NPR’s Nina Totenberg this morning had an excellent roundup on the issue, while The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all have sharply worded editorials today chastising Republicans such as Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sessions has vowed to vote against cloture for the Hamilton nomination after years of haranguing Democrats for daring to block Republican judicial nominees.

Hamilton is a widely respected federal judge in Indiana who has the support of his home state’s Republican senator, Richard Lugar. But critics, who call him “the anti-Jesus pro-Allah judge”, don’t like that he ruled against allowing sectarian prayers as part of the official proceedings of the Indiana House of Representatives. They also don’t like that he struck down a law requiring women to have face-to-face counseling before being allowed to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion.

While it’s not surprising that some Republicans don’t like those rulings, that’s not supposed to be grounds for blocking a vote on the president’s nominee. No one is arguing that the Yale-educated, former Fulbright fellow who’s won the support of the American Bar Association isn’t qualified for the job. In contrast, Democrats allowed a vote on President George W. Bush’s nomination of Judge Jay Bybee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, even though as a Justice Department Lawyer Bybee approved memos authorizing the torture and abuse of detainees that even prominent Republicans have since disavowed and that sparked an ethical investigation into his conduct.

But in addition to Republican obstructionism, President Obama hasn’t exactly gone out on a limb to push his judicial nominations forward. Alliance for Justice has issued a report pointing out the paucity of judges nominated and confirmed by the Senate so far under Obama as compared to the first year of the previous administration. After Obama’s first ten months in office, only five judges had been confirmed by the Senate, 22 nominees remained pending and 97 vacancies were still open. During George W. Bush’s first year in office, the president had nominated 64 judges and won confirmation of 18 by mid-November. Meanwhile, Obama is operating with a strong majority of Democrats in the Senate, whereas Bush had to deal with a Democratic-controlled Senate in 2001.

Hamilton is likely to get a vote this week. Even so, the Obama administration still has a lot of catching up to do.

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First of all, I reject the idea that the “birther” campaign is motivated by racism. There may be racism among it, but there are legitimate questions about the documentation of Obama’s birth certificate. I’m sorry, I’ve been following this closely from the start. To assume that all those signs about the birth controversy were motivated by racism, that is simply wrong.

Paglia has been on this beat before, writing in April that “there were ambiguities about Obama’s birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved.” But this particular interview is compelling, especially for Paglia’s convoluted explanation that she despises victim politics but thinks “The Sopranos” was a bigoted portrayal of Italian-Americans.

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Lawyers have been making that argument for years now, but the United States has insisted that the prisoners at Bagram have no right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court. The Obama administration recently appealed a federal court’s ruling that some of the prisoners do indeed have that right.

Now, notwithstanding any constitutional concerns, Maj. Gen. Doug Stone is reportedly recommending that the United States completely revamp its detention policy in Afghanistan, focusing on rehabilitating rather than simply imprisoning the detainees. He also acknowledges that the vast majority of the men held at Bagram were likely swept up in raids yet had not engaged in hostilities against the United States.

As I’ve written before, many of the prisoners at Bagram have been held there for six or seven years without charge or access to lawyers. Stone worries that imprisoning them without charge or an ability to defend themselves for years will turn them into hardened anti-American radicals.

Stone’s 700-page report is not yet available, but he has reportedly briefed senior U.S. officials on his findings, including the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal; Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan; and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Stone earlier helped revamp the prison system in Iraq.

McChrystal is expected to address the issue of detention facilities in an assessment of Afghanistan due within the next few weeks.

Since then, Republicans have increasingly turned against Sotomayor, with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) the only one on the Judiciary Committee to support her nomination. In her report, Totenberg said Sotomayor will be lucky to get even ten Republican votes, and half of those are lawmakers who are retiring. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on Sunday that he’s still “going back and forth” on whether he’ll vote for the nominee, despite the large Latino population in his home state.

While some Republicans, like Graham, realize the Hispanic vote is growing and will be important to Republican influence in the future, many more are simply eager to appeal to their conservative white base in upcoming elections. And with influential conservative TV pundits like Pat Buchanan saying that white working class folks are the most discriminated-against group in America today, as he did on MSNBC, and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck saying President Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people,” the Republicans’ immediate fears seem to be getting the best of them.

Since we first reported in January on the pending court case, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, there’s been growing pressure — both from advocacy groups and now also from the mainstream media — on the Obama administration to reverse the course pursued by its predecessor.

The case involves five victims of the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition policies, who claim they were abducted abroad and sent to foreign countries to be interrogated under torture.  With the help of the ACLU, the victims sued Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA carry out its policies. Although they didn’t sue the government, the Bush Justice Department intervened in the case and convinced the court to dismiss it, arguing that the very subject matter of the case — the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program — is a state secret, so allowing the victims their day in court endangers national security.

Last week The New York Times weighed in, calling the Bush administration’s argument that the entire case constitutes one big state secret “preposterous,” and urged Obama to “rethink the government’s position.”

“Should Mr. Obama decide against pursuing criminal cases for the torture and abuse of prisoners, taking any chance of an effective civil case off the table would give a pass to such misconduct and leave its victims without any legal remedy,” wrote The Times’ editorial board. “That certainly does not fit principles that the new president has so often articulated.”

The Los Angeles Times’ editorial board agreed Friday, writing: “we hope the Obama administration lawyers will show up in court Monday and reject the approach of the previous administration, letting the case go forward.”

And a story on NPR’s All Things Considered Sunday also highlighted the case as a test of Obama’s promises for transparency. Ominously, former federal prosecutor David Laufman told NPR’s Ari Shapiro that if the administration hasn’t changed course yet, it’s not likely to do so tomorrow, before a three-judge panel in a federal court of appeals. “It would be pretty unorthodox for a Justice Department lawyer to stand up in court on Monday and for the first time tell the court that it is reversing course,” Laufman said.

If the signs so far aren’t encouraging, critics can take heart that bipartisan advocacy groups like the Constitution Project and a growing number of mainstream media outlets are watching this case closely, and seem intent on holding the new administration to its promises.

David Remes, who recently started an organization called Appeal for Justice, focused on the plight of detainees (he was formerly a partner at the Washington law firm Covington & Burling, where Eric Holder, Obama’s pick for AG, is a partner) represents about 17 of the Yemenis at Guantanamo bay in habeas corpus proceedings before the DC District Court. As he explained to me last week, who’s been able to leave Gitmo so far has been based more on whether the US has good relations with their home countries than on whether they did anything that warranted their detention.

“The return process is highly political,” says Remes. The more than 500 detainees already sent home since includes all of the Europeans that were picked up, and 90 percent of the Saudis.

“Many were accused of very serious acts of terrorism,” says Remes. “But as a result of
negotiations with the home country we sent them back.” Although the US returned men who had not been officially cleared for release, he says, it continues to hold about 60 men who have been cleared for release, but have nowhere to go.

The problem for the Yemeni prisoners is partly that the Yemeni government hasn’t satisfied the US that it’s doing enough to crack down on terrorism and control its borders. But the problem remains that we haven’t seriously determined which of these guys poses a danger to the United States.

“The government claims that many of the them were taking the side of the Taliban in a civil war with the Northern Alliance,” says Remes. “But even if true, what basis do we have for holding them because they were on the wrong side of another country’s civil war?”

This comes, of course, from their defense lawyer. And while he may be no traditional lefty (Remes spent more than 25 years as a corporate litigator, defending the likes of ExxonMobil before devoting himself to the plight of prisoners at Guantanamo), US authorities may reasonably be hesitant to return people who may be cooperating with terrorists to a country that refuses to deal with the problem. Then again, it was a pretty cursory process that labeled them “enemy combatants” to begin with.

Says Remes: “I’d call it a kangaroo court except that that would be unfair to the kangaroos.”

They found 70 towns and cities from Connecticut to California where Wall Street and Main Street actually meet. They interviewed the denizens of this metaphorically powerful intersection about their take on the economic crisis and the bailout. Here’s what they found.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep interviewed the controversial leader this afternoon in New York and pulled no punches. Ahmadinejad is in the United States to address the United Nation’s General Assembly, which is meeting this week.

In an often heated conversation, according to the transcript, Inskeep confronts Ahmadinejad on Israel, “wiping countries off the map and chopping off hands” — and the Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

Ahmadinejad, for his part, denies that Iran has provoked the United States, and instead calls the U.S. the aggressor. “I think it’s necessary to open up a bit regarding the relations between Iran and the United States,” he explains. He challenges Inskeep to define the “international community” that opposes Iran’s actions, and he alleges that the U.S. and a small group of allies claim to represent global opinion on Iran, whereas in reality most countries are behind Iran.

Here’s the full transcript. The interview will air tomorrow, Tuesday, on the show “Morning Edition.” Audio will be available on NPR.org tomorrow morning.