Sen. Barack Obama was on Larry King Live tonight. I only got to hear a few minutes. Here's what I heard:

• Osama bin Laden: He'll go after him and the U.S. will either kill him or bring him back for a trial and if it's a trial, the death penalty is appropriate. If he's in Pakistan, we'll ask Pakistan to help. We'll go get him if we have to.

• VP Stakes: He will pick someone who shares his vision and will bring a new kind of politics to Washington.

Did I miss anything?

In a 216 page opinion (pdf) written by seven judges, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals today affirmed President Bush's ability to indefinitely hold someone captured on American soil as an enemy combatant, but said his executive power is not unlimited and those held must have the right to challenge their confinement.

President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.

But a different 5-to-4 majority of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruled that Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., must be given an additional opportunity to challenge his detention in federal court there. An earlier court proceeding, in which the government had presented only a sworn statement from a defense intelligence official, was inadequate, the second, overlapping majority ruled.

Facts:[More...]

Today, Barack Obama said:

What’s missing in our debate about Iraq, what has been missing since before the war began, is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq and its dominance of our foreign policy . . . [T]his war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize. This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.

McCain responded:

Your turn.

This interview excerpt with Jim Webb has been going around:

Josh Nelson: You mentioned the role the blogosphere played in your Senate campaign. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit. And also tell us what type of role you would like to see them play in legislative fights in the future.

Jim Webb: The blogs… the good news and bad news about blogs. First the bad news. The bad news is anybody can say anything about someone and they don’t even have to put their name on it. In fact, the anonymity encourages irresponsibility. And it is pretty frustrating, I’ll be honest with you, that’s why I just stopped reading this stuff a long time ago. . . . [MORE]

Lawyers for Canadian Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, 15 when captured in Afghanistan and brought to Guantanamo Bay, have released this video of his questioning. From the accompanying BBC news article:

During the 10-minute video - filmed secretly through a ventilation shaft - Mr Khadr can be seen crying, his face buried in his hands, and pulling at his hair. He can be heard repeatedly chanting: "Help me."

At one point he tells the foreign ministry official and agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that he was tortured while being held at the US military detention centre at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He raises his orange shirt to show wounds and tells them: "You don't care about me."

His lawyer says: [More...]

Addressing the NAACP last night, Sen. Barack Obama said he will continue to stress his theme that black voters must take accountability for bettering their own lives.

Obama got a standing ovation at the annual NAACP convention here, presenting himself as a symbol of the political power that earlier black leaders had won. Touting the sacrifice of these activists, Obama said their courage had allowed him to "stand before you tonight as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America."

But Obama, in diagnosing conditions in the black community, made it clear that he was prepared to break with the generation of black leadership represented by Jackson. He said that government and business alone couldn't be blamed for the pain suffusing some black neighborhoods, but that black parents needed to show more maturity and demand more from their children.

Obama's advice to parents: [More...]

The Washington Post has a new poll, but they are holding the topline numbers for release tomorrow I assume. Which makes for an interesting experiment. Today, WaPo released other results from the poll. On the commander in chief question (which is faulty imo for the reasons expressed in this dkos diary) produced the following results:

[72%] said McCain would make a good commander in chief. . . . Obama's [at] 48 percent[.]

The problematic question notwithstanding, it will be interesting to compare the topline presidential preference result with the C-i-C question results. If Obama holds a comfortable lead with that sizable a gap, it will be a bad sign for McCain having any chance of winning this election. More . . .

I've been out the past several hours. Did anything newsworthy happen?

This is an open thread.

When Ana Marie Cox is slapping you around effectively, you may want to rethink your position. In response to Hendrick Hertzberg's attack on people who care about civil liberties, Cox writes:

In other words: Don't you want to win, you dirty freaking hippie? Except if you're a member of the MSM, in which case, Don't you want to be one of the "better newspapers"? Oh, and John McCain is worse. I'm fine with people defending Obama's flip-flops, but I don't like pretending they don't matter. Especially if it's not just a simple change of some random position, but -- as with FISA -- a real rejection of a significant campaign promise. I'm probably going to vote for Obama, okay; I do not have to like it. I do not have believe that his awesomeness creates amnesia.

(Emphasis supplied.) Speaking for me only

Via Yglesias, the ACLU reports that the Bush Administration has added the one millionth person to its terrorist watch list:

The nation's terrorist watch list has hit one million names, according to a tally maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union based upon the government's own reported numbers for the size of the list. "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon."

Hmm. Do you doubt they are all being surveilled under the FISA Capitulation Act?

Heritage Foundation has a new report on the ever increasing number of federal crimes enacted by Congress.

This study reviews the crimes newly enacted by Congress in order to: (1) update the number of fed­eral crimes; (2) measure whether Congress contin­ues to pass federal criminal laws at the same pace found by the ABA report; and (3) determine whether the new crimes contain a mens rea require­ment, a key protection of the common law that pro­tects those who did not intend to commit wrongful acts from unwarranted prosecution and conviction.

Bottom line: An average of 56.5 new crimes are enacted yearly.

The growth of federal crimes continues unabated. The increase of 452 over the eight-year period between 2000 and 2007 averages 56.5 crimes per year—roughly the same rate at which Congress cre­ated new crimes in the 1980s and 1990s. So for the past twenty-five years, a period over which the growth of the federal criminal law has come under increasing scrutiny, Congress has been creating over 500 new crimes per decade. That pace is not steady from year to year, however; the data indicate that Congress creates more criminal offenses in election years.

[Hat tip to Ed Still of VoteLaw.]