After news came out that Holder's DOJ seized two months of telephone records of AP reporters it sent a shock wave through the Beltway media and mostly left-wing bloggers. The fact that it's happening under a Democratic president is even worse, because the left has always stood for freedom of the press. Even though President Obama says he wasn't involved with this investigation and is now offering up a new push to pass federal shield laws, it's still a chilling example of judicial overreach with respects to said freedom of the press. I'd be just as furious over this if Dick Cheney had favorite henchman David Addington pull the trigger.

Now we get the news today that Fox News reporter James Rosen has been tracked by the DOJ since 2010.

Yahoo News:

The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails, the Washington Post reported on Monday. In a chilling move sure to rile defenders of civil liberties, an FBI agent also accused Rosen of breaking anti-espionage laws with behavior that—as described in the agent's own affidavit—falls well inside the bounds of traditional news reporting. (Disclosure: This reporter counts Rosen among his friends.)

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You have to hand it to those Fox Newsies for partisan gumption. They didn’t let any lack of actual evidence of Obama administration wrongdoing in the Gen. David Petraeus sex scandal stop them from theorizing and suggesting that there was. For extra GOP points, Steve Doocy dragged in Eric Holder, one of Fox’s favorite Obama-administration scapegoats, and said that his theoretical involvement in the theoretical cover up “could be” why Eric Holder is staying on as Attorney General for President Obama’s second term.

As Karoli pointed out earlier, there’s a lot of Republican partisanship afoot in the Petraeus scandal:

David Petraeus is in disgrace because he had a midlife crisis or something and got hot and heavy with a woman prone to jealous, impulsive acts (sending harassing emails to her suspected rival, Jill Kelley). Meanwhile, some FBI agent with the hots for Jill Kelley and a "worldview" that included weird and unprovable conspiracy theories about political coverups to protect President Obama got impatient and contacted his teaBircher Congressional buddies.

The Curvy Couch Crew ignored those facts this morning in order to raise questions about the Obama administration. Gretchen Carlson said, “Something’s not being told about that whole side of the story.” Meaning why the FBI was investigating. And yet she left out the part about how that FBI agent with the hots for Kelley and an antagonism toward President Obama went to Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor with his suspicions and how Cantor called the FBI director on October 31 to push the story relay his concerns in the final week of a hotly-contested presidential election.

“How do we know there wasn’t a national security breach? They’re still going through (Petraeus’ paramour’s) files?” Laura Ingraham squawked accusingly. Of course, there’s nothing to suggest at this point that there was one. But she moved on to smear Holder:

Eric Holder, we’re supposed to believe, didn’t talk to one of his closest friends. One of his closest friends is Barack Obama. He’s been at the center of voter ID cases, immigration cases against Arizona, Fast and Furious, the refusal to prosecute the New Black Panther Party. I mean, Eric Holder is a fulcrum of a lot of what’s going on over the last four years. He’s very close to the president. And I do not believe, after all the years I’ve been here, that Eric Holder would have kept information from the president about a CIA director being a part of a federal investigation. And if he did, I think that’s incompetence or malfeasance.

If you believe the FBI – and I tend to believe them more than the heated hypotheses of Fox News partisans – there was nothing to tell the president. From ABC News:

The FBI withheld its findings about Gen. David Petreaus' affair from the White House and congressional leaders because the agency considered them the result of a criminal investigation that never reached the threshold of an intelligence probe, law enforcement sources said today.

The sources said agents followed department guidelines that generally bar sharing information about developing criminal investigations. The FBI is also aware of its history under former director J. Edgar Hoover of playing politics and digging into the lives of public figures. As one official said, the rules are designed to protect people (both private and elected officials) when negative information about them arises in the course of a criminal investigation that is not a crime.

…Investigators uncovered no compromising of classified information or criminal activity, sources familiar with the probe said, adding that all that was found was a lot of "human drama."

In other words, this looks a lot like a tempest in a Tea Party pot. On October 31, the day that Rep. Cantor called the FBI, President Obama had his hands full with Super Storm Sandy and the end of his presidential campaign. I don’t know about you but I wouldn't bother my boss with “human drama” details, either, if he were in the middle of a cataclysmic natural disaster and at the tail end of a national re-election campaign.

But Doocy, it seems, could not pass up an opportunity – no matter how wildly speculative – to take a smearing swipe at Holder and Obama. “Laura, that could be one of the reasons why Barack Obama’s asking him to stay on for another second term.”

Not one of the other three Fox Newsies on the set objected to such baseless conjecture.

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Hilary Rosen continues to be a great Democratic representative, turning the Fast and Furious conversation back to where it belongs: Why the Republicans are really targeting Eric Holder. On This Week with Jake Tapper:

WILL: Well, this is being played out in a context of executive aggrandizement, as Republicans see it. First of all, the president rewrites immigration law by executive fiat. Then, while it's saying we must shield the secrets here regarding Fast and Furious deliberations, there's a torrent of leaks on the most sensitive national security matters appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Finally, Mr. Holder himself has made himself obnoxious to Republicans by saying, unlike the Supreme Court, that photo I.D. laws constitute voter suppression, that is, if you have to present when you vote a photo I.D., the way you have to present a photo I.D. to get into Justice -- Attorney General Holder's Justice Department.

I just have to say here: Do you have any idea how frequently this happens, that a president decides where to place enforcement efforts? Ronald Reagan did not want to deal with the PR problems of repealing programs - he simply cut the budgets to make sure they were de facto repealed.. Under George W. Bush, the FDA simply stopped doing random inspections of drug manufacturing facilities, instead moving to a system of self-reporting. (Uh huh.) George Will knows this. He's just a hack who parrots the line of the day. He must hold the world's record for coasting on a Pulitzer Prize, because he hasn't done an honest day's work since.

ROSEN: Now we're getting to the real issue. This is why Republicans don't like Eric Holder, because he has challenged voter I.D. laws under the civil rights statutes as voter suppression rules that they are, because he has challenged the Arizona, you know, discriminatory immigration law, because he has refused to implement the discriminatory anti-marriage law.

So, you know, Eric Holder has shown a lot of backbone in the Justice Department, and the Republicans hate it. So what do they do? They call for his resignation; they throw him with document requests that are impossible to respond to; they just throw more and more stuff at him to distract him from doing the things that actually the president and the people hired him to do.

WILL: Let the record show that the Supreme Court, with Justice John Paul Stevens, liberal justice writing it, said that there's no constitutional flaw in photo I.D. voter laws.

Yes, Stevens did say that. In the same decision, Antonin Scalia wrote in his concurring opinion:

"It is for state legislatures to weigh the costs and benefits of possible changes to their election codes, and their judgment must prevail unless it imposes a severe and unjustified overall burden upon the right to vote, or is intended to disadvantage a particular class."

ROSEN: You know, they're going to have to review that in the courts. Thirteen states, George, have instituted new statutes since the Republicans took over those state legislatures in 2010, purely for the purpose of limiting voting.

Nancy Pelosi said at her press conference yesterday that the real reason Republicans are going after Eric Holder isn't Fast and Furious, but because he is enforcing laws against voter suppression. And you know, she's got a good point!

“I’m telling you, this is connected,” Pelosi said. “It is no accident. It is a decision and it is as clear as can be. It’s not only to monopolize his time, it’s to undermine his name. To undermine his name, undermine his name, as he goes forward to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

In case you haven’t followed Fast and Furious, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, is leading that investigation, which found that U.S. agents allowed guns into the hands of Mexican drug lords for the purpose of better tracking them. The House plans a vote next week to hold Holder in contempt of Congress after President Obama claimed executive privilege on the documents.

Pelosi’s office issued the following elaboration, referring to Bush administration firings of seven U.S. attorneys in 2006:

“The Miers-Bolton/US Attorneys matter involved White House staff and their efforts to subvert justice by firing conservative, Republican US Attorneys for not pursuing bogus voting fraud cases. This is directly related to current Republican efforts to impede AG Holder from pursuing efforts to prohibit Republican efforts to subvert voting rights. This shows an ongoing effort by Republicans to deprive people of the right to vote dating back at least to 2007.

“–On March 14, 2007, Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett explained that one reason for the firing of the U.S. Attorneys in New Mexico, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania was ‘lax voter-fraud investigations.’

“–On April 13, 2007, DOJ turned over more documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee that were subsequently revealed to include the name of the U.S. Attorney for eastern Wisconsin who had brought at least a dozen cases against Republican contributors or individuals with party ties and who declined to pursue allegations of Democratic voter fraud.”

Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday night appointed two top prosecutors to lead a probe into recent leaks about classified national-security operations.

Ronald Machen, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and Rod Rosenstein, U.S. attorney for Maryland, will head the probe, Mr. Holder said Friday.

"I have every confidence in their abilities to doggedly follow the facts and the evidence in the pursuit of justice wherever it leads," Mr. Holder said.

He added, "The unauthorized disclosure of classified information can compromise the security of this country and all Americans, and it will not be tolerated."

Mr. Rosenstein was appointed by former president George W. Bush and asked to stay on by President Barack Obama. Mr. Machen is an Obama appointee.

The naming of the prosecutors follows publication a week ago of details about a U.S. cybersabotage program, including the use of a computer worm called Stuxnet, which Iran has acknowledged it found in its computers. The New York Times on June 1 published an account of the U.S. cyberattack operation in an excerpt from a forthcoming book by one of its reporters, David Sanger. He said he had been working on the book for a year. Other news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, followed up with details about the program.

Earlier this week, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) said the leaks might have been "an attempt to further the president's political ambitions for the sake of his re-election at the expense of our national security." Some Democratic lawmakers also criticized the leaks but said they didn't believe they were politically motivated.

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I'm actually kind of relieved to hear this denial. The idea that a political staffer was part of national security meetings was repugnant to me, just as it was when Karl Rove was part of every decision in the Bush White House:

Senior Obama political aide David Axelrod said little today about a past fight with Attorney General Eric Holder, but flatly denied reports that he attended high-level national security meetings.

"I know there were weekly meetings dealing with terrorist threats and planning around it, but I did not attend those meetings," Axelrod said on CBS' Face the Nation.

As for a new book's report of a 2009 confrontation with Holder over the attorney general's concerns about political interference in legal matters, Axelrod said:

"First of all, let me say, Eric Holder is a great friend of mine. We actually went to the same high school. So we may have gone chest to chest back in the day. But we have a strong relationship. And I'm not going to get into the details of that, other than to say I respect him."

Axelrod, a former administration aide who now works with Obama's re-election campaign, also told CBS: "I obviously never tried to interfere in anything that he (Holder) did, never talked to him about a governmental matter or a Justice Department matter in all of the years I was in the White House."

The Huffington Post's Dan Froomkin has a pointed piece about the Obama administration's inaction on potential speculation in the energy market. Talk is cheap - and it's costing us quite a bit at the gas pump. I get the distinct impression that the president thinks enforcing any regulations at all, for anybody, will stall the recovery and cost him his reelection:

The topic of gas prices came up at Obama's press conference on Tuesday after a Fox News reporter asked if the president was on purpose driving up gas prices to wean Americans off fossil fuels. "Just from a political perspective, do you think the president of the United States going into reelection wants gas prices to go up higher?" he asked, with a laugh. "Is there anybody here who thinks that makes a lot of sense?"

Obama said there is "no silver bullet" to lowering high gas prices. Rather, he said, he endorsed an "all of the above strategy," that includes increased domestic production, energy conservation and the development of renewable energy.

His plans also involve "making sure that my attorney general is paying attention to potential speculation in the oil markets," Obama said. To that end, he said, "I've asked him to reconstitute a task force that’s examining that."

But it wasn't an investigative task force. Its job was to "monitor oil and gas markets" for potential violations of criminal or civil law. Even that might have helped -- but, as one expert from Public Citizen points out, the task force wasn't doing anything.

At the time Holder promised, "if illegal conduct is responsible for increasing gas prices, state and federal authorities should take swift action.” Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program for consumer group Public Citizen, said the Obama administration "isn't reconstituting this task force because this task force wasn't even meeting in the first place."

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Here's the problem with sporadic adherence to the rule of a law and an opaque extra-judicial "legal" system: We just don't know who or what to believe. (That, and the executions.) The timing on this Iran "terror" plot is a little too convenient, isn't it? I guess we should be grateful the terrorists -- excuse me, alleged terrorists - weren't simply sent to Gitmo. And we'll just pretend that Israel hasn't been trying to push us into an attack on Iran. Amy Davidson in the New Yorker:

It’s hard to know, at this stage, how solid the case against two men charged with trying to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States is. But it does have one thing to recommend it: an indictment. One of the men charged, Manssor Arbabsiar, an American citizen, was arrested at J.F.K. on September 29th. (The other, Gholam Shakuri, an Iranian, is at large, but, according to Eric Holder, the Attorney General, is not believed to be in the United States.) Arbabsiar will be put on trial in a court in lower Manhattan, just as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be “Christmas Bomber,” went on trial today in a court in Detroit. Neither was sent to Guantánamo, or put before a military tribunal, or preëmptively assassinated. That sounds like a simple thing, and it should be, and can be, even when, as in this new case, the alleged crime is complex. There is something discouraging about the relief one feels at a rudimentary adherence to the rule of law.

At least six countries are part of the story: allegedly, an American who also had an Iranian passport travelled to Mexico to meet with a member of a drug cartel (who turned out to be a confidential D.E.A. informant) to recruit a hitman to kill a Saudi Arabian and maybe also attack the Israeli embassy in Argentina. (A map with pins in it would help here.) And its scale was also potentially great: according to a wiretap recording cited in the indictment, which said, “They want that guy [the Ambassador] done [killed], if the hundred go with him, f*ck ’em.” Still: that is nothing our justice system—our real one—can’t handle, when we let it. The evidence against Arbabsiar, according to the indictment, includes “a series of Mirandized interviews” in which he “confessed to his participation in the plot” and also gave information about the involvement of others.

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Well, that's what you would call some nifty police work:

Authorities arrested a U.S. citizen in connection with the failed bombing attempt in New York's Times Square as he tried to leave the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday.

Faisal Shahzad was arrested at 11:45 p.m. Monday night by Customs and Border Protection agents as he attempted to board an Emirates airlines flight to Dubai at New York's JFK airport, Holder and other officials said.

"It is clear that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans," Holder said.

The next time you hear some right-winger (most notably Dick Cheney) sneer at the Obama administration's "law enforcement approach to terrorism," remember this.

There is a prison in Texas where 15.7% of the inmates were raped in the preceding year alone. Think about that for a second. One in six inmates were raped either by other inmates or those charged with guarding them -- which in that prison alone means there were 470 victims of sexual violence in a 12-month period. In any country that likes to think of itself as a beacon of freedom, this is outrageous and must be stopped.

While the percentage is not quite as significant at other prisons around the country, it is still disgracefully high, especially for those who are violated in the most dehumanizing way possible. This includes over 100,000 men, women and yes -- CHILDREN -- a fact that should be every bit as shocking, embarrassing and downright sickening as those photos from Abu Ghraib.

Well, now seems like the perfect time to do something about this. It is currently Sexual Assault Awareness month, and we are approaching the end of a deadline (June 2010) for the Attorney General to act on recommendations mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), passed in 2003. You want bipartisanship in Washington? I give you a bill that was unanimously passed, co-sponsored by Sens. Teddy Kennedy and Jeff Sessions, and signed into law by George W. Bush. Its standards were created by a bipartisan federal commission upon consultation with corrections officials, criminal justice experts, advocates and prison-rape survivors.

So what can you do to make sure the Obama Administration enacts these common-sense solutions, such as weeding out known predators, ensuring the especially vulnerable receive additional monitoring and increasing the overall transparency of our corrections system by providing independent audits of our prisons? You can quite literally make your voice heard.

How? By adding your public comment to the rising tide of those who realize that whether your issue is improving public health, creating a more just and moral society or saving taxpayer money (think litigation), ensuring Attorney General Holder codifies the federal regulations mandated by the PREA, forthwith, should be a top priority.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that "In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." In the era of interactive media, you needn't be part of the elite to make your voice heard. Every one of us has a weapon in our very own progressive arsenal, our ability to raise our voices quite publicly. So speak up, and become a part of a campaign to further ensure we live in the America we want and deserve.

**I am proud to be a media consultant for Just Detention International