Vice President Cheney’s handwritten notes, disclosed in a new court filing by Patrick Fitzgerald, show that he was “acutely focused” on smearing Joseph Wilson. Among the questions Cheney jotted in the margins of Wilson’s op-ed: “[D]id his wife send him on a junket?” PDF available here.

UPDATE: TalkLeft has the May 5th hearing transcript. Firedoglake breaks it down.

In 2000, John McCain called Rev. Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance.” Yesterday, in a naked attempt to broaden his political base, McCain delivered the commencement speech at Falwell’s Liberty University.

McCain’s hypocrisy was noted on many blogs. He returned the favor in his speech at Liberty by attacking the blogosphere:

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights”¦It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Oh, so McCain is always right – the problem is that we’re bloggers so we’re too impressed with ourselves to understand. If you are reading this, you are part of the blogosphere too, so you won’t understand McCain’s genius either.

(P.S. Glad to hear that McCain has grown out of his “infatuated with self-expression” phase.)

Percentage of Americans who believe the NSA program collecting phone records of Americans, revealed by USA Today this week, “goes too far.”

On Thursday, ThinkProgress argued that the telcos could be liable for tens of billions of dollars for turning over phone records to the government in violation of the Stored Communications Act. In this morning’s New York Times, law professor Orrin Kerr agrees:

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order.

“This is not a happy day for the general counsels” of the phone companies, he said. “If you have a class action involving 10 million Americans, that’s 10 million times $1,000 “” that’s 10 billion.”

In today’s Washington Post, Richard A. Falkenrath – former deputy assistant to President Bush – takes the opposite view. Here’s Falkenrath’s argument:

The three companies reported to have supplied telephone records to the NSA also appear to be acting lawfully”¦.[T]he Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 explicitly permits telecommunications companies to provide customer records to the government if the government asks for them.

Actually, that’s false. The relevant portion of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act – known as the Stored Communications Act – explicitly prohibits voluntary or required disclosure of phone records to the government with several limited exceptions. (See 18 U.S.C. 2702-03.) As we explained here and here none of those exceptions apply.

It’s clear from his column that Falkenrath is obviously a huge fan of Michael Hayden, the administration, and the NSA program. That’s fine, but it doesn’t change the law or the telcos’ potential liability for turning over the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.