Charlene S. Lugar, 77, was stopped shortly after 6:30 p.m. by an officer who noticed smoke coming from her car and damage to the front end of the car as she drove on Old Dominion Drive, Officer Bud Walker said. The officer pulled her over near Dominion Reserve Drive, ‘developed probable cause that she was intoxicated’ and arrested her. He did not release her alleged blood-alcohol content.

Conservatives are all about making quick, half assed conclusions about stuff, however. Particularly in the arena of national security, which they feel is a club they can use to hit Democrats with. And of course, there’s Stephen Hayes and his idiot connections.

Here is what Hayes wrote in 2004:

Until this material is declassified, there will be gaps in our knowledge. Indeed, even after the full record is made public, some uncertainties will no doubt remain.

The connection between Saddam and al Qaeda isn’t one of them.

Of course, we know that this is – to put it charitably – b.s.

Weekly Standard staff writer and author of the book The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America (released on June 1 by Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house HarperCollins), Stephen F. Hayes has appeared in recent months on numerous cable and Sunday talk shows to support his contention that there was indeed a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Despite vigorous critiques that have undermined the credibility of Hayes’s contention, conservative pundits have embraced Hayes and his book in order to, in the words of Center for Strategic and International Studies fellow Daniel A. Benjamin, “shore up the rickety argument that Baathist Iraq had posed a real national security threat to the United States.”

Everything old is new again, and just as dumb the second time around.

Steve Burton, 39, never served in any branch of the U.S. military, but he was seen and photographed several times wearing a Marine uniform and various medals, including the Navy Cross, the highest medal awarded exclusively by the U.S. Navy, federal investigators said.

The Palm Springs, California, bank officer entered a not guilty plea Thursday to a charge of ‘unauthorized wearing of military medals or decorations.’ The federal misdemeanor charge carries a maximum penalty of a year in federal prison upon conviction.

The man who is a suspect in the Halloween night slaying of a Seattle police officer is a ‘domestic terrorist’ who had explosive devices in his apartment, police officials said Saturday.

Christopher J. Monfort is believed to have worked alone in the fatal shooting of Seattle Police Officer Tim Brenton, as well as the Oct. 22 firebombing of four Seattle police vehicles, said Jim Pugel, Seattle Police assistant chief.

‘This man, from everything that we can tell, appears to be a lone domestic terrorist,’ Pugel said at a news conference.

An American flag found near where Brenton was shot provided a link between the cases, a law enforcement source said. Pugel told reporters there was one critical ‘piece of evidence’ at the homicide scene that resembled something else found in the Charles Street arson case.”

The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base here was on the way to have her car repaired when she responded to a police radio report of gunfire at a center where soldiers are processed before being sent overseas, the authorities said Friday.

As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Kimberly Denise Munley, spotted the gunman, later identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.

Sergeant Munley — a woman with a fierce love of hunting, surfing and other outdoor sports — bolted from her car, yanked her pistol out and shot at Major Hasan. He turned on her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and Major Hasan went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.

…

Sergeant Munley, 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said.

Mr. Medley said she had received specific training in a tactic called active shooter protocol, which was intended for this kind of situation.

“She’s absolutely a hero,” he said. “She had the training; she knew what to do. And she had the courage to do it — by doing it she saved countless people’s lives.”

Police believe as many as a dozen people watched a 15-year-old girl get beaten and gang-raped outside her high school homecoming dance without reporting it.

Two suspects were in custody Monday, but police said as many as five other men attacked the girl over a two-hour period Friday night outside Richmond High School.

“She was raped, beaten, robbed and dehumanized by several suspects who were obviously OK enough with it to behave that way in each other’s presence,” Lt. Mark Gagan said. “What makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw what was happening and failed to report it.”

How can you watch something like that and do nothing?

A federal judge on Tuesday revoked bail for Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who is facing conspiracy and fraud charges.

Judge Stephen C. Robinson of Federal District Court in White Plains said Mr. Kerik could not be trusted to honor the consent order that prohibits any involved party from revealing confidential information pertinent to the coming trial.

Mr. Kerik had been allowed to remain free on $500,000 bail, which was secured by his house in New Jersey. The judge turned down a request by Mr. Kerik’s lawyers to keep him from being put behind bars for 48 hours while they prepare an appeal.

And if you’re Woody Allen while doing this, you’re even sicker in the head.

The main mob turncoat against ex-Gambino boss John A. (Junior) Gotti has identified 11 cops as being crooked – including storied ex-NYPD detective Bo Dietl.

The stunning charges appeared in an explosive FBI report on police corruption in August, with the damning charges coming from Gambino hitman John Alite.

Dietl, a frequent quest on the Don Imus radio program and a high-profile private detective, fed information to the Gambinos from the mid-to-late 1980s, Alite told the FBI.

You may remember Bo Dietl from his stint as a pundit on Fox News.

Albert Gonzales, 28, of Miami, Fla., was indicted today for conspiring to hack into computer networks supporting major American retail and financial organizations, and stealing data relating to more than 130 million credit and debit cards, announced Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny A. Breuer, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Ralph J. Marra Jr. and U.S. Secret Service Assistant Director for Investigations Michael Merritt.

In a two-count indictment alleging conspiracy and conspiracy to engage in wire fraud, Gonzales, AKA ’segvec,’ ’soupnazi’ and ‘j4guar17,’ is charged, along with two unnamed co-conspirators, with using a sophisticated hacking technique called an ‘SQL injection attack,’ which seeks to exploit computer networks by finding a way around the network’s firewall to steal credit and debit card information. Among the corporate victims named in the indictment are Heartland Payment Systems, a New Jersey-based card payment processor; 7-Eleven Inc., a Texas-based nationwide convenience store chain; and Hannaford Brothers Co. Inc., a Maine-based supermarket chain.

The indictment, which details the largest alleged credit and debit card data breach ever charged in the United States, alleges that beginning in October 2006, Gonzales and his co-conspirators researched the credit and debit card systems used by their victims; devised a sophisticated attack to penetrate their networks and steal credit and debit card data; and then sent that data to computer servers they operated in California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine. The indictment also alleges Gonzales and his co-conspirators also used sophisticated hacker techniques to cover their tracks and to avoid detection by anti-virus software used by their victims.

If convicted, Gonzales faces up to 20 years in prison on the wire fraud conspiracy charge and an additional five years in prison on the conspiracy charge, as well as a fine of $250,000 for each charge.

A federal jury convicted a former Louisiana congressman Wednesday of taking bribes on 11 of 16 counts in a case in which agents found $90,000 in his freezer.

Former Rep. William Jefferson, a Democrat who had represented parts of New Orleans, was accused of accepting more than $400,000 in bribes and seeking millions more in exchange for brokering business deals in Africa.

Of course, the only lesson members of congress will learn from this episode is to hide bribe money somewhere other than the fridge.

A criminal complaint says 48-year-old John Zaubler called 911 Saturday and said he was going to kill Sotomayor by “blowing her up” because he did not want his girlfriend to go to federal prison.

The complaint also says he wanted to kill Obama by “blowing him up.”

Sketchy information on this guy, but on the surface he doesn’t sound like the Freeper-style guy the feds are on the hunt for.

It was on Fox News a lot.

Dr. Tiller, as some of you may know, was a regular target of Bill O’Reilly

You’ve got to wonder: what’s next? The wingnut faction is now the driving force on the right of America’s political spectrum. They were insane before, but the election of President Obama has seemingly given them the sanction to run wild. Every day Glenn Beck explains to his viewers that Barack Obama is out to get them. Every day Rush Limbaugh feeds the paranoia of his followers, most recently equating Judge Sotomayor to a klansman, lying and saying that the lives of whites are under threat from her.

Which disciple of conservative politics will be next to erupt in violence? And who will be the media personality that pulled his or her mental trigger?

Lest we forget, it isn’t just media conservatives that egg this on:

Sen. John Cornyn said yesterday that recent examples of courthouse violence may be linked to public anger over judges who make politically charged decisions without being held accountable.

…

Cornyn continued: “I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have.”

The rhetoric encouraged from Republican conservatives like John Cornyn and Rush Limbaugh and the rest is manifesting itself in violence and violent threats:

Threats against the nation’s judges and prosecutors have sharply increased, prompting hundreds to get 24-hour protection from armed U.S. marshals. Many federal judges are altering their routes to work, installing security systems at home, shielding their addresses by paying bills at the courthouse or refraining from registering to vote. Some even pack weapons on the bench.

…

The threats and other harassing communications against federal court personnel have more than doubled in the past six years, from 592 to 1,278, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. Worried federal officials blame disgruntled defendants whose anger is fueled by the Internet; terrorism and gang cases that bring more violent offenders into federal court; frustration at the economic crisis; and the rise of the “sovereign citizen” movement — a loose collection of tax protesters, white supremacists and others who don’t respect federal authority.

Right wing terror is here, its real, and lives have been lost. How much longer should we sit here and pretend like this is an honest difference of opinions and not something far more sinister?

What matters is that the government tortured people.

(The argument over whether the evidence was good or not is mostly a red herring, as well)

Also, Harry Reid seems to have taken a break from continually getting rolled by the Senate Republicans to come out against an investigation into an activity that stained the soul of America. A lot of brilliance there, as usual.

Rep. Jane Harman , the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to drop espionage charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.

Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

Somehow I think Rep. Harman’s constituents might want to know why she was even considering using her congressional powers for a group under investigation?

Pittsburgh police say a man wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call, killing three of them.

Police chief Nate Harper says the motive for Saturday’s shooting isn’t clear.

Friends say the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

>> Was Pittsburgh shooter driven by right-wing gun paranoia about Obama?

>> In this video, Richard Poplawski’s friend says that he was concerned over “Zionist control of the government” which is a key belief of the extremist militia right.

As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual-abuse crisis broke publicly across the U.S. Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inability to change that he searched for an island to purchase with the intent of using it as a place to isolate such offenders, according to documents recently obtained by NCR.

Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paracletes, an order established in 1947 to deal with problem priests, wrote regularly to bishops in the United States and to Vatican officials, including the pope, of his opinion that many sexual abusers in the priesthood should be laicized immediately.

(via)

“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” she said, using unusually blunt language. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.”

Since last year, drug-related killings and battles between law enforcement authorities and the cartels have resulted in more than 7,200 deaths in Mexico, and raised doubts about the country’s stability. The violence has begun spilling across the border.

Of course, the logical thing to do would then be to decriminalize most of this stuff, since it just ends up creating a black market like the prohibition of alcohol did in the 1920s. But that’s not likely to happen any time soon.