R.I.P.. Mike Wallace. The CBS 60 Minutes icon has died at age 93.

Looks like Rick Santorum may be dropping out of the Republican primaries. Guess it will be Obama v. Romney.

NBC News President Steve Capus gives Reuters the network's version of how the editing mishap of the George Zimmerman 911 call happened.

As part of the investigation, the producer who edited the call... had cut the video clip down to meet a maximum time requirement for the length of the segment - a common pressure in morning television - and inadvertently edited the call in a way that proved misleading.

... the network's editorial controls - including senior broadcast producer oversight, script editors and often legal and standards department reviews of sensitive material to be broadcast - simply missed the selective editing of the phone call.

If you're online today and have something to talk about, here's an open thread.

Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload have beefed up their legal teams . News reports say prominent copyright lawyer Andrew Schapiro of Quinn Emanuel is joining the defense.

But there's a hitch. The Quinn Emanuel lawyers only want in if they can opt if the court decides they can't be paid from the funds seized from MegaUpload.

Checking the docket, Mr. Schapiro hasn't individually entered his appearance yet, but Paul Brinkman and William William Burck, other lawyers from his firm, Quinn Emmanuel, are trying to.

The Quinn Emmanuel lawyers (and long-standing MegaUpload lawyer Ira Rothken) are attempting to enter a special or limited appearance for the purpose of litigating the release of seized assets for attorneys' fees and issues related to the preservation of data on Carpathia's servers. [More...]

For weeks, the City of Sanford has maintained a page on their website dedicated to the Trayvon Martin shooting. It included the 911 calls of George Zimmerman and the neighbors who called 911 to report the shooting. It also included the video of Zimmerman arriving at police station from several camera angles, a written description of his earlier 911 calls and police reports of earlier burglaries in the neighborhood.

No more. Those are gone from the city's page, with this statement:

The office of the State Attorney, 4th Judicial Circuit, State Attorney Angela Corey has requested that the City of Sanford remove all reports, videos and audio pertaining to the Martin/Zimmerman case from the website. Their office has provided legal justification for the action and they believe further access to the information will have an adverse effect on their efforts to come to a resolution to this investigation.

The calls are all over You Tube and other media websites. [More...]

NBC not only acknowledged its misleading portrayal (composite graphic here) of George Zimmerman's statements on his 911 call concerning Trayvon Martin, it has now fired the producer responsible for the error.

Now it's time for CNN and CNN NewsWire to explain an apparent similar gaffe -- one about what Zimmerman purportedly told his lawyers he said on the 911 call, in partiuclar, a word that some have claimed is a racial slur. It's been more than 24 hours since I began writing this very long post, and I still haven't seen an explanation or acknowledgement by CNN on the change in its articles. If I missed it, please let me know in comments so I can correct it. Since online versions of the articles keep changing, in many instances, I am using the versions of the articles as they appeared on LexisNexis.

The unexplained edit is contained in articles that appeared Thursday, April 5, under the headline "Expert: Zimmerman whispered 'punks' before shooting Trayvon Martin," later changed to "Lawyers: Zimmerman whispered 'punks' before shooting Trayvon Martin." [More...]

Busy.

Open Thread.

Bump and Update: The Judge rejected the Government's request for a life sentence, and sentenced Viktor Bout to 25 years, the minimum term possible given the mandatory sentence requirement of the statute. Mr. Bout did address the judge:

"Your honor, I am not guilty...."I never intended to kill anyone. I never intended to sell arms to anyone. God knows this truth."

According to the Judge,

... Mr. Bout simply took advantage of the opportunity presented to him, rather than actively looking to commit a crime that could be prosecuted in U.S. courts. She also said the federal sentencing guidelines in the case called for too harsh a sentence.

Presumably, he will get credit for his jail time since March, 2008 in Thailand, since he was only being held on our extradition request. He will get credit for the time in custody since he got to the U.S. That would make the sentence 21 years, of which he will have to serve 85% or 17.8 years, if he doesn't win his appeals and Congress doesn't increase good time while he's serving the sentence. He'd be 66 when he gets out. The Judge made the right call in my view by refusing to sentence him to life or 30 years. [More...]

Schapelle Corby news: This week Indonesia's Justice and Human Rights Ministry officially recommended Schapelle Corby be granted clemency due to the decline of her mental health and that her sentence be cut by 10 years. The Director of Prisons joined in the request. With the 19 month sentence cuts she's received over the years, she could be released in 2014. Today, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard joined the recommendation.

The decision rests with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has opposed clemency in the past. A Supreme Court judge is said to have made the same recommendation. It may be months before Yudhoyono announces his decision.

[More...]

The five detainees charged with participating in the 9/11 attacks will appear in court at Guantanamo within 30 days to schedule proceedings in their trial by military commission. They include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi

An arraignment will be held at Guantanamo next month, and all of the pretrial issues that surfaced in the earlier case will have to be litigated again, including the issue of self-representation and the mental health and capacity of Binalshibh and Hawsawi.

All of them were held in secret overseas prisons until 2006 when then President Bush ordered them moved to Guantanamo. All alleged being tortured. The death penalty is being sought for all of them.

The 123 page charge sheet is available at the Military Commission's website here (click on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed et al (2), and then use the arrow to go to "Docket." They will also be tried on the charges returned in January, 2012, available at the same link. [More...]

Most Democrats are familiar with the story of FDR's battles with the Supreme Court regarding the constitutionality of his New Deal legislation. In 1937, the Court reversed course and recognized the Commerce power as empowering the Congress to enact the New Deal legislation.

In discussing the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, much has been made of the supposed unprecedented nature of the regulation of "inactivity." I have found the argument to be so specious (particularly when one considers the power conferred by the Necessary and Proper Clause), that I have devoted little time to rebutting this argument. But in passing on another subject, I reread NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, 301 US Reports 1 (1937), the case that began the the "switch in time saves 9" process. A review of the case is instructive. Follow to the other side for the discussion.

I'm out tonight, and have missed most of the day's news.

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

An official mea culpa and apology from NBC News for editing and distorting the meaning of George Zimmerman's 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case in a Today show segment that was repeated on MSNBC.

During our investigation it became evident that there was an error made in the production process that we deeply regret. We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers.

I wrote yesterday NBC was investigating the edit error. Good that they followed up swiftly. [More..]

Unseemly:

In the escalating battle between the administration and the judiciary, a federal appeals court apparently is calling the president's bluff -- ordering the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the Obama Administration believes that the courts have the right to strike down a federal law, according to a lawyer who was in the courtroom.

The order, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, appears to be in direct response to the president's comments yesterday about the Supreme Court's review of the health care law. Mr. Obama all but threw down the gauntlet with the justices, saying he was "confident" the Court would not "take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

In case you were wondering, the President is officially a politician. Now we know that Republican judges are too.

Speaking for me only