Here's an open thread to get your weekend rolling.

As for me, I just loved reading Diane Keaton's post on Huffpo about turning 60. I hope I have her attitude when I get there. From Annie Hall, Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Reds through Something's Gotta Give, she has always been one of my very favorite actresses.

And here's John Conyers on the Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance program (received by e-mail.)

Danny Glover has a three part series in the National Journal (available free) on the rise of political blogs and their influence. It really covers the whole spectrum, and I recommend reading all three parts including the interviews with Arianna and Henry Copeland of Blogads.

High-profile Allegheny county coroner Cyril Wecht has been indicted on 84 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud and related offenses arising from his alleged use of government resources to benefit his private practice.

FBI agents searched his office, seizing computers and his private files last spring, and three of his employees resigned as the federal investigation proceeded.

Wecht... has said he is careful to not do private work on county time. He also has said he has never been questioned about the private consulting work he has done for the decades he has held a government job.

....Wecht, who is also an attorney, teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University. He did not immediately return messages seeking comment Friday.

Marty Lederman at Balkanization thinks it may be fruitless to get a special counsel appointed to investigate Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program. But, he has another possible solution:

My friend David Barron has come up with the simple but ingenious idea that Congress should vote for a statute that would confer statutory standing on certain persons to file a cause of action in federal court seeking declaratory relief that the NSA program is unlawful -- say, for example, persons who have a reasonable basis for claiming that they are chilled by the spying program because their employment regularly requires them to make overseas calls in connection with academic or journalistic work related to the war on terrorism.

That way, the Supreme Court could resolve the question. Of course, the President could veto such a bill. But I think there'd be some chance of an override (see, e.g., the overwhelming majorities for the McCain Amendment); and, in any event, presumably such a veto would be politically dicey.

There's more at David Barron's blog, Law and Culture.

The ruckus over Bush's signing statement attached to the McCain anti-torture amendment continues. 22 high-ranking former military officers have written a letter to President Bush asking him to enforce the amendment.

When U.S. President George W. Bush in December signed the law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees championed by Sen. John McCain R-Ariz., he did so with a caveat: As commander-in-chief, he can waive the limits when he deems necessary for national security.

The generals and admirals who signed the letter Thursday, including a former four-star commander of Central Command, said the issue is less about the detainees as it is about the values that the military holds dear.

by Last Night in Little Rock

bin Laden yesterday may have given George Bush his latest Presidential Daily Briefing via Al-Jazeerah about more possible attacks on the U.S. Will the U.S. step up "security against terrorism"? Who knows. We didn't the first time.

This time we might, but for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways. One need only look at the PATRIOT Act and what the government has done with it. Who would have imagined five years ago we'd even be having this discussion?

Now, the government has yet another excuse to take away more of its citizens' civil liberties. And that is where the terrorists win: We sit on our hands and let our President turn us into a police state. When our government lives in fear of every citizen, government inevitably will turn against its citizens because it must control their lives to assuage its worries. I've read "1984," and I feel like I'm living it.

Does bin Laden have to attack us to take alter the way of life in America? No; he need only threaten to, and the Bush Administration will, quite predictably, do the rest for him. Everyday, the government intrudes more and more into our personal lives. That is how the terrorists are making their point. Will they "win" by causing further subjugation of the American people, without firing a shot or setting off a bomb? How subtle. How diabolical. How "George."

In the meantime, is the government even looking for bin Laden? Remember that Bush said he doesn't think much about bin Laden.

Republicans in the California Senate have killed a bill that would have imposed a three year moratorium on executions in the state.

There are a lot of reasons to suspend or eliminate California's death penalty. Elisabeth Semel, director of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law's Death Penalty Clinic names a few in this op-ed last week:

...the line that divides those we execute and those we do not remains as arbitrary and capricious as it was in 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared it constitutionally intolerable.

...each of the 11 executions after 1977 cost Californians a quarter of a billion dollars. The article found that, for institutional reasons, the cost of housing death-sentenced inmates is three times that of the general population. A capital trial costs at least three times as much as a non-capital murder trial. It takes tens of millions of dollars annually to pay for courts, prosecutors and defense counsel.

The defendant is 32, with an IQ of 72. He's a low level drug dealer. Under the federal mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, the Judge had no choice but to impose a sentence of life without parole. The Judge is angry.

Judge David N. Hurd said child rapists and murderers will go free on parole while Justin D. Powell languishes in prison for life, largely because the defendant was convicted of drug crimes twice during his teenage years, more than a decade before the instant offense. Because of those prior convictions, the sole sentencing option was life, Hurd said.

"The increment of harm in this case bears no rational relationship to the increment of punishment that I must impose," Hurd said at a sentencing proceeding last week in Utica, N.Y. "This is what occurs when Congress sets [a] mandatory minimum sentence which distorts the entire judicial process... . As a result, I am obligated to and will now impose this unfair and, more important, unjust sentence."

by TChris

Testifying from behind a curtain to conceal his identity from the public, a witness in a military murder trial revealed that he warned his "CIA bosses" about abusive interrogations of Iraqi prisoners.

He said Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, accused of suffocating an Iraqi general during an interrogation, didn’t seem to care.

“He said he was pretty sure they were breaking those rules every day,” said the man, whose CIA ties were exposed by a defense lawyer who let the intelligence agency’s acronym slip out during questioning. It was the first public acknowledgment that the agency played a role in Army interrogations at the makeshift prison camp where Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush died.

Other witnesses described the abusive interrogation techniques.

The New York Times reports that using documents as their weapon of choice, lawyers from around the country today joined forces to file dozens of motions attacking the Homeland Security Agency's continued deportation of Haitian citizens.

The lawyers filed motions in dozens of cases, asking immigration judges to stop the deportations because their clients' lives may be threatened. The State Department has warned Americans against traveling to Haiti, citing the lack of an effective police force and the presence of armed gangs engaged in kidnappings and violent crime.

The lawyers, who held news conferences in Miami, New York, Boston and Philadelphia, said they were acting because homeland security officials had not given Haitians temporary protected status, which temporarily prevents the deportation of immigrants who cannot return to their native countries because of armed conflict, natural disasters or other extraordinary conditions.

The Democrats have asked Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to reply to the State of the Union Address.

Arianna is seriously miffed.

....the Dems decide that the charge against Bush shouldn't be led by someone who can forcefully articulate why the GOP is not the party that can best keep us safe, but by someone whose only claim to fame is that he carried a red state.

Via David Sirota: Is Ohio Democratic Senate Candidate Paul Hackett becoming the Tom Tancredo of the Democratic Party? Shame on him.

From the Toledo Blade:

The Bush administration, Mr. Hackett said, "is willing to let illegals come in and take the jobs of Americans." The answer made several of the young Democrats squirm in their seats.

One pushed Mr. Hackett to clarify. "Deport them?" Mr. Hackett was asked. "If we can afford to," Mr. Hackett said, "yeah."