Obama administration lawyers have asked the US Supreme Court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by eight states including California, New York City and three land trusts six years ago, seeking tougher restrictions on carbon dioxide releases by utilities than those set by the federal government, according to the San Francisco Chronicle's Bob Egelko. Justice Department lawyers argue that federal primacy, in the form of recent EPA regulations, give the federal agency and Congress the sole power to regulate greenhouse gases.

An old-fashioned case of housing discrimination based on race is emerging in Chicago.

[caption id="attachment_10179" align="alignleft" width="112" caption="no caption required"][/caption] The Chicago Tribune rounds up what's left of its newsroom (ten reporters are cited as writers or contributors) to cover a jury convicting former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on one count of lying to the FBI. So Blagojevich was found not guilty of 23 other counts charged by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. These include the headline extortion, racketeering and conspiracy charges, which asserted that Blagojevich wanted to auction off the vacant Illinois U.S. Senate seat and that the former governor ran the state as if it were a crime syndicate.

The Obama administration has deployed the 'BP Squad' of federal investigators to the Gulf to probe whether there was any wrongdoing on the part of government regulators or private companies related to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. As Peter Henning points out in The New York Times, the criminal probe focuses mostly on

Here is encouraging news on the Chicago crime-fighting front. The Chicago Tribune's Annie Sweeney reports on the early success of a program in which the Chicago Police Department calls on the expertise of the Cook County Sheriff's Department and FBI to track down felons and illegal guns. Officers arrested "dozens" of felons over the weekend and confiscated a .50 caliber pistol, while operating in three different Chicago neighborhoods. Perhaps more remarkable -- though correlation may not equal causation here -- was that there were no shootings or homicides in those neighborhoods over the weekend.

Recovery, or at least stabilization, may be the watch words on Wall Street and in private industry, but for municipalities in California, it's still very much the darkest hour.  As Ryan Gabrielson of CaliforniaWatch reports that seven different L.A. County municipalities have approached the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department about having the sheriffs take over local policing duties. That's about double what's considered normal in a tough economic period.

A critical part of the Chicago gun control debate is why so many weapons were already in the city before handguns became legal to carry this month. The Chicago Tribune's Becky Schlikerman reports one successful instance of the city teaming up with the FBI to seize 60 unregistered and illegal guns from 25 city residents. The FBI and Chicago Police Department arrested suspects who were going to use guns for an armed robbery to get cocaine -- but the FBI says the sting was about guns, not drugs. The Supreme Court effectively ended Chicago's 28 year-old gun ban last month.

Hoping to generate badly needed tax funds, the City of Oakland has approved, in concept, four industrial-sized indoor marijuana gardens capable of filling rolling papers and bongs all over the Bay Area. It also appears geared toward drawing a federal backlash. According to John Hoeffel in the Los Angeles Times, officials hope to grab a bigger share of the $28 million dollars changing hands annually at Oakland's pot clubs, which distribute the 'medicine' to qualified 'patients.'

A federal judge has significantly changed how the the Illinois corrections system operates: inmates can now challenge orders sending them to the maximum security Tamms Correctional Center.

[caption id="attachment_9585" align="alignleft" width="99" caption="Ron Huberman"][/caption] This year the Chicago Public Schools stopped the use of race in its admissions policy for magnet and prep schools and instead employed a complex mix of socioeconomic factors. CPS schools chief Ron Huberman persuaded the city's school board that socioeconomic status was an effective proxy for race -- and so far Huberman appears correct. The Chicago Sun-Times Maudlyne Inhejirika reports that minority students fill 77 percent of magnet and college prep school spots, the same ratio as when the race-based admissions policy was in place.