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:

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.