Rush Limbaugh: “The wizards at the Today Show plan, on Monday, to do a big expos© on my parody tune “Barack, the ‘Magic Negro.‘” Limbaugh says he is sending “encyclopedic documentation” to NBC showing “the brilliance of it, the humor of it.” We’ll see how much of that NBC incorporates into its report.

Thirty years ago today:

Q: So what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations…where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

NIXON: Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.

Q: By definition.

NIXON: Exactly, exactly.

Watch it:

The echoes of President Nixon’s radical interpretation of American democracy are still heard frequently today, most notoriously in relation to President Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program.

In Dec. 2005, it was revealed that Bush had “signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying.”

A few months later, on Feb. 6, 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales came before Congress and was asked to explain why President Bush didn’t simply work with Congress to develop a system that was legal:

KENNEDY: Now, we were facing the issue of electronic surveillance at another time, in 1976, when we had the attorney general, Ed Levi, and President Ford. And they followed a much different course than you have followed. Ed Levi came and consulted with us. … [T]hey dealt with the Congress, and they got FISA. … And the question that I have for you is, why didn’t you follow that kind of pathway, which was so successful at a different time? … Why didn’t you follow that pattern?

GONZALES: Sir, the short answer is that we didn’t think we needed to, quite frankly.

“Casualties among private contractors in Iraq have soared to record levels this year, setting a pace that seems certain to turn 2007 into the bloodiest year yet for the civilians who work alongside the American military in the war zone, according to new government numbers.” At least 146 were killed in the first three months of the year, the highest since the war began.

In 2005, the Kansas Board of Education received national ridicule when it rewrote public school standards to cast doubt on the mainstream evolution theories of Charles Darwin.

One of the board members who voted to teach intelligent design was Kenneth Willard, a conservative who is now the only member running as president-elect for the National Association of State Boards of Education. NASBE is a nonprofit organization of state school boards that “works to strengthen state leadership in educational policymaking.”

Willard was one of the Kansas board’s most vocal proponents of intelligent design:

“Any introduction of any criticism of evolution or the consideration of it is a challenge to the blind faith in evolution that some people want to hold.” [PBS, 11/11/05]

“I’m very pleased to be maybe on the front edge of trying to bring some intellectual honesty and integrity to the science classroom rather than asking students to check their questions at the door because it is a challenge to the sanctity of evolution.” [New York Times, 11/9/05]

“What we’re dealing with here…is a high degree of fear of change.” [Washington Post, 11/9/05]

But Willard’s positions remove intellectual honesty from the classroom. As the New York Times notes, there is “no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. Courts have repeatedly ruled that creationism and intelligent design are religious doctrines, not scientific theories.” Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said that teaching science without evolution was akin to teaching “American history without Lincoln.”

A new Board of Education in Kansas recently approved new evolution-friendly policies, but now scientists fear that if Willard is elected to NASBE, “challenges to the teaching of evolution would move to the national board.”

Fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias held a three-hour meeting this week with the staff of the Office of Special Counsel, which last month launched “a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.” Iglesias also reveals:

Weeks before the 2006 midterm election, …Iglesias was invited to dine with a well-connected Republican lawyer in Albuquerque, N.M., who had been after him for years to prosecute allegations of voter fraud.

“I had a bad feeling about that lunch,” says Iglesias, describing his meeting at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen with Patrick Rogers, a former counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party.

When the voter-fraud issue came up, Iglesias said, he explained to Rogers that in reviewing more than 100 complaints, he hadn’t found any solid enough to justify criminal charges. [...]

Unbeknownst to Iglesias, a few months before that lunch, Rogers and another Republican attorney from New Mexico, Mickey Barnett, had complained about Iglesias at the Justice Department in Washington. The session was arranged with the assistance of the department’s then-White House liaison, Monica M. Goodling, and an aide to White House political strategist Karl Rove, according to e-mails released recently by congressional investigators.

One of those they met with was Matthew Friedrich, a senior counselor to Gonzales. Friedrich would meet again with Rogers and Barnett in New Mexico, where, he told congressional investigators, the pair complained about Iglesias. They made it clear “that they did not want him to be the U.S. attorney…. They mentioned that they had communicated that with Sen. Domenici, and they also mentioned Karl Rove,” Friedrich said, according to a transcript provided by congressional investigators.

“Justice Clarence Thomas sat through 68 hours of oral arguments in the Supreme Court’s current term without uttering a word.” The last time Thomas asked a question in court “was Feb. 22, 2006, in a death penalty case out of South Carolina.”

“Three mortar rounds or rockets exploded Saturday in the Green Zone, wounding one person, a U.S. official said. The blasts occurred after British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived there for talks with Iraqi leaders. Blair’s official spokesman downplayed the incident, saying there was ‘nothing to suggest anything other than business as usual.‘”