Anti-war Activists in Puerto Rico are meeting with success by visiting high schools and handing out flyers to students.

At the bottom of the leaflet was a tear sheet that students could sign and later hand to teachers, to request that students' personal contact information not be released to the U.S. Defense Department or to anyone involved in military recruiting.

....As a result, 57 percent of Puerto Rico's 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders, or their parents, have signed forms over the past year withholding contact information from the Pentagon -- effectively barring U.S. recruiters from reaching out to an estimated 65,000 high school students.

The requirement of providing information to the Pentagon is part of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, all schools receiving U.S. federal funding must provide their students' names, addresses and phone numbers to the military unless the child or parents sign an opt-out form.

....Juan Dalmau, secretary general of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) [says]his efforts are saving the island's children from becoming "colonial cannon meat."

Here's an idea that needs to spread to the mainland U.S:

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Earlier this week I wrote about former Bob Ney staffer Will Heaton who cooperated with the feds and wore a wire to tape conversations with Ney. Heaton was facing up to five years in jail. His sentencing guidelines were 18 to 24 months.

Heaton was sentenced today to two years probation.

The indirect beneficiary of Heaton's cooperation, of course, will be Jack Abramoff, whose final sentence reduction has not yet been determined.

at Bloggingheads. Marty is right as usual. Kerr is less right than usual.

Rudy Giuliani said:

The truth? This:

. . . [A]n exhaustively detailed account from his mayoral archive, revised after the events to account for last-minute changes on scheduled stops, does exist for the period of Sept. 17 to Dec. 16, 2001. It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts.

Rudy Giuliani has trouble with the truth. When will the Media notice? As for James Lee Witt, remember this?

I'm still in court mode today, happily back in Denver, so I've only got highlights for you until tonight.

• No plea yet from Michael Vick, but very bad allegations from his two co-defendants who got cooperation deals:

The court papers, filed as Quanis Phillips, 28, and Purnell Peace, 35, pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges Friday, said all three men "executed approximately eight dogs that did not perform well in testing sessions" in April of this year by methods such as hanging and drowning.

Peace, of Virginia Beach, and Phillips, of Atlanta, said the money behind the Bad Newz Kennels dogfighting operation, based on property Vick owns in Virginia, came "almost exclusively" from the Atlanta Falcons star. And they confirmed to prosecutors that all the accusations in the 18-page indictment are true.

• Rudy's 29 hours at Ground Zero. More from Barb at Daily Kos and Atrios and other bloggers.

• The Eagles are releasing their first new album in 28 years, Long Road Out of Eden. I heard the single, Long Road, on the radio this morning. It's so.... Eagles. Really, like 1973 Eagles. There's no mistaking them for anyone else and I love the Eagles, particularly Don Henley, but still, it's like going back in time. Then I read it's not a new song:

How Long' is sung by Don Henley and Glenn Frey and was written by J.D. Souther. How Long' is one of Souther's earliest songs. It first appeared on his 1972 debut 'John David Souther'.

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I was out of town today and missed the verdict. Since getting home, the news is all about the miners in Utah. So without benefit of having seen live coverage or later analysis, first let me say I agree with TChris:

Whether or not the verdict is correct, the prosecution proves that violations of the law can be addressed in criminal courts. It was never necessary to treat Padilla as an "enemy combatant" or to attempt to deny his right to a jury and to all the other rights that should attend a criminal prosecution.

Now, let me add: I'm dismayed that a jury would come back with a guilty verdict after a day and a half of deliberation in a trial where the evidence took three months to present.

It took 12 Miami-Dade jurors just 11 hours to reach their unanimous verdicts, despite a complex body of evidence that included hundreds of FBI phone wiretaps introduced during the three-month federal trial.

It takes longer than that to comprehend the jury instructions. The instructions in Padilla's case were 42 pages long and are available here (pdf). The jury's job is to determine whether the government has proved each and every element of the charged crimes against each defendant. The elements of the crimes are contained in the jury instructions. They are to apply the law as given in the instructions to the evidence presented at trial.

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Michael Vick is feeling the squeeze. He has no good options. Vick has used speed and agility to avoid sacks under those circumstances throughout his career, but this week he's facing a pass rush that he can't elude by scrambling. (Sorry. Sports metaphors end here.)

The Falcons quarterback has been indicted for conspiring to sponsor dog fights. Vick can accept the government's proposed plea agreement, knowing he'll probably serve a year or two in prison, or he can take his chances at trial. If he elects a trial, however, prosecutors have threatened to add more charges.

The evidence against Vick is (warning: disturbing photo) horrific. He would risk more convictions (and probably a longer sentence) by exposing such ugly facts to a jury. Reports that Vick's lawyers advised him to take the deal are therefore unsurprising.

Given the NFL's emphasis on players' off-field misconduct, Vick's playing career may be over even if he could beat the charges at trial. He lost his endorsement contract with Nike. He has no good choices. His deadline to decide is tomorrow.

Jack Balkin's theory of progressive orignalism is one of my very favorite legal topics. Here is my take. Recently, Balkin has been addressing critiques from conservatives. His most recent post is masterly:

Over at NRO, Ed Whelan has offered a series of posts commenting on my exchange with Matthew Franck. . . . Ed makes three key points, each of which is ultimately about the same thing--he wants to restrain judges and leave decisions to the political process. As I explained in my exchange with Matthew Franck, this is all very well and good, but it is in some sense orthogonal to the debate over originalism. In addition, Ed's version of originalism has many of the problems I identified in my original articles.

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Alberto Gonzales, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month about his visit to John Ashcroft's hospital bed:

"We would not have sought, nor did we intend to get any approval from General Ashcroft if, in fact, he wasn't fully competent to make that decision."

Does this sound like the description of a man who is competent to decide pressing and complex questions of law and policy?

"Saw AG," [FBI Director] Mueller wrote in his timed log of the events on the evening of March 10, 2004. "Janet Ashcroft in the room. AG is feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed."

Gonzales groupies will parse the Attorney General's language to argue that a feeble, stressed, and inarticulate hospital patient might still be competent, but the question is not whether Gonzales committed perjury. The question is whether the Senate will continue to tolerate Gonzales' practice of providing misleading testimony. Wouldn't we experience consequences if any of us were to respond so dishonestly to congressional inquiries? Does the AG deserve a continuing pass simply because he's the AG?

The sorry saga of Jose Padilla's prosecution has ended with a guilty verdict. Had the government prosecuted Padilla as a criminal from the start, instead of insisting that he was an "enemy combatant" before flip-flopping to avoid Supreme Court review of its claim, it would not have taken 3-1/2 years to reach this point.

[Padilla] was finally added to the Miami terrorism support indictment in late 2005 just as the U.S. Supreme Court was poised to consider President Bush's authority to continue detaining him.

Padilla's co-defendants were also convicted. Whether or not the verdict is correct, the prosecution proves that violations of the law can be addressed in criminal courts. It was never necessary to treat Padilla as an "enemy combatant" or to attempt to deny his right to a jury and to all the other rights that should attend a criminal prosecution.

TalkLeft background on the Padilla case is collected here.

A federal court in 1992 ordered the NYPD to stop arresting homeless panhandlers for violating an unconstitutional ordinance that prohibited loitering “for the purpose of begging.” As TalkLeft noted here, the order didn't stop the arrests. Neither, apparently, did a threat to hold NYPD in contempt of court.

Judge Shira Scheindlin's latest response may be more successful in getting the city's attention: she's certified a class action lawsuit, permitting a class of homeless people to sue the city for violating their civil rights by continuing to enforce the ordinance.

Judge Scheindlin said the suit seeks more than what the police had so far agreed to do, such as the dismissal of fines and the expunging of wrongful convictions from public records. Class certification is the only way to ensure equitable relief and to prevent future enforcement of the unconstitutional law, Judge Scheindlin said.

A lot of pixels have been devoted to the fact that the Bush Administration will be writing the September report, as "opposed" to just General Petraeus. The problem with this logic is that General Petraeus is part of the Bush Administration too. So how is this different? The Left blogs seem to have bought into the notion of Petraeus as honest broker. He is not. Matt Yglesias gets it right:

But as we read yesterday, the [September] reports are being written by the White House. This is, in my view, appropriate. Petraeus and Crocker work for Bush and it's always been silly to portray them as independent actors. But the point is that there's no independent assessment here -- the White House is going to make an official statement of the White House's assessment of the situation and why the White House believes its official assessment supports the policies the White House favors. All that's fine, and insofar as the White House is persuasive it should sway people. But we've already seen what the White House talking points on the surge are . . . -- there's no particular reason to wait with baited breath to see how they format the official document.

Zactly. BTW, what happens if the Bush Administration allows Petraeus to "write" the report on his own? It is suddenly now the Holy Grail again?