What is going on here is a power grab, pure and simple. And not just in the Loughner case, but in a much broader federal versus state sense.

Shirley Sherrod is quite a woman, and now she has followed through on her promise and filed a lawsuit against Andrew Breitbart. Ms. Sherrod has come to the dance locked and loaded and with a very compelling story. Andrew Breitbart better strap in, it could be a bumpy ride.

Three weeks ago I woke up and started organizing my thoughts to write this post. I had no more than written the title when news started coming in hot, first on Twitter and then local news channels, that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in Tucson. In a strange dichotomy, it was both an event which brought the ugly underbelly of hate in my state into even better focus than it had been before, which is the subject of this post.

One of the favorite choices of the wingnuts for actual legislation has always been ‘tort reform’. It was their hue and cry to get out of making health care productive for most citizens, even though it is not an area subject to federal legislation.

In Texas where there has been extensive tort reform, conditions have been created that are ideal for incompetence and outright fraud. One area that has seen a true disaster is in emergency room care. Under conditions that may include extreme stress, mistakes can occur but the patient maimed for life cannot count on any compensation for those mistakes.

Amid all the holiday hustle, bustle and, on at least some of the lame duck session accomplishments, success of Barack Obama, it is good to keep in mind what a lump of coal his administration has been on civil liberties and privacy. Nothing has been more emblematic of the cancer they have been in this regard than the posture they have relentlessly fought for on unfettered and unilateral ability of the Executive Branch to impose the state secrets doctrine to shield the government from litigation, even when it is concealing blatant and wholesale government criminality.

Now, with the decision to just let KSM rot, it seems to me, that plan gains a new anchor (and none too soon! given that only a handful of al Qaeda members remain in Afghanistan, that justification was getting rather dicey). After all, the very decision not to try KSM in a military commission is an admission that it would not work for him–it might rule out the death penalty for him in any case, but a military commission judge actually has leeway to adjust any sentence on account of the extreme torture KSM underwent, meaning our torture of KSM might become a central issue in a military commission.

Today is the 154th birthday of SCOTUS Justice Louis Brandeis, one of the Court’s most forceful voices for freedom of speech and the right to privacy. Today, as AG Eric Holder deals with cases involving torture, wiretapping, state secrets, GQ paints a picture of an AG filled with angst, as Marcy Wheeler summed it up yesterday. But maybe it’s not angst, but that Holder is being haunted by SCOTUS Justices past, like Brandeis, Holmes, Robert Jackson, and Potter Stewart.

Happy birthday, Justice Brandeis, and keep up the good work.

As bmaz has pointed out in language blunt enough that one presumes even the willfully obtuse Holder Justice Department might understand it, many of us are bearing witness to investigator John H. Durham intentionally allowing the statute of limitations to expire on Jose Rodriguez’s crime of destroying videotaped evidence of torture. Marcy Wheeler’s torture timeline links to the documentation that the tape destruction occurred on November 8, 2005. The five year statute of limitations on that charge will expire in just a few days. Further, my understanding of the timeline is that the last known waterboardings took place in March, 2003. Some aspects of the torture statutes carry an eight year statute of limitations, so that deadline for waterboarding prosecutions will expire in just a few months. However, with over a hundred deaths of prisoners during US interrogations, there are a number of potential murder charges that are not subject to a statute of limitations.

Breaking, 5:30pm. After 8 hours of deliberations by the seven-person military jury, the jury reached a decision, sentencing Omar Khadr to prison for 40 years. The decision is subject, reportedly, to the plea deal made with Khadr and his legal team, whereby the young man confessed to murder and other crimes, for a promise of [...]

As you may have heard on Twitter, Omar Khadr has plead guilty to all charges against him. Omar Khadr, the only Canadian, only child soldier and only Guantanamo Bay detainee charged with battlefield homicide in the killing a U.S. soldier, pleaded guilty to all terrorism and murder charges on Monday. “Yes” said Mr. Khadr, when [...]