Nancy Pelosi's pick for House Intelligence Chair has generated a lot of discussion. The two front-runners were Jane Harman and Alcee Hastings (discussed here.)

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek reports today that Pelosi is now considering two others for the position:

One is Rep. Norm Dicks, a onetime strong Iraq-war backer who has since joined ranks with Murtha and now wants a phased troop withdrawal. The other is Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a quiet Texas lawmaker and former Border Patrol official who opposed the Iraq war from the outset. The aforementioned leadership aide notes that Reyes may now have the upper hand for "political" reasons: the Hispanic Caucus is angry because it has no members in the new House leadership or chairing major committees. Pelosi appears to be "leaning toward" Reyes, the aide says, but "the truth is, nobody knows what she is going to do."

Author and lawyer Scott Turow opines in the New York Times Magazine today that Justice Anton Scalia is a civil libertarian who may decide against the Administration in terror cases.

On Scalia's originalist philosophy:

Justice Scalia is led to these seemingly divergent positions by his unyielding adherence to a school of constitutional interpretation called originalism. To Scalia, the Bill of Rights means exactly what it did in 1791, no more, no less. The needs of an evolving society, he says, should be addressed by legislation rather than the courts.

On the warrantless wiretap challenge when it gets to the high court:

The plan:

Over the past two days, warnings have spread through messages delivered to the cellphones of Sunni Muslims. In Arabic, they read:

"Very big armed groups are being formed in Sadr City, backed up by the Interior Ministry, to kill great numbers of the citizens of Baghdad once the curfew is lifted. Spread the word among our people."

It signed off: "A reliable source."

Guests are --

Meet the Press: Schwarzenegger.

FOX News Sunday: Charlie Rangel, Barney Frank, and John Dingell. Trent Lott.

Face the Nation (CBS): McCaskill of Missouri and Brown of Ohio and Corker of Tennessee.

This Week (ABC): King Abdullah II of Jordan and then Dick Durbin and Sam Brownback.

Late Edition (CNN): Senators Cornyn and Reed.

Rangel, Frank and Dingell being portrayed as Commies on Fox will be the lowlight - but they can fight so . . . that is what I would watch. Probably I'll just roll over and zzzzzzz.

I liked this from Stanley Fish on the emptiness of "bipartisanship:"

the phrase “common ground” is trickier than might first appear, for there are (at least) two kinds of common ground – one philosophical and one pragmatic – and the odds of success will change dramatically depending on which you are hoping to find. If you are seeking the philosophical version of common ground, you have entered a conversation that has been going on for thousands of years. The aim of that conversation is to identify the values or needs all men and women share simply by virtue of being human.

Countries, customs, economies and political systems differ greatly, but if there were something common to all of them – something cross-cultural or even trans-cultural – it could serve as the basis of cooperation even between those who disagree on almost everything. Even in the midst of conflict that appears to hold out no hope of resolution, the gridlock (one of our favorite words these days) could be broken if the warring parties reminded themselves that although they are divided on many issues, something basic unites them. Invoking “the welfare of the American people” (or some other facile piety) won’t do it, because what best promotes that welfare is precisely what people are arguing about. It has to be something at once deeper and more precise, something with an appeal so universal that merely to name it is enough to get combatants to lay down their swords and beat them into plowshares.

What Broder and Lieberman and Klein and Obama think is by merely invoking "common ground" and "bipartisanship" you have done something meaningful. Anyone not an idiot knows this is nonsense. Lieberman and Obama certainly know this. I doubt Broder does. Klein may not either. It is just political posturing. The essential emptiness of Broder-ism, Lieberman-ism and Obama-ism.

Pyschodrama as the best tool to win over jurors? The LA Times explains.

The article focuses on personal injury lawyers, but it is also used by criminal defense lawyers. It's a really interesting topic, bound to provoke strong reactions from non-lawyers. The article begins:

The lawyer stood sobbing in the center of a darkened hotel conference room, ringed by dozens of other personal-injury lawyers. As the attorney recalled the final moments of his mother's life, his voice cracked and his body shook with repressed grief. And all around the circle, the lawyers watching him also began to weep.

Then the others began to make their own confessions: "My parents died … ," one began, his voice husky with tears. "I was disconnected from my father …," another said. "All of a sudden, I thought about my mother … ," a third added.

The seminar leader is a lawyer named Judd Basile,who learned the method from Gerry Spence who has been teaching it at his trial college for years. Every lawyer I know how has attended Spence's 3 week course in Wyoming swears by it.

Iraq:

In a wave of reprisal killings, Shiite militiamen attacked Sunni mosques in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq on Friday, defying a government curfew and propelling the country further toward full-blown civil war. The exacting of revenge for the deaths of more than 200 Shiites on Thursday came as powerful politicians linked to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr threatened to pull out of Iraq's coalition government if Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki attends a scheduled meeting with President Bush next week in Amman, Jordan. A boycott by loyalists of Sadr, on whom Maliki relies for political support, could upend Iraq's fragile unity government.

All hail the new leader of Iraq - Muktada Al Sadr. Well done Bush. Well done Dick. Well done Rummy. Well done Condi. Wolfowitz, Hadley, Bolton, Feith, McCain - Lieberman.

The glory is yours.

Matt Stoller, who has been on fire the last few days BTW, takes DC Gasbag Tom Edsall (who seems intent as being as successful as the car with the similar name) to task:

[Edsall] is one of the Old Wise Men of Washington, or a Very Serious Person, as Atrios would say. After that, I would sometimes read his work in the Washington Post and think 'who is this silly man?' His sources are obviously heavily stacked towards neoliberal insiders on the Democratic side, and he dismisses progressive activists and voters alike. Even though voters rejected an anti-labor anti-choice political party, the lesson for Edsall is that voters embraced an attack on labor and more restrictive abortion laws. It's not hard to figure out why Edsall believes this - peer pressure. Edsall's crowd is that of Harold Ickes, Rahm Emanuel, and Steny Hoyer, people who live in a rarefied world of Democratic elitism.

The hot Christmas item this year may be the big screen tv. I've been trying to decide on one for a few months, since I moved into a place with an additional room that seemingly would be perfect for one.

But, how do you choose? I've read many articles about the difference between rear view projection screens, LCD and Plasma. I'm still confused.

Then there's the installation issue. And the furniture issue. Do you hang it on the wall, put it in a wall unit, or let it sit on a stand?

It's been almost a year since the public learned of President Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program.

Under the Republican leadership in Congress, nothing much happened to shut it down. A lot of bad bills, such as Sen. Arlen Specter's, were tossed around but went nowhere.

What will change in January when Democrats have a majority in Congress? Not enough, from my vantage point, but here's the lowdown:

Is Sudan arming the militias and hindering the relief efforts in Darfur? An investigation into atrocities in Darfur is almost complete. International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno - O'Campo says that if the Sudan Government is not conducting its own legitimate inquiry, he will present evidence to the Judges of the International Criminal Court.

The International Criminal Court has found sufficient evidence to identify the perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region, and the probe offers "reasonable grounds to believe" that crimes against humanity were committed, chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told the annual meeting of the court's member states in The Hague.

"We selected incidents during the period in which the gravest crimes occurred," he said Thursday in a report on his activities over the past year. "Based on the evidence collected, we identified those most responsible for the crimes." Moreno-Ocampo did not name the targets of the investigation, which he said is nearly complete.

From CNN's Truthteller:

Michael Ware reports from the Iraqi capital tonight.

And Michael, the Iraqi government and the U.S. military in Baghdad keep saying this is not a civil war. What are you seeing?

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, firstly, let me say, perhaps it's easier to deny that this is a civil war, when essentially you live in the most heavily fortified place in the country within the Green Zone, which is true of both the prime minister, the national security adviser for Iraq and, of course, the top U.S. military commanders. However, for the people living on the streets, for Iraqis in their homes, if this is not civil war, or a form of it, then they do not want to see what one really looks like.

This is what we're talking about. We're talking about Sunni neighborhoods shelling Shia neighborhoods, and Shia neighborhoods shelling back. We're having Sunni communities dig fighting positions to protect their streets. We're seeing Sunni extremists plunging car bombs into heavily-populated Shia marketplaces. We're seeing institutionalized Shia death squads in legitimate police and national police commando uniforms going in, systematically, to Sunni homes in the middle of the night and dragging them out, never to be seen again.

I mean, if this is not civil war, where there is, on average, 40 to 50 tortured, mutilated, executed bodies showing up on the capital streets each morning, where we have thousands of unaccounted for dead bodies mounting up every month, and where the list of those who have simply disappeared for the sake of the fact that they have the wrong name, a name that is either Sunni or Shia, so much so that we have people getting dual identity cards, where parents cannot send their children to school, because they have to cross a sectarian line, then, goodness, me, I don't want to see what a civil war looks like either if this isn't one.

More.