Excellent statement by William Taylor and Ben Brafman in response to the outrageous interviews the accuser's lawyer in the Dominque Strauss-Kahn case has drummed up for her. (The Newsweek interview took place over three hours in her lawyer's office.)

Ms. Diallo is the first accuser in history to conduct a media campaign to persuade a prosecutor to pursue charges against a person from whom she wants money. Her lawyers and public relations consultants have orchestrated an unprecedented number of media events and rallies to bring pressure on the prosecutors in this case after she had to admit her extraordinary efforts to mislead them. Her lawyers know that her claim for money suffers a fatal blow when the criminal charges are dismissed, as they must be.

This conduct by lawyers is unprofessional and it violates fundamental rules of professional conduct for lawyers. Its obvious purpose is to inflame public opinion against a defendant in a pending criminal case. The fact is, however, that the number of rallies, press conferences, and media events they have orchestrated is exceeded only by the number of lies and misstatements she has made to law enforcement, friends, medical professionals and reporters. It is time for this unseemly circus to stop.

As I said in the earlier post, a motion to restrict the accuser and her lawyers' extra-judicial comments is needed immediately. And the District Attorney should seriously consider dropping the charges altogether after this blatant attempt to poison the potential jury pool. [More..]

Update: Newsweek has an interview The Maid's Tale, with the DSK accuser, Nafissatou Diallo.

Time for a gag order immediately in the Dominque Strauss-Kahn case. The hotel maid accusing him is going public, embarking on a media tour, starting with ABC News: GMA on Monday and Nightline on Tuesday.

In an exclusive television interview, ABC News' Robin Roberts speaks with the hotel employee who alleges she was sexually assaulted by former International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

For the first time viewers will hear, in her own words, her version of the events that allegedly took place at the Sofitel Hotel in New York in May. ...The interview airs on Tuesday, July 26 on "Nightline."

ABC shows a picture of the accuser, but still doesn't mention her name? How absurd. I hope Ben Brafman is spending today drafting a Motion to Ban Extra-Judicial Comments by Trial Participants. This case needs an order like the one entered in the Kobe Bryant case: [More...]

It's really distressing not to hear our Democratic President point out that social security and Medicare are not government welfare programs. The Government forcibly took our money with a promise we would get it back after we reached retirement age. And retirement age shouldn't be the age we need to move to assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

Millions of us have paid these taxes for forty plus years. Obama should flat out refuse to shift the goalposts. Raising the eligibility age by two years will force those of us without employer paid insurance to stick with our private plans at a cost of $1,000 a month or more during that period. Even those who responsibly planned for retirement didn't count on another $20,000 in private health care premiums foisted on them at the last minute (And yes, three years before reaching 65 is the last minute considering most people are having trouble paying their existing bills and can't just decide to put aside another $12,000 a year.) [More...]

Not sure what this is supposed to mean - Boehner Says GOP Prepared to Act Alone on Debt Deal. How can the GOP act alone? At the least, Harry Reid has to do something and so does President Obama. Boehner says "“I and my Republican colleagues in the House are prepared to move on our own.” And do what? Pass a clean debt ceilng bill? Obviously no. They already passed Cap, Cut and Something Or Other. Are they gonna repass it?

Not sure what Boehner is talking about.

Speaking for me only

Matt Yglesias points us to this post from Erick Erickson of Red State (Disclosure: I had frequent personal interactions with Erickson in the past and in my experience, on a personal level, Erickson was a nice, decent guy. The public Erickson is of course, another matter):

Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

(Emphasis supplied.) In that post, Erickson is writing about the Oslo terrorist attack. I for one don't see the terrorist attack as representative of Christianity. And I don't believe we need to look to Christianity to try and understand the Oslo terrorist attack. Similarly, terrorism in the name of Islam is not, in my view, informed by the religion of Islam (I'm not expert in Islam so I certainly could be wrong.) More . . .

Jeff Sachs at Huffpo:

[A]t every crucial opportunity, Obama has failed to stand up for the poor and middle class.
...Obama could have cut hundreds of billions of dollars in spending that has been wasted on America's disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, but here too it's been all bait and switch. Obama is either afraid to stand up to the Pentagon or is part of the same neoconservative outlook as his predecessor. The real cause hardly matters since the outcome is the same: America is more militarily engaged under Obama than even under Bush.

[More...]

I don't care whether the debt ceiling lift is temporary or permanent. I care that I have paid into a system my entire adult life knowing I would get Medicare at 65 and social security at 66. Republicans want to steal the money I've already paid in and put it somewhere else, making me wait another two years for Medicare. And raise my taxes at the same time.

If President Obama backs raising the age of medicare, which won't save the Government money in the long run due to the huge numbers of 65 and 66 year olds who will shift to Medicaid and who will break the backs of small businesses providing health care to elderly workers -- and which will force middle class elderly workers who don't have employer paid health care to pay premiums of ten thousand dollars a year or more for two more years, with huge deductibles and out of pocket costs, he doesn't deserve a second term as Democratic President. Let him run as as Republican or go home to Chicago. He will have sold us out.

Bump and Update: Here are suspect Anders Behring Breivik 's online postings in English. He "rants against multi-culturalism." BBC News has this profile of him. More from The Telegraph here.

Norwegian police describe him as a "right-wing Christian fundamentalist." It's still unclear if he acted alone.

According to police, Breivik has been charged and confessed. The death toll is close to 100. [More...]

Amy Winehouse Is dead. RIP.

Cadel Evans has won the Tour de France.

Open Thread.

Yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein wrote a post titled The context of liberal surrender and Barack Obama’s choices:

It was never at all plausible after November 2, 2010 that Obama and the Democrats could get through this year and next without losing on several fronts compared to what they had in the very liberal 111th Congress. And yet liberals seemed to believe that if only Obama negotiated properly he could avoid those losses. It just wasn’t going to happen. So the proper way to see the current negotiations are in the context of watching both sides surrender.

I'm not seeing how agreeing to an all spending cuts deal constitutes surrender by the Republicans. Will it be all they asked for? No. But being effective negotiators, Republicans knew to ask for pie in the sky, and then just settle for pie on the ground. They can get the sky on the next go around.

But the more interesting aspect to Bernstein's analysis is his failure to connect the December deal to extend the Bush tax cuts to the current debt ceiling deal (and the coming budget negotiations.) When the President surrendered on the Bush tax cuts, he lost almost all of his bargaining leverage. (Indeed, the only leverage Democrats have now is that a substantial number of Republicans do not want to vote for a debt ceiling increase under any circumstances, thus Dem votes will be required.) When some of us were explaining this in December, others were arguing The December Deal was a victory. Here is a post where I discuss Yglesias making that claim:

We've gotten the "Grand Bargain" sideshow out of the way, so the question now is what will be the actual debt ceiling deal? Is it possible that the "clean" bill (with respect to spending cuts) McConnell option will be the end result? Absolutely not. The question is, as it has always been since last December, how much in spending cuts will the GOP extract in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. The talks resumed this morning:

Congressional leaders trooped to the White House for a Saturday morning meeting called by the president Friday night to discuss what options existed for moving forward with the negotiations. [. . .] To meet Republican demands for dollar-for-dollar cuts to correspond with any rise in the borrowing authority, Congressional aides said there were discussions about extending the debt ceiling for a period of months tied directly to cuts, with a second installment then subject to the McConnell process. Democrats and Mr. Obama were insistent that the increase be guaranteed to take the Treasury Department through 2012 without another fight.

[More...]

President Obama on the failure of the budget talks:

Obama said he had demanded $1.2 trillion in additional revenues over 10 years, in exchange for spending cuts, including cuts to Medicare and Social Security. He said the revenues had been structured in a way that marginal tax rates would not be increased, and no Republicans would be forced to cast a vote that would violate the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which most Republicans in Congress have signed. Boehner said that the additional $400 billion in revenue would have amounted to a tax increase that would hurt small businesses.

Even though Boehner ended today's talks, he says he will attend tomorrow's White House meeting on the debt ceiling. From ABC: How Negotiations Broke Down.