Travel day for me.

This is an Open Thread.

Congrats to my good pal Mickey Sherman, CT defense attorney and CBS and cable TV legal analyst. Variety reports:

James Belushi has agreed to team with Diane English and Barry Levinson for an hourlong TV drama that will cast him as a defense attorney character modeled after the famed lawyer and TV commentator Mickey Sherman. ...... Sherman wrote the memoir “How Can You Defend Those People?,” and the idea is for Belushi to play a likable (ex-)prosecutor who defends the guilty and innocent with equal vigor.

[More]

Afghanistan, health care and swine flu seem to be the main topics of the day.

It's Game 5 of the World Series, and Dancing With the Stars tonight.

Here's an open thread for you, all topics welcome.

The appeal of the decision refusing to hear Roman Polanski's motion to dismiss the 1977 criminal charges and case has been set for Dec. 10 by a California appeals court. The motion was based on the revelations of the documentary, Wanted and Desired, which included interviews with a former prosecutor and the judge, which Polanski argued demonstrate proseuctiorial and judicial misconduct.

Earlier this year, the trial court refused to hear the motion because Polanski was not present in court. The appeal is asking the trial court be required to rule on the motion despite Polanski's non-appearance.

In related news, Polanski's lawyers in Switzerland have upped their bail offer to include a large cash deposit. Will that do the trick?

The Newark Star Ledger joins two state senatorss and goes to bat today seeking a pardon for John Ray Wilson, a MS patient busted for growing 17 pot plants behind his house. He's facing 20 years. Prosecutors offered hin 3 to 9, which he turned down. The paper ends with:

Sens. Nicholas Scutari and Raymond Lesniak (both D-Union) have asked Gov. Jon Corzine to pardon Wilson, who declined an offer to plead guilty in return for a three- to nine-year sentence and is scheduled to go on trial Dec. 14. The senators want Corzine to throw out the first-degree charge, so Wilson can enter pretrial intervention on the lesser offenses. They have called the charges "inappropriate" and an "inhumane application" of the law.

Dude, they’re right, this is totally bogus.

[More...]

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against Maher Arar in his extraordinary rendition and torture lawsuit against the Government. Arar, a Canadian, was detained at JFK, flown to Syria where he was tortured for almost a year, before being returned to Canada. The Canadian government found that Mr. Arar had no connection to terrorism and apologized to him. It also awarded him a multi-million-dollar settlement for its role in the mess. Not our government. Georgetown law professor David Cole, who argued the case, which was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights says:

“This decision says that U.S. officials can intentionally send a man to be tortured abroad, bar him from any access to the courts while doing so, and then avoid any legal accountability thereafter. It effectively places executive officials above the law, even when accused of a conscious conspiracy to torture. If the rule of law means anything, it must mean that courts can hear the claim of an innocent man subjected to torture that violates our most basic constitutional commitments.”

The opinion is available here. The dissent, which begins on p. 61 of the 184 page opinion, is well worth reading. All of our Maher Arar coverage is accessible here.

Two interesting stories today. First, Comcast is closer to buying NBC:

General Electric and the cable giant Comcast have moved closer to a deal giving control of NBC Universal to Comcast, and a formal announcement could be made sometime next week, people briefed on the talks said Sunday. After a series of meetings last week, the two companies reached a tentative agreement on Friday over the main points of a deal, these people said. Comcast would own about 51 percent of NBC Universal, contributing several billions of dollars in cash and its own stable of cable networks to the new venture.

This is an interesting antitrust question. Comcast already owns a number of cable networks, like E!, The Golf Channel, Versus and various regional sports networks. Add the NBC/Universal networks and that certainly is going to be a lot of vertical integration. Most antitrust analysts view vertical integration antitrust issues as much less problematic (see also the Supreme Court.) Regulators and the Congress might consider whether this analysis is accurate.

The second story is about how the DVR is saving the big TV networks:

Ezra Klein writes:

There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As [Kaiser Permanente CEO] Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn't set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you'll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers. [. . .] The health-care reform debate has done a good job avoiding the subject of prices. The argument over the Medicare-attached public plan was, in a way that most people didn't understand, an argument about prices [. . .] "A health-care debate in this country that isn't aware of the price differential is not an informed debate," says Halvorson.

(Emphasis supplied.) What's fascinating to me is Ezra Klein has been one of the Village wonkers pooh poohing the central point of a public health insurance option - that the government does better negotiating health care prices than private insurance companies (for whatever reason you may want to attribute.) His focus on the exchanges and the "regulations" and his attempts to diminish the public option demonstrate that the one of the main wonkers not getting the whole "government does better at cost containment in health care" thing is - Ezra Klein. The irony of his post is rich.

Speaking for me only

Via Digby and Lew Rockwell, a chilling story:

The Everett police officer who witnessed another cop fatally shoot a drunken man told investigators he believed the officer was frustrated before he pulled the trigger. Officer Steven Klocker said Niles Meservey was drunk and “ornery” June 10, but didn't pose an immediate, lethal threat to officer Troy Meade or anyone else.

The officers were trying to coax the intoxicated Stanwood man from behind the wheel of his Chevrolet Corvette, which was parked outside the Chuckwagon Inn, where Meservey had been drinking. [. . .] At one point, Meade told Meservey, “I don't know why the (expletive) I'm here to save your dumb (expletive) ... maybe to stop you from killing yourself driving,” Klocker recalled in a June 26 statement to detectives.

[. . .] Meade jumped back. He tossed away his stun gun, drew his handgun and opened fire. [. . .] As he pulled a dying Meservey from the Corvette, Klocker saw the stun gun probes still in the man's shoulder. Meservey, 51, died in the parking lot. He'd been struck seven times by police bullets.

(Emphasis supplied.)

The news today so far: Ford makes a billion in profits and Hamid Karzai has been declared the elected President in Afghanistan following his opponent's withdrawal from the race.

The Guantanamo detainees will be receiving the H1N1 swine flu vaccine. Some Republicans, like John Boehner, object.

Texting while driving? If someone is killed, you could do big time...in England. Death by Dangerous Driving carries 4 to 7 years. Bet it catches on here.

I'm off to court, here's an open thread for you, all topics welcome

Well, it's not quite nightfall, but I'm on my way out for the evening, so here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

"Small Box", an opera about the death penalty, will play for one night only on Nov. 7th in Indianapolis.

The opera has a cast of eight -- six men and two women. Two of the men are prison officers assigned to the death row visiting room. The officer in charge is an older man, whose assistant is a new officer, still learning the ropes after two weeks on the job.

One inmate is a multiple murderer who, because of a judge's error, had his death sentence reduced to life in prison. He works as the unit's janitor.

[More...]