President Obama is about to speak.

Watching on TV, it seemed like a very lackluster affair tonight. Very little glamour and everyone looked tired, with the exception of Arianna Huffington, who looked terrific and was very animated.

Maybe it's because we're getting towards the end of Obama's "reign." During the dinner, he kept shaking his head "no" when the server wanted to give him food. He rubbed his eyes. He perked up and started smiling just before he was about to speak, when a flock of males all came up to greet him like groupies. Interesting that no females were fawning over him.

Is anyone else watching? I doubt I'll make it through Joel McHale. (Update: I watched him, comments below):[More...]

Our earlier open thread just filled up. Here's another one, all topics welcome.

Some welcome news regarding requests by law enforcement for information in your online accounts. The Washington Post reports:

Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.

Law enforcement, of course, is unhappy about this. [More...]

Robert Patton, Director of Oklahoma's Department of Corrections, has written a letter (available here) to the Governor with a timeline of events in the botched execution of Robert Lockett earlier this week.

First, the executioners spent 51 minutes trying to find a suitable vein in Lockett's arm. When they couldn't, they inserted an IV tap into his groin. [More...]

Our last open thread is full. Here's another one, all topics welcome.

Denver has become the 7th Colorado county to refuse to honor federal immigration holds. The reason for the decisions: Court rulings that have held county sheriff departments may be liable for violating the 4th Amendment.

"It is the legal equivalent of asking the sheriff to make a new arrest" without any legal grounds, Mark Silverstein, legal director of the Colorado chapter of the ACLU, said at a news conference.

The Colorado ACLU's request for the policy change is here. [More...]

Time for an open thread. All topics welcome.

Update: The execution was botched and halted, but the inmate then had a heart attack and died. The execution of the second inmate was postponed.

Despite the controversy over lethal injection drugs, Oklahoma will proceed tonight to kill two inmates. The federal defender for one of them says:

“Tonight, in a climate of secrecy and political posturing, Oklahoma intends to kill two death row prisoners using an experimental new drug protocol, including a paralytic, making it impossible to know whether the executions will comport with the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual suffering...We have serious questions — were these drugs imported, are they counterfeit, what is the expiration date, are they tainted?”

Oklahoma's new drug protocol has not yet been tested. One of the drugs, the one that sedates and reduces pain, will be given in a much smaller amount that provided by another state that uses the same drug in its death cocktail.

U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York, who was both a federal prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer before becoming a federal judge, recently gave a talk at the University of Southern California law school on why innocent people plead guilty.

“We have hundreds, or thousands, or even tens of thousands of innocent people who are in prison, right now, for crimes they never committed because they were coerced into pleading guilty. There’s got to be a way to limit this.”

In a nutshell, the reasons many innocent people plead guilty are too much prosecutorial power (in charging decisions and plea agreements) and mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

“People accused of crimes are often offered five years by prosecutors or face 20 to 30 years if they go to trial. … The prosecutor has the information, he has all the chips … and the defense lawyer has very, very little to work with. So it’s a system of prosecutor power and prosecutor discretion. I saw it in real life [as a criminal defense attorney], and I also know it in my work as a judge today.”

The solutions, according to Judge Rakoff: Reduce prosecutorial discretion and eliminate mandatory minimums. I couldn't agree more.

The NBA has banned Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life for his comments about African Americans.

Article 35 of the NBA Constitution...allows the commissioner to indefinitely suspend owners for "conduct prejudicial or detrimental to the association."

Sterling was also fined $2.5 million.

Patrick Keefe, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, writing in the New Yorker, has an 11 page article with several new details on the capture of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, mostly from law enforcement sources.

Keefe's interviews with law enforcement contain some new details. For example, why did El Chapo's most trusted associates flip so fast when arrested in the days preceding El Chapo's capture? U.S. law enforcement sources tell Keefe they were tortured. They say the Mexican Marines are known for that. [More...]

Comcast today announced that it will divest 3.9 million subscribers of Comcast and Time Warner to Charter Communications and a new spinoff company, after its planned acquisition of Time Warner.

Contrary to earlier reports, Comcast is holding onto Colorado. Most of the divestitures are in the Midwest and South and currently belong to Time Warner.

The changes would occur after approval of the Comcast-Time Warner deal, and are intended to increase the likelihood of the deal's approval.