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:

The House Judiciary Committee's hearing on the use and abuse of presidential dlemency authority for executive branch officials, to include the Scooter Libby sentence commutation, begins at 12:00 pm ET.

You can watch the live webcast here.

I've already expressed my opinion on the witness list, and how I don't think it will shed any light on Bush's motives in granting the commutation.

I think it is worthwhile to listen to the testimony of Joe Wilson and law professor Doug Berman.

Unless the President waives executive privilege on the Libby commutation as Rep. Conyers asked him to do in this letter (pdf), and as President Clinton did in similar hearings into his exercise of clemency, I don't think we get very far today.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing has begun on the U.S. Attorney Firings.

TPM has Sara Taylor's written statement.

She's going to walk the line of deciding which questions she can answer as a private citizen and which she won't answer because Fred Fielding says they would impact privileged staff communications.

"While I may be unable to answer certain questions today, I will answer those questions if the courts rule that this committee's need for the information outweighs the president's assertion of executive privilege...

I look forward to answering those questions not covered by the President's assertion of executive privilege."

Firedoglake is live-blogging the hearing. (Part One and Two, so far.) TPMuckraker also is following the hearings.

The hearing is steaming live here.

I am not comfortable with this line of reasoning from Avedon Carol and Matt Yglesias:

Avedon Carol wonders if it shouldn't "concern us that Republicans are constantly talking about how people will all wise up when the next terrorist attack at home comes?" After all, they seem to really be "looking forward to it, and they take great delight in the thought that, by God, people will see things differently when it happens."

I detest it when Wingnuts accuse Democrats of "wanting the terrorists to win" when Dems speak the truth about Iraq. I think this is only marginally better than that -- a veiled insinuation that Wingnuts want terrorists to successfully attack us.

Can everybody, Wingnuts and DFHs, just drop this line of thinking? I guess I know Republicans and Wingnuts will not so is this a case of sauce for the gander? Perhaps, but I still do not like it.

I was watching the Larry King thing with Moore/Gupta and Atrios' reaction is my own:

I haven't gone into the full details, but from what I could tell from the Larry King joint appearance tonight what happened was fairly typical. Basically, to "fact check" Moore, the kind of scrutiny which rarely happens to, say, hacks from AEI or the Preznit of Amurka, Gupta pulled up some nitpickery alternative numbers. One could determine whether Gupta's chosen numbers were more or less correct than Moore's, but nothing supported the idea that Moore "fudged the facts" as was claimed. . . . [w]hat is clear is that "fact checking Moore" means one can throw up something, anything, and use it to cast doubt on his integrity. I welcome fact-checking. I just wish CNN would subject more of their guests to it.

In the spirit of fact checking, I would point to pieces of shoddy factual work by Gupta that I am personally familiar with. One was his fact-checking a few months ago of Bush's claim on stem cell research where Gupta was not willing to call out the flat out falsehoods of the bush Administration on this. Would that he held the President of the United States to the same standards as he appears to want to hold Michael Moore.

But the other was tonight.

In 2006, a report called the Illinois Study was released. It claimed that double-blind sequential lineups did not produce more valid eyewitness identifications. Prosecutors have since relied on that study to contest 30 years of research that shows they are more reliable than simultaneous identification procedures.

Now, a new report is out by leading researchers in the country finding that the Illinois study was flawed.

A blue ribbon panel of social scientists, convened by the Center for Modern Forensic Practice of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the Illinois Eyewitness Identification Field Study, which challenged 30 years of academic research into eyewitness identification procedures, was itself crippled by a design flaw that made the study's conclusions a dangerous basis for shaping public policy.

The Eyewitness Identification Reform Blog says there's no way to put lipstick on this pig.

The new findings are available here (pdf).