From the diaries by Erick.

Last Saturday it was a judge in St. Bernard Parish.

This week it’s a Gretna City Councilman. (Gretna is the parish seat of Jefferson, suburban New Orleans.)

That’s not really news.

The really interesting story here is that U.S. Attorney Jim Letten is the guy going after these clowns. Letten is a Republican and an eight-year Bush appointee who has the support of both Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA).

With both Louisiana senators now in agreement, Letten, the GOP’s choice for the job eight years ago, appears to be a lock to win Senate approval and hold onto his spot as the Justice Department’s top man in the New Orleans area. President Barack Obama, however, has the final say on whether Letten’s name is submitted for a vote.

Cautioning that her recommendation is only a first step in the process, Landrieu expressed confidence that Obama will nominate Letten, a registered Republican appointed by President George W. Bush.

“I think Jim Letten has good support from a broad range of Democrats as well as Republicans, ” Landrieu said as the U.S. attorney stood at her side for a news conference on the steps of the state Supreme Court.

“And I think President Obama said as he ran for this office that he wanted to reach across the aisle and build bridges and find middle ground. And I don’t think that he’s going to find this recommendation unusual.”  [emphasis added]

This would seem to be a case where the grownups on both sides of the aisle agree that what The People need is not Hope and Change, but More of the Same.

From the Book of Obama, Chapter and Verse 1:

In thebeginning was Obama, Worker of light and the Hope of People unhappy with that which had made their Country great.

And Obama saw that the world was without Internet, and He knew such a world to be void and formless

So he decided to bestow upon the World the gift of Internet

And some said to Obama, “But Obama! the World already has Internet, as was bestowed upon us by the Gore, Great in his girth and his gift of hyperbole!”

But Obama heard them not; for He knew the world began with His ascension to the Promised Land of the office which He currently Holds

And so He bestowed upon them an Internet, giving it, through His power, for the first time to the People, though some still cried out that this gift was false…

There’s always been a creepy sense of vanguard-esque self-importance among the members of the Obama White House staff. Yesterday, we got more evidence of that, as the White House put out a press release declaring that this first year of Obama marks “the first time the activities at the White House Easter Egg Roll have been broadcast online” (screencap here in case of memoryholing).

The problem? George W. Bush’s White House started offering a live webcast of the Easter Egg Roll in 2002 (screencap here in case of memoryholing)

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We take for granted that the government of the United States will act with probity and restraint. Uniquely among nations, we have a government that is overshadowed by powerful ideas about the sources of its legitimacy. These are encoded in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, key passages of the Gettysburg Address (“dedicated to the proposition…”, “of the people, by the people, for the people”) and elsewhere.

Examining the history of our government’s involvement in political economy bears out that it has always been very reluctant to intervene in private arrangements. Every nation must find a critical balance between the rights of men and the rights of society, and every nation must provide for its material well-being in the context of that balance. As Americans, we have always sought to err on the side of human dignity and private rights, even in times of war and crisis.

We’re now deeply enmeshed in crisis. Moments of crisis often bring change. But now we now have a President who is pleased to tell us that we must look to the future with fear, rather than welcome it with hope as Americans have always done.

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At very least, this ongoing saga goes to show that you simply can’t run for the highest office in the land on a platform of exceptionless adherence to the Rule of Law and purer-than-the-driven-snow ethicality, and then implement that promise on a “well, it’s [supposedly] better than the last guy” basis. Is that business as usual? Absolutely. However, President Obama didn’t run for office on a platform of “business as usual”; rather, he ran on a platform of revolutionizing the entire Washington world, and leaving scandals and errors like these behind forever.

Reading the arguments presented by those defending now-withdrawn HHS nominee Tom Daschle by saying “He only broke the law once, and I really like his policies, so we should ignore that,” and defending Obama by claiming that a better record than the one they assign George W. Bush is the only bar he need clear, is a source of a good bit of humor for me (as an aside, does anybody here remember how many Bush appointees had to withdraw from consideration due to cheating on their taxes or being implicated in pay-to-play scandals? I didn’t think so).

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