'You still have to investigate crimes, not people.'

If you missed it, here’s 60 Minutes’ devasting piece on the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. This is the best piece of broadcast journalism I’ve seen in a very long time:

Scott Horton has been reporting on this case for months on his weblog at Harpers.org—his work is absolutely essential reading. There is no better example of what eight years of the Bush administration has done to American politics than this phony prosecution. Siegelman sits in prison today for no other reason than that he was a successful Democrat in a Republican state. I am sure that if the whole of this conspiracy becomes known before January 2009, several former high-level Bush administration officials will be prosecuted.

For what it’s worth, Karl Rove denies Jill Simpsons’s allegations. I don’t believe him and you shouldn’t either—his career is deception, and he’s a veteran of dirty-trick politics in Alabama.

And as though the whole sad affair were not maddening enough, at least one CBS affiliate in Alabama went dark while it was broadcasting the Siegelman piece. The station manager claims he lost the network feed from New York for 12 minutes—almost the exact length of the segment.

Update

The Times looks into the CBS blackout here. Horton called CBS:

I contacted CBS News in New York and was told that “There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.”

—Douglas Carlucci

Comments

[T Andress]

ALABAMA’S EXTREME LEFT GOP

“60 Minutes Done A Great Job”

The Bush’s elete group of corrupt GOP’ers are scared to death that Don Siegelman may be on the streets before the election. Slick Bob is so nervous that he is combing his hair and spraying his mouth and under arms every five minutes. He’s hoping that the next president will be John McCain a republican and that Riley will be asked to be McCain’s running mate.

However, if the next president is a Democrat he/she will probally appoint new U.S. Attorneys in Alabama. Riley along with most of the top GOP operatives could get Federal charges filed against them for taking millions of dollars from Michael Scanlon and Jack Abramoff. This money was used to defeat Siegelman’s lottery and to fund Riley’s two campaigns for governor.