I've barely been here since Wednesday, when news broke of John Mark Karr's arrest in the Jonbenet Ramsey murder case. I am the first to agree there are far more important and consequential events going on in the world. I sympathize with everyone who is frustrated and tired of the coverage.

I've been a television legal analyst for the last decade. I've commented on every development in the Ramsey case since the week Jonbenet was killed, nine and a half years ago. In other words, I'm part of the obsessive media coverage.

And therein lies a dilemma. Should I not write about things I'm interested in because readers don't share that interest?

Arianna has a good take on the obsessive news coverage of the Jonbenet Ramsey case:

the only people happier than the cable "news anchors" must be Bush, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld. When you've basically screwed up the world, and you're headed into a heated anti-incumbent election, it must be a gift from heaven to have a story that, essentially, shuts down the delivery of news.

Plus, we get to see -- again, and again, and again -- that footage of a heavily made-up adorable little girl lasciviously prancing around. Because it's news, right?

I'm watching Sen. John McCain on Meet the Press. David Gregory is the host. The topic is Iraq. He seems to be weaseling to me. He thinks Rumsfeld has done a poor job but won't call for his resignation. Serious mistakes have been made but he has confidence in the President.

He says Iraq is not in civil war, we can fix it. He backs the war. There should be no date set for withdrawal.

The difference between him and Bush is what?

In the truth is stranger than fiction department, as if things couldn't get any more bizarre in the coverage of suspect John Mark Karr in the Jonbenet Ramsey murder investigation, now comes this: Karr had made several visits to a sex-change clinic in Thailand.

Staff at the Pratunam Clinic, Thailand's top transgender center, said Saturday that John Mark Karr, 41, was a patient but wouldn't say how close he was to getting "sexual-reassignment" surgery. The disclosure came a day after it was discovered that Karr sought cosmetic surgeons' help changing his face in Bangkok. In his nine months there, he made 12 phone calls from his hotel room, nine to plastic surgeons.

... Two calls were to the Pratunam Clinic, which specializes in putting men under the knife to become "ladyboys," as they are called locally, and sponsors the annual World's Most Beautiful Transsexual competition. It charges $1,600 for the surgery, which could cost $25,000 in the West.

"Yes, he had treatment here," a representative said. "He was our patient. He came a number of times. But we cannot give out details on his treatment as we are ethically bound to keep these things private."

He's on his way back to the U.S. His plane will land in L.A. tonight.

Give me a ticket for an airplane,
Ain't got time to take a fast train.....

The Boxtops singing The Letter, 1967.

Note: Don't click the arrow in the picture, the video won't play. Click here instead.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The NSA wiretapping case decided Thursday; ACLU v. NSA, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 57338 (E.D. Mich. August 17, 2006); which was mentioned by me as a "resounding defeat" for the government, on the order of the Gitmo case; Hamdan v. Rumsfeld; is getting interesting play from President and the media.

The GOP rhetoric is starting to sound like "if you are for the Constitution, you are for the terrorists." How low can we sink?

by Last Night in Little Rock

Yesterday, President Bush signed into law a 907 page pension law that has a little known proviso: Anyone can inherit a 401(k) without paying taxes on it. Before, only spouses could do so. The LA Times has the story today:

A little-noticed provision in a pension law signed Thursday by President Bush will for the first time allow anyone to inherit a 401(k) nest egg without immediately paying taxes on the windfall, a benefit that in the past was reserved for spouses.

Gay advocates and other observers described the measure as a significant shift in how the government treats domestic partners who are not married, even though the provision was not written specifically for same-sex couples.

With this change, Congress is acknowledging that improvements can be made to our laws that address financial inequities and impediments that same-sex couples face," said James M. Delaplane Jr., an attorney and specialist on pension benefits. "There's no doubt about it."

The legal change is an obscure element in a new 907-page law affecting pensions and workplace-based retirement accounts. Proponents of the overall package hailed it as a long-sought effort to stabilize a system of retirement benefits that has grown porous. Many traditional pension plans are teetering on a base of shaky funding, and many companies are cutting back on future commitments.

"Americans who spend a lifetime working hard should be confident that their pensions will be there when they retire," Bush said as he signed the Pension Protection Act of 2006.

The obvious intent was to remove tax penalties and enable 401(k) holders to pass the corpus to anyone they wanted. Congress knew exactly what it was doing. This was in the works for three years.

by TChris

Our ever-defiant president intends to continue wielding unbounded and unchecked executive power, regardless of what a court tells him about the law, and if you don't like it, you're naive.

"I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live," Mr. Bush said in a question-answer session at Camp David, Md.

"This decision" refers to Judge Taylor's declaration that the NSA wiretapping program is unconstititutional (discussed here and here at TalkLeft). "Those who herald the decision" understand the Constitution and the obligation of the president to obey the law. It's really pretty simple.

The president resorted to his tired argument, "if Al Qaeda is calling into the United States, we want to know why they're calling." So do we. That's why we want the president to hasten to a FISA court and get a warrant that will help him intercept suspicious calls. His stubborn insistence that he don't need no stinkin' warrant has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with an unprecedented assertion of executive domination over the other -- supposedly coequal -- branches of government.

by TChris

Last year, TalkLeft noted the strange behavior of Oklahoma Judge Donald D. Thompson, who was pleasuring himself with a "male enhancement pump" during trials. Thompson was convicted last month of four counts of indecent exposure. He was sentenced today to four years in prison.

Was the sentence too stiff? (Pun intended. Hey, it's Friday.)

Lambert at CorrenteWire has a great post on the Michigan court's decision in the ACLU lawsuit challenging NSA warrantless surveillance. [Opinion text here pdf]

The good news: Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has courageously declared that Bush's warrantless program of domestic surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments, the separation of powers doctrine, and FISA, is not justified under the AUMF, and is not justified under the purported doctrine of "inherent authority."

Then, of course, there's not-so-good news:

Sorry everyone, I know there's a lot of news besides Jonbenet Ramsey, but I don't have time to cover it today or tonight. Here's a space for it.

The comments seem to be slower than ever today. It looks like I'm going to have to move TalkLeft to its own server. I'll do it over a weekend probably so there will be less downtime, but I'm as frustrated with the slowness as you are. I'm hesitant to double my hosting expenses but it seems there's no other solution. I was just told that one of the most popular blogs around with ten times TalkLeft's traffic but without comments has a database of 54 MG and TalkLeft's is 234MB -- and that's after I deleted the comments from 2002 through 2004. An alternative is to move to Drupal or something like that from Movable Type, but it would cost a fortune to have someone redesign and move the site and I don't have time to deal with that right now.

My schedule (all subject to change without notice, that's how it works and studio space is double-booked all over town today) : Tucker Carlson 4:30 ET, Catherine Crier (court tv) 5:30 pm, Paula Zahn, 8:00 ET, Hannity and Colmes.,9 pm. Then I'm done.

My Washington Post Chat transcript on the Ramseys (from the 9 News studio) is here.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The NSA's broad wiretapping program that sweeps into its purview non-terrorism suspects, including journalists, lawyers, and scholars, was declared unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the Eastern District of Michigan. The opinion appears here. It was a resounding defeat for the Bush Administration.

CNN.com summarizes as follows: