Via Democratic Daily:

Breaking News: Cindy Sheehan to Leave Camp

This story just off the news wires… Cindy Sheehan’s mother has had a stroke. The grieving woman who started an anti-war demonstration near President Bush’s ranch nearly two weeks ago said Thursday she was leaving because her mother had a stroke.

Cindy Sheehan told reporters she had just received the phone call and was leaving immediately to be with her 74-year-old mother at a Los Angeles hospital. “I’ll be back as soon as possible if it’s possible,” she said. After hugging some of her supporters, Sheehan and her sister, Deedee Miller, got in a van and left for the Waco airport about 20 miles away.

The Associated Press article is here.

Marvin Kalb, senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has an excellent take on RoveGate in the Financial Times, in which he brings the lessons of Watergate to the White House.

The investigation appears now to be heading towards rapid conclusion. If the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, finds that either Mr Rove or Mr Libby or both violated the law, they would face criminal charges, and the Bush administration would find itself enmeshed in a scandal of dimensions that are already being compared to the Nixon-era Watergate scandal.

....Much is still not known about Mr Fitzgerald’s investigation – he has insisted on absolute secrecy – but what is known suggests that the Bush administration is engaged in a two-front war: one to cover up its blunders in the lead-up to the Iraq war based on the mistaken assumption that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction”, and the other to protect the leaker. The two fronts are now unmistakeably linked.

Nicholas von Hoffman writing in the Observer:

If random searches of people in the subways are being done for anything except political effect, it's nonsense. The decision to search is a confession of helplessness. It is saying that the police and Homeland Security don't know who the enemy is, so maybe they can get lucky and spot one among the thousands racing to catch the A train.

Analyze it: The chances of seizing a terrorist in the middle of rush hour are almost zero. If the authorities had any idea who the would-be terrorists are or where they're lurking or what kind of terror weapon they intend to use, they would grab them and clap them onto an airplane for "rendition" to some far-off place where the ACLU cannot get at them.

LA Police Chief Bill Bratton is earning kudos in Los Angeles. This LA Times editorial not only praises him, but talks about a second term.

Bratton is only three years into a five-year contract. It's early to talk about a second term(the maximum allowed), but 10 years under a single effective chief shouldn't be too much to hope for.

It was Bratton, not Guiliani, who reduced the crime rate in New York. I hope his success in LA makes more people realize this.

Off topic, but what a great trend. If you can't read the words, Norwegianity has them:

My butt is big
And round like the letter C
And ten thousand lunges
Have made it rounder
But not smaller
And that’s just fine.
It’s a space heater
For my side of the bed
It’s my ambassador
To those who walk behind me
It’s a border collie
That herds skinny women
Away from the best deals
At clothing sales.
My butt is big
And that’s just fine
And those who might scorn it
Are invited to kiss it.
Just do it.

Salon has the story behind the ad, and others like it we can expect to see this fall.

Talk about snake eyes: Jose Luis Betancourt got 24 years for drug trafficking. Then, he lost his lottery winnings, because the court found he bought the ticket with drug proceeds.

The text of the opinion is here (pdf). [link via How Appealing.]

Great post by Nathan Newman on the border as the new color line. Here's a snippet:

Similarly, a politics of national "citizenship" and exclusion of immigrants may juice electoral coalitions in the short term -- although I'm not even convinced of that -- but in the long run such politics of nationalist politics does nothing to address multinational corporations moving jobs around the globe like a chessboard, pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom. And such nationalist rhetoric just feeds a politics that will likely block the creation of international institutions that can restrain corporate power.

Arianna's latest piece on Judith Miller is up - she says New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, a staunch defender of Miller, is angry at Bill Kovac, who has been critical of her. Arianna wonders, "has the Times learned any lessons from the Howell Raines reign?"

Nancy Goldstein has a new article up on the Equal Justice Initiative and Alabama's death row. She asks, "If you are a poor person of color accused of a capital crime in Alabama, what stands between you and the death penalty?"

This very fine non-profit is trying to turn back the state's bad habit of routinely denying poor people decent legal representation, and then sentencing them to death without access to decent post-conviction appeal. The article also brings up the question of states' rights vs. federal oversight, particularly in Alabama, where almost all socially progressive decisions have been federally mandated, and where voters show a more than subtle inclination towards returning to the days of Jim Crow

by TChris

TalkLeft reported yesterday that four misdemeanor charges were filed against Gov. Taft of Ohio. Those charges were presumably the result of negotiations, given the governor's decision to enter "no contest" pleas to the charges today.

His no-contest plea wraps up the case less than 24 hours after Taft became the first Ohio governor charged with a crime. He was fined the maximum $1,000 for each of four misdemeanor counts. As expected, no jail time was ordered. The charges had carried a maximum sentence of six months on each count.

One day between charging and conviction serves the political strategy of getting this mess out of the press, but Taft's decision to accept the convictions makes it difficult for him to continue his argument that his failure to disclose a variety of gifts, "including dinners, golf games and professional hockey tickets over four years," was accidental.

Update (TL): Crooks and Liars has a video of Taft's apology.

George Hunsinger, professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and coordinator of Church Folks for a Better America (and frequent reader and commenter at TalkLeft) has a letter to the editor in today's New York Times:

Bob Herbert is right ("No End in Sight in Iraq," column, Aug. 11). We need a serious national conversation about exiting from Iraq.

First, we need to face reality: no good options exist. The American-led occupation is the main cause of the insurgency, not the cure. Yet an abrupt pullout could lead to even more chaos. The last best hope lies in "internationalizing" the peacekeeping forces until Iraq can take over on its own.

Those who object to this path as unrealistic need to explain how we can better extricate ourselves from the biggest American policy disaster since Vietnam.

Altercation today has new ediiton of "Scoring Scotus" - scroll down to "Roberts' Confirmations Hearings: Light on the Mayo or Heavy on the Mustard?" And thanks to Eric for giving me another opportunity to contribute.