Charles Pickering, who Bush recess-appointed to the 5th Circuit when his racist past prevented his nomination succeeding in the Senate, has decided to retire, less than a week before his term was up, issuing a statement attacking those who opposed him as “extreme special-interest groups” hostile to people with religious views. The self-important twit ascribed the defeat of some unnamed D Senators to their opposition to his nomination.
Silvio Berlusconi escapes jail yet again on two charges of bribing judges, back in the 1980s before he could simply restructure the entire judiciary and change any law he wanted to break. He was acquitted on one charge, and on the other the charge was dismissed, although it was proven, because of the statute of limitations. This is somewhat confusing, actually, because there is a discretionary element to the statute of limitations if the defendant has no criminal record. So the judges today decided to halve the statute of limitations from 15 to 7½ years (the bribe was paid in 1991). Also, there was a delay in the trial when Berlusconi got a law passed making himself immune from criminal prosecution; the trial resumed when the law was overturned. Berlusconi is smugly pretending that he was exonerated: “I was right to be serene, knowing full well that I had done nothing wrong.”
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