Despite all the fear-mongering Republicans wanting to throw more money at the southwest border, statistics show it's not needed.

The AP examines the statistics and concludes the border area may be one of the safest places in America.

The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report. And an in-house Customs and Border Protection report shows that Border Patrol agents face far less danger than street cops in most U.S. cities.

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Jury selection went faster today in the trial of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. A pool of 30 potential jurors have passed the challenges for cause stage. The Judge says they need 40 and he thinks opening arguments could come Tuesday.

The judge also said he's unlikely to let Blago attend his daughter's graduation set for late Tuesday afternoon -- unless, it sounds like, they hurry up the jury selection process to finish early.

Zagel said taking an afternoon off here and there would send the wrong message to jurors, who were asked to take off so much time out of their own lives to serve on the jury. He did say he would consider ending the day early if opening statements in the case could begin earlier.

Maybe it's just me, but I would think it's more important to conduct a thorough vetting of potential juror biases in a such a high profile trial than to worry about taking a few hours off from a trial that's expected to last four months. Plus, only those chosen will be getting any "message" by a delay of opening arguments. [More...]

President Obama will nominate retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper to be the new director of national intelligence.

The Democrats released memos by Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. You can read some of them here.

.... the majority of the memos, emails and reports made public Friday provide little insight to her own views.

Here's the latest on Day 46 of the Gulf Oil spill.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

The FBI set up Joran Van der Sloot to extort money from a representative of Beth Holloway in Aruba.

So it seems it wasn't Joran's idea to call Beth Holloway and offer details for cash, it was her and the FBI's idea. They probably hoped that if arrested on the extortion charge, they'd be able to get him to Alabama and the FBI could question him about Natalie's murder. Also likely in on the plot: the lawyer for Mrs. Holloway, John Q. Kelly, who was seen in Aruba that week. Question: Did the money wired to Joran belong to the F.B.I.?

So Joran took the bait and got a down payment, and gave or intended to give false information, just like he has before. Why would he do that? Maybe because he has no real information since he didn't kill Natalee Holloway or dispose of her body? Of course, no one wants to believe that. That requires the presumption of innocence, and only guilt sells in the American media.

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Discussing Justice Souter's Harvard Commencement Address (my earlier post here), Linda Greenhouse writes:

[F]or those who care about the Supreme Court, Justice Souter served up some rich fare: his own vision of the craft of constitutional interpretation and a defense of the need for judges to go beyond the plain text — what he called the “fair-reading model” — and make choices among the competing values embedded in the Constitution. Doing this was neither judicial activism nor “making up the law,” he said; rather, it was the unavoidable “stuff of judging,” and to suppose otherwise was to “egregiously” miss the point of what constitutional law is about.

[. . . Souter] note[d] that with another confirmation season approaching, “we will as a consequence be hearing and discussing a particular sort of criticism that is frequently aimed at the more controversial Supreme Court decisions: criticism that the court is making up the law, that the court is announcing constitutional rules that cannot be found in the Constitution, and that the court is engaging in activism to extend civil liberties.” He framed the speech as a rebuttal to those criticisms.

Justice Souter's address provides a great place to start with nominee Elena Kagan on the issue of judicial philosophy and constitutional interpretation. Let's hope some intrepid progressive Senator on the Judiciary Committee (how about Senator Specter?) opens the conversation. In the meantime, I join Greenhouse's pleasure in seeing Justice Souter choosing to remain in this important discussion about constitutional interpretation.

Speaking for me only

Joran Van der Sloot, expelled from Chile, is en route to Peru where officials want to question him about the murder of Stephany Flores.

It will be a long day -- he left Chile at 8:55 a.m. (handcuffed this time) with three detectives in a plane.

The plane will undertake the five hour plus journey to the border, stopping in San Padro de Atacama to refuel, before touching down in Arica, in the north of Chile. The suspect will then be taken over the border to Peru by land and handed over to Peruvian authorities.

On their side, Peruvian police have begun arrangements to receive the suspect at Santa Rosa, Tacna, the southernmost city in Peru. From Tacna, van der Sloot will be transported by air to the the Peruvian capital, Lima.

To avoid the delays an extradition process can take, Chile agreed to expel Joran as being "an undesirable" or illegally in the country, which allows them to return him to the country from which he crossed into Chile, which is Peru. [More...]

After an impossibly intense period of work, I finally get a chance to dedicate some time to the relaunch of SportsLeft, which will start with a preview of the World Cup, which starts on June 11.

SI's Grant Wahl had a nice piece (can;t find it online) on what the "beautful game" means around the world. There are sports I enjoy more than association football (soccer), but the World Cup is indeed something special.

Open Thread.

[T]he future of the Constitution as the Framers wrote it can be staked only upon [. . .] trust. If we cannot share every intellectual assumption that formed the minds of those who framed the charter, we can still address the constitutional uncertainties the way they must have envisioned, by relying on reason, by respecting all the words the Framers wrote, by facing facts, and by seeking to understand their meaning for living people. -- retired Justice David Souter, 2010 Harvard Commencement Address

As a longtime proponent of the view that the Constitution was ORIGINALLY intended to be a "living" document (see for example, this and this), it was with great interest that I read about retired Justice David Souter's Harvard commencement address on constitutional interpretation. E.J. Dionne finds the political strong point for the views he, Souter and I appear to share regarding constitutional interpretation - comparing Plessy and Brown:

New York City has agreed to pay Barry Gibbs $9.9 million. Gibbs served 19 years in jail as a result of being framed by a corrupt detective.

....Barry Gibbs, had served 19 years in prison when his conviction was overturned in 2005 after questions were raised about how his case had been handled by Louis J. Eppolito, a New York City police detective, one of the notorious “Mafia cops” serving life in prison for taking part in mob-related killings.

.... “They are permanent scars,” he added. “It’s been a long road. I’ve been through a lot, and it was very traumatic for me.” Mr. Gibbs, 62, who has recently wrestled with severe health problems, previously received a $1.9 million settlement from the state.

The victim was a prostitute, and at the time of her murder, Gibbs was a postal worker with a drug problem who had had a relationship with her. [More...]

BP capped the leaking oil well with a containment device referred to as "Top Hat.

BP engineers Thursday night guided a containment dome onto the hydrocarbon geyser shooting from the Gulf of Mexico oil well -- a desperate and iffy attempt to capture the leaking oil and funnel it to a ship on the surface.

...It was not an elegant operation. Furious clouds of oil escaped the "top hat." Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the spill, called the development a positive step but said, "It will be sometime before we can confirm that this method will work and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment."

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Congrats to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight. He just inked a three year licensing deal with the New York Times. FiveThirtyEight will be "folded into" The Times, but Nate will remain in control of the content. He'll also be writing for the paper and the Sunday magazine.

Jury selection got off to a slow start in the trial of former Governor Rod Blagojevich. More here. Above, Patti Blagojevich asserts her husband's innocence at court today.