'Stand Up For Choice'! Urge the Republican Party to return to its traditional path of individual responsibility and personal freedom by supporting the right to choose.

Stand Up For Choice(SM)!
Big Tent Extravaganza
Monday, August 30th / 8:00 PM / New York, NY

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Confirmed Talent : Lou Reed, Moby, Joan Osborne, Cynthia Nixon, Kathleen Turner, Lewis Black, Michael McKean, Patrice O'Neal, Annette O'Toole, Giancarlo Esposito, Nellie McKay, Ollabelle, Suzanne Westenhoefer and...
the GE Smith Band.

Leslie Van Houten, convicted of participating in the Charles Manson-La Bianca killings, has been refused parole for the 15th time. She's been a model prisoner for the past 30 years.

It's time for the State of California to set her free. As TalkLeft commented when she was coming up for hearing the 14th time:

Grant Leslie Van Houten parole. She was 19 at the time of the crime, has paid for it with 30 years of her life, and if you have ever listened to her (and we have, since some of her prior hearings have been televised) you can't help but feel she's genuine and hardly a threat to anyone now.

Imagine the feeling. You sit on a jury, convict a man of rape and sentence him to 45 years in jail. 22 years later, DNA proves the man innocent. Jurors in the case of Arthur Lee Whitfieled, released from jail this week, share their reactions.

In the past two weeks, Wilton Dedge left jail after 22 years. Robert Coney was freed at 76 after serving 41 years. And Michael McAllister, who served 18 years.

How many more of them are there? What can we do to find them? Pass a real Innocence Protection Act, for one. Bush won't do it. Kerry will.

David Sirota has compiled a group of articles reflecting the GOP's real attitude towards New York which can be summed up in two words: Drop Dead. The latest is Speaker Dennis Hastert's attack. The earliest quotes are from Newt Gingrich back in 1989 and 1990.

On a related note, don't miss Tom the Dancing Bug's cartoon in Salon called "A Republican Guide to NYC."

How coincidental. Two weeks after the accuser in the Kobe Bryant case sues the athlete for damages in civil court from an alleged sexual assault, a former personal assistant to William Kennedy Smith does the same--for an incident that allegedly occurred in 1999.

In the lawsuit, the 28-year-old woman alleges that after a night of drinking in 1999, Kennedy Smith forced her out of a cab and into his Chicago home where he raped her. The woman is Kennedy Smith's former personal assistant.

The allegations are "outrageous, untrue and without merit," William Kennedy Smith said in a statement. "Unfortunately, my family and my personal history have made me unusually vulnerable to these kinds of allegations," Kennedy Smith, 43, said in the statement.

Kennedy Smith is a medical doctor in Chicago.

If this is indicative of the quality of jurisprudence we can expect from Bush's judicial picks, we're all in trouble:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday tossed out a ruling issued last year by U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab after ruling that the judge had copied his opinion, nearly word-for-word, from a memorandum written by one of the attorneys in the case. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Schwab made only two substantive changes to the memo, other than minor changes for grammar and style, then signed it as his own opinion.

In doing so, the court said, Schwab failed to show that he put the necessary thought and jurisprudence into the ruling. The appeals court ordered the lower court to rethink its ruling, which had dismissed a lawsuit filed by a man whose daughter was murdered in 2001 by a man on probation for a related crime against the same family. The father sued Westmoreland County probation officers for not doing enough to keep the killer, Charles Koschalk, away from Annette Bright.

Schwab's opinion to dismiss the case was taken from a "proposed opinion" submitted by attorneys for the county. He said in a written statement that he wouldn't make a similar mistake again.” ....Schwab issued the ruling eight months after President Bush appointed him to the bench in January 2003.

Take this, Bob Dole--from one who knew you when.

Former Senator and Vietnam War Veteran Max Cleland went to Crawford today to deliver a letter from 9 Senators to President Bush asking him to condemn the Swift Boat Vets ad. He was turned away and left, still holding the letter. Buzzflash has the text of the letter here.

As Cleland approached the ranch, he was greeted by Bush supporter Jerry Patterson, also a Vietnam Vet, who handed him a letter written by some other vets criticizing Kerry for criticizing the war when he came home.

This whole Swift Boat affair has gotten beyond tiresome. It's a major distraction and the Bush camp is hoping it continues. Because, otherwise, the focus goes back to Bush and his failures as a leader the past four years.

Ben Ginsberg, the lawyer for the RNC and Bush campaign, has tendered his resignation as outside counsel to President Bush as a result of yesterday's disclosures that he provided legal advice to the Swift Boat vets regarding their anti-Kerry ad. [link via Mrs. Atrios, who's doing a great job subbing for her husband today.]

I cannot begin to express my sadness that my legal representations have become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election," Mr. Ginsberg told the president in a letter distributed today by the Bush-Cheney campaign. "I feel I cannot let that continue, so I have decided to resign as national counsel to your campaign to ensure that the giving of legal advice to decorated military veterans, which was entirely within the boundaries of the law, doesn't distract from the real issues upon which you and the country should be focusing."

Ben Ginsberg and I used to spar sometimes on the old CNBC Rivera Live show about the Clinton impeachment and Ken Starr investigation. I considered him very smart, although predictably partisan on the issues. To his credit, unlike some (most) of the other right-wing pundits, his arguments were grounded in law rather than emotion. I doubt this will be a setback to his career. But, have his actions hurt Bush?

Ginsberg says there is no connection between the Bush campaign and the Swift Boat vets--both were just clients seeking his expertise on campaign finance laws, and it's not unusual for a lawyer to advise more than one group.

The group "came to me and said, 'We have a point of view we want to get into the First Amendment debate right now. There's a new law. It's very complicated. We want to comply with the law, will you keep us in the bounds of the law?'" Ginsberg said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I said yes, absolutely, as I would do for anyone."

That's a hard sell for me. Imagine for a moment that the outside group seeking Ginsberg's legal advice on campaign finance laws was one that intended to publish an anti-Bush or pro-Kerry ad. Do you think he would have agreed to advise that group? I don't. Also, Ginsberg hasn't decided whether to charge the Swifties for his advice--in other words, he may have been working for free, or "pro bono" as it's called in the trade.

The manager of the Kerry-Edwards campaign had this to say about Ginsberg's role:

Now we know why George Bush refuses to specifically condemn these false ads," she said. "People deeply involved in his own campaign are behind them, from paying for them, to appearing in them, to providing legal advice, to coordinating a negative strategy to divert the public away from issues like jobs, health care and the mess in Iraq, the real concerns of the American people."

Russian Computer Expert Predicts Internet Terrorist Attack

Terrorists will paralyze the Internet on August 26, a Russian expert in antivirus programs said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a conference hosted by Russian Information Agency Novosti, Aleksandr Gostev from Kaspersky Labs said information on this terrorist attack was published on special websites. He did not elaborate.

First of all, the United States and Western Europe will suffer from the attack, Gostev was quoted by the agency as saying. The head of the labs, Yevgeny Kaspersky, reminded the audience that similar attacks had earlier paralyzed the Internet in South Korea. He added that it would be “impossible” to stop terrorist organizations if they “get down to business”.

[via Norwegianity who got it from Drudge.]

The ACLU issued a press release today accusing the Government of stonewalling in the lawsuit over access to torture documents at Abu Ghraib and other prisons:

Decrying the government’s failure to comply with a court order requiring it to respond to a request for information about prisoner mistreatment abroad, the American Civil Liberties Union today said it will raise the issue with the court in a hearing scheduled for September 9.

The government released only a handful of documents, only one of which was not already publicly available. The anemic document production comes less than a week after a federal judge in New York rebuked the government for its failure to comply with the ACLU’s request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

A Pentagon report focusing on military intelligence at Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison was released today, the day after yesterday's report on the Defense Department's role in the scandal. It finds:

The new report says that 27 military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors "allegedly requested, encouraged, condoned or solicited" the abuse of Iraqi detainees, it said. But, it continued, "Most, though not all, of the violent or sexual abuses occurred separately from scheduled interrogations and did not focus on persons held for intelligence purposes."

This latest report is based on 170 interviews and a review of more than 9,000 documents by a staff of 28 investigators, analysts and legal advisors. But it is far from the last statement in the matter. Seven low-ranking members of the 372nd Military Police Company, which provided guards for the prison's cellblocks, already have been charged in connection with the abuses, and more legal proceedings against other soldiers and perhaps some civilian contractors are expected.

....it concluded that the major cause of the abuse at the prison outside Baghdad was human failings. "The primary causes are misconduct (ranging from inhumane to sadistic) by a small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians, a lack of discipline on the part of the leaders and soldiers . . . and a failure or lack of leadership" at several levels of command, states the report, which was scheduled to be released at 1:30 p.m. by the Army.

Update: The text of the Fay report is here.