In less weighty news, Mildred Baena, Arnold Schwarzenegger's former housekeeper and mother of their child together,has decided to tell her story and share a photo of 13 year old Joseph. She says Joseph was told a year ago that Arnold was his father. His response was, "Cool."

She hopes Arnold and Maria can patch things up.

Pakistan denies the allegation in the New York Times that an Army Major was one of those arrested with undercover CIA operatives suspected of providing the U.S. with information about the Osama bin Laden compound in Abboutabad.

Sen. Patrick Leahy today condemned the arrests.

Time Magazine reports a federal grand jury is investigating the 2003 torture and killing of Manadel al-Jamadi at Abu Ghraib as a potential war crime. Years ago, navy seals were charged over the death. At least one went to trial and was found not guilty.

TIME has obtained a copy of a subpoena signed by Durham that points to his grand jury's broader mandate, which could involve charging additional CIA officers and contract employees in other cases. The subpoena says "the grand jury is conducting an investigation of possible violations of federal criminal laws involving War Crimes (18 USC/2441), Torture (18 USC 243OA) and related federal offenses." [More...]

The Pitkin County Commissioners in Aspen met a few weeks ago and condemned the DEA's recent bust of a group of retirement-age drug suspects. More here.

Yesterday they wrote the DEA a letter, lambasting the agency for not telling local law enforcement what they were up to. The Commissioners urge the DEA to "“reconsider the directive you've given to your field agents and employees that places innocent people at risk.”

The letter has more details of the meeting between DEA and local law enforcement after the most recent bust.

Obama in Old San Juan.

NYTimes Editorial on SCOTUS' 5-4 decision (PDF) weakening the securities fraud law. I have not read the decision, but I will note that Congress can overturn this SCOTUS decision and political parties can at least talk about it. Maybe I missed it, but I have not seen any reactions from politicians on this case.

Open Thread.

It's day 3 of deliberations in the retrial of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

I've been entrenched in motions writing, and hope to be back here soon.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

The Debtors have demonstrated that DOMA violates their equal protection rights afforded under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, either under heightened scrutiny or under rational basis review. Debtors also have demonstrated that there is no valid governmental basis for DOMA. In the end, the court finds that DOMA violates the equal protection rights of the Debtors as recognized under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

No one expressed the Debtors’ view as pertinent to this simple bankruptcy case more eloquently and profoundly than Justice William O. Douglas in the concluding paragraph of his opinion for the majority in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 486 (1965):

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights—older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not in political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions. Id.

[More . . .]

Via Atrios, I discovered that Dem political lawyer Ron Klain "overs[aw] implementation" of the infrastructure spending in the 2009 stimulus:

When I worked in the Obama White House, one of my most important assignments was to help oversee implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act[.]

Why was Ron Klain charged with this task? What did he know about infrastructure projects? As Atrios points out he surely knows very little about economics and job creation. Atrios writes:

I wasn't supposed to pay attention to the GOP debate last night was I? cuz I didn't.

Here's a blatantly sexist take on it:

Michelle Bachmann was able to speak in complete sentences and therefore has stolen the critical MILF vote (or more accurately, the vote of those who will vote for women they consider MILFs) from Palin.

Sheesh.

Open Thread.

Since December, you have read me rail often against The Deal. My objection was not, per se, to the tax cuts, but rather to the fact that the tax cuts would be "paid for" by spending cuts in the following months. The efficacy of government spending as opposed to tax cuts is beyond dispute. Trading spending for tax cuts is terrible policy if your are trying to stimulate the economy in a zero bound environment.

As in December with regard to The Deal, Ezra Klein tries to make lemonade from this lemon of a policy, this time citing Larry Summers' endorsing more tax cuts as fiscal stimulus (and, to be fair, arguing for no spending cuts, good luck with that now). As for The Deal, Klein treats the proposed tax cuts as effective fiscal stimulus with no spending cuts tradeoff:

This election will be won or lost by governance and the economy, not by candidates and campaigns. Another $200 billion in economic stimulus will mean a lot more to Obama’s reelection effort than $200 million in ads.

(Emphasis supplied.) To imagine that spending cuts will not be traded off for those tax cuts is simply absurd. Obama and Dems need to argue for something better than this.

Speaking for me only

Paul Krugman:

O.K., the obvious question: If Medicare is so much better than private insurance, why didn’t the Affordable Care Act simply extend Medicare to cover everyone? The answer, of course, was interest-group politics: realistically, given the insurance industry’s power, Medicare for all wasn’t going to pass, so advocates of universal coverage, myself included, were willing to settle for half a loaf. But the fact that it seemed politically necessary to accept a second-best solution for younger Americans is no reason to start dismantling the superior system we already have for those 65 and over.

Accepting this as true (and people like Jon Gruber and Ezra Klein who championed the Wyden-Bennett exchange reform would not accept this as true based on their writings at the time), how precisely does the "second best option" work? I'm simply not seeing it, and while Krugman keeps describing the exchanges as "the second best option" and "half a loaf," I do not understand his reasoning for expecting positive results from the exchanges. As I said at the time, any expansion of Medicaid for the less well off is a positive, and that is why I supported a positive vote for ACA. But the exchange/subsidies reform? No, that's not a "second best option" or "half a loaf." It will fail in my estimation.

Speaking for me only

All the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. - LeBron James in post NBA Final loss press conference.

From a public relations perspective, there is no doubt that this was an idiotic thing for LeBron James to say. (Full disclosure, I invested on the Heat to win the NBA title at the beginning of the playoffs so his failure affected me personally.) But it does raise questions - as sports fans - why do we care so much? And does our caring about sports detract from the rest of our lives? On the flip.