Yesterday, U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter filed the maximum 2000 petition signatures required to seek Michigan’s 11th Congressional District seat. Rep. McCotter spent filing day the same way he spends every day – working hard for the people of Michigan. While managing the GOP’s time under the House’s Committee of the Whole, his resolution honoring the late Ernie Harwell was sent to the full House.

There are a few items of interest in the news today that we’d suggest taking a look at.

First up, former UN Ambassador John Bolton takes a look at “universal jurisdiction” and the way it is being used/abused by human rights activists to bring charges against legitimate actions by freely elected governments.

It is no accident that arrest warrants never seem to be issued for the likes of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, since the real targets of universal jurisdiction these days are Western nations. Ultimately, what it targets is the very ideas of sovereign accountability and political independence. These goals largely motivated the 1998 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court, itself a step toward constraining states’ abilities to police their own affairs, and an institution that the Obama administration yearns to join.

Transferring accountability for decisions from democratic politics to the criminal justice system understandably intimidates policy makers from making perfectly justifiable choices, such as defending against terrorist threats. Moreover, “command responsibility” has been transmogrified from liability for failing to stop known criminal activity, to liability when officials “should have known” their subordinates were committing crimes.

Her name was Neda. In Farsi, it means “the voice.” True to her name, she loved music; sought freedom; and she’s dead – shot down in the streets by the Iranian regime’s state sanctioned murderers. She must not have died in vain.

You can study this until the scream. No one can study it afterward. This is a second and longer version of what I posted Saturday evening 20, this version recorded from an additional phone: both videos are now all over Europe and Asia. The Twelvers are doomed by the slaughter of Neda Salehi Agha-Soltan, 27. We know that doomed men take a long time to fall and that the next few weeks are likely to look like an abyss. The rallying message “Neda” is written quickly on the streets. I have seen it in Twitters.