The prosecution of five alleged terrorists charged with conspiring to attack Fort Dix is plodding along. Thirteen days of testimony by paid government informant Mahmoud Omar revealed how the defendants trained for their mission: they played paintball. If you don't have any real guns to train with, paintball seems like a sound alternative. Besides, it's fun.

Omar has been a less than impressive witness, but that's what you'd expect from a criminal who was being paid $1,500 a week to act as an informant (reaping a total of $240,000), not to mention the free pass he received for his own crimes. To keep the paychecks coming, Omar had to give the government a plot, even if he had to make it up as he went along.

Omar's testimony against the five alleged conspirators veered off course when he acknowledged that two of the five didn't know anything about the plan to attack Fort Dix. [more ...]

And here I thought that the atomic bomb had definitively proven e=mc2. Turns out to be not the case, at least for mathematicians/physicists. Now, apparently, it has been proven:

It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

. . . According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons. The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent? The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

High school readability? Take that, blog analyzer.

In all the talk about Hillary at State, I have been remiss in giving President-Elect Obama real credit for performing an incredibly important task for the Democratic Party - his rebuke of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Via Digby (whose post is also a must read), Eric Boehlert wrote a great piece on the matter:

Politico (and Andrea Mitchell at NBC) say so:

President-elect Barack Obama is "on track" to name Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as his secretary of state shortly after Thanksgiving, two senior Obama aides said. Financial disclosure issues have been worked out, aides said. The officials said they expect her to accept.

I think this is right and I think it has been a done deal, subject to the Bill Clinton financial stuff, since last Thursday. Basically, when the President asks you to serve, you can not say no. I think a lot of the drama was folks on the Obama side hoping to torpedo the idea and hoping that Bill Clinton would provide the excuse. Bill Clinton knew this and made sure that it was perfectly clear that he would do whatever was necessary. On a related note, I agree with Josh Marshall on this:

As elected Democrats decide how to invest in the nation's infrastructure, they should remember this: bridges and roads and trains and buildings are all important, but so are drug and alcohol treatment programs, shelter and service providers for the abused and homeless and mentally ill, and reintegration services for newly released inmates.

The nation's infrastructure is more than a collection of the things we build and the surfaces we pave. Governing Democrats need to recognize that people are part of our infrastructure. Bridges are more easily repaired, but restoring productivity to the citizens we now discard will yield a better return on our public investment.

Democrats should also remember that the criminal justice system is part of our infrastructure. They should restore meaning to the phrase "equal justice for all" by helping states improve their woefully underfunded public defender services. [more ...]

Dr. Pepper promised to give a free soda to everyone in America if the Guns & Roses album "Chinese Democracy" (delayed since 1994) saw a 2008 release. It goes on sale Sunday and is streaming on MySpace now.

Beginning Sunday at 12:01 a.m., coupons for a free 20-ounce soda will be available for 24 hours on Dr Pepper's Web site. They'll be honored until Feb. 28.

I'm more of a Pepsi guy, so my coupon is up for grabs.

Update: "The attorney general is conscious, conversant and alert. His vital statistics are strong and he is in good spirits," according to a Justice Department spokesperson.

original post:

This is frightening:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed during a speech Thursday night and lost consciousness, a Justice Department official said. ... Mukasey was delivering a speech to the Federalist Society at a Washington hotel when "he just started shaking and he collapsed," said Associate Attorney General Kevin O'Connor. "They're very concerned."

Mukasey began slurring his words during the speech before collapsing and losing consciousness. He was taken to George Washington University Hospital.

We send our best wishes to the Attorney General.

Go Gators! Just to kick off our nightly college football discussion. Just kidding.

This is an Open Thread.

The U.S. Army has scheduled its first execution since 1961.

Ronald A. Gray has been scheduled to die by lethal injection at the Federal death camp at Terre Haute on December 12.

Only the President, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, can approve the execution of a death sentence [Article 71(a), Uniform Code of Military Justice]. On July 28, 2008, the President approved the death sentence in the case of the United States v Ronald A. Gray. The President took action following completion of a full appellate process, which upheld the conviction and sentence to death. Two petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court were denied during the appellate processing of Pvt. Gray's case.

President Bush approved the death order. Gray was sentenced to death by a court-martial panel in 1988 for "two murders, an attempted murder, and three rapes."

Gray was 22 at the time of his sentencing. According to the 1999 U.S. military appeals court opinion here, there were psychiatric and organic brain damage issues, as well as a host of other issues, all decided adversely to Gray.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon today ordered the release of five of the six habeas defendants in Boumediene v. Bush/Al Odah v. U.S (pdf). The opinion will be out later today.

In the first case of its kind, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said the government's evidence linking the five Algerians to al-Qaida was not credible as it came from a single, unidentified source. Therefore, he said the five could not be held indefinitely as enemy combatants, and should be released immediately.

"To allow enemy combatancy to rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with the court's obligation," Leon told the crowded courtroom.

[More....]

The Bush administration may claim the right to ignore the law when it engages in electronic surveillance, but it seems unwilling to share its unlimited power with the states. When the New York Police Department wants to use federal electronic surveillance laws to spy on suspected terrorists, it must convince the Justice Department to seek a warrant from the FISA court. The NYPD is complaining that the Justice Department "unfairly blocked the city’s applications for surveillance warrants, first in June and then in September."

[Attorney General] Mukasey said that the Police Department had sought authority ... to eavesdrop on “numerous communications facilities” without providing an adequate basis for their requests. Some officials who have been briefed on the cases said the requests, from the police Intelligence Division, were unusually broad, and included telephones in public places, like train or subway stations, rather than phones used by a specific individual.

Sure, go ahead and listen to every call made from a public telephone. Don't worry about the privacy rights of the New Yorkers you're supposed to be protecting. [more ...]

Susie Madrak and Anglachel point to two funny "blog analyzer" tools. One attempts to determine whether you can tell if a blog is written by a man or a woman. Here is the TalkLeft result:

We guess http://talkleft.com is written by a man (51%), however it's quite gender neutral.

The other is a readability analyzer. Here is TalkLeft's result:

This blog's reading level: High School

Not sure if that is good or bad.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only