As well he should:

President Barack Obama has welcomed the Florida Gators to the White House and congratulated them on a second national championship in football in three years. Obama welcomed the Gators to the East Room and sa[id] their excellence on and off the football field is worthy of praise. Obama says being a champion doesn't end when the clock runs out and noted that the team volunteers 400 hours each year.

. . . In a moment of levity, Obama says he still supports a national playoff system instead of the current bowl system. But the president also says he's confident the Gators could've defeated any team out there.

Damn straight they would have Mr. President. This is an Open thread.

NYTimes:

The Treasury Department is preparing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing for Chrysler that could come as soon as next week, people with direct knowledge of the action said Thursday.

Here's the interesting part:

The Treasury has an agreement in principle with the United Automobile Workers union . . . Moreover, Fiat of Italy would finalize its alliance with Chrysler while the company is under bankruptcy protection. The only major question that remains unresolved is what happens to Chrysler’s lenders, who hold $6.9 billion in company debt.

(Emphasis supplied.) More . . .

Via Lambert, Philip Heymann inadvertently makes an argument for a special prosecutor regarding torture:

“When you get one administration prosecuting its predecessor, you start creating the conditions of a banana republic,” said Philip Heymann, a law professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who served as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton. “Every Republican in the country would think this was a dangerous attack on the two-party system.”

This is an argument for a special prosecutor, not against prosecutions.

Speaking for me only

Congratulations to Ezra for his new gig. On a related note, I disagree with Matt Yglesias' concern:

I do have some concerns about this. After all, one thing all decent progressive blogs do is point out semi-regularly that the Washington Post opinion section is a pretty rotten operation. . . . People don’t go after their bosses with hatchets. So while hiring Ezra makes the Post less hatchet-worthy, it also means that we’re down a hatchet-wielder.

I never thought Ezra was very good as a hatchet wielder anyway (just as I do not look to Ezra for serious critiques of Democrats.) The job of watchdogging an entity like WaPo could never come from inside WaPo (this is a general rule of course - Howie Kurtz is a lousy Media critic for many reasons, but one of them is he gets paid by WaPo and CNN.) There are plenty of folks to do the job. And let's face it, who really expects the up and comers like Klein and Yglesias to do this job anyway? Not me.

Speaking for me only

Obama Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said:

High value information came from interrogations in which [torture] w[as] used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country[.]

In the New York Times today, an FBI interrogator involved in the interrogations, flatly contradicts Blair:

CNN:

Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that he would "follow the law" as he weighed potential prosecutions of Bush administration officials who authorized controversial harsh interrogation techniques. . . "We are going to follow the evidence, follow the law and take that where it leads. No one is above the law," Holder said at an Earth Day event.

Of course, this is already proven untrue, as President Obama has stated CIA interrogators will not be investigated, much less prosecuted. We'll see what it really means in due course.

Speaking for me only

What I find particularly disturbing about the reaction in some quarters to the Jane Harman incident is their inability to separate their disdain for Harman with the merits of what appears to have occurred. Consider this reporting from The Hill:

“This appears to have been by-the-book,” said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation [. . .]

Apparently Bankston thinks the selective leaking information gleaned through wiretaps is "by the book." A less vindictive civil libertarian disagrees:

Randy Barnett in the WSJ:

[S]tate legislatures have a real power under the Constitution by which to resist the growth of federal power: They can petition Congress for a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution. Article V provides that, "on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states," Congress "shall call a convention for proposing amendments." Before becoming law, any amendments produced by such a convention would then need to be ratified by three-quarters of the states.

Barnett would like such a convention to adopt a federalism amendment, checking federal power and restoring states rights. Barnett's proposal is principled. Insane but principled. States rights forever!

Speaking for me only

Even President Obama’s new director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, wrote in a memorandum to his staff last week that “high value information came from interrogations in which these methods were used[] [. . .] Mr. Obama and most of his top aides have argued that the use of those methods betrayed American values — and anyway, produced unreliable information.” -NYTimes

Via Atrios (whose title is completely misleading in this context), Media Matters attempts to whitewash the outrageous comments from Obama Director of National Intelligence, and in the process, unfairly criticize NBC News' Andrea Mitchell (who, Gawd knows, has received much merited criticism from MM in the past). Media Matter discredits its body of sound work with these contortions on Blair's behalf. MM writes:

Today is the National Call-In Day for the "Crack the Disparity" National Month of Advocacy, a month-long coordinated push to eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. Help flood Congress with calls. Call your federal lawmakers today and tell them that it is time to end the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

Tell your elected officials that the current law:

• overstates the relative danger of crack cocaine to powder cocaine;
• contributes to the growth of our prison population, increasing the financial burden on taxpayers;
• disproportionately affects African Americans; and
• uses limited federal resources on low-level street dealers rather than on the major drug traffickers.

Follow this link or visit here to get talking points and contact information for your federal senators and representative.

What happens to the children of the undocumented arrested in workplace immigration raids like the one in Carthage, MO?

The New York Times reports they are being given away to foster families.

One of the 136 illegal immigrants detained in the raid was Carlos’s mother, Encarnación Bail Romero, a Guatemalan. A year and a half after she went to jail, a county court terminated Ms. Bail’s rights to her child on grounds of abandonment. Carlos, now 2, was adopted by a local couple.

Truly a depressing story. [More...]

Ohio State Law Professor Peter Shane served as Attorney-Adviser in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel from 1978 to 1981.

Today, he provides three takes on the torture memos. He ends with:

When I read the just-released opinions, I felt like throwing up. As an American, as a lawyer, as an OLC alum, I cannot help but take this personally.