I was out of town today and missed the verdict. Since getting home, the news is all about the miners in Utah. So without benefit of having seen live coverage or later analysis, first let me say I agree with TChris:

Whether or not the verdict is correct, the prosecution proves that violations of the law can be addressed in criminal courts. It was never necessary to treat Padilla as an "enemy combatant" or to attempt to deny his right to a jury and to all the other rights that should attend a criminal prosecution.

Now, let me add: I'm dismayed that a jury would come back with a guilty verdict after a day and a half of deliberation in a trial where the evidence took three months to present.

It took 12 Miami-Dade jurors just 11 hours to reach their unanimous verdicts, despite a complex body of evidence that included hundreds of FBI phone wiretaps introduced during the three-month federal trial.

It takes longer than that to comprehend the jury instructions. The instructions in Padilla's case were 42 pages long and are available here (pdf). The jury's job is to determine whether the government has proved each and every element of the charged crimes against each defendant. The elements of the crimes are contained in the jury instructions. They are to apply the law as given in the instructions to the evidence presented at trial.

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Michael Vick is feeling the squeeze. He has no good options. Vick has used speed and agility to avoid sacks under those circumstances throughout his career, but this week he's facing a pass rush that he can't elude by scrambling. (Sorry. Sports metaphors end here.)

The Falcons quarterback has been indicted for conspiring to sponsor dog fights. Vick can accept the government's proposed plea agreement, knowing he'll probably serve a year or two in prison, or he can take his chances at trial. If he elects a trial, however, prosecutors have threatened to add more charges.

The evidence against Vick is (warning: disturbing photo) horrific. He would risk more convictions (and probably a longer sentence) by exposing such ugly facts to a jury. Reports that Vick's lawyers advised him to take the deal are therefore unsurprising.

Given the NFL's emphasis on players' off-field misconduct, Vick's playing career may be over even if he could beat the charges at trial. He lost his endorsement contract with Nike. He has no good choices. His deadline to decide is tomorrow.

Jack Balkin's theory of progressive orignalism is one of my very favorite legal topics. Here is my take. Recently, Balkin has been addressing critiques from conservatives. His most recent post is masterly:

Over at NRO, Ed Whelan has offered a series of posts commenting on my exchange with Matthew Franck. . . . Ed makes three key points, each of which is ultimately about the same thing--he wants to restrain judges and leave decisions to the political process. As I explained in my exchange with Matthew Franck, this is all very well and good, but it is in some sense orthogonal to the debate over originalism. In addition, Ed's version of originalism has many of the problems I identified in my original articles.

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Alberto Gonzales, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month about his visit to John Ashcroft's hospital bed:

"We would not have sought, nor did we intend to get any approval from General Ashcroft if, in fact, he wasn't fully competent to make that decision."

Does this sound like the description of a man who is competent to decide pressing and complex questions of law and policy?

"Saw AG," [FBI Director] Mueller wrote in his timed log of the events on the evening of March 10, 2004. "Janet Ashcroft in the room. AG is feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed."

Gonzales groupies will parse the Attorney General's language to argue that a feeble, stressed, and inarticulate hospital patient might still be competent, but the question is not whether Gonzales committed perjury. The question is whether the Senate will continue to tolerate Gonzales' practice of providing misleading testimony. Wouldn't we experience consequences if any of us were to respond so dishonestly to congressional inquiries? Does the AG deserve a continuing pass simply because he's the AG?

The sorry saga of Jose Padilla's prosecution has ended with a guilty verdict. Had the government prosecuted Padilla as a criminal from the start, instead of insisting that he was an "enemy combatant" before flip-flopping to avoid Supreme Court review of its claim, it would not have taken 3-1/2 years to reach this point.

[Padilla] was finally added to the Miami terrorism support indictment in late 2005 just as the U.S. Supreme Court was poised to consider President Bush's authority to continue detaining him.

Padilla's co-defendants were also convicted. Whether or not the verdict is correct, the prosecution proves that violations of the law can be addressed in criminal courts. It was never necessary to treat Padilla as an "enemy combatant" or to attempt to deny his right to a jury and to all the other rights that should attend a criminal prosecution.

TalkLeft background on the Padilla case is collected here.

A federal court in 1992 ordered the NYPD to stop arresting homeless panhandlers for violating an unconstitutional ordinance that prohibited loitering “for the purpose of begging.” As TalkLeft noted here, the order didn't stop the arrests. Neither, apparently, did a threat to hold NYPD in contempt of court.

Judge Shira Scheindlin's latest response may be more successful in getting the city's attention: she's certified a class action lawsuit, permitting a class of homeless people to sue the city for violating their civil rights by continuing to enforce the ordinance.

Judge Scheindlin said the suit seeks more than what the police had so far agreed to do, such as the dismissal of fines and the expunging of wrongful convictions from public records. Class certification is the only way to ensure equitable relief and to prevent future enforcement of the unconstitutional law, Judge Scheindlin said.

A lot of pixels have been devoted to the fact that the Bush Administration will be writing the September report, as "opposed" to just General Petraeus. The problem with this logic is that General Petraeus is part of the Bush Administration too. So how is this different? The Left blogs seem to have bought into the notion of Petraeus as honest broker. He is not. Matt Yglesias gets it right:

But as we read yesterday, the [September] reports are being written by the White House. This is, in my view, appropriate. Petraeus and Crocker work for Bush and it's always been silly to portray them as independent actors. But the point is that there's no independent assessment here -- the White House is going to make an official statement of the White House's assessment of the situation and why the White House believes its official assessment supports the policies the White House favors. All that's fine, and insofar as the White House is persuasive it should sway people. But we've already seen what the White House talking points on the surge are . . . -- there's no particular reason to wait with baited breath to see how they format the official document.

Zactly. BTW, what happens if the Bush Administration allows Petraeus to "write" the report on his own? It is suddenly now the Holy Grail again?

It's court in the mountains for me today. I've got an early flight there and a late flight back so that means an open thread day for you.

Here's the tiny plane I'll be flying on. No bathroom, no flight attendant. Even with the constant turbulance caused by the heat of summer it beats driving seven hours each way.

What it doesn't beat is getting up at 5am to arrive at the airport an hour and a half before the flight and on the other end, having to worry about whether the flight will be cancelled due to wind conditions or whether weight restrictions will make them bump some passengers. The worst part, of course, is that I like my client and I'll be very sad when for the first time after months of doing court hearings, I leave to go home while he stays in the custody of the Town Marshals.

I hope you all have a better day planned.

I never expected to be supporting any of our fine Democratic candidates for President at this point, much less Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT). I was not shopping for candidates. Indeed, I insisted (insist?) that the Netroots has spent 2007 too focused on the 2008 horserace instead of being focused on the pressing issues of today, especially the Iraq issue.

But that actually explains how Chris Dodd won my support. Chris Dodd is leading on the issues of today as well as discussing his vision for the issues of tomorrow. Take Iraq for instance. While Dodd thoroughly explains his views on what he will do about Iraq as President, he has spent just as much time explaining and stressing the critical importance of Democrats doing all they can now to end the Iraq Debacle. This is not an issue that can wait 18 months. Thus Dodd argues that we must:

End the War in Iraq Decisively. Chris Dodd understands that ending the war in Iraq makes America safer. He strongly supports the Feingold-Reid proposal - the only responsible measure in Congress that sets a timetable to end the war in Iraq by March 31, 2008 - and he has urged all the candidates in the presidential race to join him. It is time to stand up to the President's misguided Iraq policy.

(Emphasis supplied.) More than anything else, this position won my support. Instead of introducing a "Dodd plan" for getting us out of Iraq, to buttress a stump speech, Chris Dodd put the issue first, he put the nation first, and he argued for what Democrats (and any Republicans with wisdom and courage) should be doing NOW, not in January 2009, to end the Iraq Debacle. With this one act, Chris Dodd demonstrated the type of leadership, political courage, selflessness and wisdom that we need from our future President.

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Jackson Browne, Lives in the Balance:

There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

A Pentagon report to be released tomorrow discloses there were 99 suicides in the military last year. One-fourth of those who took their own lives had served in Iraq or Afghanistan. That's more suicides than the military has had in the past 26 years.

I blame President Bush. Every day he keeps our soldiers in this war, more of them are going to die. The ones that survive will come back with post-traumatic stress disorders that will take years if not decades to overcome. Some of them are bound to take their own lives as well.

This war was not worth the price. We have a President who is unable or unwilling to acknowledge his mistakes. Experts agree the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily. So why are the troops still there? Let's stop the funding and bring them home now.

Responding to Max Sawicky's point about Obama's conceit that he will transform politics, Paul Waldman writes a piece that is all confusion and fantasy. Sawicky wrote:

Today in the Post we find Obama claiming an advantage over Clinton by virtue of his capacity to unify the country. The last thing we need, at a point where the Democrats can establish a decisive margin of political power, is somebody out to unify the country. I fear that Senator Obama is turning into the DLC candidate, in all but name.

I think Sawicky is wrong in thinking of Obama as the DLC candidate. There is no DLC candidate. Not even Biden. The DLC is basically irrelevant to Democratic politcs, but still willing to be a weapon for Republican politics by their incessant bashing of Democrats as too far Left.

No, Obama's problem, as I have argued ad nauseum, is the notion that he will be the first politican in history who can lead his political party to success while not engaging in partisanship. It is pure foolishness. But what is especially galling is Obama's willingess to be divisive among Democrats while promising to not be divisive with Republicans. It is simply political madness. A madness that apparently infected Paul Waldman: