Everyone is abuzz today with news that Law & Order star Fred Thompson has jumped into the Republican presidential race.

I'd rather talk about Rudy. David Boaz in the New York Daily News tells Libertarians to beware of him. Finally, someone in big media talks about his abysmal record as U.S. Attorney in New York.

As a U.S. attorney in the 1980s, Giuliani conducted what University of Chicago Law Prof. Daniel Fischel called a "reign of terror" against Wall Street. He pioneered the use of the midday, televised "perp walk" for white-collar defendants who posed no threat to the community - precisely the sort of power play for which conservatives reviled former state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. And Giuliani's use of federal racketeering statutes was so disturbing that the Justice Department changed its guidelines on the law.

Moving on to the present:

CNN is reporting a Saudi detainee has committed suicide. Some information is available here.

In other Gitmo news, 15 American lawyers are in Yemen.

Fifteen American lawyers have come to Yemen in order to reveal the truth about the situation of Yemeni detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they said this week at a press conference in Sana’a. They claim that the U.S. government was lying when it said that Yemen has refused to accept its detainees back into the country. “The main purpose of our visit is to expose the lie that the Yemeni government does not want its citizens back,” said Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network.

A few more details. The New York Times also reports, with some reactions from Guantanamo lawyers.

The jury returned a guilty verdict against marijuana activist Ed Rosenthal today -- he won't serve any jail time though. Background here.

Bob Stein, who saw many a scoundrel in his long distinguished career as a magazine editor, revels in the outing of Lou Dobbs:

Finally, finally the MSM, and the New York Times at that, has done for the CNN anchor what this blog has been apoplectically attempting to do for more than six months.

Starting with dismantling the leprosy hoax, David Leonhardt goes on to a litany of Dobbs’ offenses against journalistic truth that led to my naming him “the world’s worst journalist” earlier this month. Leonhardt’s conclusion:

“The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths. He is the heir to the nativist tradition that has long used fiction and conspiracy theories as a weapon against the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews and, now, the Mexicans.”

Read the whole post and the whole article. A timely takedown.

Things are heating up in the Scooter Libby sentencing. The Judge today ordered "that the media and, to the extent they have position on the issue, the parties shall submit to the Court by 5:00 p.m. on May 30, 2007, their legal views regarding what right, if any, the media has to access the sentencing letters prior to the June 5, 2007 imposition of the defendant's sentence."

Jane Hamsher and Marcy Wheeler, as credentialed bloggers for Firedoglake and Daily Kos, have submitted their letter. More from Jane here and Marcy here.

My view on the letters is here.

The Judge also ordered Team Libby reply to the government's sentencing memoranda (here and here, pdf) by 5:00 p.m. on May 31, 2007.

Update: Here is Team Libby's response.

Rep. George Miller (D-CA) released this statement:

Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, today said that the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber case, in which discriminated workers have only a narrow time-frame to file a complaint in the face of ongoing discrimination, was wrong and Congress should work to clarify the Civil Rights Act. “The Supreme Court’s ruling makes it more difficult for workers to stand up for their basic civil rights in the workplace. A worker undergoing sex, race, or other discrimination in pay is discriminated against with each and every discriminatory paycheck, not just when the company set the worker’s pay. Yet, according to the Supreme Court, if a worker does not file within 180 days of the employer’s decision to set her pay unlawfully, she has to live with that discrimination paycheck after paycheck. This ruling will force Congress to clarify the law’s intention that the ongoing effects of discriminatory decisions are just as unacceptable as the decisions themselves.”

Hillary Clinton is asking for help choosing her campaign song. The finalists are here. I voted for "Ain't No Stopping Us Now."

Too many of the choices are love songs, which I don't think really apply. Plus, if they're going to go down that road, maybe they should have included the Chiffons' One Fine Day. Or Bruce Springsteen's "Tougher Than the Rest." I like Cher's version.

Go on over and vote.

I have written on Prof. Jack Balkin's wonderful discussions of Professor Bruce Ackerman's theory of Constitutional Moments and Balkin's onw theory of Constitutional amendment by partisan entrenchment before, but Balkin has added two posts to the materials and they are even better. To reset, Balkin writes:

I will try to show that partisan entrenchment offers a simpler and more compelling explanation. Of course, Ackerman’s system is trying to do much more than Levinson’s and my theory. We are merely trying to show how doctrinal change occurs. He is trying to offer a theory that both describes and legitimates constitutional change as a act of popular sovereignty. In choosing between the two accounts, it is important first to decide what you want your theory of constitutional change to do. Levinson and I offer a much simpler theory-- with fewer moving parts– that assumes that not all great transformations are necessarily faithful to the Constitution, legitimate, wise or just. At best, partisan entrenchment produces results that are roughly but imperfectly democratic, because they tend to keep the courts in sync with the dominant national political coalition of the time. Ackerman’s theory has many more complications and assumptions, but he wants to legitimate constitutional transformations, not simply explain why they occur.

Balkin then discusses Ackerman's response to the criticism that the Civil Rights movement and the changes wrought do not fit into his theory:

The ACLU announced today it is suing Jeppesen, a Boeing subsidiary for its participation in secret renditions.

The lawsuit, which the ACLU said it would file Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges that Jeppesen knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the clandestine transportation of the men to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" under the agency's "extraordinary rendition" program.

"American corporations should not be profiting from a CIA rendition program that is unlawful and contrary to core American values," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "Corporations that choose to participate in such activity can and should be held legally accountable."

More information about the lawsuit is available at the ACLU website here.

It's been decades since I read Nora Ephron's Heartburn, her novel based on the crumbling of her marriage to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, so I don't have a ready answer as to whether Bernstein is a sexist. But judging from his new book on Hillary Clinton, I wouldn't be surprised.

Check out these passages from the book:

“The prospect that she could not bear a child, which seemed increasingly likely in the first two years of her marriage--and which she probably feared even earlier—could have been as frightening to her as anything she might conjure….Hillary suffered from a condition called endometriosis, which often makes conception difficult, can cause infertility, and frequently results in extreme pain during and after intercourse.’” (P. 149-50)

“‘She’s not a heavy-duty intellectual. He’s much brighter than she is. She’s bright, but she’s not very bright…” (p. 275).

“Her ankles were thick.” (p. 32)

“‘At first, she didn’t wear stockings….Her hair was friend into an Orphan Annie perm….There wasn’t one…feminine thing about her.’” (p. 130)

More...

In March, Harold Meyerson wrote:

In effect, what the protesters are doing is making the unattainable perfect the enemy of the barely-attainable good. Because Obey is quite right: The votes aren't there to shut down funding for the war. What he and Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership in both houses are about is finding some way to curtail the president's determination to pass the war on to his successor regardless of the continuing cost to U.S. interests and lives.

Did the Iraq Supplemental do that? Of course not. But on to Meyerson's Plan B, from:

It took the Democrats, and their dovish Republican allies, four full years to pass a cutoff of funds for U.S. ground forces in Vietnam. . . . Pelosi is steering the same course, for a war even more reckless and absurd than Vietnam.

What is Meyerson saying? That Congress can not end the war 'cuz they don't have the votes.' Well, why not just say that in the first place? As it happens, most of us always knew that. And many of us advocate an approach that requires strong Democrat support only, not waiting for phantom GOP support. This is what galls. The stupidity of it all.

Apparently, evoking the Gestapo is not an effective interrogation method:

As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

Illegal, immoral, ineffective. Why do it? Revenge? Sadism?