Republican Felon Family Values

by emptywheel

Remember Stephen Griles, who at different times was doinking both Italia Frederici (who served as Jack Abramoff's liaison inside Department of Justice) and Sue Ellen Wooldridge (who was giving sweatheart deals to favored oil companies at the expense of the taxpayers)? A few weeks ago, he signed a pretty nice plea deal in which he'd get some jail time--but he wouldn't have to cooperate in the ongoing investigations into either Frederici or Wooldridge.

Well, it seems he wanted to have further insurance against testifying against his current gal, Wooldridge, because just days after he made his plea deal, he married her up. Now, if he's ever asked to testify against Wooldridge, he gets to plead spousal privilege.

Gotta tell you, these Republican thugs sure set new standards for family values.

Comments

[P J Evans]

Yep, EW: standards that the cat might bring in, if your cat is prone to raiding the trash.

'Party of morality', my a**. These guys only recognize morality when it gives them a quick way out of one of their messes. (This also reminds me of Darth getting married to avoid the draft; was that his fourth or fifth deferment?)

[bmaz]

EW - Marital priviledge usually does not extend to communications made prior to marraige; especially communications that are part and parcel of a common criminal enterprise.

[Redshift]

I don't have a reference handy, but I recall hearing at the time this blew up (on Randi Rhodes, I think) that before she was put in charge of giving away the store to the oil companies and possibly when they first got involved, Wooldridge was Griles ethics advisor! And she was promoted out of that position because, y'know, shagging your subordinate is kinda unethical.

The mind boggles.

[emptywheel]

I was wondering about that, bmaz. Also note, he may be subject to bigger fines because she's got more than he does.

Redshift--I get the feeling they're the kind of peopel who might hang well with Wolfie and his gal pal.

[freepatriot]

here's a little off-topic nugget

apparently tokyo jodi the worm tongue greater has psychic abilities that previously suspected

consider this tokyo jodi comment from empty wheel's post last week; "Conyers wants more interviews":, which was sourced from "the Politico via Laura Rozen"

If Monica is supposed to have done something illegal with DOJ types, requesting loyality oaths in blood or something, then why haven't those DOJ lawyer types said something?

Are is this just more suppose this, suppose that?

Gather all the emails in the world and see if you can find something.

I will warrant that this time the folks are going to be real careful about asserting anything positively, so the perjury trick is not going to happen again.

Posted by: Jodi | April 17, 2007 at 17:55

tokyo jodi the worm tongue was proven wrong by emptywheel, in a post titled "I Guess Monica Wasn't the Only One Issuing Loyalty Oaths" ON THE SAME FUCKING DAY TOKYO JODI THE WORM TONGUE MADE THE COMMENT

now the story seems to have GROWN SOME LEGS

there is a diary posted at DKOS; "Concerned DOJ Employees Send Anonymous Ltr to Leahy re: MORE Politicizing", that basically repeats emptywheel's post from last week, except the story is sourced from Crooks And Liars

looks like the letter from "A Group of Concerned Department of Justice Employees," to the Housse and Senate Judiciary Committees has been made public

think about that for a minute

the very DAY that tokyo jodi the worm tongue says that no such complaints exist, the complaints that "don't exist" surface in the hands of the Congress

I'm telling you folks, tokyo jodi has some psychic powers. They're kinda cassandra-ized, but this woman can predict the future, in a way (in the WRONG way)

she can wrongly predict nearly any situation you could name

hey, tokyo jodi the worm tongue, the Yankees and the RedSox are playing tonight, who do you like ???

[Rayne]

Oh, this is a different game Griles and Frederici-Griles are playing...it's called transferring assets. Let's say there's some sort of financial penalty that Griles has to pay -- or believes he will have to pay in the future. He transfers the assets to his spouse to protect them. Or vice versa. I remember being counseled on this quite some time ago along with a group of other members of the local SAE organization, by a guest speaker who was an attorney specializing in corporate law and bankruptcy.

So...does this mean Griles believes he's on the hook but good?

Ah, love, a many splendored thing!

[Rayne]

Whoops, I forgot, it's Wooldridge-Griles, not Frederici-Griles. All cats gray or some such thing.

[freepatriot]

keep in mind that a spouse can decide to vollentarily testify against a spouse

so this isn't an iron clad defense

what kind of dirt do we got on the wife ???

WHAT ??? to much like dick cheney ???

wink

[LabDancer]

E. Wheel: But it may be relevant to note that, having prosecuted & defended criminals for three decades, I see such standards are utterly in keeping with the antisocially determined.

The lessons of the political marketplace in America – since no later than the European “ideal” was cut off at the end of WWII - suggest that the domestic authoritarian is a pest as persistent as the cane toad in Australia.

We also see that its nice to have some distant early warning system in place to warn against the pending devastation they leave in the wake of their dominance - in effect a really big searchlight operated by those who familiar with their history and breeding grounds and mating rituals. Occasionally you get lucky with someone who didn’t just attend the box socials but actually married into the mob and turned on it - I'm thinking of John Dean.

But like many orchids you just can't grow John Deans in captivity, they have to be captured in the wild. We could encourage academic study, like history - but that doesn't seem to work well with some school districts in certain states. So it's more reliable for us to seek out and nuture those who clearly are gifted at picking out infected toads out from frog habitats.

Uh ... in honor of Sean Penn’s victory over Colbert in the Great WWF-style Metaphor-Off last night [and also because I don’t think I can stretch the amphibian one any further], I’ll just make a shift here back generally towards our species - - and point out that I think you Ms. E. Wheel have several markers of that gift - - notably, cred as a reverse Night of the Living Dead detector.

I don't think I can suggest that resorting to levels of behavior under the guise of politics which so low as to be indistinguishable from crime is something exclusive to the right. I'd like to, and it sure seems so at times, but greed seems to act more like osmosis in plants in crossing political barriers.

But crime in the service of politics for politics sake? For a variety of reasons [of which Dean has most of mine and many more] I think that's a pretty sure marker of authoritarianism.

However, I think it's possible what we are observing now, in the death throes of the Bush Cheney Occupation, is the emergence of a veritable Burgess Shale of new authoritarian mutations, from the workings of many conflicting rationalizations on the RNC/religiotic/Second Amendment/crony capitalist DNA, as reality has worn down its sharp edges and its faulty RNA machine has stuttered out flawed replications while its gene pool has suffused with the bastard love child of Donald Segretti - Karl Rove; the inheritors of Nixon's flame of the unitary executive - the wank tanks growing around the AEI host; and a resilient underground cell which has proven able to adapt to survive the apparently inevitable episodes of abuse at the hands of their more successful projects who fancy themselves progenitors instead of produce [I'm thinking of the friends of Hohlt.]

I've been calling the wide variety of new mutants NEOCONARTISTS. It seems to fit the increasingly dominant behaviour pattern suggestive of more, or more robust, repeats on its criminal allele.

Or maybe EARLY CRIMICONS is better, because I expect CRIMICONS is where the mutation cycle will bottom out and allow the species to replicate en mass for its next Bull Run.

[McCarthy - Nixon - Reagan - Bush on 'ludes - Bush on Crack - Anyone care to guess at the next Bull Run leader? It may be too close to call, especially since nurture is as involved as nature. But with a post-WWII ratio of 5 of THEM and only 2 holding to any anchor of reasonableness. Okay, okay, I left out Ike & Bush on 'ludes didn't quite get to full criminal. But my thinking was that Ike picked his party based on his having a major jones for golf, and Bush the Elder only had one term to grow horns and has to get major demerits for fathering the current king. Okay, I'll leave him out. Still in all, I think the typical rate is scratch two Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates and at least one will end up vying for World Domination through wider use of military might and calling for suspension of various important laws and constitutional safeguards just until we can get through his particular spot of bother.

Which we MUST prevent. From now on - no, from 2000 on, it's not been just the Constitution and personal freedoms at risk; it's the planet and survival of the species.

On the plus side, hope springs in the last mid-terms and polls since that some of the more retrievable streams of disappointment in the Rovian nibelungen base might be diverted away from the RNC floodplain - at least in the short run.

But in the long run, if past is prologue, it seems likely that Rove is this era's Roger Maris (Sorry, Rog; nothing personal.), his record at first to held up in admiration [!?!!], then as a standard, and then surpassed. And it seems he's surpassed Segretti's stud record, if the nest in DoJ is representative.]

So - lots of work in the lab for professor emptywheel; a life's work found, I trust.

Speaking of labs [Watch THIS segue!], with your frequent multi-post days in recent weeks - - a trend which I'm feeling goes back to at least the pre-game frenzies stage heading into High Noon at Prettyman - - I get the impression either you’ve found a way to replace the sustenance from your other work to blog full time, or else mr. e took on an extra job, or [punchline alert]you've put the lab in remunerative labour.

Whatever facilitates it, long may it run.

Bmaz: Given the influences of the newly robust repeats on the criminal allele, I would expect the thinking patterns of the transitional mutation Neoconartist will feature quite a lot of this outsmarting-oneself behavior, as he works desperately to avoid irrelevancy, impoverishment and the pen. But as a trial lawyer, I'm more used to working out things int the morgue, so I'd be perfectly content to defer to someone more able to detect behavioral patterns in the living - a psychologist, for example.

[Veritas78]

I think we can assume that "jodi" is on someone's payroll for the work he/she is attempting here. It's becoming obvious at Think Progress and HuffPo that the trolls are synced, hence paid. If they threw $240k at Armstrong Williams, there's a lot more that they are throwing both up and down the rw foodchain.

My own hunch is that it's $50 a post, but $20 or $100 wouldn't surprise me.

Btw, I post for free!

[bmaz]

Geez, for a $100 a pop, I'll write write some tripe for them and then donate the proceeds to Marcy and FDL!

[bianco]

well if for every jodi, karma raises a labdancer, then let the rnc drop a billion in payola please.

[Mimikatz]

Cheney didn;t get married to avoid the draft, he and the wife conceived a child as soon as his student deferments ran out. Can't remember which one, but obviously it's the older one.

[readerOfTeaLeaves]

Crimicon replicants, indeed. LabDancer, I would refer you to Joe Conason's "It CAN Happen Here," which recounts the ideological mutations of politically toxic subspecies [IranContritis Venalis, Enronalgia Dementis, etc.] over time. Conason seems to have an instinct for misencoded alleles in RNCbots.

The subspecies Abramson, Elliottitis is particularly enlightening for its robust codings of obtuse defiance and authoritarian mendacity. Like an Aussie cane toad, this subspecies appears to kill what seeks to eat it.

Neoconartists appear to result from (and perpetuate) genuinely 'base' pairings. An RNC Taxonomy would make a useful Wiki by illuminating the inheritance patterns and spotting the more lethal mutations early on. The inability to distinguish legitimate business from criminal activity appears to infect all RNCbot subspecies.

[orionATL]

oh, come on e'wheel

don't be so damned elitist.

the sopranos have family values they are proud of,

as do their relatives, the republicans.

think of abrahmoff and his family.

[joejoejoe]

Is doinking and boinking the same thing?

[peanutgallery]

From Deborah Yang down below

hey, ew, I know Hopsicker is not really your style, but he has an interesting take on Lam and Jerry Lewis - that perhaps Lam had a sealed indictment against Lewis which DiFi also almost elicited from Lam. the rambling and speculative story is at Madcow morning news http://www.madcowprod.com/04102007.html

[emptywheel]

joejoejoe

I think so.

[Jodi]

tokyo, freepatriot the wormtongue,

I asked a question which at the time was valid. I am still not aware of where these supposed public letters of complaint about "forced loyality oaths" are. I would appreciate a pointer/url. Thanks.

(and on a personal note tokyo, freepatriot the wormtongue, can't you shorten you nick name for me, so I will have less typing to do when I do yours.

Veritas78

is that $240K per year? Oh my gosh! Were sexual favors involved?

[Jodi]

And further for everyone.

When the blog title states that only left liberal Democratic views are wanted, I will bid you all adieu.

[bianco]

1) having served an 8 year stretch on usenet , my nose has been trained, against my very own will even, to spot a busted troll on contact, and franky my dear jodi, you write like a busted troll.

2) the spotter of doink v boink wins a qp doll.

3) refining the the title of this thread into a more pointed trope: it might be nifty keen for anti-repubicans to coin the term "felony values" as a smackdown antidote to the tried and untrue "family values" earsore.

[Veritas78]

Sexual favors? You tell us. The cash is flowing to some. It would be a shame if you were working for free.

[desertwind]

Way OT, but I'll bet there's a scandal in this and, even if there's not, y'all should sign the petition. I'm just somebody who likes chocolate --

The FDA -- 'encouraged' by national manufacturing groups -- is considering changing the definition of chocolate. The FDA is arguing that the American public can't tell the difference between mockolate and chocolate, so why not allow a cheaper product out there and call it "chocolate"?

April 25th is the deadline for the FDA to receive citizen input on this:

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/oc/dockets/comments/getDocketInfo.cfm?EC_DOCUMENT_ID=1477&SORT=DOCKET_NOD&MAXROWS=15&START=1&CID=&AGENCY=FDA

Chocolate lovers of the world unite! These 2 sites & LATimes OpEd piece explain better than I can:

http://dontmesswithourchocolate.guittard.com/howtohelp.asp

http://www.typetive.com/candyblog/

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-may19apr19,0,4511657.story?coll=la-opinion-center

[TCinLA]

Republicans and their lady problems.

Anybody wonder how it is that Mr.Powerful Neo-Con, aka Paul Wolfowitz, can only manage to snag Ms. Bow-Wow of 2007??? Talk about "throw a bag over her and do it for Old Glory." Yikes!

And then there's Fred Thompson,who admittedly now has Hollywood connections and a Hollywood paycheck, but has anyone checked out Wocott's site to see the "senior prom pic" of him and Ms. Bobbalicious of 2005????? Now thatr is a Republican Trophy Wife! Can you imagine her as First Lady? Or First Two Lady??????

[freepatriot]

for the record, tokyo jodi the worm tongue picked the Yankees

what's the matter worm tongue, somebody drop a house on your sister ???