In what has been billed locally as the first Arab-American to win, Michigan’s Rima Fakih won the Miss USA pageant tonight. The 24-year-old brunette from Michigan beat out four blondes and 46 other women for the 2010 Miss USA title after nearly stumbling in her evening gown. Fakih won the pageant Sunday night after swimsuit, [...]

Greg Craig, who was ousted from the Obama Administration because he’s too much of a purist on archaic things like the Constitution, reassures us that Elena Kagan is largely a “progressive” in the mold of the guy who ousted him.

Mark Mazzetti has a follow-up story to his previous expose of a DOD-funded contractor network conducting spying in Pakistan. In an article providing many new details about complaints from CIA about the DOD contractor, he comes pretty close to admitting that this turf war focuses at least partly on whose contractors–rather than whose officers–are conducting [...]

Faisal Shahzad was arrested just before midnight on May 3. On May 5, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that one of Shahzad’s friends and his father-in-law, Iftikhar Mian (elsewhere named as Mohammad Asif Mian), had been detained by Pakistani intelligence. The same report describes a meeting that took place on May 4, at which Pakistani [...]

Charlie Savage has a story explaining what the Administration means when it says it wants to “modernize” Miranda warnings. As he explains, it’s not just or even primarily Miranda warnings that are the problem (according to the Administration), but rather the requirement that a person arrested without a warrant be brought to court promptly. President [...]

Remember how I suggested one of the bright sides of Elena Kagen’s nomination to SCOTUS would make Republican heads explode when they realize Hamdan lawyer Neal Katyal may be Acting Solicitor General? Well, keep your eye out for splattered fearmonger brains, because Katyal just signed a document as the Acting Solicitor General. Though perhaps their [...]

Fresh off of the ICRC’s confirmation that DOD has a black site in Bagram, Marc Ambinder has a long piece on it, describing it as run by part of the DIA, the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, and downplaying, somewhat, what its use of Appendix M might mean. For example, he describes the Appendix [...]

You can watch along at CSPAN3 or the Committee Stream. Republican talking point of the day seems to be that Obama’s Counterterrorism approach is to have incompetent terrorists. Nadler wastes no time to pitch his State Secrets bill. Go Nadler! “Those rules [Obama's state secrets compromise] still reserve unaccountable review to the executive.” Lungren has [...]

As you may have read, Transocean (the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig) made everyone rescued from the rig sign statements laying out whether they were involved in the incident, and whether they had gotten hurt. Lawyers for the oil rig’s owner, Transocean, requested that workers who had survived the blast sign the form [...]

McClatchy provides details of the appeal the outlets for four reporters banned from Gitmo for publishing the name of Joshua Claus have made to the Pentagon. Arguing that a Pentagon order banning four journalists from covering military commissions at Guantánamo Bay was illegal and unconstitutional, The Miami Herald and two Canadian news outlets appealed on [...]