Update: Bernie pleads guilty. More details here in the New York Times.

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Former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was nominated by Bush to be Homeland Security Chief after being recommended for the job by his pal Rudy Giuliani, will plead guilty Friday to two misdemeanors for failing to report gifts from contractors. The contractors are alleged to have ties to organized crime.

At today's proceeding, Mr. Kerik is expected to acknowledge that while serving as correction commissioner, he paid only a fraction of the cost of a $200,000 renovation to his Bronx apartment that was started in 1999 by associates of the contractor, Interstate Industrial.

Detailed background on the allegations against Kerik is here. Unanswered questions will remain after Kerik pleads guilty today, particularly about how much Rudy knew about Kerik's closeness to the company when he appointed Kerik to the Police Commissioner job in 2000. The Times reports:

Police chiefs of some of the country's largest cities are complaining that Homeland Security is not living up to its promise to share terror-related information with them. It's causing a "growing rift" and some departments are threatening to pull out of the HSA program.

In a report released this week, the homeland-security department's inspector general, Richard Skinner, said that the department's computer network designed to pool information on terrorist threats for police and other federal agencies has been ignored by many of its intended users.

The Homeland Security Information Network, or HSIN, was set up to share secret information with as many as 600 federal, state and local agencies at a cost of $337 million. The department described it as its "backbone" for dealing with national emergencies and terrorist threats. But the report found that officials across the country "are confused and frustrated, without clear guidance on [the network's] role or how to use the system to share information effectively."

Ryan McFaddan, the Duke lacrosse player who sent an offensive e-mail after the party at which the accuser says she was raped, has been reinstated. Details about the e-mail are here.

Also, the county commissioner pondering a run against DA Nifong has gathered the necessary signatures to make it onto the ballot.

This is too funny. Think Progress has the video of Sen. Trent Lott on Fox News with Neil Cavuto today. Lott blasts the Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumseld and then admits he hasn't finished reading it.

LOTT: I think some people are probably laughing at us. This is ridiculous and outrageous. Now in legal speak, let me say, I have not read the entire opinion, nor the dissents. But preliminarily my opinion is they probably didn't even have jurisdiction. They shouldn't have ruled the way they did. This is not a bunch of pussycats we're talking about here. These are people that have made it clear in many instances that they would kill Americans if they got out. This is Osama bin Laden's driver. And this is one other example of why the American people have lost faith in so much of our federal judiciary. This is a very bad decision in my opinion.

The only Senator to speak about the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld today was Dick Durbin (D-IL.) Here is his statement and a snippet:

Today, the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration and for James Madison and for the rule of law. Here is what Justice Anthony Kennedy said: "Concentration of power (in the executive branch) puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an incursion the Constitution's three-part system is designed to avoid."

This is a historic decision -- a decision that reminds this President and every President to come that they must answer first to the Constitution of the United States. It says to President Bush and all of those who promulgated these policies that they must answer to our Constitution.

Let's hope our Imperial President takes note.

Update: The New York Times calls the decision "the most significant rebuff to date to President Bush. In a nutshell,

Justice Stevens declared flatly that "the military commission at issue lacks the power to proceed because its structure and procedure violate" both the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs the American military's legal system, and the Third Geneva Convention.The majority opinion rejected the administration's claims that the tribunals were justified both by President Bush's inherent powers as commander in chief and by the resolution passed by Congress authorizing the use of force after the Sept. 11. There is nothing in the resolution's legislative history "even hinting" that such an expansion of the president's powers was considered, he wrote.

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The Supreme Court has ruled Bush's military tribunals at Guantanmo are illegal. The opinion is here (pdf).

The ruling, a strong rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and international Geneva conventions.

The vote was split 5-3, with moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the court's liberal members in most of the ruling against the Bush administration. Chief Justice John Roberts, named to the lead the court last September by Bush, was sidelined in the case because as an appeals court judge he had backed the government over Hamdan. Thursday's ruling overturned that decision.

This is just crazy. A New Orleans judge sentenced three people who looted liquor from a grocery store after Hurrican Katrina to 15 years in prison, saying he wanted to send a message.

They were convicted of attempting to leave the grocery with 27 bottles of liquor and wine, six cases of beer and one case of wine coolers, six days after Katrina made landfall. Little, McGowen and Pearson each testified that they were not looting, but they offered conflicting accounts of matters such as who drove to the store.

The looting law under which they were convicted had been in effect for two weeks. Compare their sentence to the year these men got for bribing a federal official in the aftermath of Katrina.

This could be the best news I've read all day. Indonesia is about to agree to a prisoner exchange treaty with Australia that might allow Schapelle Corby to finish serving her 20 year jail sentence for importing 9 pounds of marijuana into Bali, a crime she denied committing, in her native Australia. Last May, Bali said a transfer would not be considered.

It's not a "go" yet. First, the transfer treaty would have to be retroactive and cover past offenses. It's not clear that it will. Second, Schapelle might prefer to do her time in Bali.

This is a classic, and reading the news about the possible transfer of Schappelle Corby and some of the Bali 9 heroin smugglers from the hellhole of Kerobokan prison in Bali to one in Australia, it just popped into my mind.

So baby, here's your ticket, put the suitcase in your hand
Here's a little money now, do it just the way we planned
You be cool for twenty hours and I'll pay you twenty grand

....It's a losing proposition, But one you can't refuse
It's the politics of contraband, It's the smuggler's blues

By the way, the blond in the video is Glenn Frey's ex-wife, Janie Beggs, a really cool lady.

Larger video version here.

As the Administration puts out more spin on detainee suicides, the reality is that these suicides are acts of despair, not acts of war.

Many of these men, uncharged of any crime, have reported that they've been told that they will never get out. Aziz does not know if he will survive what he calls this "compulsory, slow execution."

Still, many detainees also believe that there is some moral impulse that will push the American people to action. They thought that starving themselves will make people pay attention. They thought that telling the humiliating and painful stories of torture or abuse will outrage us. Perhaps now they think that their dying will make us finally acknowledge what our country is doing. Instead, we allow ourselves to be told that these deaths were an act of war and not even give it a second thought.

In the mail today: Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power by Joseph Margulies, lead counsel in Rasul v. Bush in which the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to judicial review.

Scotus Blog reports the Supreme Court did not issue a decison in the Hamdan case today. But, it issued two decisions unfavorable to criminal defendants.

In a ruling written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., the Court concluded that states may bar foreign nationals from raising the issue of their treaty rights to talk with a consular officer , if they did not raise that issue at trial. The Court majority said that the outcome was dictated by the Court's 1998 summary decision in Breard v. Greene. The Court did not resolve the issue of whether individuals could sue to enforce the consular rights treaty, the Vienna
Convention.

In a 5-3 ruling, the Court decided that prison officials may deny newspapers, magazines and photographs to their most dangerous inmates. The plurality opinion by Justice Stephen G. Breyer upheld such a ban. Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., took no part. He had dissented when the Third Circuit struck down the ban.

President Bush rabel-rouses and calls the actions of the New York Times, in writing about the secret Operation Swift program that used national security letters to obtain records relate to international banking transactions, "disgraceful." Conservatives are rallying to his cry.

Who's sticking up for the Times?

Froomkim is a must read.

As far as I can tell, all these disclosures do is alert the American public to the fact that all this stuff is going on without the requisite oversight, checks and balances. How does it possibly matter to a terrorist whether the government got a court order or not? Or whether Congress was able to exercise any oversight? The White House won't say. In fact, it can't say. By contrast, it does matter to us.

This column has documented, again and again , that when faced with a potentially damaging political problem, White House strategist Karl Rove's response is not to defend, but to attack.

Arianna who has hardly been a pal to the Times this year comes out strongly in its camp: