President Barack Obama has named four chiefs of the Justice Department.

• David Kris is assistant AG for national security.
• Tony West is assistant AG for the Justice Department’s civil division.
• Lanny Breuer is assistant AG for Justice’s criminal division.
• Christine Varney is assistant AG for the antitrust division.

It's the criminal division, responsible for prosecuting crimes in our federal courts, that I'm interested in.

Breuer is a partner at the Washington law firm Covington and Burling, where attorney general-nominee Eric Holder also served as partner. He was special counsel to President Clinton and defended Clinton during his impeachment. New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens also hired Breuer last year to represent him during Congress’ investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball.

White Collar Crime Blog has this to say about Breuer: [More...]

You make the call. First up is Maureen Dowd:

I love the hurly-burly way the Illinois governor rammed through his choice for the Senate, compared with the namby-pamby way the New York governor strangled his best choice for the Senate. So now we have an N.R.A. handmaiden in Bobby Kennedy’s old seat? Paterson could have acted a month ago, or even a week ago. . . . Then the Democrats would have had another Kennedy in the Senate representing New York — Bobby’s niece and a smart, policy-oriented, civic-minded woman to whom the president feels deeply indebted in an era when every state has its hand out.

(Emphasis supplied.) That one is going to be hard to beat I know (and I did not even get into the paranoid CDS conspiracy theory.) But read what Lawrence O'Donnell had to say:

The mother of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, killed during the 1993 Waco Siege, was found stabbed to death yesterday. Her sister, Beverly Clark, is being held in the death.

Bonnie Clark Haldemann, who wrote a book about her son in 2007, was 64. Some news articles say she was 60, but that's not possible since Koresh was born in 1959.

According to her autobiography (p. xi), she was born Sept. 8, 1944 and only 14 both when she became pregnant and when Koresh was born. She met his father at age 13 while working at her junior high school. He was 18. They never married although it seems they stayed in touch and she remained close to his mother.

Bonnie went on to become a nurse. She worked in elder care facilities. Her autobiography says Bonnie "lived, worked and worshipped" with the Branch Davidians from 1985 to 1991 (p. xii). She lost 14 children in the deadly siege and fire.

R.I.P. Bonnie Clark Haldeman.

The X Games have been taking place in Aspen since Thursday. They are great to watch. Today's action included:

Women's Ski SlopeStyle, Men's and Women's Snowboard SlopeStyle, Men's Snowboard SuperPipe elims, Men's and Women's Boarder X and Ski Big Air all going down.

If you missed the coverage this afternoon, at 9pm ET on ESPN you can watch: SuperPipe Men's Elimination, Snowmobile SnoCross Final,Skiing Big Air Final. Also from today:

Courtesy of Steve Clemons:

The game plan -- whether real or fantasy -- is intriguing. It goes something like this. Caroline Kennedy would be appointed now to the Senate. She would perform well above the very low expectations many had for her and win handily the seat in the 2010 mid-term race in which that Senate seat needs to be contested again. She would then be in place until 2016. [Steve is inaccurate here as the NY Senate seat will be contested again in 2012.] Ted Kennedy's view "may be" that Caroline would instantly out-shine Hillary Clinton in the eyes of New York voters and in the American political scene and that in 2016, Caroline Kennedy would be 59 while Hillary Clinton would be 69.

So the yarn is Caroline Kennedy was going to run for President in 2016. Whoa! That strikes me as nuts. But what do I know.

Speaking for me only

A bizarre story on top of the tragedy of the death of John Travolta's son:

Authorities in the Bahamas have charged an island lawmaker and detained two other people in an alleged plot to extort money from actor John Travolta after the death of his son, police said Friday. Two of the suspects — ambulance driver Tarino Lightbourne and former tourism minister Obie Wilchcombe — were detained on Friday. Earlier, several tabloids quoted Lightbourne describing efforts to revive the celebrity's chronically ill son, Jett, who died of a seizure this month at their family vacation home on Grand Bahama.

[More...]

As someone who always thought President Obama's (and then Presidential candidate John Edwards') rhetoric on lobbyists was so much nonsense, I am not at all surprised to learn this:

Mr. Obama's nominee for deputy secretary of defense, William Lynn, has been a lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, and his nominee for deputy secretary of health and human services, William V. Corr, lobbied for stricter tobacco regulations as an official with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, conceded the two nominees did not adhere to the new rules. . . .

So much for the ban on lobbyists. As Robert Schlesinger writes:

Your turn.

This is an Open Thread.

President Obama speaks on the economic stimulus package he is proposing:

WaPo's Colbert King (Yes, I know there is a certain "who?" quality to this post) demonstrates the Beltway still can't get over it. What a pathetic column.

Speaking for me only

Colorado Governor Bill Ritter has suggested that Supermax in Florence, Colorado would be appropriate for Guantanamo detainees.

Ritter wouldn't oppose transferring the Guantanamo Bay detainees to Supermax because it was built for just that type of high-risk inmate, Ritter spokesman Evan Dreyer said today. "If Supermax is chosen, there's no reason to take a 'not in my backyard' approach," Dreyer said.

Not quite. Supermax is for "the worst of the worst" of convicted felons. None of the remaining detainees at Guantanamo has been convicted of a crime yet. [More...]

The shameless Stuart Taylor, seeing that he positioned himself on the Extreme Right when he wrote two weeks ago in Newsweek that President Obama would need to do "What Cheney Did", now claims Obama is doing everything he asked. First, let's remember what Taylor wants you to forget - his demand that Obama 'be like Dick':

The flaw of the Bush-Cheney administration may have been less in what it did than in the way it did it—flaunting executive power, ignoring Congress, showing scorn for anyone who waved the banner of civil liberties. Arguably, there has been an overreaction to the alleged arrogance and heedlessness of Bush and Cheney—especially Cheney, who almost seemed to take a grim satisfaction in his Darth Vader-esque image.

[MORE . . .]