I watched Hardball's interview with Michael Brown tonight. I was impressed. I'm going to join Jane and Moderate Voice and Taylor Marsh and say apologies are due him and I regret my criticism of him during Katrina.

On Hardball, Brown was confident and direct in answering the questions. His biggest beef is with HSA Chief Michael Chertoff. When asked to rank his own performance, Brown gave himself a 5. He also gave Bush a 5 (too high in my opinion, but it's probably out of loyalty.) He gave Chertoff a 2.

Michael Brown was a scapegoat for the Administration.

Sorry, Mr. Brown, I was was wrong about you.

Update: Michael Brown responds to Jane here in FDL's comments.

LA Police Chief Bill Bratton has joined the effort to reform three-strikes laws in California by requiring the third strike to be a serious or violent crime.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who is pushing a ballot initiative to soften the tough law, said at a news conference Thursday that he had won the chiefs' backing....Cooley has long criticized the breadth of the state's law, which sometimes results in sentences of 25 years to life for those whose third strikes were nonviolent or minor crimes. His ballot initiative, coauthored with defense lawyer Brian Dunn, would limit third strikes in most cases to violent or serious offenses.

Bratton, through a spokesman, called the proposal "a balanced approach that will benefit the criminal justice system without jeopardizing public safety."

The reform would be via a ballot initiative put to California's voters in November. This is good for Bratton and good for Californians. The voters passed three-strikes in 1994, and likely never intended it to be used to impose life sentences on those whose third strikes were minor shoplifting type offenses.

Faced with a court order, the U.S. has finally released the names of hundreds of detainees held at Guantanamo.

Human rights activists say this new information should make it easier to piece together the personal histories of the detainees - and for the first time to build a big picture of who is held at the camps, and why they are there.

What the documents do not do is shed light on speculation that there are other prisoners, known as "ghost" detainees, at the camp. If a prisoner at the camp has not had a CSRT they will not feature in the transcripts.

For more news on the detainees and some personal profiles, visit Caged Prisoners.

Former Congressman Randy Cunningham was sentenced to 8 years in prison today for his bribery and corruption misdeeds.

Another life ruined by greed. Josh Marshall has highlights of the Government's sentencing memorandum here. The defense response is here (pdf.)

My view: The sentence is too long. He's 65 and broke and not in great health. Five years would have accomplished the same thing in terms of punishment and deterrence. With 8, he'll probably die in prison. Abramoff probably will get no more than five years. There's really no comparison.

Last Night in Little Rock's view: Agreed. But, all signs point to the sentence being leverage to get him to roll over on somebody else and getting a sentence reduction. Katherine Harris would look good in khaki. (AOL via HuffPo.)

by Last Night in Little Rock

Like an episode of "The Shield" or "Training Day", both set in Los Angeles, 19 former police officers have been charged with robbing drug houses while acting as police officers according to AP this morning.

Say hello to Centcomm, the official U.S. Central Command website. Central Command is the major combat command that covers U.S. military operations in most of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. It provides news/press releases, images and casualty reports from the CENTCOM area of responsibility, including anti-terrorism activities.

When reporting on government activities, it's helpful to get their side of the story, especially since I tend to opine so much on why they are wrong or where they are being less than candid.

Also, say hello to Up Against the Law, it's much more my style.

I'll be gone the rest of the afternoon, so here's an open thread.

I agree with Aaron Brown. The priorities of cable news networks have become too skewed in favor of the sensational. With soldiers being killed overseas, our government passing more Patriot Act legislation and other laws that don't make us safer, only less free, who wants to hear about another celebrity shooting or more from Natalie Holloway's mother? I think the Holloway case is the best example right now. Why does this mother get air time night after night to talk about her missing daughter? She continues to impugn the reputation of Joran van der Sloot, who has not been charged with a crime. Now Joran is fighting back, taking to the airwaves himself. What is newsworthy about any of this?

Back to Aaron Brown:

by Last Night in Little Rock

Pat Robertson was defeated for re-election to the Board of National Religious Broadcasters. His spin was that he was too busy to attend but one meeting in 30 years anyway, and his departure was amicable. On AOL News, however, it was noted that there were 33 vacancies and 38 candidates, and he was running for re-election.

Apparently the membership was tired of his antics:

NRB President Frank Wright said there was no broad effort to distance the group from Robertson. But ''there was broad dismay with some of Pat's comments and a feeling they were not helpful to Christian broadcasters in general,'' he said in Wednesday's Washington Post. In the past few months, Robertson suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez should be assassinated and that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine punishment for pulling out of the Gaza Strip.

A 19 page affidavit (pdf) by Patrick Fitzgerald was unsealed today in the Scooter Libby case. It appears that Bob Woodward may have tape-recorded his conversation with his source because the affidavit refers to a transcript of the conversation.

The affidavit also makes it pretty clear that Woodward's source and Novak's as-yet unidentified source are the same. Editor and Publisher reports:

Woodward suddenly revealed late last year that he had talked with Libby as well as another unnamed government official about CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joe Wilson. Earlier, columnist Robert Novak had also said he had an unnamed second source.

One paragraph in Thursday's filing, NBC reported, indicates that the unnamed official spoke both with Woodward and Novak, and "Libby has been given a redacted transcript of the conversation between Woodward and [redacted] and Novak has published an account briefly describing the conversation with his first confidential source [redacted]."

This software program sounds a little scary.....

For companies like ConAgra, the individual opinions blasted out in cyberspace are becoming an increasingly powerful force. Together, they form the fabric of online word of mouth that can determine the hottest new product, make or break a TV show, or set off a customer revolt. Eager to tap into the buzz, a growing number of companies are turning to sophisticated new technologies that track what's said on Internet social networks, blogs, message boards, product review sites, "listservs" -- wherever people congregate publicly online.

The companies are very interested in what commenters on blogs and message boards have to say:

Murray Waas breaks yet another story today. President Bush has not been truthful with Americans about the information he received about Iraq and WMDs.

Two highly classified intelligence reports delivered directly to President Bush before the Iraq war cast doubt on key public assertions made by the president, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, according to records and knowledgeable sources.

The first report, delivered to Bush in early October 2002, was a one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate report [that]....stated that the Energy Department and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research believed that the [aluminum] tubes were "intended for conventional weapons," a view disagreeing with that of other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which believed that the tubes were intended for a nuclear bomb.

This is pretty ground-breaking stuff, read the whole thing. Reddhedd analyzes Waas' article here.

As expected, the Senate today voted to pass the Patriot Act renewal legislation, including the Meth bill and new death penalty offenses. Ten Democrats voted against it. Send them your thanks.

The ``no'' votes came from Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., and Feingold, Byrd and seven other Senate Democrats: Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Carl Levin of Michigan, Patty Murray of Washington and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

The House will pass it next week and then it goes to Bush for his signature.