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Houston Chronicle:

CNN said it shouldn't have used a former U.S. attorney who quit his job after allegedly biting a stripper as an analyst about New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal.

No mention of Kendall Coffey's past was made when anchor Tony Harris interviewed him Tuesday on the legal questions surrounding Spitzer's case. Coffey quit his job in May 1996 after being accused of biting a topless dancer on the arm during a visit to an adult club after losing a big drug case.

Coffey talked on CNN about what kind of charges the New York governor could face. Spitzer is accused of having a high-priced call girl visit his hotel room during a visit to Washington last month.

While Coffey's past is known to CNN's booking department, it wasn't to the person who set up Harris' segment. CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard blamed a "miscommunication."

"Coffey has been a guest on CNN in the past but was probably not the right one for this story," Pritchard said.

Oopsie! It's a little like having Bill "Phone sex with a loofah" O'Reilly lecture you about moral rectitude.

Given Texas’ legal and political culture, and given Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) penchant for the death penalty, this is quite a surprise.

Gov. Rick Perry accepted a parole board recommendation Thursday to spare condemned inmate Kenneth Foster, the getaway driver in a 1996 murder who had been scheduled for execution within hours. [...]

Foster was convicted of murder and sentence to death under Texas’ law of parties, which makes non-triggermen equally accountable for a crime. Another condemned man was executed under the same statute earlier this year.

“After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster’s sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment,” Perry said in a statement.

Be sure to read Digby’s take on why today’s developments offer a “glimmer of hope.”

Via The New York Times:

Though prosecutors have considered the case solved for nearly two decades, a chorus of eyewitnesses say the police arrested the wrong man. Now, on the eve of execution, scheduled for Tuesday, they have joined his family and his lawyers in an effort to get the courts to hear new evidence they say proves he is innocent.

With no physical evidence — the murder weapon was never found — prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses who took the stand against Mr. Davis.

But since his trial, seven of the nine have recanted or changed their testimony, saying they were harassed and pressed by investigators to lie under oath. Other witnesses have come forward identifying a different man as the shooter.

But because of a 1996 federal law intended to streamline the legal process in death penalty cases, courts have ruled it is too late in the appeals process to introduce new evidence and, so far, have refused to hear it. Read more...

More on this story from The Washington Post and AJC.com.

Call the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, and ask them to grant clemency to Troy Davis: 404-651-6599

(Many thanks to James Rucker from ColorOfChange.org)

UPDATE: Davis has been awarded a 90 day stay of execution.

I'm not holding my breath on this one. I truly believe that American companies are being typically short-sighted as ever. Considering there is a six month waiting list for Toyota and Honda hybrids in my area, I would imagine that the company on the forefront of offering an electric car would have consumers beating down their door, especially as gas prices go higher and higher and people want less and less to be dependent on foreign oil. Further, I simply cannot believe that we have the technology to create a space station, but we cannot figure out a working electric battery for a typical commuter car.

SJ MercuryNews:

The company that killed the electric car, at least according to the makers of a popular 2006 documentary film, intends to announce today that it's getting back into that business.

Continue reading »

MSNBC:

Federal prosecutors in Arizona have opened a preliminary investigation of a camping trip Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., took 10 years ago that included two teenage congressional pages, a Justice Department spokesman told NBC News. NBC News first reported on the camping and rafting trip on Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington said that the U.S. attorney in Arizona has started a "preliminary assessment" of the trip, after an unidentified source made allegations about the congressman's behavior on the expedition.

[..]As NBC News first reported, Kolbe took a tour down the Grand Canyon in July 1996 with a group that included two 17-year-old males who had recently left the congressional page program.

Continue reading »

Check out ABC's Evangelical wunderkind and his resume over at IMDB before1998:

No poster. no actors, no writers, no production notes, no running times..

The trade deadline is approaching fast and it seems like every team is in the hunt for a playoff spot. What do you think will happen?

Also, what are some of your favorite sports books? I just finished Joel Sherman's "Birth of a Dynasty: Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees," which was really entertaining. Throw some of your favorites out there--I need a break from politics this weekend.

Update: SB Nation has a ton of Sports Blogs and most Baseball teams are represented. I, as you know do the Yanks.

Mandate Indeed

Geez. The way these conservatives talk, you'd think they won by 30 points instead of 3.

Even Bush himself has been telling the press that he has "the people at my back" (or is that backside?) -- in the process of making clear to everyone considering crossing those bridges they say they're building what the reality is: It's "my way or the highway."

But the entire press corps has bought into the myth of Bush's "mandate." Indeed, it's all any of them can seem to talk about.

Now, just as an experiment, I went back and checked, because I thought I remembered that Bill Clinton cleaned Bob Dole's clock in 1996 by a substanitally wider margin. Sure enough, the final figures were:

Bill Clinton 47,402,357 49%
Bob Dole 39,198,755 41%

Ross Perot 8,085,402 8%

In other words, Clinton won by a margin of of 8 percent of the popular vote -- 8.2 million.
Did the "liberal media" declare that Clinton had a clear mandate from the people?

Well, no.

The mainstream press instead proclaimed that Clinton had been given "a message, not a mandate".

The season starts Sunday which I'm fired up about, so we'll start off with a real oddity or tragedy. Is John Wetteland selling his 1996 World Series Ring? It's up on Ebay.

Helping the Helpless

Walmart, in there continued effort to put a smiley face on their operation, decided to cut off food for the homeless today:

"Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the nation's largest food retailer, said Thursday it will no longer donate nearly-expired or expired food to local groups feeding the hungry."

No wonder they were falling all over themselves yesterday.

Olan James, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said the policy, which applies to all 1,224 Wal-Marts, 1,929 Supercenters and 558 Sam's Clubs, is an attempt to protect the corporation from liability in case someone who eats the donated food gets sick.

I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers just hanging around homeless people-looking for a good case. By the way:

"Ernie Brown, a spokesman for Sacramento's Senior Gleaner- said Wal-Mart's concerns about liability seem misplaced in light of the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, a federal law passed in 1996 offering food donors wide-ranging protections from civil lawsuits or criminal prosecution. The law states that donors can be held liable only in instances of "gross negligence."

Jane has more: "Walmart is sparing no expense today to assure both traditional media and the internet that they are wracked with grief over the racially insenstive accident generated by their online "mapping" program...read on"