Gina Marie Santore beat out 80 contestants to win a date with Presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich. The contest was sponsored by Politics NH with Kucinich's approval. Details of the date:

The two met Thursday morning in the lobby of a downtown hotel and later discussed health care, medical malpractice and prescription drugs over oatmeal at a restaurant.

[Santore] said she works as a confidential aide to the Camden County sheriff in southern New Jersey and lives with her boyfriend. Kucinich attracted her attention, she said, because she found his views "intoxicating."

Lives with her boyfriend? A breakfast date? Sounds like either the contest sponsors or Kucinich wanted to make sure the date didn't go anywhere.

In what is being called a "bombshell" in Germany, a German judge today freed 9/11 terror suspect Abdelghani Mzoudi who had been jailed since October, 2002 on charges he was an accessory to 3,066 counts of murder in the 9/11 attacks. The ruling could cause the reversal of the conviction of another suspect who was sentenced to 15 years.

Judge Klaus Ruehle expressed doubt today that the defendant had knowledge of the attacks. "There is the serious possibility that Mzoudi, despite his involvement and his visit to Afghanistan, was deliberately excluded from planning for the attacks and did not consciously provide a supportive role," the judge said, according to Reuters.

By implication, the judge's decision also raised questions about the conviction of another man in the case, Mounir el-Motassadeq, who was sentenced this year to 15 years after being convicted of similar charges. After Judge Ruehle's action to free Mr. Mzoudi, Mr. Motassadeq's lawyers immediately filed papers seeking his release and renewed their appeal of his conviction.

George Bush is unelectable. That's our opinion and we're sticking to it. Pass it on. So that when people go to google and search for "unelectable," guess what will come up. It's not there yet, but remember " miserable failure "--it doesn't take long.

Update: check this out.

Who would have thought it? Justice Scalia pulled the stop switch on the texecution of Kevin Lee Zimmerman yesterday due to a pending lawuit over whether the combination of lethal injection drugs used to kill inmates violates the cruel and unusual punishment ban of the 8th Amendment.

This is the second texecution stopped in the past two days over this issue. The drug at issue is pancuronium bromide, and we have written about the controversy several times, including here .

Pancuronium bromide paralyzes the skeletal muscles but does not affect the brain or nerves. A person injected with it remains conscious but cannot move or speak. The drug has been banned in Tennessee--for use by vetinarians performing euthanasia on animals. Yet Tennesse and 30 other states use it to kill inmates.

Scalia's order came with only 20 minutes to spare. Zimmerman was not happy.

"I'm disappointed," Zimmerman told Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons. "I was ready to go. The stay only means 18 more months of this crap."

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."