Murray Waas reports that the House Judiciary and International Relations Committees, on a party line vote, rejected resolutions of inquiry that would have commenced a Congressional inquiry into the leaking the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Not too surprisingly, Republicans today beat back formal "resolutions of inquiry" by Democrats on the House Judiciary and House International Relations Committees that would have required the Bush administration to turn over to Congress information and records relating to the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame....

Republicans argued that any vote in favor of the resolution might impair the ongoing federal grand jury probe by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Democrats pointed out that Congress engaged in its own extensive formal investigations of Watergate and Whitewater while special prosecutors conducted criminal inquiries.

The House Intelligence Committee has scheduled a closed-session vote tomorrow. Murray says the outcome is expected to be the same.
AP article is here.

Law Prof Eric Muller at Is That Legal takes issue with Judge John Roberts position that early in his career he was just a staff lawyer who didn't make policy decisions and just argued the way he was told.

....we are talking here about a man who left a clerkship with then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist to become a Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States under President Reagan, and who left that position to join the White House staff as Associate Counsel to the President.

These are no ordinary "staff attorney" positions. Nobody gets jobs of this sort just by being a talented young lawyer (as they do at the D.A.'s office, the Public Defender's Office, or the litigation firm downtown). These are, in their nature, ideological positions.

People for the American Way also scoffs at the claim that Roberts' position as Deputy Principal Solicitor General during Bush I was not an ideological position (received by e-mail):

by TChris

Fifty-four Senate Republicans, evidently afraid of the truth, killed Sen. Hillary Clinton's proposal for an independent investigation of the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina. A public outcry for accountability didn't deter Senate Republicans from protecting the Bush administration from scrutiny.

The Senate vote is hardly likely to be the last word on whether to create an independent commission or as an alternative a special congressional committee to investigate Katrina. The 9/11 Commission was established in 2002 after resistance from Republicans and the White House, and opinion polls show the public strongly supports the idea. In a CNN/USA Today Gallup poll taken Sept. 8-11, 70 percent of those surveyed supported an independent panel to investigate the government's response to Katrina. Only 29 percent were opposed.

The AP has an article on Bush's legacy, which it says will be defined by three crises: September 11, Hurricane Katrina and the War in Iraq.

Katrina's lethal aftermath revealed that the Bush administration didn't learn valuable lessons from the 2001 attacks about responding to disasters. As for the president himself, since the Sept. 11 terror strikes, Bush seems to have lost his touch for connecting with an anxious public.

This is just unbelievable:

Two Loyola University students attending classes at Boston College after their school was shut down by Hurricane Katrina were stabbed on a Boston street early Wednesday morning. Joseph Vairo, 19, was in serious condition at a hospital after being stabbed twice, Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn said. An unidentified 20-year-old was treated and released.

There's a must-read article in Salon today, Dreams Unrealized on the failure of the civil rights movement in the U.S., in the context of the yeoman's job foreign poverty lawyers are doing for the poor and those facing the death penalty in the U.S.:

While it may be easy for American tourists to turn a blind eye to their own third world, a steady stream of young Australians and Europeans have been coming to Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and the rest of the deep South for years to serve the needs of the indigent people throughout these states.

As the co-director and recruiter for Reprieve U.S., an organization that sponsors and places volunteers at poverty law offices, it is always mildly surprising and embarrassing to me to hear these bright and passionate people explain that they are applying either to work for the poor in the criminal justice system in Texas or to help build shelters in Guatemala, and are unable to determine where the needs are greater. What seems most shocking to our volunteers is the complete disregard that the U.S. government has paid our clients throughout their lives, failing to provide housing, healthcare, education and other basic needs.

[Via Capital Defense Weekly]

by TChris

Another pledge of allegiance case might work its way to the Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."

TalkLeft background on the case that reached the Supreme Court, only to go unresolved on the merits, is here.

Let's have some praise where praise is due: For the inmates in Louisiana who have pitched in as first responders and other helpers for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

[James]Cox, a prisoner for nearly 30 years, is serving time for armed robbery at the Washington Correctional Institute. In the past two weeks, though, he has also been a first responder, one of dozens of inmates in orange jumpsuits who have been driving forklifts, clearing debris and handing out food and water to people living here near the Mississippi line.

As Louisiana digs out from Hurricane Katrina, convicts have been opening roads with axes and chainsaws and doing other useful work. At Angola State Penitentiary, near Baton Rouge, inmates produced mattresses for shelters. Some prisoners have even donated money from what little they are paid so evacuees can buy postage stamps.

by TChris

Douglas Dowd asks whether this description of the "New South," written in 1940, applies to the nation as a whole today:

Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibiity, attachment to fictions and false values..., too great an attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism... .

Dowd's answer, informed by history and current events, is here.

This weekend, another Minuteman-style group is gearing up to “patrol” the California-Mexico border at various points between the Pacific Ocean and the Arizona state line. As they head to the South Bay and drive past Chicano Park on I-5, this group will see the above 50 × 10 foot canvass painted to resemble a movie billboard.

Cazamigrantes is Spanish for migrant hunters. The billboard was designed by local artist Susan Yamagata and painted by Southwestern College’s Border Arts Workshop. It was commissioned by Latino organizations in San Diego.

Several people have e-mailed me this week to let me know the site is loading so slowly it's become a source of frustration. If you are having the same problem, please add a comment here. I am going to contact my hosting company to see if there is something they can do, but I'd like to get a handle on the size of the problem. Please be patient.

by TChris

A federal marshal who shot another driver after a traffic altercation in Maryland has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. A jury rejected Arthur Lloyd's claim that he acted in self-defense. The verdict isn't surprising if this description of the evidence is accurate: