Remember the case of the 14 year old girl who was raped and murdered by U.S. troops?

8 of them will face courts-martial proceedings on rape and murder charges.

Eight soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division will be court-martialed on murder charges stemming from their service in Iraq, including two who face a death sentence for allegedly raping a 14-year-old girl and killing her and her family, the military ordered Wednesday.

The Fort Campbell soldiers facing the death penalty are Sgt. Paul E. Cortez and Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman. Both are accused of raping Abeer Qassim al-Janabi in her family's home in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, then killing her along with her parents and younger sister.

Another soldier, Steven Green, is being tried in federal court in the U.S., since he was discharged before charges were filed. You can read the affidavit for Green's arrest here. Page 6 lays out the events and players.

As Jeralyn writes, our current Congress is the worst in a long time. A bad combination with the worst President and worst Media. This, it is quite strange that Kevin Drum would pooh pooh the importance of a Democratic Congress:

So what happens if Democrats win control of Congress in November? Conservative Bruce Bartlett says, nothing much. At the Washington Post, liberal Harold Meyerson mostly agrees. He says the Democratic agenda will be pretty much what you'd expect:

It includes raising the minimum wage, repealing the Medicare legislation that forbids the government from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices, replenishing student loan programs, funding stem cell research and implementing those recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission that have thus far languished.

That ain't chopped liver. Moreover, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of this:

Democrats will have considerably more oversight power, even if Republicans did gut the oversight staff when they took over a decade ago. And not a moment too soon.

This is by far the most important result of a Democratic Congress and for Kevin to note it in passing as "nothing much" is, well, not sharp.

Matt Taibi writes on The Worst Congress Ever in Rolling Stone. The tag line says it all:

How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and perverts -- in five easy steps.

Here's RS's list of the 10 worst Congressmen.

NORML's Paul Armentano has an op-ed in today's Examiner pointing out that the U.S. is spending $1 billion dollars a year to incarcerate people for marijuana offenses. The figure comes from the latest report released by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The new report is noteworthy because it undermines the common claim from law enforcement officers and bureaucrats, specifically White House drug czar John Walters, that few, if any, Americans are incarcerated for marijuana-related offenses. In reality, nearly 1 out of 8 U.S. drug prisoners are locked up for pot.

Another $8 billion is spent on arresting them.

This is the first open thread since the new site launched Monday.  All topics are welcome.

For those of you who want to see the comment you are responding to in the same window as the one you are writing in, if your comments are set to "nested" or "threaded" there will be a "reply to this" button in each comment.  Click on the "reply to this" for the comment you want to respond to and that comment will be there when the commenting screen opens.  

So you can view and cut and paste from the individual comment you are replying to and view both in the same window.

Update: I deleted this post by accident (I'm learning Scoop too for the first time).  Let's start again.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The NY Times reports tonight that the closely watched Long Island case of the DWI death of 7 year old wedding flower girl Katie Flynn prosecuted as second degree murder for "depraved indifference" for the accused driving on the wrong side of the road at three times the legal limit resulted in a guilty verdict after a five week trial.

Martin R. Heidgen, of Valley Stream, NY, was found guilty on Tuesday after five days of deliberation, with the jurors having twice reported being deadlocked. Jurors wept as the verdict was read.

The case became a cause celebre for the D.A.'s election and advocates of stronger DWI prosecutors.  It "is one of only a few murder convictions won in fatal drunken driving cases anywhere."

by Last Night in Little Rock

A new issue: How far may a police officer go in searching an arrestee's personal GPS device for where he has been?  The first apparent first case is now working its way through the courts.

From the Journal Times of Racine, WI, by Janine Anderson: Sheriff's department uses Google Earth to pinpoint marijuana fields.

The Racine County Sheriff's Department used Google Earth -- an online mapping program -- last week to pinpoint marijuana fields in Mount Pleasant and bust a Racine man for harvesting pot.

We've corrected most of the bugs (including those posted in the comments we thought warranted fixing) and the RSS feed.

I'm very happy with the move, and hope you are too.   Change is never easy, try it out, see if you don't get used to it.

Before I let the developers off the hook, here's your last chance to tell us what isn't working or what you wish we would change.

David Ignatius laments the demise of civil rational public discourse that he labels centrist:

People from the Old Media, like me, instinctively prefer a centrist style of civilized debate. Of course we do, say Halperin and Harris. We are the gatekeepers of the old order. The shrill voices of the New Media -- the bloggers and talk-radio hosts and other partisan megaphones that Halperin and Harris describe as the "Freak Show" -- don't just threaten our beloved center. They might eventually put us out of business.

The gatekeepers have been AWOL. There is no rational debate because lies are accorded equal treatment as truth. Issues are nothing in campaigns for the Gatekeepers, personality and image everything. David Ignatius and the Old Media failed us and Left bloggers were forced to deal with it. and we have. But if Ignatius wonders what killed rational discourse in this country he need look no further than his mirror. He and the Media failed and accepted the Republican ground rules of falsehoods and trivialities. Ignatius, you killed rational discourse.

I go on and on about how to fight the political battle. But in a post, Digby discussed how governance has changed in our country:

It really can't be overstated how Newt's bare knuckle style of politics changed the way things worked in Washington. When it was combined with the big money media operations that finally came to fruition during that era --- Limbaugh, FOX etc. --- any old fashioned notions of political comity went out the window. And it was such a strong series of below the belt punches that it knocked the Democrats to the ground for nearly a decade. (It was providence that the Democratic president at the time was a skilled rope-a-dope fighter who could withstand a relentless rain of blows.)

Indeed, it has been governance as an extension of scorched earth politics and is the single most important reason why today's Republican Party simply is incapable of competent governance.

But let's assume Democrats, in some imaginable miracle, take both houses of Congress, how should they run the Congress? Some thoughts on the other side.

Democracy in Iraq:

For Mr. Maliki, these concerns have taken on a keen personal edge, exposed Monday when the White House revealed that Mr. Maliki asked President Bush in a telephone call whether there was any truth to rumors that the Americans had plans to replace him "if certain things don't happen within two months," in the words of Mr. Bush's press secretary, Tony Snow.

Chalabi time? What a farce. It would be funny if it was not tragic. Purple fingers anyone?

In death, Ken Lay has escaped both conviction and incarceration.  Lay died before his sentence commenced, and today, a federal judge vacated his conviction.  Since Lay died before his case could be reviewed on appeal, the law gives Lay a posthumous pass.

In a technical sense, the UPI may be correct to say that the action "lifts a cloud from Lay's name."  In the real world, those who saw Lay as a symbol of corporate avarice will not forget that a unanimous jury found the evidence of his guilt convincing beyond a reasonable doubt.