Punk rock legend Johnny Ramone has died of prostate cancer. He was 55. Rest in peace.

A tribute concert and cancer research fundraiser was held in Los Angeles on Sunday to mark the band's 30th anniversary. It featured performances from Los Angeles punk band X, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Henry Rollins and others.

Along with his wife, Linda Cummings, friends including Pearl Jam rocker Eddie Vedder, singer Rob Zombie, Lisa Marie Presley, Pete Yorn, Vincent Gallo and Talia Shire were gathered at Ramone's bedside yesterday.

If you get a chance, go see the documentary, End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones. [hat tip, Jake Fogelnest, who is directing the soon-to-be-released political satire show at the Upright Citizens Brigade, George Bush, Son of a MotherF**er.]

Not good news. Two Americans and a Briton have been kidnapped from an upscale neighborhood in Baghdad.

The three, all employees of Gulf Services Company, a Middle East-based construction firm, were seized from a two-story house surrounded by a wall in the al-Mansour neighborhood, said Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, an Interior Ministry official.

Yesterday, three decapitated bodies were located by a roadside near Dijiel which is north of Baghdad. Authorities believe the bodies are those of Iraqis who have been killed but have not released their identities.

The bodies were found Wednesday in nylon bags, the heads in bags alongside them, said Abdul-Rahman said. They were all men with tattoos, including one with the letter 'H' on his arm, but no documents were found on them, he said.

[After two days of off-topic comments, this thread is closed.]

The Washington Post reports that one of the experts who was asked by CBS to review the Killiam memos says at least one of the documents was faxed from a Kinkos in Ablilene, Texas. Who's from Abilene?

There is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents....Burkett, who has accused Bush aides of ordering the destruction of some portions of the president's National Guard record because they might have been politically embarrassing, did not return telephone calls to his home.

In news interviews earlier this year, Burkett said he overheard a telephone conversation in the spring of 1997 in which top Bush aides asked the head of the Texas National Guard to sanitize Bush's files as he was running for a second term as governor of Texas. Several days later, he said, he saw dozens of pages from Bush's military file dumped in a trash can at Camp Mabry, the Guard's headquarters.

What top Bush aides asked for a file purge?

The Bush aides Burkett named as participants in the telephone conversation were Chief of Staff Joe M. Allbaugh and spokespersons Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett. All three Bush aides and former Texas National Guard Maj. Gen. Daniel James have strongly denied the allegations.

Dan Rather has acknowledged the possibility that the Killian memos regarding Bush's National Guard service may not be authentic. To his credit, he's willing to shoulder the blame.

"If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story," Rather said in an interview last night. "Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.' "

Rather's doubts stem from speaking with Marian Knox, Killian's former secretary. Knox said she didn't type the memos but they accurately reflect Killian's beliefs. CBS has the details of the tonight's interview here.

Will Rather survive the storm if he was wrong?

Drip. Drip. There are more records of Bush's National Guard service about to be released:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan hinted that more documents regarding Bush's National Guard service may soon be released. Asked whether officials in the White House have seen unreleased documents, McClellan called that "a very real possibility." Other officials with knowledge of the situation said more documents had indeed been uncovered and would be released in the coming days.

Bump and Update: New Orleans catches a break, but Mobile, AL doesn't. The eye of Hurricane Ivan should hit Mobile by early Thursday morning.

Live hurricane bloggers: Weatherbug and Brendan Loy in Mobile and Mike Roetto in New Orleans (via Instapundit.]

Bump and Update: Hurricane Ivan is getting closer. Right now it's headed towards the Gulf Coast. Florida's western panhandle is still at risk. It's expected to arrive late Wednesday.

New Orleans may sink if it gets hit hard.

Great news from John Edwards today: If Kerry and Edwards are elected, there will be no military draft.

During a question-and-answer session, the mother of a 23-year-old who recently graduated from West Virginia University asked Edwards whether the draft would be reinstated. "There will be no draft when John Kerry is president," Edwards said, a statement that drew a standing ovation.

Despite Rumsfeld's statements Bush wouldn't start a draft either, recent actions of the Pentagon cast doubt on that claim. For example, the miltitary's use of the "stop-loss" program has been alleged by many to be a back-door draft. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) thinks a reinstatement of the draft is warranted.

Ralph Nader warns a draft is coming....unless he's President, of course. Bills have been introduced in Congress to reinstate the draft...although they have little chance of success. Democratic Underground reports the draft may come disguised in a budget proposal.

But don't take a chance. The safest route to avoiding involuntary induction into active military service is a vote for Kerry-Edwards.

Martha Stewart announced today that she has asked the Court to lift the stay on her jail sentence so she can go in now. I assume that means bedspace has opened up at the women's minimum security prison camp in Danbury....or at a backup suggested by her lawyers, the low security prison at Coleman, FL.

When she gets designated, we'll post the address where you can write her. Also, she can get magazines from publishers. A magazine subscription would probably be a welcome gift, and one she can share with less fortunate inmates.

Work beckons, so here's an open thread. Please don't feed the trolls.

Before discussing the trial and sentence of the three Americans convicted of running a private jail in Afghanistan and torturing prisoners, I'd like to recognize the dedicated work of New York defense lawyer, Bob Fogelnest, a good friend of mine. I wrote about him in April when he started a weblog Mullah Bob, about his journey to Afghanistan to mentor and supervise six Afghan criminal defense lawyers and participate in training programs designed to help improve the quality of justice and bring the Rule of Law to war-torn Afghanistan. This was supposed to be a two month venture, which he did without pay, receiving only expenses.

Bob ended up defending one of the three Americans charged with torturing Afghan prisoners. The men were found guilty and yesterday the Judge sentenced two of them to ten years in prison and one to eight years. Bob's client was Edward Carbarallo, a New York Journalist invited to Afghanistan to make a documentary on America's war on terror.

A new report released today by the Death Penalty Information Center shows death sentences in the U.S. have dropped in each of the past four years.

The Death Penalty Information Center, which is to release the report tomorrow, attributes the decline largely to growing public awareness of death-row exonerations and concerns that innocent people might be sentenced to die.

John Kerry has said he supports a moratorium on the death penalty.

The mainstream media has made up its mind: The CBS Killian memos on Bush's National Guard Service were forgeries. The LA Times lead editorial in Wednesday's edition carries the headline " A Black Eye for CBS News." But the paper also bashes Bush on his Guard service.

Whatever the truth, CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't really need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that . Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country. It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School.

In an interesting twist, Marian Knox, Killian's former secretary has spoken out. She says the memos are not the ones she typed, and some of the words are different, but they accurately reflect Killian's views and may have come from real memos that she did type for Killian.

She said that although she did not recall typing the memos reported by CBS News, they accurately reflect the viewpoints of Killian and documents that would have been in the personal file. Also, she said she didn't know whether the CBS documents corresponded memo for memo with that file. "The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones," she said. "I probably typed the information and somebody picked up the information some way or another."

Knox also said that Killian kept a "cover his back" file that he kept in a locked file. She said she used a mechanical Olivetti that had a "th" superscript key. as well as an IBM selectric.