Biracial black/Bangladeshi-American Michigan state Sen. Hansen Clarke, who defeated incumbent Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick in yesterday's Democratic Party primary in Michigan's 13th Congressional District, seems ripe for some right-wing conspiracy theorizing. If you think Barack Obama or Keith Ellison got the conspiracy mills humming, check out Clarke's family biography:

NRO has tried hard to connect Imam Faisal Rauf, the man behind the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero, to terrorism, but this statement in their editorial today is correction-worthy:

Nor is Rauf exactly full-throated in his rejection of terrorism, offering only this: “The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” While he cannot quite bring himself to blame the terrorists for being terrorists, he finds it easy to blame the United States for being a victim of terrorism: “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”

Look, I know I've said this before, but Gov. David Paterson is leaving an incomparable progressive legacy on corrections issues in New York. The budget passed by the state Legislature yesterday would end the practice of prison-based gerrymandering, by which conservative upstate politicians inflate their power by counting the largely black prison population as constituents despite the fact that inmates, by definition, reside in the district involuntarily.

The decision in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger marriage-equality case is expected to come down today. This LA Times editorial wrap-up published after the closing arguments in June does a great job of explaining just how badly the case went for opponents of marriage equality:

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center on Constitutional rights have filed a lawsuit against Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Asset Control over their having blocked the ACLU's attempt to challenge the government's authority to engage in the targeted killing of American citizens suspected of terrorism. The lawsuit is being brought on behalf of Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki, the extremist cleric who has been linked to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and several terror plots targeting the United States.