I asked in my earlier post on the NYT leak of Jim Comey emails what the big rush was in May 2005 that Comey couldn’t use a week to fix the “combined techniques” opinion.

The emails themselves explain the rush–and that rush should have been the NYT story. On April 28, 2005, Comey wrote:

[Alberto Gonzales] mentioned at one point that OLC didn’t feel like it could accede to my request to make

Someone wants the NYT to prempt the OPR report. And the NYT has obliged.

My understanding of where the Jewel suit against the people who authorized illegal wiretapping will go.

Last November, Bob Corker seemed pretty fond of bankruptcies for America’s automakers. But now that those bankruptcies will affect small business owners, he’s having second thoughts.

Crazy Pete Hoekstra finds a journalists to help him manufacture political controversy again.

The cases that will affect Vaughn Walker’s chess game going forward.

I’m a little late to the the House Judiciary State Secrets Hearing (committee stream here). Jerrold Nadler has had his opening statement–the big news in that was that Holder refused to make a witness available for this hearing. Jim Sensenbrenner is up noting that Obama has adopted Bush’s approach on State Secrets.

For all the blistering that I, and many others here, give to Obama for his continuation of the Bush/Cheney duplicity on wiretapping, privacy, torture and Executive primacy issues, there are similarly a great many areas in which he is so many light years ahead of where we have been moribund for the last eight years that it is hard to remember we are still in the same galaxy. The Cairo speech was a remarkable reminder of the value of Obama.

Lawrence Wilkerson says the number 183, describing waterboarding, may describe the number of bottles used. That makes more sense if we remember that the interrogators were using far more water than Jay Bybee said they could use.

Yes, as we suspected, Bush punted on the auto crisis to leave the problem for Obama. But curiously, he did not punt on the auto finance crisis.