by TChris

NY Times readers deserve honest answers to questions that Public Editor Byron Calame wants to ask:

"While a multitude of issues need to be addressed," Calame wrote, "I certainly will expect The Times’s explanation to address these fundamental questions that I first posed to the key players at the paper in July: Was Ms. Miller’s contact with the source she is protecting initiated and conducted in genuine pursuit of a news article for Times readers? Why didn’t she write an article? What kinds of notes are there and who has them? Why wasn’t she exploring a voluntary waiver from the source?

Calame says he's posed these questions to "key players" at the paper since July, without response.

by TChris

After enduring eight years of (mostly) unwarranted attacks against President Clinton – every new scandalous allegation reported with utter conviction on the right wing airwaves – it is easy to feel a not-quite-guilty pleasure in the accusations of misconduct directed at Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Karl Rove, and every other miscreant in the reigning Republican government. They might all be innocent, but it is difficult to sympathize with those who built their careers by denouncing the invented transgressions of their political enemies.

Lanny Davis (quoted in this NY Times article) is correct that a “presumption of guilt culture … has come about in Washington in the last 10 or 15 years.” A presumption of guilt culture extends across the entire country. The presumption of guilt has been nurtured by the “get tough on crime” crowd, a movement spearheaded by right wing politicians, although plenty of Democrats have played along. It isn’t fair, but it isn’t unique to this administration. Accused Republicans may feel their guilt has been unfairly presumed, and maybe it has, but they played a part in building a culture that condemns on the basis of accusation, without awaiting due process or the testing of evidence by confrontation and counter-evidence.

Here’s Davis talking about his experience in the Clinton administration:

by TChris

Senator Sam Brownback wants to be the next faith based president. To prove his mettle (and to increase his name recognition), he's taken on the role of "the Republican most publicly questioning the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers." Is Brownback prepared to take on Pat Robertson?

"They're going to turn against a Christian who is a conservative picked by a conservative president, and they're going to vote against her for confirmation?" Mr. Robertson said Wednesday on his television program. "Not on your sweet life, if they want to stay in office."

At the last Republican National Convention, Brownback "rallied a closed-door meeting of Christian conservatives with calls for a 'cultural war.'" It sounds like Brownback will soon be at war with his own culture.

by TChris

Update: More information about the coaching, from Voice of America:

Before the event, the officers were seen and heard rehearsing their statements to President Bush.

According to AP, Scott McClellan says "the troops were expressing their own thoughts." What a coincidence that they "all gave Bush an upbeat view of the situation." Editor & Publisher reports McClellan's furious attempt (including a futile "I'm sorry, I don't know what you're suggesting") to deflect inquiries into his earlier assertion that "there would be no screening of questions."

Update: NPR has an audio of part of the rehearsal on this page.

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original post:

Via video, the president spoke to the troops today, asking questions about the progress they were making as Iraq approaches a ratification vote on its proposed constitution. As we've come to expect from this administration, the seemingly impromptu session was carefully scripted.

by TChris

Attack ads have become commonplace in political races, but an attack ad against a prosecutor is unusual, to say the least.

A conservative group is running a TV ad likening the Democratic district attorney prosecuting House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to a vicious dog.
...

"A prosecutor with a political agenda can be vicious," the narrator says, while a snarling dog barks on screen.

The ads are in "heavy rotation" in Austin. Are DeLay's supporters hoping to taint the pool of potential jurors who may decide DeLay's fate?

by TChris

In the context of Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court, Edward Lazarus argues that liberals should seize the opportunity to dismantle myths about judging that the right wing has propagated for a couple of decades.

In recent years, conservatives have -- with a fair amount of success -- painted liberals as having defiled the judiciary by overstepping the line between law and politics, and thereby substituting their own policy judgments for the "real" meaning of federal statutes or the Constitution. And Democrats have been far less successful in conveying to the public the view that legal interpretation is inherently politically-influenced -- even despite the fact that any objective study of both liberal and conservative judicial decisionmaking inexorably leads to just such a view.

This is not to say that judges have license to rewrite statutes or to ignore the plain text of the Constitution.

Right wing, pro-life blogger Paul Deignan at Info Theory writes that Harriet Miers can be an evangelical and pro-choice.

Please also note that it is possible to be a good evangelical and pro-choice at the same time. One rationale is that people have free will and that the child is in the hands of God anyway. Another is that this serves a purpose on earth by allowing nonbelievers to eradicate themselves over generations, i.e. that is may be part of God's plan. There are still many other rationalizations that explain why 34% of good evangelicals are pro-choice.

I hope she is one of those 34%, but even if she is not, I believe she will keep her personal religion and her judging separate.

According to Drudge, the right is in a snit over Harriet Miers refusal to join a conservative group like the Federalist Society. Good for her. Stephen Henderson of Knights-Ridder reported on October 7:

[Miers] also said during her sworn testimony that she would not join an organization like the Federalist Society, a group of conservative intellectuals that is a leading proponent of a strict _ and some say narrow _ interpretation of the Constitution. "I just feel like it's better not to be involved in organizations that seem to color your view one way or the other for people who are examining you," she said.

The article also reports she's progressive on racial issues:

by TChris

Phil Spector’s defense lawyers face an uphill battle in their attempt to persuade a judge to throw out the incriminating admissions that Spector allegedly made to police officers who questioned him about the woman found dead in his home. Several sources claim to have heard Spector say that he shot the woman accidentally. The police say Spector later changed his story, claiming that the woman committed suicide.

In a recently filed defense brief, attorney Bruce Cutler claimed that Spector, 64, "was experiencing symptoms of withdrawal from his medications, which could include hallucinations, forgetfulness, serious fatigue, and/or slurring." Police refused or ignored his requests for his medication after they took him into custody at his home, Cutler said.

Cutler also argues that the police didn’t advise Spector that he had the right to remain silent, although it appears that Spector made some of the statements before he was taken into custody, when no warning was required. But even if the suppression motion succeeds, the defense will need to contend with the damaging testimony of Spector’s driver:

by TChris

George Curry writes about a panel he moderated in Texas on the topic of police misconduct. One of the panelists, Travis County Sheriff Gregory Hamilton, observed that firing abusive officers is “the only way to get rid of the problem.” Another panelist, Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez, acknowledged the obvious roadblock to that solution:

But that is made difficult, Valdez said, because cops subscribe to a code of silence. "Cops don't rat on other cops," she explained.

Without a video of abusive conduct (like the New Orleans incident discussed here), whether misconduct occurred often comes down to a citizen’s word against an officer’s -- or several officers, if they all stick together. Curry suggests, however, that the “problem is even deeper.”

by TChris

Zero tolerance is an excuse for zero thinking. In Washington, D.C., it also seems to be an excuse to harass drivers who haven’t broken any law.

D.C. police pulled over Debra Bolton for driving without headlights. Fair enough; she deserved the warning she received for that infraction. But the officer smelled alcohol on Bolton’s breath, so he made her do field sobriety tests. Bolton thinks she aced the tests. The officer claims he told her to recite the alphabet from D to X, while Bolton thought he said D to S. He also claimed she lost her balance during balance tests, which Bolton disputes. And the officer made the improbable claim that he saw “jittering” in her eyes when he administered the horizontal gaze nystagmus (HGN) test, a test that supposedly reveals whether a driver’s blood alcohol content exceeds .10.

The officer arrested Bolton, and the results of a breath test revealed that Bolton was telling him the truth: she’d had a glass of wine with dinner, but that was all. She tested .03, well under the legal limit of .08. Yet Bolton’s ordeal had only begun.

I'll be offline today. In case you're not, here's some space to keep a discussion going.