Money quotes

Billmon on the Dow Jones index reaching an all-time high:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high today: 11,727 -- four points higher than the previous record, set January 14, 2000. So if you invested $1,000 in the 30 companies in the Dow six years and almost nine months ago, you'd have $1000.34 today! [...] taking almost 7 years to get back to where you started isn't exactly something to brag about.

Billmon on the extensive coverage of the Amish schoolgirl shootings:

It's a horrible story, and as a father my heart goes out to the families involved, but I feel compelled to point out that if this were Baghdad, a day with only five dead children and five wounded ones would be considered the dawn of a new era of peace, and Tony Snow would be bragging about how much progress we're making in Iraq.

Not that the corporate media has noticed the discrepancy. Iraqi deaths (at least 52 today alone...) rate a couple of paragraphs in an AP story, if that.

If it bleeds, it leads -- as long as it's American blood, that is.

Poputonian on the contents of the letter captured during the raid which killed Abu Musab Zarqawi, allegedly from a member of al-Qaeda which said "prolonging the war is in our interest".

Who gave these instructions, Karl Rove or al Qaeda?

keninny at DownwithTryanny says:

I don't think Mark Foley is a "pedophile" but still think he deserves everything he's getting. [...] The power relationship is simply too unequal for society to smile and look the other way.

I don't think this hypothetical congressperson of ours is a pedophile. But I have no problem describing him or her as a sexual predator. "Predatory" seems to me quite an apt description for such behavior.

Is sexual predation enough to cost a nonhypothetical congressman his career? Well, why on earth not?

Glenn Greenwald on the the Foley scandal:

It is not a coincidence that the GOP was harboring someone like Mark Foley within its highest ranks while their most powerful political officials purposely looked the other way and even actively helped to conceal what he was up to, thereby enabling him to continue. After all, even now that this conduct has been exposed, their instinct -- all the way to the highest levels -- is to excuse and defend those leaders and offer up the most disgusting defenses -- all because preservation of their political power depends on it. This is not some bizarre aberration. This is how they operate and it is what they are. And the Mark Foley scandal is making it virutally impossible for anyone to convincingly deny it any longer.

Glenn Greenwald on the Fordham resignation:

If you were a person rooting for this scandal to bring down the GOP House Leadership (and I'm not saying such a person exists; I'm speaking hypothetically), and you had the power to create one event to happen today, the Fordham resignation, followed by his subsequent accusations, would have to be very high on the list, if not right at the very top.

Josh Marshall on the implications of the Fordham resignation:

Now, one of key figures in the scandal, Kirk Fordham, who was Foley's longtime Chief of Staff and until today Rep. Tom Reynolds' chief of staff, has been fired. And he's come out and said, no, the whole leadership story is a lie. Fordham says he repeatedly told Hastert's then-Chief of Staff Scott Palmer as far back as 2003 that there was a problem with Foley and the pages. And nothing was ever done.

So, two years before the date everyone's been focusing on back in 2005. We're not at parsing little details.

They staked everything on a story. And the story was apparently pure fiction.

Unless Hastert and Co. can thoroughly discredit Fordham in the next few hours (and oh are they going to try) I'd figure Hastert is gone by this time tomorrow if not sooner. And just as a capital ship generates a giant whirlpool as it founders and disappears into the sea, I'm sure he'll be taking several with him.

Brad DeLong on Matt Yglesias' comment that "the NRO gang, they're about three hundred times as intellectually honest as the average conservative broadcast media outlet":

Sorry Matt, 300 times the intellectual honesty quotient of Hugh Hewitt still leaves them 99 44/100 % hack.