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By Nicholson Baker
$19.80
By Mark Heisler
$21.33
$13
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By Ellen Goodman — By now the Tale of Lilly Ledbetter is beginning to sound like the Perils of Pauline or the Pre-Feminist Follies. At 70 years old, she’s the star of a long-running drama about how hard we have to run to keep from slipping backward.
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By Amy Goodman — The American Psychological Association is in the midst of its own heated presidential campaign. The central issue is whether APA members should be banned from participating in “harsh interrogations.”
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Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s health-care plans contain some form of mandate—a requirement that Americans purchase insurance. At least one legal scholar wonders whether that’s constitutional. At the very least, Karl Manheim argues in an Op-Ed article, it’s “certainly unprecedented.”
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Washington Post / Karen Ballard
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A recently declassified memo shines the spotlight once again on John “Take Them to the Point of Death” Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor and once deputy legal counsel in the Justice Department.
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By Joe Conason — For years, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has warned that the nexus of capitalism and criminality poses a serious threat to America. With Bear Stearns now in ruins, maybe we will listen to him.
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Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” is meant to throw the Democrats into disarray by keeping their primary race close, but according to MSNBC’s Dan Abrams, it just might be illegal.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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Poor I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. First, he was tossed under the bus in the kerfuffle over Valerie Plame’s identity leak. Now, as a result of same, Libby’s been stripped of his legal license in Washington, D.C.
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Flickr / dbking
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The Supreme Court examined the District of Columbia’s handgun ban Tuesday, a case that could at last yield a conclusive ruling on the Second Amendment. So far, it doesn’t look good for gun control advocates.
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By Mark Dowie — How a few brave Americans took on a powerful company and the federal government to save the land they love.
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By Amy Goodman — The women of New York had a champion in Eliot Spitzer. The good news in the wake of the governor’s resignation is that his successor, David Paterson, and the state’s activists are ready to keep up the fight.
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wcsh6.com
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Ralph Nader has announced that he will run for the presidency for a third time. In the past months on Truthdig, the case has been made both for and against such a campaign. Here Chris Hedges says why he should run, while Robert Scheer tells Nader himself it would be better if he didn’t.
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Truthdig
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Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer interviews documentarian Alex Gibney about his 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a compelling examination of the circumstances that led Americans to commit torture.
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The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating memos and opinions rendered by the department that endorsed the practice of waterboarding, which many consider to be torture. The inquiry is unrelated to the FBI’s criminal investigation of the CIA, which destroyed video recordings of the waterboarding of suspects.
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By Larry Blumenfeld — Ned Sublette’s remarkable new book tells an inspiring story of resilience and resistance by ordinary men and women who won’t cooperate in their own erasure.
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supremecourtus.gov
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The Supreme Court rejected an appeal related to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program on Tuesday, offering no explanation. The American Civil Liberties Union and others have had a hard time proving the plaintiffs were spied on because the evidence they need is considered a government secret.
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wikipedia.org
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CIA Director Michael Hayden told lawmakers Thursday that waterboarding is a useful technique but might not be “lawful under current statute.” Hayden said his agency used waterboarding because of “misshaped and misformed” direction from Washington.
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wsvn.com
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Hillary Clinton has made much of her “35 years” of “working to bring positive change to people’s lives,” but when McClatchy’s Washington bureau investigated the claim, it found that the “bulk of her career” was spent “at one of Arkansas’ most prestigious corporate law firms, where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards.”
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Last week at the gates of the mercenary company Blackwater, nonviolent protesters who re-enacted an infamous Blackwater shooting were arrested. As “Blackwater” author Jeremy Scahill notes: “The arrest of the activists and the subsequent five days they spent locked up in jail is more punishment than any Blackwater mercenaries have received for their deadly actions against Iraqi civilians.”
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By Marie Cocco — Election Day began with voting machines refusing to start up. It ended with them refusing to shut down.
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AP photo / Dennis Cook
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Activists around the world took to the streets Friday wearing orange jumpsuits in protest of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, which Amnesty International calls an “unlawful black hole.” Eighty demonstrators were arrested in or near the Supreme Court building, where justices are reviewing the legality of the government’s detention program.
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By Marie Cocco — The most revealing indicator of the state of our democracy is not to be found in the snowdrifts of New Hampshire but in the marbled chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court. Soon enough, we will discover whether the court under Chief Justice John Roberts will become a partisan tool in the national Republican drive to place constraints on voting that are targeted at those who tend to support Democrats.
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According to recently declassified documents, infamous FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover presented President Harry Truman with a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 people, mostly Americans, of whom he disapproved. The year was 1950 and the occasion was the start of the Korean War, but Hoover had apparently been building his list of the “potentially dangerous” for years.
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By David Sirota — A recent study found that one-third of Americans “believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories,” which really isn’t that surprising considering we have a government that has gone out of its way to undermine the rule of law and public accountability.
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By Amy Goodman — The kidnap and torture program of the Bush administration, with its secret CIA “black site” prisons and “torture taxi” flights on private jets, saw a little light of day this week.
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supremecourtus.gov
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The Supreme Court decided on Monday that federal sentencing guidelines, a kind of back seat judging considered by many to be racist, should be treated as “advisory” and not at all mandatory. Justices Alito and Thomas, to no one’s great surprise, were the only dissenters.
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theithacajournal.com
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Some 150 students donned hoods and turned their backs in silent protest of former Attorney General John Ashcroft at Cornell University on Thursday. Cornell law student and protest co-planner Michael Siegel told Truthdig the demonstrators were meant to represent “the detainees who were arrested and imprisoned without due process under Ashcroft’s leadership.”
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By Marie Cocco — The Supreme Court will soon revisit the constitutionality of Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of men languish without any real legal recourse.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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A Saudi woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail by an appeals court because she was riding in a car with a man when she was attacked and gang-raped by seven men. It is forbidden in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to be together. She was 19 at the time of the attack.
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nytimes.com
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Michael Mukasey has been sworn in as U.S. attorney general, a day after 53 senators decided that a man who doesn’t know what torture is should have the job. But the real blame—for anyone who objects to the confirmation, that is—should be reserved for Democrats Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, who made Bush’s day when they gave Mukasey the green light.
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Do we really need another attorney general who doesn’t know what torture is? The Senate Judiciary Committee just barely approved the nomination of Michael Mukasey on Tuesday. He is expected to breeze through the rest of the process. Remember some weeks from now, when the head of the Justice Department is a man who, despite fact and testimony and common sense, can’t call torture by its name, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer are responsible.
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By Amy Goodman — U.S. attorney general nominee Judge Michael Mukasey admits waterboarding is repugnant, but refuses to say whether it amounts to torture. Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein voted for his confirmation anyway.
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The Supreme Court has placed a temporary moratorium on the death penalty while it considers the legality of lethal injection, which should take months. Justices Scalia and Alito dissented from the opinion, which spared prisoner Earl Wesley Berry only minutes before he was to be killed.
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By Elliot D. Cohen — The “Last Days of Democracy” author warns that Congress is about to aid the Bush administration with its Orwellian plans by granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications giants for helping the government spy on Americans.
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Original from archives.gov
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By Chris Hedges — A Dallas jury, a week ago, caused a mistrial in the government case against this country’s largest Islamic charity. The action raises a defiant fist on the sinking ship of American democracy.
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By Marie Cocco — The nominee for attorney general doesn’t know “what is involved” in waterboarding, and he appears to back Bush’s usurpation of power. Isn’t it time for the Democrats to grow some spine?
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Scott Ritter — The former intelligence officer and weapons inspector argues that the president’s recent World War III comment offers some rare insight into the highly secretive world of George W. Bush’s White House, where the leader of the free world gets advice from reckless neoconservatives, “war criminal” Dick Cheney and “God.”
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sciam.com
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Portugal is the latest European country to pick up on a growing trend of favoring therapy over jail for possession and use of small amounts of illegal drugs. Critics of the new law worry that Portugal will become a hot spot for foreign drug users, but supporters believe the law will shift the focus of the government’s anti-drug efforts from users to traffickers and will give addicts a better chance to get clean.
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youtube.com
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Get ready for the inevitable barrage of jokes on late-night television: The Washington state Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that a law holding politicians legally accountable for lying about their opponents is unconstitutional.
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The House voted 389 to 30 to pass a bill that would make private contractors working for the U.S. government in Iraq subject to United States law. It’s the second time Congress has attempted to apply some sense to the legal vacuum created by the Bush administration and its Coalition Provisional Authority, which pushed through what amounts to blanket immunity for mercenaries.
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wonkette.com
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The Supreme Court, arguably the most powerful institution in our democracy, manages to fly a bit under the radar. Take, for example, the $1.5-million advance Rupert Murdoch paid Clarence Thomas to write a book. Conflict of interest, perhaps? The Nation’s Jon Wiener thinks so.
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While attempting to clarify his previous remarks on the immorality of homosexuality, outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace on Wednesday managed to put his foot even deeper into his mouth, saying that, while he’s willing to keep an open mind, our nation should not “condone activity [read: gay sex] that, in my upbringing, is counter to God’s law.”
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By Marie Cocco — There is no set piece more emblematic of the tragic farce that is the American involvement in Iraq than the grotesque episode of Blackwater USA and the killing of civilians in Baghdad—at least nine and as many as 28—on Sunday.
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By Amy Goodman — The Jena Six, teenage victims of good old-fashioned, Deep South racism, have won a crucial battle in their struggle against prejudice.
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csmonitor.com
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Challenging their culture’s conservative gender laws, a group of Saudi Arabian women from the Committee of Demanders of Women’s Right to Drive Cars is preparing to petition King Abdullah to allow women to, well, drive cars.
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By Jon Wiener — In a move that shocked legal scholars and outraged faculty, University of California Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake has fired noted liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who had signed a contract only a few days ago to become the first dean of UC Irvine’s new law school.
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After German authorities foiled a terror plot earlier this month, U.S. National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell was all to eager to give credit to recently revised FISA rules, arguing, in effect, that potential civil liberty violations helped save American lives. Woops. It turns out that much of the information used by the Germans was obtained under the old FISA law, which McConnell continues to claim wasn’t effective enough.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger has until mid-October to put his pen where his mouth is on gay issues. For the second time, the California Legislature has passed a law that would make marriage in the state gender-neutral. The governor vetoed the first effort back during his more conservative phase.
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By Ellen Goodman — Whether or not Larry Craig manages to save his Senate career, the circumstances of his arrest bear exploring. Isn’t there a better way to secure an airport bathroom than the institutionalized entrapment and humiliation of gay men?
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Quelle Surprise! Haiti on the Mend
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