Meanwhile the Justice Department still has nobody at OLC, as hundreds of opinions requiring expert advice pile up.

Classes start this week for Dawn Johnsen at IU’s Maurer School of Law, and also for John Yoo at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. But before classes start for either of them, Yoo is sitting down tomorrow night with John Stewart to chat about his new book.

That should make the first class session on Tuesday quite something at both schools.

Sam Stein asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the pace of federal appointments in the past year, and Gibbs said the President is unhappy about the slowness of the confirmations. More importantly, Stein has some Administration officials on background saying that Dawn Johnsen will be re-nominated for head of the Office of Legal [...]

Here’s a list of the nominees that Hanoi Harry Reid, and without any question Barack Obama himself, since he will not lift a finger to help, think are more important than installing the head of the Office Legal Counsel, to oversee reformation of the rotting festering hole that produced the torture and wiretapping crimes of the previous administration.

It’s been eleven months since Dawn Johnsen was nominated to serve as the Assistant Attorney General to head up the Office of Legal Counsel. Dozens of other nominees have been confirmed to major DOJ positions in those eleven months, and still she waits.

Dawn Johnsen going to come up for a vote after the health care bill is finshed. Heaven help the GOP if they try to stall on the floor of the Senate. The OPR report on the Yoo and ByBee memos will be out by then and available for use as a cudgel if the GOP tries to burn floor time and run out the clock.

An article by Greg Miller at the L.A. Times has lifted the veil on the profound terror lying behind the supposedly known nomenclature of torture. Miller focuses on the use of “sleep deprivation,” a term we will now have to always render in quotes, as the irony of describing one sort of torture as a means of covering up three or four other kinds of torture is both diabolical and morbidly