Berkeley voters may get a second chance to vote on a city initiative that would establish procedures for opening medical marijuana dispensaries. A California judge made a preliminary decision to nullify the election that resulted in the proposal's narrow defeat. The reason:

The county reused voting machines from Diebold Election Systems Inc. without saving sufficient data to carry out a recount or review the election process, [Gregory] Luke [representing Americans for Safe Access] said. Officials failed to save key evidence even after the suit was pending, he said. Data from the vote in question has only been found on 20 of the hundreds of machines used in the election, according to Luke. ...

In addition to ordering another vote on Measure R, Judge Smith's preliminary ruling called for the county to pay the US$22,604 cost of the recount, as well as attorney's fees and the cost of a trip to Diebold offices in Texas.

The judge is expected to make a final ruling (which may be appealed) within two weeks.

For some time now, the RIAA has been obtaining subpoenas from federal courts that compel colleges and universities to disclose the identities of students associated with IP's that RIAA believes were used to download music. Having identified the students, the RIAA threatens litigation unless the students fork over a few thousand dollars. This heavy-handed approach to copyright enforcement hasn't inhibited illegal downloading, but it's created a nice cash machine for the RIAA and its lawyers.

A U.S. District Judge in Virginia tossed a judicial wrench into the machine on Thursday when he refused the RIAA's ex parte request for a subpoena. Judge Kelley's tightly-reasoned decision concludes that no law authorizes a court to order the disclosure. Do you suppose RIAA will cite his decision in its future ex parte requests for subpoenas?

Rudy Giuliani expressed a view common to the GOP:

I think that if we've learned any lessons from the history of the 20th century, one of the lessons we should learn is stop trying to psychoanalyze people and take them at their word. If we had taken Hitler at his word, Stalin at his word, I think we would have made much sounder decisions and saved a lot more lives.

An Al Qaida in Iraq leader said:

Abu Sarhan's views suggest[] a more restrained view of the United States, which he considers an occupier but one that should not leave immediately. . . . "The real enemy for the resistance is Iran and those working for Iran," he went on. "Because Iran has a feud which goes back thousands of years with the people of Iraq and the government of Iraq."

(Emphasis supplied.) Today, a Maliki lieutenant said:

[T]he U.S. was treating Iraq like "an experiment in an American laboratory." He sharply criticised the U.S. military, saying it was committing human rights violations, embarassing the Iraqi government with its tactics and cooperating with "gangs of killers" in its campaign against al-Qaida in Iraq.

(Emphasis supplied.) I think if we take these statements at face value, staying in Iraq means staying mired in an intractable and increasingly vicious sectarian civil war. What do you think Rudy?

I'm going to take advantage of the great weather and then attack a massive amount of wiretap discovery for the rest of the day.

Here's an open thread where you can pick the topics.

The New York Times reports on a new study by an economist at Harvard that says federal public defenders get better results than CJA lawyers (privately appointed lawyers under the Criminal Justice Act.) The 40 page study is here.

How much better? The study says the PD's clients sentences were on the average 8 months shorter.

I think federal public defenders do a great job. I always laugh when I get a call from a prospective client who tells me they want to get rid of their pd and hire private counsel so they can get a "real lawyer."

I also do a few CJA cases a year. It's how we private lawyers give back -- our way of doing pro-bono, taking cases for far less than we get in our private practices. In my district, we're not contract lawyers in that we don't agree to take a percentage of the court's case load or even a set number of cases a year. We get called occasionally, when the Public Defender has a conflict, and if we're free (usually 2 days from the time we get the call), we agree to take the case.

I'm not an economist or a statistician, but I think this study is seriously flawed. The first problem I have with the study is this incorrect premise:

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Dave Weigel and Matt Yglesias are having fun picking on Marty Peretz's personal assistant and I can't resist piling on. Peretz's Kirchick wrote:

[ R]egime change in Iraq was the official, bipartisan policy of the United States government years before it became fashionable for journalists to write tiresome, 5,000-word articles linking Ahmed Chalabi, PNAC and Paul Wolfowitz.

(Emphasis supplied.) I am tired of those pieces too. But they at least have the virtue of being true. Chalabi, Wolfowitz and PNAC were intimately connected. Unlike the claims made in those once fashionable articles that connected Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and mushroom clouds.

The other difference between those two types of tiresome articles is one type consists of rather meaningless blather. The other contributed to the launching of the most disastrous strategic blunder since Vietnam.

Iraqi PM Maliki says that the US can leave now as far as he is concerned:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that the Iraqi army and police are capable of keeping security in the country when American troops leave "any time they want," though he acknowledged the forces need further weapons and training. The embattled prime minister sought to show confidence at a time when congressional pressure is growing for a withdrawal and the Bush administration reported little progress had been made on the most vital of a series of political benchmarks it wants al-Maliki to carry out.

Even better is this from one of Maliki's lieutenants:

[O]ne of his top aides, Hassan al-Suneid, rankled at the assessment, saying the U.S. was treating Iraq like "an experiment in an American laboratory." He sharply criticised the U.S. military, saying it was committing human rights violations, embarassing the Iraqi government with its tactics and cooperating with "gangs of killers" in its campaign against al-Qaida in Iraq.

There seems to be no one but Bush, the GOP and the Neocons who want the US in Iraq. Oh, and Al Qaida.

From Sargent:

Senator Reid Appreciate these two former Chairmen coming forward and expressing their clear discontent with the Administration’s policies in Iraq.

They clearly recognize there is no purely military solution in Iraq and that the war, on its current course, is making this nation less secure.

But they put a lot of faith in the President that he will voluntarily change course and voluntarily begin to reduce the large U.S. combat footprint in Iraq.

Unfortunately, Senator Reid is not as confident in the President’s willingness to change course voluntarily. In the fifth year of the war, we need strong legislation that compels the President to change course, change the mission, and begin the reduction of U.S. troops. That’s what Reed/Levin does. It is binding legislation, and that is the approach he prefers.

But what if Warner-Lugar was binding?

This is interesting:

One of the main elements of [Warner-Lugar] amendment, which was filed shortly after noon today, would require the president to seek a new rationale for the war authorization by the time Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, delivers a report in September on the progress of the troop buildup. The measure also would require the president to review and update the National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq no later than Sept. 4. “Many of the conditions and motivations that existed when we authorized force almost five years ago no longer exist or are irrelevant to our current situation,” Mr. Lugar said. He went on, saying the 2002 war authorization is “obsolete and requires revision.”

Think Republicans will embrace this? Having to vote a NEW war authorization? One Democrats will vote against almost uniformly?

At first blush, I think I am going to embrace this idea requiring from Bush a new war authorization. I wonder what Warner and Lugar imagine would be the upshot if continuing the war was NOT authorized?

The Government has rested its case in the Miami terrorism trial of Jose Padilla and his two co-defendants.

The Southern District of Florida blog has a wrap-up of coverage.

Journalist Lew Koch has been writing about the case for Firedoglake. His latest is here, focusing on the jurors playing dress-up.

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This just in from Yearly Kos (by e-mail):

The YearlyKos Convention team is pleased to welcome Senator Hillary Clinton to the second annual, historic gathering of the netroots in Chicago this August. Clinton joins Senators Edwards, Obama, Dodd, and Governor Bill Richardson as a participant in the first ever collaborative presidential forum with both a respected blogger(Joan McCarter of DailyKos) and a leading member of the traditional media (Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine) as moderators, with author and blogger Dr. Jeffrey Feldman facilitating questions from attendees.

Yearly Kos is taking place August 2 to 5 in Chicago. I'll be there and joining Marcy Wheeler of The Next Hurrah and Christy Hardin-Smith from Firedoglake on a panel about blogging the Scooter Libby trial. Sheldon Snook from the U.S. District Court in D.C. who herded all of us and the MSM at the trial, will also be joining us.

Registration for Yearly Kos ends tonight at midnight. You can register here.

In my bloggingheads conversation with Conn Carroll of the National Journal's Blogometer, I tried to explain my view of using Presidential politics to influence Iraq policy. I tried to emphasize that a savvy and issues oriented Netroots could push our Presidential contenders to lead on getting us out by endorsing, embracing and promoting the not funding approach, the only possible way to end it during Bush's tenure. I think Jerome Armstrong's post on Obama and not funding is very much in line with what I have tried to do as well:

The recent attack from Obama that was directed toward Clinton and Edwards over Iraq made me wonder about which of the two, between Obama and Edwards, might be perceived as having more credibility on ending the Iraq War. . . . [E]nding the war means cutting off funding of the war, and that's not been something that Obama has been in favor of, until just recently.

. . . Obama wants to make a preemptive differentiation that only he is prepared to be the Democratic nominee based on his original opposition to invading Iraq. It's as if Obama is trying to become the Dean of '08 in attracting those of us who were against this war from the beginning. But the comparison of Obama to Dean ends in 2003. Dean never supported funding of the war, Obama continually did until the most recent vote.

. . . I applaud the change made by Obama. It's the direction those of us who want this war ended want every Democratic politician to take, in an effort to end the war in Iraq. But the notion that Obama has some sort of special appeal over the issue of Iraq, to those of us who are actually paying attention, seems full of folly.

I hope Jerome is right because it is my wish to see our Presidential contenders be pushed to be leaders in the Not Funding movement. More.