The secret life of Clarence Thomas, revealed for a hefty $1.5 million.

"This is the largest advance ever paid a sitting Supreme Court justice and that the agreement with this most conservative justice on the court coincidentally came from News Corp., the leviathan media empire owned by the conservative Rupert Murdoch."

Avedon Carol of Sideshow, who resides in Britain has some thoughts on the Pete Townsend arrest.

Since the Home Office has just announced that they will no longer bother investigating "minor" crimes like burglary and assault because they "don't have enough manpower", I'd like to hear the explanation the Bill has for sending 16 cops to bust a guitar player.

Our prior post on this is here.

"The U.S. government's willingness to compromise on human rights to fight terrorism sets a dangerous precedent and drives away some nations from joining that war, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. The private group said U.S. support for human rights in countries that are critical to the anti-terrorism campaign was at best inconsistent and at worst completely muted."

A hearing is scheduled to begin today for the two U.S. Pilots who took "go pills" containing amphetamines and mistakenly killed Canadian troops last year in Afganistan.

The hearing is to decide whether the pilots should face a court martial. "At issue is whether Air National Guard pilots Majs. Harry Schmidt and William Umbach are criminals or military men who made a tragic error while on duty in the Afghan war. The two face charges of manslaughter, assault and dereliction of duty -- which could bring up to 64 years prison time -- for dropping a 500-pound bomb on a Canadian military unit."

Lawyers for the pilots have said the mens' judgment may have been impaired by their usage of the amphetamine "go pills" given to them by the Air Force to combat fatigue on their missions. We wrote about this aspect of the case here.

Update: The lawyers rapped the Government hard at the hearing.

Instapundit says no-knock drug raids are dangerous and an example of the Drug War's violation of civil liberties. He's right.

Check out this article in the Baltimore Sun about the decision not to charge Lewis S. Cauthorne, who shot four police officers when they barged into his house, with a crime.

"Investigators concluded detectives did not announce that they were police just before smashing down Cauthorne's door with a battering ram and rushing in to look for drugs."

The authorities believe Cauthorne acted in self-defense. In an interview given the night of the incident, Cauthorne said, "I didn't know you guys were police. I thought I was getting robbed."

The police were required to knock and announce themselves before entering the house. None of the officers suffered serious injuries. "The raid yielded six bags with trace amounts of marijuana, empty vials, a razor with cocaine residue and two scales, documents show."

Nor has Cauthorne been charged with any drug crimes. Nonetheless, he spent six weeks, between the date of the incident on Nov. 19 and January 7 in jail.

Proseuctors in the case of the accused snipers begin their bid for the death penalty against juvenile suspect John Lee Malvo today in a Virginia courtroom.

Today's hearing is signficant for the defense in that it will be their first opportunity to learn some of the evidence the State has against their client--it is expected that about two dozen witnesses will testify for the prosecution, including ballistic experts, and officers and agents who handled various pieces of evidence. It will also give the defense a chance to cross-examine the witnesses, test their memories, and commit them on record to a version of events. Should they testify differently at a later hearing, they could be impeached by the testimony they give today.

From a factual standpoint, "the prosecutors will try to tie Malvo to an Oct. 9 slaying at a Prince William County gas station, as well as the Oct. 14 shooting of FBI analyst Linda Franklin in Seven Corners, to meet the provisions of one element of Virginia's death penalty law."

The hearing itself is fairly routine. The Judge has to decide if there is probable cause to believe Malvo committed the shooting with which he is charged, and if so, he will order Malvo transferred to adult court. Juvenile courts in Virginia cannot hear murder cases involving a defendant older than 14. Probable cause is a very low standard--kind of like, are there reasonable grounds to believe Malvo committed the crimes?

Virginia is carefully laying the groundwork for it's bid for the death penalty against Malvo. They are crafting arguments under two different provisions of the capital murder statute. The first argument is that Malvo engaged in more than one killing in a three year period. For this theory to succeed, prosecutors have to show that Malvo was the triggerman in each of the named killings. Their second argument falls under Virginia's new and untested terrorism law, which requires the prosecution to prove that the killings were intended to terrorize the community at large. To support this theory, prosecutors are expected to introduce the note Malvo allegedly wrote saying "Your children are not safe anywhere at any time," and a tarot card that was left at the scene of another one of the murders.

Malvo is charged with the killing of Linda Franklin in Fairfax County. John Muhammed is charged with the killing of Dean Meyers in Prince William County. They are not being tried together.

Update on the hearing: Police say Malvo contacted them four times to demand $10 million to stop the killings. Fingerprints on weapons in four shootings linked to Malvo.

"Police in Los Angeles have settled on a new way of handling those pesky burglar alarms that take up so much of their time. They will now ignore them -- unless someone can prove that there is a genuine emergency."

"The change was approved by the Los Angeles police commissioners at the request of chief William Bratton, who said that 92 percent of the alarms are false -- wasting time and money in a city struggling with gang violence, a spike in violent crime and a shortage of officers."

Security companies have said they will challenge the move. We support Bratton on this one.

Via the Hamster, you too can receive between $5.00 and $20.00 as your share of a class action lawsuit over CD pricing pending in the U.S. District Court in Maine. To make it easy to collect your money, you can fill out the claim form online at this website set up specifically for this purpose. It's easy as could be, all you have to do is answer three questions "yes" or "no," and if the answer is "yes" to all three, you get to submit the claim on line. The big one is whether you purchased any CD's from a retail outlet between January, 1995 and December 22, 2000. You don't need receipts or details of your purchases, but you are declaring under penalty of perjury that you did buy one or more CD's during this time period.

So what's the catch? None, other than this:

The cash paid by the Defendants, after the payment of attorneys' fees, litigation and Settlement administration costs, shall be distributed to consumers who purchased Music Products. The number of claims filed will determine the actual amount of the individual refund but will not exceed $20.00 per claimant. If the number of claims filed would result in refunds of less than $5.00 per claimant, there will be no cash distribution to individual consumers. Rather, the cash portion of the Settlement shall be distributed to not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be used for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products.

In plain English? The total amount available for distribution is a net amount, the amount the losers to the lawsuit have to pay, after litigation and administrative costs and attorneys' fees are deducted. They will then divide that number by the total number of claims filed. If the resulting number is less than $5.00, no money is distributed to the claimants. It all goes to charity.

Call us optimists, we went ahead and filed. It took two minutes.

Pete Townsend, leader of the band "The Who," has been released on bail. No charges have been filed against him. He was questioned at police headquarters after his arrest today "on suspicion of possession indecent images of children" and released. He is due to appear again at the police station later in January, if the police want to question him further.

Townsend has not shied away from the media.

Townshend, who has said he believes he was abused as a child, acknowledged Saturday he had downloaded child pornography from the Internet but insisted he had done it for research purposes.

"I am not a pedophile. I think pedophilia is appalling," the guitarist, who is married with three children, said in a statement.

Hours before he was arrested he told the Sun newspaper he had worked "tirelessly" to help the abused but had been foolish to wage a one-man battle against child pornography.

British police arrested more than 1,300 in "Operation Ore," Britain's largest child pornography investigation. How did it start?

The probe, which began 10 months ago, was launched after U.S. law enforcement agencies identified about 7,000 British suspects as users of child pornography Web sites.

Kevin Drumm over at Calpundit had a great post the other day opposing the use of torture in the terror war, based upon a recent new lead article in The Economist.

Our views are set out here.

At what point do U.S. officials holding foreign detainees and prisoners cross the line between acceptable interrogation techniques and torture? It seems to us that the U.S. is operating under an "end justifies the means" philosophy--trying to justify tactics that anyone with an ounce of humanity would know amount to torture--under the rubric that the terrorist threat to Americans is so potentially catastrophic that such treatment is necessary. We're not buying into the argument. We find these tactics to be a gross violation of human rights. They are also dangerous to our own servicemen and women: If we treat the citizens of other countries this way, why won't these other countries retaliate with similar or harsher treatment when they capture members of our military?

As Kevin notes, this Washington Post article is also a must read on the issue.

The Washington Post today reports on the effects of the clemency decsion in Illinois.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers ( NACDL) says that Illinois commutations can benefit even victims and improve national relations.

We'll be discussing it live on CNN's TalkBack Live around 3:30 EST.

It's official. The voters have decided. The 2002 Media Whore of the Year Award goes to Bob Woodward. Why? Read Eric Alterman.

In a nutshell, according to MHO,

Contrasts were drawn between the intrepid, power-challenging, authority-questioning Watergate investigative reporter of the 1970's, and the obscenely slavish, weasely celebrity-reporter of the New Millennium, who relies on bizarre and dishonest devices (inventing facts) to achieve the outcomes his powerful patrons desire. For this year's voters, the extreme and tragic transformation of Bob "Woody" Woodward - and his decadent journey from "All the President's Men" to "Ten Days in September" - represents a poignant microcosm of the national mainstream media's deterioration over the last thirty years.

Runner up was NBC's Tim Russert.

[link via Cursor , just about the top daily news source around.]