Bump and Update: The Gulf Coast is hunkering down. CNN says the eye wall has made landfall in Fort Walton Beach, Florida in Santa Rosa County. Landfall looks to occur within the next hour devastating the Pensacola area. CNN says It's a category three, 120 miles per hour right now.

CNN's Anderson Cooper is back from London recouping his role from Hurricane Ivan and is down in Pensacola in his rain gear, shouting over the rain and wind.

For personalized late breaking Hurricane Dennis updates, check out the Central Florida Hurricane Center 2005 - it's run by weather hobbyists. For official news, check out the National Hurricane Center or National Weather Service.

Are any talkleft readers in Dennis' path? If so, please keep us updated in the comments.

Digby says go here. For more reasons, go here and here.

This article on Rep. James Sensenbrenner by Maurice Possley in the Chicago Tribune is a must. Sensenbrenner is rapidly becoming Public Enemy Number One.

In an extraordinary move, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee privately demanded last month that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago change its decision in a narcotics case because he didn't believe a drug courier got a harsh enough prison term.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), in a five-page letter dated June 23 to Chief Judge Joel Flaum, asserted that a June 16 decision by a three-judge appeals court panel was wrong. He demanded "a prompt response" as to what steps Flaum would take "to rectify the panel's actions" in a case where a drug courier in a Chicago police corruption case received a 97-month prison sentence instead of the at least 120 months required by a drug-conspiracy statute.

Sensenbrenner is behind the "five years for a joint" and "snitch or go to jail" bill pending in Congress. As TChris wrote, it's time to "just say no" to Sensenbrenner.

Back in September, 2003, Robert Novak wasn't as close-mouthed as he is today. This appeared on Drudge's site and was attributed there to Novak:

'Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives'...

I found this in the TalkLeft archives, here.

David Corn scoops a Newsweek exclusive to be released today confirming that Karl Rove was Matthew Cooper's source. Corn says,

This new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or, at least it should). If what I am told is true, this is proof that the Bush White House was using any information it could gather on Joseph Wilson--even classified information related to national security--to pursue a vendetta against Wilson, a White House critic. Even if it turns out Rove did not break the law regarding the naming of intelligence officials, this new disclosure could prove Rove guilty of leaking a national security secret to a reporter for political ends. What would George W. Bush do about that?

I continue to believe that Karl Rove was Matthew Cooper's second source. (Cooper has acknowledged that Lewis Libby was his first source.) But, before we jump the gun, I think we need to ask: Is it possible that Fitzgerald wants Cooper to tell what he and Rove talked about not to get Rove, but because that conversation may make a case against Libby and possibly others? Or, does he want Rove as well?

America Blog writes:

This is one of those emails going around, and it worked for me, and now I'm kind of freaked out. Read through this - and finish each mathematical calculation before moving on to the next question - then post in the comments if it worked for you, and someone please explain why. Because it worked for me.

At the end of this message, you are asked a question. Answer it immediately. Don't stop and think about it. Just say the first thing that pops into your mind. This is a fun "test"... AND kind of spooky at the same time! Give it a try, then e-mail it around (including back to me) and you'll see how many people you know fall into the same percentage as you. Be sure to put in the subject line if you are among the 98% or the 2%. You'll understand what that means after you finish taking the "test".

It didn't work for me, but how about you?

Before suggesting that Alberto Gonzales is an acceptable Supreme Court nominee, I encourage you to read about his role as advisor to President Bush on clemency decisions. Objecting may be pointless, as TChris points out in the comments here, but that doesn't mean we have to give him a thumbs-up:

If he had a prosecutorial bias in a job that required him to provide a dispassionate and even-handed evaluation of a conviction and death sentence, it stands to reason that he would have a pro-prosecution bias if appointed to the Supreme Court. That alone should disqualify him, although it wasn't enough to stop the appointments of Rehnquist, Thomas, Kennedy, etc.

Don't miss the full Alan Berlow article in the Atlantic Monthly, available free here. He begins:

As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales, now the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee, prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand

Nat Hentoff had this Village Voice column on Gonzales and the death memos. John Dean weighs in here.

Australian Schapelle Corby turns 28 today - inside a Bali jail.

The New York Times has a rather mean-spirited article about her Sunday- focusing more on Australia's racist policies than on Schapelle, and asserting that Scapelle's case is gathering attention because she is white and good-looking. It castigates Australians for not making Tran Thi Hong Loan, a 33 year old Australian of Vietnamese descent, a cause celebre since she is serving life in prison in Vietnam for attempting to leave the country with 880 grams of heroin in a bottle of hair spray.

Two wrongs don't make a right. The point here is not racism, it is Indonesia's draconian penalties for drug offenses, particularly those for marijuana.

Happy Birthday, Schapelle, we wish you a successful appeal

USA Today is reporting that Capt. Leslie J. McCoy, the Commanding Officer at Guantanamo, has been sacked for misconduct, allegedly unrelated to the detainees.

The commanding officer of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was relieved of his duties Saturday after he was accused of inappropriate management practices, a Navy spokesman said. Capt. Leslie J. McCoy, who had commanded Guantanamo since March 2003, was the subject of an investigation into inappropriate personnel and administrative practices unrelated to the base's detention camp for suspected terrorists.

"His release and reassignment are in no way related to the detainee operations taking place in Guantanamo," said C. Patrick Dooling, spokesman for Navy Southeast Region based in Jacksonville.

The Taliban today claimed it beheaded a missing U.S. commando this morning.

The Taliban said they beheaded a missing U.S. commando in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, but the Pentagon said it had no information to support the claim.... Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said the U.S. commando was killed at 11 a.m. and his body dumped on a mountain in the eastern province of Kunar, where a four-man Navy SEAL team went missing during a clash with militants June 28.

"We killed him using a knife and chopped off his head," he said by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

The U.S. military has said two of the missing commandos were found dead on Monday, having been killed in action, while another had been rescued and one was missing.

Further research is indicating to me that Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, is one of those special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has in his cross-hairs. Whether he will get him, or whether there's anything to get, remains unknown. I also now believe that Matt Cooper's second source (Libby being the first) is Karl Rove. But...is it possible that Fitzgerald wants Cooper to tell what he and Rove talked about not to get Rove, but because that conversation may make a case against Libby and possibly others? Or, does he want Rove as well?

I've accumulated another few dozen documents off of Lexis and I don't have the space on a blog to go through all of them. So I will list some that I haven't seen discussed much either in MSM or on the blogs I've read. These are just more dots and I'm not done trying to connect them. Also, my goal is to figure out where Fitzgerald is headed from publicly available information. I'm not an investigative reporter. My focus is on the legal issues and possible criminality involved - not on national security issues.

1. First up is the transcript (25 pages, pdf) of a Democratic Policy Committee Hearing held on October 24, 2003, presided over by then Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, on the national security implications of the leak of Valerie Plame's identity. The chief witnesses were Jim Marcinkowski, Former CIA Case Officer; Larry Johnson,Former CIA Analyst; and Vince Cannistraro,Former Chief of Operations and Analysis, CIA Counterterrorism Center.

Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, had this to say about the London bombings.

I am horrified at the nightmarish acts of carnage we have just seen inflicted on London and its people in what authorities are describing as co-ordinated terror attacks. What on earth these murderers think they can gain by blowing up innocent men, women and children is impossible to imagine. No doubt the fatalities will include people of all religions and races without discrimination. My heartfelt sympathy goes out to all those who have suffered loss or injury.

More of Yusuf's statement is here.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit yesterday in Carhart v. Gonzalez (pdf) affirmed the District of Nebraska and struck down the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act adopted in November 2003, and signed into law with appropriate conservative fanfare. It barred a method of abortion generally used after the first trimester without regard to preservation of the health of the pregnant mother, and that was its flaw. Under the Act, a partial birth abortion was a two year felony for the physican. 18 U.S.C. § 1531(a). See the N.Y. Times story here.

The Eighth Circuit is not, by any means, a liberal court. It is heavily stacked with Republican appointees. This panel had a Reagan senior judge, a Bush I, and a Clinton appointee (2 of 11 active judges are Republican appointments).

The Times article notes that this is the first appellate ruling on this statute, and it comes right at the time Justice O'Connor's vote would be missing when [and not if] the case gets to the Supremes, which it will.

What can we expect with political and procedural maneuvering? What happens next?