What's on the Pentagon's playlist?

The National Security Archive, and a coalition of high-profile music artists and band members want to know, particularly when it comes to detainee interrogations.

The artists and bands are going on record to close Camp X-Ray, the Pentagon's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention facility for terror detainees captured oversees.  They are extremely angered that their music either already has been, or may have been, used to help the Pentagon conduct detainee interrogations and, they maintain, may have played at excessively loud levels and for long periods of time to torture detainees.

They include:

With a narrow exception, Delaware's Sports Lottery violates federal law, a federal appeals court ruled today.

Although it allowed multi-game (a/k/a parlay), high-stakes wagers on NFL games, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled (see below) that "betting on all [other] major professional and college sports" violates a federal law.

Why?  Because Delaware's law allowing for a sports lottery where players could gamble on all professional and college teams violated a federal prohibition against individual and over/under point-spread bets.

It's official.  Mr. Clucky, the Miami Beach rooster, his guinea hen girlfriend Wallflower, and their poultry guardian Mark Buckley lost their appeal in Miami Beach's chicken eviction case.

Special Master Joe Kaplan issued a fowl, anti-poultry ruling (see below) against Buckley today, holding that:

Mr. Buckley's argument that his rooster and hen constituted an exception to the [City] Code because he considered them to be his "pets", to be without merit.

Is it over for these fine feathered friends? Is their legal jig up on the streets of Miami Beach? 

A German court ruled that a fixed gear bike with a single hand-brake is not illegal, and should be considered the same as a bike with two regular hand brakes, or a brake sytem that works by pedaling backwards.

You're probably asking wondering what the heck is a 'fixie' bike, and why is this such a big deal?

Can't bicyclists opt to do foolish things, and bring a world of hurt and pain upon themselves if they're so inclined?

William Jefferson, the former Congressman who represented New Orleans, Louisiana, was convicted by a jury today of 11 of 16 criminal counts that included federal bribery, racketeering and money laundering charges.

The scandalous 95-page criminal indictment filed in 2007 charged Jefferson with conspiring to enrich him "and his family members by corruptly seeking, soliciting, and directing" that he and his family member members be paid "things of value" in exchange for performing official acts while in office that would favor those whom he sought to bribe.

But perhaps the thing that this case will be most remembered for is the FBI's discovery of $90,000 in frozen, bundled cash inside then Congressman Jefferson's Washington, D.C. home freezer, money that the government charged Jefferson was going to use to bribe Nigeria's Vice President at the time.

Following his arrest on federal criminal charges by the U.S. Attorney last week in New Jersey's epic corruption scandal, Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, III -- a former election and politics lawyer in private practice -- resigned from office today.

His official web page and bio are gone, replaced by a notice that Dawn Zimmer, Hoboken City Council President and former mayoral candidate, is now Acting Mayor.

In what may be his last offical act on mayoral letterhead, Cammarano wrote Hoboken's City Clerk that he was resigning from office at 12 p.m. on Friday, July 31, 2009.

Peter Cammarano, III, the Hoboken, New Jersey Mayor (inset, left and center), and Dennis Elwell, Mayor of Secaucus, New Jersey (inset, right), face high-level political corruption charges, along with more than 40 other people who were also charged with crimes ranging from corruption, extortion, money laundering, illegal money transmitting, to conspiracy to transport human organs.

Cammarano was allegedly caught by the FBI on tape in June telling a government cooperating witness, Solomon Dwek, "I stopped being a lawyer last month, um, hopefully for good." The FBI allegedly recorded a conversation that the Hoboken Mayor had with Dwek in a Hoboken diner where Cammarano is said to have conspired to extort $5,000 from Dwek, and bragged before his election that "[r]ight now, the Italians, the Hispanics, the seniors are locked down. Nothing can change that now. . . . I could be, uh, indicted, and I'm still gonna win 85 to 95 percent of those populations."

Thomas Daniel (inset) the lawyer hired by Alaska's Personnel Board to investigate an ethics complaint involving Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's legal defense fund set up to help pay the cost of defending allegations of misconduct while in office, confirmed to FindLaw that a copy of his confidential report had somehow become public. Daniel said "I suspect the complainant released it, but don't know for sure."

Eagle River, Alaska resident Kim Chapman filed the ethics compalint against Gov. Palin on April 27, 2009, alleging that Palin's Alaska Fund Trust violated two Executive Branch ethics laws that 1) prohibit using an official position for personal gain, and 2) bar public officials from accepting gifts that seek to influence how official duties are performed. 

"It is a copy of my report," Daniel told FindLaw, but emphasized that "the release was not authorized," and that "there was no deadline" to make it public."  The only person capable of waiving the confidentiality provision to which he remained bound, Daniel stated in his report, is Gov. Palin.