It’s only taxpayer money, after all. Or, the beauty of a budget deficit is that it isn’t even anyone’s money. When you’re spending money that you don’t even have, how can it be real money? And when you’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars that you don’t even have, what’s a few million more? It’s not like anyone has to ever actually foot the bill. We’ll run our ever-increasing budget deficits and pass the bill to our children and grandchildren. They, if they’ve learned anything from us, will pick up right where we left off, and just pass the bill to their children and grandchildren. And just as long as everyone keeps having children and grandchildren, everything will be just rainbows and roses.

Oh, did I forget to mention what this is about? The central front in TWAT may be in the lawless border regions of Pakistan (actually) or in Iraq (in the Bush administration’s unrelenting senile dementia, which must be contagious because McCain has contracted it too; maybe it’s spread by brown-nosing, since Joe Lieberman is also an advanced case). But it is clearly necessary (see “propaganda purposes”) to have a domestic front in TWAT too. And, despite the paltry material the TWAT gods gave your government to work with, it has worked tirelessly and unrelentingly to create a domestic front out of nothing more than smoke, mirrors, snake oil and whole cloth. The thing about smoke, mirrors, snake oil and whole cloth is that it only seems to take in the media and Republicans/”conservatives”. Juries somehow don’t seem to buy it quite as eagerly as CNN or Fox News.

But, hey, all you can do is keep trying. And your government certainly is when it comes to those infamous domestic terrorists known variously as the “Liberty City Seven” or the “Seas of David” gang or cult or paintball warriors:

Federal prosecutors announced plans Wednesday to retry six Florida men on terrorism charges despite two consecutive mistrials in a case once trumpeted as a success in the government’s war on terrorism.

“We’ve worked very hard this past week, reviewing everything in this case and considering it very, very seriously,” prosecutor Richard Gregorie said in Miami federal court. “The United States has decided it’s necessary to proceed . . . one more time.”
[...]
The most recent trial in the so-called Liberty City Seven case ended last week after jurors could not agree on verdicts for any of the defendants on any charges. The first trial ended Dec. 13 with one acquittal and a hung jury regarding the other six defendants.
[...]
The two trials have cost several million dollars, including fees for court-appointed defense lawyers and prosecutors’ salaries. Providing security for the two trials has cost more than $1 million, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

“Enough is enough,” said defense lawyer David O. Markus. “The feds are always saying that they don’t have enough resources, so why are they clinging to this money-draining case?”

Quite the comic, that David O. Markus. He knows perfectly well how much face there is to be lost by dropping this prosecution at this stage.

Though somebody should sit Richard Gregorie down, and explain to him that the time to consider everything in this case very, very seriously was before deciding to go to trial the first time. Still, choosing to go to trial may be a little more defensible than choosing to go to mis-trial.

Does anyone know what the current record is for consecutive number of mistrials in the same case?