wednesday reads

MPs in Turkey are due to debate a motion authorising cross-border military operations into northern Iraq to target Kurdish rebel bases there.


Saying the free flow of information must not be choked off, the House on Tuesday took up a media shield bill to protect the confidentiality of reporters' sources in most federal court cases. The White House, warning that the bill would encourage leaks of classified information, threatened a veto.

DoJ's shifting focus:

The Justice Department under the Bush administration has retreated from prosecutions of mobsters, white-collar criminals, environmental crimes and traditional civil rights infractions, new department data show.

As part of a series of policy shifts that have greatly transformed the administration of federal justice, the department has strongly emphasized immigration and terrorism-related investigations. It has also devoted new attention to areas important to conservative activists, such as sex trafficking and obscenity, according to the department's own performance and budget numbers.

David Neiwert: Watching the Bus Plunge


Glenn Greenwald on Neonepotism


Watch the PBS Frontline episode: Cheney's Law

For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review

Deepening unhappiness with President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress soured the mood of Americans and sent Bush's approval rating to another record low this month, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.


Supernova 2005ap: 100 Billion Times Brighter Than the Sun


The Pojman Pocket Protector Webseum (via Boing Boing)


Eric Clapton shreds