After three weeks of deliberation, a federal jury in Denver has rejected the death penalty for William Sablan, an inmate at Florence who it found killed his cellmate. The facts were ugly. As I wrote here

The defendants are cousins and maximum security inmates at Florence who allegedly killed their cellmate, cut out his body organs and held them up to guards to taunt them — and to warn other inmates not to snitch them out. The aftermath of the murder was videotaped by guards.

It would have been the first federal death verdict in Colorado since Timothy McVeigh. Sablan's lawyers initially went for an insanity defense. Then, as Alan Pendergast of Westword wrote on the day of the guilty verdict,

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There is nothing funnier to me than the spectacle of Matt Lauer talking about things he has no clue about. Their dicussion of Pelosi in Syria is hilarious:

LAUER: Vice President Cheney called Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria “bad behavior,” a Washington Post editorial on Thursday called it “counter-productive and foolish,” and op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning goes a step further and suggests her trip may actually have been a felony, that it may have violated something called the Logan Act. Tim, is this the way the Democrats wanted to get off the mark in terms of foreign affairs?

Dick Cheney, Fred Hiatt and the loony tunes WSJ Editorial Page making stupid and reckless accusations is the concern? I tell you what you need to be concerned about Matt - you should be concerned about looking like a GOP puppet. This is embarrassing journalistic malpractice. But let's face it, does anyone expect anything else from the likes of you? Of course not. Here's a secret Matt, no one takes you seriously. No one.

Minneapolis seems to be the domestic news hotspot today.

With the Republican convention scheduled to hit town next year, officials are worried about pigeon poop. So, they are going to send officials up to rooftops to spring out through trap doors and steal the pigeons' eggs after they are laid and before they hatch.

"We'll build them little condos. We'll keep taking the eggs, and they won't have little ones," said Bill Stephenson, the city's animal control supervisor. "Slowly they'll die off."

The scheme has the blessing of the St. Paul Audubon Society. Member Val Cunningham said pigeons aren't native, and their eggs aren't protected. If the plan works, "it would be sweet for the city," Cunningham said.

They considered but decided against contraceptives because they didn't want to sterilize eagles or hawks by mistake.

I've never lived in a city with pigeons, but don't they have feelings too? Where are the Republican right to lifers on this plan to kill the unborn?

I've been following the curious developments in the U.S. Attorneys office in Minneapolis for a few days, but until today, there was too little available information from which to decide if it was newsworthy.

What was known: U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger resigned in February, 2006. Rachel Paulose, age 34, a former aide to Alberto Gonzales whose last job was serving as senior counsel to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty was immediately named as his successor and made Acting U.S. Attorney. She was confirmed by the Senate in December, 2006 and sworn in in March, 2007, by which time she had already been in the job for a year.

Earlier this week there were rumblings about three career prosecutors in the office submitting resignations. DOJ sent out a mediator. Late yesterday it was announced that the three were remaining with the office, but were accepting demotions from managerial positions to rank and file prosecutors. Another top administrative official, not a prosecutor, also submitted his resignation.

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There's no love between Californians and George W. Bush. On war and the economy, his approval ratings in the state have tanked to Nixon-like numbers.

Just 26 percent of California voters surveyed by the Field Poll approved of the president's performance in office -- nearly reaching the record low 24 percent approval rating of former President Richard Nixon in August 1974, just before his resignation over the Watergate scandal.

The poll showed that just 24 percent of the state's voters saw the president's performance in Iraq in a positive light, compared with 72 percent who viewed it negatively.

There are two indicators of what the numbers mean.

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Atrios comments on E.J. Dionne's column on dogmatic atheists and brings up some interesting points while leading me to think of another.

My daughter recently celebrated her bat mitzvah and one of the readings at the service was the Red Heifer:

According to the Numbers 19:2: "Speak unto the Children of Israel that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke". In other words, it must not have hairs of any other color, it must be in perfect health, and it must never have been used to perform work. . . . The existence of a red heifer that conforms with all of the rigid requirements imposed by halakha is a biological anomaly. . . . The absolute rarity of the animal, combined with the mystical ritual in which it is used, have given the red heifer special status in Jewish tradition. It is cited as the prime example of a chok, or biblical law for which there is no apparent logic, and is therefore of absolute Divine origin. . . .

I have always viewed the Red Heifer writing as being a call for unquestioning faith. It means, I think, that there are matters to which only God can know the why. And that God demands, in essence, acceptance of dogma. It is this requirement of all religions that makes it impossible for me to be religious, or atheist for that matter. I do not, and believe can not, know if God exists. I can not accept the dogma of either path.

I love fights over words. They remind me of the Clinton era and the battle over the meaning of the word "is."

Trial starts next week in a lawsuit by the makers of Equal against the makers of Splenda. For the record, I switched to Splenda years ago, when I got the impression, however founded or unfounded, that Splenda was the more healthy of the two.

The issue: What does the phrase "made from sugar" mean?

To me, "made from sugar" means the product began with sugar and got converted to something else in the manufacturing process. Equal, which has seen a huge dip in sales since Splenda began marketing its product, says Splenda is making a false assertion because there's no sugar in the product.

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For the 'You don't say?' file:

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

In other news, Dick Cheney is still lying about it:

Red State thinks a plan to end the war is abandoning the troops:

You see, when you tell the nice veteran that nobody's planning to deny the troops what they need, political obsessives like Gateway Pundit go track down the boasting press releases that say, yeah, people are.

The press release is of course about the Reid-Feingold bill. That bill gives the troops what they need, an end to the Iraq Debacle on March 31, 2008 and full funding while the troops are in the field. I wish the Republicans would explain to the nice veterans that they oppose ending the Iraq Debacle one year from now. That 5 years of disaster is not enough for them.

The Reid-Feingold bill is something the "anti-war movement" is embracing, as is over 60% of the country. The Republicans want Debacle without end. Tell the nice vet Red State. 5 years of the Iraq Debacle is not enough for you. You want, nay, demand, more.

Mark Halperin has been on a downward career trajectory for the past seven months, starting with his incredible bootlicking of Bill O'Reilly, followed by his incredible bootlicking of Hugh Hewitt, followed by his falling out with his coauthor John Harris over his self abasing behavior with Fox, Hewitt and others. So it seems almost inevitable that now his invective for Democrats is not couched with any pretense of neutrality:

Although Halperin is political director of ABC News and founder of its online analysis column The Note, [Teresa] Heinz-[Kerry] blurted, "What would he know? Why would anyone listen to him?" when Charlie Rose interviewed the couple at the 92nd Street Y last week. On Wednesday, Halperin spoke at a Bernstein Global Wealth Management session and replied, "As Bill Clinton might say, 'That's like a pig calling someone ugly.'"

Very O'Reilly like of Halperin. I see a future Fox News Political Director in the making.

h/t Sirota.

Jeralyn posted about the NYTimes editorial calling on Senate Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi to work to repeal the travesty that is the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

What the Times does not talk about is the fact that Bush will veto any such bill, assuming their are the necessary votes to pass a repeal and overcome a GOP filibuster.

I like this exercise because, as you may know, I support the Reid-Feingold "not funding" the Iraq Debacle bill. I am always asked, where are the votes? What about the filibuster? What about the veto? My response is always the same - filibusters and vetoes do not fund the Iraq Debacle. Do not flinch when the time comes (in the Reid-Feingold bill, the time is March 31, 2008.) Does the same strategy apply for Gitmo? It could. I think there are other avenues for closing Gitmo and restoring the rule of law on enemy combatants and habeas. I n short, to stop the Iraq Debacle, there are no other options. To stop Gitmo, there are imo.

The New York Times in an editorial today calls on Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to take action against the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, both of which limit appeal rights of detainees.

Both violate the Constitution, and the court should strike down the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which limits avenues for appeal. But Congress approved the military commissions, left in place the combatant status review tribunals and suspended habeas corpus. Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi have a moral obligation to lead the way to righting these wrongs.