Jane at Firedoglake reports that according to Hardball, the grand jury is meeting today in the Valerie Plame leaks investigation.

Will Rove be indicted? I think that comes next week. But stay glued to the news, and FDL for updates.

From Full Court Press:

On May 5, 2006, the Eleventh Circuit issued a split, 2-1 decision denying asylum to a Colombian woman who, because of her political work, had been on the receiving end of menacing phone calls, a death threat note and gunfire. Previously filibustered, formerly recess-appointed, highly controversial Bush II pick Bill Pryor authored the majority opinion over a stinging dissent by Bush I appointee Ed Carnes.

Despite the growing evidence that immigration courts have been falling down on the job, the Eleventh Circuit has never - yes, never - reversed an immigration court's refusal to grant political asylum. In Luz Marina Silva's case, Judge Carnes felt the time had come. Unfortunately for Ms. Silva, Judges Pryor and Frank Hull (a Clinton appointee who regularly joins the court's most conservative wing) thought otherwise.

I have just received the May 5 hearing transcript in the Scooter Libby case (thanks to reporter Jason Leopold for sharing it with me.) I haven't yet read it, so you can have first takes.

Update: Christy of Firedoglake weighs in here and here . Empty Wheel includes her thoughts in her post about Cheney. Tom Maguire also has a detailed analysis.

7:00 pm Thursday evening

I'm inside the movie theatre at Denver Pavillions waiting for Al Gore's new movie on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, to begin screening any moment now. Al Gore will be holding a Q and A session right afterwards. My seat is great, thanks to Mania TV and Special OPs Media -- a blogger press pass.

It's starting, I'll live blog the q and a session as soon as the movie's over.

*********
Movie over, exellent. I highly recommend it. It's a lot of Gore, he is the movie, but there are excellent graphics and he makes global warming understandable. I know less than nothing about the topic and I came away with some understanding. The use of cartoons in the movie was a great idea, even I could understand those. The scenes of Antartica and Alaska and Mount Kilminjaro were particularly powerful as were the Katrina scenes.

The feel-good story of the day...and do we ever need one.

He was serving a life sentence for a murder he did not commit and was ready to end it all. But [Christopher]Ochoa didn't follow through. And on Friday, he will have a new life awaiting him when he graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School -- the same institution that rescued him from his worst nightmare.

....Ochoa, who grew up in El Paso, hopes to one day become a prosecutor so he can control investigations. He calls American justice the best system in the world, but says corrupt investigators and prosecutors have broken it.

Ochoa was the first person exonerated by the Wisconsin Innocence Project. His confession was coerced, and someone else later confessed to the crime. DNA also proved him innocent.

Larisa at Raw Story reports that two aircraft carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Enterprise are headed to the Middle East and Western Pacific. The USS Ronald Reagan is positioned in the Gulf.

Larisa reports the U.S. could be gearing up for air strikes in Iran, possibly in June.

Leaks are coming out on a second round of DNA tests. Reports are that DNA from a third player "is consistent with" DNA found on tissue under a fingernail in the trash.

Even if true, it doesn't establish a rape. It could have happened from contact during a scuffle over the money, or during a lap dance while she was dancing. It could have been a secondary transfer. The players have said the accuser was painting her nails in the bathroom. Nails were found in the living room where the dancing occurred.

President Bush gave a commencement address in Mississippi today. On the NSA phone records collection, he said:

"We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans," Bush said before leaving for a commencement address at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College in Biloxi.

The transcript is here.

Right -- as if anyone is going to believe him. The ACLU is calling for a full investigation of the NSA data-mining of phone records.

TPMmuckraker writes:

Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) have put out a statement questioning the legality of the program. Their statement contains this: "when the Attorney General was forced to testify before the House Judiciary Committee a few weeks ago, he misled the Committee about the existence of the program."

They are referring to Gonzales' April 6 hearing testimony (pdf) and his answers to questions posed by Rep. Gerald Nadler.

There is much more going on than even the massive datamining discussed in USA Today. The NSA domestic phone record spying program was largely outed by a whistleblower, Mark Klein, who worked at AT&T.

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.

The ACLU's lawsuit against Bush's NSA warrantless surveillance program is set for hearing in federal court in Michigan on June 12. Today, the organization announced that 72 members of Congress, led by Rep. John Conyers, have filed a friend of court brief. The ACLU reports (press release, will be online soon here):

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, seeks a court order declaring that the NSA spying is illegal and ordering its immediate and permanent halt.

The disclosure that the National Security Agency has been collecting and analyzing phone records of tens of millions of Americans has struck a chord. Here are some of the reactions, and some of the reasons this is such a big deal.

From Jim Harper, Cato Institute's director of information policy studies and a member of the Department of Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee (not online yet, received by e-mail):

• "It flies in the face of Fourth Amendment principles that call for reasonableness or probable cause. It is not reasonable to monitor every American's phone calling in a search for terrorists.

• The program was not authorized by Congress and it flies in the face of Congress' intent when it de-funded the Total Information Awareness program because of concerns about the privacy consequences of 'data mining.'