by TChris

Update: More information about the coaching, from Voice of America:

Before the event, the officers were seen and heard rehearsing their statements to President Bush.

According to AP, Scott McClellan says "the troops were expressing their own thoughts." What a coincidence that they "all gave Bush an upbeat view of the situation." Editor & Publisher reports McClellan's furious attempt (including a futile "I'm sorry, I don't know what you're suggesting") to deflect inquiries into his earlier assertion that "there would be no screening of questions."

Update: NPR has an audio of part of the rehearsal on this page.

.....
original post:

Via video, the president spoke to the troops today, asking questions about the progress they were making as Iraq approaches a ratification vote on its proposed constitution. As we've come to expect from this administration, the seemingly impromptu session was carefully scripted.

by TChris

Attack ads have become commonplace in political races, but an attack ad against a prosecutor is unusual, to say the least.

A conservative group is running a TV ad likening the Democratic district attorney prosecuting House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to a vicious dog.
...

"A prosecutor with a political agenda can be vicious," the narrator says, while a snarling dog barks on screen.

The ads are in "heavy rotation" in Austin. Are DeLay's supporters hoping to taint the pool of potential jurors who may decide DeLay's fate?

by TChris

In the context of Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court, Edward Lazarus argues that liberals should seize the opportunity to dismantle myths about judging that the right wing has propagated for a couple of decades.

In recent years, conservatives have -- with a fair amount of success -- painted liberals as having defiled the judiciary by overstepping the line between law and politics, and thereby substituting their own policy judgments for the "real" meaning of federal statutes or the Constitution. And Democrats have been far less successful in conveying to the public the view that legal interpretation is inherently politically-influenced -- even despite the fact that any objective study of both liberal and conservative judicial decisionmaking inexorably leads to just such a view.

This is not to say that judges have license to rewrite statutes or to ignore the plain text of the Constitution.

Right wing, pro-life blogger Paul Deignan at Info Theory writes that Harriet Miers can be an evangelical and pro-choice.

Please also note that it is possible to be a good evangelical and pro-choice at the same time. One rationale is that people have free will and that the child is in the hands of God anyway. Another is that this serves a purpose on earth by allowing nonbelievers to eradicate themselves over generations, i.e. that is may be part of God's plan. There are still many other rationalizations that explain why 34% of good evangelicals are pro-choice.

I hope she is one of those 34%, but even if she is not, I believe she will keep her personal religion and her judging separate.

According to Drudge, the right is in a snit over Harriet Miers refusal to join a conservative group like the Federalist Society. Good for her. Stephen Henderson of Knights-Ridder reported on October 7:

[Miers] also said during her sworn testimony that she would not join an organization like the Federalist Society, a group of conservative intellectuals that is a leading proponent of a strict _ and some say narrow _ interpretation of the Constitution. "I just feel like it's better not to be involved in organizations that seem to color your view one way or the other for people who are examining you," she said.

The article also reports she's progressive on racial issues:

by TChris

Phil Spector’s defense lawyers face an uphill battle in their attempt to persuade a judge to throw out the incriminating admissions that Spector allegedly made to police officers who questioned him about the woman found dead in his home. Several sources claim to have heard Spector say that he shot the woman accidentally. The police say Spector later changed his story, claiming that the woman committed suicide.

In a recently filed defense brief, attorney Bruce Cutler claimed that Spector, 64, "was experiencing symptoms of withdrawal from his medications, which could include hallucinations, forgetfulness, serious fatigue, and/or slurring." Police refused or ignored his requests for his medication after they took him into custody at his home, Cutler said.

Cutler also argues that the police didn’t advise Spector that he had the right to remain silent, although it appears that Spector made some of the statements before he was taken into custody, when no warning was required. But even if the suppression motion succeeds, the defense will need to contend with the damaging testimony of Spector’s driver:

by TChris

George Curry writes about a panel he moderated in Texas on the topic of police misconduct. One of the panelists, Travis County Sheriff Gregory Hamilton, observed that firing abusive officers is “the only way to get rid of the problem.” Another panelist, Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez, acknowledged the obvious roadblock to that solution:

But that is made difficult, Valdez said, because cops subscribe to a code of silence. "Cops don't rat on other cops," she explained.

Without a video of abusive conduct (like the New Orleans incident discussed here), whether misconduct occurred often comes down to a citizen’s word against an officer’s -- or several officers, if they all stick together. Curry suggests, however, that the “problem is even deeper.”

by TChris

Zero tolerance is an excuse for zero thinking. In Washington, D.C., it also seems to be an excuse to harass drivers who haven’t broken any law.

D.C. police pulled over Debra Bolton for driving without headlights. Fair enough; she deserved the warning she received for that infraction. But the officer smelled alcohol on Bolton’s breath, so he made her do field sobriety tests. Bolton thinks she aced the tests. The officer claims he told her to recite the alphabet from D to X, while Bolton thought he said D to S. He also claimed she lost her balance during balance tests, which Bolton disputes. And the officer made the improbable claim that he saw “jittering” in her eyes when he administered the horizontal gaze nystagmus (HGN) test, a test that supposedly reveals whether a driver’s blood alcohol content exceeds .10.

The officer arrested Bolton, and the results of a breath test revealed that Bolton was telling him the truth: she’d had a glass of wine with dinner, but that was all. She tested .03, well under the legal limit of .08. Yet Bolton’s ordeal had only begun.

I'll be offline today. In case you're not, here's some space to keep a discussion going.

Fitzgerald is examining discrepancies between what Cheney, his staff (including Libby) and other White House Officals (including Karl Rove and even Ari Fleischer) told investigators and the grand jury about the leak of Valerie Plame's identity. Undoubtedly, he will also consider what Joseph Wilson has said.

Yesterday, I recapped previously reported information on the White House Iraq Group. Today I'm going back to the beginning, with background relevant to the discrepancies, dating from Cheney and Libby's involvement with CIA analysts in 2002, through the President's Africa trip in 2003 and ending with a statement by Cheney in September, 2003. The links are to the actual sources, not prior TalkLeft posts, although all have been mentioned before on TalkLeft.

The two main discrepancies that I see as still being very important are:

• Cheney and the White House deny knowing about Wilson's trip before he published his op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003. They deny asking for or receiving a report on Wilson's trip. Wilson, on the other hand, tells Meet the Press that Cheney's office did ask for and receive the report on his trip. He tells Vanity Fair and writes in his book that in March, 2003, the White House began a campaign to discredit him, a plan that culminated with the disclosure of his wife's identity and CIA employment in Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 column.

I can't think of any other way than outrageous to describe this:

An Army veteran who fled to Canada to avoid prosecution for growing marijuana to treat his chronic pain was yanked from a hospital by Canadian authorities, driven to the border with a catheter still attached, and turned over to U.S. officials, his lawyer says. He then went five days with no medical treatment and only ibuprofen for the pain, attorney Douglas Hiatt said.

Steven W. Tuck, 38, was still fitted with the urinary catheter when he shuffled into federal court for a detention hearing Wednesday, Hiatt said. "This is totally inhumane. He's been tortured for days for no reason," Hiatt said.

It gets worse: The judge ordered him released to a hospital, but instead, he got sent to another jail:

TChris wrote yesterday about developments in Senator Bill Frist's stock deal. Today, the Washington Post reports the SEC has subpoenaed his records.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has been subpoenaed to turn over personal records and documents as federal authorities step up a probe of his July sales of HCA Inc. stock, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued the subpoena within the past two weeks, after initial reports that Frist, the Senate's top Republican official, was under scrutiny by the agency and the Justice Department for possible violations of insider trading laws.