Although supposedly in a rush to leave on vacation, Rove e-mailed Stephen J. Hadley, then Bush's deputy national security adviser (and now national security adviser). According to the Associated Press, Rove's e-mail said he "didn't take the bait" when Cooper suggested that Wilson's criticisms had hurt the administration.

While it's not entirely clear what Rove meant in the e-mail, the significance is that Rove immediately reported to Hadley, an official who was in a position to know classified details about Plame's job. In other words, the e-mail is evidence that the assault on Wilson was being coordinated at senior White House levels.

Flaherty and other reparations opponents also create discrete groups in their historical narratives: North and South, slaveholders and those who had nothing to do with the institution at worst (and, at best, fought the system). The NLPC's characterization is typical: "Prior to and during the Civil War, the great majority of the population was located in the Northern states where slavery was outlawed… In fact, many of those northerners were abolitionists and detested the institution of slavery."

This statement is flawed on many counts. As current lawsuits and corporate disclosures demonstrate, Americans living in the North -- businesspeople; financiers; those who owned property in the South by birth, marriage, or inheritance -- often supported and profited from slavery. Various prominent proslavery writers were Northerners. Mob violence was directed against abolitionists and free African Americans in Northern cities. The contention that the North was somehow an abolitionist stronghold may be comforting, but it is untrue. Reparations opponents attempt to minimize slavery's impact on the nation’s past and present, yet as the late African-American historian Nathan Irvin Huggins argued, we must acknowledge that there can be no accurate American history unless we "begin to comprehend that slavery and freedom, white and black, are joined at the hip."

Let's imagine for a moment that a member of the Bush Administration was pardoned by the president after being indicted for say, leaking a CIA undercover agent's name to the public. And let us also say for the purposes of this question that the Executive Clemency order was issued after the indictment was proffered but before the case was prosecuted. The very timing of this pardon would virtually steal the golden fleece of justice from American citizens before our Justice system could work its magic.

So then let's further imagine that the federal prosecutor had no choice but to challenge the legality of the executive branch's pre-empting the full and fair prosecution of the law.

Now, finally, here's the question to be posed to Judge Roberts...- "If the President issued this imaginary pardon BEFORE the conviction, and the resolution of this imaginary case came all the way down through the system to end up on your docket, how would you, as a Justice of the Supreme Court, likely rule?

It feels like the left has already thrown in the towel on fighting Judge John Robert's nomination. Everyone is so busy conceding that it could have been much worse, we've already forgotten the idea that it could have been much better.

Roberts' nomination reminds us why more of us need to question the alleged virtue of a having a "strict constructionist" on the Supreme Court.

What would America look like if the "strict constructionists" had their way? Let's look at the founder's intent and see what a "strict constructionist" America actually looks like.

In 1787, women and men who didn't own land couldn't vote. African-Americans had no rights. The Constitution doesn't address any sort of environmental rights.

In 1886, the "strict constructionists" on the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson declared that "separate but equal" didn't violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

That was the wrong decision then and it remained the wrong decision until it was finally overturned by Brown v. The Board of Education in 1954 by "activist judges".

Lloyd e-mails to note Ruth Conniff's "Time for Tough Questions:"

Roberts's record also raises serious questions about whether he would protect the interests of individual American citizens from overwhelming corporate and government power. His opinion in Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, upholding the decision that the arrest, search, handcuffing and detention of a twelve-year-old girl for eating a single French fry in a Washington Metro station did not violate her Fourth or Fifth Amendment rights is troubling. So is his opinion in Acree v. Iraq, that Iraqi citizens who had been tortured and falsely imprisoned could not pursue a claim against the Bush Administration-supported Iraqi government. His dissenting opinion in Rancho Viejo v. Norton appears to show contempt for the environmental and species-protection function of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

These and other issues deserve a thorough probing by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Let the tough questions begin.

And from yesterday: