According to a new Mason-Dixon Poll, George Bush Leads John Kerry in North Carolina--but if Edwards is on Kerry's ticket, the race is even:

President Bush leads Sen. John Kerry in North Carolina, but according to a WRAL/Mason-Dixon Poll, "if Kerry chooses Sen. John Edwards as his running-mate, the race in the state currently becomes a dead-heat."

"Statewide, Bush is supported by 48% of voters, while Kerry is backed by 41%, independent Ralph Nader draws 3% and 8% remain undecided. With Edwards as Kerry's running-mate, the GOP ticket of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney is favored by 46%, the Kerry/Edwards Democratic ticket gets 45%, Nader draws 2% and 7% are undecided."

[link via Political Wire.] And Oliver Willis asks, "Kerry/Edwards Just A Matter Of Time?"

We sure hope so. Edwards has the people-pleasing personality, the magnetism, the honest face and the genuine smile. Kerry ought to grab him quick if he wants to make the most of Bush's declining poll numbers. A dead heat when your opponent is falling is no great shakes.

Who wouldn't want Edwards as VP? Well, Hillary for one. If Bush wins in 2004, she might not want Edwards running against her for the nomination in 2008 as the "former VP candidate." If Kerry wins in 2004, she won't want Edwards running against her in 2012 as the "vice president."

Does anybody know how much impact Bill and Hillary have on Kerry? We always thought they viewed Edwards as their man, until Clark came along. What are we missing?

If Kerry wins this year, Hillary's out till 2012. If Edwards is his VP choice, that's a tough matchup for Hillary in 2008. If Bush wins now, she can come back for the Presidential race in 2008, with relatively no baggage.

We hope some astute politico type reading this post will send us an email or post what's wrong with our almost perfect view of a Kerry -Edwards ticket.

Via Phil Carter at Intel Dump:

The Defense Department announced the creation of a new administrative system today which will periodically review the status of detainees being held at Guantanamo bay to see if they merit further detention in America's war on terrorism. The U.S. has come under fire from international law critics for some time, because it has no 'competent tribunal' established in accordance with Art. V of the 3rd Geneva Convention for the review of prisoner status at this facility. The DoD release doesn't explicitly say this process will fit that bill, but it seems obvious to me that it is intended to do so.

We join Phil in wondering what took so long.

So you believed we were getting ready to pull out of Iraq? They fooled you.

While the Pentagon says it plans to scale back the U.S. occupation in Iraq, it's quietly doing just the opposite, high-level internal e-mails reveal. It has launched a massive nationwide call-up of former service members across the country who have not fully completed their eight-year contractual obligation to the US Army. They are known collectively as the Individual Ready Reserves, or IRR, and they number more than 118,000.

Even the IRS is being enlisted to help:

The Defense Department, strapped for troops for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, has proposed to Congress that it tap the Internal Revenue Service to locate out-of-touch reservists. It's one of the last options the military has before drafting civilians. And the move comes on top of rumors the Pentagon plans to redeploy to Iraq some 4,000 US troops stationed in South Korea. Call-ups for IRR members begin today, according to high-level Army e-mails I've obtained. Those who don't report could face AWOL or desertion charges.

Link via Unfair Witness. Also discussing this development is Daily Kos, Political Animal and Atrios .

Could it get any more obvious Bush is planning a draft next?

President Bush and the Democrats have reached an agreement to end the impasse over Bush's non-controversial judicial nominees:

Breaking a months-long impasse, the White House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday struck a deal allowing Senate confirmation of dozens of President Bush's judicial nominations in exchange for a presidential promise not to bypass the Senate again this year. Under the agreement, Democrats will allow votes on 25 non-controversial appointments to the district and appeals courts. In exchange, Bush agreed not to invoke his constitutional power to make recess appointments while Congress is away, as he has done twice in recent months with judicial nominees. The agreement was reached in a meeting among top Senate Democrats and Republicans as well as Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff.

by TChris

Can the U.S. convince citizens of other nations that our ideals are real, much less worth adopting, if we jettison those ideals whenever they seem inconvenient? Take, for instance, the right to due process and to the presumption of innocence -- rights that protect individuals from the arbitrary actions of government. Or freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, which has long been understood to include torture.

Stuart Taylor Jr. explores the question: Must We Become More Like the Barbarians to Save Ourselves? His answer: the administration's policy of presuming guilt and violating fundamental rights has been a strategic disaster. If Bush intended to persuade the world that our ideals mean nothing, he's done a masterful job.

"The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people." So said Bush last July, in response to a reporter's question about whether the 660 suspected Qaeda and Taliban members then imprisoned at Guantanamo (aka Gitmo) were "getting justice." The "bad people" included three Afghan boys between 13 and 15 years old who have since been released as harmless, after many months in captivity.

Bush decreed in January 2002 that no Gitmo prisoner would be allowed to go before a tribunal, because it was clear beyond doubt that every single one of them was an unlawful combatant. This was ludicrous on its face. In the fog of war—against enemies without uniforms who hid among civilians, while dishonest bounty hunters collected rewards for all the "terrorists" they could grab—many of those detained will inevitably turn out to be civilian noncombatants. Indeed, anonymous officials have asserted that, despite supposedly careful screening in Afghanistan, dozens, if not hundreds, of men were sent to Gitmo by mistake. And the Pentagon has released more than 130 Gitmo detainees.

Asia news sources are reporting that four people have been arrested in connection with last week's decapitation of Nicholas Berg. No identities have been released, but reportedly, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is not among them.

Four people were arrested over the beheading of US businessman Nicholas Berg, an Iraqi source said, as top officials at the funeral of Iraq's slain Governing Council president vowed not to cave in to terrorists. The source said four people were held over Berg's murder in a possible breakthrough in the US-led battle against extremists that have been trying to undermine efforts to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.

The U.S. says it has not received any arrest information:

But Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations, said: "We have no information from the coalition that any arrests were made today."

ABC News is reporting there is a military cover-up going on in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Dozens of soldiers — other than the seven military police reservists who have been charged — were involved in the abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and there is an effort under way in the Army to hide it, a key witness in the investigation told ABCNEWS.

by TChris

Recognizing that the U.S. squandered its human rights credibility by abusing prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, the State Department made the realistic judgment that its report on human rights might not be taken seriously by the rest of the world. It delayed the report's release until today, but -- with good reason -- the rest of the world is entitled to think the U.S. needs to correct its own behavior before it points fingers at others.

Charges in the report against countries who abuse prisoners bear striking similarities to those being leveled against the United States around the world. For example, the report summarized Saudi Arabia's "poor" human rights record with these words: "Security forces continued to torture and abuse detainees and prisoners, arbitrarily arrest and detain persons and detain them incommunicado."

The report also criticizes countries for restricting freedom of the press -- exactly what the U.S. did when it temporarily closed the Iraqi newspaper Al Hawse.

If abuse of prisoners, indefinite detentions, and interference with a free press deserve criticism (and they do), the State Department might want to draft an addendum measuring the U.S. by the yardstick it applies to others. As one observor notes, the U.S. should not "be the policeman for the world" without adhering "to the same human rights standards they hold for others."

Everybody's doing it so we will too. Change our xml feed to Feedburner. Digby at Hullaballoo started it. As See the Forest says, if you don't know what we're talking about, don't worry about it. If you do know, here's our new xml feed.

Or, click where you see to subscribe. The feed should be readable at these readers:

See the Forest quotes UPI analyst Martin Sieff who writes about the dissension over Rumsfeld within the Administration. STF concludes Rumsfeld is toast and will take the fall for the Bush Administration to try and save the election.

From Drug War Rant [via Avedon Carol at Sideshow]:

The recent study comparing marijuana use in San Francisco and Amsterdam is a real blow to the drug warriors. Not only did it show that prohibition does not reduce marijuana use, there were a couple of other very interesting things in the study. The full report is now available online as text and as a pdf with graphs.

....Note that in the city where prohibition is the rule, there is significantly higher rates of experimentation with other drugs. As opposed to the gateway theory, this indicates that prohibition actually increases the likelihood of using other illicit drugs. As the study notes: The “separation of markets,” in which lawfully regulated cannabis distribution reduces the likelihood that people seeking cannabis will be drawn into deviant subcultures where “hard drugs” also are sold is one public health objective of Dutch decriminalization. Looks like their idea works better than ours.

Avedon adds: "And, as even Harry Anslinger admitted, it wasn't a "gateway drug" until it was made illegal."

Received by email:

Read 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski's recent dissent in US v. Navarro-Vargas, No. 02-50663 (9th Cir. May 4, 2004), a case involving the constitutionality, under the Indictment Clause, of a standard grand jury instruction directing the grand jurors not to consider "the wisdom of laws enacted by Congress." Arguing that such local community review of the wisdom and utility of criminal legislation is a core function of the grand jury, Judge Kozinski goes on to assert:

This kind of community judgment strikes me as particularly important in federal prosecutions, and not merely because Washington is usually much farther away geographically than the state capital. State prosecutors are elected locally and must stand for re-election on a regular basis. They will, of necessity, take the local community’s values into account. United States Attorneys, by contrast, are appointed by the President and never have to stand for election. In their daily operations, they are supervised by the Department of Justice, whose prosecutorial policies they implement. Except for the tradition of senatorial courtesy, which gives the state’s senators some say in who will be the United States Attorney in a particular district, there is very little state control, and almost no local control, over federal prosecutors.