Bump and Update: ABC News has an explanation for the black beard in the Osama photo accompanying his upcoming video:

The "phony beard" may be an important clue as to where bin Laden is hiding, according to Clarke. "One place where a beard would stand out would be southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia," Clarke told ABC News. "No one's thought he was there, but that is an environment where most men, Muslim men don't have beards."

ABC also reports U.S. authorities have obtained a transcript of the tape, which will be directed to suicide bombers.

Original Post 9/6/07
A New Osama bin Laden Video is Imminent

An Islamic website reports that Osama bin Laden will be releasing his first video since 2004 in time for the 6th anniversary of 9/11.

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Did Norman Hsu try to commit suicide? The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Hsu was taken off a passenger train at the Grand Junction train station earlier in the day by paramedics who requested a backboard to move him, said Sgt. Lonnie Chavez with the Grand Junction Police Department. Authorities received a request for medical assistance at the train station at about 11:15 a.m., but the exact nature of Hsu's condition was unclear, Chavez said.

Justin Rood at ABC has a good piece today, pointing out that Hsu apparently is not registered to vote. I noted the same thing here.

Original Post 9/6/07
Norman Hsu Arrested in Colorado

Norman Hsu has been found and apprehended -- at a hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado.

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John Edwards will announce a plan against terrorism tomorrow.

The former North Carolina senator and Democratic presidential candidate is planning to propose creating a "Counterterrorism and Intelligence Treaty Organization." This would serve as a kind of modern-day NATO, giving member countries a way to better track terrorists' communications, recruiting and financing, on the theory that breaking up plots requires cross-border cooperation, as shown in Germany's foiling of an alleged plot this week.

....The new structure is needed, say those advising Edwards, given that NATO does not include many countries in which Islamic terrorists operate, and given that other international bodies, such as the UN and Interpol, include countries that have contributed to the world terror threat. To belong to the new international body, countries would have to pledge to tough criteria for pursuing extremists or terrorism financing within their own borders, and nations that declined to take part would be singled out, which could encourage more assistance from nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Edwards's advisers say.

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Michelle Obama has an interview in Glamour magazine. Do we really need to know this?

In an interview with Glamour magazine, Michelle Obama reveals that her husband, Barack, is so “snore-y and stinky” when he wakes up in the morning that their daughters won’t crawl into bed with him.

Context:

Referring to their daughters, Mrs. Obama says: “We have this ritual in the morning. They come in my bed, and Dad isn’t there — because he’s too snore-y and stinky, they don’t want to ever get into bed with him. But we cuddle up and we talk about everything from what is a period to the big topic of when we get a dog: what kind?”

Mrs. Obama thinks these sorts of disclosures will prevent Obama from being deified and then knocked down. I think it's information I'd rather not know.

I'd also rather not wonder whether the comment means they sleep in separate beds ("my bed" -- "he's not there") -- some things should stay private and that's one of them.

Update: Glamour Magazine has "corrected" the quote from Mrs. Obama, adding the word "if", which eliminates the interpretation that they sleep in separate beds. See below:

The ACLU scored a big victory for all of us today. A federal judge in New York found the Patriot Act provision pertaining to national security letters -- specifically, the part that gagged recipients of the letter -- unconstitutional.

A federal court today struck down the amended Patriot Act’s National Security Letter (NSL) provision. The law has permitted the FBI to issue NSLs demanding private information about people within the United States without court approval, and to gag those who receive NSLs from discussing them. The court found that the gag power was unconstitutional and that because the statute prevented courts from engaging in meaningful judicial review of gags, it violated the First Amendment and the principle of separation of powers.

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Roll Call reports that White House Counsel Fred Fielding is floating a bunch of names to Senators for the replacement of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

White House counsel Fred Fielding has been making the rounds in the Senate the past several days and met with Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on Wednesday afternoon. Although Leahy would not comment on the meeting prior to speaking with Fielding, he did say that Bush's top legal adviser has reached out to numerous Judiciary Committee Senators to vet names and gauge feedback over possible nominees.

Aides in both parties say there are six names:

Former Solicitor General Ted Olson; former Attorney General Bill Barr; former Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger; D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman; former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson; and Michael Mukasey, a former judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Larry Thompson has said he doesn't want the job, he's happy at Pepsico. As to the others:

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Speaking only for me of course

The NYTimes reports on the lack of Dem resolve on Iraq:

With a mixed picture emerging about progress in Iraq, Senate Democratic leaders are showing a new openness to compromise as they try to attract Republican support for forcing at least modest troop withdrawals in the coming months. . . . Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said, "If we have to make the spring part a goal, rather than something that is binding, and if that is able to produce some additional votes to get us over the filibuster, my own inclination would be to consider that."

In response, Sen. Chris Dodd provides leadership on Iraq now:

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The latest twist and turn in the Larry Craig resignation saga: He's getting ready to leave by September 30 after all.

Sen. Larry Craig has all but dropped any notion of trying to complete his term, and is focused on helping Idaho send a new senator to Washington within a few weeks, his top spokesman said Thursday.

The only exception would be a court ruling by September 30 vacating his guilty plea.

My translation: His motion to vacate the plea and sentence will be on more than one ground and at least one of them cannot be determined from the face of the documents and will require a written response and possibly a hearing. That is unlikely to occur within the next three weeks.

If Craig was only going to complain about the failure of the plea form to advise him of his right to counsel, I think he could get a ruling by Sept. 30. But if he is also going to argue that the facts he admitted to don't constitute a crime, the prosecutor will want to file a brief in opposition and the court may want to hold a hearing.

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Great video, check it out.

Rudy Giuliani is promising to appoint conservative, "strict constructionist" judges if elected. Who's helping him decide who they should be? Ted Olson and Miguel Estrada.

Giuliani has even created a Justice Advisory Committee populated by bright conservative lights including former Bush solicitor general Theodore Olson as the committee's chairman; Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, a Northwestern University law professor; and Washington lawyer Miguel Estrada, who was denied a federal appeals court bid in 2003 because Democrats feared he was too conservative

He's also courting the Federalist Society. Anyone who thinks Ted Olson wouldn't run a partisan Department of Justice if appointed Attorney General should think again.

Olson was in the room at the first meeting of the Federalist Society in 1982....The idea was to launch a counter-cultural legal movement in which conservative lawyers and scholars would roll back what they viewed as the excessive intrusion of judges into American life.

....The plan was to sow talented conservatives at every level of the federal judiciary and ultimately gain a foothold at the Supreme Court. "That was very much on our minds," Olson said.

It looks like the unidentified (and unindicted) co-ejaculator theory is alive and well in Mississippi.

After being exonerated by DNA evidence, Kennedy Brewer was freed on bond after serving 15 years in prison for a rape and murder. The DA now says he will retry him:

“I perceive that Kennedy Brewer assisted someone else in the killing of the child,” Mr. Allgood said. “Whether he actually penetrated that child or not functionally doesn’t make any difference if he was aiding, assisting and encouraging in her death.”

This case has lots of red flags, including a jailhouse snitch and a suspended forensic dentist who testified about about bitemarks, itself a junk science.

Brewer is represented by the Innocence Project which reports that Mississippi has the second largest (after Louisiana) number of incarcerated residents per 100,000:

"If the system's failure rate is a mere one percent, 215 people in prison in Mississippi are innocent," the project says.

Far from getting ready to close Guantanamo, the U.S. is spending big bucks there to build new courtrooms.

The U.S. military is building a mobile courtroom complex on an unused runway at the Guantanamo Bay naval base and plans to be ready by March to conduct as many as three terrorism trials at a time.

The $10 million project will add two new courtrooms to the existing one, which is being fitted with a new computer projection system to display evidence for the war crimes tribunals set up to try suspected al Qaeda operatives held at the U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba.

The Pentagon now plans to try 80 of the prisoners on war crimes and to hold up to 3 trials at a time. Called a "mobile courtroom complex" the new project appears to be made of tents:

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