Freeman said he was approached by a forensic specialist working for the Maine State Police. The specialist, he said, was working with police to inventory camp equipment confiscated by police in April after Earth First! attempted a protest campout on Sears Island.

Freeman said police initially told him his DNA was wanted as part of an ongoing investigation into a broken padlock on Sears Island. Freeman said after more questions, police told him the investigation was actually related to the vandalism incidents at Plum Creek.

Police asking for DNA to investige an act of politically motivated vandalism? This kind of thing ought to be reserved for serious crimes, I think.

Activist: Police ask for DNA as scare tactic

We’re a movement to take our country back from polarizing politics. In 2008, we’ll select and elect a Unity Ticket to the White House— one Democrat, one Republican, in whatever order, or independents committed to a Unity team.

Someone is sick of the partisanism.

Unity08: Select & Elect a Unity Ticket in the 2008 Presidential Race

California is one step closer to joining a national movement that would change the way that the Electoral College works without amending the U.S. Constitution.

AB 2948 by Assemblymember Tom Umberg, Chair of the Assembly Elections Committee is a simple bill that would have California join in an interstate compact with other states to award our electoral votes to the Presidential candidate who won the national popular vote.

I like this.

California Assembly Passes Electoral College Reform - California Progress Report

After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004.

Memeing this because it demands commentary. Rolling Stone often has good political articles, but for something this serious I dare say its the wrong forum. Partisan conservatives, most of whom have certainly never read Rolling Stone, are likely to laugh out loud at the idea that a Kennedy accused them of fraud in a rock and roll magazine. If, say, a law professor accused them of fraud in a dry academic journal, and the results were publicised elsewhere, that would be a very different thing.

In any event, a little bit of fraud might get you 1,000 votes here or 1,000 votes there. If you have enough local political power to pull it off, you can sustain a small margin this way. You can't convert a large margin. Can you produce 2 million votes?

In any event, I think the greatest injustice of our system is that a 2 million vote difference grants broad power to the nutjobs who make up each party's respective "base." America is moderate.

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

WARRANTS: Not good enough for us, too good for you.

Congressional Quote of the Day!

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said Sunday that he was seeking greater consensus on the Supreme Court, adding that more consensus would be likely if controversial issues could be decided on the "narrowest possible grounds."

He said the nation would benefit if the justices could avoid 5-to-4 decisions in cases with sweeping impact, noting that many of the court's most controversial cases, including presidential wartime powers and political boundaries in Texas, would be decided in the final six weeks of the current term.

So far he seems to be delivering on this promise. The court is tossing up dramatically more unanimous decisions. Whether that trend will last as the sample size grows remains to be seen. If successful, whether this is a good or a bad thing will take me time to contemplate.

Chief Justice Says His Goal Is More Consensus on Court - New York Times

But disregarding the text of the Constitution because it does not comport with your vision of the "rule of law" is as much judicial "activism" — if one must use this phrase — on the right, as it is when the Left discards the text because it does not meet their vision of "Justice." In either case, judges are substituting for the text something they prefer, which in this case is silence where the Constitution is in fact speaking quite eloquently.

More writing related to the idea below...

Randy E. Barnett on National Review Online

I propose adopting a "presumption of liberty" by which the burden is placed on Congress to establish that its laws are truly "necessary and proper"—what it used to debate but no longer.

Now thats an idea I could really get behind. This collection of posts on Volokh is perhaps the most vital conversation that I've seen about the nature of the Constitution in a long time, mostly because it seems for some reason to have broken from the partisan arguements that often follow from policy objectives.

We used to have a limited government and a conservative judiciary. In the 30's the power of the legislature was vastly expanded because people expected the government to solve social problems. The power of the judiciary expanded in reaction to that.

In theory it is that case that conservatives want a limited government and liberals want an expansive one. You'd think conservatives could really get behind the idea in the above passage. However, in practice conservatives mean limited only in a fiscal sense and not really with regard to liberty. So they've been arguing that the judicial branch, which is the only present mechanism that actually limits the power of the government, stop doing that, so that the legislature can do whatever it wants, particularly with regard to cracking down on immoral behavior. This is supreme irony. It is also supremely ironic that support for a powerful judiciary is considered a liberal idea.

The next person who talks to me about judicial activism will get a response about legislative activism.

The idea of a limited government is something I could really get behind in a general sense, and you'd think in a general sense conservatives would be wonderful allies in that endevor, but in practice the Republicans seem much more interested in limiting a handful of things that I think really matter (like healthcare) and not limiting the plethora of pork and useless over-regulation that I'm not interested in, and I think they're unlikely to swallow the pill of individual liberty that would be required by legislative analyses about whether laws are "necessary and proper." I wish they were, but there is something to be said for reclaiming the words "limited government," which neither party is really interested in.

The Volokh Conspiracy - On 'legislating from the bench'

The State Secret Privilege was used dishonestly in its first case!

United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953) is a landmark legal case in 1953 that saw the creation of the State Secrets Privilege, an unofficial but judicially-recognized extension of presidential power.

The widows of 3 crew members of a B-29 Superfortress bomber that had crashed in 1948 sought accident reports on the crash, but were told that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber's top-secret mission.

In 2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and were found to contain no secret information. They did, however, contain information about the poor state of condition of the aircraft itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force's case. Many commentators have alleged government misuse of secrecy in the landmark case.

United States v. Reynolds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I just received fairly reliable word that the Georgia Private Investigator Felony Statute has been vetoed by the Governor. Unfortunately I don't have a press link on that, so if anyone out there has a secondary source they can confirm this through, that would be helpful, but it seems like the Governor has heard the message from the technology community and understood the ramifications of this law. Thank you to everyone who communicated with them!

Confirmed:

The existing definition of “private detective business,” continued in this bill, in conjunction with the applicable exemptions in the law, fails to exclude from the private investigator licensing requirement many professions that collect information or may be called as expert witnesses in court proceedings. To expand the penalty from a misdemeanor to a felony without revision of the existing definitions in the law could result in unintended consequences; I therefore VETO HB1259.