It astounds me how many TV bobbleheads are ignorant of the fact that dropping charges does not exonerate Ted Steven. They're just so eager to proclaim his innocence, I guess because they're too lazy to figure out the difference. What else is new?

Mr. Stevens’s chief lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, said of his client: “His name is cleared. He is innocent of the charges as if they had never been brought.”

Prof. Joshua Dressler of the Ohio State University law school said, however, that the failure to be convicted in a criminal trial does not, by itself, confer innocence on someone.

“The decision by the judge to dismiss the case is certainly not a statement that the defendant is innocent,” Professor Dressler said, “but that the prosecutors didn’t play by the rules, and for that reason alone we have to use this strong remedy” to deter other prosecutors from similar misbehavior.

In fact, two jurors have said that the dismissal of the case because of the prosecutors’ actions did not make Mr. Stevens innocent in their view.

Brian Kirst, an alternate juror in the trial, said the prosecutors’ problems had nothing to do with much of the testimony that mattered to him. “I mean he had the chair,” said Mr. Kirst, a professional photographer.

He said he was strongly leaning toward conviction — though he did not participate in the verdict because he was randomly deemed an alternate — because he believed that the defense had done little to rebut the basic accusations that Mr. Stevens had been given lots of gifts and never reported them.

Colleen Walsh, one of the jurors who convicted Mr. Stevens, said on her personal blog of the trial’s collapse, “The only thing this proves is that the prosecution messed everything up.”

Ms. Walsh, a church secretary, wrote on the blog as if speaking to Mr. Stevens, saying: “You may be innocent on corruption charges which were never brought up. But you are still guilty of not disclosing some of your major gifts to the public.”

Most of the prosecutors’ mistakes involved the handling of Bill Allen, a chief witness against Mr. Stevens who, the government said, provided some $250,000 worth of goods and services to upgrade the senator’s Alaska residence. Prosecutors failed to provide defense lawyers with interview notes in which Mr. Allen told them that he believed Mr. Stevens would have paid for things if he had been sent a bill and that the renovations were worth only about $80,000.

Here's a perfect example of the Washington Post's schizophrenic coverage. They have one article talking about Ted Steven's "vindication":

Now, Stevens's friends and former colleagues say, the last word will be one of vindication -- albeit bittersweet -- over an unjust prosecution that ended his tenure as the longest-serving Republican in Senate history.

"We're delighted that it's been demonstrated that Ted was telling us the truth all along. Obviously, we're a little disappointed that this didn't come out before the election," said Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), who served for years with Stevens on the powerful Appropriations Committee.

Bennett paraphrased former Labor secretary Raymond J. Donovan, who beat back an indictment in the mid-1980s: "I think he can get his reputation back. I don't know where he goes to get his legal fees back," Bennett said.

[...] Since then, he and his wife, Catherine, have spent half their time in their home here and the rest at their self-described "chalet" near Anchorage. Friends said Stevens left Washington late last week to return to Alaska, where he finished up repairs to his deck.

That's the same wrap-around deck that was built for Stevens by workers from Veco, the now-defunct oil services company whose former chief executive testified that he plied Stevens with more than $250,000 in gifts including home remodeling.

[...] After the news broke that the charges would be dropped, Stevens "sounded elated," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). "Here's a guy who gave 60 years of service to this country, and he was screwed [by federal prosecutors]. . . . How does he get his reputation back?"

And then they have this editorial in today's exact same paper:

Yet this extraordinary reversal cannot erase or forgive the ugly behavior that gave rise to the indictment in the first place. Trial records and testimony painted a picture of a man so consumed with his own sense of entitlement that he did not think twice about accepting such expensive freebies as a Viking gas grill, a vibrating Shiatsu massage lounger and a five-foot sculpture of migrating salmon -- not to mention extensive plumbing, electrical and carpentry work on his "chalet" in Girdwood, Alaska. All told, the government calculated that Mr. Stevens took gifts worth in excess of $250,000.

Where does this paragon go to get his reputation back? Hmm. Well, he could start by selling off his ill-gotten gains and donating the money to charity. I'm sure Ted (who's now working for a D.C. lobbying firm) could learn to love a more ascetic lifestyle!

Gross breaches of law and fairness by prosecutors are the reason that Mr. Stevens will walk free. The Justice Department admitted that the lawyers from the Public Integrity Section who put Mr. Stevens on trial failed to turn over to defense lawyers information about contradictory statements by a key prosecution witness. An agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who worked on the case also recently alleged that prosecutors had been willfully withholding pertinent evidence from the defense team.

I can't stress it enough: These are abuses of the law. Far too often, prosecutors do illegal things in their eagerness to get a conviction, and I'm always happy to see them get knocked down for doing it - even when it means a sleaze like Stevens gets off.

But that doesn't make our "intertubes" hero any less guilty, except in the legal sense -even if his conviction will be reversed. Remember that.

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You lie, you get convicted. Have Stevens' re-election chances just gone down the "tubes"? Sorry, it was too easy.

The Hill:

Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Senate Republican in history and patriarch of Alaska politics, was found guilty of felony charges for making false statements.

The verdict could spell the end of a 40-year Senate career for a man who rose to be one of the most dominant figures in the upper chamber and who helped transform Alaska in its 50 years of statehood. The verdict was reached after the jury deliberated since Wednesday and found the 84-year-old senator guilty of failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts from Bill Allen, the former head of Veco Corp., and other friends.

The jury did not seem to buy the explanation from Stevens that Allen showered him with gifts he didn't want and was unaware of, and that he believed the $160,000 he gave to another contractor covered all costs for the home renovations.

Good riddance. We'll keep you updated on the sentence when it comes down.

UPDATE: Jed has some good videos of Palin "palling around" with her BFF Ted Stevens.

NOW takes a look at the FBI case against the "Corrupt Bastards Club," where cash and favors flowed between an Alaska-based oil services company and an Alaska Republican good-old-boy network that stretched all the way to DC.

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Two state legislators have been convicted in Federal court for accepting bribes from VECO. The FBI has video and audio evidence that reveal VECO executives shockingly handing out cash to those legislators in exchange for promises to roll back a tax on the oil industry. But that may only be the tip of the oily iceberg. NOW's Maria Hinojosa learns that dozens more lawmakers are being eyed in the growing scandal, including one of the country's most powerful politicians, Alaska U.S. Senator Ted Stevens.

Watch the complete show online here.