We have sunshine today, so I'm not going to spend the day at the computer.

For those of you following the Rupert Murdoch news empire misadventures, here's the latest on the resignations of Lee Hinton, the publisher of the WSJ and Rebekkah Brooks, who ran the British papers. U.S. connections to the phone-hacking scandal are growing.

Here's a Kaiser report on the fiscal effect of raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Here is the transcript of the final day of the Roger Clemens trial, which ended with a mistrial after the Government played a video and showed a transcript to the jury containing the very statements of Andrew Pettitte's wife Laura that only a week earlier, the Court had ruled inadmissible.

There was no snafu, no playing of the wrong tape, and no forgetting to edit or redact the tape and transcript. The Government acted deliberately. [More...]

I've been following the amounts we spend on the war on drugs for a while. (More here.) Here's today's sequel.

Our Justice Department thinks that technology is hampering its ability to wiretap our phones. So it wants more money. From the DEA's 2012 Budget: [More...]

It's still raining. Thunder, lightening, the whole nine yards. 9 days and counting.

Speaking of Who'll Stop the Rain (one of my favorite movies with Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty about Vietnam, heroin, Haight-Ashbury, federal drug agents and Percodan), I watched the Lincoln Lawyer last night. It was good -- not as great as some of the reviews, but worth seeing.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled (opinion here) that TSA's body scanners at airports were illegally implemented . But it also refused to order their suspension, directing the Agency only ".. promptly to proceed in a manner consistent with this opinion."

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., rejected arguments from the Obama administration that the TSA was exempt from laws requiring federal agencies to first notify the public and seek comments.

"It is clear that by producing an image of the unclothed passenger, (a full-body) scanner intrudes upon his or her personal privacy in a way a magnetometer does not," wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg for the three-judge panel.

The Court rejected constitutional arguments against the use of the body scanners, including a 4th Amendment challenge. [More...]

Matt Yglesias again trots out his tired trope that "the Left" does not understand the importance of monetary policy:

Part of what I think goes wrong in the contemporary left’s understanding of this is that people have a kind of romance with the idea of the Works Progress Administration. [. . . H]owever, [. . .] lurking behind this fiscal measure is a monetary one. Under the fiscal system that prevailed between the wars, the government’s ability to spend money on public works was limited by its ability to get its hand on gold. This is why leaving the gold standard is so crucial, both here and abroad, to launching recovery from the Depression[.]

"The Left" fully understands this. But it understands something more - that printing money is not enough in a liquidity trap. In 1938, Keynes explained it to FDR:

Reading news reports of the mistrial declared in the Roger Clemens perjury trial, one is left wondering how did the Government not know what was in its own exhibit? As if some paralegal or tech person on the Government team failed to properly edit a videotape shown to the jury.

This was a case the Government not only knew was being closely watched by millions, but a case on which it had a team of prosecutors, backed by investigators, paralegals and technology experts to assist with exhibits. There was even an FBI agent, their lead agent, sitting at counsel table.

It strains credulity to suggest that prosecutors didn't review Clemons entire hearing testimony and carefully select the portions they thought would bring them the most bang for the buck, and then have a video prepared of those segments to introduce as an exhibit for the jury. [More...]

Open Thread.

Kevin Drum writes:

Although we should be spending more now to get the economy back on track, this is why a long-term deficit deal with teeth is something that both liberals and conservatives ought to be willing to compromise to achieve.

A "long term deficit deal with teeth" can not exist. The reason is one Congress can not bind future Congresses.

Case in point - the US government ran fiscal surpluses of $236.2 billion from 1998 to 2000. Indeed, the CBO projected trillion dollar surpluses beyond that. Guess what happened next? The massive Bush Tax Cuts plus two trillion dollar wars. Goodbye surpluses.

Stupid statement from Drum.

Speaking for me only

Apparently, Obama and the Dems are trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on the debt ceiling negotiation:

The Senate's top two officials are working on what one aide called a "hybrid," fail-safe solution to the debt ceiling debate that could garner enough political support to pass Congress.

The plan, which is being hatched by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), would ensure that over $1.5 trillion in cuts over ten years be passed into law. It would also grant President Obama the authority to extend the debt ceiling through the 2012 election season while requiring him to propose -- but allowing him to ultimately veto -- cuts beyond those initial $1.5 trillion.

WTF? McConnell offered to do a clean raise of the debt ceiling (with some pointless votes) and Dems say no to that? They INSIST on spending cuts? In the middle of a recession? They deserve to lose.

Speaking for me only

Tomorrow is Stage 12 of the Tour de France with a mountaintop finish on the HC Luz-Ardiden right after going over the HC Col de Tourmalet (with a little Cat 1 climb just before that.) It has a chance to be epic as the Tour heads to the Pyrenees. See this preview and this one at Podium Cafe.

Got to get up early to watch it. The riders will be hitting the foot of the Col de Tourmalet around 9:30 EST. I'm finishing some work tonight because I'll be watching tomorrow morning.

Oh BTW, for those of you following the Women's World Cup - Abby Wambach? A Gator. Just sayin'

Open thread.

Major props to Christine Pelisek, Terry Greene Sterling and Christopher Dickey of The Daily Beast, who discovered the identity of the jailed fiance/husband of the hotel maid in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. He is Amara Tarawally, 35. Yesterday, Daily Beast reporters interviewed him at the Arizona immigration center.

Tarawally himself was arrested in July 2010 along with another African, a Mexican, and a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, according to court records. Tarawally had produced almost $40,000 in cash to buy 114 pounds of marijuana from a man who turned out to be a police informant in Chandler, Arizona.

After a plea bargain, in which three felony charges were dropped and Tarawally copped to conspiracy to possess a large amount of cannabis, he served nine months in jail and was put on probation but immediately turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Tarawally is now behind the cinderblock walls and concertina-wire fences of a detention center in the desert town of Eloy, Arizona, awaiting a deportation decision.

The accuser's phone call in a Fulani dialect with Tarawally the day after the encounter with DSK may be the biggest problem for the state's case. Prosecutors believe she told him not to worry, she knew what she was doing and the man she accused had a lot of money. [More...]