Diebold shows its true colors again. Via Cursor:

Internal Diebold e-mail recommends charging Maryland "out the yin-yang" if the state requires the company to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased.

From USA Today:

A four-month examination by USA TODAY of how cluster bombs were used in the Iraq war found dozens of deaths that were unintended but predictable. Although U.S. forces sought to limit what they call "collateral damage" in the Iraq campaign, they defied international criticism and used nearly 10,800 cluster weapons.

A cluster bomb is "a bomb that contains dozens or hundreds of small explosives and is dropped by aircraft." A cluster munition is "A piece of ordnance that contains dozens or hundreds of small explosives and is fired by ground-based howitzers or rocket launchers."

A world-wide moratorium campaign against cluster bombs is underway.

Cluster bombs have been controversial since they killed thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian civilians during and after the Vietnam War. They have since been used by armies around the world, including Russian forces in Chechnya and Sudanese government troops fighting rebels in a long-running civil war. But their use in urban areas of Iraq has given new momentum to a movement to restrict the use of cluster bombs.

....Cluster weapons are especially dangerous to civilians because they spray wide areas with hundreds of bomblets. Most are unguided "dumb" weapons, so they can miss their target, and many of the bomblets don't explode immediately.

Part 2 of USA Today's report is here. We urge you to read both reports in full.

Here is our earlier post on why cluster bombs should be banned.

Update: Human Rights Watch says hundreds of civilian deaths in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could have been prevented by abandoning two misguided military tactics--cluster bombs and the U.S. "decaptiation" strategy. Their new 147 page report is available here.

Taegan Goddard of Political Wire gives three good reasons why those forecasting a McGovern-type loss for Howard Dean (or whoever becomes the Democratic nominee) are wrong. Goddard explains why it will be a close race.

It's nominations time for the 2003 Koufax Blogging Awards. Last year the awards were run by Dwight Meredith of PLA (Politics, Law and Autism.) Dwight has since joined Mary Beth Williams at Wampum Blog and they will be running the awards together. You can nominate your own blog or someone else's. (TalkLeft is very proud to have won the 2002 award for "best single issue" blog.)

The purpose of the awards is to recognize and applaud the best of the left. Nominations are open now through the end of December and can be submitted by email or by commenting at their site, here. There will be 11 categories this year. The categories (links are to last year’s awards) are:

Say hello to Color of Money:

Today Public Campaign launched it's new interactive website. It allows users to conduct their own research on campaign money, race/ethnicity, and income in their own communities, looking up information about their state, city, and zip code, as well as viewing color maps of the 25 top contributing metropolitan areas nationwide.

Along with the website, a 34 page study was released that shows a dramatic disparity between America's diverse population and the small number of people who finance political campaigns: nine out of ten dollars contributed by individuals to federal campaigns and parties (of contributions more than $200) in the 2000 and 2002 elections come from majority non-Hispanic white zip codes, yet nearly one out of three Americans is a person of color. Eighty-five percent of the campaign contributions studied were "hard money" contributions, untouched by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Wednesday to hold up the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act ban on "soft money" contributed to political parties. A PDF version of the study can be downloaded from here.

ABC News has pulled its reporters from the Kucinich, Sharpton and Mosely Braun campaigns, according to this Kucinich press release:

This appears to be another instance of what Kucinich criticized at the debate, namely the media trying to pick candidates, rather than letting the voters do so. In a democracy, it should be voters and not pundits or TV networks who narrow the field of candidates.

This move, before any state's caucus or primary, appears based on a belief that viable candidates can be predicted 11 months prior to an election, a belief that flies in the face of the historical record. Time and again candidates dismissed as "fringe" have wound up either with the nomination or with a significant impact on the convention and in the primaries.

This action by ABC, as well as Koppel's comments during the debate, can only serve to disempower Americans, communicating to them that someone other than they is deciding elections and that their votes don't mean much.

He's right of course. This is still a nine person race. Let the people decide, not the media, pollsters, campaign strategists, pundits and endorsers. We'll make up our own minds, and we want to hear what these candidates have to say.

Andrew Young, a civil rights "trailblazer" will endorse Wesley Clark on Dec. 21 in South Carolina:

Young's ties to the glory days of the civil rights movement may help Clark, a neophyte to American politics, in the black communities.

About half of all Democratic voters in South Carolina are black. Minorities play major roles in several other primary and caucus states, including New Mexico, Michigan and Arizona.

Some background on Andrew Young:

Young, 71, was a congressman, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Atlanta's mayor for two terms and a gubernatorial candidate in 1990, losing to Zell Miller in a primary runoff. Young's rise to prominence began in the civil rights struggle, when he was a top lieutenant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His election to Congress in 1972 made him the first black elected to Congress from Georgia since Reconstruction.

Speaking in Miami yesterday, Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge advocated legalizing undocumented immigrants:

"The bottom line is, as a country we have to come to grips with the presence of 8 to 12 million illegals, afford them some kind of legal status some way, but also as a country decide what our immigration policy is and then enforce it," Ridge said at a town hall meeting at Miami-Dade Community College.

Ridge noted that the undocumented immigrants pay taxes and social security and contribute to their communities:

"I'm not saying make them citizens, because they violated the law to get here," he said. "So you don't reward that type of conduct by turning over a citizenship certificate. You determine how you can legalize their presence, then, as a country, you make a decision that from this day forward, from this day forward, this is the process of entry, and if you violate that process of entry we have the resources to cope with it."

Conservative legal affairs writer Stuart Taylor joins the chorus of those criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft for his unfair tactics in the Zacarias Moussaoui case:

But Attorney General John Ashcroft seems so eager to kill the man that he would shoot a hole in the Constitution to get him. Ashcroft wants to put Moussaoui on trial for the capital crime of complicity in the 9/11 plot, without letting his lawyers take the testimony of three captured Qaeda leaders who may have told interrogators that Moussaoui did not participate in it. That's the watered-down notion of justice that an Ashcroft subordinate urged a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., to endorse on December 3.

How will Ashcroft explain this? The convictions of the defendants in the Detroit terror trial held earlier this year are in jeopardy. The Justice Department admits it withheld potentially exculpatory evidence--

The evidence includes a letter from an imprisoned drug gang leader who alleges the government's key witness confided he made up some of his story. The December 2001 letter, which could have been used by defense lawyers to challenge the prosecution witness during the trial this spring, wasn't turned over until a couple of weeks ago. The defendants are now asking that their convictions be overturned, and the judge has scheduled an emergency hearing Friday to demand an explanation from the government.

Under the Supreme Court's Brady v. Maryland ruling, prosecutors are obligated to turn over all evidence that can be used to impeach the testimony of prosecution witnesses or to prove innocence.

The lead prosecutor, Richard Covertino, and another AUSA in the case have been replaced. Covertino's lawyer, former AUSA William Sullivan, acknowledges that his client intentionally withheld the letter.

The defense in the trial of accused sniper John Lee Malvo presented a psychiatrist today who testified Malvo was insane at the time of the sniper shootings:

Sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo "displayed a pathological loyalty" to John Allen Muhammad and was so brainwashed by him that he no longer knew right from wrong, a defense psychiatrist testified Wednesday.

Malvo "was merged with Mr. Muhammad," Diane Schetky said at Malvo's capital murder trial. "He was acting as his proxy ... He was like a puppet in his hands." Asked by defense lawyer Craig Cooley if Malvo was able to distinquish right from wrong - the legal standard for insanity in Virginia - Schetky said, "I believe he was not."

Update: A second psychiatrist testified for the defense today, offering the opinion that Malvo "was unable to distinguish between right and wrong and unable to resist the impulse to commit these offenses."

The psychiatrists and a forensic psychologist who testified earlier all agree that Malvo suffers from a a dissociative disorder which one of the psychiatrists defined as "a loss of identity combined with psychological numbness, 'caused by the coercive persuasion' of Muhammad.

Malvo is expected to rest his case after the prosecution finishes cross-examining the second psychiatrist tomorrow.

Lionel at Trial, Age 14

Some great justice news today:A Florida appeals court ordered a new trial for Lionel Tate--the youngest person ever sentenced to a life term for murder. Lionel was 12 when he killed a playmate. He claimed at trial they were just wrestling.

Appellate judges ordered a new trial Wednesday for a teenager serving a life sentence for killing a 6-year-old playmate, raising questions about whether child murderers are competent to be tried as adults and locked away with no hope of parole.

The judges at the 4th District Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that Lionel Tate's first-degree murder conviction and life sentence should be reversed because Tate's competency should have been evaluated before the trial. The boy's lawyers had claimed he was imitating pro wrestlers when he killed Tiffany Eunick in July 1999.

Tate's family turned down a plea bargain before the trial that would have given him a three-year sentence.

Details of the case and sentence are here and here. The text of the decision is here.

Lionel Today