We have Con Air for inmates and Ghost Air for detainees and now there's ICE Air. Tonight, Nightline examines ICE Air, the airline that deports the undocumented:

ICE has 22 detention facilities all over the country. When illegal immigrants are caught, they're flown to one of three hubs in Texas, Arizona or Louisiana. From there, ICE Air has daily flights to Central American countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and also frequent flights to Nicaragua, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia and the Caribbean. When it gets enough immigrants to fill a plane, it also flies to Asia, eastern Europe and Africa. ICE Air leases nine planes, and sometimes it also charters commercial jets. It flies six days a week.

Business is brisk. [More...]

It's not often that liberal John Amato at Crooks and Liars and conservative Ed Morrissey at Hot Air agree. Today, they do, in reacting to news reports brought to our attention by Robert Cox that New Rochelle High School bowdlerized school library copies of the book "Girl Interrupted."

Students at New Rochelle School High School are going to find it difficult to complete their next assignment: comparing the film adaptation of "Girl, Interrupted" to the best-selling book. In the book, Kaysen recounts her confinement at a Massachussets mental hospital in the 1960's.

Pages from the middle of the book have been torn out by the school district after having been deemed "inappropriate" by school officials due to sexual content and strong language.

...."The material was of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students," said English Department Chariperson Leslie Altschul, "since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing."

As a graduate of NRHS, I'll add my disappointment in the censorship attempt. It's certainly not the New Rochelle I remember.

The book mutilation has been widely criticized. The good news is the school district has now acknowledged it was wrong. [More...]

To protesters who assembled outside the capitol in Washington state, freedom of religion apparently does not include freedom to hold beliefs that differ from the protesters' Christian viewpoint. They are "outraged" that a display promoting atheism stands next to a nativity scene in the state capitol.

The Establishment Clause prohibits the state from endorsing any particular religious viewpoint. Making the capitol available to competing ideas promotes the free exercise of religion without violating the Establishment Clause. Why do the protesters hate the concept of religious freedom?

The most interesting protest sign features a picture of Bill O’Reilly punching Gov. Christine Gregoire. Why O'Reilly, you ask? [more ...]

The Los Angeles Times takes a look at the Maryland State Trooper who, working undercover, "infiltrated" progressive groups and attended progressive events that she perceived as terrorism-related. TalkLeft last discussed the Maryland surveillance program here.

Maryland officials now concede that, based on information gathered by "Lucy" and others, state police wrongly listed at least 53 Americans as terrorists in a criminal intelligence database -- and shared some information about them with half a dozen state and federal agencies, including the National Security Agency.

Among those labeled as terrorists: two Catholic nuns, a former Democratic congressional candidate, a lifelong pacifist and a registered lobbyist. One suspect's file warned that she was "involved in puppet making and allows anarchists to utilize her property for meetings." ...

Puppet makers being well known terrorists. Right, Osama bin Geppetto? [more ...]

Obama will have a choice: He can give the Left what it wants and weaken our defenses. Or he can follow the advice of his more prudent advisers, recognize that Congress, the courts, and officials including Attorney General Michael Mukasey have already moved to end the worst Bush administration abuses — and kick the hard Left gently in the teeth. I’m betting that Obama is smart and tough enough to do the latter.

The advisor to watch on this is Cass Sunstein, who is no doubt advising Obama to do precisely what Taylor wants. Yglesias is "stunned" to read this from Taylor - I have no idea why, Taylor has always defended Bush abuses. Will he be stunned to learn that Obama advisor Sunstein has defended Bush abuses too?

Speaking for me only

NYTimes reports:

The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit holds for the first time that government agents may obtain admissible evidence against United States citizens through warrantless searches abroad. The searches must still be reasonable, as the Constitution requires, Judge Jose A. Cabranes wrote, adding that the government had met that standard in its search of the home and monitoring of the telephone of one defendant, Wadih El-Hage, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, who was a naturalized American citizen living in Nairobi, Kenya.

“The Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonableness — but not the Warrant Clause — applies to extraterritorial searches and seizures of U.S. citizens,” the judge wrote.

More when I read the opinion (PDF).

The Bush administration may claim the right to ignore the law when it engages in electronic surveillance, but it seems unwilling to share its unlimited power with the states. When the New York Police Department wants to use federal electronic surveillance laws to spy on suspected terrorists, it must convince the Justice Department to seek a warrant from the FISA court. The NYPD is complaining that the Justice Department "unfairly blocked the city’s applications for surveillance warrants, first in June and then in September."

[Attorney General] Mukasey said that the Police Department had sought authority ... to eavesdrop on “numerous communications facilities” without providing an adequate basis for their requests. Some officials who have been briefed on the cases said the requests, from the police Intelligence Division, were unusually broad, and included telephones in public places, like train or subway stations, rather than phones used by a specific individual.

Sure, go ahead and listen to every call made from a public telephone. Don't worry about the privacy rights of the New Yorkers you're supposed to be protecting. [more ...]

The California Supreme Court today agreed to decide whether voter approval of Prop. 8 repealed the state constitutional right to same sex marriage that the court recognized earlier this year.

The court agreed today to review two related arguments by opponents of Prop. 8 - that the measure exceeds the legal scope of a ballot initiative by allowing a majority to restrict a minority group's rights, and that it violates the constitutional separation of powers by limiting judicial authority.

The supreme court's direct action will eliminate the need for litigation to work its way through trial courts and intermediate appeals before reaching the state's highest court. [more ...]

The Chesapeake Climate Action Network doesn't sound much like a terrorist organization, does it? It does to the Maryland State Police. The executive director and three staff members were entered into the agency's terrorism database, apparently because the group held a nonviolent protest at a high school where Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr. was speaking about the need to reduce pollution from coal-fired power plants. The Network didn't believe Ehrlich's proposals were adequate, so its members let him know. In less troubled times, this was known as petitioning the government to redress a grievance, or was recognized as the exercise of free speech, both protected rights under the First Amendment.

Newly released files reveal previously unreported details about the actions of the Maryland State Police, a topic discussed in earlier TalkLeft posts here and here. The decision to label the Network's Executive Director as a terrorist seems odd since he didn't attend the protest. [more ...]

Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, who broke the warrantless wiretapping story for the NYTimes (and justly earned the Pulitzer Prize), raise an important question:

President-elect Barack Obama will face a series of early decisions on domestic spying that will test his administration’s views on presidential power and civil liberties. The Justice Department will be asked to respond to motions in legal challenges to the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program, and must decide whether to continue the tactics used by the Bush administration — which has used broad claims of national security and “state secrets” to try to derail the challenges — or instead agree to disclose publicly more information about how the program was run.

More . . .

The Rev. Edward Pinkney was the Green Party candidate for Congress in Michigan's 6th District. He earned a respectable 3,500 votes despite his inability to leave his prison cell to attend campaign events.

According to an AP story, Pinkney was convicted in 2007 of "paying people to vote in a Benton Harbor election." He was placed on probation.

Months later, he wrote an article in a Chicago newspaper, People's Tribune, saying the judge who handled his case, Alfred Butzbaugh, could be punished by God with curses, fever and "extreme burning" unless he changed his ways.

For that exercise of free speech, Pinkney's probation was revoked. A different judge imposed a 3 to 10 year prison sentence. The ACLU is helping Pinkney appeal. Today it asked the appellate court to release Pinkney on bond while his appeal is pending. [more ...]

Michael Daniels, the Mayor of Pleasant Grove City, Utah, is dancing on a tightrope as he explains why the City accepted "an imposing red granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments" for display in a city park, but won't accept for display a monument that depicts the Seven Aphorisms of the Summum religion. A similar dance will be performed in the Supreme Court tomorrow as the Court hears argument about the constitutionality of that choice.

The First Amendment prohibits government from establishing a religion. A corollary to that prohibition is that government may not favor one religion over another. So why is Pleasant Grove City not improperly favoring Christianity's Ten Commandments over the Summum's Seven Aphorisms? Mayor Daniels' explanations are unconvincing.

[more ...]