Yet, as the Plum Line’s Greg Sargent reports, the video poorly represents the views of the residents of Standish. He interviewed Standish City Manager Michael Moran, who dismissed Liz Cheney’s “fearmongering” and said the documentary was “off base“:

Standish’s City Manager tells us that local leaders and residents want the facility, and dismissed Cheney’s efforts as “fearmongering.” Cheney is “certainly not representing the views of our community,” the City Manager, Michael Moran, told our reporter, Amanda Erickson.

While some local residents do appear to have expressed mixed feelings or opposition to the plan, Moran says that they’re an isolated minority that Ms. Cheney’s video elevates out of proportion in a way that’s “off base.”

The truth is, the residents of Standish — like the residents of Thomson, Illinois — aren’t afraid of housing terrorism suspects on U.S. soil. Last month, the Standish City Council voted 6-0 in support of a resolution asking the federal government to relocate Guantanamo prisoners to their city. Moving detainees to the city would help keep their prison facility open, which would guard against “the loss of the 350 jobs provided by the [jail].”

[T]here is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder’s critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again.

In terrorist trials over the past 15 years, federal prosecutors and judges have gained extensive experience protecting intelligence sources and methods, limiting a defendant’s ability to raise irrelevant issues and tightly controlling the courtroom.

Comey and Goldsmith are hardly the first conservatives to support Holder’s faith in the U.S. justice system. In a joint statement prepared by the Constitution Project, David Keene, founder of American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and former representative and presidential candidate Bob Barr wrote Sunday, “We are confident that the government can preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition that has served us effectively for over two centuries. … The scare-mongering about these issues should stop.”

As the story of six-year-old Madison Leuchtmann of Franklin County, MO, demonstrates, even children are victims of this insurance company abuse. Madison was born with bilateral atresia, which means she lacks ear canals in both ears. In order to hear, she wears a special device on a headband that allows her to make out sounds. Despite her disability, Madison is at the top of her kindergarten class and is slowly learning to read.

Yet Madison, due to her growth, will soon require a new hearing implant to be able to recognize sounds. Her hearing and speech therapist warns that “if she doesn’t get her implants by age seven, she’s not going to be able to blend her words. … She won’t be able to hear herself [talk].” Madison’s pediatrician, Dr. Randall Clary, also insists that without the implant, the girl may never be able to hear again.

Unfortunately, the Leuchtmann’s family insurer, Cigna, has issued “one denial after another,” flatly refusing to cover the $20,000 bill for the implant. In a written statement to the local news station Fox 2, Cigna explained, “It is not unusual for commercial benefit plans to exclude hearing assisted devices,” prompting Dr. Clary to angrily respond, “This is obviously medically necessary. You have a child that has no ear canals!” Dr. Clary also told Fox 2 that he sees these sort of denials “on a weekly basis.” Watch Fox 2’s report:

The United States is the only developed country without a universal, cradle-to-the-grave health care system. In no other developed country would a girl be on “the verge of never hearing again” because a for-profit insurance company decided that its bottom line was more important than keeping a child from going deaf.

She calls it a “massive mistake” and blames the current attorney general, Republican Greg Abbott, for allowing the language to become part of the Texas Constitution. Radnofsky called on Abbott to acknowledge the wording as an error and consider an apology. She also said that another constitutional amendment may be necessary to reverse the problem.

“You do not have to have a fancy law degree to read this and understand what it plainly says,” said Radnofsky, who will be at Texas Christian University today as part of a five-city tour to kick off her campaign.

Abbott’s spokesman Jerry Strickland replied to Radnofsky’s charge by saying, “The Texas Constitution and the marriage statute are entirely constitutional.” This isn’t the first time the reach of the second section has been questioned. Before the amendment passed, a group called Save Texas Marriage warned that a judge could potentially void all marriages in the state if the language became part of the Texas Constitution.

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Richard Lugar (R-IN)
John Thune (R-SD)
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
Susan Collins (R-ME)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

Many of Sessions’ implausible attacks on Judge Hamilton appeared more at home on Glenn Beck’s show than they did on the Senate floor.  At one point, Sessions embraced false claims that Hamilton gave Muslims preferential treatment over Christians. Sessions also deemed Hamilton unfit for the bench because Hamilton spent one month working for ACORN in 1979. Yet, for all of his impotent rage against President Obama’s first nominee, Sessions couldn’t even convince much of his own caucus to support a filibuster. Hopefully, Sessions’ utter powerlessness against Hamilton’s nomination will embolden Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to move forward with dozens of other Obama nominees currently being held up in the Senate.

But last night on Fox, the network’s top legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano — who has been known to disagree with Fox’s right-wing narratives on legal issues — disputed that view, citing the constitutional right to be tried in the place where the crime has been committed. “I don’t care about the Constitution!” host Bill O’Reilly responded. The debate continued:

O’REILLY: So why is he entitled to come to New York City to be tried in the civilian criminal court if he’s arrested in Pakistan?

NAPOLITANO: Because the document you don’t want me to talk about says when the government is going to prosecute you, it must do so in the place where the alleged harm was caused.

Later in the program, Fox analyst Brit Hume said he’d “been scouring the columns of various people opining about this to see if somebody makes a good argument for doing it,” adding, “And I really haven’t heard one.” Hume then noted Napolitano’s opinion and said, “I’m not certain I agree with that.” Watch it:

Holder’s “bold and principled” decision was “a victory for the rule of law and the American system of justice,” the Center for American Progress’ Ken Gude said.

“If you are accused, you get to know what you know what you are accused of, you get to face your accusers, and you get to defend yourself in court, and then you face a trial and a conviction. This is who we are as a system,” said Tom Andrews, director of the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo. “The Taliban? You can get a trial and a beheading in a few hours. That’s not our system of justice.”

Read more about Holder’s decision in today’s Progress Report.

The right has exploited this possible move by fear-mongering to score political points. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) started circulating a letter among state officials telling President Obama, “If your Administration brings Al Qaeda terrorists to Illinois, our state and the Chicago Metropolitan Area will become ground zero for Jihadist terrorist plots, recruitment and radicalization.” Rep. Don Manzullo (R-IL) claimed that moving detainees to Thomson would make the city a “target for future terrorist activity.”

One group of people, however, that is not afraid of bringing detainees to Thomson is the residents of the city themselves. As the Chicago Tribune reports, a transfer of Guantanamo detainees to Thomson Correctional Center would be “greeted warmly” by the city’s residents, who would welcome the jobs created by such a move:

News that the federal government seems interested in transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the Thomson Correctional Center was greeted warmly in this small, rural farm town along the Iowa border.

After holding out hope that the sprawling $145 million prison might improve the economic conditions in this remote area of the state, residents say any prisoners would be a welcomed sight.

“It would help the businesses here, and God knows we could use that,” said Kay Lawton, 59, a Thomson resident. “It doesn’t matter to me who they bring here.”

“A murderer is a murderer no matter where he’s from,” [Thomson Village President Jerry] Hebeler said. “That’s the way I look at it.” [...]

“As long as it’s safe and we’re protected, I’m comfortable with it,” Hebeler said. “Maybe this is something that will put us on the map.”

CNN’s Gary Tuchman traveled to Thomson and interviewed its residents about their feelings about a possible transfer of Guantanamo detainees. He concluded that “for economic reasons, people are very much in support” of the transfer. Watch it:

In opposing the transfer of detainees to Thomson, Kirk and Manzullo are putting themselves at odds not only with job-seeking residents, but also fellow conservatives. In a joint statement prepared by the Constitution Project, David Keene, founder of American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and former representative and presidential candidate Bob Barr write, “We are confident that the government can preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition that has served us effectively for over two centuries. … The scare-mongering about these issues should stop.”

Last night on Fox News, Bill Kristol called Napolitano’s comment “stupid” and stated outright that there should be no trial:

KRISTOL: I was very struck also by Janet Napolitano’s comment, I hadn’t read it before to see her say that, that the number one priority is to bring him to justice is such a knee-jerk comment and such a stupid comment. He’s going to be brought to justice. He is not going to be innocent of murder. There are a lot of eyewitnesses to that. They should just go ahead and convict him and put him to death.

Watch it:

Apparently, Kristol is not a huge believer in the Constitution, the Sixth Amendment of which states that “[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

Hasan’s attorney, Col. John Galligan (Ret.), noted this fact when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked how he could “represent someone accused of mass murder”:

GALLIGAN: I fully appreciate the importance of ensuring that everybody has a fair trial. I think that’s particularly important when it applies to anyone in uniform, officer or enlisted. Their profession is to defend us. We owe it to them as either fellow service members or as U.S. citizens to ensure that we properly defend them. The rights that I’m asking be accorded to Major Hasan are the rights that service members live and die for. Let’s just make sure we don’t deprive them in his case.

As Adam Serwer at TAPPED noted of those espousing Kristol’s view, “This is Salem Witch Trial justice: If the crime is heinous, the accused is automatically guilty. That the evidence may be overwhelming doesn’t matter: You don’t just ’skip’ a fair trial because you feel like it. There’s a word for systems of justice that selectively afford due process — that word is ‘corrupt.’”

A Louisiana justice of the peace who drew criticism for refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple has resigned, the secretary of state’s office said Tuesday.

Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish’s 8th Ward, was widely criticized after he refused to grant a marriage license to Beth McKay and Terence McKay, an interracial couple who ultimately got a marriage license from another justice of the peace in the same parish.

The McKays hired an attorney and protested the justice’s actions.

Despite a national uproar and a call by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal for him to lose his license, Bardwell, 56, said in October that he had no regrets. “It’s kind of hard to apologize for something that you really and truly feel down in your heart you haven’t done wrong,” he told CNN affiliate WAFB.

Civil rights organizations had called for Bardwell to resign while Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) had called for him to be dismissed. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), on the other hand, would only go so far as to say that Bardwell “should follow the law as written.”

Four months later, nothing has changed. Since taking office last January, only four of President Obama’s judicial nominees have been confirmed, despite the fact that President Bush’s judges received very different treatment:

Consider, for example, the judicial nominations process during President George W. Bush’s last two years in office, 2007 and 2008. Bush was deeply unpopular at the time, and he faced a Senate firmly under Democratic control. Still, a large number of Bush nominees sailed through. The Senate voted on more than one-third of Bush’s confirmed nominees (26 of 68) less than three months after the president nominated them. [...]

The story was similar in the first two years of Bush’s presidency: A Democratic majority in Congress confirmed 100 of Bush’s nominees in 17 months, even after delays due to a change in party control of the Sen. after Senator James Jeffords left the Republican Party in May 2001.

Blocking nearly every single one of a President’s nominees is unprecedented, but conservatives have played Calvinball with the Senate’s confirmation rules for decades.  During the Reagan and Bush I Administrations, then-Senate Judiciary Chair Joe Biden (D-DE) followed a longstanding rule allowing a nominee’s home state senators to block a judicial nominee, but only if both senators agreed to do so. After President Clinton took office and conservative Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) became judiciary chair, however, the rules suddenly changed to allow a single-home state senator to veto a nominee — a power that segregationist Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) used to block every single one of Clinton’s nominees from North Carolina. Yet when Bush II took office, Hatch eliminated the home-state senator veto altogether.

This time, however, the right doesn’t even have enough votes to maintain a filibuster if the Majority Leader insists that President Obama’s nominees deserve the same favorable treatment he gave to President Bush’s; the only question is how long Reid will let the “Party of No” say no to Obama’s judges.

Yesterday, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) challenged the constitutionality of one of these anti-ACORN measures being supported by Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) during a hearing of the Science and Technology committee. Grayson repeatedly questioned Broun about the constitutionality of “bills of attainder” — which are punishments that single out a group or individual without a court trial. The Georgia Republican was unable to offer a coherent rebuttal:

GRAYSON: I’d like to ask the gentleman from Georgia a few questions, and I’ll yield to him for the purpose of having answers to these questions. Does the gentleman from Georgia know what a bill of Attainder is?

BROUN: A bill of, the answer’s yes, in fact it’s been very explicitly described by the court’s.

GRAYSON: What is it?

BROUN: [long pause. Scrambling through papers.] The courts have applied a two pronged test. Number one, whether specific individuals or entities are affected by the staute, Number two, when the legislation affects a “punishment,” on those individuals, it serves no legitamate regulatory purpose.

GRAYSON: What, um, does the Constitution says about Bills of Attainder?

BROUN: Oh, I suggest that this is not a Bill of Attainder. It’s, um, certainly does focus on a specific entity, but it does not inflict punishment by any means. In fact…

GRAYSON: Will the gentleman from Georgia explain what the Constitution says about Bills of Attainder?

ANOTHER CONGRESSMAN: Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield for a second? The gentleman from Florida?

GRAYSON: No. I’d like an answer to my question. [...]

GRAYSON: The question is, will the gentleman from Georgia agree with me that the Bill of Attainder clause was intended not as a narrow or technical provision, but as an implementation of the seperation of powers, and a general safeguard against legislative exercise of the judicial function, or more simply, trial by legislature. Will the gentleman agree to that?

BROUN: No, sir, I will not, and I ask counsel to help us with this. I think all this is determination of the court and I’d like to appeal to Mr. Sensenberner.

GRAYSON: Well, I’m sorry, but it’s my time, not yours or Mr. Sensenberner’s, so I will reclaim my time, and I will point out that what you just you would not agree to is from a Supreme Court case called the United States v. Brown, something I would expect you might know about, given your name.

Watch it:

Grayson ended his remarks by noting that the conservative crusade against ACORN isn’t based in principle but politics: “We are trampling on people’s Constitutional rights. And I think it’s unfortunate that the mania that exists on the other side of the aisle regarding this one organization, and we know why that mania exists, it’s because they’ve registered an awful lot of Democrats, continues to distort and waste the time of this committee and many other committees here in Congress. Enough is enough.”

(HT: MinistryOfTruth at Daily Kos)

T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are “entitled” to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

“They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it,” Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. “Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars.”

Unfortunately for Pickens and others who feel that the U.S. can freely exploit Iraq’s oil because we invaded it, the U.S. is a signatory to the Hague Conventions, which specifically bar the confiscation of private property by occupying powers. And while Pickens is right that the invasion cost us tremendously in both blood and treasure, it is Iraqis who have suffered the most. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed in the war, millions fled the country, and the nation’s infrastructure remains in tatters.

Earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization conference report a new requirement that would mandate the videorecording of all interrogations of anyone in a Defense Department facility:

Congress is moving to require videotaping of interrogations of detainees held by the military, a step proponents say will prevent abuse and create a valuable intelligence record.

The provision, which the House passed on Thursday as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Act conference report, would apply to interrogations of anyone held at a Defense Department facility. Because the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret overseas prisons have been closed, it would most likely cover terrorism suspects whether they were questioned by a military or a C.I.A. officer.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), who first proposed the videotaping measure, said that it will allow the government to “continue the process of putting our detainee policies back on a sound legal footing while maintaining our ability to get actionable intelligence.”

Indeed, Holt’s measure would do much to curb abuse in the interrogation system. The New York Times notes that although the Guantanamo Bay prison camp — the site of many human rights abuses — contained video recording equipment, “it was rarely used.”

Under the previous administration, officials simply destroyed recordings of abusive interrogations. Following an ACLU lawsuit earlier this year, the CIA admitted to destroying 92 videotaped recordings of abusive interrogations, prompting ACLU attorney Amrit Singh to accuse the agency of engaging in a “systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations.”

The measure is also incredibly important at a time when many civil liberties advocates are concerned that the detention camp at Bagram Airforce Base in Afghanistan has become the same sort of “legal black hole” that Guantanamo once was, with prisoners facing poor conditions and little in the way of due process.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” Speaking on the Senate floor yesterday, Franken said:

The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law … And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. … The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen.

Watch Franken’s speech:

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke against the amendment, calling it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.” Franken responded, “This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court.”

In the end, Franken won the debate. His amendment passed by a 68-30 vote, earning the support of 10 Republican senators including that of newly-minted Florida Sen. George LeMieux. “He did what a senator should do, which was he was working it,” LeMieux said in praise of Franken. “He was working for his amendment.”

Appearing with Franken after the vote, an elated Jones expressed her deep appreciation. “It means the world to me,” she said of the amendment’s passage. “It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it.”

GOHMERT: If you’re oriented toward animals, bestiality, then, you know, that’s not something that can be used, held against you or any bias be held against you for that. Which means you’d have to strike any laws against bestiality, if you’re oriented toward corpses, toward children, you know, there are all kinds of perversions, [...] pedophiles or necrophiliacs or what most would say is perverse sexual orientations but the trouble is, we made amendments to eliminate pedophiles from being included in the definition. [...] But people have always been willing to give up their liberties, their freedoms in order to gain economic stability. It happened in 1920 and 1930’s. Germany gave up their liberties to gain economic stability and they got a little guy with a mustache, who was the ultimate hate monger. And this is scary stuff we’re doing here when we take away what has traditionally been an important aspect of moral teaching in America.

Watch it:

Several times in the speech, Gohmert credited the conservative Christian “C Street” leader Chuck Colson for inspiration. Oddly, Gohmert also meandered into a self-defensive monologue about how he is not racist because he once voted for Alan Keyes, the birther leader who has said that President Obama is “a radical communist” who “is going to destroy this country, and we are either going to stop him or the United States of America is going to cease to exist.”

Kris looked flustered and mumbled that “this is surreal,” apparently referring to having to respond to Franken’s question. “I would defer to the other branch of government,” he said, referring to the courts, prompting Franken to interject: “I know what that is.”

Watch it:

Jones argued that the alleged gang rape was not related to her employment and thus, wasn’t covered by the arbitration agreement. Finally, two years later, a federal court has sensibly agreed with her. Tuesday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2 to 1 ruling, found her alleged injuries were not, in fact, in any way related to her employment and thus, not covered by the contract.

One of the judges who ruled in her favor, Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale, is a West Point grad, Vietnam vet, and one of the court’s most conservative members, a sign, perhaps, of just how bad the facts are in this case. It’s a big victory, but a bitter one that shows just how insidious mandatory arbitration is. It’s taken Jones three years of litigation just to get to the point where she can finally sue the people who allegedly wronged her. It will be many more years before she has a shot at any real justice.

“We do not hold that, as a matter of law, sexual-assault allegations can never ‘relate to’ someone’s employment,” wrote the court. “For this action, however, Jones’ allegations do not ‘touch matters’ related to her employment, let alone have a ’significant relationship’ to her employment contract.

Yesterday, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) held a town hall meeting with his constituents in Grove, Oklahoma, where he unleashed a tirade of hyperbolic remarks against Obama administration policies. At one point he even suggested that Obama is “obsessed” with releasing terrorists into the United States, and claimed that there has “never been a case of torture” at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp:

He is also alarmed, he said, by the proposed closing of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Obama administration wants to shutter the camp because of its association with torture.

Inhofe said: “There has never been a case of torture there. The people there are treated better than in the federal prisons.”

He continued, “I don’t know why President Obama is obsessed with turning terrorists loose in America.”

As the Center for Constitutional Rights has documented, there have been countless cases of detainees being abused and tortured at the prison camp. Detainees have been beaten, deprived of sleep for weeks, sexually harrassed, and shackled to the floor for days at a time. Inhofe’s statement at the town hall is only the latest in his political broadsides. He has in the past suggested that Obama is “un-American,” that the mentality of Middle Easterners is “worse than Nazism,” and that the conditions at Guantanamo Bay are humane.

Human Rights Watch responded to the announcement by imploring Holder to go further and investigate those who “planned, authorized, and facilitated the use of abusive methods.” As constitutional attorney and blogger Glenn Greenwald has noted, Holder’s investigation would effectively immunize interrogators who complied with the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) interrogation memos, which authorized brutal torture, and ensure that White House officials who authorized torture “will never be held to account.”

In an appearance today on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) echoed the concerns of these advocates. He told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that Holder should not “limit the investigation” to field interrogators and that he should also investigate the people who gave the orders that resulted in abuse and torture, including former Vice President Cheney:

NADLER: Now, the law says very clearly that it is the obligation of the Attorney General to investigate, to see whether crimes were committed, any time there was torture under American jurisdiction. He must do that. If he didn’t do that, he’d be breaking the law. My criticism of the Attorney General is that he should not limit the investigation to people in the field who may have committed the torture, but to people who may have ordered it, such as the Vice President, for example.

Watch it:

Nadler has been one of the most vociferous critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and its record on civil liberties. In the past, he has said that Bush officials “clearly committed war crimes” and that the Obama administration would be “breaking the law” if it did not fully investigate the Bush administration’s complicity in torture. Most recently, he responded to Cheney’s comments opposing a torture probe by saying that his objections show that he “still fails to understand the law.”

We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists. And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror.

Listen here:

Of course, Gonzales said he was reassured that Holder was interested the “one percent of actors” who went beyond the legal authorization and not the 99 percent who “are heroes and and should be treated like heroes for the most part.” No doubt that Gonzales puts himself in that 99-percent group.