Sen. Barack Obama is returning to Colorado tomorrow to give a speech on national service in Colorado Springs.

The morning event, at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs campus in northern Colorado Springs, is by invitation only. The audience will include active military personnel, as well as what campaign spokesman Matt Chandler described as those serving in the nation’s other essential services — the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and ROTC.

Obama's visit reportedly also will include a $1,000-a-head fundraiser and possibly a visit to one of the region’s five military bases — though any details of additional planned events have not been released to the media.

It is not expected that Obama will meet with James Dobson while here.

The McCain Outrage Skit continues:

On MSNBC last night, Webb told McCain that he should "calm down" with the use of his military service in the campaign, adding that it was time to "get the politics out of the military." Now the McCain campaign is responding to Webb, arguing that Webb's comments prove that Obama "can't control his surrogate operation." McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers sends us this:

If you didn't think this was a coordinated attack on John McCain's credentials before, it's clear now that it is. Barack Obama's surrogates are telling the McCain campaign to "calm down" about attacks on his military record? Seriously? Now somehow Wes Clark's attacks are John McCain's fault? It's absurd. If Barack Obama can't control his own surrogate operation, how can he be trusted to run the country?

I hope someone in the Obama camp remembered to turn off Bill Burton's fax machine and Blackberry this time before he has Obama cower with a rejection of Webb.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

First Read:

“Inartful” was the word Obama used Tuesday to characterize remarks Gen. Wes Clark made over the weekend and subsequently about McCain’s military service. . . . At a press conference, the Illinois senator was asked what he thought about Clark's comments, which seemed to downplay the significance of McCain’s military service -- he was shot down and held as a POW for five and-a-half years during the Vietnam War -- and whether he felt they were similar to the Swift Boat ads used to attack John Kerry in 2004.

“I don’t think that Gen. Clark, you know, had the same intent as the Swiftboat ads that we saw four years ago; I reject that analogy,” he said, before adding that he had said many times that McCain’s deserved honor and respect for his service to the country. “Now I have differences with him on policy, and I will vigorously debate a lot of the decisions he’s made when it comes to national security that have weakened our capacity to meet the threats and challenges of the 21st century. But that certainly doesn’t detract from his past service to America.”

[MORE . . . ]

I have no idea what you all have been talking about but our mid-morning open thread is full, so here's a new one.

Please be civil. Thanks.

The Justice Department today released the final Sex Offender Registration and Notification ACT (SORNA) Guidelines. These are the guidelines for the Adam Walsh Act's sex offender registration and notification provisions. A copy of the guidelines is here (pdf.)

The Act is officially known as the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. The Guidelines are in Title I of the Act, named the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). The DOJ office that released the guidelines is the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing,
Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking (SMART).

The final guidelines incorporate changes to the intitial guidelines made following a period of public comment. SMART explains the revisions here (pdf).

Sex offenders are society's newest pariahs. Even those as young as 14 (pdf).

The NYTimes writes

While Mr. Obama opposes requiring religious tests for recipients of aid or use of federal money to proselytize, The Associated Press reported that he supports letting religious institutions -- in the non-federally funded parts of their activities -- hire and fire based on faith, according to a senior adviser to the campaign who the news agency said spoke on condition of anonymity.

While that notion appeared controversial, it seems to find support in a 2000 case involving the Boy Scouts of America. The Supreme Court ruled that the group, as a private organization, had a First Amendment right to set its membership rules.

(Emphasis supplied.) The bolded portion of the excerpt is simply incorrect. The Boy Scouts case (the Dale case) is not relevant to federal funding of organizations. As Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his decision in Rumsfeld v. Forum For Academic And Institutional Rights, Inc., which I discussed in this post, Dale is inapposite to cases involving the Spending Power:

This is an outrage. Ronnie White, arrested for running down a police officer in a parking lot, was arrested and put in isolation. Only guards and supervisors had access to him.

Twelve hours later he was found dead in his cell, strangled with two broken bones in his neck. The Medical Examiner has ruled it a homicide.

Vigilante justice is no justice at all.

The Justice Department, FBI and Maryland state authorities are now investigating.

Wes Clark will be interviewed by Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC in the next minutes. If I can, I'll provide some highlights.

Glenn Greenwald thinks that Obama is going to allow religious discrimination in hiring by faith based groups. I am trying to get the best info I can on this.

Quick update - Clark stands by his statements and Andrea Mitchell says sure all that is true, but Obama does not have executive experience either. Clark gets off a great line on Mitchell I was asked a direct question and I answered it directly, I know that does not happen much in politics but it is what I do.

Clark is too good for these people. Andrea Mitchell is outraged on behalf of McCain and calls him "an extraordinary person." Andrea Mitchell is entitled to her opinion, but not when she is pretending to be a journalist.

This is an Open Thread.

Last week, TalkLeft called attention to an appellate decision that found insufficient evidence to justify the government's detention (for six years) of Huzaifa Parhat as an enemy combatant. The unclassified version of the court's decision (pdf) has been released. It reveals the court's impatience with the administration's arguments.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents. The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Isn't that exactly what the Bush administration has been saying ever since 9/11?

Via TPM:

Here's what Orson Swindle, a fellow POW of McCain's, said on the call, in a reference to generals, admirals, and other officers who back the Arizona Senator:

"General Clark probably wouldn't get that much praise from this group. I can't speak for them, but we all know that General Clark, as high-ranking as he is, his record in his last command I think was somewhat less than stellar."

BTW, this is not new, and in my view, not a dirty trick - both Republicans and Democrats attacked Clark's military record when he ran for President. It is and was fair game for debate. I think Clark's record was stellar and am prepared to debate it. Is McCain prepared to debate his own military record?

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed four lawsuits against military contractors on behalf of four detainees who were subjected to torture at Abu Ghraib.

The defendants are CACI International Inc. (NYSE: CAI) and CACI Premier Technology, Inc., of Arlington, Va.; L-3 Services Inc., an Alexandria, Va.-based division of L-3 Communications Corp. (NYSE: LLL), of New York; and three individual contractors, Adel Nakhla, of Montgomery Village, Md., Timothy Dugan, of Pataskala, Ohio, and Daniel E. Johnson, of Seattle, Wash.

The allegations:

The lawsuits allege that the defendants committed multiple violations of U.S. law, including torture, war crimes, and civil conspiracy. CACI, which provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib, and L-3, which provided translators at the prison, were linked to abuses there in military court martial proceedings which resulted in convictions for U.S. military personnel but no civil or criminal penalties for contractors implicated in abuses. According to the lawsuits, the individual contractor defendants allegedly “tortured, and conspired with others to torture.”

The lawsuits were filed in the federal district courts where the contractor defendants reside: Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, and Washington state.

Canadian rendition victim Maher Arar has been denied relief by the U.S. District Court in his lawsuit against the U.S. arising from his seizure at JFK airport and transfer to Syria where he was tortured for a year.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has the details.

Today, a federal Court of Appeals ruled against Center for Constitutional Rights client Maher Arar’s case against U.S. officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured and interrogated for a year under the extraordinary rendition program.

Maher Arar is not available to comment in person, but is issuing the following statement: “The Court’s 2-1 ruling is outrageous. It basically legitimizes what was done to me, and permits the government to use immigration law as a disguise to send people to torture without regard for due process.”

All of our Maher Arar coverage (47 posts)is accessible here.