The New York Times sued the Justice Department over their reticence to turn over a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel detailing the argument for how the US government can legally assassinate an American citizen.

The Obama Administration may still veto the bill, since this punting to the Supreme Court on this one aspect does not address their point, which isn’t really opposition to indefinite detention as much as it is opposition to having Congress dictate detention policy at all. They already operate under the premise that the US can indefinitely detain terrorist suspects, and they want that power maintained in the executive branch rather than codified into law.

Every year the Defense Authorization includes some big controversy. This time it’s provision measure that would mandate indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects in military custody and open the door for those indefinite detentions to extend to US citizens. Mark Udall is trying to strip out that provision.

Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem — Lady Be Good, from episode 320 of The Muppet Show.

I realize that Dick Cheney is basically a troll these days, but I’m going to go ahead and feed him a little for this one.

Discretion in remembrance is the key to the weekend.

Paul Krugman’s blog today laments another example of false equivalence, when he catches Clive Crook claiming that if the shoe were on the other foot, Democrats would behave like the Tea-GOP. They’d take the US credit to the brink, holding the economy hostage to impose the Democrats’ policy objectives, so they’re just as bad as the Tea-GOP crazies who have created the debt limit crisis.

Nothing says intelligent and well-read like indicting a continent for not burning adherents of a religion at the stake when they “take root,” or as the rest of us say, “move someplace and have the audacity to not covert to exactly what their neighbors practice.” The Inquisition worked out GREAT. Why isn’t everybody doing that?

Among all of the right-bloggers who had a major musgasm upon hearing the initial reports out of Oslo (Professor Mustard recovered nicely going from Norway – The Warning Signs Were There to Sometimes news moves too fast for our own good with scarcely a rumple in his cravat) none deserve more special consideration then the amusingly named Astute Bloggers for their 3-part demonstration of how the Self-Correcting Citizen Journalist plies his craft.

The only response to the two attacks in Norway yesterday is total horror. In the latest update, at least 91 people are dead from a bomb at a suite of government buildings and a gun attack at a Labour Party youth camp on Utoya Island. The suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, was a right-wing nationalist and Christian fundamentalist with a predilection for Pamela Geller and other anti-Muslim, white supremacist websites and writers.