2010
Republicans are getting closer to taking back the Senate in 2010. In each of the following 9 states where a Democrat is up for re-election, the Republican challenger is leading or tied with the Democrat incumbent/candidate.
Arkansas
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Illinois
Nevada
New York
North Dakota
Pennsylvania
“GPA”?
Senior White House Advisor Valerie Jarrett confuses GPA with GDP. Just go to 2:36 in the video below.
2010 ND Senate Race
Could we finally get rid of Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND)? Republican Governor John Hoeven has been a bit of a tease in the past, never actually getting ito a Senate race. But, with a national anti-Democrat wave developing, this is the year he’ll probably run for Dorgan’s seat.
Are We OverReacting to Terrorism
Regular thorn-in-our-side Invalid10 makes a good point in the comments: “You have a higher chance of being killed by your toaster than a terrorist.”
I’m sympathetic to this argument, as you can see from my rant about the Swine Flu.
So why, in real life, are we willing to lose more lives fighting the terrorists than were lost in the terrorist attacks themselves?
In a similar vein, why do other countries fight costly wars over meaningless little strips of land?
Well, it’s for the same reason that a Mafioso will hunt you to the ends of the earth if you steal from him and run. The amount of money involved may be small, but the message it sends is critical: Violations will not be tolerated.
It’s also the reason the IRS tries to recover a few hundred dollars at a time from individual taxpayers.
Some of these “overreactions” are entirely rational, like the terrorism, Mafia, and IRS examples above.
Some are laughably irrational – like companies trying to save money by buying fewer staplers.
In some cases, the lack of even symbolic action encourages violations – like the routine influx of illegal immigrants.
I support hunting terrorists to the ends of the earth because it sends an important message. Yes, losing brave lives in that cause is a rational decision.
I support greater immigration enforcement, not because it will catch even the majority of illegal immigrants, but because it will send the right message to anyone who’s thinking of making a long, expensive, and illegal journey in search of an American job.
I don’t support most silly corporate “cost cutting” measures. They send the right message, but at far too high a cost in lost morale and product quality.
I don’t support the Swine Flu vaccination craze because it’s likely to kill more people than it saves.
All clear now? Great!
Tomorrow’s Senate Vote on Obamacare
Is a foregone conclusion. The real drama will come in the next several weeks.
Bad Law
When KSM is tried in a civilian court, you will lose many of your Constitutionally-guaranteed rights to a fair trial:
Good criminal defense attorneys are seldom deterred by futility, so it’s reasonable to expect that KSM’s lawyers will make all the arguments there are to make: They’ll allege a violation of KSM’s right to a speedy trial, claiming that the years he spent in CIA detention and Gitmo violated this constitutional right. They’ll seek suppression of KSM’s statements, arguing (persuasively) that the torture he endured—sleep deprivation, noise, cold, physical abuse, and, of course, 183 water-boarding sessions—make his statements involuntary. They will insist that everything stemming from those statements must be suppressed, under the Fourth Amendment, as the fruit of the wildly poisonous tree. They will demand the names of operatives and interrogators, using KSM’s right to confront the witnesses against him to box the government into revealing things it would prefer to keep secret—the identities of confidential informants, the locations of secret safe houses, the names of other inmates and detainees who provided information about him, and a thousand other clever things that should make the government squirm. The defense will attack the CIA, FBI, and NSA, demanding information about wiretapping and signal intelligence and sources and methods. They’ll move to dismiss the case because there is simply no venue in the United States in which KSM can get a fair trial.
All of these motions and three dozen more will be either denied or denuded of any significant impact on the disposition of the case. The speedy-trial argument will fail. Important documents will be scrubbed and redacted to the point of unintelligibility or will be ruled irrelevant. The motions to dismiss will all be denied. And though some of KSM’s statements will be suppressed in order to preserve the appearance of impartiality and integrity, plenty of the most damming ones will remain admissible. While condemning in stern language the terrible treatment of KSM and denouncing water-boarding as beneath the high standards of our justice system, the trial judge will nonetheless admit into evidence statements made by KSM in subsequent military tribunals, along with those made to a so-called “clean team” of interrogators, rendering all the suppressed evidence utterly insignificant.
In an idealized view, our judicial system is insulated from the ribald passions of politics. In reality, those passions suffuse the criminal justice system, and no matter how compelling the case for suppressing evidence that would actually effect the trial might be, given the politics at play, there is no judge in the country who will seriously endanger the prosecution. Instead, with the defense motions duly denied, the case will proceed to trial, and then (as no jury in the country is going to acquit KSM) to conviction and a series of appeals. And that’s where the ultimate effect of a vigorous defense of KSM gets really grim.
At each stage of the appellate process, a higher court will countenance the cowardly decisions made by the trial judge, ennobling them with the unfortunate force of precedent. The judicial refusal to consider KSM’s years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM’s initial torture from his subsequent “clean team” statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they’ve been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.
What Happens Next?
Here’s what you can expect to see in the coming weeks.
Whoa! Again
Gallup: Obama JA dips below 50 percent for the first time. That’s a 20-point drop since his inauguration.
Whoa!
Is John McCain finally in Primary trouble?