26 years ago, on December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment building on the upper West Side of New York. I heard about it while laying in bed in Denver that night while my then-spouse was watching Monday Night Football. Howard Cosell interrupted the program to announce "An unspeakable tragedy tonight in New York City."

I was nine months and three weeks pregnant -- way overdue -- and had just returned from the hospital where they tried to induce labor but failed. Immediately after hearing Cosell's announcement, I heard a loud pop. My water had finally broken. I rushed to the hospital and a few hours later, at 1:00 am MT, the TL kid was born. I tell more about the events of that night here, and how for the past 26 years, I have told the TL kid that when John Lennon's spirit left his body, it must have entered his.

Talk about intemperate, this may take the cake.

A judge who jailed 11 people because they were late for traffic court after being directed to the wrong courtroom lost his job Thursday, as the state Supreme Court ruled he was unfit to remain on the bench.

In a unanimous decision, the court said the jailing and strip-searching of the 11 motorists capped a series of conduct complaints against Seminole County Judge John Sloop, 57.

"Judge Sloop's indifference to the anxiety, humiliation and hardship imposed upon these 11 citizens reflects a callous disregard for others that is among the most egregious examples we have seen of abuse of judicial authority and lack of proper judicial temperament," the high court wrote in an unsigned opinion.

It's not the Koufax Awards but the 2006 Weblog Awards by WizbangTech.

TalkLeft is nominated in the "Best of the Top 250 Blogs." If you'd like to vote for us, we'd appreciate it. Just click here.

You can vote once a day for the next 8 or so days. It's got real time calculations, so you can see after your vote how the blogs are doing in the vote count.

The voting skews right because Wizbang, which sponsors it, is mainly a right-wing blog. There are several left-leaning blogs nominated however.

This form of voting is intended to level the playing field for the smaller blogs. The reasoning:

Hard to believe that a message board for the Texas District Attorneys' Association is public, but it is. It's also revealing in its revelation of tactics prosecutors use for minor offenses.

Via Grits for Breakfast, here's the thread. Grits says:

Be careful who you agree to let become one of your MySpace friends - what you blog can and will be used against you if they turn out to be a police investigator.

I'm going to reprint much of the thread below in case it's taken down.

Jose Padilla's defense lawyers have subpoenaed Department of Defense officials and records pertaining to his treatment during his three years in the South Carolina brig.

Today, the feds moved to quash the subpoenas in an effort to prevent the defense from introducing evidence of his treatment and conditions of confinement at trial.

What the defense asked for:

Defense attorneys have issued subpoenas for at least four military officials, including a security officer and technical official at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where Padilla was jailed. They have also subpoenaed Maj. Gen. D.D. Thiessen, commander of U.S. Marine forces in Japan, about treatment of other enemy combatants, according to court documents.

A federal judge in Michigan has found the state's the DOC in contempt of court. He ordered DOC to provide more prison doctors and nurses within four months. He's threatened the DOC with a $2 million fine.

He said a prisoner deserves to serve his sentence, not face delays in treatment.

"What he does not deserve is a de facto and unauthorized death penalty at the hands of a callous and dysfunctional health care system that regularly fails to treat life-threatening illness," Enslen wrote.

This isn't the Judge's first ruling taking the DOC to task.

Sen. Arlen Specter has introduced a much-needed bill to protect the attorney-client privilege.

The bill is titled the Attorney-Client Privilege Protection Act of 2006 (ACPPA).

The ACPPA would prohibit government lawyers from forcing organizations into:

• Disclosing information protected by the attorney-client privilege or work product doctrine;
• Refusing to contribute to the legal defense of an employee;
• Refusing to enter into a joint defense strategy with an employee;
• Refusing to share relevant information with an employee; and
• Terminating or disciplining an employee.

As for why it's needed:

This hasn't gotten enough play in the media.

Sen. Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy on Tuesday introduced S. 4081 to eliminate the habeas corpus- stripping provisions of the Military Commissions Act. The text of the bill is available in the Congressional Record and follows below.

Blogging or reporting on the web can be a risky endeavor in some countries. Many have lost their liberty because they told the truth or expressed their opinions.

The number of journalists jailed worldwide for their work increased for the second consecutive year, and one in three is now an Internet blogger, online editor, or Web-based reporter, according to an analysis by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

About half of the world's imprisoned journalists are print reporters (including editors and photographers), but web-based journalists are increasingly losing their freedom.

China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Ethiopia were the top four jailers among the 24 nations who imprisoned journalists.

Howard Dean took up Cristine Jennings' cause today, calling for a new election in the Florida House race:

State officials certified Buchanan as the winner by just 369 votes. But Jennings claims that touch-screen voting machines in Sarasota County malfunctioned in the U.S. House District 13 race and possibly cost her the election.

More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters who marked other races didn't have a vote register in the House race, a rate much higher than the rest of the district.

'There are 18,000 people who may have voted, and we don't know what happened to their votes. You can bet that if the Republicans were 500 votes short they'd be calling for a new election, and they'd be right,' Dean said.

This is the seat formerly held by Katherine Harris. The winner has been declared to be Republican Vern Buchanan.

Sometimes we focus more on prison abuses abroad than we do at home. The first is not more important than the second as Ira Robbins points out in the Baltimore Sun.

While the alleged human rights abuses of prisoners detained in Guantánamo Bay and the Middle East have sparked widespread criticism and debate in this country and abroad, surprisingly little attention has been focused on the treatment of citizens imprisoned within our borders. Each year, approximately 7,000 Americans die in U.S. prisons and jails. Some of these deaths are from natural causes, but many more result from mental disorders left undiagnosed and diseases left untreated.

The abhorrent quality of correctional health care not only violates prisoners' constitutional rights, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars and threatens the general health of communities surrounding these facilities. Understanding why prisoners die is an essential first step in identifying the major pitfalls of our health care system. Passing legislation to correct these problems is the crucial next step. Therefore, Congress should extend and strengthen the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act, or DICRA, before it expires at the end of this year.

Say Hello to Dicra:

Leslie Vaughn Prater will be the last person who needlessly dies in police custody if his mother has her way. Prater suffocated as four Chattanooga police officers held him face down on the ground.

Prater negotiated a settlement of her wrongful death lawsuit that helps educate the city's officers.

Loretta Prater, a Southeast Missouri State University administrator, will teach three classes at the Chattanooga police academy about the death of her 37-year-old son, Leslie Vaughn Prater, said Sgt. Tom Layne Wednesday. She said her sessions with police recruits would give them a "sense of how important their role is when they are out there on the street."

The facts surrounding Prater's death aren't pretty.