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.]

Andrew Northrup wins today's "priceless award" for his post over at The Poor Man on the 2004 Republican ticket of Bush and Cheney, and so much more.

Congressional Quarterly and C-Span are reporting today that Missouri Reps. Richard Gephardt and William Clay have written President Bush urging him to renominate Ronnie White of Missouri for a seat of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. White, an African-American, was nominated by Clinton and rejected in a party-line vote in 1999, primarily because of then-Missouri Senator John Ashcroft's opposition. Ashcroft crusaded against White because of a few of his dissents in death penalty cases. You can read about Ashcroft's sabotaging of White's nomination here.

The debate has just begun. And we have just begun to fight. Activists around the world on Sunday applauded the move by the governor of Illinois to spare death row prisoners from execution and urged President Bush to follow his lead by abolishing the death penalty.

Death penalty foes view Governor Ryan's decision as a chance for more change.

Governor Ryan is the third Governor to clear death row during his term in office--New Mexico and Arkansas governors have done the same thing. We need a moratorium in every state, and on the imposition of the federal death penalty as well.

We need a national review commission to study the innocence cases and find ways to prevent the re-occurrance of these injustices.

We need funding and training for adequate capital defense lawyers.

We need the Innocence Protection Act to pass Congress and to be introduced in every state.

All police interrogations must be videotaped.

We must stop the execution of the mentally ill and of offenders who were under 18 at the time of their crimes.

"Among those executed in the U.S. last year were a mentally ill man, inmates who had been deprived of legal rights and three under 18 at the time of their crimes -- the only three child offenders known to have been judicially executed anywhere in 2002....The United States and Japan are the only industrialized democracies in which the death penalty is still used."

There are many more reforms needed. Until they are all implemented, we need to stop the executions. The chance is just too great that we are going to execute an innocent person, if we haven't already.

Vengeance is not justice.

A new Knights Ridder News Service poll shows that the majority of Americans oppose a unilateral war with Iraq:

With U.S. troops mustering in the Persian Gulf and the nation on the cusp of war with Iraq, Americans in overwhelming numbers oppose unilateral U.S. military action, a national poll conducted last week for Knight Ridder newspapers found.

Many survey respondents said President Bush has not effectively explained why military action might be required. Nearly one in five said they still do not believe that Iraq poses a serious threat to the United States.

A robust majority of Americans -- 83 percent -- would support going to war if the United Nations backed the action. But support for war dwindles rapidly without U.N. approval.

Fewer than half of the respondents said they would support an attack on Iraq if the United States were joined by only one or two key allies. And 59 percent said they would be opposed to an attack if the United States decided to go it alone -- a switch that presents the Bush administration with a political and diplomatic quandary.

Perhaps this accounts for the huge numbers of anti-war activists planning to descend on Washington next weekend to protest the war. At least 100,000 are expected to participate. As one of the movement's leaders said, "The most important thing politically for us is to shatter the false myth of consensus . . ."

Update: 12/27/04: Erik Aude arrives home from Pakistan. 12/21: Erik Aude is released from jail.

Original Post:

A 21 year old California actor, Erik Anthony Aude, who had a bit part in "Hey Dude, Where's My Car," has been sentenced to seven years in a Pakistani prison for smuggling opium. He could have been sentenced to death.

Aude's mother said he was "duped by a man he met at a Burbank gym into thinking he was importing leather goods." She called the sentence as good as a death sentence.

Pakistan is not a member of the Prisoner Transfer Treaty Program so Aude can't even do his time in a U.S. jail. Ouch.

[link via The Guardroom]

Go read Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul on her thoughtful, heart-ful, and hopeful reaction to Governor Ryan's clemency speech yesterday. She begins,

I didn't see or hear Governor Ryan's speech yesterday, but reading the transcript, I'm sorry I missed it. It's an extraordinary speech, demonstrating that when you're doing the right thing, the simplest and most straightforward language carries enormous weight. Reading through, I wondered, how many politicians ever ask themselves Ryan's simple questions -- Is that fair? Is that right? Those questions would make a better plaque than "The buck stops here" to put on the desk in the Oval Office.

and she takes off from there.

Nathan Newman and Atrios bring us the news that the Department of Justice, under Ashcroft, is hiring law grads based upon ideological (read: right-leaning and conservative) views. Here's Nathan:

The Justice Department has killed civil service hiring of new employees in favor of political appointees screening all new employees for ideological purity.

The focus of the most recent controversy is the "Honors Program" which hires recent law graduates for the Justice Department. The results have been dramatic:

A half-dozen school placement officers said they had noticed a marked shift to the right in the political makeup of students who were approached for interviews this year.

At Columbia University Law School, for example, the head of the campus Federalist Society chapter set a school record by winning interviews at five separate Justice Department divisions, according to public interest law dean Ellen Chapnick. The Federalist Society is a conservative legal group whose membership includes some of the Justice Department's top officials.

Now, it may well be that liberals are less interested in joining a Justice Department of John Ashcroft, but historically both liberals and conservatives have joined the day-to-day enforcement programs of the federal government precisely because they have a reputation for NOT being politicized, except on the more obvious high-profile political hot potatos.

But as with the rest of the federal government, the Bush administration is trying to turn the whole civil service into one massive spoils system rewarding conservative cronies and proteges.

One of the problems with this is that its hard to get rid of civil service employees. For example, the U.S. Attorney's job is a political appointment. When a Republican is elected President following a Democratic Administration (as happened in 2002,) the U.S. Attorneys lose their jobs. But the Assistant U.S. Attorneys under them don't lose their jobs, due to civil service protections.

So doesn't this mean that these recent law-grads with conservative, right-wing ideological bents, can stay in their positions as long as they want, even if and long after the Democrats come back into power. We think so. These Ashcroft appointees can't be fired so long as they are doing their job.

This should get be getting wider attention in the media. Help spread the word.