Let the DoddMania begin:

The Military Commissions Act. Warrantless wiretapping. Shredding of Habeas Corpus. Torture. Extraordinary Rendition. Secret Prisons.

No more.
I have decided to place a "hold" on the latest FISA bill that would have included amnesty for telecommunications companies that enabled the President's assault on the Constitution by illegally providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization.

I said that I would do everything I could to stop this bill from passing, and I have.
It's about delivering results -- and as I've said before, the FIRST thing I will do after being sworn into office is restore the Constitution. But we shouldn't have to wait until then to prevent the further erosion of our country's most treasured document. That's why I am stopping this bill today.

Thank you Senator Dodd. You make me proud to be a supporter of your candidacy for President.

What a frightening thought. Cops using steroids to bulk up and get the upper hand when dealing with suspects.

In New York City this week six police officers are being investigated for illegally using prescriptions to obtain anabolic steroids for body building. According to law enforcement experts, the prototypical steroid user is in his 30s, white and worried about competing.

The article then describes a cop named Matthew (not his real name) and relays his comments about how he and his fellow cops bulked up so they'd have a better advantage in taking down suspects.

Matthew's case is just one example in an increasing trend among urban police officers working tough beats.

....From Boston to Arizona, police departments are investigating a growing number of incidents involving uniformed police officers using steroids. So-called "juicing" has been anecdotally associated with several brutality cases, including the 1997 sodomizing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in New York City.

Matthew eventually got fired, charged and served 23 days in jail.

The S-CHIP veto overide has failed. The roll call vote is here. Via Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.), received by e-mail:

The House voted 273 to 156 to override the veto, however this was 16 votes short of the 2/3 necessary to override the President’s veto and pass this bill into law.

"I am disappointed the President is playing politics with our children’s health”, said Perlmutter. “As we saw with the vote on stem cell research, the President and many Republicans reject the will of the majority of Americans and the hopes and promise that basic health care services can provide to our children. Be assured, I will continue to fight to keep kids from hardworking American families ."

Yesterday Senator Chris Dodd said:

While the President may think that it's right to offer immunity to those who break the law and violate the right to privacy of thousands of law-abiding Americans, I want to assure him it is not a value we have in common and I hope the same can be said of my fellow Democrats in the Senate.

"For too long we have failed to respect the rule of law and failed to protect our fundamental civil liberties. I will do what I can to see to it that no telecommunications giant that was complicit in this Administration's assault on the Constitution is given a get-out-of-jail-free card."

Senator Dodd, what you must do is lead the fight against the capitulation by your fellow Dem Senators on this issue:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

. . . It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' [House] bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage. The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

More...

Total capitulation.

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Here's more:

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

Why am I not surprised? Because I never expected anything else since August when the Dems signed onto Bush's bill so they could go home and vacation during the August recess.

The saddest part is that FISA didn't need to be gutted or amended. It needed to be followed.

More...

Yesterday, at the corruption trial of contractor Brent Wilkes in California, the Government closed its case with testimony from two prostitutes who testified about their activities with Wilkes and former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

A prostitute whom prosecutors say a defense contractor provided to former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham testified Wednesday that the congressman fed her grapes as she sat naked in a hot tub before they headed to a bedroom at a Hawaiian resort.

....Donna Rosetta said she was chauffeured to a private villa at the Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel in Kamelua, Hawaii, in August 2003 by an escort service she worked for. Cunningham and Wilkes invited her and a second woman to undress and slide into a hot tub before Cunningham invited her upstairs, Rosetta said. "They were smoking cigars and talking about some meeting they had earlier," Rosetta said. She and Cunningham went to a bedroom, and he tipped her $50 to $80, she said.

The other woman, Tammy McFadden, testified that Wilkes and Cunningham appeared to be arguing about who would go upstairs with which woman. "The one I ended up with was the one who was running the show," said McFadden, referring to Wilkes. She described Cunningham as "the boisterous one" and said he was overbearing.

I hear Wilkes' lawyer didn't even cross-examine at least one of the women. Probably, of more concern to him was the testimony of Wilkes' nephew, Joel Combs, who found the hookers and described for the jury how Wilkes used free trips and other inducements to get close to Cunningham.

More...

Murray Waas has a new article at HuffPo about Alberto Gonzales receiving information about subordinates at the Justice Department during the NSA leak probe and its impropriety, given that he himself was a subject of the various probes and these same employees might be called to testify against him.

Senior federal law enforcement privately question the propriety of Gonzales receiving such sensitive information about subordinates being scrutinized in one inquiry when those same individuals were likely to be witnesses about alleged misconduct by Gonzales for the other investigations.

This is a long article that covers a lot of ground, I recommend reading all of it.

There is a passage in today's WaPo article on the Senate capitulation on FISA that demonstrates how little Democrats understand of the power of the Congress to do nothing:

An adroit Republican parliamentary maneuver ultimately sank the bill. GOP leaders offered a motion that would have sent it back to the House intelligence and Judiciary committees with a requirement that they add language specifying that nothing in the measure would apply to surveilling the communications of bin Laden, al-Qaeda or other foreign terrorist organizations.

Approval of the motion would have restarted the legislative process, effectively killing the measure by delay. Democratic leaders scrambled to persuade their members to oppose it, but with Republicans accusing Democrats of being weak on terrorism, a "no" vote proved too hard to sell, and so the bill was pulled from the floor.

Stacey Bernards, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), called the Republican maneuver "a cheap shot, totally political."

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called it a "perfect storm" of progressive Democrats who did not think the bill protected basic constitutional rights and of Republicans who took advantage of the lack of unity. "It was too precipitous a process, and it ended up in a train wreck," she said. "It was total meltdown."

I see while I was out today President Bush made the statement:

If Iran had a nuclear weapon, it'd be a dangerous threat to world peace," Bush said. "So I told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested" in ensuring Iran not gain the capacity to develop such weapons. "I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously," he said.

In the mail today, I received an unsolicited advance copy of the book released Tuesday, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark.

From the inside jacket:

In Utah, the judge in the Warren Jeff's polygamy trial has ordered a reporter to write a public service article or be held in contempt of court.

The backdrop: Reporter Katie Baker was a reporter covering the Warren Jeffs trial. She was new to covering trials and didn't know the Judge had entered an order prohibiting reporters from interviewing prospective jurors. Baker interviewed a female potential juror outside the courthouse and the tv station she worked for aired it that night. (The tv station did know about the rule but the regular managing editor was not working on the Jeffs case that day.)

So, is the judge's order proper? First Amendment lawyer guru Floyd Abrams has his doubts and calls the order "extraordinary."

"The notion that a judge can either compel a journalist to write a story, or sit in judgment on a story to determine if it sufficiently serves the public interest, is extremely disturbing," Abrams said in an interview from New York.

"It puts the judge in a classic role of censor," he said. "The judge is deciding whether the story is worthy or not - not even if it's true but whether it's worthy."

The tv station says its reviewing its options.

Bump and Update: Here's the hearing transcript (pdf.)

******

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing yesterday about the Jena 6 case.

Al Sharpton again called for more hate-crime laws. That's not the issue. Nor is the issue whether the "noose incident" justified the beating of a white student.

The issue is whether the Jena 6 defendants were treated more harshly because they are black.

That question still begs an answer.

The Pentagon is calling up 8 national guard troops, telling them to prepare for departure to Iraq and Afghanistan in July. Seven troops will go to Iraq and one to Afghanistan. Two of the units will be "full combat brigades."

July? We should be out of Iraq by then, not sending more troops.