Tomi Rae says she's James Brown's wife... the fourth wife, that is... and adds more meat to the matter of just why she want the keys to the padlock on the Godfather of Soul's home...
Duke rape prosecutor Mark Nifong gets a smack from the North Carolina Bar. The Smoking Gun has the docs.
Saddam Hussein's death appears to be imminent and that his death by hanging will likely be videotaped. In fact, the U.S. may hand the former Iraqi dictator over to Iraqis as early as today. Assuming he survives long enough to make it to the gallows, the execution could take place in days, weeks, or maybe on Dubya's State of the Union speech day!
Ford, Nixon were BFFs... And Ford's pardon of Nixon may not have been the bald escape from justice that some have judged it to be:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 — President Gerald R. Ford was never one for second-guessing, but for many years after leaving office in 1977, he carried in his wallet a scrap of a 1915 Supreme Court ruling. A pardon, the excerpt said, “carries an imputation of guilt,” and acceptance of a pardon is “a confession of it.”
Mr. Ford’s decision to pardon Richard M. Nixon for any crimes he might have been charged with because of Watergate is seen by many historians as the central event of his 896-day presidency. It also appears to have left him with an uncharacteristic need for self-justification, though friends say he never wavered in his insistence that the pardon was a wise and necessary act and that it had not resulted from any secret deal with his disgraced predecessor.
“I must have talked to him 20 times about the pardon, and there was never a shred of doubt that he’d done the right thing,” said James Cannon, a Ford domestic policy adviser and author of a 1994 book about his presidency. During one of their discussions, Mr. Ford pulled out the 1915 clipping, from Burdick v. United States. “It was a comfort to him,” Mr. Cannon said. “It was legal justification that he was right.”
Over the last three decades, as emotions have cooled, many who were initially critical of the pardon have come to share Mr. Ford’s judgment that it was the best way to stanch the open wound of Watergate. In 2001, a bipartisan panel selected Mr. Ford as recipient of the Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library, singling out for praise his pardon decision, which Mr. Ford later said he believed was a major factor in his failure to win election to the presidency in 1976.
In a 2004 interview with Bob Woodward, reported Thursday night on The Washington Post’s Web site, Mr. Ford offered another, less lofty motive for the pardon: his friendship with Nixon, which lasted for two decades after the pardon and which letters show was closer than publicly understood.
“I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon,” Mr. Ford told Mr. Woodward, “because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma.”
Few dramas in American political history remain more riveting than that of Nixon’s exit and Mr. Ford’s reaction, at first halting and then decisive, to the looming possibility of a former president on criminal trial for months on end.
“At the time, I thought this was going to cause a problem with the public and the press, and of course it did,” said Robert T. Hartmann, a former Ford aide. “I thought he was right. But it’s also important to be seen as right and remembered in history as having done the right thing.” Meanwhile, here's an interesting picture, from the Times today:
hmm....
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Someday we may find out what Bush's new strategy on Iraq will be...
And I don't care what the FDA says, I'm not eating cloned animal food...Labels: Bush, current affairs, Duke rape case, Ford, Iraq, news, Saddam Hussein, Somalia |
