The Jose Padilla case is complicated, and those who need a script for commentary when the verdict is handed down in an hour or so should follow these simple guidelines:

Script for Supporters of the Bush Administration: If the jury convicts, this proves how strong the government's case has been all along. If the jury acquits, this proves that you can't try to bring terrorism cases in a criminal court system.

Script for Opponents of the Bush Administration: If the jury convicts, this shows how the criminal justice system can indeed handle terrorism cases. If the jury acquits, this shows just how weak the case against Padilla has been all along.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Scripts for When Padilla Jury Hands Down Its Verdict:

This is from an official US Comptroller's report!

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

FT.com / World - Learn from the fall of Rome, US Comptroller warns

The State Department has a message for White House candidates wanting to expound on sensitive diplomatic issues: Shut up...

First it was Barack Obama's talk of dialogue with dictators and invading Pakistan to kill Islamist militants, then it was Hillary Rodham Clinton refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons to that end. Now, the Democratic front-runners have been joined by radical Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, who threatened to bomb Muslim holy sites to stop terror attacks....

"To somehow suggest that an appropriate response to terrorism would be to attack sites that are holy and sacred to more than a billion people throughout the world is just absolutely crazy," he said...

Tancredo placed 4th in Saturday's straw poll.

U.S. State Department cringes as presidential hopefuls muddy diplomatic waters - International Herald Tribune

1. Mitt Romney - 4516 votes - 31%
2. Mike Huckabee - 2587 votes - 18.1%
3. Sam Brownback - 2192 votes – 15.3%
4. Tom Tancredo - 1961 votes – 13.7%

The three politicians who raised their hands to indicate that they don't beleive in evolution are Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, and Tom Tancredo.

Iowa Straw Poll Results: Mitt Romney Wins, Ron Paul Comes Fourth on Product Reviews Net

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - The controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets.

This didn't get any discussion here. The FBI is prosecuting leakers of the NSA program... The program that Bush happily admitted to and readily discussed in the press once it was revealed. Now that Bush's popularity rating is through the floor, he is, in fact, free to do anything.

Govt. Looks for Leaker on Warrantless Wiretaps - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com

The following paragraph basically sums up everything that is wrong with the American criminal justice system, no matter what the context is.

A handful of cases — in which a predator does an awful thing to an innocent — get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. This attention typically bears no relation to the frequency of the particular type of crime, and yet laws—such as three-strikes laws that give mandatory life sentences to nonviolent drug offenders — and political careers are made on the basis of the public’s reaction to the media coverage of such crimes.

It has occurred to me that the criminal justice system in the US is so out of control that not being a criminal is really little protection from worry about being caught up in it. All it takes is for someone to have a political interest in making you go away and an ability to make false accusations. The balances are so heavily weighted toward prosecutors and the punishments so severe that if it happens, you are real likely to be fucked for life. Even a few years in prison can have a significant impact on your life. Your best hope is the "prosecutors discretion," or having access to a lot of money, if you do. The cost of defending yourself can often have a deep impact on your future planning and options in your life. This has happened to people who use this website. Its a real risk associated with living in this country and I have seriously considered that it might be a good argument for living somewhere else.

We law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society — the society we have made — creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

By the end of the 110th Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives could achieve the goal of providing broadcast-quality video of all hearings and the floor for download on the Internet.

This is an important and under-recognized victory for the openness of our democracy.

Internet Archive: Report to the Congress: Congressional Hearings Online

Congressman DeFazio: "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."

All the rumors are true...

The Iraq war has been an amazing success, global warming is just a myth – and as for Guantanamo Bay, it's practically a holiday camp... The annual cruise organised by the 'National Review', mouthpiece of right-wing America, is a parallel universe populated by straight-talking, gun-toting, God-fearing Republicans.

Someone let a reporter onto the National Review's cruise. I don't understand why people who are this stupid are able to be that powerful.

Ship of fools: Johann Hari sets sail with America's swashbuckling neocons - Independent Online Edition

k wrote:

It is hard enough to run the hurdles posed by a bicameral system where, unlike many countries around the world, each House has an absolute veto on the other. It is, I believe, indefensible to give a single individual, who has no conceivable claim to greater legitimacy than the collective House and Senate, the power to set aside their expressed political judgment.

Oh, give me a break. THIS is EXACTLY the same as all the Republican bitching about filibusters from two years ago. The U.S. President has always had the power to veto laws for whatever reason. Thats hows things have always worked. And now all of a sudden its some great affront to Democracy when it means you don't get your way?! You're damn right it's counter-majoritarian! The fact that either party gets 51% of the vote, particularly in a single election, is not, in fact, carte blanche to ram through your partisan agenda. These checks and balances exist to prevent that very thing, and in recent years they have worked exactly as they should. You can override a veto. If the government isn't getting things done its because the parties are too busy following the radicals at their fringes than working together on reasonable solutions that have broad support.

RE: Balkinization