A 20 year old from Cortez, Colorado has been indicted for threatening to kill then-President Elect Barack Obama eight days before his inauguration. He was also indicted for threatening to blow up the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

[Timothy Ryan]Gutierrez faces one count each of transmission of threats and falsely threatening to use explosives. The indictment claims Gutierrez e-mailed the FBI's Washington office eight days before Obama's inauguration saying: "I'm going to assassinate the new president of the United States of America. P.S., you have 48 hours to stop it from happening."

The indictment says a second e-mail threatened to blow up the mall with 40 pounds of C4 explosive and TNT planted on seven cars parked outside.

The FBI paid Guitierrez a visit the day of the emails, but didn't arrest him. Guitierrez turned himself in this afternoon at the FBI Office in Durango. Cortez is a small town with a population under 10,000 in Southwestern Colorado.

While I usually refrain from commenting upon lawsuits when I know the participants, I thought TalkLeft readers would be interested in this article about an excessive force suit that TL reader, commenter, and occasional diarist Ben Masel brought against the University of Wisconsin Police Department. His trial ended this week with a jury that hung after only four hours of deliberation. Knowing the profound interest that Ben and his able attorney have in protecting our freedom to exercise our civil rights, I'm sure the second trial (and possible appeal) will be pursued with gusto fueled by good will.

The vote was 59-0.

NYTimes report.

Women's health advocates were dismayed this week to see the removal of family-planning aid from Congress' economic recovery bill after a push by Republicans to politicize a generally cut-and-dry issue of Medicaid waivers. (Time has some good background here.) But the dismay may not last long. A source present at today's White House signing ceremony for the Lilly Ledbetter bill tells me that President Obama gave assurances that the family planning aid would be done soon -- perhaps as soon as next week, when the House is set to take up a spending bill that would keep the government funded until October.

You might enjoy David Obey's remark that Republicans, by focusing on trivial details in the stimulus bill, are behaving "like 1,000 mosquitoes to harass the majority." It's more like 188 mosquitoes in the House, but it must feel like 1,000 to House Democrats. Obey should invest in some bug spray.

In particular, Obey singled out Republican grievances that roughly $50 million appropriated to expand funding of the arts won't stimulate the economy or create jobs. What nonsense. Not only will it create jobs for artists, curators, musicians, actors, writers, and dancers, arts funding will create jobs for staff and maintenance workers at museums, theaters, publishing houses, galleries, arts centers, and places where public art is on display. Art also creates a demand for the raw materials from which the art is made and for performance spaces.

In an Executive Order, President Obama directed that:

The Secretary of Defense shall immediately take steps sufficient to ensure that during the pendency of the Review described in section 4 of this order, no charges are sworn, or referred to a military commission under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the Rules for Military Commissions, and that all proceedings of such military commissions to which charges have been referred but in which no judgment has been rendered, and all proceedings pending in the United States Court of Military Commission Review, are halted.

(Emphasis supplied.)Via litigatormom, we discover that one military commission judge has chosen to defy this executive order:

Steve Benen is nonplussed that Mark Halperin thinks President Obama failed in his quest for post partisan unity. Benen writes:

Halperin believes, for reasons that are unclear, that the paramount goal was to win the support of lawmakers who were wrong and who were advocating bad ideas. It's not about what works, or what would actually improve the economy in the midst of a serious recession. What really matters is "bipartisan solutions." Why? Because Mark Halperin says so. Merit be damned -- if Democrats liked the legislation and Republicans didn't, it's necessarily flawed.

(Emphasis supplied.) Come on. President Obama said and signalled so. For crissakes, that was the essence of the post partisan unity schtick. Let's not act like naifs. This is, in part, Obama's own doing. It is silly to pretend otherwise. Of course what Halperin says is absurd. But it was absurd when President Obama said it too.

Speaking for me only

Making good on an important campaign promise, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act today. The law overturns a Supreme Court decision that precluded victims of gender discrimination in pay from obtaining relief if they didn't know of the discriminatory pay differential within 180 days of the time their pay was set.

The McCain-Palin ticket, echoing the Republican Party as a whole and business lobbyists, insisted that the legislation would encourage frivolous litigation -- defined, in Republican-speak, as any litigation brought by an employee against an employer. It is to the president's credit that he made this legislation one of the first priorities of his administration.

Said President Obama:

Unless they get caught having sex with inmates or smuggling drugs into a prison, it's rare for corrections officers (formerly known as prison guards) to be charged with criminal behavior in their administration of prison affairs. It's encouraging that charges have been filed twice in less than a year against corrections officers at the youth facility in the Rikers Island jail.

According to the new indictment, guards used violent inmates to ride herd over others, sanctioned assaults on inmates and decided when, where and how they would take place. Prosecutors accused the guards of setting up a system of warning signals to protect gang members from being discovered when they administered beatings. They said the guards directed their “teams” to avoid hitting inmates in the face so that any injuries would not be readily apparent.

The indictment charges three guards who were allegedly involved in the death of an 18 year old who was beaten to death in his cell. [more ...]

I am not enamored of the stimulus plan that passed the House because I think it is entirely too timid for the problems we face. In addition, it does not a thing for the housing crisis. For that reason, I think it is bad politics. Because for all the caterwauling, including from me, about Obama's post-partisan unity schtick, as in most cases, the politics of the stimulus plan will be determined by the results of the policy.

It is for that reason that I find Andrew Sullivan's analysis perplexing. First, Sullivan says he opposes the bill. But not 15 minutes later, he excoriates the House GOP for voting against the bill:

Shockingly, I am with David Broder on something.

This is an Open Thread.

Why d[id] Boehner and the other leaders want [the] vote [on the stimulus bill] to be unanimous? Because they still want to extract concessions in the conference. . . In the end, I suspect that a couple dozen Republicans will vote for the final stimulus bill. But they sent a message today that they have discipline.

Is Booman expecting Obama to give more concessions to the House GOP? And what of concessions to the Senate GOP? Relatedly, Al Giordano writes: