We know a million bucks ain't enough

How much is? How much money would it take for the current Attorney General of Texas, Greg Abbott, to say: "My moral values preclude me from making a ruling in this case":

One thing you have to like about Texas politicians is their resistance to embarrassment.

Take the case of Attorney General Greg Abbott. Last Dec. 15 he received $100,000 in campaign contributions from Houston homebuilder Bob Perry and his wife. The next day, he received a letter from Rep. David Swinford of Dumas, chairman of the House Committee on State Affairs.

Swinford wanted Abbott to issue a formal opinion on whether Grandma, a.k.a. state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, had the authority to conduct a review of the performance of the newly created and controversial Texas Residential Construction Commission.

...

But the notion that the attorney general can take $100,000 from someone with a direct interest in his ruling is outrageous. And it's actually worse. Since 2001, Abbott has received $1.1 million from Mr. and Mrs. Perry.

Memo to Rep. Swinford: Don't bother asking the attorney general for an opinion on that. I phoned and e-mailed his press office Friday to discuss the issue but received no response.

Since the Attorney General and his staff likely started their holiday weekend early last Friday and couldn't get back to Casey with a response, we'll just have to answer for him:

"There IS no limit, according to my well-documented Christian principles. There is NO MAXIMUM amount of money I will accept that would prevent me from passing legal judgment in favor of my largest campaign contributors.

"After all, billion-dollar corporations are people, too."

Update: John Cobarruvias of Homeowners Against Deficient Dwellings is personally offended. And muse adds more.

A pause in the political action

... to once more tip the cap to the Astros' one certain Hall-of-Famer, who has the Babe in his rearview mirror after yesterday:

Only big names remain. Craig Biggio passed Babe Ruth for 37th on the all-time hit list Sunday with his 2,874th. Next is Mel Ott, a Hall of Famer, and after that Frankie Frisch, a Hall of Famer, too, and following him a list of luminaries leading up to one of the few numbers in baseball with any gravitas.

Health permitting, Biggio, a spindly kid from Long Island whose uniform has seen more dirt than Pigpen, will reach 3,000 hits early next season. He is, remember, 40 years old, and though he has not taken to pounding prune juice, his days no longer resemble June 29, 1988, the one on which Biggio singled off Orel Hershiser, in the midst of a Cy Young season, for his first big-league hit.

"Now," Biggio said, "you wake up and you go to the bathroom more – and you hurt more when you walk to the bathroom."

Brother Biggio, I can relate to that last part. I hope you keep pounding 'em out all the way to Cooperstown.

"If our enemies know what we're doing, why can't we?"

The buzz about the New York Times revealing the Bush administration's spying on financial transactions reached entirely new levels of preposterousness in the week since the story was published.

Glenn Greenwald discloses the many conservatives who have gone beyond being offended to summoning Nazi-style thuggery against the people who wrote and published the story. His post reveals details that are simply appalling to everyone who values democracy. If someone gets injured as a result of these lunatics inciting violence, God help them.

But the reaction from the MSM has been more than pushback; they are hitting back -- hard.

Richard Orr, a blast from my personal past, is responsible for the headline above. He continues:

Correct me, but in all the stories I've seen and read on the Times' "exposure" that the government has been dogging al-Qaida's financial network, I have yet to see one concrete example of who or what is being harmed by it.

What's more, the 9-11 commission has publicly said such surveillance is necessary to choke off the money that feeds their terrorist operations.

So if al-Qaida wasn't aware their financial transactions are being tracked, we have nothing to fear from them. They're too stupid to worry about.

What we do have to fear are the mindless calls for prosecuting the news media for informing us of what the most secretive administration in memory is doing in the apparent belief they're running a private corporation instead of a democratic republic that requires an informed electorate.

They're the same cries that went up with publication of the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon era - the exposure of which led to the revelation that Nixon operatives had broken into a psychiatrist's office to find damaging personal information on Daniel Elsberg, the man who exposed what the administration was up to in Vietnam and elsewhere.

In Watergate, Nixon argued that the Pentagon Papers and the tapes from the Oval Office, if made public, would compromise national security when, in fact, it was national embarrassment and the fear of prosecution that really concerned them.

If our enemies know what we're doing, why can't we?

And this morning on Meet the Press, Dana Priest crushed Bill Bennett like a peanut -- with the Moral Gambler sitting right next to her. If you want to see it, McBlogger has it.

Update (7/3): Greenwald follows up. The right-wingers have disgraced temselves once again -- not that this atrocious display will stem their bile.