The judge who will decide whether Larry Craig can withdraw his guilty plea isn't making that decision today. He won't decide until next week, after Sen. Craig's tentative resignation date of September 30. Will the delay affect Craig's decision to resign? Apparently so.

“Today was a major step in the legal effort to clear my name,” Craig said in a statement. “The court has not issued a ruling on my motion to withdraw my guilty plea. For now, I will continue my work in the United States Senate for Idaho.”

Translation: For now I will continue to be ineffectual until the court denies my motion.

to this:

The Defense Department is seeking an additional $42.3 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total request for 2008 to nearly $190 billion, according to prepared testimony Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is to present to Congress this afternoon.

No funding past a date certain. The Iraq Debacle must end. Only the Congress can do it. By NOT funding the Iraq Debacle.

Just say no.

Wasting time, good will and attempting to wreak havoc, the original Lieberman-Kyl Amendment on Iran was tantamount to granting President Bush the power to wage war against Iran. Still wasting time and attempting to wreak havoc, the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment was gutted of its war authorizing provisions, but remained provocative, unnecessary and stupid. It should have been voted down. It was not. It passed. Among the Ays was Senator Hillary Clinton. Among the Nays were Senators Chris Dodd and Joe Biden. Absent was Senator Barack Obama.

I liked a lot of the new diaries, but these stood out to me:

Will Life Imitate Art?, by Kristin Levingston of Brennan Blog, about a cop, Charles Crew, returning to the justice system that wrongly convicted him of murder, along with discussion other matters.

A Profile of Lula, by Randinho, discussing a NYTimes piece on the labor leader/political dissident who rose to become the President of Brazil.

A Systems Analysis of Iraq, by John Horse, discussing the an analytical systems approach to evaluating the Iraq failures.

More great stuff in the recommended and recent diary lists. Check it out.

While decrying what he terms "poll literalism," Kevin Drum then engages in a curious bit of poll hypotheticalism:

First, withdrawal from Iraq. A recent New York Times poll showed that 65% of respondents want to withdraw either some or all of our troops from Iraq. Hooray! The country is with us! But then the Times asked a followup question: "What if removing troops meant Iraq would become more of a base of operations for terrorists, then would you still favor removing U.S. troops from Iraq, or not?" Guess what? Of that 65%, only 30% still favored removal. That's a huge drop based on a single hypothetical, and in a real campaign that hypothetical would practically blanket the airwarves. It wouldn't convince everyone, of course, but it would probably convince a sizable chunk. The odds are that in real life — i.e., during a campaign

It would probably convince a sizable chunk? How does Kevin know this? Excuse me, this is ridiculous use of polling. Can we do one with a Democratic hypothetical and see what the results would be? Of course not. What Kevin is pointing to is actually push polling. Push polling is not ACCURATE polling and it is impossible to draw any conclusions from it. But Kevin sees value in it, as he then defends the Biden push poll that Celinda Lake performed:

Warren Jeffs isn't exactly a likeable guy (yes, that's an understatement), but the notion that he became an accomplice to rape by orchestrating the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her cousin stands on questionable legal footing.

University of Utah law associate professor Daniel Medwed said he was "mildly surprised" at the verdict. He said he thought the facts of the case were not a perfect fit for the charges, and that lesser charges - possibly solemnizing an illegal marriage - might have been more appropriate. "Feeling he had done something wrong is a little bit of a stretch to saying he was an accomplice to rape," Medwed said.

The jury in Jeff's case was nonetheless convinced, finding him guilty yesterday. Whether the conviction will withstand an appeal is an interesting question.

Another appellate issue may be lurking in this bit of news:

The jurors, who began their deliberations on Friday after a week of testimony, announced in a note on Monday that they were deadlocked on one of two charges. The judge, James L. Shumate, pressed them to continue, and then early on Tuesday, for reasons the court did not explain, an alternate juror was substituted for one of the original panel members. A unanimous verdict came a few hours later.

All we know at this point is the court's official explanation: "there was an event with a juror."

Taking another time-out from the serious issues of the day, Congress held a hearing to complain about music lyrics that "exploit violence and sexism for profit." As if television doesn’t. Here’s a voice of sanity:

At least one performer at the hearing told lawmakers that rap music had been unfairly singled out as a scapegoat for deeper social problems. "Gang violence was here before rap music," said David Banner, a rapper who records for Universal Music and whose real name is Levell Crump. "I can admit that there are some problems in hip-hop, but it is only a reflection of what is taking place in our society. Hip-hop is sick because America is sick."

If Congress wants to be taken seriously, it should focus on the underlying societal problems of racism and sexism and inequality and poverty, not on the reflection of those problems in rap or hip-hop.

Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS has reignited debate on the question of President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service. The allegedly fake documents (I think they were faked) overshadowed what I believe was an overwhelming case that Bush obviously was derelict in his duty. Eric Boehlert revisited the issue:

The simple, yet apparently elusive, truth is that CBS' report on Bush and the National Guard could have (and should have) been broadcast without the controversial memos. And if it had been, the results would have been exactly the same. Meaning, the documents were irrelevant because they provided texture (the supposed frustration of Bush's commander), not new facts about Bush's service. Yet journalists pretend the memos are the National Guard story and that without them, questions about Bush's military dodge disappear. Why do they think that? Based on the coverage last week, it's clear that journalists who mocked Rather still don't have the slightest clue what the established facts of the Guard story are.

More.

I'm getting ready to leave leaving for Madrid for the annual Lexis-Nexis Legal Advisory Board meeting.

Big Tent Democrat, TChris and maybe LNILR will be posting in my absence, so be sure to check in. The Dems are debating tonight and Larry Craig's plea withdrawal hearing is today, and I'm pretty sure they will cover those as well as any other big news. We'll also do diary rescues, (details here) so feel free to contribute your own posts.

I'll be checking in occasionally. In the meantime, here's an open thread.

Update: For legal readers out there, if you have an opinion of what Lexis Nexis and/or Martindale Hubbell are doing right and what they need to improve, or are willing to share your perception of their value and service to your practice, please send me an e-mail. I won't share your name if you ask me not to. They really would like to know. (And I might get extra brownie points at the meeting.)

This is disturbing:

Nooses were left in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag and in the office of a white officer who conducted race relations training after the incident, leading a congressman to call Tuesday for a thorough military investigation.

A Coast Guard probe was unable to determine who left the nooses, said Chief Warrant Officer David M. French, a spokesman for the Coast Guard Academy.

This is even more disturbing:

A task force found that minority members comprised 13.5 percent of the Coast Guard's student body, compared with 16 percent in 1991, Cummings said. Minorities comprised only 7 percent of the faculty and staff, and fewer than 1 percent of captains on active duty are black, Cummings said.

The Supreme Court has agreed to review a Seventh Circuit decision upholding Indiana's voter ID law. In a piece published yesterday, Adam Liptak questioned whether Judge Posner's opinion for the Seventh Circuit represented a privileged view that is out of touch with the reality of low income life:

“It is exceedingly difficult to maneuver in today’s America without a photo ID,” Judge Posner wrote for a divided panel of the federal appeals court in Chicago in January, upholding an Indiana voter identification law enacted in 2005. “Try flying, or even entering a tall building such as the courthouse in which we sit.”

But somewhere between 13 million and 22 million Americans of voting age, most of them poor, get by without driver’s licenses, passports and other kinds of government documents bearing their pictures, perhaps because they do not have the money to drive, much less to fly.

Liptak also exposed the latest justification for passing laws that burden the right to vote in the name of preventing the virtually nonexistent problem of fraudulent voting. more ...

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the use of lethal injections to execute inmates -- a procedure that may inflict unnecessary pain and suffering -- violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments.

The high court will hear a challenge from two inmates on death row in Kentucky - Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr. - who sued Kentucky in 2004, claiming lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Baze has been scheduled for execution Tuesday night, but the Kentucky Supreme Court halted the proceedings earlier this month.

There are, of course, broader reasons to oppose the death penalty, as a new ABA study of capital punishment in Ohio demonstrates.

The system is full of racial and geographic imbalances, too many defendants don't get adequate legal help and too many protections of offenders' rights are absent from the capital punishment process, according to a 30-month review of Ohio's death penalty system by the American Bar Association.

The authors of the report want Ohio to suspend executions until the flaws in its criminal justice system are corrected. That would be good advice for every state that relies on death as a punishment.