Former Illinois Governor George Ryan lost his appeal to overturn his conviction on corruption charges yesterday. He will remain free pending a request for an "en banc" rehearing by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The main issue in the appeal involves the propriety of the Judge substituting two alternate jurors 8 days after deliberations began and a juror's bringing outside material into the jury room.

Yes, a juror did bring improper outside information into deliberations at Ryan's trial and "there is no doubt this should not have happened," the two-judge majority wrote. The judges also acknowledged that the sudden removal of an outspoken juror after eight days of deliberations was irregular.

"The trial may not have been picture-perfect," the two judges wrote in the majority opinion.

One judge dissented from the majority's view:

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General Petraeus can not testify before Congress on 9/11. Forget about why 9/11 was chosen, it simply is unacceptable. We will not be able to even discuss Petraeus' testimony with any sense of rationality if he testifies on 9/11. Bush will be accused of politicizing the date. Petraeus' actual testimony will not even be the central focus. Adele Stan is right:

The administration has exploited the pain of that memory one too many times. Even if that's not the intention here of some White House political genius, more than half of the population will never be convinced of that. So let us remember a horrible day when we all came together without linking it to the war that is tearing us apart.

Another conservative realizes that Rudy is insane:

I am not defending Rudy, the presidential candidate. Almost no one who has lived in New York wants Rudy anywhere near the nuclear football, nor would we like to see his strongly authoritarian instincts (however much they arguably may have done for New York's policing) unleashed on the federal justice system. Rudy is craaaaaaaaazy . . .

h/t Yglesias.

It never made any sense to me that Matt Bai was chosen as the moderator of the Yearly Kos Presidential Forum. Bai has a long track record of hostility towards Left blogs and the views espoused by them. Joan Walsh reviews his new book and finds, surprise! - that Bai is very hostile to the goals of the Left blogs. Kevin Drum, in a strange reaction, ignores this and likes the book very much:

As near as I can tell, she and I had an almost (though not quite) identical reaction to Bai on substantive grounds, but despite that I loved the book and she hated it. Basically, I thought it was a terrific and insightful piece of reporting even though I thought Bai's basic theme failed to hold water, while Walsh was exasperated by the cluelessness of the book's basic theme but allowed that it also had some colorful and interesting reporting.

So Kevin likes clueless and inaccurate books apparently. Good to know.

Anne Applebaum writes:

In the end, most presidents do learn on the job: Bill Clinton would probably never have predicted he'd contemplate bombing Belgrade, just as President Bush surely had never devoted much thought to Afghanistan. It's not easy to predict whose particular set of experiences will suit which particular crisis and which weaknesses will prove fatal. But we can certainly entertain ourselves between now and November 2008 trying to guess.

(Emphasis supplied.) Actually, Anne Applebaum demonstrates her non-expertise on the issues. In 1992, the Balkans were very much a hot spot and Slobodan Milosovic very much an issue:

KagroX points to the pitfalls that the September Petraeus Bush Report creates for Dems. Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) corrects a mistake made in the USA Today article Kagro cites about his position on Iraq:

[A]s we approach this pivotal debate, I want to clearly and unequivocally express to you where I stand on the question of executing a responsible redeployment from Iraq:

I am firmly in favor of withdrawing troops on a timeline that includes both a definite start date and a definite end date ("date certain") and uses clearly-defined benchmarks. I am not in favor of an "open-ended" timeline for withdrawal, as some members of Congress have proposed recently.

As many foreign policy experts agree, setting a date certain for withdrawal is fundamental to forcing George W. Bush to bring our troops home from Iraq and ensuring the Iraqis step up and defend their own country. That's why -- even as I consider all proposals as a matter of due diligence -- I am standing strong on setting a definite redeployment end date (as an example, I recently voted for the "Responsible Redeployment from Iraq Act" to safely draw down our troops over the course of nine months).

Well done Representative McNerney.

Michelle Obama is on the campaign trail, stumping for her husband. From a recent speech,

At another stop, in Atlantic, Michelle said she travels with her husband in part "to model what it means to have family values," adding "if you can't run your own house, you can't run the White House." She didn't elaborate, but it could be interpreted as a swipe at the Clintons.

I thought playing the "family values" card was a Republican strategy. Maybe not when your candidacy appears to be, as Obama acknowledged the other day, "a stretch" for the voters".

I don't appreciate Obama (or his wife's) personal snipes at fellow Democrats. It's one thing to criticize policies or positions on issues. It's another to launch personal attacks. To use your spouse as the messenger is even lower.

Update: Obama's campaign denies his wife's remark was a swipe at the Clintons.

Arianna connects the dots between Karl Rove and the Utah mining disaster.

Coal mining interests have donated more than $12 million to federal candidates since the Bush-era began with the 2000 election cycle, with 88% of that money -- $10.6 million -- going to Republicans.

And what did that largess buy the coal mining industry? Mine safety regulators far more interested in looking out for the financial well-being of mine owners than for the physical well-being of miners.

As "Exhibit A", Arianna points to Richard Stickler, Bush's "mine safety czar":

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The Washington Post reports:

Vice President Cheney's office acknowledged for the first time yesterday that it has dozens of documents related to the administration's warrantless surveillance program, but it signaled that it will resist efforts by congressional Democrats to obtain them.

Among the docuemnts Cheney acknowledges having in his possession:

They include 43 separate authorizations from President Bush for the program, which had to be renewed approximately every 45 days beginning on Oct. 4, 2001.

The letter also lists dates, from October 2001 through February 2005, for 10 legal memoranda from the Justice Department. Although Cheney's office has copies of the memos, none of them "was rendered to the Office of the Vice President," Coffin wrote.

As to 2004, the year of the Ashcroft hospital visit,

Coffin's letter indicates that Bush signed memos amending the program on March 19 and April 2 of that year. The details of the dispute have never been revealed publicly.

Th March 19 and April 2 memos amending the plan, signed by Bush, would seem to be key in understanding the objections of those in the Justice Department. I hope the Senate Judiciary Committee sticks with their plan to seek to hold the White House in contempt for not turning them over.

Update: Marty Lederman at Balkanization parses the letter from Cheney's office.

NYTimes:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.

Kelly Anne Moore was the chief of the Violent Crimes and Terrorism Section in the Brooklyn United States Attorney’s Office from 2002 to 2006. One of the cases she prosecuted was that of two Yemenis,including Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad,who were charged and convicted of conspiring to send money from Brooklyn, NY to members of al Qaeda and Hamas to support terrorist activities. One was sentenced to 75 years and the other to 45 years. Both are now serving their sentences at Florence's Supermax in Colorado.

Ms. Moore is now in private practice. As she (and others who have tried terrorism cases) know, the U.S. courts are just fine for the job. We don't need special National Security Courts or military tribunals.

In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Ms. Moore writes:

Besides terrorists, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted Ku Klux Klan bombers, members of violent groups like the Weathermen in the 1960s and ’70s, and members of Italian organized crime in the ’80s and ’90s. The same system has been used repeatedly against complex drug trafficking and human trafficking syndicates, many of which operate primarily overseas.

I'd add to that list those charged and convicted in the Oklahoma City Bombings.

Here are some of the points she makes:

Jack Balkin continues to think circles around the conservative critics of his theory of Progressive Originalism:

Matt [Franck of NRO] has demurred when I asked him what parts of the post-New Deal order he thought were constitutional under his theory. . . . In a previous post I asked Matt whether he thought the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal rights for women. He responded that Bradwell v. Illinois, which held that Illinois could deny women the right to be lawyers, "was rightly decided." He hastened to add that this "declares nothing on [his] view of women's equality." As a matter of original understanding-- that is, original expected application-- Matt is probably right. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment believed that its guarantees were perfectly consistent with the common law coverture rules, under which women lost all of their rights upon marriage. . . . The question is whether our Constitution must be applied today in the way that Justice Bradley and his contemporaries would have applied it. Matt says yes. I say no: The text of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require it, and the principles underlying the text do not require it. Matt, by contrast, believes that the meaning of the text is identical (for purposes of legal interpretation) with its original understanding. I argue that this confuses concepts with their expected applications, and the meaning of a sentence with the expectations of the speaker who uttered it.

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