Our guest columnist this morning is Walter Dellinger, writing in 1994 in his capacity as assistant attorney general of the United States and head of the Office of Legal Counsel. We’ve taken the liberty of highlighting passages for speed-skimmers.

Speaking about the DOMA appeal Tuesday, DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said “The Department of Justice has a long-standing practice of defending federal statutes when they are challenged in court, including by appealing adverse decisions of lower courts.”

Presidential Authority to Decline to Execute Unconstitutional Statutes

I have reflected further on the difficult questions surrounding a President’s decision to decline to execute statutory provisions that the President believes are unconstitutional, and I have a few thoughts to share with you. Let me start with a general proposition that I believe to be uncontroversial: there are circumstances in which the President may appropriately decline to enforce a statute that he views as unconstitutional.

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We’ve largely been ignoring the latest episode of Big Shitpile, mainly because, well, it doesn’t involve Bozos or Nazis.

Turns out we were wrong.

If, like us, you’re just tuning in to Dancing With The Banks, foreclosures have largely been put on hold nationwide because of red tape. And by “red tape”, we mean that nobody can prove they own the foreclosed mortgages.

This isn’t just a matter of robo-notaries rushing through the paperwork. It’s a matter of the paperwork itself missing a few papers. Like, oh, deeds:

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Most years we’re able to happily ignore Time’s esteemed Washington correspondent, but his Monday column was so thoroughly perplexing, we decided to try out Google’s new beta Halperin-English translator.

Barack Obama is being politically crushed in a vise. From above, by elite opinion about his competence. From below, by mass anger and anxiety over unemployment.

Translation: Fuck Politico. I’m winning this morning.

With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters.

Translation: I’m not going to bother citing sources.

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Teabagger		Costume
	Rich Iott	Col. Klink
	Christine O’Donnell	Witch Hazel

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSTLDel-G9k

We’re slowly coming to the upsetting realization that Other Things Happened during our Lost Week — things we would have been happy to note, had we not been caught up in noting things that surely qualify us for a Local Peabody.

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Damn, now we’re obsessed again.

We briefly noted yesterday afternoon a photo of three young Latino men branded as ILLEGAL ALIENS in ads by Sharron Angle and David Vitter. The way these things work, we figured it was a stock photo — but looking for it quickly then, and devoting more time to it Wednesday night, we couldn’t turn up the source.

So who are they? Are they models who signed off on a generic contract, and have yet to discover where their faces have turned up? Are they actual illegal immigrants, perhaps photographed for an L.A. Times feature? What’s their story?

Jon Chait at TNR had the same question yesterday afternoon:

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Ladies and gentlemen, Keith Olbermann presents BozoGate, starring Angry Bob as Bozo, Michael Musto as Random Witch, and about a minute in, A Very Special Cameo by Stinque, playing the part of Bozo Truthers in the crowd scene.

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