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YOWZER!

The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the US Treasury Department are investigating allegations that a Bush-appointed US Attorney inappropriately shared private income tax information on one of his targets with a state judicial commission that included one of his relatives, according to court documents and a source close to the investigation.

Dunnica Lampton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, is already under investigation for allegations of political prosecutions in his state. According to new documents viewed by Raw Story, Lampton allegedly shared the private income tax records of then-Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver E. Diaz Jr. with the Mississippi Commission on Judicial Performance and with one of its then-commissioners, his distant cousin Leslie B. Lampton. …

Heard any whispers, y’all?

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. . . I’m glad I’m not in Venice today.

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Ok, these are just names offered up by the Great Mentioner and probably mean nothing, or mean things that have to do with favor exchanges and nothing to do with what might happen.  BUT the the Wall Street Journal’s WashWire blog lists Ronnie Musgrove as one of 6 possible candidates for Secretary of Education.

In noting this report, YallPolitics also noted that Musgrove’s campaign Web site promises he would “fight for better education the Mississippi Way.”

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Oxford has had its fair share of being in the limelight this year, such as hosting the first presidential debate in September on the University of Mississippi campus.

But just a few months prior, it was the rise and fall of prominent attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, often referred to as the “Tort King,” that turned all eyes on Oxford in 2008.

On Nov. 28, 2007, Scruggs, his son Zach Scruggs, law partner Sidney Backstrom, former attorney Timothy Balducci and former state auditor Steven Patterson were indicted on federal charges for trying to bribe Circuit Court Judge Henry Lackey with $40,000 for a favorable ruling in a lawsuit — Jones v. Scruggs —against the elder Scruggs over Hurricane Katrina litigation.

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Headline in today’s Wall Street Journal:

How to Combat a Banking Crisis: First, Round Up the Pessimists:
Latvian Agents Detain a Gloomy Economist; ‘It Is a Form of Deterrence’

h/t Krugman.

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This sounds like a colorful one:

It’s a bizarre case in which police say a television and radio personality bought a disguise, had the alleged murder weapon checked out by a gun store and planned an alibi that included watching a football game with friends in Mississippi.

The elaborate plot to kill his wife went awry, investigators said, when they found a handwritten note in Vince Marinello’s trailer that they said was a checklist for the killing, including a note on getting rid of the gun and disguise.  …

Jefferson Parish sheriff’s investigators said Marinello — who was arrested Sept. 7, 2006 — disguised himself as a scruffy man — complete with fake beard — and rode a bicycle to the parking lot of a building in suburban Metairie where his wife was attending a regularly scheduled appointment.  …

The Marinellos met when Vince Marinello was hosting an Elvis impersonators contest at a New Orleans music club in 2004. Her family said he swept Liz off her feet. They married eight weeks after meeting on Oct. 24, 2004.

The relationship apparently fell apart just as rapidly as it began.

Less than a year after the marriage, Marinello sent his wife a handwritten note scolding her for not complimenting him on his appearance as much as their neighbors and friends did, not spending enough time with him and spending too much of his money.

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The Clarion Ledger fronts a Jerry Mitchell story, in which Brad Pigott has good things to say about Eric Holder:

The Obama administration will be the first to implement the newly passed Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act, which creates a cold-cases unit inside the Justice Department to gather information for possible prosecution of unpunished killers from the civil-rights era. Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden were co-sponsors of the bill.

Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, architect of the bill, anticipates the law will receive high priority from the Obama administration and from Eric Holder, Obama’s choice for attorney general.

Holder, who served as acting attorney general in the Clinton administration, has shown “great sensitivity to victims, and he will enhance that position as attorney general,” Sykes said. “I’m looking forward to working with him and the Obama administration.”

…Former U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott of Jackson worked with Holder in the investigation and 2000 arrest of Ernest Avants, convicted in the Klan’s 1966 killing of Ben Chester White. “Eric Holder will be vigilant in seeing new re-sources brought to bear on these sometimes stale civil-rights cases,” Pigott said.

As deputy attorney general, “he was my immediate boss for the last few years of the Clinton administration,” Pigott said. “He was a great one. He is very smart, very focused, a great listener.”

Holder will do well in his new job, he said. “He’s soft-spoken but quick-minded. He has a depth of experience, which is what we need.”

As an aside: Doesn’t the Clarion Ledger have the worst website in newspapers? I had to see a physical paper to notice this story, which is above the fold. You can look and look at the site and miss very important information. I may have looked past it because of an opaque headline, but it was virtually invisible.

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Stating that lobbying has grown explosively in recent years in Jackson, and that, contrary to public hand-wringing, he thinks they perform and important service, Sid Salter concludes that  the legislature is very unlikely to do anything about the lobbying situation.  Why does he say they perform a public service, you ask?

Because, no offense, not all of the state legislators we elect and send to Jackson are exactly Masters of the Universe when it comes to public policy.

Given the cluelessness of our legislative hens, we must hire some foxes to take care of the hen-house.  The scariest part is that he has a point there.

Folks have noted that Salter’s columns sometimes fail to arrive at an opinionated conclusions.  This one seems to answer that complaint.

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A not-terribly informed reading of tne news suggests Ole Miss (which rises to number 22 in the AP poll, breaks in at 25 in the USA Today poll, and does not make the BCS poll) looks to play in the Cotton Bowl against Texas Tech (so suggests more informed speculation here and in this account of Texas Tech’s final game Baylor).  Texas Tech’s only loss was a severe thrashing by Oklahoma, and it’s ranked number 7.   Ole Miss has beat Texas Tech twice in the Independence Bowl and lost to it twice in regular season games during the Eli Manning era.  There’s apparently an outside shot Ole Miss would play in the Capital One Bowl (whose spokesman says nice things about Ole Miss here) but Georgia appears the likelier contender there.

Bear in mind I don’t really know what I’m talking about here.  “All I know is what I read in the newspapers.”

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As WaPo’s Emily Wax reconstructs the attack, “So what was that about?” is now the main question around the Mumbai massacre. Ghost Wars author Steve Coll calls it “a mystery somewhat without a mystery“:

India, with at least some degree of international cooperation, will now undertake an investigation to try to identify the support networks the Mumbai attackers employed, with a particular eye on signs of direct state sponsorship in Pakistan. If past investigations into such groups prove to be any guide, it may be difficult to find clear-cut evidence of direct involvement by Pakistani intelligence or army personnel. This is because Pakistan, knowing the stakes of getting caught red-handed, has increasingly pursued its clandestine proxy war against India in Kashmir and on the Indian mainland through layers and layers of self-managing and non-state groups. The Pakistani government and its domestic Islamist proxies, including nominally peaceful charities based in Pakistan but with operations in Kashmir, almost certainly pass through money and weapons on a large scale. They do so, however, in such a way that is very difficult to trace these supplies back to the government.

Despite some WAY-out-of-the-box thinking on “celebrity terrorism” from security expert Paul Cornish, and Paul Cruickshank’s surmise that “it is quite possible, and even likely, that the Mumbai attacks were the result of a joint operation between a Kashmiri group and indigenous Indian militants” (most likely the Indian Mujahedeen), ToL’s theory seems most plausible:

Officials and analysts in the region believe that last week’s atrocities were designed to provoke a crisis, or even a war, between the nuclear-armed neighbours, diverting Islamabad’s attention from extremism in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and thus relieving pressure on al-Qaeda, Taleban and other militants based there.

One analyst even described the attacks as a “pre-emptive strike” against Barack Obama’s strategy to put Pakistan and Afghanistan at the centre of US foreign policy.

McClatchy notes that

Indian media reports, which are unsubstantiated, claimed that intercepted phone calls were between some of the terrorists and a mastermind in Karachi called “Amir”. They have reported that the attackers were trained in marine commando techniques on Mangla Dam, a lake stretching between Punjab province and the Pakistani-held part of the Kashmir region.

A report Sunday in The Hindu newspaper said that an email taking responsibility for the attacks, signed by an unknown group called the Deccan Mujahideen, originated from a computer in Pakistan. The Indian accounts left analysts and security experts with many questions, however. Lashkar-e-Taiba has not previously targeted Westerners, as in the Mumbai attack, as it is focused against India, especially Indian rule over part of Muslim-majority Kashmir. Nor has it shown the military-style expertise displayed by the terrorists.

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