Say hello to Accountability Now. It launches tomorrow, and is a political action committee which will seek out liberal candidates to move the Democratic party to the left.

Soliciting donations from their readers, the bloggers said they were planning to recruit liberal candidates to challenge more centrist Democrats currently in Congress.

The formation of the group is another step in the evolution of the blogosphere, which has proven effective at motivating party activists to give money and time to political campaigns, especially in local races.

Who's behind it? On the blogger end, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald and Daily Kos, to name a few. They've already bankrolled $500k. On the labor side, SEUI. Also involved: Move-On.org.

Fundraising starts for real next month.

For the past 38 years, I've read the Rocky Mountain News daily. Tomorrow will be the last day. The paper will cease publishing Friday.

Maybe I shouldn't have stopped my subscription and read it solely online the past five years. Or maybe Denver doesn't need two dailies. [More...]

It's a motions day for me. My issue: Is a single instance of weaving within a lane on the interstate without crossing a line a valid reason for a traffic stop under the theory that the driver might be tired and fall asleep and therefore a welfare check is called for?

Here's an open thread for you, all topics welcome.

Here is the video of Attorney General Eric Holder's press conference yesterday. At 25 minutes in, he is asked whether DOJ will continue raids on medical marijuana dispensaries (in states that have legalized medical marijuana.)

Holder says "what the president said during the campaign, you'll be surprised to know, will be consistent with what we'll be doing here in law enforcement." He says Obama is "formally and technically and by law my boss now, and so what he said during campaign is now American policy." [More...]

Some highlights:

-increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans and using revenues from a new program: selling carbon credits to manufacturers as part of a cap-and-trade plan meant to slow climate change.

-a proposal to phase out government payments to crop producers making more than $500,000. Additional revenues are posited from a tightening of tax-code enforcement.

-use revenues from the centerpiece of his environmental policy — a plan under which companies must buy permits to exceed pollution emission caps — to pay for an extensionof a two-year tax credit that benefits low-wage and middle-income people.

[More . . .]

Attorney General Eric Holder today said the Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban and a ban on "cop killer" bullets.

"As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons," Holder told reporters."

Just a few?

Attorney General Eric Holder today announced the arrest of 52 people in a continuation of a Bush Administration drug investigation of the Mexican cartels. The operation began 21 months ago. The total number of arrests (a number of whom are low level traffickers) is 750.

The military may get involved in the effort:

The Homeland Security Department has developed a plan to send more agents and other resources, and possibly U.S. military support, to the U.S. side of the border if the drug violence continues to spill over and overwhelm the agents stationed there, a DHS official confirmed.

The Pentagon is looking into a larger role in bolstering counter-narcotics efforts. Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, told Congress Wednesday that the corruptive influence and increasing violence of the cartels has undermined Mexico City's ability to govern parts of its own country.

Another Holder plan that should be no surprise: He wants to bring back the assault weapons ban.

I think we forgot to put one of these up today. Your turn, all topics welcome.

It's unanimous: Pleasant Grove City, Utah is not required to display a monument in a city park donated by "a tiny religious sect" -- even though the park displays a monument to the Ten Commandments, a religious symbol endorsed by a much larger religious sect. Despite the skepticism expressed in this post about Pleasant Grove's apparent endorsement of one religious viewpoint to the exclusion of others, the Supreme Court analyzed the case under the Free Speech Clause rather than the Establishment Clause (that's how the case was argued to the Court) and concluded that the case was about Pleasant Grove's right to express itself by selecting which monuments to display in a public park.

“The Free Speech Clause restricts government regulation of private speech,” Justice Alito noted. “It does not regulate government speech.”

[more ...]

Why was I asking for specifics in President Obama's speech last night? Because the severe problems we face need more than vague platitudes. To put it bluntly, the Obama Administration is fiddling while our financial system burns. Here is Krugman on the nonexistent plan for the financial crisis:

Ben Bernanke’s testimony over the past two days gives us our best clue yet about where the administration and the Fed are going with bank rescue. And the answer seems to be … nowhere. . . . More and more, it looks as if we’re headed for the decade of the living dead.

Pretty speeches in February 2009 won't be worth a hill of beans in elections in November 2010 and 2012.

Speaking for me only

In a split decision, the 10th Circuit, en banc, has reinstated the insider trading conviction and 6 year prison sentence of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio. It also revoked his bail. The 104 page opinion is here (pdf.)

The 5-4 decision by the full 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstates Nacchio's conviction and his six-year prison sentence and revokes his release on $2 million bond.

....Nacchio was convicted in 2007 on 19 counts of insider trading for illegally selling $52 million worth of stock six years earlier, after company insiders warned him that Qwest could not meet its financial targets.

The issue was the trial court's exlcusion of Nacchio's expert witness. [More...]

In a blog post entertainingly discussing Bobby Jindal's silly jibe at volcano monitoring, Paul Krugman asks:

Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens.

In fact, the Founding Fathers designed our government to NOT have a standing army. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution provides among Congress' powers:

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years

(Emphasis supplied.) The Federalist Papers discussed this limitation in detail in Federalist 26: