Some folks are beginning to notice that Cass Sunstein is no defender of the rule of law. Via Glenn Greenwald, Ari Melber writes:

Cass Sunstein, an adviser to Barack Obama from the University of Chicago Law School, cautioned against prosecuting criminal conduct from the current Administration. Prosecuting government officials risks a "cycle" of criminalizing public service, he argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton--or even the "slight appearance" of it.

What people do not realize is Cass Sunstein has been defending the Bush Administration's illegal actions and the Bush Administration's preposterous claims for many many years now. This is who he is. I think that any connection he has to Barack Obama is extremely troubling.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Barack Obama is in Afghanistan but the big political news imo is that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki told the German magazine Der Speigel that he agrees with Barack Obama's plan for Iraq:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months. In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

Perhaps Maliki will start referring to it as a "time horizon." I believe this is devastating to John McCain.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Say goodbye to Phil Gramm. The man was always good for a laugh. He'll be missed.

Former Sen. Phil Gramm stepped down today as co-chairman of his friend John McCain’s campaign, eight days after he went seriously off message to say that the nation is in a “mental recession.”

Gramm's departure avoids further missteps by a guy who can be counted on for embarrassment, but it doesn't make John McCain any the wiser on economic policy. Advantage Obama:

“The question for John McCain isn’t whether Phil Gramm will continue as chairman of his campaign, but whether he will continue to keep the economic plan that Gramm authored and that represents a continuation of the polices that have failed American families for the last eight years,” said Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan.

Nailed it.

If you get arrested protesting at the Democratic National Convention in August, have no fear, the DNC People's Law Project will have your back.

The People's Law Project will provide pro-bono attorneys to help jailed protesters during the convention. The group will also staff a hotline where protesters can call for help and will field teams of neutral legal observers who will attend rallies and videotape protesters' interaction with police.

60 lawyers willing to volunteer their services met at the University of Denver today for a training session on how to defend arrested protesters.

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has said the police have undergone training to help diffuse violence. Denver civil rights attorney David Lane, speaking at today's session, said police reaction to the protesters is key.

President Bush and Iraq Prime Minister Maliki have agreed to set a "time horizon" rather than a timeline for troop withdrawal from Iraq. The White House released this statement today:

"In the area of security cooperation, the president and the prime minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals," the statement said. It said those goals include turning over more control to Iraqi security forces and "the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq."

.... "The president and prime minister agreed that the goals would be based on continued improving conditions on the ground and not an arbitrary date for withdrawal."

It sounds like an aspirational plan rather than an action plan. It's also vague and certainly not binding. I'm not impressed.

Meanwhile, in other Iraq news, it looks like John McCain spilled some beans on Sen. Barack Obama's weekend travel plans to Iraq.

Robert Novak writes:

[T]he private Republican view is that the focus must be on Obama in the coming campaign for McCain to win. A positive campaign will lose, and the spotlight on Obama must be harsher for McCain to have a chance.

Thanks for the insight Bob.

Polls can be wrong and opinions can change between now and November, but results of the latest Field Poll are encouraging:

Californians are likely to uphold the right to gay marriage in the state by voting against a ballot measure that seeks to override a court ruling allowing same-sex unions, poll results showed on Friday.

The Field Poll survey firm found 51 percent of voters oppose the measure, which proposes an amendment to the state's constitution recognizing marriage as only between a man and woman, while 42 percent were in favor.

Writing from Netroots Nation discussion between Markos and DLC Chair Harold Ford, Ezra Klein writes about the incongruity of Ford speaking at Netroots Nation:

[T]he DLC ceased being a threat and became simply a foil. In 2005, when DailyKos was preparing to destroy the DLC, they were punching up, or thought they were. Now it would be baffling if they took the DLC on: What would be the point? The netroots are bigger, richer, and more relevant, or at least feel as if they are.

That strikes me as hilarious. Who was "bigger, richer and more relevant" on FISA? Harold Ford said:

It's good to know that there's no crime in Maryland. That must be the case if the Homeland Security and Intelligence Division of the Maryland State Police found time to mount undercover operations to spy on people who support progressive viewpoints.

Undercover Maryland State Police officers repeatedly spied on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups in recent years and entered the names of some in a law-enforcement database of people thought to be terrorists or drug traffickers, newly released documents show.

What did Maryland taxpayers obtain in return for investing tax dollars in these spying missions? What terrible crimes were the peaceniks and death penalty opponents committing?

[N]one of the 43 pages of summaries and computer logs - some with agents' names and whole paragraphs blacked out - mention criminal or even potentially criminal acts, the legal standard for initiating such surveillance.

Note to the Maryland police: dissent is not a crime. It's not even suspicious. It's a right. Learn to respect it, would you please? [more ...]

The Straight Talk Express took a detour yesterday so that John McCain could revive the "Commie menace" rhetoric of an earlier era.

Asked later if he thought Obama was an extremist, McCain said: “His voting record … is more to the left than the announced socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.”

Does McCain think Obama is a socialist? “I don’t know. All I know is his voting record, and that’s what people usually judge their elected representatives by.”

Is Obama a socialist? That would be news to those on the left who criticize him for being insufficiently progressive. Yet McCain's answer amounts to "Gee, I dunno, but he sure looks like one." McCain stopped short of calling Obama a pinko, but it's still early in the campaign.

Matt Yglesias writes:

McCain doesn't need daily [foreign policy] talking points. But the reason he doesn't need daily talking points isn't that he can talk about national security issues with fluency and skill without them. Lacking daily talking points, he's repeatedly confused Sunni and Shiite, repeatedly forgotten that Czechoslovakia doesn't exist, changed his position on Afghanistan twice in 24 hours, etc. In short, he's made a ton of gaffes just as you would expect from an underprepared candidate. But he's allowed to get away with a lack of adequate preparation because, in the mind of the press, his years in captivity decades ago are adequate demonstration that he understands national security issues even though there's no real basis for that view.

(Emphasis supplied.) Wes Clark spoke at Netroots Nation last night and said about his now infamous remarks about McCain:

It's understandable that Laci Peterson's mother is "outraged" that Scott Peterson posted his protestation of innocence on his family's website (his own website is relatively empty). She's nonetheless misguided in suggesting that "it isn't right that [inmates] should have access to the Internet, either direct access or through somebody else."

Her view that "being on death row is supposed to eliminate an inmate's privileges" is also understandable, but free speech is a right, not a privilege. Inmates lose some rights, but not all of them, by virtue of being incarcertated.

Free speech isn't free if people like Laci Peterson's mother can act as censors of words they find offensive. Whether or not Scott Peterson is guilty, there's no doubt that countless innocent inmates are serving time. If they don't bring their stories to the public's attention, who will? They often depend upon sympathetic journalists or columnists to call attention to their plight. Should they be barred from talking to reporters? Should they be prohibited from exposing abuses in the prison system that prison administrations will otherwise suppress? What's so different about eliminating the middleman and speaking to the public directly via the internet?