by TChris

As TalkLeft reported here, the Bush administration, in response to a lawsuit, will release Secret Service logs of Jack Abramoff's visits to the White House. Yesterday, however, Scott McClellan hinted that the records will be incomplete.

"I don't know exactly what they'll be providing, but they only have certain records and so I just wouldn't view it as a complete historical record," McClellan said.

President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, famously took the heat for "accidentally" erasing 18 1/2 minutes from an embarrassing White House tape. Who will take the heat for failing to keep complete logs of Abramoff's embarrassing White House visits?

by TChris

Now that public support for the president has weakened, Sen. Arlen Specter seems to have rediscovered one of the central tasks of the legislature: to act as a check against the executive by exercising oversight of presidential power.

''There is some need for some oversight by Congress to assert its authority here," Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview.

Some need? There's been a compelling need for half a decade. Where have you been, Senator?

Specter says the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings in July "into President Bush's assertion that he has the power to bypass more than 750 laws enacted over the past five years." We can predict that Attorney General Gonzales will haul out one of the administration's standard responses: the president's power to protect the nation (from whatever) is limitless, and his interpretations of the Constitution are more important than those of Congress or the courts.

by TChris

Joseph Clark was strapped to a gurney in an Ohio prison yesterday, waiting to die. Technicians spent 22 minutes searching for a suitable vein in which to inject the chemicals that would end his life. After the drugs finally started to flow, Clark grew impatient. After a few minutes, he "was able to raise his head off the gurney and said, 'It's not working.' " The vein had collapsed, forcing technicians to spend more than half an hour looking for another vein.

It seems evident that Clark's death was cruel and unusual. Whether or not he felt physical pain, he was subjected to emotional torture as the minutes dragged by. This is the latest proof that death by lethal injection, far from being a humane alternative to other methods of execution, is barbaric. TalkLeft's recent coverage of the controversy surrounding lethal injection can be found here, here, here and here.

I'll be travelling until Friday so here's an open thread to keep yourselves current. I'll have my laptop with me, so I won't be gone entirely. And TChris and LNILR may check in as well.

If there's PlameGate news, be sure to check Firedoglake, Empty Wheel at the Next Hurrah, and Tom Maguire.

All of the sites on our blogroll are special, so I hope you give them a read too.

The ACLU has released another 9,000 pages of documents it received from the Defense Department pursuant to its Freedom of Information Act request. Check out this document (pdf) charting the detainee deaths prior to May, 2004.

Of 58 deaths, 8 were homicides and several others were unknown or under investigation. It lists each death and a cause. Here are some of them:

"Soldier killed detainee in violation of ROE"; "Soldier killed detainee while handcuffed"; "1 strangulation found outside isolation unit"; "1 blunt force trauma and choking, died during interrogation" (there are three of these); "Soldier drowned detainee, body not found"; and "died sleeping after interrogation."

And that's just one document I happened to click on out of the 9,000 new pages. As to Gen. Sanchez, the ACLU reports:

All has been quiet on the judicial nominations front for a while. A big fire is about to erupt. Two more controversial judges are up again for confirmation -- Terrence Boyle and Brett Kavenaugh. Democrats aren't happy with either, but they are particularly incensed about Boyle.

Democratic leaders said they certainly would filibuster one of the nominees, Terrence W. Boyle, and might filibuster the second, Brett Kavanaugh, if Republicans refuse to call him back for a second hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The partisan rhetoric was the strongest signal yet that the Senate might revisit the brinkmanship that brought the chamber to the edge of crisis a year ago, when a bipartisan group of 14 members crafted a temporary cease-fire.

The Bush family has been trying to get Boyle on the appellate bench since 1991. Bush I was unsuccessful. Now it's his son's turn.

Death penalty proponents like to say that it has never been established that an innocent person has been executed in the United States. That may no longer be the case. Arson experts have found that Texas executed a man whose crime may not have been a crime at all. The fire for which he was executed appears to have been an accidental one. Junk science and inadequately trained experts are the culprit.

Update: Don't miss JR's comment below. S/he is the son of one of the experts in the case and provides a lot more information.

Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post has more on Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner, as does today's New York Times. But it's Froomkin's personal account of the dinner I found most interesting. He got to meet Karl Rove, whom he describes as "charming" and not looking very worried at all. Dan explains why it would have been inappropriate for him to ask Rove any questions about PlameGate or his last grand jury appearance. He also posits that the annual dinner is past its prime.

Indeed, if the press and this particular White House had an even moderately functional professional relationship, then a chance to build personal relationships would be a nice bonus. But it's not a functional professional relationship. From the president down to the freshest press office intern, this White House seems to delight in not answering even our most basic questions.

So the last thing in the world we need is a big party where the only appropriate mode of communication is sucking up.

Mike Nifong, Durham County District Attorney, has won the Democratic primary election. Since there is no Republican candidate, he retains his job for another term.

Now that the election is out of the way, maybe he will have time to take a look at the defense photos showing Reade Seligman at the ATM machine at 12:24 am, a critical time period for the alleged rape.

by TChris

A "turning point" has finally been reached in Iraq. How do we know? The ever-optimistic president said so yesterday, on the third anniversary of his "Mission Accomplished" speech. Remember "Mission Accomplished"?

It didn't turn out that way.

Violence in Iraq continued instead of ebbed. In the six weeks from the start of the invasion to Bush's speech, 139 U.S. soldiers had died. In the three years since, as of Sunday, there have been another 2,258 U.S. military deaths in Iraq -- an average of 63 each month.

The latest "turning point" may mark a turn from disaster to chaos.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has filed his response to various reporters' motions to quash his subpoenas for records and notes.

Thanks to Tom Maguire for hosting the 45 page response, here and here.

I've only skimmed them, so I'll be back later with some thoughts. In the meantime, feel free to weigh in, or for analysis, check in with Empty Wheel.

Related: Jane at FDL has a new Karl Rove timeline.

by TChris

In response to a lawsuit that was filed to enforce a Freedom of Information request, the Bush administration says it will release Secret Service logs of Jack Abramoff's visits to the White House. The logs probably won't resolve an ongoing mystery:

It is not clear if the logs will resolve the issue of how Mr. Abramoff and one of his lobbying clients, the chief of an Indian tribe in Texas, were able to attend the May 2001 reception with Mr. Bush, since Mr. Abramoff's name was not on the guest list for the event. The White House has said it cannot explain how Mr. Abramoff was able to enter the White House complex that day.

Maybe he used his key to the back door.