los angeles times

There’s growing attention today to the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans planning to filibuster the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and to the Obama administration’s failure to make judicial nominations a higher priority.
NPR’s Nina Totenberg this morning had an excellent roundup on the issue, while The New York Times, [...]

Winning his freedom was a big step for Mohammed Jawad, reportedly the youngest prisoner at Guantanamo Bay until he was released in August. But Jawad, who two U.S. judges have said was tortured in U.S. custody, is still suffering from the effects of his treatment during seven years in custody without charge, according to a [...]

Documents reveal the CIA was allowed to deny detainees sleep upward of 80 to 180 hours at a time.

Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly getting closer to appointing an independent prosecutor to investigate torture under the Bush administration. That’s making some CIA employees nervous.
Greg Miller and Josh Meyer of The Los Angeles Times on Sunday confirmed earlier reports that Holder has reluctantly come around to thinking that he can’t avoid the fact that [...]

Well, you’ve got to hand it to President Obama. He doesn’t really worry too much about pleasing the people who most ardently supported him as a presidential candidate.  As Spencer wrote, Obama is expected to announce today that he will revive the much-criticized military commissions to try detainees held at the U.S. detention facility at [...]

I wouldn’t normally flag a policy proposal by a car reviewer, but Dan Neil’s piece in The Los Angeles Times today deserves mention. With a few nifty calculations, he argues that we could cut our dependence on OPEC oil by 50 percent over ten years, simply by buying millions of hybrids and giving them away [...]

For those who’ve been wondering whether Congress can really just vent its anger at those $165 million in AIG bonuses by levying a 90 percent tax on the bonuses of all executives who receive bailout money, the answer is: probably, yes.

This story that ran Sunday in The Los Angeles Times, “Obama Preserves Rendition as Counter-Terrorism Tool”, has caused quite a stir.  Swirling ’round the blogosphere, it’s got all sorts of people in a tizzy that President Obama isn’t really ending torture and the Bush administration policy of “extraordinary rendition” of suspected terrorists to torturing countries.
But [...]

While Rashid Khalidi disappeared as a campaign issue faster than he became one — after it became clear that Sen. John McCain’s ties to the pro-Palestine Columbia University professor are closer than those of Sen. Barack Obama — a former president of the International Republican Institute has come to Khalidi’s defense.
Last week, the McCain campaign [...]

I’ve been doing my best today to ignore the McCain campaign’s current non-issue du jour — the release of a video showing Sen. Barack Obama’s attendance at a going-away party for a pro-Palestine professor, Rashid Khalidi. But it looks like this is all that matters to Sen. John McCain.