From the ACLU (received by e-mail):

[N]ext week Congress returns from recess, and at the top of their agenda is passing legislation that would attempt to retroactively legitimize President Bush's unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program. Two similar bills are slated to be marked up in, and possibly voted out of, committee next week - Rep. Wilson's H.R.5825 in House Judiciary on Wednesday, September 6, and Sen. Specter's S.2453 in Senate Judiciary on Thursday, September 7.

As part of our effort to spread the word about these bills and the danger they pose to civil liberties, I'm asking for your help. My goal is to get as many people as possible talking about NSA next week, especially on Wednesday, September 6.

Bloggers can help get this issue back into the national consciousness. Here's how.

Some good news out of Hawaii today. The Hawaii Supreme Court has held that an employer can't fire an employee just because of a past criminal conviction. There must be a rational relationship between the conviction and the job duties.

The high court overturned a lower court decision Wednesday that threw out an anti-discrimination complaint filed by Jon S. Logan Wright in April 2004. In it he claimed the Kahului Home Depot fired him after a background check conducted more than a year after he began working revealed he had a 1996 Nevada drug conviction. In that case he served no jail time and was placed on probation, which ended in November 1997.

Logan had passed numerous drug tests showing he was clean.

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Yesterday I wrote about President Bush's citing General John Abizaid as saying "If we withdraw before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here." And in fact, General Abizaid said something much different. It is indeed a fascinating read about Abizaid from March 2005 on many levels. Specifically on what Bush discussed though, I want to excerpt at some length from two discussions Gen. Abizaid had with soldiers in Iraq:

Capt. John Benoit, an artilleryman from the Louisiana National Guard, looked Gen. John Abizaid squarely in the eye and asked bluntly: How's the war going? . . . The insurgency, Abizaid acknowledged, has grown worse over the past year. [Remember this was March 2005!!] There's no defensiveness on that point, though, as he segues into a discussion of why the insurgents--particularly the radical Islamists--must be confronted. "What we can't allow to happen is guys like Abu Musab Zarqawi to get started," Abizaid told Benoit and the soldiers of the 1-141 Field Artillery. "It's the same way that we turned our back when Hitler was getting going and Lenin was getting going. You just cannot turn your back on these types of people. You have to stand up and fight."

. . . A day after he met with the Louisiana guardsmen, Abizaid flew to Al Anbar province to bid goodbye to Maj. Gen. John Sattler before his force is replaced with a new rotation of marines. Generals across Iraq have been talking about the need to have Iraqi forces take on an increased role in fighting insurgents. On the wall of the marines' conference room hangs a sign quoting Lawrence of Arabia. "Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly," it reads in part. "It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them . . . . " Abizaid drove home the same point. "The hardest thing your successors need to do is take their hand off the wheel. What we have to do is set the Iraqis in front to fight the insurgency," he told the marines. "The insurgency will go on long past the time we are gone."

How would the insurgency go on if the insurgents follow us home? It would not of course. Abizaid did not mean what Bush means. Yet again the President of the United States chooses to lie to the American People. It is now old hat. But Abizaid is an interesting figure and there is more to discuss about his statements. I'll do so in extended copy.

Keith Longtin spent 8 months in jail after police interrogated him for 38 hours and got him to falsely confess to murdering his wife. A Prince George County, Va MD. jury has awarded him $6.8 million in damages.

Longtin, now 50, was released from jail only after DNA evidence found in his slain wife was matched with a serial rapist. The sexual offender was later convicted of the murder.

The Circuit Court jury awarded $5.2 million in compensatory damages to Longtin. It also leveled punitive damages of nearly $1.2 million against four county homicide detectives -- one of whom is retired -- who, the jury found, violated Longtin's civil rights.

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens' son, Ben Stevens, was one of the state legislators whose office was searched by the FBI Thursday looking for evidence of improper links between the legislators and VECO Corp., an oil field services company and

Federal agents raided the offices of at least six Alaska lawmakers Thursday in a search for any ties between the legislators and a large oil field services company, officials said.

Tam Cook, the Legislature's top attorney, said the company named in the search warrant was VECO Corp., an Anchorage-based oil field services and construction company whose executives are major contributors to political campaigns. Two legislative aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from federal agents who told them not to talk to reporters, said FBI agents were looking for any ties including financial information and gifts.

Here's who got searched:

The Chicago Tribune today credits and praises "pork-busting bloggers" with outing Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and W. Va. Senator Robert Byrd as the anonymous senators blocking a bill that would establish a database showing how the Government spends our tax dollars.

Sponsored by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the measure would create a searchable online database of federal grants and contracts. An unnamed senator (or senators, as it turned out) was blocking that bill from coming to the floor. Under an arcane Senate rule, any member who has concerns about a bill can block it--anonymously. Party leaders know the blocker's identity but don't have to tell anyone, even the bill's sponsor.

Porkbusters, a group of bipartisan bloggers, went on the warpath. They asked bloggers to contact their senators and ask outright if they were one of the anonymous blockers of the bill. 98 Senators said "no." That left Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd, both of whom eventually 'fessed up.

This is so funny....a caller into the Michelangelo Signorile radio show provides his impromptu reaction (mp3) to seeing President Bush's motorcade passing through Little Rock yesterday.

by TChris

What to think of Michael Brown? His job with the Arabian Horse Association didn't work out, and only cronyism can explain his appointment to manage FEMA. Brown seemed less informed about conditions in New Orleans than CNN viewers, and more interested in fine dining than in the grueling work of disaster relief.

After being thrown overboard by the president who assured him he was doing a heck of a job, Brown worked hard to rehabilitate his image, with some success. Many of his criticisms of the Bush administration are justified, and the monumental failure of the federal response to Katrina cannot rest on Brown's shoulders alone. Still, there's little doubt that "Michael Brown was completely in over his head in running a federal agency and dealing with an actual disaster," and it's fair to argue that he "can't bring himself to actually take responsibility for his own failures."

A new series, "AIR: America's Investigative Reports," takes another look at Michael Brown, exposing "a pattern of Brownie's incompetence that merely foreshadowed the breathtaking malfeasance to come."

by TChris

For more than a hundred years, veterans desiring to pursue disability claims haven't been able to hire a lawyer to bring those claims -- unless they can find one who will work for $10 or less. The Department of Veterans Affairs' legislative director wants to keep it that way. He says a proposed change in the law, allowing lawyers to be paid for helping veterans win disability claims, "sends the wrong message to our brave troops fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere -- that they need to hire an attorney to obtain the benefits a grateful nation has provided." Of course, if DVA gratefully paid disability claims, disabled veterans wouldn't need lawyers, making it difficult to understand why DVA would oppose the change.

Here's why it might be helpful for a veteran to have a lawyer fighting to win benefits from DVA:

On Aug. 16, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims rendered a 31-page decision in a veteran appeal which determined that the Department of Veteran Affairs has been unlawfully denying presumptive disability compensation for exposure to Agent Orange for service members who served in the waters offshore of Vietnam and earned the Vietnam Service Medal.

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

President Bush repeated today that:

"If we withdraw before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here,'' Bush said, attributing the line to Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

Two things. Who's they? And did Abizaid really say that? I seriously doubt it. I think that is another Bush lie.

Why would the Al Sadr's Mehdi army follow "us" home? Or the Badr Brigade? Or the Sunni insurgents? Why would these "terrorists" follow us home? As I understand it, the violence in Iraq is sectarian in nature. Why some folks believe Iraq is in a civil war. So, according to Bush, the "terrorists" will interrupt the violence in Iraq in order to follow us home? Does that make sense?

Well, General John Abizaid DID say this (as I stated before, I do not believe Abizaid said what Bush says he said):

I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war," Gen. John Abizaid testified at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Bush is a moron and a liar. He is capable of saying stupidities like Bush's line. Abizaid, to now, has not shown himself to be that. I think Bush should stand bravely by his own stupidities without trying to foist them on General Abizaid.

Be careful what you do with your old cell phone when you upgrade to a new one. Even if you think you have deleted your e-mails and text messages, you haven't.

Selling your old phone once you upgrade to a fancier model can be like handing over your diaries. All sorts of sensitive information pile up inside our cell phones, and deleting it may be more difficult than you think.

A popular practice among sellers, resetting the phone, often means sensitive information appears to have been erased. But it can be resurrected using specialized yet inexpensive software found on the Internet.

Happily, I never caught the Crackberry addiction and don't even own one. Nor do I e-mail or text message on my cell phone. Even so, after reading this article, I'm glad I've never sold an old cell phone or computer. Better to dismantle them and destroy their innards.

by TChris

Christine Wilhelm drowned her son in a bathtub, and tried to drown her other son. Common sense might cause one to wonder whether this behavior was the product of mental illness, but it was only after Wilhelm's convictions were reversed last week (decision in pdf here) that the prosecutor, Patricia DeAngelis, said that she is "considering the possibility of giving a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity." What took so long?

Wilhelm has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic but DeAngelis had pressed for a 50 year to life prison sentence and denied her mental health treatment.

This columnist notes that many have criticized DeAngelis for "getting convictions at all costs."