Attorney General Eric Holder's National Security Speech

With gun tzar Joe Biden expected to propose his "gun recommendations" to Obama by next Tuesday, a proposal which will certainly involve some additional measure of gun control, the last thing the nation needed was more gas being poured into the fire today. Yet that is precisely what it got following news that two people had been shot, one of which reportedly a student, at Taft Union High School in the San Joaquin Valley in California earlier.

While it is widely assumed that the too-big-to-fail banks in the US (and elsewhere) are beyond the criminal justice system - based on simple empirical fact - when the Attorney General of the United States openly admits to the fact that he is "concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them," since, "it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy," one has to stare open-mouthed at the state of our union.

Hedges v. Obama, the lawsuit challenging the indefinite detention provision of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), continued Wednesday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Today at 1pm the real circus starts. From the House Committee on the Judiciary: "On Wednesday, May 15 at 1:00 p.m., Attorney General Eric Holder will testify before the House Judiciary Committee for an oversight hearing on the U.S.

By Tabassum Zakaria and Susan Cornwell WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was likely to face a storm of questions on Tuesday over the Justice Department's controversial decision to seize telephone records of the Associated Press, a move denounced by critics as a gross intrusion into freedom of the press. The episode has created an uproar in Washington and led to questions over how the Obama administration is balancing the need for national security with privacy rights. Holder, a frequent target of conservatives, was scheduled to appear at 1 p.m. ...

On Wednesday the courts will hear arguments regarding the government's ability to indefinitely detain anyone under the laws of war. A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will use the arguments to rule on an appeal to the permanent block placed on the indefinite detention clause of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).