by TChris

President Bush doesn't think Americans should see the consequences of the war in Iraq, particularly the flag-draped coffins waiting to be flown back home. (TalkLeft has one photo here with links to the rest.) As Peabody award winner Bill Gallagher observes: "The truth is the president's torturer, and any image that challenges his arrogant fantasies must be stopped."

Truth will surely torture the President Friday night, when ABC's Nightline will devote its entire program to reading the names of the war dead while showing their photographs. The executive producer of the program hopes that this effort to honor the sacrifices our soldiers have made (as the President asked us all to do) will cause viewers to "take some time to reflect on the price that these men and women have paid in our names."

Is Government spying on weblogs around the corner? This article says maybe. [hat tip to Big Tex]

The Washington Post today opines on the defeat of the Victim's Rights Amendment to the Constitution, and the (in our view) unwise provision contained in the Senate's new Victim's Rights legislation that would allow victims to go to federal appeals courts to enforce their rights under the law:

A constitutional amendment on this subject was never necessary -- unless, that is, the goal was to diminish protections for the accused in criminal trials. Congress can provide for victims anything that doesn't infringe upon defendants' trial rights, using its normal legislative powers. The new bill would guarantee them the right in federal cases to notice of public proceedings, to be protected from the accused, to attend proceedings, to confer with prosecutors, to receive restitution from the perpetrator and to be otherwise treated "with fairness and with respect for the victim's dignity and privacy." Such protections are actually not new; current law is, broadly speaking, similar. What is new is that the law would have an enforcement mechanism: It would allow victims to go to federal appeals courts to force trial judges who ignore their rights to respect them.

This is a potentially troubling provision; it will probably -- particularly at first -- spawn a great deal of litigation as victims seek to intervene in pending criminal cases, prosecutors seek to preserve their own latitude to try cases in ways that best serve the government's interests, and defendants seek to ensure that their constitutional rights are not compromised. Granting victims standing in court whenever they feel their "dignity and privacy" have been disregarded could prove troublesome for prosecutors.

But at least the Senate, by writing these rules into a statute instead of into the Constitution, has preserved the critical principle that the rights of defendants -- whose liberty the state is seeking to take away -- must trump whatever accommodations the government offers to victims, in the event that the two cannot be reconciled. The statutory route lets Congress tinker further if the balance proves imperfect, and it largely avoids compromising the fairness of trials.

As Gary of Amygdala writes, ordering a pizza may get you in hot water with the government:

It's dinnertime, and you're hungry and tired, so you pick up the phone and order your favorite pizza. But you might have just landed yourself a lot more than pepperoni and cheese. If you owe fines or fees to the courts, that phone call may have provided the link the state needed to track you down and make you pay. That's one of the strategies of firms such as a company being hired by the Missouri Office of State Courts Administrator to handle its fine and debt collections.

David Coplen, the state office's budget director, said he discovered that pizza delivery lists are one of the best sources such companies use to locate people....A sampling in January of just three of Missouri's 114 counties found about $2 million owed to courts by people whose Social Security numbers were known, Coplen said. That finding suggests courts statewide could reap significant revenue once Dallas-based ACS Inc. gets to work this month pursuing people using phone numbers and addresses.

Via Law Prof Michael Froomkin at Discourse.Net:

One of the marks of a free country is that you can criticize the Maximum
Leader without fear of investigations or reprisals. Not in Seattle, USA, where a boy was investigated by the Secret Service, then disciplined by his School, for drawing Bush as the devil in an art class assignment on the Iraq war.

by TChris

The Justice Department has withdrawn the subpoena that it issued to New York-Presbyterian Hospital for the records of women who received abortions. Other courts confronting similar Justice Department subpoenas have protected the privacy of those records, but Judge Casey in the Southern District of New York held the hospital in contempt for failing to produce redacted versions of the records. The Justice Department contended that the records would help it defend a constitutional challenge against a law that bans a particular abortion procedure.

The Justice Department says it changed its position because it wants the case to be resolved promptly. Maybe. Or maybe the Justice Department knew it would lose on appeal. Or maybe the Justice Department realized that its position was inconsisent with the President's pledge to support the privacy interests of patients. In any event, if the judge grants the Department's request to vacate the contempt order, the Department's misguided attempt to obtain the records will finally be laid to rest.

by TChris

Let's start by getting our terms straight. If you take property that belongs to another person without that person's consent, it's called theft. The fact that the property is easy to steal is not a defense to theft. So why does Manuel Miranda, who worked for Bill Frist and Orrin Hatch, continue to argue that taking over 4,000 memoranda that belonged to Democrats from the Senate's computer system isn't theft?

New York federal prosecutor David Kelley will lead a Justice Department investigation into the theft of the documents. The Justice Department had been urged to appoint an independent prosecutor to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, but it's unclear just how independent Kelley will be since John Ashcroft hasn't recused himself from overseeing the investigation.

An investigation by the Senate's sergeant-at-arms suggested that the wrongdoing was not limited to the two Republican staff aides who downloaded and printed the files.

The report also suggested that many other Republican aides might have been involved in trafficking in the stolen documents, and Democrats have questioned whether officials at the Justice Department and the White House were also privy to the material in working to support Mr. Bush's nominees and derail Democratic opposition.

Whether Kelley will successfully uncover the full extent of the wrongdoing may depend upon the cooperation he receives from the Justice Department, but his appointment letter "left open whether he would have the type of broad autonomy given to the prosecutor in another politically sensitive case involving the leak of a C.I.A. officer's identity." Bowing to political pressure, Ashcroft recused himself from that investigation. Since this investigation could also lead to the White House, Ashcroft should recuse himself here, as well.

Say hello to Volconvo, "a socially conscious group that wants to promote intelligent debate and activism."

Congrats to Lis Wiehl, our friend and frequent sparring partner on Fox News, whose book comes out today. We've read it, it will be a best seller, get your copy now:

Winning Every Time: How to Use the Skills of a Lawyer in the Trials of Your Life
by Lis Wiehl

Our sitemeter has been down almost all day. It's a pain, because TalkLeft takes forever to load when Sitemeter is not working. There's one way we can always tell if it's us or Sitemeter....We check Instapundit whose sitemeter is on the same server. His sitemeter is down now too. [This has nothing to do with our hosting company which is the great Hosting Matters--only with Sitemeter which uses its own servers to compute site stats.]

Only a contortionist could twist abortion rights into having a connection to 9/11. President Bush's former (and returning) media spin artist Karen Hughes managed to do the job. Kicking Ass has the details, orginally contained in this Salon article.

Hughes' comments:

I think that after September 11, the American people are valuing life more and we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life. President Bush has worked to say, "let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions." And I think those are the kinds of policies the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy and, really, the fundamental issue between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life."

The Christian Science Monitor has a very good article on the rise of skinheads in the Pacific Northwest. The citizens there are banding together to oppose them.

It was a Saturday morning recently when Jason Martin heard a knock at his front door. As he stepped outside, he was astounded to find 200 people there cheering, then singing "God Bless America," and praying the "Lord's Prayer" together. "It made me feel very humble, very received, very respected, very encouraged," he recalls. Later that day, more than 500 people in town marched and rallied in support of Mr. Martin, an African-American minister who had wakened up three nights earlier to find a cross burning on his front lawn.

Pastor Martin's story - especially how his community responded to a frightening example of bigotry - is an important chapter in the Pacific Northwest's evolution from recurring racism and hate to what experts say is an inspiring model of how communities can reverse this troubling legacy of national life.....There's been a second cross-burning in Washington State. Racial profiling has become an issue in Portland, Ore., where there have been two recent instances in which black motorists pulled over by white police officers were shot and killed. There have been several episodes of hateful literature distributed in the region, most recently last week in a suburb of Portland where white supremacist tracts were included in bags of candy meant to attract kids.

The number one authority on this topic in our book is Journalist and Author David Neiwart, who writes the blog Orcinus from his home in the Pacific Northwest.

In related news, white supremacist Matthew Hale, leader of the former World Church of the Creator (now known as the Creativity Movement), was convicted today of soliciting the murder of a federal judge and obstruction of justice.