post and TPM for diving so wholeheartedly into the mud on this. And he's right—sex scandals are non-stories and should be treated as such. (Olbermann's glee, for instance, was actively painful to watch last night.) But that doesn't mean the Sanford story isn't important or that the man shouldn't resign. Though the media seems strangely uninterested in this fact, Sanford skipped town (skipped the whole country!) for a week without telling anyone where he was going, and in fact actively misled his staff about his whereabouts. There are powers that only governors can exercise; it's wildly irresponsible for him to pull a stunt like this no matter what's going on in his personal life, and if that's the level of judgment he exercises when dealing with the state's business he obviously needs to resign. Governing a state is serious business, and a serious responsibility; Sanford blew it off, and so he needs to resign or else be impeached. That's the only aspect of this story that's newsworthy and the only one we should be talking about, no matter how salacious the details or egregious the apparent hypocrisy.

UPDATE: But don't take my word for it; even "Chainsaw" Charles Krauthammer says Sanford has to go.

Linkdump!

* The headline reads, "Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected."

* Probably the stupidest thing ever published in the L.A. Times: a bald anti-science assertion that deadly allergies don't exist.

* 'Going Under': Doctors addicted to drugs. Via MeFi.

* Valuating Facebook in terms of Whoppers.

* I don't know if I'm more worried that my insomnia will lead to paranoia or Exploding Head syndrome.

* News that by this point will surprise no one: Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models.

* Legislation has been introduced for a post-Bush truth and reconciliation commission. This is something that is sorely needed, and I hope the Democratic leadership puts its full weight behind it.

* Blago: owned. More discussion here.

* The literary world is abuzz with news of Jack Torrance's latest, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

* Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction.

* Things not to do: buying a $1000 house in Detroit. Big ups to Cleveland, which is apparently turning into Detroit.

(Thanks to Bill for some of these!)

Colorado U.S. attorney Troy Eid, a Bush appointee, chose not to charge three meth addicts with high-powered rifles and a self-confessed plan with conspiracy to assassinate Barack Obama, against the suggestion of the FBI.

When police searched the hotel rooms and cars the men were using, they confiscated meth, needles, laptops, cell phones, a black mask, books indicating check fraud and forgery, bags of new clothes, tactical pants and bar coupons.

Based on the evidence, FBI special agent Robert Sawyer believed there was probable cause to charge the men with conspiracy to kill Senator Obama. However, US Attorney Troy Eid last week said there is insufficient evidence to indicate a true threat, plot or conspiracy against the senator.

The men were charged with various weapons and/or drug charges.

No true threat?

9Wants to Know has learned three men in Denver discussed assassinating U.S. Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Denver by sneaking into one of his events and shooting him with a gun hidden inside of a camera.

...

Johnson, Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell all thought that Obama had a suite in the third floor of the Hyatt hotel, where they were staying. In fact, Obama was staying in another Denver hotel.

The men were doing methamphetamine inside the hotel with two women on Aug. 23 discussing the plot to kill Obama, according to federal records.

Adolf said, "It would not matter if he killed Senator Obama because police would simply add a murder charge to his pending charges," according to the records.

There were seven outstanding warrants for Adolf's arrest.

The underage woman told law enforcement that Adolf also talked about using "a high-powered rifle 22-250 from a high vantage point" to shoot Obama during his acceptance speech at INVESCO Field at Mile High.

Politics on the mind.

* Is impeachment still off the table, Madame Speaker? Rob Suskind reports that "the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein." Via MeFi.

* You wouldn't like him when he's angry: Barack pushes back hard on the energy issue, and it makes me happy. And that's not the only thing he's pushing back on:

They're very good at negative campaigning. They're not so good at governing.

* Al Giordano plays veepstakes, but won't make a bet.

* Al Franken's latest schtick: drawing a map of the United States from memory. He's pretty good—for a celebrity.

* Raising Arizona and the H.I. McDunnough theory of John McCain.

Dept. of Sounds Good to Me: Bush administration worried about possible criminal prosecution. More from Glenn Greenwald, with particular attention to the Democrats' continued complicity in all this—which in turn points us pretty quickly back to the pessimism I expressed just last week over the FISA debacle, now with an even darker color about it:

As I was writing at the tail end of an Yglesias comment thread last night, the grandstanding you're seeing on the lefty blogs over telecom immunity seems to me to be misdirected anger over the dawning recognition that Bush and his cronies really are going to get away with everything scot free. Well, they are. Pelosi took impeachment off the table—wrongly, I think, though I understand the political calculus involved—and it's extremely unlikely there will be any substantive investigation of Bush following Obama's election. There never has been. We'll "turn the page." "For the good of the country," a criminal Republican administration will once again walk, and the really sad fact is the exact same bunch of thugs will probably pop back up yet another decade down the line to do it all again.

We lost the fight to hold Bush accountable when Pelosi took impeachment off the table.

I remain pretty skeptical that any of these people will ever face any sort of justice for what they've done, though I'd be very happy if we somehow do see it. There's still more at Amygdala, all about our learned helplessness in the face of the last eight years.

The New York Times has dueling op-eds on the FISA issue: the editorial board is unhappy with Obama, while Morton Halprin (who was spied on by Nixon) believes the FISA compromise is the best legislation we can hope for at this time.

I've already written about this (in both blogspot and Daily Kos flavors), but I have one or two things to add. First, on the merits of the FISA compromise, I think the bill itself is pretty awful, but telecom immunity isn't the awful part. I can't imagine the government making any other policy choice if it ever wants a private company to comply with its requests ever again. The problem here was and always has been Bush administration illegality, not telecom compliance—so the netroots are directing their fire in entirely the wrong direction. This TPM reader gets it right:

Before we all torpedo the best candidate we have had in 30+ years over this FISA thing, be aware of the two facts: (1) there is a long-established government contractor immunity doctrine in American law & what the telecoms did after 9-11 in obeying government demands for compliance is right in stride with that doctrine, and (2) in any event, the federal government is likely required to indemnify the telcos for any judgment or settlement they'd have to pay. Is this really the make-or-break litmus-test the netroots is clamoring for? No way. Is this just another example of liberals eating their own? You betcha.

As I was writing at the tail end of an Yglesias comment thread last night, the grandstanding you're seeing on the lefty blogs over telecom immunity seems to me to be misdirected anger over the dawning recognition that Bush and his cronies really are going to get away with everything scot free. Well, they are. Pelosi took impeachment off the table—wrongly, I think, though I understand the political calculus involved—and it's extremely unlikely there will be any substantive investigation of Bush following Obama's election. There never has been. We'll "turn the page." "For the good of the country," a criminal Republican administration will once again walk, and the really sad fact is the exact same bunch of thugs will probably pop back up yet another decade down the line to do it all again.

We lost the fight to hold Bush accountable when Pelosi took impeachment off the table. I'm sorry that's true, but that's reality, no matter what happens with FISA and telecom immunity or what anybody says on the Internet.

What's actually at stake now is the character of the *next* eight years, eight absolutely crucial years in a very precarious moment not only for this nation but for the entire world—and with regard to that struggle Obama is doing the right thing by taking the FISA issue off the table. He's being pragmatic. We need to be pragmatic too.

I'd been meaning to link to Matt Yglesias's post a few days ago about executive power, simply to note that he identifies one of the more pressing flaws in the American system, the fixed four-year presidential term (for which even impeachment is no longer a practical limit). If Bush has taught us nothing else, he's taught us that democracy requires a recall function, ideally one that can be initiated by the people directly without the intervention of the legislature. (Not that he hasn't taught us other things; for instance, it's also quite clear that the Electoral College needs to be scrapped altogether.) I propose a Constitutional Convention, next Friday in the Lit grad student lounge.

Matt is also scrapping a bit with Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolutions over his "Angry Ape" theory of electoral politics, and I think Matt gets this absolutely right too, not that the Clinton camp will notice:

Yesterday, Tyler Cowen revealed his Angry Ape Theory of American politics: "Under this theory foreign policy disasters, no matter who caused them, will help the Republican candidate. We will demand An Angrier Ape." That theory may or may not be correct, but the last thing you need is for Democratic political strategy to be framed by people who think it's correct. That just guarantees loss. You need to find people who think they can persuade the public that an Angry Ape isn't the way to go and let those people have a crack at it.

Elsewhere in Left Blogistan, Kevin Drum links to The Nation's investigation into the source of all those right-wing chain-emails. My family knows me well enough not to send these along, so I've never really gotten them, except for the few months after 9/11 when they briefly went mainstream—but everyone I've ever seen has been painfully, painfully stupid.

Depressing weekend politics triple threat:

* World authors on climate change, including George Saunders. Via blucarbnpinwheel.

But then again, who can resist the allure of springtime? Last spring a "mini-hurricane" lifted our house off its foundation, and what a wild, lovely ride we had, flying over the city, observing the beauty of the new-blooming roses and orchids and the dear friends being slung willy-nilly into the sides of downtown buildings, and the river overflowing its banks and flooding entire sections of town.

So let the global-warning nuts complain all they want. I love nature, just as it is, however it is.

*Poems from Guantánamo, via MeFi.

DEATH POEM
Jumah Al Dossari

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the "protectors of peace."

* The Nation's Alex Cockburn explains how the Democrats blew it in just eight months. Via I cite. He makes a lot of good points, most notably this harsh rebuke to those (like me) who waste their time fantasizing about impeachment:

The left is as easily distracted, currently by the phantasm of impeachment. Why all this clamor to launch a proceeding surely destined to fail, aimed at a duo who will be out of the White House in sixteen months? Pursue them for war crimes after they've stepped down. Mount an international campaign of the sort that has Henry Kissinger worrying at airports that there might be a lawyer with a writ standing next to the man with the limo sign. Right now the impeachment campaign is a distraction from the war and the paramount importance of ending it.

Impeach Cheney: 'The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.' By Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general to Ronald Reagan.