In the "Emily Litella Never Mind" department:

A scientific study warning of great risks associated with ecstasy use has been retracted.

A report submitted for publication last year by the team conducting a study on Ecstasy at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine claimed that one night's use of ecstasy could result in permanent brain damage and symptoms resembling Parkinsons' Disease. Other scientists said hogwash, it would take massive doses of the drug to cause brain damage.

Turns out the scientists got their drugs mixed up. They hadn't injected ecstasy at all into the monkeys and baboons who were the test subjects, but d-methamphetamine.

California Governor Gray Davis has signed into law the bill passed by the state legislature granting drivers' licenses to undocumented residents. The bill allows state residents to apply for a driver's license using a state-issued identification number rather than a Social Security number. This will allow the thousands of undocumented California residents to obtain licenses. Gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante supports the law. Arnold opposes it, as do the other major Republican contenders for Governor. It is estimated that there are up to 2 million undocumented persons in California.

To obtain a license, an applicant must show a federal taxpayer identification number (but not a Social Security number, which requires lawful residence and permission to work) and other documents, such as a foreign passport, foreign driver's license or an identification card issued by foreign consulates, such as the matricula identification cards issued by the Mexican government.

We wrote about this earlier today and it provoked a lot of comments, many asking what benefits the bill would provide.

The American Immigration Lawyers' Associaton (AILA) says:

• Licensing noncitizens enriches our domestic intelligence by allowing law enforcement authorities to verify and obtain the identities, residences, and addresses of millions of foreign nationals. Restrictive licensing will deprive authorities of this information.

• The proliferation of fraudulent documents that will result from restrictive licensing will impede law enforcement efforts by contaminating intelligence regarding who is present in the United States.

We have to say we are very impressed with candidate John Edwards weblog.

Check it out. It's a Slash weblog which is different other kinds of blogs. For example, Edwards' readers can register (anonymously and free) and post, as well as comment and rank the comments of others.

Second, Edwards' blog is actually 51 separate blogs. There is a national blog to discuss and read about Edwards and issues nationally--and one for each state where you can write about and discuss Edwards with folks from your state. The only thing missing is links to other blogs.

We like Edwards. Since we remain undecided on our favorite candidate, we read Dean and Clark's blogs almost every day. We'll be reading Edwards now too.

Thanks to Oliver Willis for the link.

A three judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals today refused to delay the Oct. 7 recall vote.

The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund had filed suit, charging that the county's plan to eliminate more than 100 polling places and cut the number of bilingual poll workers would disenfranchise Latino voters.

But the three-judge panel, with one Democratic and two Republican appointees, refused to block the vote.

CNN reports on a new CNN/Time poll showing that Bush's reelection in 2004 is no sure thing:

41 percent of all registered voters say they will definitely vote against Bush; just 29 percent say they will definitely vote for him. So Bush must woo about seven in ten swing voters -- not a difficult task for a popular incumbent, but far from a certainty.

The top preferred Democrats are Kerry, Lieberman, Dean, Gephardt, in that order. Sharpton is ahead of Bob Graham and Kucinich is last, behind Carol Mosley Braun.

So who won the Democratic debate last night? According to Washington Post editor Dan Balz, the answer is there was no winner.

The consensus after the debate was that no one was the true winner. Most of the campaign staffs were happy with the performance of their candidates and there wasn't a lot of heavy spinning afterwards, a sign that this debate probably did not change things much in terms of the state of the Democratic race.

Balz analyzes the debate at length in answering readers' questions in the online chat, the transcript is at the above link.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has made his first serious misstep in our view. Yesterday he vowed to fight the bill passed by the California legislature granting drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants. Gray Davis has said he will sign the bill.

Bye, Arnold. Vote No on Recall.

In a speech to hundreds of military officers, Retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a former U.S. Commander in the Middle East who remains a consultant with the State Department, has blasted Bush's war policies.

A former U.S. commander for the Middle East who still consults for the State Department yesterday blasted the Bush administration's handling of postwar Iraq, saying it lacked a coherent strategy, a serious plan and sufficient resources...."There is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together," said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, and so, he said, "we're in danger of failing."

Zinni cannot be dismissed as a malcontent or Bush opponent:

Zinni's comments were especially striking because he endorsed President Bush in the 2000 campaign, shortly after retiring from active duty, and serves as an adviser to the State Department on anti-terror initiatives in Indonesia and the Philippines. He preceded Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks as chief of the U.S. Central Command, the headquarters for U.S. military operations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Here's the best part --Zinni's speech was well-received.

Zinni's comments to the joint meeting in Arlington of the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association, two professional groups for officers, were greeted warmly by his audience, with prolonged applause at the end. Some officers bought tapes and compact discs of the speech to give to others.

Update: We've decided to reprint the email we received tipping us to the article--it's from defense lawyer Terry Kindlon, a former marine sergeant in Vietnam, who was at the speech. Please read it:

A California appeals court has ruled that a person on probation for a felony can smoke marijuana for medical purposes.

This is the right decision. It would seem obvious that if a probationer had a medical marijuana certificate issued by the state, his use of the substance should be no different than taking any prescription drug while on probation. The problem arises in two ways. First, judges will arbitrarily decree that a probationer cannot use marijuana. Second, the terms of most state probation agreements specify that the probationer cannot violate any state or federal law, and the use of marijuana is a federal offense. Drug felons are subjected to urine analysis which shows if they smoked marijuana. The lab is obligated to forwards the positive report to the probation officer, and the rest is obvious.

We have faced this problem in our own cases. We're heartened to see this California decision, and hope other states will adopt its reasoning. [Thanks to Oakland attorney Dennis Roberts for the tip]

Here is the portion of the transcript from the Wednesday gubernatorial debate in California on the issue of the death penalty. [Ed. The source text was all in capital letters, so we changed it to lower case to make it more readable, but some uncapitalized letters will seem strange.]

Bottom line: Arianna and Canejo are opposed to the death penalty. Bustamante and the Republicans favor it. Camejo also opposes three strikes laws when minor crimes are the third strike.

Shandobil: the next question is from john myers, directed toward arianna huffington.

Myers: Ms. Huffington, one of the most solemn jobs of a governor is his or hers involvement in the sentence for death. You've called for a moratorium on capital punishment because of a racial disparity in the process and factually innocent people sentenced to death. Are you philosophically opposed to the death penalty or its application.

Huffington: I'm philosophically opposed to the death penalty and very opposed to the way it has been applied in california and across the country. At a time when new dna testing has known that innocent people are being put to death by government, I absolutely would want a moratorium. The only reason we do not have more elected officials asking for a moratorium is because they only follow the polling results and they are spineless to speak their own minds and hearts. That is we need independent discussion on the issues of death penalty and others in the state.

In an unexpected announcement, the Energy Department said it will decrease the number of polygraphs administered to employees with access to "nuclear secrets," particularly in the nation's weapons laboratories.

The deputy energy secretary, Kyle E. McSlarrow, said at a Senate hearing that the new policy was likely to reduce the number of people given polygraph tests to 4,500, mainly in sensitive arms and intelligence posts, from some 20,000 now.

McSlarrow said there has been increasing criticism of the techniques used in polygraphs and the department agreed with some of the critics. The increase in use was a result of the Wen Ho Lee case.

In 2001, Congress instructed the Department of Energy to adopt widespread polygraph screening in reaction to the case of Wen Ho Lee, the scientist at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico who was suspected of being a spy but was freed from jail in September 2000 after admitting to a security violation. That order raised an outcry from experts who ridiculed lie detector tests as pseudoscientific and a potential threat to national security.

Last October, in a report requested and paid for by the Energy Department, a panel convened by an arm of the National Academy of Sciences said polygraph testing was too flawed to use for security screening. The panel said lie detector tests did a poor job of identifying national security risks and were likely to produce accusations against innocent people.

The Senate panel conducting the hearing was chaired by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) who added:

"This is a smart decision. I have been appalled by the D.O.E.'s continued massive use of polygraph tests in the wake of a national study condemning the reliability of these tests. Our national scientists deserve better."

We had hoped this lame theory of prosecution had been put out to pasture, but it's being raised this week in Miami. In their book, Actual Innocence, DNA gurus Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld call it "the unidentified co-ejaculator" theory of prosecution: If new DNA testing excludes the defendant, the prosecutor claims the defendant is still guilty, he just didn't ejaculate, and there must have been more than one person who had sex with the victim--even though they can't identify the second perpetrator.

Here's the latest use of the theory, in which DNA tests have cleared a man in jail since 1983 for a rape of an 11 year old. Prosecutors say all the tests show is that the 11 year old victim had consensual sex earlier in the day with someone else.

... in court papers filed last week, Rundle's office argues that the DNA test results are irrelevant because the state never claimed the semen samples taken from the victim came from McKinley. The state says McKinley was caught by police in the act of raping the victim, that he never ejaculated and that the semen came from another male with whom the 11-year-old had had "consensual" sex earlier that day.

"The fact that another person's DNA was found in the victim's vaginal swabs does not establish that the defendant did not commit a sexual battery," argue Assistant State Attorneys Michael Gilfarb and Penny H. Brill in the motion. "It only provides, as the defense already knew, that the victim had sexual intercourse with someone else, sometime prior to the sexual battery."

However, the detective at trial 20 years ago testified that there was semen in the girl's underwear which was "consistent with" defendant Richard McKinley's blood type.

McKinley testified that he had seen the girl at an arcade that night. But he denied assaulting her. He said he was urinating in the alley when approached by the police officers and started running because he didn't know what was happening.