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.

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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.'

by TChris

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility wondered what role Justice Department lawyers played in assisting the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of Americans. OPR wanted to learn whether Justice Department lawyers broke any laws or otherwise behaved unethically, but the National Security Agency refused to give OPR's lawyers the security clearances they would need to learn about the program. (Any lawyer who investigates an administration program is apparently regarded as too disloyal to merit a security clearance.) Stymied, OPR closed its inquiry.

Any meaningful investigation will have to come from a legislature that has been loathe to expose any of the Bush administration's misconduct.

"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said [Rep. Maurice] Hinchey.

Yes it is. And it's up to the rest of us to vote for legislators who have the courage to do so.

USA Today reports that the National Security Agency has been collecting billions of domestic home, business and cell phone records on tens of millions of Americans, obtaining the records from phone companies.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans -- most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

There's more information here:

Update: The Washington Post obtained the logs at the same time as Judicial Watch. It has done some digging and found:

An administration source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation said that at the March [6] 2001 meeting, Abramoff asked to have two people placed at the Interior Department, but that Rove declined to get involved and referred him to the White House personnel operation.

Abramoff's [January 20] 2004 meeting was with an Office of Management and Budget official who had been blocking his efforts to secure use of the Old Post Office Building for a development project. The official, Steve McMillan, continued to refuse to accommodate him in the meeting, the source said.

Original Post:

Judicial Watch has published the logs (pdf) of Jack Abramoff's entry into the White House. (News article here.) Two times over the years. What a bust.

Raw Story notes that one of the days coincides with the day Bush nominated Patrick Pizzella, an Abramoff associate as Assistant Labor Secretary.