by TChris

Countries that refuse to immunize Americans from prosecution in the International Criminal Court are feeling the wrath of the Bush administration.

The United States has … cut aid to some two dozen nations that refused to sign immunity agreements that American officials say are intended to protect American soldiers and policy makers from politically motivated prosecutions.

As usual, the Bush administration’s heavy handed approach to diplomacy is making the country less secure.

by TChris

Update: The NY Times explores the Discovery Institute's impact on the Intelligent Design debate:

Pushing a "teach-the-controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.

*****

Original post:

Pandering once again to religious extremists (perhaps to make up for his flip-flopping position on stem cell research), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist echoed the president today by arguing that "intelligent design" should be taught in public schools. Frist thinks students need to be exposed to "different ideas." Of course, some ideas (like "people are born with a particular sexual orientation") haven't made the list of ideas to which Frist thinks students should be exposed.

I'm finishing a long brief that's due by 5pm today. Here's a place for you to vent.

USA Today reports that in 1983, Judge John Roberts lobbied for a national ID card.

When he worked in the Reagan White House in 1983, John Roberts made the case for a national ID card, saying in a memo that it would help address the “real threat to our social fabric posed by uncontrolled immigration.”

I'm beginning to think the confimation hearings may get feisty after all. If they don't, there's something wrong with our Senate Democrats.

The Washington Post today calls the bill to streamline death penalty appeals, introduced in the Senate by Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and in the House by Daniel E. Lungren (R-Calif.), "an unmitigated disaster."

Habeas corpus is the centuries-old device by which inmates challenge the legality of their detentions. In modern times it has become the essential vehicle by which convicts on death row or serving lengthy prison terms attack their state-court convictions. Many innocent people owe their freedom to their ability to file habeas petitions.

Yet in many death cases, the most drastic versions of the bill would eliminate federal review entirely. Even where they didn't do that, they would create onerous procedural roadblocks and prevent federal courts from considering key issues. They would bar federal courts from reviewing most capital sentencing and create arbitrary timetables for federal appeals courts to handle these cases.

The Post points out [as I did here]that "chief justices of the nation's state court systems have voted overwhelmingly to urge Congress to slow down."

by TChris

Inmates in jails and prisons make collect calls to stay in touch with their families. Jail administrators and prison wardens don't much care what it costs the families to accept those calls, so they sign contracts with telephone companies that permit outrageous charges while giving a kickback to the government. The Center for Constitutional Rights sued the New York State Department of Correctional Services and MCI seeking to end that practice in New York.

The lawsuit, Walton v. NYSDOCS, seeks an order prohibiting the State and MCI from charging exorbitant rates to the family members of prisoners to finance a 57.5% kickback to the state. MCI charges these family members a 630% markup over consumer rates to receive a collect call from their loved ones, the only way possible to speak with them, CCR says.

A judge dismissed the suit as time-barred, but the CCR has appealed. (Law geeks take note: the linked article contains a link to the CCR's brief.) Whether or not the lawsuit gets reinstated, New York and other jurisdictions should stop punishing the families of the incarcerated who often have their telephone service disconnected because they can't afford to pay for the collect calls. Yet a proposed New York law to require telephone companies to provide fair-market rates to jails and prisons has gone nowhere.

Anti-war and human rights activist Dr. Habib Siddiqui, has some unkind words for New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Writing for al-Jazeera, he calls her a "Yellow Journalist."

The role of a good reporter is like that of an intelligence analyst who digs for the truth, and not of a stenographer who simply reports what he/she hears without verification. Regrettably, Miller has been nothing but an eavesdropper, and if I may add, a terrible one in that. For the War Party she performed miracles by essentially becoming its spokeswoman. Earlier in the program, she described her role as the conveyor of official news rather than of a skeptical reporter: “My job was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of the New York Times as best as I could figure out, what people inside the governments who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction.”

[hat tip Patriot Daily.]

The right-wing blogosphere has launched a coordinated assault on former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick as part of a larger effort to blame the Clinton administration for 9/11. Think Progress sets the record straight and explains why the smear is a lie.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer claims a “highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its information.” Shaffer says those efforts were blocked by military lawyers.

....Shaffer’s story, if it’s true, involved communications between the Department of Defense and the FBI. Gorelick’s 1995 memo was only about communications between the FBI and the criminal division of the Justice Department. (It also didn’t create a wall between the FBI and the Justice Department but that’s another story.) Whatever problems Shaffer had trying to communicate with the FBI it had absolutely nothing to do with Gorelick.

Gorelick's memo is here. She explained herself in the Washington Post which I wrote about here, where I also explain why the "the wall" often is a good thing.

by TChris

Judge Roberts presumably rubbed sticks together to start a fire in his cave before using a dinosaur bone to scrawl these words on the wall:

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts disparaged state efforts to combat discrimination against women in Reagan-era documents made public Thursday, and wondered whether "encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good."

Does encouraging sexists to join the Supreme Court contribute to the common good?

Via Democratic Daily:

Breaking News: Cindy Sheehan to Leave Camp

This story just off the news wires… Cindy Sheehan’s mother has had a stroke. The grieving woman who started an anti-war demonstration near President Bush’s ranch nearly two weeks ago said Thursday she was leaving because her mother had a stroke.

Cindy Sheehan told reporters she had just received the phone call and was leaving immediately to be with her 74-year-old mother at a Los Angeles hospital. “I’ll be back as soon as possible if it’s possible,” she said. After hugging some of her supporters, Sheehan and her sister, Deedee Miller, got in a van and left for the Waco airport about 20 miles away.

The Associated Press article is here.

Marvin Kalb, senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has an excellent take on RoveGate in the Financial Times, in which he brings the lessons of Watergate to the White House.

The investigation appears now to be heading towards rapid conclusion. If the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, finds that either Mr Rove or Mr Libby or both violated the law, they would face criminal charges, and the Bush administration would find itself enmeshed in a scandal of dimensions that are already being compared to the Nixon-era Watergate scandal.

....Much is still not known about Mr Fitzgerald’s investigation – he has insisted on absolute secrecy – but what is known suggests that the Bush administration is engaged in a two-front war: one to cover up its blunders in the lead-up to the Iraq war based on the mistaken assumption that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction”, and the other to protect the leaker. The two fronts are now unmistakeably linked.

Nicholas von Hoffman writing in the Observer:

If random searches of people in the subways are being done for anything except political effect, it's nonsense. The decision to search is a confession of helplessness. It is saying that the police and Homeland Security don't know who the enemy is, so maybe they can get lucky and spot one among the thousands racing to catch the A train.

Analyze it: The chances of seizing a terrorist in the middle of rush hour are almost zero. If the authorities had any idea who the would-be terrorists are or where they're lurking or what kind of terror weapon they intend to use, they would grab them and clap them onto an airplane for "rendition" to some far-off place where the ACLU cannot get at them.