Obama Will Speak Today on West Virginia Mine Explosion

Obama meeting with senior advisors

Obama is scheduled to speak at 1:20 pm eastern. Watch a live stream here. This will be his second public statement, since offering prayers earlier this week.

This just in. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is retiring. Obama gets to nominate someone new, which means more republican obstruction ahead.

Patrick Leahy Tackles Cheney

Dick Cheney, on a tour of defense, says he's a hero, fighting the Obama administration to save the nation. Cheney is a Tea Partier.

Obama and Sen. Patrick Leahy also discussed the next Supreme Court judge. Leahy says Obama should nominate someone soon.

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What Kind of Judges Might Obama Appoint?

I've heard Obama say that he will appoint judges who look out for the most vulnerable. Here's part of a discussion at PBS:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, Professor Cassell, you said a minute ago that there's the potential at the district and the circuit court level for there to be more activist judges appointed. What do you mean by that? What makes you believe that?
PAUL CASSELL: Well, if you look at President Obama's record when he was in the Senate, he was really on the far left of his party. He wasn't, for example, in the Gang of 14 that tried to take a centrist approach to judicial nominations. He voted against Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito.

And so while he was in the Senate, I think he was very much on the extreme edge of his party.

Hopefully, as he becomes president now and the responsibilities that weigh on the office come to bear, I think maybe he'll take more of a centrist approach. Maybe he would appoint someone like a Justice Breyer, if you want to go back a little bit, a Justice Byron White, who had a bit more of a liberal bent, but was still very much in the mainstream of American jurisprudence.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Professor Karlan, we know that the president-elect taught constitutional law for a while at the University of Chicago. How much is known, do we know right now about his judicial philosophy?

PAM KARLAN: Well, we know things that he said in the campaign debates and on the stump. And he's talked about wanting judges who've had some real-world experience. He wants judges who are empathetic.

He taught courses related to voting rights when he was at the University of Chicago, and he takes, I think, a fairly traditional moderate-to-liberal view that one of the things courts are supposed to do is to protect people who aren't able to protect themselves fully through the political system.

I don't think he's outside the mainstream in any sense. The mainstream is a very wide river, and it ranges from people who are quite liberal to people who are quite conservative, but they're all in that mainstream.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So based on that, what would you expect him to do?

PAM KARLAN: Well, I would expect to see, for example, that he'll appoint a number of judges who have done legal services work for poor people. He's likely to appoint more judges who have been criminal defense lawyers than some of the Republican presidents, who've really only appointed people who have been prosecutors. He may appoint people who've worked for some of the civil rights groups to the bench.

But I think, you know, his own background suggests that he cares tremendously about competence and intelligence and technical skill. And those things can be found in lawyers from a wide range of backgrounds and from a wide range of practice areas.
Read the whole thing.

Supreme Court Doesn't Take On Extremist's Claims

The extreme extremists on the right are shut down again. You'd think they would put their efforts into something more meaningful, something that actually betters society. They could pick an issue that matters and do some good. They're wasting the time of the Supreme Court and others. Sadly, this will not be the end of their opposition to Obama as they await Armageddon.

Chicago Trib: UPDATE: The Supreme Court has turned down an emergency appeal from a New Jersey man who says President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because he was a British subject at birth.

The court did not comment on its order Monday rejecting the call by Leo Donofrio of East Brunswick, N.J., to intervene in the presidential election. Donofrio says that since Obama had dual nationality at birth -- his mother was American and his Kenyan father at the time was a British subject -- he cannot possibly be a "natural born citizen," one of the requirements the Constitution lists for eligibility to be president.

NYT gives a historical rundown and sums it up pretty well:

This is the kind of doubt-bending thing that lives independently online, but from the looks of today’s decision by the highest court in the land, the accusation isn’t gaining much ground in the realm of reality.

From MSNBC:

What Obama Will Do

Here's a good diary at DailyKos:

What WILL Barack Obama actually do?

He’ll appoint Supreme Court judges from the “We ♥ the Constitution” wing of the law.

He’ll get us out of Iraq some number close to 36500 days sooner than crotchety guy.

He won’t start trying to kill Iranians… unprovoked.

He will restore some order to the tax system.

Oh, and... this.

Anything beyond that… is pretty much just double stuff on the Oreo™.

Don’t think that’s enough?

In other words, get off the ideologies. He can't be everything to everyone. But he'll be miles, centuries, better than McCain.