My DD reports, "For Estrada, the 60 votes are not there to invoke cloture. Novak states that the Republicans see only five Democratic senators backing Estrada, so the 60 senators needed for cloture seem unattainable. The Estrada nomination is 4-5 votes short."

Don't miss Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley's latest on Ashcroft's mishandling of the Moussaoui case. We don't always agree with Turley, but on Moussaoui, we've been on the same page since the case began. We even like his title and subtitle: Sanity and Justice Slipping Away: Ashcroft rolls over legal rights to pursue a demented terror suspect.

Here's a sample, but go read the whole thing:

Lacking any meaningful evidence linking Moussaoui to the 9/11 plot, the government wrote an indictment that reads like a bad dime-store novel, describing shadowy figures and loosely imputing their actions to Moussaoui. A central character in this criminal novelette is alleged 9/11 mastermind Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who figures so prominently in the indictment that the government named him an unindicted co-conspirator.

That made Bin al-Shibh a material witness in the case, but the Justice Department was not concerned about his being called to confirm these facts because Bin al-Shibh was at large and believed to be possibly dead. That changed last September when a very much alive Bin al-Shibh was arrested in Pakistan.

Under interrogation, Bin al-Shibh has reportedly given the CIA some valuable information, but also one highly unwelcome tidbit: Al Qaeda thinks Moussaoui is as crazy as we do.

Bin al-Shibh reportedly stated that he did send money to Moussaoui as a type of terrorist retainer. However, he also stated that no one trusted the unhinged Moussaoui for such an important mission and that Moussaoui was never made part of the 9/11 conspiracy.

Such evidence might prove Moussaoui was part of a terrorist group and even secure a lengthy sentence. But Ashcroft doesn't want to convict some terrorist wannabe with the dubious distinction of flunking out of suicide bomber school. He wants to execute the 20th hijacker and give Americans a sense of retribution for 9/11.

To access all of our Moussaoui posts in one place, go here.

Gary Hart delivered a new speech Monday night at the World Affairs Council & Council on Foreign Relations in San Francisco. You can read the full text of Principled Engagement: America's Role in the 21st-Century World here. Some quotes:

American military power must be used judiciously and prudently, even more so now that we are the dominant military power on earth by several orders of magnitude. We now spend more each year on our military establishment than at least the next five major powers, including China, Russia, a the U.K., combined.....

Our forces must be used primarily to protect our legitimate security interests and those of our allies. When they are used, certain standards must be clearly stated and met. We must define our political and military objectives, and our political goals must be tangible, obtainable, and stated in concrete terms. The American people must support the use of our forces in any sustained military operation and must be fully cognizant of the proposed levels of military force and the potential costs, including in human lives. Our military forces should be committed only after diplomatic, political, and other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted and after local forces are determined to be insufficient to resolve the conflict. We must be clear on how we intend to achieve our objective and what strategies, tactics, and doctrines we mean to employ. And command structures must be clearly defined and our plan of operation must be simple and achievable in its execution. ....

We should not hide our policies from our own people or from the world at large. In the long run, and increasingly in the short run, there are few if any secrets. Our policies must withstand the therapy of sunlight. In almost every case, except the most important security secrets, if we are afraid to disclose our practices or intentions, it usually means we will be ashamed of them when they are ultimately exposed.....

We should not behave differently to others, including the most humble nations, than we would have them behave towards us. Our dealings must not only be transparent, they must also be fair and just. This is true all the more so since we now stand constantly examined in the court of international opinion and we do not have the excuse of combating communism to rationalize our misdeeds. Even our resistance to terrorism must not become a new excuse to shortcut our principles, bully our neighbors and allies, and act as the new empire-builders....

The American Bar Association, America's largest legal group, on Monday overwhelmingly opposed a Bush administration anti-terrorism measure that bars U.S. citizens jailed as enemy combatants from consulting defense lawyers.

"The American Bar Association's policy-making body voted 368-76 to approve a proposal backing the right of U.S. citizens held as enemy combatants to have access to lawyers and judicial review of their status. It also urged the U.S. Congress to establish clear standards and procedures for the designation of enemy combatants and their treatment."

"Neal Sonnett, a Miami defense lawyer who heads the association's task force on the treatment of enemy combatants, said that while every lawyer in the room wanted to work with the administration to fight terror, "we just cannot lose our Constitution in the process. It is an issue of defending liberty and pursuing justice."

More information about the resolution is available in this AP article. You can read the text of the resolution and Task Force Report here.

The Quotable Bush

"The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein and his willingness to terrorize himself." -- Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29."

The article also has a lot about Republican concerns with John Edwards --they're striking out at him first, which is interesting because Edwards is running fourth in the polls, behind Lieberman, Kerry and Gephardt.

Good riddance to the celebrity recordings in New York City taxis. They were almost as awful as the Dell commericials.

A federal court in Manhattan has banned the Peace March scheduled for next weekend:

Antiwar demonstrators may not march past the United Nations complex on Saturday, or anywhere else in Manhattan, a federal judge ruled yesterday. Agreeing with the city that a large, moving rally of 100,000 people or more raised serious security risks, the judge said the organizers would have to settle for a stationary rally five blocks north of the complex. In refusing to grant a parade permit, the city did not violate the demonstrators' First Amendment rights, the judge, Barbara S. Jones of Federal District Court in Manhattan, wrote in her opinion rejecting their request for a preliminary injunction. She said that their free-speech rights were adequately protected by the city's counteroffer of a rally for 10,000 people at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, at 47th Street, with overflow space as far north on First Avenue as needed.

There's a nice profile of Donna Newman, court-appointed lawyer for Jose Padilla, in the New York Times, Speaking for Terror Suspect, and for the Constitution.

We heard Donna speak in November at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' board meeting in San Francisco. We don't think she'll lose either.

For a good and concise summary of the issues involved, check out this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Thanks to Jim Capozzola of Rittenhouse for sending it to us.)

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Arkansas can force a prisoner on death row to take antipsychotic medication to make him sane enough to execute . In the majority opinion, Judge Roger L. Wollman wrote:

"Eligibility for execution is the only unwanted consequence of the medication."

...Judge Gerald W. Heaney, in dissent, ... would have allowed Mr. Singleton to be medicated without fear of execution.

"I believe," he wrote, "that to execute a man who is severely deranged without treatment, and arguably incompetent when treated, is the pinnacle of what Justice Marshall called `the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance.' " Judge Heaney added that the majority's holding presented doctors with an impossible ethical choice.

The "only" unwanted consequence? Can any other consequence, good or bad, matter after that?

We won't be posting until later tonight. We're going to debating the Michael Jackson brouhaha on Hannity & Colmes around 9:45 EST. We'll be defending Michael. How sleezy of whoever leaked the deposition transcripts of his long ago lawsuit. Depositions aren't evidence unless they are admitted at trial--in most places, depositions aren't even filed with the Court. They are tools for discovery, not public documents. Sean, no doubt, won't agree.

Update: Gloria Allred just said on O'Reilly the transcript was filed with the court.

Densho, the Japanese American Legacy Project, sponsored a program on civil liberties yesterday in Seattle. The speakers, mostly elderly Japanese, detailed their experiences of their WWII detention and seemed to agree that civil rights are teetering anew as they did in WWII.

The stories told by the elderly Japanese Americans and the young Syrian woman were remarkably similar: the shock of suddenly being viewed with suspicion by friends and neighbors, the bewilderment of being torn from homes and locked up, the anger with a government that promised to protect freedoms.

It happened to people of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor. It's happening to Arab Americans and other Muslims since Sept. 11, 2001. But this time, Americans of many races are speaking out against the erosion of liberty in the name of security.

"We will not let history repeat itself," said Dale Minami, lead attorney in a lawsuit in the early 1980s that successfully challenged the federal government's claim that incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans was justified during wartime.

Densho chronicles the experiences of people imprisoned in camps across the Western U.S. in the 1940s, and yesterday's program began with films of several local residents relating a sense of loss and disillusionment still fresh after five decades.

They were followed by Nadin Hamoui, 21, a Syrian college student from Seattle. She tearfully recounted how 15 federal agents stormed her family's Lynnwood home last February as part of a post-Sept. 11 crackdown on Arab nationals living illegally in the U.S. In the chaos of the raid, Hamoui ran in to one of the agents in the hallway. "He pulled his gun and put it right in the middle of my forehead," she told the crowd of nearly 500 people.

There's lots more, go and read the whole thing.

For more on the protest of the detainees, and on those calling for Ashcroft's removal, see our prior post here.

From The Smoking Gun

Hey, dude, you're getting a cell!

Benjamin Curtis, the 22-year old actor who portrays "Steven," the Dell Guy, in those bothersome computer commercials, was arrested late last night (2/9) on a marijuana possession charge, The Smoking Gun has learned.

According to cops, Curtis was holding a "small bag of marijuana" when he was popped on Manhattan's Lower East Side (at Ludlow and Rivington for you Gothamites). Curtis is currently being held in Central Booking and is scheduled to be arraigned later today in Manhattan Criminal Court.

Curtis, who lives in lower Manhattan, was charged with criminal possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor. Bonnie Shumofsky, the actor's agent, said she was unaware of her client's bust when contacted this morning by TSG. (1 page)