Back when I was a reporter, I once explained to a (Republican) politician that it was against the state ethics law to use his wife as the township secretary, since the two of them could collude to change the public record. He looked at me, shocked, and said, "If you're not in politics to make money for yourself and your family, why would you bother?" Why, indeed.

Privatizing public facilities gives them one more way to make illegal money:

SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) - Two Luzerne County judges are headed for federal prison.

Federal authorities say President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan were involved in a $2.6 million scheme to place juvenile offenders into facilities in which the judges had a financial interest.

Court documents state that in some cases, Ciavarella ordered children into detention even when juvenile probation officers did not recommend it.

The two have agreed to plead guilty to honest services fraud and tax fraud. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years in federal prison. They have agreed to step down from the bench.

Talking Points Memo:

The president and the White House have now compared their build-up to the Iraq war with their push to phase out Social Security enough times, that it seems worth creating a detailed taxonomy of the Bush White House approach to major policy initiatives in order to predict their efforts over the next two years. This would suggest that we're now in the lying and fear-mongering phase of the campaign, which would be followed of course by a later phase in which a specific policy remedy is brought forward, nominally meant to address the fake problem. Read more...