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:

For Francisco Javier Arellano Félix, alleged Mexican drug kingpin arrested today and the 130 arrested yesterday by the DEA:

The Wallflowers and Jordan Zevon (son of Warren) performing Lawyers, Guns and Money" on David Letterman.

If you blinked during the Joe Scarboro show tonight on MSNBC, you missed me. Too many guests, too little time. So here's my one minute (literally) clip - talking about the villification of the parents of JonBenet Ramsey:

I suspect this is the John Karr arrested in Thailand for the murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

Here's his bio which he posted on a website looking for a job:

• Marital Status: Single • Desired Teaching Level: Children
• Desired Pay Per Month: Not Specified
• Degree: Bachelor of Science at Regents College in New York
· Education
- Bachelor of Science at Regents College in New York
· Experience
- Seoul, Korea: I was a classroom teacher of English for children aged 6 to 12. Duties included planning lessons, conducting classes as the sole teacher in the classroom, making assignments, and issuing grades. I taught 22 classes per week. The classes were 45 minutes in duration with an average class size of 18.

by Last Night in Little Rock

This is the text of a letter I e-mailed this evening to NBC at NBCiQuestions@nbcuni.com, per their website, asking Jay Leno to apologize to the Ramseys. Too bad Patsy Ramsey is not alive to hear it, if it ever comes:

by Last Night in Little Rock

As our Constitution and civil liberties are slipping from our grasp, we see that Attorney General Gonzalez on Monday ordered "ordered a side-by-side review of American and British counterterrorism laws as a first step toward determining whether further changes in American law are warranted." If you hated the USA PATRIOT Act, you will detest this.

Newly revised British counterterrorism laws, for instance, allow the authorities to hold a suspect for 28 days without charges, where American law generally requires that a suspect held in the civilian court system be charged or released within 48 hours.

The Northern Ireland terrorism courts have a three judge panel that acts like an international tribunal. The rules of evidence are seriously relaxed, there are no "constitutional protections," and suspects can be detained for lengthy periods without being charged. Britain has also enacted similar laws for the current terrorism threat.

General Gonzalez seems to have forgotten that we are in the United States, and we operate under a Constitution, along with its Bill of Rights, which were designed, in 1789 and 1791, respectively, to distance and protect us from the abuses of Eighteenth Century England. Whatever happened in the 225 years since, Twenty-first Century England may be regressing. Without a Bill of Rights, not much protects British citizens from arrests and detention without proof of probable cause. Their rights are purely statutory.

On CNN this morning I heard that the airliner bombing plot suspects were in a closed courtroom for a video appearance today to extend their incarcerations without being yet being charged with a crime. [Note: Nothing on CNN.com about this yet.]

Maybe Gonzalez will call this PATRIOT 3.0 and see if they can get it through the Republican led Congress before the 2006 election.

I think the flight diversion to Boston of the London plane bound for Washington will turn out to be no big deal, and not related to a terror threat:

Naccara said he did not believe any items she was carrying were the cause of the outburst. An airport spokesman, Phil Orlandella, previously confirmed broadcast reports that the woman was carrying Vaseline, a screw driver, matches and a note referring to al-Qaida, but backed off the statement. Naccara said it wasn't true.

``I don't know what she had on board with her, but we have been told she did not have a screw driver, she did not have any liquids such as Vaseline, and any notebook she may have had, it did not contain an al-Qaida reference,'' Naccara said. ``This is still playing out, of course.'' ``There was speculation in the beginning of all those items, but those have been proven untrue,'' he said. He said he had no information about matches.

A CBS video is here.

by TChris

With the ceasefire apparently holding (for now) in Lebanon, attention can return to Iraq, where gunfire has not ceased, and where daily killings are in fact increasing. The country is no longer at risk of a civil war; it's embroiled in one.

July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, reinforcing criticism that the Baghdad security plan started in June by the new government has failed.

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. ... The rising numbers suggested that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control, and seemed to bolster an assertion many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have made in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.

by Last Night in Little Rock

New Jersey's Attorney General Zulima Farber resigned Tuesday over an ethics complaint investigated by a special prosecutor as reported in the NY Times and on CNN.com. The picture on the NY Times website seems particularly telling.

The Attorney General of New Jersey is a unique appointed position of great power over the state's entire law enforcement mechanicism, which makes the alleged transgression appear worse than it might have been. But, in politics, appearance is reality.