Enron's former CFO Andrew Fastow caught a big break from the sentencing judge today. Instead of the ten year sentence he agreed to in his plea agreement, (pdf) the Judge granted him leniency and sentenced him to only six years.

As I wrote here about Bernie Ebbers (who entered prison today) and Scott Sullivan, there is something morally bankrupt about a system that allows a defendant who exercises his constitutional right to go to trial to get 25 years while a codefendant with greater or equal culpability who cooperates with the Government and tells the Government's truth at trial when testifying against that defendant gets five years.

Was Jeffrey Skilling, who faces a possible 185 years, but is likely to get far less, let's say 30 years, five times more culpable than Fastow? No. He was convicted with Fastow's testimony. purchased by the Government with promises of years of freedom.

The whole thing stinks.

A vote on the bill to build a 700 mile fence across 1/3 of the U.S. - Mexico border could come on Friday. That's because Sen. Bill Frist has attached the bill on detainee treatment to the border fence bill.

The Senate is likely to vote first on the detainee portions, and then take up the border bill.

If Democrats agree, the Senate would debate detainee treatment first and a vote on the border fence could happen Friday. Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said he believed he and Frist could work something out.

Several key Republicans remain opposed to the border bill. The Senate passed a version of it calling for 370 miles of fence, but the House didn't act on it. Instead, the House wants the Senate to pass its bill, H.R.6061.

What a colossal waste of money. Does Congress think it grows on trees? Let's forget about border bills and punitive immigration bills and enact more important legislation. Here is the Democrat's wish list:

In an about-face, President Bush today declared he will declassify the judgments of the NIE.

Once again, there's a leak out of our government, coming right down the stretch in this campaign, you know, to trade confusion in the minds of the American people, in my judgment, is why they leaked it. So I told the DNI to declassify this document. You can read it for yourself. We'll stop all of the speculation, all the politics, about someone saying something about Iraq, you know, somebody trying to confuse the American people about the nature of this enemy. And so John Negroponte, the DNI, is going to declassify the document as quickly as possible, declassify the key judgments for you to read yourself and he'll do so in such a way that he'll be able to protect sources and methods that our intelligence community uses. And then everybody can draw their own conclusions about what the report says. Thank you.

Really? As Glenn Greenwald writes at Salon,

by TChris

Remember when we were told that the war in Iraq would be an in-and-out job, over before we knew it ("It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months"), and that post-war reconstruction would be largely funded by the newly liberated country's oil revenues? It hasn't worked out that way.

In the latest sign of pressure on troop strength from violence in Iraq, the Pentagon said Monday that it has extended the combat tour of 4,000 U.S. soldiers, the second time in as many months that an Army brigade has seen its yearlong deployment lengthened.

Many share responsibility for the lies. Yesterday, the spotlight focused on the Secretary of Deceit, Donald Rumsfeld.

"I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq," retired Army Maj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste told a forum conducted by Senate Democrats.

by TChris

Judith Clark, a Weather Underground member charged with acting as a getaway driver in the 1981 robbery of an armored car that resulted in three deaths, asked to represent herself at her trial. When that request was granted, Clark refused to participate in the trial, sitting in her cell while the prosecution presented its case.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled yesterday that Clark is entitled to a new trial. It's one thing for a court to allow a defendant to represent herself, but quite another to allow a trial to go forward when the defendant's interests are completely unrepresented. Defendants are allowed to represent themselves only if they're capable of abiding by court rules, and Clark showed herself unable to follow the primary rule: show up for the trial.

Clark was sentenced in 1983 to 75 years in prison.

I love this article at Slate by Seth Stevenson, This is Your Ass on Drugs, evaluating one of the ads by the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, called Pete's Couch.

The spot: A high-school kid sits on a couch in a basement rec room, next to a couple of stoner friends. Looking straight at the camera, he says, "I smoked weed and nobody died. I didn't get into a car accident. I didn't OD on heroin the next day. Nothing happened. We sat on Pete's couch for 11 hours." The couch then magically teleports into the midst of some wholesome teen scenes (kids mountain biking, ice skating, playing basketball), while the zonked-out stoners just sit there, looking bored. Our narrator concedes that you're more likely to die out there in the real world ("driving hard to the rim" or "ice skating with a girl") than on Pete's couch back in the rec room. But, deciding it's worth the trade-off, he says, "I'll take my chances out there."

The point of the ad is to make it seem like kids who smoke pot are nothing but couch potato[e]s. As if because they hang out one day getting high, all of their days will be spent that way. Stevenson writes:

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

The scramble on the Right in the wake of the NIE Report that the Iraq Debacle has worsened the terrorism situation has led to some very strange contortions.

Michelle Malkin says:

If our intelligence agencies are laboring under the moonbat illusion that Muslim hatred of the infidel West didn't really start bubbling until the year 2003, we are really in deep, deep doo-doo.

So no "emboldening" by the Iraq Debacle says The Wild One. But James Joyner says:

[I]t's quite likely that an American withdrawal from Iraq without accomplishing the barest part of our mission-a reasonably stable, democratic society-would embolden the jihadists.

I see. So the Iraq Debacle could not possibly have embolden the terrorists (Malkin) but withdrawing from Iraq will embolden the terrorists (Joyner). This makes a much sense as the "safer but not safe" nonsense from Bush.

by TChris

The Justice Project reminds us that the president's attempt to strip detainees of their right to habeas corpus review is only the most visible Republican assault upon the Great Writ.

[O]ther members of the Republican leadership are trying to strip away this right for U.S. citizens convicted of crimes. With only days left before Congress adjourns for mid-term elections, some members of Congress continue to skirt regular order in an attempt to attach widely-criticized habeas repeal measures to unrelated legislation. While attempts to keep these unpopular measures off the DOD bill were initially unsuccessful, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is now insisting that a controversial "judiciary package" of crime legislation, which includes habeas-stripping measures, be attached to the DOD bill. We are also keeping an eye on another possible vehicle for the judiciary package -- the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, which is presently in conference and will likely be finalized in the coming days.

The details of the "judiciary package" are unclear, and Republicans appear to be tinkering with it among themselves. One of the most extreme proposals would insulate sentencing decisions from habeas review, permitting unconstitutional death sentences to escape correction by the federal courts. The package apparently incorporates elements of the dangerous Streamlined Procedures Act (more aptly known as the Kill 'Em Quicker Act), a bill that TalkLeft protested in posts collected here.

Via Josh Marshall,

We're hearing that Sen. Rockefeller, ranking member of the Senate intel committee, has just come out for declassifying and releasing the April NIE. We're trying to confirm.

Late Update: Confirmed.

Later Update: Hillary just came out for it too.

David Corn has more in his Nation column on why the NIE should be declassfied.

The immigration laws we have had on the books since 1996 are the toughest in 100 years. The last thing we need are more punitive ones.

Ask Gurdev Gill.

The expanding definition of an aggravated felony raises a troubling question: is the government's immigration policy of "one strike, you're out" tipping the scales of justice, and ruining people's lives? If ever there was someone symbolic of the American dream, it's Gurdev Gill.

The 1988 deportation law was changed in 1996.

This law as written in 1988 was meant to deport only felons who'd committed serious crimes like murder or drug trafficking. But in 1996 Congress broadened the law. And worse, they made it retroactive. Which means now immigration authorities can look back twenty, thirty, even forty years -- and virtually any minor offense, like drunk driving, even shoplifting, is enough to get a longtime resident deported.

The L.A. Times reports:

The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.

The Army's budget this year is $98,2 billion. Next year Schoomaker projects it will need a 41% increase to $138.8 billion. That's way too much money and just another reason we should start bringing troops home and let the Iraqis deal with their civil war. Without our unwanted intervention, they'll figure it out. Let's use the $98.2 billion budget money for reparations resulting from damage we've caused to Iraq and its citizens and for the medical, mental health and vocational benefits our returning vets surely will need instead of continuing to wage an unnecessary, futile war and cause more damage.

When do we admit Bush's vision of democracy in Iraq was a bad acid trip?

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

When we last heard comprehensively from Joe Lieberman on Iraq in December 2005, this is what he said:

Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do.

Thus Lieberman fully embraced the Bush plan for the Iraq Debacle, as he has since Day One. Today, after months of silence on Iraq, Lieberman, like Garbo, will talk: