Remember the lamer paint ball terrorist wannabes (or maybe they were just guys who got encouraged to talk big by an unscrupulous government informant)?
Well, the jury is deadlocked.
No surprise. These guys could not have conspired to run a lemonade stand.
It makes a big difference if it’s the Senate intelligence committee or the Senate Judiciary Committee version.
The former has retroactive Telco immunity for the illegal wiretaps that the Telcos did for Bush and His Evil Minions™.
Senators are aggressively lobbying Senate Leader Harry Reid on this.
Chris Dodd has already made it clear that he will filibuster, and because Reid won’t extend the courtesy that he does to the obstructionist Rethuglicans, this will mean him talking, and talking, and talking, and talking on the floor of the Senate.
It would take Dodd off the campaign trail, but the spectacle would be the best thing that could possibly hit his candidacy.
The following letter was sent to him:
Dear Majority Leader Reid:
We understand that the Senate will shortly be considering amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As you know, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Judiciary Committee have reported very different versions of the FISA Amendments Act, S. 2248, and it is up to you, as Majority Leader, to decide how the Senate considers this legislation.
We urge you to make the version of S. 2248 reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee the base bill to be considered by the full Senate. While the structure of Title I of both bills is the same, and both make improvements over the Protect America Act, the reasonable changes to Title I made in the Judiciary Committee ensure that the FISA Court will be able to conduct much-needed oversight of the implementation of these broad new surveillance authorities, and help to better protect the rights of innocent Americans. While we appreciate the hard work that the Intelligence Committee has done on this legislation, the process by which the Judiciary Committee considered, drafted, amended and reported out its bill was an open one, allowing outside experts and the public at large the opportunity to review and comment. With regard to legislation so directly connected to the constitutional rights of Americans, the results of this open process should be accorded great weight, especially in light of the Judiciary Committee’s unique role and expertise in protecting those rights.
We also believe that the Judiciary Committee bill is preferable because it does not provide immunity for telecom companies that allegedly cooperated with the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. As this is such a controversial issue, we feel it would be appropriate to require the proponents of immunity to make their case on the floor.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Russell D. Feingold (D-WI)
Christopher J. Dodd (D-CT)
Barack Obama (D-IL)
Bernard Sanders (I-VT)
Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-DE)
Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
Tom Harkin (D-IA)
Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD)
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY)
Daniel K. Akaka (D-HI)
Jim Webb (D-VA)
Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA)
Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
For your convenience, I have highlighted the presidential candidates who have objected.
Let’s see, a 22 year old girl, one of their employees is gang raped bo other Halliburton employees, and Halliburton’s response is to keep her prisoner in a shipping container, and when the Army doctor turned over the rape kit, they “lost” it.
I used to wonder why Halliburton hired Dick Cheney, and continued to employ him after his disasterous decisions (he bought a company that made them liable for asbestos law suits). Now I think I know why, they simply came from the same place value wise.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. I just hope that the right wing former media mogul does not go down alone. Richard Pearle was on his board, and is as crooked as the day is long.
I have no clue as to why lybby dropped the appeal, but it means that he can no longer take the 5th if he is called before Congress.
I can’t help feeling that there is some sort of angle here that I am missing.
It now appears that The C.I.A. was told to preserve the torture video tapes.
White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.
So, they were wold not to by a number of lawyers, and decided to do so anyway, when things started getting hot, with legal and Congressional investigations ramping up.
Sounds like obstruction of justice to me, in fact, I’d call it a slam dunk.
Senator Whitehouse (D-RI)has read the Secret memos from Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counse, and he has concluded that they say the following, “The President’s Word Is Law. (Whitehouse’s full speech is here.)
Why these folks have not hat their law licenses revoked is beyond me.
We are a nation of laws, not men.
He’s written a letter to Michael Mukasey about this.
I don’t expect any action prior to January 20, 2009.
Good.
This could be compared to Willie Horton, but it’s not.
With Willie Horton, Dukkakis supported a furlough program to rehabilitate people. He had no other connection with the guy. With Wayne Dumond, Mike Huckabee specifically lobbied for his release, because the victim was a relative of Bill Clinton, and the daughter of a Clinton contributor.
According to Murray Waas, who has also been all over the Plame affair, Huckabee went so far as to imply that he would grant clemency if Drumond was not paroled.
So says Canadian Justice Michael Phelan.
According to Canadian news accounts, Justice Michael Phelan’s ruling struck down an agreement that once barred thousands of refugees seeking asylum in Canada. The judge said the United States does not protect refugees fleeing political persecution and torture, which international conventions require.
Instead, it adheres to rigid policies which may result in mistreatment, including forcing victims of abuse to return to the countries in which they were mistreated, he said.
As a result, the United States can no longer be considered a safe place for refugees, Phelan ruled. His ruling nullifies an existing U.S.-Canada agreement saying that if a refugee is turned away from one country, he or she cannot seek refuge in the other. The agreement was intended to reduce so-called “asylum shopping,” in which immigrants attempt to obtain refugee status from multiple countries.
I’d be offended, if I didn’t agree.
As a result of 911 we have abdicated our moral authority to sadists, cowards, and the delusional.
Bush and His Evil Minions™ have been stonewalling on releasing Patrick Fitzgerald’s Plame investigation to Henry Waxman, Chairman of the Committee ON Oversight and Ggovernment Reform, has sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey saying that the White HOuse is blocking release of these documents to his committee, and said that:
Equal application of the law means tþat there should not be one standard applied by the Justice Department to congressional investigations of Democratic administrations and another standard applied to congressional investigations of Republican administrations. I ask that you personally look into this matter and authorize the production of the documents to the Committee without any further delay.
He also notes that Janet Reno cooperated with Congressional committees, which I think is a subtle way of saying that if he does not make a statement for turning over the documents, that Reno is a better man than he is (insert Janet Reno jokes here).
Personally, I think that Mukasey is probably too much one of Bush’s lackeys to to the right thing, but I won’t be disappointed if I am wrong.
Well, the fact that his brother-in-law, Rickard “Dickie” Scruggs, was indicted on bribery charges may go a bit of a way towards explaining his leaving the senate.
Scruggs is perhaps best known for suing tobacco companies in multibillion-dollar lawsuits in the late 1990s. But he also acted as Lott’s lawyer, as well as the attorney for many Mississippi homeowners, in a successful lawsuit against State Farm Insurance when the firm denied thousands of claims in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
So, even if Lott has done nothing illegal, he probably does 3 wrong things before having breakfast, it sounds like it was a good time for him to look at the DC lobbying gig.
Well, a few weeks ago, I got a summons for Jury duty, and today, I had to show up, juror number 635, so I show up to the courthouse in Towson at 9:00am. Parking is paid for, so I go up to level “L”, park, and go into the courthouse.
Taking a left after the metal detector, I then go up a short flight of stairs, hang a right, and get in line. I am given a packet with a jury badge, and $15.00 in cash for expenses.
Once we are all checked in, a woman working for the courts picks up a microphone, and explains the basics of how it works. We are to be sent upstairs by juror number, and then go through voir dire. Given my early diet of Perry Mason, it all seems pretty much second nature to me.
There are monitors arranged throughout the jury room, and they are used to show a brief, and rather cheesy video showing how it is all supposed to work. It was narrated by a judge, and showed pretty clearly just why they use actors to portray them on TV.
While we were waiting, they put a movie on the monitors to entertain us* (more on this later), but about halfway through, the paused it to call jurors 1 through 330 to court for voir dire. They then restarted the film. At about 12:20, most of jurors 1-330 (they only take twelve and a few alternates) returned to the jury room.
At about 12:50 we were sent out for lunch with instructions to return by 2:00pm. They ran the last half of the film again for the benefit of those jurors remaining from the 1-330 cohort.
At about 3:30, Judge Pat Springer came to the room, and thanked us all for our service, and we were free to go.
As a special bonus to this post, I am adding what I hope will be a VERYinfrequent feature of this blog, Jury Duty Reviews:
The movie in question was Secondhand Lions.
Michael Caine: Garth
Robert Duvall: Hub
Haley Joel Osment: Walter
Kyra Sedgwick: Mae
The film was chosen by the court staff was an attempt to find something that would not offend anyone, but still would entertain what would necessarily be an adult audience.
The film covers some fairly well trod ground, with Osmont being the 13 year old child of the feckless mother Sedgwick who is dumped off on his great uncles, Caine and Duvall.
Sedgwick has a minor roll really, and this is essentially a 3 person film, albeit one where they are played by 6 actors, because of the extensive use of flashbacks.
It is set in Texas, and Cain does his accent very well. Duvall does not do an accent, but his manner of speaking fits in well with the Texas location. Thankfully, Osmont does not attempt an accent all.
Duvall, as always, is impressive, as is Caine, who can sometimes disappoint, and Osmont does a very creditable job in playing a 13 year old.
Your kids will love this movie, and it’s entertaining for the adults.
It’s funny and…I’m sorry, but I have to say it….Heartwarming.
*Yes, I know, it’s technically a public performance in violation of US IP laws, because it qualifies as a “public performance”, but I’m not ratting them out to the MPAA.
French prosecutors have dismissed a torture case against Donald Rumsfeld based on “customary immunity”…Funny thing though…I’ve never heard them claim this immunity with Israelis. (FWIW, I do believe that Sharon should have spent some time in the clink for his roll in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, because he was at the very least criminally negligent).
My guess is that this came straight from Sarkosy.
Welcome to 1984, only 23 years late.
The feds are increasingly using the enhanced 911 services to track people’s movements, and most of the judicial precedent at this point is saying that they do not need probable cause to get a court order, it is noted that, “Such requests run counter to the Justice Department’s internal recommendation that federal prosecutors seek warrants based on probable cause to obtain precise location data in private areas”, so we get
In one case last month in a southwestern state, an FBI agent obtained precise location data with a court order based on the lower standard, citing “specific and articulable facts” showing reasonable grounds to believe the data are “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation,” said Al Gidari, a partner at Perkins Coie in Seattle, who reviews data requests for carriers.
Which means that the agents think that all they need to show is that they want the information.
Well, this is pretty good evidence that he has them running scared.
I’m not sure really why the need to do the research though. They already have the very public case of Wayne Dumond, where Huckabee lobbied for the convicted rapist’s parole, and Dumond later raped and murdered a neighbor.
He did this because Dumond’s first victim was a distant cousin of Clinton, so the wingers were claiming that he was “railroaded”, because…well…it involved Bill Clinton.
This is how Wingnuts thing.
This law basically amounted to exile from the state, as it prohibited “registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches and other areas where children congregate”, and the Georgia supreme court has ruled it unconstitutional.
There were a number of problems with the law:
Honestly, it’s not like pedophiles can’t drive. I understand that the case that brought this on was a sex offender that was living near a day care center and re-offended, but this should be handled through the corrections process, such as longer sentences, and probation conditions.
She is back in Washington, back at what amounts to her old job, though she is still being looked at by the Office of Special Counsel discrimination and mishandling classified documents.
Eric Back has what amounts to the definitive description of the staff response, “The mood in the office is described as a combination of relief and euphoria.”, but I imagine that they were dancing and singing, “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.”
Dana Milbank had this gem in his account of a Federalist Society meeting:
But there were signs that Thomas is not a regular on the speaking circuit. “You know, it’s really hard to talk up here when this guy in front of me keeps moving,” Thomas announced early in his speech. He was referring to a television screen on the floor in front of him that was showing his own image — but because nobody but Thomas could see the TV, nobody knew what he was talking about.
“It’s me! I see myself moving around!” Thomas explained, then let out a resonant laugh: “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” He continued: “This guy keeps moving around in front of me. Jeez! At any rate, stop looking at this guy in front of me! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You look at it and think, it’s too much of a good thing!”
A technician covered up the offending screen with a black cloth.
So Clarance Thomas, much like your average parrot, is capable of being fascinated and distracted by an image of himself.
What a maroon, to quote Bugs Bunny.