WASHINGTON - Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed during a speech Thursday night and was being taken to a hospital.

Associate Attorney General Kevin O'Connor said Mukasey began shaking while addressing the Federalist Society at a Washington hotel.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081121/ap_o n_go_ca_st_pe/mukasey_collapses;ylt=AkG .d_YjxU6AZvarQad01Ks0NUE

My thoughts are with the AG.  I don't have to agree with the man to hope that he's alright.

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In a stunning revelation last week, John Yoo, the uber-Christian torture memo author, wrote that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, the one that protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure, had "no application to domestic military operations." Even in the seventh year of the Bush Administration, when we've all grown wearily familiar with these types of outrages, this one sends a particularly sharp chill up my spine.

It may be that Yoo (and, by extension, Bush), for better or for worse, really have good intentions.  Maybe they are so concerned about domestic terrorism that they think the Constitution needs to be overruled in order to protect our safety.  Let's just pretend, for the sake of our own sanity, that this is true.

Nevertheless, this type of finding is the proverbial Pandora's Box.  You need to have utmost faith in our elected officials, their largely invisible political appointees, and the permanence of their judgment and intentions.  In other words, everyone involved in these operations has to have the best interest of U.S. citizens (except those being swept up by these unreasonable searches) in mind and it must ever be thus.

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Mini-scandal: a waitress's report that Mrs. Clinton had failed to tip after eating at a Maid-Rite diner in central Iowa, an assertion that ricocheted around the Internet on Thursday.

At last, an issue that can propel Obama and Edwards over Senator Clinton and into the lead - TippingGate.

But the waitress, Ms Esterday. got it right. "You people are really nuts," she told a reporter during a phone interview. "There's kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now -- there's better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn't get a tip."

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 5 -- Angry protests by thousands of lawyers in Lahore and other cities on Monday demonstrated the first organized resistance to the emergency rule imposed by the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

homer www.altara.blogspot.com homer www.altara.blogspot.com homer www.altara.blogspot.com

Comment - Can we possibly picture our pin-striped lawyers pouring out of their office suites to march in protest against warrantless wiretapping, torture, habeas corpus denial, and other affronts to our constitution by the Bush administration?

and fake news:

President Bush came to the defense of his embattled nominee for the post of Director of Military Detainees. The nominee, General Hucksby, has come under fire from Democrats for ambiguous answers regarding a form of interrogation known as fingernail-pulling.

General Hucksby refused to say whether this practice constituted torture, as he had not been briefed on the subject. Several Democratic Senators said that they would have difficulty confirming a nominee who did not recognize torture when he sees it.

In his news conference today, President Bush excoriated the Democrats for ignoring national security in the midst of a war on terror and instead focusing on extending the federal government into health care for poor children. He pointed out the gross unfairness in asking General Hucksby to decide whether fingernail-pulling is torture, saying, "because, you see, the use of this technique is classified".

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It seems obvious now that Judge Mukasey, despite his refusal to call waterboarding torture, will be confirmed due to yet another capitulation of the Democratic Congress.  I'm surprised there isn't the online movement for a filibuster that we saw with the Telecom Retroactive Immunity bill last month.

I think it's time to create some pressure on the Democratic candidates to filibuster Mukasey.  Torture is abhorrent to the constitution, American values and human rights.  A capitulation on this is inexcusable.

Dodd is probably the go-to guy on this one.

(202) 224-2823

In case Obama feels like leading, his number is below as well.

(202) 224-2854

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A group of distinguished intelligence and military officers, diplomats, and law enforcement professionals delivered an urgent message this morning to the chairman and the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling on them to hold the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey until he takes a clear position on the legality of waterboarding.

Their message strongly endorses the view of former judge advocates general that waterboarding "is inhumane, is torture, is illegal." The intelligence veterans added it is also a notoriously unreliable way to acquire accurate information.

They noted that the factors cited by the president and Mukasey as obstacles to his giving an opinion on waterboarding can be easily solved by briefing Mukasey on waterboarding and on C.I.A. interrogation methods.

The intelligence veterans noted that during their careers they frequently had to walk a thin line between morality and expediency, all the while doing their best to abide by the values the majority of Americans have held in common over the years.  They appealed to Senators Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter to rise to the occasion and discharge their responsibility to defend those same values.

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