A federal judge in California says he will rule Wednesday on whether to delay the recall election due to the ACLU lawsuit challenging the punch card voting machines in six LA Counties. Here is the text of the ACLU lawsuit .

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, seeks to delay the election until the six urban counties that use punch-card ballots - including Los Angeles - replace the voting machines. If upheld, the suit would move the recall to a March ballot, when the presidential primary is scheduled to take place.

Without the order, "the election could be nothing more than a sham, given the universal recognition that punch-card machines are failed voting mechanisms," wrote Mark D. Rosenbaum, legal director for the ACLU.

During a two-hour hearing today, Wilson listened to arguments from both sides and said that he would return with a decision by midweek, the Associated Press reported.

This ought to make admissions applications soar next year:

The University of Colorado topped the list of party schools in the nation...according to the latest Princeton Review's survey. The "Best 351 Colleges" survey is based on responses from more than 100,000 students at U.S. campuses.

....Despite a six-year effort to curb binge drinking at the University of Colorado, the school ranked third in widespread use of marijuana, fourth in the prevalence of hard liquor consumption and 11th in the prevalence of beer usage, Princeton Review reported in its 2004 findings. CU also ranked first among schools where students study the least.

The English version of Arab newspaper Dar Al Hayat says a communique has been received from Al Qaeda (the Abu Fahes Al Masri Brigade) claiming responsibility for last week's power outage in the U.S.

The communiqué attributed to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the power blackout that happened in the U.S. last Thursday, saying that the brigades of Abu Fahes Al Masri had hit two main power plants supplying the East of the U.S., as well as major industrial cities in the U.S. and Canada, "its ally in the war against Islam (New York and Toronto) and their neighbors."

The communiqué assured that the operation "was carried out on the orders of Osama bin Laden to hit the pillars of the U.S. economy," as "a realization of bin Laden's promise to offer the Iraqi people a present."

The statement, which Al-Hayat obtained from the website of the International Islamic Media Center, didn't specify the way the alleged sabotage was carried out. The communiqué read: "let the criminal Bush and his gang know that the punishment is the result of the action, the soldiers of God cut the power on these cities, they darkened the lives of the Americans as these criminals blackened the lives of the Muslim people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. The Americans lived a black day they will never forget. They lived a day of terror and fear… a state of chaos and confusion where looting and pillaging rampaged the cities, just like the capital of the caliphate Baghdad, and Afghanistan and Palestine were. Let the American people take a sip from the same glass."

There's more.

We've completed our blog move to another hosting company's servers. The site is working well and much faster. We've also got court in the mountains today, so we won't be back here until tonight. Feel free to read our weekend posts --and the great sites on the right. If you get a cached page from the old site, just clear your browser and the new page should come up.

Update: Three days later, we're thrilled with our new hosting company.

The 3rd edition of AntiPolygraph.org's free e-book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, is now on-line and may be downloaded as a 1 mb PDF file.

This new, revised and expanded edition includes updated chapters on polygraph validity, policy, and procedure.

Also of possible interest is news that the American Polygraph Association's annual seminar held earlier this month featured a presentation on how a polygraph operator can rig the "test" when he "knows" the subject is guilty:

California defense attorney Barry Tarlow, whom we consider to be one of the deans of criminal defense, has written an op-ed in Sunday's Los Angeles Times titled Rape Suspects' Uphill Road. Using the Kobe Bryant case as an illustration, Tarlow explains why rape defendants are at an unfair disadvantage due to public policy considerations that have resulted in rape shield laws:

We are about to witness the imbalance of these rules in the case of Los Angeles Laker star Kobe Bryant in Eagle, Colo. Colorado has a stringent rape shield law. Evidence about an alleged victim's reputation or sexual conduct with others is presumed to be "irrelevant," and the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that this "generally renders a victim's sexual history inadmissible."

....For Bryant, who has been charged with sexual assault, this is likely to mean that much of his intimate sexual history will now become "fair game." Like our country's last president, Bryant has made a humiliating public admission that he committed adultery. The prosecution's task, however, is not to prove that sexual contact occurred, but that it occurred without the alleged victim's consent.

....Although the defense might also be interested in investigating whether the alleged victim has previously engaged in similar sexual behavior, it would have an uphill battle to get such evidence in front of the jury. The same goes for evidence of sexual aggressiveness. Any evidence of it in his past may be admissible; in hers, that's not likely.

Here's the latest report from the Justice Department, Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population, 1974 -2001, released this afternoon.

The report discloses that more than 5.6 million, about 1 in 37 adults, have served time in state or federal prison. This appears to include only prisons and not local jails, which would make the number of persons who have been incarcerated much higher.

More than 5.6 million adult U.S. residents were serving time or had previously served time in a state or federal prison as of the end of 2001, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The extent of prison experience, as estimated for the first time, shows that 1 in 37 adults living in the U.S. on December 31, 2001 had been confined in prison at some time during his or her life. At the end of 2001, there were 1,319,000 adults in prison and an estimated 4,299,000 adults who were former prisoners.

The increase in the number of inmates between 1974 and 2001 is 3.8 million. Again, the total of persons serving time in prison in this period is 5.6 million. Here's a portion of the racial and gender breakdown:

At the end of 2001, about 16.6 percent of adult black males were current or former inmates, compared to 7.7 percent of Hispanic males and 2.6 percent of white males. Among black males 35 to 44 years of age, 22 percent were current or former prisoners, compared to 10 percent of Hispanic males and 3.5 percent of white males in the same age group.

Here is the story behind the study that exposed the flaws in Diebold's electronic voting machines. It all started with a website....

A Palestinian Reuters cameraman has been shot dead in Iraq while filming a prison. Reports are that he was killed by U.S. soldiers.

A Reuters staffer told The Associated Press in Baghdad that Dana, a Palestinian, appeared to have been shot by U.S. soldiers as he was videotaping outside the Abu Ghraib prison after a mortar attack there Sunday, in which six prisoners were killed and about 60 others were wounded.

The staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the videotape in Dana's camera showed two U.S. tanks coming toward him, two shots, apparently from the tanks, rang out and Dana fell to the ground. He was taken away by a U.S. helicopter for treatment.

The estimable journalist David Neiwert of Orcinus explains why recent racism charges against Latino Democrat and California gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante are false .

National Consumer Coalition’s Privacy Group has a website section Heroes and Villians that this week names Attorney General John Ashcroft as the " Privacy Villian of the Week" for his upcoming tour garnering support for the Patriot and Victory Acts. We now have a draft of the Victory Act and can confirm that it contains some abominable provisions that will further eviscerate the privacy interests of all Americans. Here are a few, as described by Heroes and Villians:

The full name of the VICTORY Act is the "Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003," and like the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorists" (USA PATRIOT) Act, it is a grab bag of enhanced police-state powers only tangentially related to its bombastic and acronymic title. It is Title V of the VICTORY Act that has the most direct effects on consumer privacy.

Section 503 grants the Attorney General the power to issue "administrative subpoenas" in investigations related to the extremely broad definition of "terrorism" instituted in the USA PATRIOT Act. (An "administrative subpoena" is like a search warrant automatically issued by the Clerk of Court, except without the bother of having a judge sign off on it.) This investigatory power of the DoJ includes the ability to subpoena consumer data from a business. And if so ordered by the Court, the business would not be able to tell anyone about the subpoena for 90 days. Infinite 90-day extensions of this time limit are also available.

This power would be very analogous to the USA PATRIOT Act search warrants issued by the secret FISA court. The House of Representatives has voted to defund enforcement of such warrants on bookstores and libraries.

Then there is Section 504:

We join Amnesty International in condemning the arrest and detention of Lebanese lawyer and human rights activist Dr al-Mugraby in Lebanon.

Dr Muhammad al-Mugraby, who is putting his name forward as a candidate for the post of Chair of the Beirut Bar Association, has in recent years issued a number of statements in which he criticised sections of the judiciary and the Beirut Bar Association, and called for the reform of these institutions.

These prompted the Bar Association of Beirut to instigate a disciplinary action against Dr al-Mugraby accusing him of issuing leaflets and memoranda with the object of "harming and questioning the integrity of the judiciary and the credibility of the Beirut Bar Council".

On 17 January 2003 a disciplinary board of the Beirut Bar Association issued a unanimous decision striking off the name of Dr Muhammad al-Mugraby in absentia from the register of the Bar Association. The decision is subject to appeal, and becomes final only after the defendant has exhausted all means of appeal, according to Article 553 of the Code of Civil Procedures. Dr al-Mugraby appealed against the decision and is still waiting for the outcome. In the meantime he continued to practice law as a lawyer and to represent his clients before the court with the knowledge of the Beirut Bar Association.