President Obama will strike a centrist tone in his State of the Union Address. Doesn't he always?

Bath Salts are the new drug in crosshairs of the war on drugs.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Hospira, which manufactures the sodium thiopental used in executions in U.S., has announced it will cease making the drug. The Washington Post reports:

The decision by Hospira of Lake Forest., Ill., was prompted by demands from Italy, which does not have capital punishment, that no sodium thiopental - which the company had planned to make at its plant outside Milan - be used for executions, officials said.

"We determined we could not prevent the drug from being diverted for use in capital punishment," said Dan Rosenberg, a Hospira spokesman. He noted that the company never condoned the drug's use for lethal injection and had hoped to continue making it for medical use.

33 of the 35 states with the death penalty use sodium thiopental, also called Pentothal, as part of a three drug cocktail: [More...]

The Denver Post has an article on Project Noble Mustang. Wild mustang horses are rounded up and trained by inmates for months and then deployed along the nation's border to catch drug smugglers and undocumented immigrants.

[A]gents now use the prison-trained mustangs to catch illegal immigrants every day. Rafael V. Garza, horse patrol commander for the Border Patrol in the Laredo, Texas, sector, said in the first year of service, his nine mounted agents caught 500 illegal immigrants. "It's the intimidation factor," Garza said.

It sounds like a great program for the inmates, who get valuable life skills from it. I just wish the horses were used for a purpose other than rounding up suspected lawbreakers. Like what? Hippotherapy. More here and here.

With the Comcast-NBC Merger, there's been talk of NBC beefing up its Versus channel as a competitor to ESPN.

Long story short: NBC Sports and Dick Ebersol will take control of Versus (as well as Comcast's Golf Channel). They'll change the name to a more recognizable NBC brand, use more NBC talent and most importantly, they'll pump money into the network that will allow it to challenge ESPN for television rights deals.

A commenter in our thread on Olbermann's abrupt departure from MSNBC says that's probably where he's headed. Make sense?

Also, Reuters says Keith has two years left on his contract ("The New York Times said he signed a $30 million four-year contract extension in 2008" )and TMZ says he'll continue to be paid his salary (around $7 million a year.)

NBC announced today Keith Olbermann is leaving the network and tonight would be his last show.

Lawrence O'Donnell will move into his time slot.

Good move or disaster for MSNBC? Where do you think Olbermann will wind up? My suggestion: CNN should dump Spitzer/Parker and sign Olbermann.

A federal judge in Benton, Illinois today sentenced former sheriff Raymond Martin to two life terms for marijuana distribution. (He was also convicted for a failed plot to kill witnesses and carrying a firearm (his service revolver)during his drug activity.) Charges against his ex-wife and son are pending. His son Cody testified against him at trial. The judge said today: "Words cannot adequately describe how despicable it was for what you did to your son, Cody....Animals protect their young more than you did yours."

More from the Judge: "You represent the worst of humanity. You are a pathetic person and a sorry excuse for a human being for involving your son."

So a crooked cop in Podunk involved with marijuana who made threats that never came to pass and possessed guns gets two life sentences, while Jon Burge, a crooked cop in Chicago, who used guns as one method of actually torturing innocent arrestees for decades gets 4.5 years.

In other news, Cyclist Floyd Landis today called for the legalization of doping.

And Bradley Manning has filed a complaint about the conditions of his detention.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Bump and Update: Burge was sentenced today to 4 1/2 years in prison. More here. The Judge told Burge, "The case "demonstrates at the very least a severe lack of respect for the due process of law and your refusal to acknowledge the truth in the face of all this evidence," she said."

*****

Original Post

Jon Burge, the Chicago cop who allegedly tortured arrestees until they confessed during a period of 40 years, will learn his punishment today in a Chicago federal court.

His name has become synonymous with police brutality in the nation's third-largest city, with allegations stretching back nearly 40 years and the case even affecting the state's debate over the death penalty. Dozens of suspects — almost all of them black men — claimed Burge and his officers tortured them into confessing to crimes from robbery to murder.

Burge's sentencing hearing began yesterday, with the Government asking for 30 years. The Probation Department concluded his guideline range is 15 to 21 months. Burge agrees but is asking for a below guideline sentence. Because Burge was only convicted of lying and obstruction in relation to a civil case, and the judge, as explained below, has sided with Burge and the Probation Department on the calculation of his guidelines, his sentence is likely to be in the 15 to 21 month range, or close to it. [More..]

Today appears to be John Adams Day for defenders of the individual mandate in the health bill. FTR, as I have written many times, I find the argument that the individual mandate is unconstitutional to be absurd in the extreme. Frankly, it is not a plausible constitutional objection. It is, in fact, a frivolous argument. That said, I'm not sure the Act for The Relief of Sick anf Disabled Seamen helps the legal argument that much. As Ezra Klein acknowledges:

If you read Rick Ungar's excellent explanation of the bill, you'll see it was a bit different than the individual mandate: It was a payroll tax that all sailors on private merchant ships had to pay, and in return, they were basically given access to a small public health-care system.

Making it Medicare for Sailors. The argument against the constitutionality of the individual mandate has included the idea that requiring the purchase of private insurance is what makes the individual mandate in the health bill unconstitutional and what makes it different from Medicare and Social Security. There is no logic in this distinction with regard to the Necessary and Proper Clause (as this open letter from law professors explains), but courts first decide what result they want, and come up with rationales later. More . . .

Judge Lewis Kaplan has issued a 56 page opinion upholding the conviction of Ahmed Ghailani for the 1988 U.S. Embassy bombings.

From the ruling (available on PACER): Judge Kaplan notes that Ghailani's defense from the beginning "was the contention that he was an innocent dupe – that is, that he innocently performed benign acts which, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to have furthered plans of others to bomb the embassies." He quotes the defense stating to the jury:

“One question. I'll make this as easy for you today as possible because there is one question for you to decide. Did he know? After four weeks of trial, dozens of witnesses, hundreds of exhibits, 200-some charges, I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there is one question: Did he know and did he know beyond a reasonable doubt? And based on the facts and the law, the answer to that one question simply is no. Ahmed did not know.”

[More...]

It seems pretty bad politics for an aspiring Republican Presidential candidate to claim that President Obama's tenure in the Presidency is "Bill Clinton's third term" (Clinton is very popular) but when your prime directive is pissing off liberals, then that's what you do:

[Newt] Gingrich seemed amused when noting that the Clinton administration redux that Democratic activists sought to avoid by supporting Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary seemed to be happening anyway. "It must be fascinating to be one of those left-wing activist groups that spent so much time and energy beating Hillary Clinton, because they didn't want to see this kind of an administration, to now watch a member of the famous Daley machine in Chicago emerge," he said.

Speaking for me only

David Brooks reports:

Vice President Biden sent me a heartfelt e-mail on Thursday that ended: “The Senate will not be the same without Joe’s leadership and powerful intellect. But it is his civility that will be missed the most.”

(Emphasis supplied.) Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, here was Lieberman's "civlity" in action:

When [Arianna] Huffington said there's nothing in the Duelfer Report to bolster [Joe] Lieberman's conclusions, the senator replied, "I don't think you've read it, sweetheart."

More . . .

Via Meteor Blades, Andrew Whitehead of EPI critiques The Roadmap of Republican Paul Ryan:

The Roadmap would place the entire burden of deficit reduction on spending cuts. "The hefty tax hikes on the middle class included in the plan do not go toward deficit reduction. Nor does the Roadmap’s overall revenue plan improve the long-term fiscal outlook. The plan actually reduces federal revenue relative to either current law or current policy."

So here's my question, in light of The Deal, what is the Democratic alternative? And I do not mean a "wish list" alternative, but one the President and Dems are willing to fight for. After The Deal, are we to really expect that Dems will not capitulate? After The Deal, the threat of government shutdowns and debt ceilings won't have the Dems telling us that agreeing to 98% of the GOP agenda on taxes and spending was not "the best they could do?"

Speaking for me only