On ABC's This Week, Senator Joseph Biden really crystallized what is wrong with the Beltway Democrats' view of the Iraq Debacle.

Biden said he won't support continuing the Surge while at the same time saying he had to vote to FUND the Surge. This answer echoed his debate answer:

We have 50 votes in the United States Senate. We have less of a majority in the House than any time other than the last eight years. Ladies and gentlemen, you're going to end this war when you elect a Democratic president. You need 67 votes to end this war. . . . We're funding the safety of those troops there until we can get 67 votes...

Leaving aside the Orwellian "funding the safety of those troops" by voting to keep them in a war, what Biden is telling you is that even though he opposes continuing the war, he will vote to continue funding the war indefinitely. So let's be clear, Senator Biden, speaking for a good number of Beltway Democrats, including Netroots darlings like Senators Webb and Tester, despite opposing continuing the war, will not use the Not Spending power to end the Iraq Debacle. As long as this is true, the Iraq Debacle will not be ended. And, despite the protestations of these Democrats to the contrary, this means they are effectively, even if it is against their will, supporting President Bush's policies on the Iraq Debacle.

The LA Times reports on how defense lawyers across the country are using the U.S. Attorney firing scandal to challenge political prosecutions.

Defense lawyers in a growing number of cases are raising questions about the motives of government lawyers who have brought charges against their clients. In court papers, they are citing the furor over the U.S. attorney dismissals as evidence that their cases may have been infected by politics.

Justice officials say those concerns are unfounded and constitute desperate measures by desperate defendants. But the affair has given defendants and their lawyers some new energy, which is complicating life for the prosecutors.

Will the challenges resonate with jurors? I wonder how much evidence about it the Judges will allow into evidence.

Even so, the Justice Department is likely to find itself facing more discovery requests based on the scandal.

More...

The Take Back America Conference begins today. These events will be streaming live.

MONDAY, JUNE 18th

Progressive Senators Town Hall: 8:00-9:30 PM ET
TUESDAY, JUNE 19th

Sen. Mike Gravel: 8:30-9:00 AM ET
Gov. Bill Richardson: 9:00-9:30 AM ET
Sen. Barack Obama: 12:00-12:30 PM ET
Sen. John Edwards: 12:30-1:00 PM ET
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20th

Sen. Hillary Clinton: 8:00-8:30 AM ET
Rep. Dennis Kucinich: 8:30-9:00 AM ET

If you can't watch live, there will be video on demand for later viewing. The Firedoglake crew is there, so check in with them and other blogs for first-hand reports

Update: Oliver Willis is in attendance and so far, less than overwhelmed.

The Supreme Court today decided Breslin v. California (opinion here, pdf) holding that passengers in automobiles have 4th Amendment rights to contest a search and seizure during a traffic stop. The first part of the ruling:

Held: When police make a traffic stop, a passenger in the car, like the driver, is seized for Fourth Amendment purposes and so may challenge the stop’s constitutionality. Pp. 4–13.

(a) A person is seized and thus entitled to challenge the government’s action when officers, by physical force or a show of authority, terminate or restrain the person’s freedom of movement through means intentionally applied.

Last Night in Little Rock has more at FourthAmendment.com.

Jeffrey Toobin, writing in the New Yorker, explains why 2008 will determine not just our President and congressional officials, but the future of the Supreme Court for the next several decades.

He examines the rulings in the first full term in which Justices Alito and Roberts participated. He notes that the conservative controversial opinions were decided by votes of 5 to 4. And that Justice Stevens is 87 years old and Ruth Gader Ginsberg is 74. But Alito and Roberts are only in their 50's.

Since Souter and Kennedy, all appointed Justices -- Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Roberts, and Alito —- have fulfilled the agenda of the Presidents who appointed them. No surprises.

I agree with Toobin who concludes his excellent article with:

At this moment, the liberals face not only jurisprudential but actuarial peril. Stevens is eighty-seven and Ginsburg seventy-four; Roberts, Thomas, and Alito are in their fifties. The Court, no less than the Presidency, will be on the ballot next November, and a wise electorate will vote accordingly.

While media writers are still debating the ending to the Sopranos, those who are jones-ing and in need of a fix can head to Chicago where a real life mob trial, called Family Secrets, begins Tuesday.

Even in a city as heavy with mob history and lore as Chicago, the landmark trial set to begin Tuesday with the selection of an anonymous jury promises to be a spectacle.

There will be veteran prosecutors who have made careers targeting wiseguys. There will be flamboyant defense lawyers unafraid to make a joke in court and wear pink socks while doing it.

...Family Secrets will essentially put on trial the structure and enterprise that was the Chicago mob during the last few decades.

As for the cast of characters:

Most creators would probably prefer to have their intellectual property pirated than to be robbed at gunpoint. And then there's this point of view:

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."

Ken Fisher takes issue with Cotton's odd sense of priorities.

In today's NYT White House Memo, Sheryl Gay Stolberg insists that a confrontation over assertions of executive privilege in the investigation of U.S. Attorney firings would be risky for the White House and for Democrats. The risk for the White House is obvious: if the administration loses the battle and can't continue to stonewall, the truth might come out. The risk to Democrats is less clear.

Stolberg says Democrats "run the risk of looking like they are waging a fishing expedition." Even if Alberto Gonzales and other DOJ witnesses to date hadn't been so evasive and inconsistent in their testimony, and if White House emails hadn't disappeared, the "fishing expedition" charge would still ring hollow. At this point, it's obvious to the casual observer that Democrats are being stonewalled in their search for answers to legitimate questions. If this is a fishing trip, it's one the American public is willing to take.

To support her "Democrats need to worry about issuing a subpoena" thesis, Stolberg turns to Ari Fleischer. Democrats should take advice from Comical Ari?

Here's Fleischer's logic:

Finding that his previous analysis of the Politics of Iraq has fallen flat, Jonathan Alter grasps at straws and argues that the Dems' problem is one of sloganeering. Steven Benen gently guts Alter's argument:

. . . Alter's broader argument is off-base. He argues that Democrats have the right policy, but it's not "getting through" to the rest of the country. I disagree -- they have the right policy, it's getting through just fine, but Dems are coming up short executing their own strategy. Indeed, Alter suggests what's standing between Democrats and broader acceptance of their policy prescription is "some way of framing their position that commits firmly to withdrawal from Iraq, but doesn't make them look like surrender monkeys." Alter's heart is in the right place, but he's missing a key point here -- the public has already accepted the Democratic war policy. The problem isn't in framing; Dems' poll numbers started to sag only after they gave in and gave the Bush White House the war funding bill the president demanded. The sales pitch was irrelevant. . . . I think he's fallen into the same belief that tends to dominate the DC conventional wisdom -- that the Dems have fallen short in convincing Americans that it's time to withdraw from Iraq. That's just not so; Americans already want out and are waiting for Washington to catch up.

What Steve said.

Via Matt Yglesias, the ugly face of the Right Blogosphere, duly endorsed by the all important Instapundit link:

Not that I'm saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one's duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one's pain threshold.

Perhaps we can all understand better now what we are dealing with. The violent hatred expressed by the Right is truly toxic. What say you Howie Kurtz? Joe Klein?

There should be consequences for the high school pranksters who used a pilfered key to enter Hendrick Hudson High School to scatter "150 alarm clocks in the shape of houses or butterflies," set to go off at 9:15 on the last day of school. The pranksters wrapped the clocks in duct tape to make it difficult for annoyed teachers to remove the batteries.

Some community service for the criminal trespass might be appropriate -- that's what happened to "dozens of accomplices who donated as little as $1 to the stunt" -- but bringing felony prosecutions for planting fake bombs is a serious overreaction. The joke may or may not have been funny, depending on your sense of humor and/or general fear level, but the clocks clearly weren't intended as a bomb scare. Senior Alex Kane has a more mature view than those who abuse the criminal justice system by bringing unreasonable charges to make the point, yet again, that "everything changed" after 9/11:

"I think we have this climate of fear now, where even if it's a harmless senior prank, it gets tied up into thinking about terrorism," Kane said. "I understand the need to be vigilant in the face of threats. But you need to balance that out and not have people jumping out of their seats every time something kind of goes wrong."

Happy Fathers Day, everyone. How about a Sunday open thread?

The must-read of the day in my view is Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib, The General's Report.

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint.

A sample of what we didn't see:

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees....Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it.

Why didn't we see them?

Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.

More on Rumsfeld: