Director Roman Polanski, now age 75, has filed a new motion to have the sex assault charges against him dismissed. His motion alleges prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, revealed in a recent HBO documentary on the case. The statements were made by the deputy DA on the case and a judge. The victim in the case, then 13, now 43, has wanted the charges dropped for years, and still does.

In a legal brief, the attorneys quoted heavily from the documentary, citing statements by former Deputy District Attorney David Wells in which he acknowledged advising the judge on how to sentence the film director, even though he was not assigned to the case.

The lawyers said that Wells' recommendation to send Polanski away for a diagnostic study was illegal without Polanski's lawyers present. They said Wells also inflamed the judge by showing him photos depicting Polanski with girls at an Oktoberfest party in Germany while he was awaiting sentencing. They said the photos were misrepresented.

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One of the major concerns I had about now President-Elect Barack Obama (when he was candidate Obama) was his then apparent adherence to a theory of transformative change that would be post partisan. I think post-Democratic Convention Obama utterly abandoned that approach and as President-Elect, his rhetoric has been bold and progressive. No doubt some of this is attributable to the incredible challenges the country faces. But perhaps this has been his plan all along - the Mark Schmitt Theory of Change. At any rate, President-Elect Obama is a far cry from the Post Partisan Unity Schtick candidate we saw before.

In that sense, he appears to have rejected the Third Way vision of his University of Chicago Law School colleague Cass Sunstein (who I have criticized quite a lot). Rick Pildes writes a very good article on Sunstein's views on public policy and the law. Here is a telling excerpt:

The World at Risk Terror Report was released today. You can read it here(pdf).

It predicts a biological, chemical or nuclear attack before 2013. From the executive summary:

The Commission believes that unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013. The Commission further believes that terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon.

The Commission believes that the U.S. government needs to move more aggressively to limit the proliferation of biological weapons and reduce the prospect of a bioterror attack.

Among the report's recommendations:[More...]

You have all heard this story by now:

"I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.

-Franklin D. Roosevelt
Comment to a group of reformers. His point: Until they lead the way, they shouldn't expect leaders to follow.

Is the story true? Who knows. But here is a real life example - Oscar DePriest's Amendment to FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps:

President-Elect Barack Obama will name New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as his Commerce Secretary tomorrow.

Why was John Kerry left out in the cold? Among the few high-level positions left for him is Secretary of Veterans affairs.

Via John Cole, HuffPo reports David "Stretch" Gregory gets the Meet the Press gig. For those keeping score, on June 16, I wrote:

David Gregory is a lock imo.

Just sayin' From Politico - "Gregory also speaks French and is an avid oenophile . . ." A great segue to this:

Your daily Percy Harvin watch news:

Florida's Percy Harvin limped around campus in a protective boot Monday and showed improvement, but coach Urban Meyer said his star receiver remained questionable for the Southeastern Conference championship game.

This is why Talk Left is the top college football law blog.

This is an Open Thread.

In my post below, I highlighted FDR's famous 1932 speech at Oglethorpe University. I choose to highlight portions of it again here:

No, our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production. While wages rose in many of our industries, they did not as a whole rise proportionately to the reward to capital, and at the same time the purchasing power of other great groups of our population was permitted to shrink. We accumulated such a superabundance of capital that our great bankers were vying with each other, some of them employing questionable methods, in their efforts to lend this capital at home and abroad.

(Emphasis supplied.) Sound familiar? More . . .

On November 22, in his weekly radio address, President-Elect Obama said:

The news this week has only reinforced the fact that we are facing an economic crisis of historic proportions. Financial markets faced more turmoil. New home purchases in October were the lowest in half a century. 540,000 more jobless claims were filed last week, the highest in 18 years. And we now risk falling into a deflationary spiral that could increase our massive debt even further.

. . . I have already directed my economic team to come up with an Economic Recovery Plan that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011 — a plan big enough to meet the challenges we face that I intend to sign soon after taking office. We'll be working out the details in the weeks ahead, but it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy. We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels; fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.

[More . . .]

About the 8 year old in Arizona who shot and killed his father and father's boarder: First the cops wanted to try him as an adult. Then, they learned of ledgers that the kid kept of every beating, and that the kid said when it got to 1,000, he would have had enough.

Susan Mernit at Huffington Post breaks down the gruesome and mathematical tally of the beatings -- and their impact on the boy.

It's another case of powerless children in our society with nowhere to turn to. This kid is going to have a unhealthy dose of PTSD as he gets older. Who will be there for him?

Check out Susan Mernit's article on the case today at HuffPo --she's outraged at the parent who was killed. Some snippets below:

In answer to counterfactual assertions in the Media and from some bloggers like Matt Yglesias, Plutonium Page and John Issacs demonstrate that there is not a dime's worth of difference between the President-Elect and the Secretary of State designee on foreign policy. Indeed, President-Elect Obama explained:

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Requiem for a Maverick John McCain ran one of the most incompetent, schizo campaigns in history — and for that we owe him big-time

Lots of good reading here, I liked this:

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's c*ck in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?