Wise Words on John Edwards

Scott Horton:

The Edwards prosecutors may well win their case, but not because any crime was involved. Rather, they’re likely to win because John Edwards is one of the most reviled politicians in the United States, and so a choice target. No doubt his affair, undertaken while his heroic wife was dying of cancer, makes him the definition of a cad, but while he may be morally unsuited for high office, that is not the question in this trial. If Edwards can be imprisoned for using campaign funds to try to cover up his flaws, then few politicians could fairly escape prison. The Justice Department appears instead to be engaged in statutory vandalism, and it is awarding itself exceptional power to intrude into the electoral process—a power that is ripe for abuse, as the Edwards case demonstrates.

One more partisan Bush U.S. state attorney is allowed to apply a wrecking ball to the legal system by one of the most cowardly Attorney Generals the USDoJ has even had. In support of which claim, two words: Don Siegelman.

Look out below, Asia edition?

Hong Kong and Japan down 2.5% (Shanghai amazingly not so bad0. US futures look like maybe -1.5%. Financial press seems to ascribe it to gridlock in Europe thanks to the collapse of the center/center right in Greece/France plus the US jobs data. So it could just be the normal correlation move after Friday’s US selloff.

I see the results in France and Greece as a positive, since European economic woes are in direct proportion to German stubbornness. The immovable object has at last encountered the irresistible force, so there’s hope on the distant horizon.
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Update: A fascinating outcome! Germany and France are up, Brazil, China and the US are neutral, but the UK, Japan and Hong Kong are down. So if politics is driving this, Europeans seem to agree that the results in France and Greece are positive. This seems to suggest that the Asian drop is mostly followthrough from the US job numbers, while China is actually up in concert with Germany and France. Bob Pisani of CNBC:

“We’ve seen Socialists before, it’s not the end of the world,” one trader said to me this morning, trying to explain why the markets were rising all morning. “(François) Mitterand did not destroy France. This is not a 180-degree about face.”

He does have a point. Hollande’s motto was, “Change is now.”

But judging by the markets, no one seems to believe that Hollande is going to be the vanguard of an anti-German movement in Europe.

First there is the problem of French legislative elections, which begin on June 10. It is not at all clear that the Socialists will win an absolute majority just because Hollande won 51 percent of the vote, though they do control the Senate.

Diageo does a very good thing. Will Microsoft follow?

Leo Hickman, The Guardian:

Diageo, one of the world’s largest drinks companies, has announced it will no longer fund the Heartland Institute, a rightwing US thinktank which briefly ran a billboard campaign this week comparing people concerned about climate change to mass murderers and terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson and Ted Kaczynski.

On Thursday, a billboard appeared over the Eisenhower Expressway in Illinois showing a picture of Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who in 1996 was convicted of a 17-year mail bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens. The caption read: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” A day later it was withdrawn.
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Its website is still hosting the original press release, which includes the claim that the “most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Microsoft, which has a policy of supplying free software to all non-profit organisations in the US, posted a blog on its website on Saturday distancing itself from Heartland.