The majority of state Republicans still support Bush, with 59 percent approving of his job performance. Only 10 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of nonpartisan voters approve.

Bush has never been overly popular in California, a state he lost twice in presidential elections, except in the months immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The lowest approval rating a president has received since the Field Poll began measuring it in the 1970s was Richard Nixon's 24 percent approval in August 1974, shortly before his resignation.

The poll also showed that 64 percent of voters believe the country is seriously off on the wrong track; 28 percent say it's generally going in the right direction, and 8 percent have no opinion.

California voters also hold a negative view of Congress, with only 23 percent approving of its performance and 64 percent disapproving, researchers found.

Despite criticism of Congress overall, Sen. Dianne Feinstein still has strong support in the state. In a simulated matchup against former Republican state Sen. Richard Mountjoy, whom she's expected to face in the November election, Feinstein dominates, 54 percent to 28 percent.

Researchers interviewed 986 likely voters - only 702 likely voters for the Senate race questions - by telephone in English and Spanish from May 23-31. The overall poll has a sampling error rate of 3.2 percentage points, while the Senate race poll has a sampling error rate of 3.8 percentage points.

Whose table? Our table!

These states joined the Democratic parties of Nevada, New Mexico, California, Wisconsin, and Vermont, and the executive committee of the North Carolina Democratic Party (their convention is later this month). If Texas does it, that'll make 10. Activists in other states have tried to pass impeachment resolutions but been blocked by their state party's leadership. Most of the states that have succeeded have done so despite opposition from the leadership. This grassroots energy, along with every poll I've seen, suggests that making the coming elections about impeachment would mobilize lots and lots and lots of Democrats. Not a shred of evidence supports the RNC-Pelosi claim that it would benefit Republicans.

The Green Party supports impeachment at the national level. And 19 city governments have passed impeachment resolutions. The next one will make 20. Where's Nancy? Is she waiting until after the primaries to acquire a spine and a little political sense? The level of public energy among Democrats, Independents, and a significant minority of Republicans suggests that people will make the elections about impeachment whether Pelosi likes it or not. She has a choice of fighting this and looking inevitably like a "flip-flopper" or riding it to victory and looking like what she would be: an international hero and the probable next President of the United States. Tough choice, I know.

There are primaries in several states on Tuesday. There are pro-impeachment Democrats in races across the country. Those in contested primaries in Pelosi's home state of California include Marcy Winograd, Kevin Hearle, Charles Coleman, Bob McCloskey, and Karen Marie Otter. Winograd has already given incumbent pro-war, pro-rogue-executive Jane Harman a scare. On Tuesday she may give her the boot and the Democratic Party a wake-up call. Over in Connecticut Ned Lamont just might do the same to Senator Joe Lieberman.

Back in California, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey is fighting off a challenge, and the peace movement is defending her, although - as an obedient Democrat - she has not found the decency to introduce articles of impeachment. Woolsey IS one of only 37 Democrats who have signed onto Congressman John Conyers' bill to create an investigation into grounds for impeachment. But not a single Democrat has signed on since Pelosi announced that impeachment was off the table.

Democracy When? Democracy Now!

Check out Tuesday's show at www.democracynow.org - It features Jonathan Tasini, who is challenging warmonger Hillary Clinton, as well as Lamont, Winograd, and Cindy Sheehan, plus John Bonifaz who just qualified for the ballot in his run to become Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Here are Democratic candidates and activists speaking for unelected citizen Democrats. Nancy, are you listening?

At Maine and New Hampshire's Democratic conventions this past weekend something else happened. The crowds went nuts for Senator Russ Feingold, especially when he criticized the leadership of his own party.

Why would that be? Well, Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the war and favor censure and impeachment. Speaking for myself, at least this Democrat will actively oppose any pro-war Democratic candidate for president - and that includes the ones who were against it before they were for it, the ones who want to end it in a careful and lengthy process, the ones who want to escalate it and kill more efficiently, and the ones who pretend it's not the top issue on everyone's mind.

New Hampshire, of course, helped give the Democrats a pro-war candidate for president last time around. Many good citizens of New Hampshire CEASED to be citizens, became amateur pundits and political strategists, obeyed their televisions, and voted NOT for their first choice, but for who the media told them (absurdly and falsely) had the best chance to win. New Hampshire, can we expect better of you this time?

Will Tuesday's results help give you courage and self-confidence? I certainly hope so.

But this is troubling. As reported at http://www.bradblog.com , the voting in California is subject to Diebold's counting. The long-term solution to this is to give Debra Bowen a sufficiently huge victory in Tuesday's primary to make her the Democratic nominee for Secretary of State. If we elect her in California and Bonifaz in Massachusetts, there will be hope for honest elections. If we have honest elections, we'll elect a party that will elect a leader that will know whose table it is.

Those who hurled ugly names at the Dixie Chicks, those who burnt their records, pushed them off the airwaves and otherwise demonized them for standing up to Bush got it wrong. It's clear now that many were duped into supporting a war based on trumped up charges, rosy predictions, and cherry-picked intelligence-a war that has become an albatross around our collective neck.

Big media got it wrong not only about invading Iraq, but also about the Chicks. Their recordings shot up the charts and they remain one of the hottest bands of all time. Their current CD is among the best-selling records in the country, and lots of concert dates are sure to sell out. That's something the Chicks refuse to do--at least in a political sense. They're still dissing their president in words and music. And they remain within their rights to do so.

The campaign against the Chicks represents political correctness run amok. You heard right. Far too long that mocking phrase, "political correctness" has been used as a moniker to brand rhetoric from the left. But the ugliest form of political correctness occurs whenever there's a war on. Then you'd better watch what you say. Three years ago, a virulent strain of right wing political correctness all but shut down debate about the war in Iraq. Not only was it deemed "impolite" to criticize the war. Firebrands like Anne Coulter and Bill O'Reilly called it treason. Partly as a result of such nonsense, we dug ourselves in deeper. Many thousands died and tens of thousands more were maimed and emotionally scarred. Our nation became famous for torture, deceit, wiretapping and aggression.

So who betrayed this country? Anyone who looks at the quagmire in Iraq-with its carnage of innocents, torture and damage to our beleaguered troops--knows the answer. Anyone who looks at the corruption involving Bush's old pals at Enron and Dick Cheney's old pals at Halliburton knows it. Anyone who looks at the president's campaign to hide the truth about global warming knows it. Many of our best entertainers have known all along precisely who betrayed us by misleading us into war.

Some say entertainers shouldn't comment on politics and religion. That's exactly backwards. When the news media fall down on the job entertainers are precisely right to pick up the slack.

Willie Nelson drives cars fueled by spent cooking oil. He tours on buses that can run on hemp oil. It's his way of making a point about reusable fuels that the mainstream media refuse to make often enough.

On May 31, I heard that easy-voiced American hero, Paul Simon, tell a "Nightline" audience he feared Bush was leading the world to some kind of terrible apocalyptic war based on false interpretation of Scripture. Isn't it past time the media looked into this?
When Neil Young came out swinging with his song, "Let's Impeach the President," he was speaking for millions of Americans the mainstream media mostly ignore.

America's actors, writers, musicians and artists got where they are by knowing and expressing a good deal about human nature-especially the human heart in conflict with itself. The world would be a scarier, deadlier place if that prophet Bob Dylan had not pointed out "It's a Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" and so many other inconvenient truths of our times.

If the press is slow to articulate the downside of going to war, then let the Chicks have at it. Three years ago, they told us their truth, and history bears them out. They were right to be ashamed of their president.

They still are.

http://www.mach2.com/williams/

Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of literary writing. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award and the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize. He is finishing a novel, RED STATE BLUES, set in his native Tennessee and Iraq. His book of selected journalism, "Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People" by Don Williams, is now available for ordering. For more information, email him at donwilliams7@charter.net. Or visit the NMW website at www.mach2.com/williams/.

Turn on the business news and you'll hear lots of happy talk about the stock market being near six-year highs, and the economy going gangbusters. Somehow it just doesn't seem that way to the average American. The happy times for rich people were set in motion when Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan dropped the Fed interest rate to 1%, and when Bush, with the help of the Republican Congress, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Taxes on investments were dropped to 15%, while working people still pay up to 28% in payroll taxes, not to mention Social Security tax. The inheritance tax has been cut, while state and local taxes are rising for most people. Right about now the American public ought to be wearing a T-shirt that says "We joined the Bush economy, and all we got to show for it was this lousy $9 trillion in public debt".

While it may have escaped notice among much of the disinterested US populace, it is no small secret to the Republican elite that their party is a hodgepodge of completely unrelated groups. Rich businessmen form the smallest but most powerful portion of the coalition, with two of the other much larger groups being religious fundamentalists on the one hand, and conservative working class people on the other (not mutually exclusive groups, by the way). The relatively small group of rich Republican businessmen has worked hard, in part by buying and controlling huge blocks of print and broadcast media, to keep this loose, eclectic Republican coalition together.

The Republican elite keep the religious right on board primarily with lip service, and occasionally tossing them a bone such as Supreme Court Justice Alito. But for the most part, they offer nothing but strong words about gay marriage, criminalizing abortion, and limiting access to contraceptives. Yet all this talk about making abortions illegal, constitutional amendments to ban gay marriages, and eliminating any barriers between church and state is just so much hot air. Rich Republican businessman and their buddies in the Bush administration have no intention of passing any such legislation, because it would give the Democrats too much ammunition to fight back with.

The rich Republican Uberclass keeps working class conservatives on board by spouting hard-core, yet empty rhetoric, ranging from fear mongering about liberals coming to take their guns away, to race-baiting and anti-immigrant tirades. While they are distracting conservative, working class people with talk about a flood of illegal immigrants coming to take American jobs, rich Republican businessmen are simultaneously shipping hundreds of thousands of US jobs overseas to reduce payroll expenses.

Inept handling of this loose knit confederation by the Bush administration has created strains between the various groups that make up the Republican Party in the 21st century. Now there are even strains between conservative politicos and big business, the two subgroups that make up the Republican elite. This can be excused in part as long as taxes remain low and business remains robust. But more and more, the Bush administration seems to inadvertently step on big business's toes because they aren't looking where they are going.

For example, working at political cross-purposes, conservative religious groups have convinced the administration to block over-the-counter sales of Plan B, a morning-after contraceptive pill, much to the chagrin of the pharmaceutical company that makes the pill (Barr Pharmaceuticals). Further, the Bush administration's recent, ill-conceived saber-rattling over Iran has been helping fuel speculative trading, thus driving up oil prices, which tends to hurt the bottom line for many businesses. Even the recent anti-immigration frenzy has simultaneously put off big agribusinesses, small business owners that rely on day labor, and many Hispanics. And of course, big business hates instability and uncertainty, both of which have been fueled dramatically by the botched war and growing insurgency in Iraq. The list of political fumbles by the Bush administration seems almost endless.

Republicans have been able to keep this loose coalition together for decades in no small part by denigrating Democrats and liberals. Throughout the Clinton presidency, and now the Bush presidency, Republicans have spent far more time slandering Democrats than they have spent vilifying terrorists, Communists, and sundry evildoers combined. Indeed this anti-liberal media empire has made conservative media types very wealthy by feeding their conservative listener's insatiable appetite for Democrat bashing. But Democrat bashing won't fix any of our country's problems, and won't assuage the simmering frustrations among Republican groups.

When the Republican bubble finally bursts, as it seems hell-bent on doing under Bush's divisive leadership, will Democrats be able to pick up the pieces and put our country back together? Maybe, but maybe not. Democrats are demoralized and disorganized, and have been marginalized politically by the conservative, corporate-controlled media. Despite the fact that our founding fathers were liberals to the core, all you need to do now to belittle someone on a TV or radio talk show is to call them a liberal. This leaves the public trusting no one to be competent or trustworthy enough to run our government. A true quagmire that I fear the United States will find extremely difficult to extricate itself from under the current political atmosphere. But for now, the Republicans seem determined to debate a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, rather than trying to figure out how to get out of Iraq, how to pay down the 9 trillion dollar debt, or how to fix our health-care system.

Dr. John Moffett is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area, who has published numerous articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett is also the author and webmaster of the political opinion website www.Factinista.org.

George Bush said in a speech on Monday: "Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them, and changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure."

All Senate Democrats, except Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a relatively conservative state, oppose the amendment. Together with moderate Republicans, the Democrats are expected to block a yes-or-no vote, which would stop the measure for the year.

Critics say Bush's efforts are aimed at energising conservative voters for November, when all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 in the Senate will be open for election.

Political purpose

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy said: "This proposed constitutional amendment is being used to satisfy the most extreme right-wing supporters and politicians. The Constitution is too important to be used for such a partisan political purpose."

Senator Wayne Allard, a conservative Republican who sponsored the measure, acknowledged that politics played a part in the timing of the debate, but for a different reason: to force senators to take a stand and answer for their votes in the campaign.

"We ought to have a vote on the amendment every year," Allard said.

The amendment would prohibit states from recognising same-sex marriages. To become law, it would need two-thirds' support in the Senate and House, and then would have to be ratified by at least 38 of the 50 state legislatures.

The constitution is difficult to change; it has been amended 27 times in the 217 years it has been in effect.

Pressure

The White House played down the significance of Monday's 10-minute speech, saying Bush was simply speaking out on an issue being debated on Capitol Hill.

Spokesman Tony Snow said the president was not personally lobbying senators to pass the amendment. Bush also pressed for it in his radio address on Saturday.

"I'm not sure this is a big driver among voters," Snow said.

Bush said a constitutional amendment was needed because laws that state legislatures had passed defining marriage as being between a man and a woman were being overturned by a few judges.

"When judges insist on imposing their arbitrary will on the people, the only alternative left to the people is an amendment to the Constitution - the only law a court cannot overturn," Bush said.

Bush rebuffed critics who argue that the amendment conflicts with the Republicans' basic opposition to government interference and the importance of states' rights.

"A constitutional amendment would not take this issue away from the states, as some have argued. It would take the issue away from the courts and put it directly before the American people," Bush said.

Campaign tool

Bush's wife, Laura Bush, said recently that while Americans wanted to debate the issue, "I don't think it should be used as a campaign tool."

Vice President Dick Cheney, whose daughter, Mary, is a lesbian, splits with Bush on the issue. Cheney said that he thought Americans should do everything they could to accommodate any type of relationship and that there should not necessarily be a federal policy in this area.

Joe Solmonese, president of the homosexual rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, said Bush was favouring an amendment that would give Americans license to discriminate against homosexuals.

"The fact that he's out of step with the first lady and the powerful vice president tells me who he's answering to today," Solmonese said.

In an ABC News poll released on Monday, 58% of Americans said that same-sex marriages should be illegal. But only four in 10 said they supported amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage, while a majority said states should make their own laws on gay marriage.

With Bush taking centre stage on the issue, advocates on both sides rushed to comment.

On the left, Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's legislative office in Washington, said politicians rightly rejected the amendment in 2004 and should do so again. "Discrimination has no place in America, and certainly not in our founding document," she said.

On the right, Matt Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage, argued that same-sex marriage advocates were trying to circumvent the democratic process and redefine marriage through the courts. "Marriage is the social glue that unites the two halves of the human race to share in the enterprise of raising the next generation," Daniels said.

How can I say this so surely? Take a look at when George W. Bush has discussed the prospect of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The first time was when he was running for president in 2000. He claimed that marriage should be between a man and a woman and would seek to change the constitution to protect the institution of marriage. Then he was anointed president by the Supreme Court and a funny thing happened. He forgot about it. It just went away. When did he remember this subject so dear to his heart? That's right, when he was running for president again in 2004. Suddenly, six months out from a tight election, George W. Bush remembered that he cared about gay marriage and proposed a constitutional amendment banning it. He did this knowing full well it did not have the ¾ votes it needed to pass. Why then propose an amendment he knew would not pass? Because he wanted to rally his Christian base to the polls in the upcoming election. It was red meat to throw to his base which was becoming rapidly disillusioned by their president. In an election that should have focused on a disastrous Iraq War and the lies perpetrated by Bush to start it, as well as so many other domestic problems such as a catastrophic economy, Bush had successfully turned the debate to gay marriage. The end result was not to ban gays from marrying, it was to distract the American people from the issues they should have been focusing on. The complicit Bush media machine went along with it and after another stolen election; Bush was back in the Oval Office.

Surely he would not forget his desire to ban gays from marrying again, right? Wrong. In fact he had forgotten it again from November 2004 until this week. Why the lapse in memory again? Because there was nothing to gain from proposing the gay marriage ban until this week. Remember, it is not about protecting marriage, it is about protecting Bush. What does Bush need protection from this time? Himself.

George Bush's approval rating has plummeted to about 29% and given the often skewed polls favoring the GOP, the actual approval rating is probably lower. The reports coming out of Iraq are horrific, including the Haditha atrocity, which have led most to conclude that it is time to exit. Bush however remains steadfast in his fantasyland version of Iraq, where his press conferences have quickly become transparent cheerleader expositions in the face of the deaths of America's children. Besides Iraq there is the daily saber rattling being conducted by the Bushites toward Iran, which has not been met with any support from the American people. Along with the war there is still the shadow of torture hanging over this administration. You have the NSA spying scandal, which is only one of 750 laws Bush has brazenly boasted to have broken. Then there is the Valerie Plame outing, as it appears that Bush purposefully revealed the identity of a covert CIA operative working on WMD issues, as political payback. This probe has caught one administration official so far and other indictments are still pending. There also are the Downing Street Memos, proving that Bush had actually lied to Congress in order to get his war. Then just last week, the story about the illegal theft of the 2004 election broke into the mainstream. You have the economy in disarray while the Bushites insist everything is coming up roses. You also have the unseemly attempts to repeal the inheritance tax during this time of economic uncertainty. It just appears that with each passing day, ten of these issues blow up on this administration and they are in constant defense mode over them because they realize they are on the wrong side of each issue.

So in the face of all of these issues, what is the focus of our Commander in Chief? In light of a 29% approval rating, the Iraq War, Haditha, Plamegate, Downing Street, NSA, 750 laws broken, Iran, and the fact that in 2004 the will of the people was subverted, what is at the top of President Bush's agenda? Gay marriage. That's right. The issue that was completely forgotten about twice in the past six years by Bush suddenly is the direst issue on the agenda of our president. Forgive me for being cynical, but that is patently ridiculous. This is what is known as the politics of distraction. Bush used it well in 2000 and 2004, but it will not work this time. I can only assume that the president does not think too much of the collective intelligence of the American people. He has such disdain for our ability to process information that he thinks he can roll out the same tired scheme from 2004 and we will not even notice. George Bush only believes in the sanctity of marriage when he can gain something from it. He thinks we must be stupid and it is time for America to stand up and remind the entire GOP what is important in this country and what we will be voting on this November.

It is the economy stupid. It is Iraq stupid. It is Iran stupid. It is the NSA and illegal spying stupid. It is Valerie Plame stupid. It is Votergate 2004 stupid. It is Haditha stupid. It is Abu Ghraib stupid. It is healthcare stupid. It is Downing Street stupid. It is 750 broken laws stupid. It is tax cuts for the rich while services to the poor are cut stupid. It is not repealing the inheritance tax stupid. It is Tom Delay stupid. It is Duke Cunningham stupid. It is Jack Abramoff stupid. It is corruption stupid. It is WMD stupid. It is outsourcing stupid. It is about checks and balances stupid. It is about Congressional oversight stupid. It is about democracy stupid.

Don't be snookered again America. Don't be fooled again my Christian brethren. George W. Bush does not care about gay marriage. He is using it and you. His hope is if he screams loud enough into the echo chamber he has created that something will resonate with the American people other than what has dropped his approval ratings down to 29%. He is hoping for distraction. He wants you thinking that it is the gays that present the greatest threat to you today. Not the economy or the war but gays. Keep in mind though that he KNOWS it will not pass. His intent is not to change anything substantive, just the discourse in America. He does not care if gays marry as long as you are talking about whether they should or not. To hear George Bush wax prophetically about gay marriage in the face of the plethora of real problems facing us all is like how Shakespeare described life; " a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

By definition, intermittent explosive disorder involves multiple outbursts that are way out of proportion to the situation. These angry outbursts often include threats or aggressive actions and property damage. The disorder typically first appears in adolescence; in the study, the average age of onset was 14.

The study was based on a national face-to-face survey of 9,282 U.S. adults who answered diagnostic questionnaires in 2001-03. It was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

About 5 percent to 7 percent of the nationally representative sample had had the disorder, which would equal up to 16 million Americans. That is higher than better-known mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, Coccaro said.

The average number of lifetime attacks per person was 43, resulting in $1,359 in property damage per person. About 4 percent had suffered recent attacks.

The findings were released Monday in the June issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

The findings show the little-studied disorder is much more common than previously thought, said lead author Ronald Kessler, a health care policy professor at Harvard Medical School.

"It is news to a lot of people even who are specialists in mental health services that such a large proportion of the population has these clinically significant anger attacks," Kessler said.

Four a couple of decades, intermittent explosive disorder, or IED, has been included in the manual psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness, though with slightly different names and criteria. That has contributed to misunderstanding and underappreciation of the disorder, said Coccaro, a study co-author.

Coccaro said the disorder involves inadequate production or functioning of serotonin, a mood-regulating and behavior-inhibiting brain chemical. Treatment with antidepressants, including those that target serotonin receptors in the brain, is often helpful, along with behavior therapy akin to anger management, Coccaro said.

Most sufferers in the study had other emotional disorders or drug or alcohol problems and had gotten treatment for them, but only 28 percent had ever received treatment for anger.

"This is a well-designed, large-scale, face-to-face study with interesting and useful results," said Dr. David Fassler, a psychiatry professor at the University of Vermont. "The findings also confirm that for most people, the difficulties associated with the disorder begin during childhood or adolescence, and they often have a profound and ongoing impact on the person's life."

Jennifer Hartstein, a psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, said she had just diagnosed the disorder in a 16-year-old boy.

"In most situations, he is relatively affable, calm and very responsible," she said. But in stressful situations at home, he "explodes and tears apart his room, throws things at other people" to the point that his parents have called the police.

Hartstein said the study is important because many people are not aware of the disorder.

The two shooting victims who survived managed to run to a nearby house, where neighbors called police about 3 a.m., Rutherford said. Their conditions and the victims' ages and identities were not immediately released.

Rutherford declined to discuss a possible motive for the shootings.

The bodies of two men and a woman were found inside the house, Rutherford said. He said another man and a woman were taken to Charleston Area Medical Center for treatment of gunshot wounds, and the man injured jumping through the window was treated for cuts.

The home is on a dead end street in an unincorporated community near St. Albans, about 15 miles west of Charleston. Police were searching for a vehicle seen leaving the area, but witnesses couldn't provide a strong description.

"There has been no doubt, and there is no doubt, that the murders and other crimes were proven without a reasonable doubt," Weinstein said.

Yet the judge delayed imposing their prison sentences until he rules on legal motions to throw out their convictions - giving Eppolito and Caracappa some slight hope as they went back to the cramped cell they share at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Henoch said a life term was the only appropriate sentence for the defendants who participated in eight gangland murders while on the payroll of the Luchese crime family - and remain "unrepentant and remorseless and, perhaps by a higher power, unforgiven."

The defendants sat stone-faced as five family members of murder victims blasted the corrupt ex-detectives and urged the judge to give them the maximum penalty. When Eppolito was addressing the court, he was challenged by a bearded man who stood up in the packed spectator gallery.

"Remember me, Mr. Eppolito? The guy you put away for 19 years?" bellowed Barry Gibbs, who served nearly two decades in prison for murder until state prosecutors developed evidence last year that Eppolito had framed him. "I had a family, too. Remember what you did to my family, huh?" Gibbs said as U.S. marshals hustled him out of the courtroom. "Remember me?"

Eppolito said he didn't recognize Gibbs and resumed his rambling defense of himself, even inviting the victims' relatives to visit him behind bars so he could plead his case directly to them.

The person to persuade remains Weinstein, who will hold a June 23 hearing on whether to vacate the convictions. Lawyers for the Mafia cops will argue the statute of limitations for the racketeering charge had expired, and that trial attorneys Edward Hayes and Bruce Cutler botched the case.

Eppolito, 57, and Caracappa, 64, had told members of their own families not to attend the sentencing. Eppolito's son from his first marriage, Louis Jr., was sitting in the second row, and looked down when his father only mentioned having three children with his second wife.

Eppolito looked ghostly pale and had regrown a goatee. He appeared to have shed much weight since his last court appearance a month ago. Caracappa was his usual stoic self but struggled to maintain his composure when his lawyer referred to portions of a letter written to the judge by his brother, Dominick Caracappa.

Caracappa declined to make a statement, but Eppolito - who had a bit part in the film "GoodFellas" - was eager to speak.

"I know the feeling of every family here today, I know how they feel inside their gut," he said. "I would invite [the victims' family members] to visit me in jail. ... I think I would prove to them I didn't hurt anybody ever. If I can't convince you, then I'll apologize."

Outside Brooklyn Federal Court, Gibbs was asked what Eppolito will experience in prison. "Every day in jail is like a million years," he said. "Psychologically it's going to break you down, like it did to me."