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I applaud Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) for continuing his efforts to seek a real investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks by introducing the Anthrax Attacks Investigation Act of 2009.

It is long past time to have an investigation of the incident, why it was not prevented, and the questionable investigation into it.

Rep. Holt does an excellent job of explaining all of the issues into this seemingly forgotten terrorist attack on our nation.

Glenn Greenwald also discusses the legislation and recaps all of the important work and analysis he has done on the anthrax terror attack case. He argues, correctly in my view:

The importance of full disclosure of all facts surrounding the anthrax attacks cannot be overstated. This was the opposite of a run-of-the-mill crime. To the contrary, the anthrax attacks -- by design, as everyone acknowledges -- had an immense political impact on the country. Contrary to endless claims from Bush supporters that Bush allowed no more terrorist attacks on "the homeland" after 9/11, the anthrax attack was exactly such a terrorist attack.

For reasons I've detailed previously, I actually believe that the anthrax attacks played a larger role than the 9/11 attack itself in elevating America's fear levels to hysterical heights, which in turn put the citizenry into the state of frightened submission that enabled so many of the subsequent events of the Bush presidency. The 9/11 attacks appeared to be a one-time extraordinary event, but it was multi-staged anthrax attacks -- coming a mere four weeks later -- that normalized and personalized the Terrorist threat.

The anthrax attacks must be removed from our society's blind spot and given the proper focus such events deserve. The fact that we have so many questions today -- over seven years later -- is unacceptable.

Andrew Sullivan asks a vital question of the main-stream media:

A simple question: now that the chief Gitmo prosecutor has said that Qahtani was tortured, will the New York Times, the AP, Newsweek and the Washington Post stop using words and euphemisms that are not true? Or do we have to endure more linguistic cowardice from the MSM?

Alas, I'm going to bet on cowardice.

Digby once again has an outstanding post about how tasers are not nearly as safe as their advocates would have us all believe.

It is a shame that a serious conversation about their potential deadly impact is taking place not here in the United States, but in England.

Matthew Yglesias is right: Attorney General Michael Mukasey has just given us a contender for best Bush Administration slogan.

Yes, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught patronizing prostitutes. Which is beyond foolish, and he deserved to lose his office over it.

But, that's not the only important question his case raises.

Given the politicization of the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush, I think we should be more than a bit interested in wondering about the true nature of this investigation.

As Harpers' Scott Norton explains:

This marks a strong shift in position in Justice Department explanations of the case, increasingly bringing into focus the fact that Eliot Spitzer was a target because he was Eliot Spitzer. The comparison of this case with the handling of the “D.C. Madam” case produces a very curious bifurcation. Eliot Spitzer is worthy of being a target, and the dedication of massive resources to nab him. But G.O.P. Senator David Vitter and Bush Administration Director of USAID Randall Tobias are not. What, other than the fact that the latter are Republicans and the former Democrats, provides the basis for distinction? This investigation increasingly looks like a political hit.

And as dday asks over at Hullabaloo:

Yeah, I'm wondering why some slimy political operative is all but managing federal investigations in the Bush Justice Department.

That is an excellent question.

Why is the Bush Administration's politicization of U.S. Attorneys scandal important? There are many reasons. The apparent political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman is one of them.

60 Minutes' Scott Pelley reported yesterday on new allegations that the prosecution of Siegelman may be more about politics than any crime, and may also be connected to a Karl Rove dirty tricks campaign. As Pelley reported:

But, as 60 Minutes found out, the imprisonment of Don Siegelman is not nearly as simple as that.

“I haven't seen a case with this many red flags on it that pointed towards a real injustice being done,” says Grant Woods, the former Republican attorney general of Arizona.

Woods is one of the 52 former state attorneys-general, of both parties, who’ve asked Congress to investigate the Siegelman case.

“I personally believe that what happened here is that they targeted Don Siegelman because they could not beat him fair and square. This was a Republican state and he was the one Democrat they could never get rid of,” Woods says.

Now a Republican lawyer from Alabama, Jill Simpson, has come forward to claim that the Siegelman prosecution was part of a five-year secret campaign to ruin the governor. Simpson told 60 Minutes she did what’s called “opposition research” for the Republican party. She says during a meeting in 2001, Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior political advisor, asked her to try to catch Siegelman cheating on his wife.

"Karl Rove asked you to take pictures of Siegelman?" Pelley asks.

"Yes," Simpson replies.

"In a compromising, sexual position with one of his aides," Pelley clarifies.

"Yes, if I could," Simpson says.

She says she spied on Siegelman for months but saw nothing. Even though she was working as a Republican campaign operative, Simpson says she wanted to talk to 60 Minutes because Siegelman’s prison sentence bothers her conscience.

Pelley's story is a must read (or watch, if you'd prefer to see the video). Siegelman has six years and eight months left on his sentence. For what? As dday explains over at Hullabaloo:

The nub of the case is that Siegelman allowed HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy to remain on an oversight board on which he had already served, and in return Scrushy gave money to a noble effort to improve education in the state of Alabama, an effort Siegelman approved of. That's literally the reason that Siegelman is in a jail cell right now. This is the kind of thing that, were it actually considered bribery, would put every politician in America in jail. The case hung on evidence that Siegelman walked out of a meeting with Scrushy with the check, a baseless lie spouted by a convicted criminal on Siegelman's staff, and the Justice Department KNEW it was a lie and yet continued the case. 60 Minutes tried to talk with the accuser, a man named Nick Bailey, but the DoJ refused to authorize the interview (he's in a federal prison).

Given the sketchy nature of the charges, was his crime really just being a Democratic politician winning in a state Karl Rove reserved for Republicans? Was the power of the United States Justice Department used for political purposes?

In a Constitutional Republic, those are serious issues. It really is well past time to get to the bottom of what Karl Rove and his allies were trying to do with the Justice Department.

The Talking Points Memo team are connecting some dots and uncovering evidence that makes asking President Bush whether he personally decided to fire former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias a necessity.

The TPM websites are going to be must reads today and this week: that is, even more than they already are.

In the aftermath of the dismissal of the Duke Rape Case, Charles Pierce at Altercation explains why concerns about the presumption of innocence and due process need to expend beyond affluent white college students.

One of the accused, Reade Seligmann, pronounced himself astonished at how easily the presumption of innocence could be cast aside by the media and, worse, by law-enforcement. Instead of asking him to call Gary Condit on that score, or asking him whether he's on his way to law school and thence onto the ACLU's legal team, I would ask him to look around in the light of what happened to him. What Mike Nifong did to him is exactly what an awful lot of people in this country -- and whole ton of people on the radio and on cable television -- ask prosecutors to do. (Hell, it's what an appeals court said Nancy Grace actually did, back when she was a prosecutor and not the avenging angel of legal TV.) Where's the presumption of innocence at Gitmo or in the black prisons in Europe? Where was it when people debated the Patriot Act, or wrote books -- Hello, Michelle. Nice to have your reasoned input on the Imus case. Now go back under your rock -- about how internment isn't necessarily a bad idea? Where was it when Rudy Giuliani encouraged the worst impulses of the New York Police Department? Where was it for Patrick Dorismond or Amadou Diallo? Where was it when Antonin Scalia said actual innocence was no bar to upholding a criminal conviction? Where was it during the increasingly ridiculous "war on drugs"? Where is it when my kids lose their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights as soon as they walk through the schoolhouse door? We are a country that begs -- in reality and in its popular entertainment, like 24 or the Law and Orders -- for prosecutors to shred the Bill of Rights to keep us safe from scary powders and scary brown people. Not long before Seligmann and his teammates were cleared, a man named James Giles walked out of a prison in Texas after serving 10 years for a rape he didn't commit because a DNA test proved he hadn't committed it. Nobody knew his name when he went off to prison. People probably cheered. I hope Reade Seligmann realizes, once his justifiable anger clears, that every time we hand over our civil liberties to some charlatan who trafficks in empty promises to protect us, we make a Mike Nifong not merely possible, but inevitable. (emphasis added)

And that fact really should bother you.

Update: Speaking of Nancy Grace, you can see The Daily Show's compilation of some of her lowlight commentary about the Duke case by clicking here.

Over at TalkLeft, we learn:

Death penalty proponents like to say that it has never been established that an innocent person has been executed in the United States. That may no longer be the case.

Yes, I think we should be very concerned about the message sent by this prosecution. From Demagogue:

In a chilling case of prosecutorial misconduct, in Oregon a 17-year old woman accuses 3 adult men of gang raping her, but since her charges can't be proven she's charged with filing a false report-- and found guilty.

The Houston Chronicle's Lise Olsen authors a chilling report that should have everyone rethinking our nation's use of the death penalty:

Texas executed its fifth teenage offender at 22 minutes after midnight on Aug. 24, 1993, after his last request for bubble gum had been refused and his final claim of innocence had been forever silenced.

Ruben Cantu, 17 at the time of his crime, had no previous convictions, but a San Antonio prosecutor had branded him a violent thief, gang member and murderer who ruthlessly shot one victim nine times with a rifle before emptying at least nine more rounds into the only eyewitness — a man who barely survived to testify.

Four days after a Bexar County jury delivered its verdict, Cantu wrote this letter to the residents of San Antonio: "My name is Ruben M. Cantu and I am only 18 years old. I got to the 9th grade and I have been framed in a capital murder case."

A dozen years after his execution, a Houston Chronicle investigation suggests that Cantu, a former special-ed student who grew up in a tough neighborhood on the south side of San Antonio, was likely telling the truth.

And remember that Cantu has been executed. There is no way to remedy this if it is an error.

(Hat tip: TalkLeft.)

Via Americablog, we learn that the GOP's war against the judiciary heated up today, this time from United States Senator (yikes) John Cornyn:

I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence.

This is utterly outrageous. Outrageous. The GOP is now embracing domestic terrorists who are trying to undermine our democracy. And they're doing it so they can take down the judges who "killed" Terri Schiavo, and instead impose some Pat Robertson-like theocracy on our country. This is absolutely utterly beyond contempt. Tell Judge Lefkow in Chicago that her mother and husband are dead because she brought it on herself.

And the ultimate irony is that it is people like John Cornyn who now risk inciting violence against judges by giving aid and comfort to these homicidal maniacs. Cornyn should resign immediately.

But I won't hold my breath.

Atrios is right. We need to know whether Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas really said the following, as claimed by new Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker:

Parker said Thomas told him a judge should be evaluated by whether he faithfully upholds his oath to God, not to the people, to the state or to the Constitution.

Justice Thomas took an oath when he became a Supreme Court Justice. If he finds that he cannot abide by that oath, he should resign.

So, this is a big deal. Reporters, even though the conservative message machine will scream you are biased for asking, this is a legitimate question that concerns the foundation of our constitutional form of government.

Wow. Two big Republican flip-flops in four paragraphs.

First, as President Bush and his surrogates try to portray Sen. John Kerry as a flip-flopper, it is worthwhile to shift the mirror back to a president who has shown a remarkable propensity not to live up to the promises he made during the 2000 campaign.

Charles Babington writes about another Bush says one thing, does another moment:

With time expiring on the decade-old assault weapons ban, gun control advocates are angry at President Bush for apparently doing nothing to extend it. In fact, the president never asked the House to continue the ban, which will expire in September, because he knew it was pointless, says Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

In his 2000 campaign, Bush said he favored extending the 1994 ban on 19 semiautomatic assault weapons. But now, "time is running out, and President Bush's strategy is to remain silent," said Michael Barnes, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, in a recent statement.

Babington continues his report and highlights House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's latest hypocritical moment:

The Senate dropped efforts to extend the law in March, and the House never started. "We stated our position before the White House had to ask us," DeLay told reporters last week. The White House "knew not to [ask], because the votes are not there."

At the same news conference, DeLay took a different view on a proposed constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriages. The House will vote on the question in September, he said, even though many Republicans say they are not close to rounding up the 290 votes, or two-thirds majority, that a constitutional amendment requires. "We feel like marriage is under attack," DeLay said, and amendment proponents can't wait for a guaranteed victory.

Remember how we were told that the PATRIOT Act was needed for the war on terrorism? How we could trust federal government agencies not to abuse these new powers.

Oops.

The Los Vegas Review-Journal's J.M. Kalil and Steve Tetreault write:

The investigation of strip club owner Michael Galardi and numerous politicians appears to be the first time federal authorities have used the Patriot Act in a public corruption probe.

At some point we are going to stop being so gullible when it comes to the Bush Administration's lack of candor, right?