A new poll commissioned by NPR, and conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research shows Democrats are in position to take back the House of Representatives.

Asked whom they'd vote for in their congressional district, 51 percent said they would pick the Democratic candidate and 40 percent would vote for the Republican. The remaining 9 percent were undecided or declined to answer. And a majority of moderates -- 59 percent -- said they plan to vote for Democrats running for Congress.

The results are almost identical to one taken last week for Democracy Corps.

The New York Times has an interesting article about how the electronic age has stripped the expungement of criminal records of practical effect.

Before, when courts used paper records, they were destroyed or put in a closet with an "expunged" stamp on them, making them inaccessible to third parties.

Now, courts keep electronic records and companies buy criminal records information. So even if the arrest or conviction is later expunged, the company still has the record of its existence.

Private database companies say they are diligent in updating their records to reflect the later expungement of criminal records. But lawyers, judges and experts in criminal justice say it is common for people to lose jobs and housing over information in databases that courts have ordered expunged.

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

"Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" I asked him a few weeks ago. Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: "One's in one location, another's in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don't know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something." To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. "Now that you've explained it to me," he replied, "what occurs to me is that it makes what we're doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area."

But I bet he is someone you would want to have a beer with. [Hat tip Tristero..

Update: The RSS feed is fixed. It displays the entire post, formatted and with pictures if you access it here or just the basic xml is here

We had problems with the RSS feed yesterday and this morning. It's fixed now, but set to display the first 40 words of entries. Does anyone remember what it used to show? Was it the whole article or just a paragraph or so? Which would you prefer?

Strategists and electoral observers, Democrats especially, may now start claiming that the very fact that Republicans are having to defend seats in these [Red] states -- two of them southern states, no less -- confirms the genius of the idea of running everywhere with equal vigor . . . But this is crap. Looking at the two southern races, Tennessee is an open seat with a strong, smart, dynamic Democratic candidate running in a clear, Democratic tailwind cycle, and yet Harold Ford's lead is still within the margin of error. . . . . Virginia's race has featured one of the most disaster-prone, self-destructive Republican candidacies in modern electoral history in a clear, Democratic tailwind cycle, and yet Jim Webb still trails.

But Schaller is wrong on his own terms, which, in any event, completely misunderstands the 50 state strategy. I'll explain on the flip.

President Bush today signed into law S. 3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The ACLU has issued a statement calling the law "one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history."

"With his signature, President Bush enacts a law that is both unconstitutional and un-American. This president will be remembered as the one who undercut the hallmark of habeas in the name of the war on terror. Nothing separates America more from our enemies than our commitment to fairness and the rule of law, but the bill signed today is an historic break because it turns Guantánamo Bay and other U.S. facilities into legal no-man's-lands.

"The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act."

The ACLU took out a full page ad in today's Washington Post to protest the law. You can view it here (pdf).

I can name on two hands over a half century the number of Democrats we have endorsed for public office. This year, we will do something different. . . . So, what in the world has happened? The Republican Party has changed, and it has changed monumentally.

You almost cannot be a victorious traditional Republican candidate with mainstream values in Johnson County or in Kansas anymore, because these candidates never get on the ballot in the general election.

Extremism should be a brand Democrats have stamped on the Republican Party for some time. That they have not is a frustration for me.

There goes another one. Lester Crawford, who was Bush's FDA director in 2005, has been charged with lying about stock ownership in companies regulated by the FDA. He will plead guilty tomorrow in federal court to the Information filed today.

The court papers also say that Crawford chaired FDA's Obesity Working Group at a time when he and his wife owned stock in soft drink and snack food manufacturer Pepsico Inc., based in Purchase, N.Y., and food product manufacturer Sysco Corp., based in Houston.

The panel Crawford was chairing was making decisions affecting food and soft drink manufacturers. Crawford, a veterinarian, abruptly resigned from the FDA job in September 2005 but gave no reason for his decision to step down. He had held the top position for just two months but had been acting head of the regulatory agency for more than a year.

If you have any issues with the new site, logging in, commenting or anything else, you can report them here.

Remember first to create a new account with your old (or different, your choice) user name and a password. You should get a screen right back that says "user created." User names must be letters, numerals or spaces.

If you don't see the link to create a new account it is here.

You can set your display preferences to suit you. For example, the number of entries to display on your home page. The ones immediately preceding that will show up in the middle right column under "older entries."

You can also set how you want comments displayed, flat, nested or threaded. I prefer nested. You can reply to a specific comment now, as opposed to the whole thread of comments.

You can also view all your comments, but those written before scoop won't come up under your name until we build a function that allows you to "claim them."

Update: Lynne Stewart got 28 months, not 30 years. Huge defeat for the Government. Congrats to Lynne. Now she won't die in prison.

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Original Post:

New York criminal defense lawyer Lynne Stewart faces sentencing today on her conviction for providing material support for terrorists by passing along messages from her imprisoned client, the blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. The Government is asking for 30 years for the 67 year old lawyer who suffers from breast cancer and other ailments.

A psychiatric report submitted to the federal judge in Manhattan who will decide the sentence, John Koeltl, claims that several emotional events in Stewart's life suggest her actions were motivated by "human factors of her client and his situation" and not by politics, according to portions of the psychiatric report.

The psychiatrist, Steven Teich, points to 11 emotional events that he claims prompted her to want to take action on Abdel Rahman's behalf, Stewart's attorneys say. Among the events that make Dr.Teich's list are her experiences seeing Abdel Rahman incarcerated and the 1995 suicide of a drug defendant named Dominick Maldonado, whom Stewart had once represented.

The psych report is sealed, but here are some more details:

The judge has reached a verdict in Saddam Hussein's trial. Both the verdict and sentence will be announced on November 5.

A death sentence for Saddam two days before election day?

[Hat tip Patriot Daily.]

(By Big Tent Democrat)

Today at 1 p.m. EST is the first of three Connecticut Senate Debstes with Ned Lamont, the Democrat candidate, Joe Lieberman, the de facto Republican candidate and Alan Schlesinger, the forlorn and abandoned Republican candidate.

If you are as interested in this race as I am, you'll want to tune in here and you can via the Internet if you are not in Connecticut.