Auntie Neo Kawn's diary from yesterday, Bob Novak Hits Pedestrian with 'Vette, Flees, on this incident, where columnist Bob Novak, driving a Corvette, hit a pedestrian crossing with the light in D.C. and then attempted to escape from the scene, drew a lot of attention.  

This morning's Washington Post has an article on the incident, Novak Cited for Hitting Pedestrian, which reveals that the pedestrian who was Novak's victim is a 66-year-old homeless man!  No wonder Novak thought he could ignore him.

Well, as Paul Mulshine has to concede, it's only a retroactive admission.  But you have to accept Mulshine's logic.

I was doing a bit of research and came upon this quote from a Krauthammer column of October 8, 2003:

"If in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have
succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated."

It's four years now. The people who have been vindicated are not geniuses but simple old-fashioned conservatives who warned against getting involved in massive nation-building schemes.

An open letter signed by sociologists and academics in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries to the Federal Prosecutor's Office [Generalbundesanwaltschaft] in Germany has been published in various places.  The letter protests the arrest of a couple of academics on what look like very flimsy charges under suspicion of belonging to a terrorist organization.

On 31st July 2007 the flats and workplaces of Dr. Andrej Holm and Dr.
Matthias B., as well as of two other persons, were searched by the police. Dr. Andrej Holm was arrested, flown by helicopter to the German Federal Court in Karlsruhe and brought before the custodial judge. Since then he has been held in pretrial confinement in a Berlin jail. All four people have been charged with "membership in a terrorist association according to § 129a StGB" (German Penal Code, section 7 on ‘Crimes against Public Order’). They are alleged to be members of a so-called ‘militante gruppe’ (mg). The text of the search warrant revealed that preliminary proceedings against these four people have been going on since September 2006 and that the four had since been under constant surveillance.

TPM Muckraker has recently posted the news that Conyers's committee has released the redacted copy of FBI Director Mueller's notes on his meetings in the days immediately before and after the Mar. 10, 2004 confrontation in AG Ashcroft's hospital room.  Mueller revealed the existence of these notes at the hearing at which he appeared last month.  Here's a link to the facsimile text of the redacted notes as provided to Conyers's committee earlier this week.

I'm currently reading Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets, and this book has made me wonder to what extent both our major parties have a history of stealing elections.  On page 107, he describes a meeting with Henry Cabot Lodge, where he, Ellsberg, and other members of Gen. Lansdale's team were trying to persuade Ambassador Lodge to hold an honest election in Vietnam.

Lodge continue with arresting statements: "You've got a gentleman in the White House right now [LBJ] who has spent most of his life rigging elections.  I've spent most of my life rigging elections.  I spent nine whole months rigging a Republican Convention to choose Ike as a candidate rather than Bob Taft.  If that was bad...

"Nixon and I would have taken Chicago in 1960 if there had been an honest count.  The Republican machine there was simply lazy; they didn't get out the vote, and they didn't have anyone watching the polls.  But I don't blame Democrats for that, I blame the Republicans.  There is just a limit to how naive or hypocritical we can afford to be out here."

The Supreme Court's unanimous opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, on the Solomon Amendment, Rumsfeld v. Fair, released on Monday, contains what strikes me as a highly significant paragraph:

The Constitution grants Congress the power to "provide for the common Defence," "[t]o raise and support Armies," and "[t]o provide and maintain a Navy." Art. I, §8, cls. 1, 12-13. Congress' power in this area "is broad and sweeping," O'Brien, 391 U. S., at 377, and there is no dispute in this case that it includes the authority to require campus access for military recruiters. That is, of course, unless Congress exceeds constitutional limitations on its power in enacting such legislation. See Rostker v. Goldberg, 453 U. S. 57, 67 (1981). But the fact that legislation that raises armies is subject to First Amendment constraints does not mean that we ignore the purpose of this legislation when determining its constitutionality; as we recognized in Rostker, "judicial deference ... is at its apogee" when Congress legislates under its authority to raise and support armies. Id., at 70.

The Independent reports that the three-man "Adjudication Panel for England" has suspended Lord Mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone of London for remarks that it ruled had been "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive".

The three-man Adjudication Panel for England unanimously ruled that Mr Livingstone had been "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive" to Evening Standard journalist, Oliver Finegold, by comparing him to a Nazi concentration camp guard in February last year.

Cheney's office released a statement today, but apparently Cheney himself has still not said anything in public on the matter.  Here's the statement as reported by AP through the South Carolina The State newspaper:

In his CounterPunch column My Epiphany, Paul Craig Roberts, Deputy Treasury Secretary under Reagan, explains his parting of the ways from Bush and the contemporary Republican Party.

From MarketWatch (via Freedom4um):

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- KBR, the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton Co. (HAL) , said Tuesday it has been awarded a contingency contract from the Department of Homeland Security to supports its Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in the event of an emergency.

According to this story in the Charleston (WV) Gazette, not only were a husband and wife arrested for trespassing for wearing T-shirts saying "Love America, Hate Bush" at a Bush rally in West Virginia on July 4th, but the wife, who worked for FEMA, was fired.

I read this on SCOTUSBLOG:

[QUOTE]Global Rights Presents: The U.S. Supreme Court Rules on War and Rights

Global Rights Presents: The U.S. Supreme Court Rules on War and Rights

Speakers:
o Frank Dunham, Federal Public Defender, Counsel to Yaser Hamdi and Zacarias Moussaoui
o Anthony Lewis, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist
o Kate Martin, Executive Director, Center for National Security Studies
o Patricia M. Wald, Former Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit; Former Judge, International Ad Hoc Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
o David Cole, Georgetown law professor; Legal Affairs Correspondent for The Nation (to be confirmed)

A light lunch will be available.

WHEN: Tuesday, June 29, 2004
12:00 to 2:00 pm

WHERE: Global Rights
1200 18th Street, NW, Suite 602, Washington, DC
Between Dupont Circle and Farragut North Metros

RSVP: SPACE IS LIMITED. Please RSVP (for yourself and a guest, if you'd like)
by Thursday, June 24, to amyf@globalrights.org or call (202) 822-4600 x 37. [/QUOTE][P]

Does Global Rights know something about when the Supreme Court will be issuing its decisions in the Hamdi, Padilla, and Guantanamo cases?