It should be an interesting news day today if the United States Supreme Court renders all decisions expected:

WASHINGTON — The nine Supreme Court justices will enter through crimson velvet drapes this morning and take their seats at a mahogany bench to announce decisions in some of the most closely watched cases of their annual term.

Twenty-six cases await resolution, including disputes over Guantanamo detainees, Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban and damages arising from the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

The ritual today and on select days throughout this month — the last of the session — is long-standing. In June, anticipation in the courtroom is palpable. Rulings will be blared across the Internet, read on the radio and headlined in newspapers.

But the first word of how the court decides a case happens here.

“One sometimes gets a glimmer of emotion from the justices” when they read opinions, says Patricia Millett, a former assistant U.S. solicitor general now in private practice. “The justices’ words, their inflection, their body language and expressions … can have an impact that is lost on the cold page.”

The author of the opinion traditionally details the facts of the case and how the majority ruled. At these moments, the courtroom, already a place of strict decorum and hushed voices, is especially still.

Sometimes a dissenting justice reads portions of an opinion from the bench, rather than let the written dissent speak for itself. That happens when a justice is particularly riled by the majority’s decision. That is more apt to occur in June.

One of the most reliable sites I have visited in the past for an overview of the courts decisions is The Volokh Consipiracy. Links are available at the site to the first of today’s decisions.

Via The Anchoress is an excellent post based on a Washington Post article:

What a long, strange trip it’s been, and here, some years later, we finally get someone in the press to tell it straight: Bush did not lie.

After all, it was not Bush, but Rockefeller, who said in October 2002: “There has been some debate over how ‘imminent’ a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. . . . To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? I do not think we can.”

One reads this and thinks…it’s really too bad that when this story of Dems on the Intel Committee plotting against Bush broke in 2003, the mainstream press ignored it, taking umbrage that anyone would leak a memo (!) while ignoring its content. Why, suddenly, is the WaPo deciding, after 5 years of supporting and promoting the “Bush lied” meme, to clarify?

Excellent post, Anchoress! And you’re right; it’s probably too late to rehabilitate this president at least in the present and soon future, but in the end I believe history will exonerate him.