Brush with Fame

OK, so it’s a very small brush, with very minor fame, but…

George Melly, jazz singer and author, has died. He played a concert at my school when I was about 16, when I was in charge of the school’s sound equipment (not quite as trivial as it sounds, as we were a main arts venue in the town, and a showcase for the county). Naturally he had his own sound guy, and I was very happy to hand the reins over to someone who knew what he was doing. But I did help with the get in and the take down (ooh, listen to me using industry jargon) and worked one of two spotlights on the night.

What’s that? Well, I guess I could send you an autograph, but I don’t really have any 8×10’s at the moment, sorry.

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Happy 4th

We’ve been trying to work out something to do to celebrate our first 4th of July back in England. Naturally we don’t get the day off, so time is limited, so we’ve decided that ‘smores will be our tradition. This isn’t as easy as you might imagine – Graham Crackers aren’t available here, neither is Hershey chocolate (thankfully) and most of the chocolate we have is sold in thicker pieces, and marshmallows are not too common.

But I think the effort will be worth it to help Sam with his incomprehension of the whole thing (he asked me today whether my aunt, whose home is a mile away, lives in England) and Lauren with her need to eat every 38 minutes.

(For those of you who read my family blog, yes this is a duplicate – I woke up at 5 this morning and am already too tired to think more)

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Morally Bankrupt

The President has commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby, the administration official who lied to investigators trying to uncover who leaked the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. He still has to pay a fine (or rather, have some ‘friends of Bush’ pay the fine), still has a criminal record (which will obviously prevent him getting a job with a friend of Bush), and has to serve probation (there go his plans for holding up the local Kwik-E-Mart).

As Josh Marshall and others have pointed out, going to prison might have changed Libby’s views on telling what he knows. Being pardoned would have prevented him from pleading the fifth in any Congressional investigation. What a coincidence, then, that the President found a happy medium.

I’ll leave the last word for the prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald:

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.” The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.

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