Update: Here's a preview of what you can expect.

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Arianna Huffington may be changing the face of blogging. Her new celebrity blogging venture, The Huffington Post, written by 250 bold-face names, will launch in cyberspace on May 9. Among the names:

Walter Cronkite, David Mamet, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, James Fallows, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer and Mortimer B. Zuckerman

....Notables will oversee certain sections, with Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator, for example, taking the lead on national security issues.

The venture is designed to compete with the Drudge Report, only it will be interactive. Drudge's former chief techie, Andrew Breitbart, has signed on. There will be some conservative participants, Tony Blankly, for one.

Here's a question: Where are the politically active musicians? No Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Mellencamp?

One more: Will any of them admit to blogging in their pajamas?

The Southern District of New York will be losing David Kelly, a well-respected prosecutor who has shunned publicity and politics, because he's a Democrat.

Mr. Kelley, 45, is drawing attention now because the Bush administration is about to replace him. The White House has let it be known that President Bush plans to nominate Michael J. Garcia, the immigration and customs chief for the Department of Homeland Security, according to Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat of New York, who has been monitoring the process.

According to Mr. Schumer and several justice officials, Mr. Kelley was not tapped to continue in his job because he is a registered Democrat. "The virtually universal view is that he's done an excellent job," Mr. Schumer said.

Among the successful prosecutions the office yielded under Kelly's stewardship: Martha Stewart, the Rigas family of Adelphia Communications, WorldCom's chief Bernard J. Ebbers, and the defense lawyer Lynne F. Stewart.

A new government report shows our prison population is soaring.

• 1 of every 138 U.S. residents are in jail

• The prison population grew by 900 inmates per week between 2003 and 2004.

• 8,000 more prisoners were admitted to federal prisons than were released

• 2.1 million people are housed in our prisons and jails.

What is it with wacky women writers named Annie? Remember Annie Jacobsen, the business writer on Northwest Flight 327 in June, 2004 who got hysterical over seeing 14 Syrian men and went on national tv to say they were terrorists out doing a dry run? Even after she was told by air marshals the men had been hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert and had return flights on Jet Blue, she didn't let it drop. She turned it into a regular series.

Via Memeorandum, we learn she's back, with her 13th column about the flight. This one has details about a recent visit she says she got from Homeland Security agents. Details, she says, of facts never before released. Like that Mohammad Attah was on actor James Wood's much publicized flight from Boston to LAX in August, 2001 [note: Wood's account, as told to Bill O'Reilly, is here.] Jacobsen writes:

Tony Perkins got the short shrift on Fox News' Rivera at Large tonight. Megyn Kendall was guest hosting for Geraldo and she had two guests, law professor Marci Hamilton and Family Research Council's Tony Perkins. Perkins was outside the Kentucky church where the Justice Sunday broadcast was televised. He got one less chance to talk than Marci, and Marci got the last word. At the very end, Perkins tried to break in but couldn't. Just as he was about to chime in, Megyn said, "Sorry, Tony, have to wrap it up." I'm sure it wasn't intentional, it was probably a hard break or time was just up, but still, Perkins was not pleased.

When he did get a chance to speak earlier in the segment, Perkins said that Sen. Harry Reid and Democrats were bringing faith into the judicial nominations issue by talking about their "closely held personal beliefs." He repeated that phrase three or four times, it was clearly his "talking point." Marci made short shrift of it and her last sentence was that the American people aren't buying it and Frist is making a mistake. And then time was up so Mr. Perkins couldn't repeat his talking point.

Microsoft has faced an uproar since announcing it would not support a state anti-discrimination (gay rights) bill this year as it has in years past. Steven A. Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, tries to explain, but it's a crummy explanation.

The e-mail message came as company officials, inundated by internal messages from angry employees, withering attacks on the Web and biting criticism from gay rights groups, sought to quell rancor following the disclosure this week that the company, which had supported the bill in past years, did not do so this year. Critics argue that the decision resulted from pressure from a prominent local evangelical Christian church.

In his message... Mr. Ballmer wrote that he had done "a lot of soul searching over the past 24 hours." He said that he and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, both personally supported the bill but that the company had decided not to take an official stance on the legislation this year. He said they were pondering the role major corporations should play in larger social debates.

The BBC reports a woman has been stoned to death in Afghanistan for adultery and that it is the second stoning of a woman for the offense since we deposed the Taliban in 2001. She is identified by Reuters as a 29 year old named Amina. Reuters says it's the first stoning since President Hamid Karzai took office.

The AP reports that local police in many states increasingly are becoming involved in enforcement of immigration laws, an area traditionally left to the feds.

Frustrated by illegal immigrant criminals who slip their grasp, a growing number of state and county police agencies nationwide are moving to join a federal program that enlists local officers to enforce immigration laws. The federal government has already granted that authority in Florida and Alabama, and the program is under consideration in Connecticut, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

It's also in the works in Southern California - one of the nation's most ethnically diverse regions - where it would reverse a long-standing local police policy of avoiding questions about immigration status during criminal investigations.

This is bad policy.

Immigrant rights groups insist the move will discourage people from reporting domestic violence or other crimes for fear of deportation, and that it would lead to racial profiling and other abuses. "We're 100 percent against it," said Amin David, president of Los Amigos of Orange County. "It will have a chilling effect on our community."

There's a lot more reasons this is a lousy idea, as I set out here back in 2003 when some Republican congresspersons introduced the CLEAR Act (H.R. 2671.)

by TChris

Two former NYPD detectives, accused of moonlighting as Mafia hit men, entered not guilty pleas this week. (TalkLeft background here.) The NY Daily News talks to Louis Eppolito Jr. about being the son of "the dirtiest cop ever."

"He has a son who walks around with his name, but I felt ignored, invisible," Louis Jr., 35, told the Daily News.

The Lexington Herald Leader has this editorial on Injustice Sunday, opining that the "Radical right's anti-filibuster show [is] an assault on truth."

It's great to see a MSM publication avoid the use of the phrase "Christian right." There's nothing Christian about them. They are radicals, pure and simple.

Today, if all goes as planned, Kentucky will play host to a well-scripted immorality play in which political and religious extremists pummel truth beyond recognition and twist Christianity into an ugly caricature of itself in their crusade to give Dubya the opportunity to perform an extreme makeover on the federal courts, packing their benches with enough "faith first, law last" judges to tilt our legal system dangerously toward the model of the Spanish Inquisition.

On the remarks Dobson and Frist will make:

• Crooks and Liars has a special "Justice Sunday" video of Sen. Bill Frist. And details of the secret audio tape obtained by the LA Times of Dobson and Perkins discussing strategy.

• Skippy on the Pope.

• Atrios tells us about the charge in the Observer that the new Pope obstructed justice by demanding that the sex abuse inquiry of the Church be conducted in secret. Norwegianity has more. Jeanne D'Arc at Body and Soul writes an outstanding piece on the new Pope and why his German Hitler Youth membership and his failure to become a part of the Resistance does matter.

• Kevin Drum on Bush "blackballing the attendance of technical experts at a telecom standards meeting this week if they contributed money to John Kerry's campaign."

• Grits for Breakfast has an op-ed in Houston Chronicle on the demise of the Harris County drug task force in Texas. His earlier post is here. He also calls attention to the backlash against Texas Senator Hinojosa for his criticism of the drug task force.

Today is 'Justice Sunday.' Read Frank Rich in Sunday's New York Times, A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time:

It may not boast a plume of smoke emerging from above the Sistine Chapel, but it will feature its share of smoke and mirrors as well as traditions that, while not dating back a couple of millenniums, do at least recall the 1920's immortalized in "Elmer Gantry." These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends.