I gave you more toward the purchase of the WHITE HOUSE than anyone else.

Don't forget your TEXAS friend, your mom and dad used to claim Houston home and I would like to return to my NEW HOME, just down the road.

Gee, dub ya, I did help to get you that POWER and you know about Pay Backs. Please, NO DeLay now

Thanks,

Your friend 'on the lam' Kenny

those two would look good in stripes.

"I always said those two would look good in stripes."

DeLay and Santorum?

Libby and Rove?

Bush and Cheney?

Oh.

I can never feel 'good' about someone getting a long prison sentence. It's just too horrific.

But I can feel very good about an evildoer being punished, and wrongs being called wrongs by society.

At least the verdict is justice, sweet justice.

(Yes, the impact on people of his crimes was worse; if his being in prison fixed that, it'd be another question.)

Now that you mention it, those others would look good too.

Perhaps now someone in the justice department can leverage the sentences of these two convicts into information about what went on behind closed doors while Bush/Cheney met with industry executives to write an energy policy that resulted in outrageous energy bills and brown outs in California and our current gasoline price spike. Unless of course, part of the discussion in those meeting involved pardons of any convictions related to fraud and/or antitrust violations.

will pardon them both before he is impeached...

I'm more than delighted that the jury did the right thing, in fact I'm tickled over it. And I hope that these criminals will be punished for what they've done not only to their employees and investors but to society as a whole. These kind of crimes have a far larger ripple effect throughout society than does someone holding up a bank in a stocking. However, that said, I don't support jail time for these kind of crimes. These are very bright, very well connected, very resourceful, very powerful people. All of those resources that they can bring to bear should be put to good use to improve our economic and legal injustices throughout society. They should be sent into our most abandoned and dysfunctional neighborhoods, our struggling small businesses, our most broken down school systems and required to bring their considerable talents to bear on the problems there. What shape or form these things would take could be worked out. We're a creative people and we can come up with a way to make it happen. They should be tagged, beepered, watched, audited, controlled and have to report to a parole officer, what? weekly? daily? whatever, but they should have to produce something of value or face actual jail time. This to me is a far more intelligent approach to justice in these situations than merely locking these guys away at further expense and drain on the public pocket, with no more satisfaction for society in the situation than, what? revenge? I'd love to see us as a society move away from our revenge obsessions and fantisizes that passes for justice.

Now lets hope that the sentence hits home too.And he was almost the appointee for the kings energycommittee. I agree that he would look good in orange or stripes, but then so would the guy who almost appointed him and hopefully wont have the chance to pardon this thief and his companion Skilling. Too many people lost their savings through their machinations.

You know Ballsee, that is very nice sentiment. But lets be serious these guys have never had a thought beyond their own greed. They never thought about helping others before. Why let them try now. I doubt they could.

I have trouble watching a drug user with minor weight goping to prison for hard time, as happens to poor minorities. These two guys, as a result of their greed, caused people to lose up to hundreds of thousands of dollars each, gutting retirements for thousands of people. They didn't think of helping them, instead encouraged them to hold onto stock that was soon to be worthless while they liquidated theirs. If these two guys do not deserve to go to prison for the harm they caused, who the hell does? They need to do hard time, and in a regular prison, not a white Republican country club prison. This needs to be a message, screw thousands of people over, and you go to prison.

gttm has the right of it. Put them under the prison, and throw away the shovel. It seems to me that the only resources these "powerful men" had was their under the table conncections to other plutocrats. Connections that these self same plutocrats have been frantically working to sever. Put another way, if your were to provide ridiculous tax give aways and subsidies to just about anyone they will, by this societies measures, appear to be successful. The true measure of Lay's and Skilling's worth is that even with the deck stack in their favor, they managed to fail. Kind of like GWB and his "business ventures" before he became govenor of Texas.

I also think that, in addition to jail time, these guys should have to take all the millions out of their bank accounts, fancy mansions, pensions, etc., and PAY BACK as many people as possible that were hurt by their actions. If they keep the money, then justice is only partially served.

Gittim and Winkandnod, yeah I'd like to beat the crap out of Lay, Skilling and all the rest of them too, but you didn't address the meat of my proposal. You repeated the list of dastardly, immoral acts of these men and their consequences as if that justifies doing exactly what I propose not to do - simply lock them away, forever, at taxpayers expense, and never avail yourself of their know-how, their connections to powerful people, their resorces. You repeated the verdict and I'm talking about the punishment. These are bad men, not stupid men, not unknowns among the powerful. I didn't mean to imply they should be given a suite at the Waldorf from which to do their community service complete with a secretaries pool and silver tea service. I think their freedoms should be curtailed, taken away. They should have to give up all their wealth to the people from whom they stole it. I don't think they should be allowed to go shopping at Neiman-Marcus with their wives. They shouldn't be allowed to be alone with their wives. They should always have someone watching them. I don't know what else the details ought to be, but I'm sure experts in incarceration could figure it out. It sholdn't be pleasant, but neither should it be so focused on revenge and punishment that you cut off your nose to spite your face. Forcing them to repay society in some meaningful way would be far more useful to both society and to rehabilitating them from their sense of overweaning entitlement that got them into trouble in the first place. It would teach them humility. Now they're only bitter and angry and remorseless.

The number of people we have locked up in jail in this country is scandalous. Half of them shouldn't be there. Maybe we lock them all away because it's easy. It certainly isn't cheap. Locking people away without any recompense to society, to my mind, isn't allowing the guilty to repay their debt to society, it's simply society reeking revenge on the guilty. We've been merely locking people up for decades now for the same kinds of things that Lay and Skilling have done. It didn't stop Lay and Skilling, and it won't stop the next one either.