Andrew Lam, writing for Pacific News Service, asks whether detained Army Chaplain Capt. James Yee will become Wen Ho Lee II. It sure seems like a possibility right now.

Yee's arrest is as troubling as Dr. Lee's, says Ling Chi Wang, a professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Though not prepared to pass judgment on the case, Wang says that "based on what has been leaked to the media, I smell a rat." The public knows next to nothing about the Yee case other than what the FBI and the military have revealed to the press, he says, much of which "we can safely regard as propaganda and half-truths."

Here's a current link to Robert Novak's July 14 column outing Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, as a CIA operative.

Among those in Congress calling for a special prosecutor (already rejected by the White House as we reported earlier): Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, both of whom wrote letters Monday to Bush and Ashcroft.

In an unprecedented power play, Attorney General John Ashcroft has moved a death penalty trial from one federal district to another. Defense attorneys say he moved the case to get a Judge more sympatico with the Government's position.

Trying to cut budgets, prisons in several states have revised their food plans to reduce calories for inmates.

These new food plans involve either reducing the number of calories provided each day or eliminating a meal on weekends and holidays by serving two meals instead of three.

....Experts on prisons say, however, that food is only a very small part of the overall cost of running a prison system — about 80 percent of prison budgets go for guards' salaries — so that any saving achieved by reducing inmates' food will be minimal and comes at a risk.

We see this as misguided, unfair and just another attempt to denigrate the least powerful among us.

The reduction in daily calories was a result of a bill passed by the Texas Legislature that required the Department of Criminal Justice to reduce its budget by 5 percent, or $230 million, this year, with about $6 million of that coming from reduced spending on food, Mr. Todd said.

State Representative Ray Allen, a Republican who is chairman of the House Corrections Committee, said, "It was not our first choice to cut their food, but we had a $9.9 billion shortfall."

Here's how the cuts are effectuated:

In the truth is stranger than fiction department.....A Tampa band named "Hell on Earth" is protesting assisted-suicide laws. To prove their point, they will feature a live assisted suicide onstage at their concert this Saturday night in St. Petersberg, Fla. If you can't attend in person, don't worry, you can watch it on the internet.

.... the suicide show will be played before a "select few people" at an undisclosed location in St. Petersburg on Saturday and be shown live on the band's Web site. ....[Band Leader BillyTourtelot] would not disclose any details about the terminally ill person or say how the person planned to kill himself.

He said the point is to raise awareness that physician-assisted suicide should be legalized in Florida. Tourtelot said he is not worried about the legal ramifications. Violating the new city ordinance is punishable by up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. A Florida law already makes it manslaughter, a felony, to assist in a suicide. But Tourtelot insists the band is not assisting the act.

"This person will be doing this self-deliverance totally by themselves, on their own accord," he said.

The band is known for unusual stage shows. A past show featured the band grinding up live rats in a blender.

The White House today rejected calls for an Independent Counsel to investigate leaks in the Plame affair. Both Wesley Clark and Howard Dean have rightly pointed out that the Justice Department is not the appropriate agency to conduct an impartial, independent investigation.

The White House says Justice will determine whether an investigation is warranted. So there are no plans at this point for the launching of an investigation--there will only be an " preliminary inquiry."

Officials said the Justice Department began a preliminary inquiry to determine if there should be a full-blown probe based on a memo from the CIA stating a leak had occurred.

We anticipate a whitewash.

Update: Maybe not.

Good news from the New Hampshire Supreme Court. In a new decision, it has disagreed with the Supreme Court and held that individuals have a right to privacy in trash they put out for collection.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled Monday that garbage is private, even when it has been put out near the street for collection. The 4-1 decision runs counter to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and high courts in most other states. But the court said New Hampshire's constitution provides a stronger expectation of privacy than the U.S. Constitution. The decision came in a case in which police searched a man's trash and found wire scrapers coated with marijuana residue.

The Court relied on the New Hampshire state consitution in arriving at its ruling:

We conclude that the defendant exhibited an actual expectation of privacy in his trash because he placed it in black plastic bags with the expectation it would be picked up by authorized persons for eventual disposal. We also conclude that society is prepared to recognize that expectation as reasonable. We acknowledge that the United States Supreme Court has held, to the contrary, that "society would not accept as reasonable [a] claim to an expectation of privacy in trash left for collection in an area accessible to the public." California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 41 (1988). We are free, however, to construe our State Constitution to provide greater protection than the Federal Constitution. See id. at 43; Ball, 124 N.H. at 231-32. We do so here.

The full text of the opinion is here. Hawaii and Washington are two other states that have ruled this way.

This just in via email from the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP):

Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 30, the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Reauthorization Act of 2003. This bill authorizes the drug czar to spend more than $1 billion dollars over the next five years for the continued funding of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. If you do not call your U.S. representative immediately, this bill -- along with the media campaign funding --will almost certainly be approved.

Please call your U.S. representative toll-free by using the Capitol Switchboard at 800-839-5276. This switchboard operates 24 hours a day. So if you are inspired to call after normal business hours in D.C., the operator will transfer you to your representative's office and you can leave a voice mail message. Of course, calling during business hours would be preferable, if possible.

We've written about this before, here and here.

MPP provides this sample script for you to use when you call:

Max has announced the "MAXSPEAK DEAD POOL"--on who takes the fall as a result of the alleged CIA leak of the identity of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.

Taking the fall" means resignation, arrest, or indictment, whichever two come first.

Update: Via Calpundit, we learn Drudge has a response by Novak up on his site. It's unsourced as of now:

'Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives'...

For the second time in one week, Law Professor Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, writes about the Death Penalty on his MSNBC weblog. We're thrilled that Glenn is giving the issue so much attention. His column today includes a long letter from us, in response to his review of Scott Turow's new book, Ultimate Punishment, in his Sept. 25 column.

Of course, we don't have the same views as Glenn on all aspects of the death penalty. For example, while he doesn't say so, we suspect Glenn supports the death penalty in theory, provided it could be fairly adminstered--while we oppose it in all cases. But we welcome his concern for the wrongfully convicted in prisons (See the 9/25 column) and for his take today on who should be locked up and who not--and why the system isn't working the way it should. Glenn says:

My own sense is that we lock up too many people, and that we lock up some of them for too long, and some of them for not long enough. That’s partly because the system is so overburdened that there are too many plea bargains, and too many cases in which charges are brought for leverage. I’d like to see the criminal justice system focus on serious crimes — violent crimes, robbery, etc. — and spend far less on victimless crimes, simple drug possession, etc. Then it would have the resources to do a good job on the cases that are really important, and we could keep violent criminals in jail for a long time.

Glenn also says people don't trust the criminal justice system. They have a hard time believing that "life without parole" really means the inmate can't be released before his death. He's probably right that those opposed to the death penalty have to work harder to make people understand this.

But we still give a lot of blame to the politicans. As we wrote Glenn,

It is now a crime to drive while tired in New Jersey. It's called "Maggie's Law." [Not to be confused with the state's Megans Law."

Under Maggie's Law, police will not be pulling over drivers whose eyelids look heavy. But the law allows prosecutors to charge a motorist with vehicular homicide, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine, in the event of a deadly crash if there is evidence the accident was caused by sleepiness.

This strikes us as overkill and another feel-good unnecessary law. There are plenty of laws already on the books that criminalize the conduct of at-fault and negligent motorists who cause an auto accident that results in death. There's no need to specify every type of misconduct that fits the crime of vehicular homicide or criminally negligent homicide or whatever the law is called in a particular state. That's what juries do.

New York and Washington state are considering similar bills.

We have been getting emails of journals from some of the Freedom Riders on the bus tour to DC. If you haven't been following the tour, designed to gain support for Immigrant rights, go here. The news reported the other day that border agents stopped some of the buses and detained the occupants for hours. Here is an unedited first hand account beginning with the stopping of the bus: