They must drink funny water in L.A. I don't get them. Paris Hilton gets 45 days for violating probation by driving with a suspended license (even though there was no alcohol involved in the probation violation and yes I know that she was put on probation for an alcohol-related reckless driving charge) while Lindsay Lohan gets 1 day in jail for all this:

She pleaded guilty to two counts of being under the influence of cocaine; no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above .08 percent and one count of reckless driving. Two counts of driving under the influence were dropped.

Lohan had two arrests for drunk driving, one in May, in which she crashed her car and fled the scene, and the other in July, shortly after getting out of rehab.

The D.A. says:

"She's getting what everyone else would get," Deputy District Attorney Danette Meyers said after an hourlong hearing in Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge H. Chester Horn Jr.'s courtroom.

I guess she means everyone except Paris.

To be clear, I don't think Lohan should have gotten more time, I'm complaining again that Paris Hilton got too much time.

Update: Thanks to Squeaky in the comments for adding that Nicole Richie served only 82 minutes of her four day sentence.

A few faces of past clients flashed in front of me as I read the letter the ABA has sent to the U.S. Sentencing Commission (available here) urging that their planned reduction of crack cocaine penalties be made retroactive.

While the planned reductions are tiny compared to what they should be, I'm sure any relief would be appreciated by the thousands of inmates who are languishing in our prisons serving draconian sentences for non-violent crack crimes.

In 2002, the Sentencing Commission recommended a greater reduction but it never happened. It recommended:

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From John Edwards' speech today in New Hampshire:

The choice for our party could not be more clear. We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.

The American people deserve to know that their presidency is not for sale, the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent, and lobbyist money can no longer
influence policy in the House or the Senate.

Hmm, where have I heard that before? On Lexis, I found Robert Dole remark's in Fresno, CA, from October 26 1996, when he was running for Vice President:

America is not for sale. Right there. America is not for sale. And the White House is not for sale. And the Lincoln bedroom is not for sale.

...Wake up, America.

Taylor Marsh, also quoting Dole, responds:

.... the Clinton money quote Edwards used today ... is straight out of the right-wing playbook. There are plenty of ways to come at Clinton on the issues, especially Iraq. But if this is the Edwards re-launch, I hope it makes a turn into better territory. Because between Obama's "Bush-Cheney lite" and Edwards talking about "The Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent," I've got to say that these guys sound positively desperate.

What is a sentence like this doing in a national news article on Rudy Giuliani's Iowa campaigning? Reporter Jill Lawrence writes:

Suffice it to say Republicans have never had a presidential candidate like this — half Woody Allen, half Rambo and 100% cerebral.

Via Media Matters which is tracking the media's reporting on Giuliani (and others).

Ms. Lawrence is also in need of a reality check.

As long as President Bush is comparing Iraq to Vietnam, I thought I'd take a look at how we got out of Vietnam. Maybe there are some lessons there for getting us out of Iraq:

• June 22, 1971, the United States Senate passed a non-binding resolution urging the withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam by the end of the year.

• December 31, 1971, there were 156,800 American soldiers in Vietnam. In January, 1972, Nixon announced "... the United States would continue to withdraw from Vietnam in coming months, removing another 70,000 troops over the next three months, but stated that 25,000 to 35,000 American troops would remain until the North Vietnamese released all the American prisoners of war."

• April and May, 1972: "On 4 April, 1972, Nixon authorized massive bombing of the North Vietnamese troops invading South Vietnam. On 15 April, Hanoi and Haiphong Harbour were bombed by the United States....On 8 May 72, President Nixon ordered the mining of all North Vietnamese ports."

• August 23, 1972, the last US ground combat troops left Vietnam

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Marty Lederman points out the problem with this statement of National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell to the El Paso Times:

There's a claim of reverse targeting. Now what that means is we would target somebody in a foreign country who is calling into the United States and our intent is to not go after the bad guy, but to listen to somebody in the United States. That's not legal, it's, it would be a breach of the Fourth Amendment. You can go to jail for that sort of thing. And If a foreign bad guy is calling into the United States, if there's a need to have a warrant, for the person in the United States, you just get a warrant. And so if a terrorist calls in and it's another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that U.S. person in this case. So we would just get a warrant and do that. It's a manageable thing. On the U.S. persons side it's 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it's in the thousands. Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing. (my emphasis)

Marty correctly, in my view, points out: More...

The "much anticipated" Petraeus Bush Report on the Surge will be presented in a few weeks. Senator Chris Dodd said:

Despite the exemplary performance of our troops, we are coming off the bloodiest summer of this misguided war and it should be clear that there can be no military solution in Iraq.

It is useless to argue the merits of a specific tactic when the strategy itself is failed.

In fact, debating over military tactics when there is no military solution only undermines efforts by those of us who believe that we must change course in Iraq now and begin to immediately redeploy US combat forces so that Iraqi leaders will have the impetus to find a political accord.

(Emphasis supplied.) Senator Dodd is leading on Iraq now. He does not believe, as most of the other candidates seem to, that we must wait until 2009 to change strategy on Iraq. More.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell engaged in a long and meaty q and a with the El Paso Times on the FISA Amendment and NSA program.

He mentions a few times that he had "20 lawyers" working on the "fix" and at one point he says they were working on it for two years.

[W]e sent up a version like Monday, we sent up a version on Wednesday, we sent up a version on Thursday. The House leadership, or the Democratic leadership on Thursday took that bill and we talked about it. And my response was there are some things I can't live with in this bill and they said alright we're going to fix them. Now, here's the issue. I never then had a chance to read it for the fix because, again, it's so complex, if you change a word or phrase, or even a paragraph reference, you can cause unintended ...

Q: You have to make sure it's all consistent?

A: Right. So I can't agree to it until it's in writing and my 20 lawyers, who have been doing this for two years, can work through it. So in the final analysis, I was put in the position of making a call on something I hadn't read.So when it came down to crunch time, we got a copy and it had some of the offending language back in it. So I said, 'I can't support it.' And it played out in the House the way it played out in the House.

He also talks about the liability of phone companies for working with the NSA program. (He says we'll need to add an immunity from liability provision to the bill when Congress reconvenes.) He also reviews what happened in the Senate and talks about what the "offending language" was. It had to do with minimization.

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These are the numbers for the latest Gallup Poll.

The latest Gallup Poll, conducted Aug. 13-16, 2007, finds public support for the Democratic nomination at 48% for Clinton and 25% for Obama, giving Clinton a 23-point lead. Support for former North Carolina senator John Edwards, in third place with 13%, is similar to what he has received since May.

The remaining candidates are in the 1-2% range.

Gallup also examines Karl Rove's remarks about Hillary. Shorter version: Unfavorables this early and particularly in Hillary's case may not mean much. They also said:

It is notable that Giuliani stands as the most positively rated 2008 presidential candidate in terms of favorable ratings at 59% (with a 27% unfavorable rating), but still does not beat Clinton in a trial heat "if the election were held today".

President Bush unveiled a new theory as to why we need to stay in Iraq. Innocent civilians will be killed if we leave, just like they were in Vietnam, where we got out too early.

"The price of America's withdrawal [in Vietnam]was paid by millions of innocent citizens," he told war veterans in Missouri.

..."Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people," Mr Bush said. "The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," Mr Bush said, mentioning reprisals against US allies in Vietnam, the displacement of Vietnamese refugees and the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

The full transcript is here. Crooks and Liars has the video of MSNBC's Neil Shuster on the report.

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Last night, as I was walking into a local tv studio to do Dan Abram's MSNBC show, I tripped on an uneven sidewalk and splattered myself on the concrete. I'm nursing a swollen wrist and bloody cuts on both knees and palms. Whose responsibility is it anyway to keep sidewalks in good repair? Or are we just supposed to walk with our heads down all the time looking for danger spots?

I'm also writing an op-ed for tomorrow's Washington Examiner on the myth of the immigrant crime wave (the topic of my MSNBC segment last night, which you can view here, but you'll need to turn the sound up on your computer to hear it. My YouTube-ing skills apparently don't include the ability to make the sound on the video match that on the tape I'm recording from.)[Update: MSNBC now has a better version here.]

So, here's an open thread for you.

Update: Texas executed its 400th inmate today, Johnny Ray Connor.

*****
European Union Urges Halt to Texecutions

As Texas is about to execute its 400th prisoner, the President of the European Union issued this statement yesterday calling for an end to Texas executions.

We believe that elimination of the death penalty is fundamental to the protection of human dignity, and to the progressive development of human rights. We further consider this punishment to be cruel and inhumane. There is no evidence to suggest that the use of the death penalty serves as a deterrent against violent crime and the irreversibility of the punishment means that miscarriages of justice - which are inevitable in all legal systems – cannot be redressed. Consequently, the death penalty has been abolished throughout the European Union.

Joining in the statement:

The Candidate Countries Turkey, Croatia* and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia*, the Countries of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidates Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and the EFTA countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, members of the European Economic Area, as well as Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan align themselves with this declaration.

Johnny Ray Connor is scheduled for execution in Texas today.

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