There are so many amputations required in Iraq that a limb shortage is feared:

Iraq is facing a hidden healthcare and social crisis over the soaring number of amputations, largely of lower limbs, necessitated by the daily explosions and violence gripping the country.

In the north of Iraq, the Red Crescent Society and the director general for health services in Mosul have told US forces, there is a requirement for up to 3,000 replacement limbs a year. If that estimate is applied across the country, it suggests an acute and looming long-term health challenge that has been largely ignored by the world.

[Hat tip Newshoggers.]

Seizing a vehicle is a disproportionate response to the minor social harm (if any) caused by drivers who use their cars and trucks to solicit a prostitute or to buy small quantities of marijuana. The California Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, struck down city ordinances that purport to authorize the seizure and forfeiture of vehicles used to commit those crimes on the ground that state law does not authorize cities to impose that penalty.

The Court invalidated a Stockton ordinance that authorized the police to seize a vehicle if they have probable cause to believe it was used to solicit an act of prostitution or to acquire any controlled substance. The ordinance provided that title to the vehicle would vest in the City, and gave the City a generous year to hang onto the vehicle before starting a forfeiture proceeding. Because the Court found that the ordinance was preempted by the state criminal code, it didn't reach the obvious due process concerns that the ordinance raised.

The decision is here (pdf).

The headline expresses my sentiment only, it does not necessarily reflect the views of other contributors or Jeralyn

From tomorrow's NYTimes Editorial:

Democratic lawmakers are asking for a special prosecutor to look into Mr. Gonzales’s words and deeds. Solicitor General Paul Clement has a last chance to show that the Justice Department is still minimally functional by fulfilling that request.

If that does not happen, Congress should impeach Mr. Gonzales.

Gleen Greenwald reports on President Bush's radio address today on, get this, amending FISA. What the President said:

[M]y Administration has proposed a bill that would modernize the FISA statute. . . [I]t seeks to restore FISA to its original focus on protecting the privacy interests of people inside the United States, so we don't have to obtain court orders to effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets located in foreign locations.

Did you get that? Bush will protect the privacy interests of people inside the United States by removing the requirement of a court issued warrant. Thank you very much Big Brother. More.

The Bush Administration has leaked the following story to the NYTimes as an explanation for Attorney General Gonzales' seemingly incorrect testimony:

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program. . . . The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program.

Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining. If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.

Personally, I am at a loss at how this exonerates Alberto Gonzales. He flatly stated there was no dispute over the TSP. Later, he stated it was about the program President Bush confirmed. Data mining is a search without a warrant. The data mining is part of the same program. The speculation, indeed JUSTIFICATION, from many conservative legal scholars was that President Bush was discussing data mining. In fact, this NYTimes reporting is flat wrong, since in his discussion of the TSP, President Bush expressly referenced "the program" described in news reports, news reports that expressly discussed a data mining program. More.

After deliberating for 30 hours, a federal jury in Milwaukee found three former police officers guilty of beating Frank Jude Jr. and of conspiring to violate his civil rights. A suspended officer was acquitted.

Jude's beating led to the largest single-day purge in Police Department history. In May 2005, Chief Nannette Hegerty fired nine officers, suspended three and demoted one. It also prompted new hiring and training practices.

Two of the former officers will continue to be paid their salaries until they are sentenced, pursuant to a law "that requires fired officers be paid until their appeals of termination are exhausted with the Fire and Police Commission, or they are sentenced on a felony." The third former officer is already serving a sentence for making a bomb threat.

Details ...

Back to law, this is a law blog after all.

Jack Balkin continues his righteous crusade in favor of progressive originalism. Hurrah for Prof. Balkin! His most recent post ties his theory of progressive originalism with the purposes of a Constitution, Our Higher Law:

The American Constitution is far more than basic law in this sense. Americans also view their Constitution as a source of important values, including justice, equality, democracy, and human rights. They view the Constitution’s guarantees as objects of aspiration; the Constitution either offers or refers to a standard that stands above ordinary law, criticizes it, restrains it, and holds it to account. Fidelity to the Constitution requires that we aspire to something better and more just than the political, social and legal arrangements we currently maintain. Hence the Constitution trumps ordinary law not simply because it is legally or procedurally prior to it, but because it represents important values that should trump ordinary law, supervise quotidian acts of governmental power, and hold both law and power to account. Thus, we say that the Constitution is not merely basic law, it is also higher law; that is, it is a source of inspiration and aspiration, a repository of values and principles.

. . . [I]t is not enough that the Constitution serve as basic law– a framework for governance, or as higher law– a source of aspirational standards and values. It must also be our law. The people who live under it– the American people–must understand the Constitution as their law. . . . The Constitution works as our law when we identify with it and are attached to it, whether or not we consent to it in any official or legal sense. The Constitution works as our law when we view it as our achievement and the product of our efforts as a people, which simultaneously involves a collective identification with those who came before us and those who will come after us.

. . . The method of text and principle, I believe, serves the multiple functions of a constitution – as basic law, higher law, and our law– far better than other forms of originalism. An originalism that strongly distrusts delegation to future generations and demands that open-ended provisions must be closely connected to original expected application is defective in all three respects. That kind of originalism makes the most sense if we think of the Constitution only as basic law. It tries to turn open-ended principles and standards into something more concrete and rule-like, something whose effects will hopefully be more predictable and (in many cases) more constraining. But that is not the only way that constitutions could serve as basic law. Constitutions can also channel and give incentives for political stability and adaptation rather than merely block and constrain decisionmaking. In fact, the former is a far better way to understand the basic law function of a constitution. . . .

Please read the entire post. It is a stirring vision of progressive Originalism and how such an approach aggrandizes Our Constitution.

I think while right on the smaller point, Matt Yglesias and Atrios miss the larger point that Anne Marie Slaughter gets wrong in discussing partisanship and foreign policy. Atrios writes:

Partisans are people who disagree with the Very Wise People of Washington who float above the muck doing The Business of the People selflessly and without regard for petty worldly concerns. It is wrong to criticize these people or undermine them in any way, for the fate of the Republic requires that we praise their wisdom and reminisce proudly about their moderate liberal death squads. They are the people who run the country, and we should let them do this without fear of criticism or accountability.

I do not think that is what Slaughter was saying entirely. She was arguing for something more - the separation of partisan politics from foreign policy. As if foreign policy was an issue "too important" for partisan politics, as opposed to say, health care, tax policy or the environment.

That is, fundamentally where Slaughter goes wrong here, not in the silly framing she chose. It reminded me of a discussion I had with Peter Beinart last year regarding his book "The Good Fight":

In the NYTimes, TNR's Noam Scheiber writes:

During the 1980s and ’90s, the [DLC] played a vital role in curbing both the perception and the reality of liberal excess inside the Democratic Party, and its efforts paved the way for Mr. Clinton’s ascendance. The council’s medicine worked. The centrist wing of the party won important battles on welfare reform, crime and the budget. By the late ’90s, Americans trusted Democrats to run the economy and keep their neighborhoods safe.

But George W. Bush taught Democrats of all stripes that their differences with one another were minor compared with the differences between them and Republicans. For seven years, Democrats have faced a radical administration that operates in bad faith. Yet there was the Democratic Leadership Council, still arguing that teachers unions endanger the republic.

. . . Today, the council has almost no constituency within the Democratic Party. About every five years, the Pew Research Center conducts a public opinion survey to sort out the country’s major ideological groupings. In 1999, Pew found that liberals and New Democrats each accounted for nearly one-quarter of the Democratic base. By the next survey in 2005, New Democrats had completely disappeared as a group and the liberals had doubled their share of the party. Many moderates, radicalized by President Bush, now define themselves as liberals.

On a variety of issues the council, and not the party’s liberal base, is out of touch with the popular mood. A recent Washington Post poll found that 60 percent of independents, along with 70 percent of Democrats, favor withdrawing from Iraq by next spring.

Precisely. I completely agree with Noam Scheiber here. However, I think Scheiber is wrong to argue that the DLC should just go away. What they should do, in my view, is understand this:

And that is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle

It is a lesson for Obama AND the DLC. Both should work to help Democrats define our agenda as the middle.

I'm updating TalkLeft's Facebook page today.

For those going to Yearly Kos, the Live Blogging the Libby Trial panel is on Thursday at 9:30 am. Also check out the panel on Friday at 4:00 pm, Ensuring Every Vote is Counted

Can we trust our voting machines to count every vote? Are minority voters given a fair chance at the ballot box? What happens when elected representatives can draw their own district lines? This panel will consider a variety of issues, ranging from redistricting to voter ID laws to felony disenfranchisement to caging, and will explain what progressives can do to ensure every adult citizen may vote, and that every vote is counted.

For those of you following the news, here's a place to talk about it.

I know this is a law blog but this rather understated headline could be extremely important:

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf held secret talks with opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto about a possible power sharing deal, media reported Saturday. The meeting, held Friday in the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi, lasted about one hour and ended without an agreement, Pakistani newspapers and television networks reported.

Reports of the meeting come amid intense speculation that Musharraf would seek Bhutto as an ally in his plans to seek reappointment from legislators for another term. The plans face constitutional hurdles, weakening the hand of Musharraf, an army general who seized power in 1999 and who is a key U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism.

Musharraf has recently been politically weakened by his failed attempt to oust Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry and also faces an alarming upsurge in Islamic militancy. . . . Musharraf has kept a low profile since the Supreme Court ended his bid to fire its chief judge, seen as a major setback to his plans to win a new five-year presidential term from lawmakers this fall.

The downturn in political fortunes comes as attacks have surged in Pakistan since an army assault on the pro-Taliban Red Mosque in Islamabad killed at least 102 people two weeks ago. A controversial security deal with tribal leaders on the Afghan border to contain Taliban and al-Qaida forces has also collapsed.

Read the whole article. This significance to me is the clear sign of Musharraf's growing weakness in Pakistan and the need for an alliance against Musharraf's erstwhile allies, the militant Islamists. Al Qaida IS in Pakistan's Waziristan region and a Pakistan willing to cooperate in fighting Al Qaida is important to US national security interests. This is a story that bears very close watching.

Maliki Asks For Petraeus' Removal:

Relations between the top United States general in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, the country's prime minister, are so bad that the Iraqi leader made a direct appeal for his removal to President George W Bush. Although the call was rejected, aides to both men admit that Mr Maliki and Gen David Petraeus engage in frequent stand-up shouting matches, differing particularly over the US general's moves to arm Sunni tribesmen to fight al-Qa'eda. One Iraqi source said Mr Maliki used a video conference with Mr Bush to call for the general's signature strategy to be scrapped. "He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias," said the official. "Bush told Maliki to calm down." At another meeting with Gen Petraeus, Mr Maliki said: "I can't deal with you any more. I will ask for someone else to replace you."

Of course, in order to avoid escalating the ongoing sectarian conflict, Gen. Petraeus is right to try and coopt the Sunni. But Maliki DOES NOT WANT THAT. It is why he truned down all of the request from the largest Sunni contigent in the Iraqi Parliament. The feud with the Saudis, who are supporting the Sunni insurgents, and the feud with Maliki, who is an ally of Iran, demonstrates there is no winning for the United States in Iraq. There is no magical strategy. There is no plan that will work. Will Senators ask General Petraeus about THAT come September?