Maureen Dowd spends her column today trying to toss off jokes about the French while revealing her outrage that the French are not outraged about Carla Bruni. It is a pathetic attempt to be cool when on the inside her squareness and zealous righteousness is chafing to get out.

In this same edition of the New York Times, the Public Editor Clark Hoyt has some scathing criticism of her columns on Hillary Clinton:

Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

Dowd's defense is precious:

A Japanese newspaper is reporting that China has declared that those suffering from leprosy, AIDS and other ailments may not enter the country during the Olympics. Yohei Sasakawa, a human rights activist, philanthropist and the World Health Organization's special ambassador for the elimination of leprosy, is asking China to change its policy.

According to Sasakawa, China has published a "guideline to Chinese law for foreigners coming to, leaving or staying in China during the Olympics," which states that, "anyone with listed diseases such as yellow fever, cholera, VD, leprosy, infectious pulmonary tuberculosis or AIDS will be prohibited" from entering the country during the games.

99% of the world population is believed to be immune to leprosy:

Leprosy is a chronic bacterial disease that mainly affects the skin and nerves. Left untreated it can result in deformity. It is cured using multi-drug therapy and is only very slightly contagious, and 99 percent of the people in the world have a natural immunity to it, according to the Nippon Foundation.

More...

Between the capitulation on FISA and the revelations about the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others in the CIA's secret black hole prison in Poland, it's time to express a little outrage.

This is an open thread.

Meet Deuce Martinez. Career narcotics agent turned Five-Star CIA interrogator. Credited with getting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi Binalshibh to talk.

Waterboarding, belly slaps, sleep deprivation and more. Martinez didn't like getting his hands dirty with the physical abuse, he waited in the wings while others did it and then conducted the interrogations. If the detainee stopped cooperating, it was back to the torture, then back to Martinez. Ultimately, they talked. The value of their information? The CIA says huge, even accounting for the misinformation they were fed. Of course, there's no way to test that theory.

Where did this all occur? Inside the CIA's black hole of choice -- in Poland. [More...]

If you can put the torture, abuse, and other human rights violations out of your mind ... and if you aren't an inmate ... turns out Guantánamo is just the place to take a quiet vacation. Will Brangelina show up soon?

Why is a high school kid getting D's and F's when he's capable of doing this?

18-year-old Omar Khan should be graduating from high school this week, but instead he faces more than 38 years in prison for hacking into school computers. School officials at the Tesoro High School in Las Flores California allege that Khan changed grades and his Advanced Placement test scores. Khan is also alleged to have installed a remote access program onto school servers. In all, Khan is charged with 69 felonies.

Khan also broke into the principal's office to steal an exam that was taken from him when he was caught cheating.

Kahn is charged with a bucketful of felonies, but the $50,000 cash bail set in his case seem excessive. So far, his parents haven't posted it.

Four advocacy groups and three voters filed a petition with California's supreme court yesterday asking the court to remove from the November ballot a citizen's initiative that would amend the state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. The petition cites two grounds.

First, the initiative was sold as a "preserving the status quo" measure. Voters who signed petitions in support of the initiative were told that man-woman marriage was already the law, and the initiative merely preserved existing legislation. That's no longer the case after the California Supreme Court recognized that people of the same sex have an equal right to marry. In other words, the Marriage Protection Act should properly be titled the Marriage Discrimination Act, and that isn't necessarily what its supporters signed up for.

On the other hand, most folks who signed the petition probably did intend to discriminate against gay marriage. The second and more persuasive argument is that the initiative actually seeks to revise the state constitution, not to amend it. [more ...]

Here's the problem:

California's 33 adult prisons were designed for roughly 100,000 inmates but currently hold 159,000. Inmate advocacy groups say the crowding has led to numerous problems, including neglectful health care and poor mental health treatment.

Here's the proposed solution being negotiated to settle litigation commenced by inmate advocates:

Under the proposed settlement, 27,000 inmates would be released before serving their full sentences and a population cap would be set in place.

Here's the Republican alternative: [more ...]

Glenn Greenwald:

The excuse that Obama's support for this bill is politically shrewd is -- even if accurate -- neither a defense of what he did nor a reason to refrain from loudly criticizing him for it. Actually, it's the opposite. It's precisely because Obama is calculating that he can -- without real consequence -- trample upon the political values of those who believe in the Constitution and the rule of law that it's necessary to do what one can to change that calculus. Telling Obama that you'll cheer for him no matter what he does, that you'll vest in him Blind Faith that anything he does is done with the purest of motives, ensures that he will continue to ignore you and your political interests.

(Emphasis supplied.) Hear! Hear!

Speaking for me only

The Rocky Mountain News today in an editorial calls on Sen. Barack Obama to "take Denver off the hook" and chip in for the August convention.

Make the calls to your donors, Sen. Obama. Send the e-mails. Denver should no longer be on the hook for Democratic National Convention expenses. A few exhortations to your supporters could quickly retire the city's remaining obligations.

After all, Denver is simply providing the venue for Barack Obama's nomination. It's his party. It's only appropriate to ask his contributors to ensure that the celebration is a rousing success.

Obama has raised $265 million so far. He's now opted out of public financing. Why is he not helping out? [More...]

James Earl Reed, 49, was executed by electric chair in South Carolina last night.

When the curtain to the death chamber was drawn, Reed was seated in a chair in the middle of the room, with leather straps at his wrists, biceps, chest, waist and ankles. A prison official placed a brown hood over Reed's face, on which there was also a cap connected to the ceiling by a thick, black cable.

A series of thumps followed a moment later, as Reed clenched his fists and his body stiffened, lurching back in the chair. Several minutes later, Reed's body relaxed and slumped forward slightly.

A technician then entered the chamber to disconnect the cable from Reed's head, and a physician checked his pulse and pupils before officials announced the time of death.

Reed had fired his lawyer and represented himself at trial. There were last minute appeals based on this week's Supreme Court ruling on self-representation at capital trials, to no avail.

States that have killed inmates since the Supreme Court ruling in Baze v. Rees: Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma and South Carolina.

AdamB announced his law panel for Netroots Nation and it is an impressive one. But one thing stuck out for me in his announcement - the bio of Cass Sunstein:

One of America's foremost legal scholars, Cass Sunstein is a professor at Harvard Law School and a visiting professor at The University of Chicago Law School, and serves as an advisor to Obama for America.

Cass Sunstein is an advisor for Obama for America? That is extremely troubling as Cass Sunstein holds views that I believe should be anathema to most progressives. For example, Sunstein supported John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court:

The Roberts nomination is not welcomed by those who object to the rightward drift of the federal courts or believe that Justice O'Connor's successor should be no more conservative than she. . . . But at this point in our history, the most serious danger lies in the rise of conservative judicial activism. . . For those who are concerned about that kind of activism on the Supreme Court, opposition to the apparently cautious Judge Roberts seems especially odd at this stage. . .

I wonder if Sunstein still agrees with that. More importantly, what does Obama think of that view. More . . .