The North Carolina State Bar today filed its formal opinion in the disbarment of Durham DA Mike Nifong for his actions in the discredited Duke Lacrosse players' case.

The opinion is here.

Nifong also has a criminal contempt hearing on deck for July 26. He has been ordered to appear personally. He also has a new lawyer.

Tom Edsall of the Huffington Post watches Fred Thompson on Hannity and Colmes so you don't have to:

Hannity[:] "They have attacked you, they have attacked your family, and now, they come out in the Los Angeles Times with a piece that says you lobbied for abortion rights. You say that's absolutely not true."
[THOMPSON]: "You need to separate a lawyer who is advocating a position from the position itself."

In others words, sorrry, Sean, it is absolutely true. Edsall wry notes:

If ever an answer demanded a follow-up, this fit the bill. . . . Hannity, however, must have missed that.

Read Edsall's whole piece. It is a good one.

Tom Tancredo is in need of an attention fix for his fledgling Presidential campaign that while never getting off the ground still took a nose-dive when immigration reform fell off the table.

His latest is to introduce a bill that he knows will not pass but hopes will push emotional buttons back into overdrive.

Everybody knows that if you are born in this country, you automatically are a U.S. citizen. Under Tancredo's bill, a baby born to undocumented residents would be stripped of citizenship.

Tancredo's legal foundation for this is his unique view of the 14th Amendment. How unique?

Tancredo doesn't have any co-sponsors for his bill. Asked what support he expected, Tancredo, standing alone on a podium, looked to the right and the left and noted the absence of fellow lawmakers.

More...

Via The Gavel (blog of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi)As we wait for President Bush's report to be released today that will lower expectations for Iraq, here's a graphic from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. CRS reports that since the President's escalation began, the cost of the war in Iraq has increased to $10 billion per month.

In 2007, so far, our Government has spent $27 billion on the War on Drugs.

No wonder our Government can't provide us with adequate health insurance.

This clip

is, of course, political theater. But it is also the heart of the matter. I repeat again, Ms. Taylor's refusal to discuss certain matters at the behest of the President is flouting a legal subpoena which has been unchallenged LEGALLY by the President.

While the President can, in my view, direct subordinates to not answer a Congressional subpoena on the grounds of executive privilege, he can not do so to persons who do not work for him, as neither Ms. Taylor or Ms. Miers do. The President has no legal power over them. The Congressional subpoena power does bind them until set aside by a court of law. What Ms. Taylor did do in fact was honor her political oath to the President will ignoring her legal duty to comply with a Congressional subpoena. Ms. Miers apparently will do the same today.

My bottom line remains the same, it is incumbent on the President to seek to quash these subpoenas, by making such a motion before a court of law.

Jack Balkin in a tour de force. Any description I provide will not do it justice. Go read it.

What could the headline writer have been thinking when he wrote this one?

Senate Narrowly Backs Bush in Rejecting Debate on Increasing Time Between Deployments

By JEFF ZELENY and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: July 12, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 11 — A solid majority of the Senate’s Republicans stood by President Bush’s Iraq policy on Wednesday and blocked consideration of a plan to give American troops more time between combat tours. But Democrats drew fresh Republican support for other proposals as they vigorously pushed to change the administration’s war strategy. . . .

The lede sentence gives you the headline

"Senate Republicans Stand By Bush's Iraq Policy, Block Debate on Changing Course"

The journalism in today's newspapers is atrocious.

In one of the most ridiculous pieces yet on the Congressional inquiry into the firing of US Attorneys, the Washington Post "reports":

After leaving her post as White House political director in May out of what she says was a search for normalcy, she now finds herself part of the unending congressional probe into the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.

(Emphasis supplied.)Unending? Umm. Has the investigation even reached its first Friedman Unit? Nice "reporting." More.

The House Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security is holding a hearing at today at 10:00 am on the DEA's regulation of pain medecine. The live feed is here. The witnesses:

• Joseph T. Rannazzisi
  Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of Diversion Control United States Drug Enforcement Administration, United States Department of Justice Washington, DC
• David Murray
  Director of Counter Drug Technology, ONDCP, The White House Washington, DC
• Edward J. Heiden Ph.D.
  Heiden Associates Inc., Washington, DC
• Valerie Corral
  Founder of WAMM, Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana Davenport, CA
• Siobhan Reynolds
  President, Pain Relief Network, Santa Fe, NM
• John Flannery
  Attorney, Campbell, Miller, Zimmerman, PC, and Author of Pain in America and How the Government Makes it Worse Leesburg, VA

John Flannery and Siobhan Reynolds will be excellent witnesses. You can read Ms. Reynolds' written testimony here. It begins:

Thank you for asking me to speak on the current situation facing patients in chronic pain. We come to you seeking your protection from the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency out-of-control, an agency that has demonstrated no respect for the rights of ill Americans, nor for the rule of law itself…

It's time we got the DEA off the backs of pain doctors so the 75 million Americans who live in chronic pain can get some relief.

More...

Robert Stein, on the departed Lady Bird Johnson:

"My mother," Lynda Bird Johnson once told me, "thinks well of everybody. She's even sure the Devil's been maligned. Just got a bad press.”

I got to know the First Lady during the time her daughter worked for me when I was editor of McCalls. She was womanly in a way that has gone out of style. Without the chic of Jacqueline Kennedy or the country-club cool of Laura Bush, Claudia Taylor Johnson devoted most of her life to herding a bull-in-the-china-shop husband from the Texas panhandle to the White House.

She will be remembered for her dedication to beautifying America with wildflowers, but Lyndon Johnson was her life’s work. She never stopped.

. . . History will have mixed feelings about a President who changed race relations in America forever by pushing through Congress against all odds the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the rallying cry of the movement, “We shall overcome,” and then damaged the country with his stubborn refusal to end a disastrous war.

But whatever he achieved would never have been possible without the loving woman who died today at 94.

RIP, Lady Bird Johnson.

As most know by now, the Republican caucus in the Senate blocked an up or down vote on Jim Webb's amendment on troop readiness. The vote was 56-41.

I did not devote much time to the debate in the Senate and, frankly, I won't, as the Republicans will not vote to buck Bush and change course in Iraq, much less vote to end the war.

I respect what Reid and Co. are doing -- they are making sure Republicans can not play this 'talk the talk but not walk the walk' game. But that does nothing to end the Debacle.

My friends (in the rhetoric of the Senate), we all know there is only one way to end the Iraq Debacle, set a date certain when the Democratically controlled Congress will no longer fund the Debacle. Until the Democratic leadership fully embraces this strategy, the Iraq Debacle will not end.

TPM has the goods on how Victor Rita (now serving a 33 months sentence), convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, was "less equal than" Scooter Libby (now scot free), also convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, providing this video of Rita's attorney, Tom Cochran, a public defender from North Carolina, testifying at today's House hearing on the commutation of Libby: