Via Think Progress:

Democrats were planning to hold a press conference today featuring three college students whose parents came to the United States illegally in order to promote the DREAM Act. But the event was postponed after anti-immigrant Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) called on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to arrest the three students:

“I call on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to detain any illegal aliens at this press conference,” said Tancredo, who claims to have alerted federal authorities about the well publicized press confrence. “Just because these illegal aliens are being used for political gain doesn’t mean they get immunity from the law. If we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where American laws are made, where can we enforce them?”

The DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act would allow undocumented students to become permanent citizens after several years provided they complete two years of college, trade school or military service. Details of the bill are here (pdf). The requirements are below:

The House of Representatives passed a bill today restricting the sale of ammonium nitrate.

H.R. 1680, the “Secure Handling of Ammonium Nitrate Act of 2007”. The bill, sponsored by Congressman Thompson, creates a nationwide standard for regulating the sale of ammonium nitrate based fertilizers nationwide that could be used in terrorist acts, without unduly burdening the agricultural sector’s access to ammonium nitrate fertilizer for farming and other legitimate agricultural purposes.

I'm not impressed. It's another feel good bill. Ammonium nitrate is not a bomb. It's fertilizer. And do we really need another database?

The bill creates a national registry to monitor the purchase and sale of ammonium nitrate and matches the names of applying farmers against the terrorist screening database.

House chair Bernie Thompson says:

“As shown in Oklahoma City and incidents around the world, the threat from Ammonium Nitrate is real, and could be not ignored any longer. This is a common sense solution that strikes the right balance between ensuring access to ammonium nitrate for farmers and making it difficult for terrorists to attain.”

Couldn't be ignored any longer? OKC was in 1995, 12 1/2 years ago. I'm not aware of any repeats.

Here's a ten second music clip I found on an old album to play as you consider the legislation. Can any of you recognize the source?

Good for Obama:

Senator Obama has serious concerns about many provisions in this bill, especially the provision on giving retroactive immunity to the telephone companies. He is hopeful that this bill can be improved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But if the bill comes to the Senate floor in its current form, he would support a filibuster of it.

Obama steps up. Senator Clinton?

And cheers to them for that:

In a move that will up the pressure on Hillary and Barack Obama to stand firm against the Senate telecom immunity FISA bill, MoveOn and a dozen top progressive blogs will launch an all-out campaign tomorrow to pressure the two Senators into publicly declaring their support for Chris Dodd's threat to place a hold on and filibuster the bill, Election Central has learned. . . . If Hillary and Obama don't comply, Green added, "it would send an unfortunate signal to Democratic voters about whether they're willing to stand up to George Bush. The idea is to get Democrats to stand on principle and exercise the powers of their office to stop Bush from covering up how far he went in illegally spying on the private emails and phone calls of innocent Americans."

Well done Move On.

New York's highest appellate court today upheld a lower court's tossing of the death penalty for John Taylor, the killer of five at a Wendy's restaurant in 2000.

The 4-3 ruling [pdf] by the state’s highest court reinforces its ruling in 2004 that a central provision of the state’s capital punishment law violates the state constitution. It would take action by the Legislature to bring back the death penalty, but Assembly Democrats have shown little inclination to do so.

In 2004, the high court ruled that an instruction judges were legally required to make to jurors in capital cases was unconstitutional. A judge was required to tell jurors that if they could not choose unanimously between a sentence of death and one of life without parole, he or she would impose a sentence that would make the defendant eligible for parole after 20 to 25 years.

Taylor is the last of New York's death row inmates. The state does not now have a death penalty law and it's unlikely the legislature will pass one.

Ten Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey today. You can read it here.

Shorter version: stop mincing words and condemn water boarding:

Your unwillingness to state that waterboarding is illegal may place Americans at risk of being subjected to this abusive technique. If the United States does not explicitly and publicly condemn waterboarding, it will be more difficult to argue that enemy forces cannot waterboard American prisoners. It also makes it more difficult for the United States to condemn repressive governments that use waterboarding on their own citizens. We are particularly troubled by recent reports that the Burmese military has used this form of torture against democracy activists. Human rights abuses such as this have rightly prompted the Administration to impose additional sanctions against the Burmese regime.

Please respond to the following question: Is the use of waterboarding, or inducing the misperception of drowning, as an interrogation technique illegal under U.S. law, including treaty obligations?

My latest thoughts on Mukasey and waterboarding are in a post I wrote this morning for Firedoglake on the mistrial in the terrorism funding charity trial.

Once Mukasey refused to say that waterboarding is torture, he lost his way home. I can just picture him leaving the confirmation hearing. He’s got a piece of the waterboard stuck on the sole of his shoe, like you know what, and no matter how many times he tries to scrape it off, it’s still there. The piece won’t leave Muckasey. It’s there to remind him that he’s one of them now. He’s solid with the Administration’s refusal to promise to discontinue waterboarding.

More...

Live chat hosted by Jane Hamsher here:

Today the UK Guardian newspaper launches Guardian America. The Editor Mike Tomasky writes:

Hello there. So what is Guardian America, what makes a British newspaper think that Americans will want to imbibe its view of America and the world, and why, having decided to undertake such an improbable project, would the paper place it in my hands? Fine questions. Let's explore. The journalistic shorthand version is that Guardian America is the US-based website of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK and around the world with content that we originate here to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers. I am sometimes asked what, or who, this means we will try to be "like"; the questioner wants an American reference point the better to slot this project into a known category. The only answer is that we will try to be like ... the Guardian.

A worthy example to emulate. Good luck to all involved.

The government's most celebrated effort to prosecute a Muslim charity for financing terrorism ended in a bust.

A federal judge declared a mistrial on Monday in what was widely seen as the government’s flagship terrorism-financing case after prosecutors failed to persuade a jury to convict five leaders of a Muslim charity on any charges, or even to reach a verdict on many of the 197 counts. ...

The case involved 197 counts, including providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. It also involved years of investigation and preparation, almost two months of testimony and more than 1,000 exhibits, including documents, wiretaps, transcripts and videotapes dug up in a backyard in Virginia.

The only verdicts returned were acquittals. Prosecutors are vowing to present their (mostly nonexistent) case to a second jury, apparently hoping that new jurors will be cowed by the words "terrorism" and "Muslim" and will overlook the absence of evidence that the charity financed anything other than charitable works.

The implications of the government's strategy for dealing with Muslim charities are stunning:

Brian Beutler has a terrific run down of what went wrong tactically with the Democratic Congress last week (S-CHIP, FISA, etc.) But Beutler still is looking at the tactical picture and looking at a Congress that he wants to do something. The problem is that, and this is true, they do not have the votes to do something in contested areas like S-CHIP, Iraq funding and FISA. This mistaken focus is exemplified here:

There is no hypothetical package of enticements the Democrats can offer a Republican that outweigh the price that that Republican will pay within his own party. He'll only be treated leniently when his party bosses realize that, if they don't let him vote with the opposition, he might lose his seat. At some point the Republicans realized something crucial: That, for now anyhow, upholding the veto is politically neutral. . . .

What does this mean? It means that even on issues as politically popular as S-CHIP, Bush can stop all Democratic initiatives. The question is then what can the Democrats do? Simply this, END all the Bush travesties. Iraq, FISA, etc. By using the power of the purse and NOT funding them. More.

During the Republican debate last night, after attacking Hillary, contender Mike Huckabee had this to say:

"We don't have a health care system. We have a health care maze. And we don't have a health care crisis. We have a health crisis. Eighty percent of the $2 trillion we spend on health care in this country is spent on chronic disease. If we don't change the health of this nation by focusing on prevention, we're never going to catch up with the costs no matter what plan we have. ... And we've got a situation with 10,000 baby boomers a day signing up for Social Security, going into the Medicare system. And I just want to remind everybody when all the old hippies find out that they get free drugs, just wait until what that's going to cost out there."

What drug is he on?

The Southern California fires are all over the news. Every time I see hear the words "the Santa Ana winds" I start thinking about writer Joan Didion (who just happens to be my favorite author) and how she captured the phenonemon with such great imagery in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), her book about Haight Ashbury during the summer of 1967.

To give you a flavor, I've tracked down some of what she wrote and quote below: