Obama's judicial nominees

As James Franco said, "It's what the people want."On Saturday Jodie Evans, a cofounder of CodePink: Women for Peace, went to David Barron’s house and gave him this letter. She asked if he really believed it was ok to order the death of a US citizen without due process. He slammed the door on her. Does that mean he does believe it so didn’t want to answer her question? Jodie didn't figure in Tim Phelps' L.A.

When's the last time we asked you to sign a petition? Right… never. But our friends at Daily Kos are offering the kind of strategic initiative that appeals to us. They want progressives to express their frustration with President Obama's tendency to fill the judiciary with corporate lawyers. It's been making a lot of us sick? Not you? Did you know that just over 70% of President Obama's judicial nominees have been corporate lawyers?

This toddler baboon is presumably the older of the two half-brothers (same father, different mothers) now in residence at Brooklyn's Prospect Park Zoo.

2016 GOP ticket?It's an unfortunate given, but there are people, mostly far right extremists divorced from both the mainstream and from reality, who pay attention to what the overly ambitious junior senator from Texas has to say.

A few months ago, Senate Republicans agreed to start behaving and stop the ritual obstruction of all the president's judicial nominations. Basically, a handful of Republicans agreed they would help Democrats break the filibusters of routine nominees and only filibuster obviously really, really bad ones. A bunch of nominees got passed and then… the Republicans went back on the agreement.