PORKER, BUSTED: Ted Stevens has been indicted: “Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator and a figure in Alaska politics since before statehood, has been indicted on seven counts of falsely reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in services he received from a company that helped renovate his home. Stevens, 84, has been dogged by a federal investigation into whether he pushed for fishing legislation that also benefited his son, an Alaska lobbyist.”
Hmm. Didn’t I suggest to the Republicans a while back that they needed to encourage him to resign? Now it’s a bit late.
UPDATE: Reader Jo Schroeder isn’t impressed:
Why can’t the Feds make real convictions on real crimes? Now it’s just False Statements. What a crock
Yes, as my colleague Peter Morgan noted in the Northwestern University Law Review some years ago (It’s not on the Web, alas), the False Statements Act is an overused weapon in the prosecutorial arsenal. Which isn’t to say that Stevens isn’t a sleaze . . . .
And reader Vic Havens comments:
Unlike Rep. Jefferson (D-LA), Sen. Stevens (R-AK) will be pressured to resign by his party fellow-members. Unlike Rep. Jefferson (D-LA), Sen. Stevens (R-AK) will resign.
Brendan Loy, meanwhile, predicts widespread blogger schadenfreude on both the left and right.