After a long afternoon at the jail, it's another barbecue night here, along with belatedly watching the latest "Weeds." What are you up to?

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

The New York Times reports on the hacking of Twitter passwords. You may want to change your password. It also has tips for Google account users.

Using a different password for every account is a pain, but it's far better than the alternative.

Bump and Update: Former state prosecutor Robert Eddleman was sentenced in Montana federal court to 30 months and Terri Jabs Kurth got 8 months in prison and 4 on home detention for making cocaine available to friends at parties at their homes. Yesterday, the same Judge sentenced former NFL player Travis Henry to 36 months for trafficking in six kilograms.

Eddleman has been in protective custody in Glendive and under 23-hour lockdown since pleading guilty. He has two children....Kurth also has two children.

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Original Post: 7/15/09

Ex-NFL Player Sentenced to 3 Yrs, for Trafficking, Local Prosecutor Faces a Year or More For Use

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The Wingnuts have been rolled out this afternoon in the Sotomayor hearings.

It should end shortly. Leahy announced that he will schedule a vote in the Judiciary Committee for July 21 (the GOP can impose a week delay on that vote) so the vote will be July 28. While it would be great for the Dems if every Republican voted against her but I suspect a few will vote for her. Her confirmation by the full Senate seems a foregone conclusion. She will be taking her seat on the Supreme Court on the first Monday in October.

This is an Open Thread.

Craig Crawford:

. . . Racially-tinged inferences, snide liberal bashing and the shameless pandering to anti-intellectual sentiment that once won the day for Republicans are now falling flat. The Sotomayor nomination has proved to be yet another test case for the efficacy of traditional conservative attack lines.

Republicans might have hoped to use this hearing to put limits on how far the President can safely go in picking liberals for future openings. Instead, they showcased just how narrow and out of touch their political base has become. . . . Until Republicans get past calling 1-800-HATE there will be fewer and fewer voters on the other end of the line.

Indeed.

Speaking for me only

The ABA representatives presented their report that rated Judge Sotomayor as "well qualified," its highest rating.

The Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, is testifying in support of Judge Sotomayor. I blogged about a call with General McDaniel in this post. Of note is McDaniel's criticism of the Supreme Court's Ricci decision.

Apparently I missed quite the show with the witnesses, judging from the comments. Sorry, life intruded. Apparently the panel on the firefighters' legal opinions is now over.

David Cone, former Royal, Met, Blue Jay and, most importantly, Yankee, speaks about his experience before Sotomayor when he was a MLBPU leader. Nice story, and I like David Cone, but the relevance of his testimony is not apparent to me.

John Yoo defends himself against malpractice allegations in the Inspector General report on warrantless electronic surveillance in an op-ed today's Wall St. Journal, Why We Endorsed Warrantless Wiretaps. He says the IG report " ignores history and plays politics with the law."

Anonymous Liberal breaks it down and says Yoo is not being truthful. (h/t to Peter Daou's tweet.)

The Innocence Project has a released a new report on the role of eyewitness identifications in wrongful convictions. “Reevaluating Lineups: Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of a Misidentification,”

The report finds that 75% of wrongful convictions overturned through DNA testing involved eyewitness misidentification. 17 states in last two years have considered reforms. The full report is here (pdf).

240 people, serving an average of 12 years in prison, have been exonerated through DNA testing in the United States, and 75% of those wrongful convictions (179 individual cases as of this report) involved eyewitness misidentification. In 38% of the misidentification cases, multiple eyewitnesses misidentified the same innocent person. Over 250 witnesses misidentified innocent suspects.

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Tom Watson leads the British Open at Turnberry. Stage 12 of the Tour de France was uneventful.

This is an Open Thread.

The nonsense continues today. I am watching intermittently. Tom Watson shot 65 at the British Open.

Jon Kyl misstating what happened in Ricci. The case he will never mention is Griggs. The law he will never mention is the 1991 Amendments to Title VII enacted by congress AFTER the Supreme Court decision in Ward's Cove.

To remember about Ricci, here was the Constitutional Accountability Center's analysis.

Though I must say Sotomayor does a terrible job of explaining this issue. [More...]

Ms. Hepatitis C, Kristen Parker, may face more charges. Turns out she worked at a hospital in New York before coming to Colorado. As a precaution, Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, NY is notifying 3,000 patients they should be tested.

No patient at Northern Westchester has been linked yet, but the health department is recommending that anyone who had surgery at the hospital between Oct. 8, 2007 and Feb. 28, 2008 to be tested for the disease.

Parker is being held without bond in Denver.

There are very real and important differences of judicial and political philosophy between the Democratic and Republican parties in the current political climate. The differences in views are fundamental and stark. They are incredibly important. But the Republican Party's Paranoid Style, its insistence on the Southern Strategy, made it inevitable that these important differences were never discussed.

Professor Jack Balkin argued that "what the candidates actually say is far less important than what the Senators expect them to agree with. By shaping the constitutional catechism at hearings, the Senate gives an account of what Americans expect from their Supreme Court Justices.

That certainly did not happen in these hearings. This was due to the Republican obsession with race. "The Wise Latina." Indeed, Balkin himself implicitly acknowledges that. His only post on the hearings is titled The Declining Utility Of The Politics Of Racial Resentment, hardly a substantive discussion of weighty constitutional matters. Balkin writes: