Finally-A Judge Who Understands the Constitution

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that a Federal Judge is questioning the constitutionality of the law designed to give the telecommunications companies blanket immunity for their illegal wiretaps. Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker has asked President Obama’s Justice Department to present its views by Wednesday on whether the law gives the attorney general too much power to decide whether a company is immune from lawsuits.

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Justice Department Continues the Assault on Justice

Most likely it will come as no surprise that the Bush Administration’s Justice Department continues it’s assault on freedom and the Constitution. According to a report in the Washington Post, the Justice Department is about to issue guidelines for starting FBI investigations that a number of U.S. Senators believe could lead to innocent Americans being spied upon by government agents or informants, “all without any basis for suspicion.”

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Mukasey Says They Knew About 9-11 Call

Speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said one of the dumbest things ever to come out of this scandal ridden Administration. He was making a speech trying to stir up support for the FISA bill with telecom immunity, where he basically claimed that U.S. Intelligence apparently knew a call came from Afghanistan safe-house to a phone in the U.S.

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A Little Habeas for Your Corpus

Wow, the courts have sure been busy lately. They given us lots of fun stuff to cover. Let’s see what we have:

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Miracle on DOJ Street

Steve Benen, in a post at Crooks and Liars makes an excellent point about the U.S. Attorney firings. It seems that all these high ranking Justice Department officials have been asked who created the list of the U.S. Attorneys to be fired, and none of them know. I guess given Bush’s divine dispensation, it just floated down from heaven.

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Time For Alberto Gonzales to go

On Thursday, Senator Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, hinted very obliquely that perhaps Mr. Gonzales’s time was up. We’re not going to be oblique. Mr. Bush should dismiss Mr. Gonzales and finally appoint an attorney general who will use the job to enforce the law and defend the Constitution.

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Terrorists At the Cartoon Network

Over the past several weeks Cartoon Network, to promote their television show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, placed boards with LED renditions of the mooninites across ten cities. This would have been fine, except for the person who saw one of them attached to a girder above a busway near the Sullivan Square T station. On Wednesday, some frightened little brain-dead Bostonian spotted Ignignokt and Err in Boston – and called the police.

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Waterboard Rumsfeld?

Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany’s top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

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Gonzales Backtracks on Senate Testimony – Hints At Additionaly Spying Programs

In a letter yesterday to senators in which he asked to clarify his Feb. 6 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales also seemed to imply that the administration’s original legal justification for the program was not as clear-cut as he indicated three weeks ago.

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War On Terror Over; Gonzalez Pursues Porn

Taking his cues from former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez has decided to make the War on Porn “one of the top priorities” of the AG’s office. In early August, the FBI’s Washington Field Office sent around a job listing to recruit eight federal agents, a supervisor and support staff to take on “manufacturers and purveyors” of pornography.

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