Ed Kilgore on impeachment:

Citing the Clinton precedent, M.J. Rosenberg writes:

"[I]mpeachment is no longer the political nuclear bomb it once was, especially if one knows in advance that conviction and removal from office is unlikely to occur. Accordingly, impeachment proceedings are essentially the best means of getting information to the public which is otherwise unavailable."

I'm glad M.J. is beginning with the premise that actual impeachment and removal of Bush ain't happening, at least based on the current dynamics. I do not share his optimism about impeachment proceedings serving as a "lever" to bring Bush to heel, given everything we know about the man. Nor do I really understand Josh's suggestion that initiating a pre-doomed impeachment effort will somehow serve as a legal precedent reducing the impact of Bush's scofflaw behavior.

So the fundamental question remains whether Democrats want to take up the "I-word" as a political exercise. And other questions quickly follow.

Matt Yglesias responds:

At the end of the day, the argument Ed's making really is an argument from craveness -- it's the argument that Democrats should fear the results of playing with fire, not the argument that there are no crimes in this neighborhood.

It amazes me that Matt, like Josh Marshall, actually do not want to think about taking meaningful and effective steps to actually check abuses by the Bush Administration. [Ed Kilgore does consider them.]They seem to assume it is impeachment or nothing. This is not craven. It is shockingly ignorant. Ever heard of the Spending Power? Inherent contempt? Apparently not.

A Pennsylvania judge has declared unconstitutional the Hazleton law banning the undocumented from living or working within city limits.

The decision, by Judge James M. Munley of Federal District Court, presents a new roadblock to local officials who want to take action against illegal immigration after broad federal legislation to address the issue failed in the Senate last month.

Judge Munley ruled that ordinances first passed last July by the Hazleton City Council interfered with federal law, which regulates immigration, and violated the due process rights of employers, landlords and illegal immigrants.

Many cities since either adopted the Hazleton law or declared their intention to do if it was upheld.

The judge emphasized that illegal immigrants had the same civil rights as legal immigrants and citizens.

“Hazleton, in its zeal to control the presence of a group deemed undesirable, violated the rights of such people, as well as others within the community,” he wrote.

The ACLU weighs in here.

More like this please.

Today is reckoning day for former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio. He will be sentenced by Judge Edward Nottingham, Chief Judge of Colorado's U.S. District Court.

Among the unknowns, in addition to the length of the sentence and the amount of forfeiture and any fine the Court will impose on Nacchio, is whether he will be allowed to remain on bond pending appeal and if not, whether he will be taken into custody immediately or told to report to his designated institution within a period of weeks.

These are very different issues. One involves the Judge determining whether Nacchio has met the stringent legal standard for an appeal bond, which I discuss here and the Rocky Mountain News discusses today here.

The other only has to do with self-surrender.

More...

Apparently, the Saudis believe the Al Maliki government is beholden to Iran:

During a high-level meeting in Riyadh in January, Saudi officials confronted a top American envoy with documents that seemed to suggest that Iraq’s prime minister could not be trusted. One purported to be an early alert from the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr warning him to lie low during the coming American troop increase, which was aimed in part at Mr. Sadr’s militia. Another document purported to offer proof that Mr. Maliki was an agent of Iran. . . . Now, Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the Iraq war. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow.

So the Saudis are fueling the Sunni insurgents, who we are working with to defeat Al Qaida in Iraq in Anbar? And we are upset about that? Hard to figure what the plan is. More.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has tossed himself into a legal pickle by answering questions in ways that, at this point, appear to have been untruthful. The question is why did he answer the questions at all? I mean 64 "I don't recall"s in his previous appearance. A flat out refusal to answer a question from Schumer in his last appearance. And think of this, as reported by Marty Lederman:

[A]t the Senate Judiciary hearing this week, Senator Durbin . . . asked the AG, in particular, whether it would be legal for a foreign government to subject nonuniformed U.S. personnel to five particular interrogation techniques -- "painful stress positions, threatening detainees with dogs, forced nudity, waterboarding and mock execution."

This was our Attorney General's shameful non-response:

"Senator, you're asking me to answer a question which, I think, may provide insight into activities that the CIA may be involved with in the future. . . . [I]t would depend on circumstances, quite frankly."

. . . In questions following a hearing last summer, Senator Durbin asked the each of the Judge Advocates General of the military services the same question about the application of Common Article 3 to such interrogation techniques. The JAGs -- Navy Rear Admiral Bruce MacDonald; Army Major General Scott Black; Marine Brigadier General Kevin Sandkuhler; and Air Force Major General Jack Rives -- have now submitted their answers, which are just a bit less equivocal, and quite a bit shorter, than the responses of the Attorney General, the President, and Mike McConnell:

QUESTION: Are those five techniques consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions?

ANSWER (from each of the JAGs): "No."

Q: Are they unlawful?

A: Yes.

So why answer the other questions instead of dodging them? Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel have a theory:

On the plane home today, I watched the first hour of "No End in Sight," the 2006 documentary about the Iraq War and events leading up to it. The film was shown at Sundance and opens in theaters tomorrow, July 27. (I received an advance screening copy a few weeks ago and just got around to watching it.)

The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq’s descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, NO END IN SIGHT is a jaw-dropping, insider’s tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003) as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts.

NO END IN SIGHT examines the manner in which the principal errors of U.S. policy – the use of insufficient troop levels, allowing the looting of Baghdad, the purging of professionals from the Iraqi government, and the disbanding of the Iraqi military – largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today. How did a group of men with little or no military experience, knowledge of the Arab world or personal experience in Iraq come to make such flagrantly debilitating decisions?

It is excellent. I hope you will all see it, and I plan to finish watching it later tonight.

The visuals and graphics are great. The selections from various Rumsfeld news conferences show him at his arrogant worst. Richard Armitage comes off to me as evasive, unknowledgable and disingenuous. I am really glad he's gone.

The film won the Documentary Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.Here's a recent review.

Today the Clinton and Obama campaigns demonstrated who is playing checkers and who is playing chess. I will not go through the full overblown silly brouhaha again, but rather fast forward to a desperate seeming Obama calling Sen. Clinton "Bush-Cheney Lite." Senator Clinton responded, and I think in devastating fashion:

SEN. CLINTON: "Well, this is getting kind of silly. I've been called a lot of things in my life but I've never been called George Bush or Dick Cheney certainly. We have to ask what's ever happened to the politics of hope?

Now I have long ridiculed this phony Politics of Hope as silly nonsense that bore no reality to the politics necessary in today's climate. But for Obama to so abruptly abandon the "high road' to attack Sen. Clinton when he has been reticent to be "partisan" in defending Democrats (or critcizing them) smacks of desperation. Obama began with a political (not a substantive) gaffe in the debate and now compounds the error. It further strengthens my view that he is not yet up to a serious run for President.

AP:

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said Thursday the government's terrorist surveillance program was the topic of a 2004 hospital room dispute between top Bush administration officials, contradicting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' sworn Senate testimony.

Think Progress:

Sens. Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Russ Feingold, and Sheldon Whitehouse explained in a letter to Solicitor General Paul Clement that “it has become apparent that the Attorney General has provided at a minimum half-truths and misleading statements” to the Judiciary Committee. They wrote:

We ask that you immediately appoint an independent special counsel from outside the Department of Justice to determine whether Attorney General Gonzales may have misled Congress or perjured himself in testimony before Congress.

Update: Judge Gertner to the Justice Department: Wrong again!

A federal judge today ordered the government to pay $101.7 million in the case of four men who spent decades in prison for a 1965 murder after the FBI withheld evidence of their innocence to protect an informant.

Once again, our Justice Department is taking a position in court that has very little to do with justice. FBI agents allegedly knew that a witness in a state murder prosecution was being untruthful when he accused four men of participating in the murder, but they kept quiet because they wanted to protect an informant who was actually involved in the killing.

Two of the wrongfully convicted defendants and the families of two others who died in prison are suing the FBI for their decision to withhold evidence of their innocence.

The government argued that federal authorities had no duty to share information with state officials who prosecuted Limone, Salvati, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco. Federal authorities cannot be held responsible for the results of a state prosecution, a Justice Department lawyer argued.

Accountability? Not in this government. Fortunately, an excellent federal judge, Nancy Gertner, is hearing the case. She'll soon decide whether the federal government should be held responsible for its conspiracy of silence.

Glenn Greenwald continues to pull down Joe Klein's pants and I have little to add to what Glenn has written.

But this part struck me:

Several days ago, I referenced a Joe Klein post from January in which he called Paul Krugman an "ill-informed dilettante" and said Krugman made "a fool of himself" when Krugman argued against the Surge. Illustrating the Virtues of Beltway Seriousness, Klein complained that Krugman failed to study the Complex, Important Issues surroudning the Surge, unlike Serious Analysts like himself, Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan . . . After I posted that, I received an email from Krugman pointing out that -- directly contrary to what Klein accused him of -- Krugman had written a column months earlier, entitled "Arithmetic of Failure," discussing the military doctrine of counterinsurgency, and explaining why it was impossible for the U.S. military to succeed with this strategy. . .

What more can be said about Joe Klein World than the notion he espouses that he, a Beltway Gasbag, is a "serious" person while Paul Krugman, Princeton Economics professor, is not. Klein has lost all connection to reality.

In what can only be read as a sharp rebuke to Cheney acolyte Eric Edelman, SecDef Gates responds to Senator Clinton as follows:

First, allow me to reiterate that I have long been and continue to be an advocate of congressional oversight as a fundamental element of our system of government. I also have publicly expressed my belief that congressional debate on Iraq has been constructive, appropriate and necessary. . . . Furthermore, I agree with you that planning concerning the future of U.S. forces in Iraq — including the draw down of those forces at the right time — is not only appropriate, but essential. . . .

Specifically, I emphatically assure you that we do not claim, suggest, or otherwise believe that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies, nor do we question anyone’s motives in this regard.

. . . Further, you may rest assured that such planning is indeed taking place with my active involvement as well as that of senior military and civilian officials and our commanders in the field. I consider this contingency planning to be a priority for this Department.

Gates of course assures Edelman of his "strong support." Well, this letter clearly is a rebuke of Edelman's previous letter.

about this:

"I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."

He is considering not participating in the GOP CNN/You Tube Debate.