by TChris

The NY Times reports that gay Republicans in Washington are "under siege and suspicion." The party that gets in bed with intolerant gay-bashing hate-spewing homophobes isn't standing behind its gay members? What a shock.

"You can see where it would be easy for some people to blame gays for something that might bring down the party in Congress," said Brian Bennett, a gay Republican political consultant. He was a longtime chief of staff to former Representative Robert K. Dornan, Republican of California, who regularly referred to gays as "Sodomites."

by TChris

The times they are a-changin'.

For the first time since 2001, the NEWSWEEK poll shows that more Americans trust the Democrats than the GOP on moral values and the war on terror.

A change is gonna come.

Fully 53 percent of Americans want the Democrats to win control of Congress next month, including 10 percent of Republicans, compared to just 35 percent who want the GOP to retain power.

Newsweek's new poll shows the presidential approval rating at an all-time low: 33 percent.

by TChris

Do you deserve to be hassled every time you try to board a plane, just because your name is John Williams? If you share a name with someone Homeland Security has added to its terrorist watch list, you probably dread going to an airport or encountering a customs agent or police officer.

Thousands of people [including more than 30,000 airline passengers] have been mistakenly linked to names on terrorist watch lists when they crossed the border, boarded commercial airliners or were stopped for traffic violations, a government report said Friday. ... The list also contains such generic names as Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson. When "60 Minutes" spoke with 12 people named Robert Johnson, it reported, all said that they are detained almost every time they fly.

Saddam Hussein is among the 44,000 names on the list because Homeland Security apparently is unaware that he's in custody. Bizarrely, names of some terrorists have been deliberately omitted from the list.

by TChris

Incidents like this one explain why the Bush administration's battle to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis has been lost:

Saying he was unable to stop the bloodshed, a Navy corpsman testified that Marines in his patrol seized an Iraqi civilian from his home, threw him into a hole and shot him at least 10 times after growing frustrated in their search for an insurgent. Slight and soft-spoken, Petty Officer 3rd Class Melson J. Bacos said Friday he saw a Marine put fingerprints from the victim onto a rifle and a shovel to implicate him as an insurgent. ...

Bacos said he asked the Marines to let Awad go, but Cpl. Marshall L. Magincalda told him in crude terms that he was being weak and should stop protesting.

According to this story, some of the Marines involved are trying to negotiate plea agreements now that Bacos has rolled over on them. Others argue that Bacos invented the story to save himself. Bacos received an extraordinarily favorable deal in exchange for his cooperation in the prosecution of the Marines.

by TChris

A recent report by People For the American Way analyzes decisions written by Bush-appointed judges and concludes that "more and more opinions seek, sometimes successfully, to cut back broadly on Americans' rights under our Constitution and laws." According to PFAW Legal Director Elliot Mincberg:

"What we're seeing is unfortunately exactly what the Federalist Society and White House hoped for when they promoted one ultraconservative ideologue after another to the appeals courts."

That news provides another reason to rescue the Senate from Republican rule. After all, we have two more years of President Bush, no matter what happens in November.

The report, Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears, is available here.

by TChris

The Constitution empowers the president to veto bills that the legislature enacts. It does not authorize the president to rewrite legislation. Untroubled by constitutional or legislative limits on executive power, President Bush again used a signing statement to explain his anticipated disobedience of the proposed law that Congress sent him.

The statement repeatedly asserts that Homeland Security Appropriations Act "purports to" do certain things. It "purport[s] to require congressional committee approval for the execution of a law." It "purports to direct the conduct of security and suitability investigations." It "vests in the President authority to appoint the Administrator, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, but purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee ..." The president claims that Congress can do none of these things.

Congress did not "purport" to do these things; Congress did them. If the president thought Congress passed an unconstitutional bill, he should have vetoed it. Can our strict constructionist president point to the constitutional language that permits him to ignore limits that Congress places on the executive powers that it enacts, or to deprive Congress of an oversight role in a law's implementation?

Charlie Savage at the Boston Globe explains how the president's power grab works to the detriment of FEMA, and of good government:

by TChris

Our second innocence case of the day (the first one is blogged here) involves Scott Fappiano, who was released today after serving 21 years for raping a police officer's wife. DNA tests established that he didn't do it.

Fappiano was arrested and first tried in 1984, despite blood-typing tests that failed to link him to cigarettes and stained clothing left at the crime scene. The main evidence against Fappiano was an identification by the rape victim, although he was five inches shorter than the 5-foot-10 attacker first described by the woman. The police officer, after viewing the same lineup, did not select Fappiano.

Fappiano's first jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of acquittal. This is the poster case for the argument that charges should be dismissed after a jury hangs. The government should get one chance to convict, and that's it. Another trial increases the likelihood that an innocent man will serve time.

This is also the second post of the day to praise the Innocence Project for its good work in freeing an innocent man. How sad it is that it took 21 years for justice to arrive.

(Guest Post from Big Tent Democrat)

Desperation. David Brooks via Althouse:

The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler's play, "The Vagina Monologues."

Foley is now universally reviled. But the Ensler play, which depicts the secretary's affair with the 13-year-old as a glorious awakening, is revered.

Okaaay. Potatoe:

IF FOR NOTHING ELSE, DAN QUAYLE DESERVES POINTS for audacity. . . . [T]he Vice President dared to argue last week in a San Francisco speech that the Los Angeles riots were caused in part by a "poverty of values" that included the acceptance of unwed motherhood, as celebrated in popular culture by the CBS comedy series Murphy Brown.

Personally, I think Brooks had a Beavis and Butthead moment and wanted to use the word vagina in a column.

by TChris

Why did Jeffrey Deskovic spend 16 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit? According to Deskovic, part of the blame lies with former District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, now the Republican candidate for attorney general of New York, who refused his requests to retest DNA using advanced techniques. She made a huge mistake and, true to Republican form, refuses to take responsibility for it. But many others made the same mistake, and as a result, Deskovic lost 16 years of his life.

Last month, prosecutors agreed to free Jeffrey Deskovic, who had been convicted in [Angela] Correa's rape and murder. They said new tests on old DNA, conducted at the urging of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic and criminal justice resource center, implicated another man.

Steven Cunningham recently confessed to killing Angela Correa. While Deskovic languished in prison for 16 years, Cunningham committed another murder.

More details of Deskovic's wrongful conviction, based in part on a false confession, are reported here. Kudos to Claudia Whitman who helped Deskovic achieve justice, and to the Innocence Project for its great work on the case.

(Guest Post from Big Tent Democrat)

Scott Lemieux pens a very interesting article on the Dred Scott decision and its merits and meaning in today's law and politics. It is worth reading in its entirety but I want to focus on a few points made by Lemieux:

. . . George W. Bush -- demonstrating the forthright advocacy of conservative jurisprudence for which Republicans are famous -- went out of his way to assure the public during one of the 2004 presidential debates that he would not, in fact, appoint Supreme Court justices who would interfere with the ability of Congress to ban slavery in Puerto Rico. Bush's strange remarks were widely interpereted as a dog-whistle signal to his anti-abortion-rights base, some of whose intellectuals (most notably Justice Scalia in his dissents in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Stenberg v, Carhart) have compared Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott. Jeffrey Rosen turned this comparison against Scalia in his merciless evisceration of the justice's support for the Court's egregious Bush v. Gore decision. And on it goes. But should this much weight really be put on Dredd Scott?

. . . The most common attack on Dred Scott, however, does not concern the finer points of interpretive theory. Rather, it's a critique borne out of a romanticized view of legislatures as being better able to resolve difficult social questions than courts. . . .

It may have been the most common attack but it was not the best one. Abraham Lincoln, most notably in his Cooper Union address, presented, to me at least, the most devastating arguments against the legal correctness of the Dred Scott decision. I'll discuss that and a few other things on the other side.

by TChris

The Bush administration has given us plenty to protest. Yesterday, in a day of protest organized by The World Can't Wait, people gathered together in more than 200 cities to express their displeasure with the Bush Administration. In New York:

Thousands of protesters clogged New York City's streets as they marched from the United Nations headquarters. Some people lay down in the middle of the street, while others carried signs saying "Expose 9/11" and "This war should be over." They also handed out fliers reading, "Drive out the Bush regime."

In Washington D.C.:

by TChris

Incumbent legislators who brag to their constituents during the next few weeks about supporting the construction of a 700 mile fence along the Mexican border aren't likely to tell the rest of the story: much of the money appropriated for the project won't be spent on the fence.

[S]hortly before recessing late Friday, the House and Senate gave the Bush administration leeway to distribute the money to a combination of projects -- not just the physical barrier along the southern border. The funds may also be spent on roads, technology and "tactical infrastructure" to support the Department of Homeland Security's preferred option of a "virtual fence."

The fence is a symbol, an expensive monument to simple-minded and ineffective solutions to complex problems. But it's also a cynical campaign lie that "reflects political calculations by GOP strategists that voters do not mind the details."