A federal judge has found that the government doesn't have enough evidence to convince him that five of the six Boumediene detainees were planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight our troops (the evidence was deemed sufficient as to the sixth). As I understand the facts, there is a document that says this. But Judge Richard Leon concluded that he didn't have enough information to assess the credibility of the source and there was no corroborating information.
The judge ordered that the five be freed "forthwith." He then urged the Justice Department not to appeal his order. "Seven years is enough," Judge Richard Leon declared.
It's a fine thing that Judge Leon is so concerned about protecting the rights of Algerians who may well have been on their way to kill Americans. But Americans also have rights, and one of them is the right of their government to appeal adverse rulings by lower courts. This right is especially important when the issue is the detention of individual who may be out to kill Americans.
The government should exercise its right of appeal, regardless of Judge Leon's plea, unless the judge's opinion persuades the government that its position lacks merit.
The liberal web sites were on fire today, but not about Hillary Clinton's appointment as Secretary of State or Tim Geithner's elevation to the Treasury Department, or the six percent jump the Dow took in the last hour of trading. No, as so often happens, the liberal web sites were hysterical about...Sarah Palin.
Governor Palin has returned to Alaska and one might have thought, out of sight, out of mind. But no: the liberals' weird obsession continues unabated. What has Governor Palin done now? In a light-hearted scene that is staged by governors around the country, she "pardoned" a turkey that consequently won't be eaten for Thanksgiving dinner.
After the pardoning ceremony, she stayed and gave a brief interview to a television reporter. The interview was entirely non-controversial; here it is:
But note: the turkey-pardoning ceremony took place, naturally enough, at a turkey farm. Why do you think they raise turkeys--millions of them--on turkey farms? That's right! They raise them and then slaughter them, so we can eat them! Which is why the governor's turkey-pardoning ceremony makes sense. Unless so "pardoned," turkeys don't tend to die of old age.
What has liberals a-twitter is that--this being a turkey farm and all--someone starts killing a couple of turkeys in the background while Palin's interview is going on and she doesn't seem to care! She continues as though nothing were happening!
This suggests other dire possibilities. When Governor Palin and her husband take their commercial fishing boat out into the ocean for 24 hours at a time, braving high winds and waves, and succeed in hauling salmon into their boat, they don't catch and release the fish! Instead, they let them die so that people can eat them! And we won't even start on what happens when Palin hunts moose or caribou. Did you know that those aren't rubber bullets?
Yes, it's quite a scandal in Liberal Land. Sarah Palin actually doesn't mind when turkeys are killed, almost in her very presence. Which is the rub, I suppose. Unlike the Governor, most liberals make sure they're somewhere else when animals are being slaughtered for food.
But this explanation must be inadequate. Surely liberals would not express such horror if they too eat animals that have been slaughtered for their benefit. There is only one explanation that fully covers the case (and explains the title of this post): liberals must not eat turkeys that have been slaughtered by others. They must, instead, eat turkeys that are still alive, like oysters! I never would have imagined such a thing, but I don't see what else we can conclude from their horror over the turkey-massacre in Alaska.
My week-long discussion with Bart Gelman and others about Bart's book on the Cheney vice presidency ended today. The participants represented an eclectic group of Cheney bashers. Fortunately, all of them were civil and some of their commentary was insightful.
For the most part, my debate was with Bart over two issues: (1) is his book anti-Cheney and (2) is it fair.
The first issue should have required no debate, but on Wednesday Bart disputed my claim that the book treats Cheney's impact as "very much for the worse." He said that his views are rather more mixed.
I therefore wrote this post. Something of a "fool's errand," it quotes chapter and verse to show how negative Bart's assessment of Cheney is.
Late today, at the close of the discussion, Bart responded by saying that the criticisms by him of Cheney that I cited are fact based. He then mentioned additional criticisms from the book by way of launching a fairly blistering attack on Cheney. I'll take this as a concession that, yes, Bart has quite a negative view of the Cheney vice presidency and, no, his assessment in not "mixed."
That leaves the question of whether Bart's account is fair or slanted. Amplifying on a previous post, I contended here that Bart stacks the deck against Cheney to some extent by stripping his account of context and failing to consider some of the questions raised by his narrative. To his credit, Bart had agreed in part with my first post about lack of context.
In my final post, I summarized my view of the Cheney vice presidency. I figured someone should mention the absence of attacks on the homeland after 9/11. It wasn't brought up during this week's discussion and (though I may be wrong), I don't think Bart mentioned it in his book. It's now a given, and I think that's the single most important fact about the Cheney vice presidency.
UPDATE: For me, the most interesting thing about the debate was the reaction of the participants when I raised the question of whether Bart's book is slanted against Cheney. Apart from Bart, the consensus seemed to be that this question was "circular," "unproductive," possibly churlish, certainly a "right-wing" tacitc, and not really worthy of much discussion.
Finally, on the last day, David Greenberg purported to "join the debate." He declared the book negative but fair, and that was that. Greenberg did not address any of the arguments I had made to that point.
SCTT adds: In the 2005 Standard column "Wielding the hatchet" and the follow-up Power Line post "Professor Greenberg regrets," I assessed Professor Greenberg's skills as a critic. Suffice it to say that I found them to be wanting. He is a piece of work.
I may well have been wrong in doubting that Barack Obama would nominate Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State. It seems that Politico, Jake Tapper, and CNN are now all reporting that Clinton will, in fact, be offered the position after Thanksgiving. Members of the transition team are saying that Clinton's financial disclosures are satisfactory and the way is clear to tap her for the top job at Foggy Bottom.
Interesting times may be about to become more interesting times.
UPDATE: CNN also reports that retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones has emerged as President-elect's leading choice to become the national security adviser. I can't disagree with Jim Geraghty's view that this would be a good sign.
JOHN adds: More good news: Obama reportedly will name Tim Geithner of the New York Federal Reserve as Treasury Secretary. If that report is right, it's an excellent appointment. The stock market jumped 5 percent on the news. That's terrific, but it also makes you wonder: given that response to Geithner's nomination, how credible is the Obama camp's insistence that the 20 percent drop we've seen since his election has nothing to do with businessmen's concern about the impact of Obama's policies on the economy?
The Senate recount continues in Minnesota; well over half of all ballots will have been recounted by the end of the day. Challenges are increasing from both campaigns and tempers seem to be fraying, with the campaigns holding dueling press conferences today, but changes in the count do not seem to be dramatic.
The Franken campaign said today that they think Coleman's lead has been cut to "double digits," assuming that challenges are rejected. But at the pace they have been able to erode Coleman's lead so far, it doesn't appear that Franken will quite get over the top.
A member of Coleman's recount team writes:
The story of the recount is the DUPLICATE ballots. They are causing huge problems. I saw it in Edina too.
The Duplicates and Originals are not matching so in some cases double counting is happening. ... I could envision that the duplicates may have to be looked at again after all of this is over.
When absentee ballots are emailed from overseas or otherwise are not suitable to go through the machines, the election judges will prepare a duplicate ballot with the same votes. The originals and duplicates will all be marked: Original#1, Duplicate #1, Original #2, etc. The originals are kept in a sealed folder and the duplicates are run through the machine. What has happened in a surprising number of instances is that the recounters can't find all the duplicate ballots. There are, say, six originals but only four duplicates. This can result in double-counting as the procedure is to begin by removing the duplicates from the ballots to be counted, and adding in the originals.
There have been a number of instances where confusion has arisen over a small number of ballots, like this one reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
In St. Louis County, election officials said this morning that four ballots -- three for Coleman and one for Franken -- may be missing from the packet delivered by Hermantown Precinct 3.
The machine count from that precinct in the Duluth suburb showed 696 votes for Coleman and 854 for Al Franken. But the hand count of the ballots, begun Thursday and confirmed today, reflected only 693 votes for Coleman.
Paul Tynjala, the county's director of elections, said it's hard to know why the machine count doesn't match the paper count. Ballots might be missing, or "the machine could have jammed, and they pulled the jammed ballots out and ran them back through," not realizing the machine already had counted them, Tynjala said. He said he planned to ask precinct officials for an explanation.
These minor glitches occur in every election, of course. The difference is that the Coleman-Franken race could be so close that a handful of ballots may decide it.
There is an analogy here, I think, to the Florida recount of 2000. The vote in Florida was essentially a tie; hence the resulting litigation. But it wouldn't have been a tie if the networks hadn't prematurely called the state for Al Gore while voting was still going on in the panhandle, which is on central time. Studies done after the election concluded that the networks' error--they claimed not to know that Florida was still voting when they called the state--cost George Bush thousands of votes, thereby leading to the photo finish.
Likewise, in Minnesota this year Coleman would have won a narrow but clear victory but for fraudulent ballots that were cast on November 4. In Minnesota, no serious effort is made to prevent voter fraud. The amount of fraud isn't large, but with ACORN hard at work the number of fraudulent ballots was surely large in relation to the razor-thin margin that now will decide the election.
UPDATE: From inside the Coleman campaign, the word is that they think their margin increased today. The Coleman camp thinks that Franken stepped up his challenges today so that the totals as reported will appear closer than they really are. (Challenged ballots won't be included in the reported totals.) Franken likely will commence a lawsuit to try to reverse the election's result, and the calculation may be that the public will be more accepting of such a lawsuit if, based on daily news accounts, it perceives the race as a virtual tie.
The challenged ballots will ultimately be reviewed by the state's Canvassing Board. As I've written before, Franken is surely not hoping for any skulguggery from that quarter, as the members of the board, including two state Supreme Court justices, are unimpeachable.
FURTHER UPDATE: Once again, I'm having a hard time making the numbers work. The Minneapolis Star Tribune says Coleman's lead has slipped a bit to 120. The Strib lists a percentage of ballots counted (64%) that is different from what is shown on the Secretary of State's web site. It's not obvious why. In any event, the race continues to be razor-thin with most of Minneapolis yet to be counted.
I'll be on Hannity and Colmes tonight at 8:10 central, 9:10 eastern, talking about Eric Holder, the Minnesota recount and maybe other topics. Michael Steele will be guest hosting for Sean Hannity; should be fun!
Kathryn Lopez provides an eyewitness account of Attorney General Mukasey's collapse last night while speaking at the Federalist Society's national conference in Washington. Kathryn reports that midway through his remarks Mukasey seemed rattled by a heckler who called him a "tyrant." Today's Wall Street Journal carries Mukasey's important column "Al Qaeda detainees and Congress's duty."
UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy has the text of AG Mukasey's Federalist Society speech and more here. Andy writes: "The Attorney General is one of the greatest men I have ever known. Not just a great judge or a great attorney-general. A great man."
This year's National Book Award winners were celebrated at the awards ceremony in New York on Wednesday evening. Insofar as the nonfiction category is concerned, the awards demonstrate the dominance of the left over the awards. The AP provided an almost comic account of the herd of independent minds at play in mid-town Manhattan during the awards ceremony:
The economy inspired nervous laughter; the name Barack Obama happy, relieved applause. [Awards host Eric] Bogosian called the bookish president-elect, "in the broadest sense of the word, a reader." Noting that Obama has been openly influenced by Doris Kearns Goodwin's Lincoln biography, Team of Rivals, Bogosian commented, "That's just so cool."
Honorary award winner Maxine Hong Kingston, who, like Obama, spent many years in Hawaii, praised his way of "putting things right by talking them through." Fellow honorary winner Barney Rosset, the publisher and literary agitator, called Obama "a dynamic leader," a miracle. Declared the 86-year-old Rosset, who walked gamely to the podium, with a cane, but grinned boldly: "For the first time in recent memory I am not thinking of renouncing my American passport."
Obama also starred in the acceptance speeches of the nonfiction winner, [Annette] Gordon-Reed, and poetry winner Mark Doty, who cited the election and his recent marriage to his male partner: "We are on a path to equality for all Americans and nothing is going to turn us back."
Barney Rosset, incidentally, is probably best known to readers of my age as the proprietor of Grove Books. Grove's backlist included such monuments to high culture as Tropic of Cancer, The Story of O, Lady Chatterly's Lover and what the New York Times cites as "a very profitable line of Victorian spanking pornography." At the awards ceremony he received the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award in honor of his many contributions to American publishing. Congratulations are in order, I guess.
In the nonfiction category the judges chose Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family as the winner in a group that also included the following nominees:
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order
Interviews with the authors of the books and other information about them are accessible here. I haven't read any of the books and have nothing to say about any one of them in particular. Many books worthy of recognition published so far this year are not on the list, however, including several I have read. I am quite confident that their omission has nothing to do with their considerable merits, but rather everything to do with their heterodox points of view:
One by one, beginning with Joe Biden, Barack Obama is filling key positions in his administration with old Washington hands. Jim Geraghty provides the details.
Why, after promising "change" and deriding (as Geraghty notes) the notion that you can get improved results with "the same Washington players," is Obama taking this approach? One theory is that Obama doesn't have much of a palace guard of Washington outsiders, as a governor would. (Obama plucked Samantha Power from relative obscurity, but her erratic behavior during the campaign may have relegated her to a purely unofficial role in the administration for now).
But there's a deeper reason, I think, It's the need for the appearance of competence.
At one point, competence looked like it was going to be the defining issue in 2008. Opinion polls and focus groups suggested as much, which made sense given the perception that President Bush's alleged lack of competence had led the nation into a ditch. Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani were considered front-runners at various times largely because they projected "competence."
Eventually, an inexperienced but impressive outsider managed to catch lightning in a bottle. But that outsider, ahead of the curve as usual, realized that his best bet in a running mate was a figure who oozed Washington experience instead of, say, an outsider like Tim Kaine.
Now, with the economy in such dire condition and a panic mentality setting in, the case for appointees with familiar names, or at least a solid Washington pedigree, seems more compelling than ever.
An hour ago, Minnesota's Secretary of State posted the latest data on the Senate recount. Candidly, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. The Secretary of State's numbers indicate that 51 percent of precincts and 42 percent of total ballots have been recounted. The Secretary shows that Norm Coleman's total votes have gone from 534,687 counted on November 4 to 534,475, while Al Franken's votes have declined from 494,930 to 494,804. The result, based on those numbers, is a net gain of 86 votes for Franken.
This doesn't make sense to me for two reasons. First, news accounts have suggested that the candidates are gaining votes, not losing votes. Second, I had thought that most of the early returns were from urban centers where Franken is strong, whereas these numbers obviously imply that more Coleman precincts have been recounted so far.
I'm not sure how to reconcile that, but if I understand the numbers correctly Coleman's lead now stands at 129 votes. [For reasons I haven't figured out yet, the Minneapolis Star Tribune calculates Coleman's lead at 136 votes.] In short, we are heading for a photo finish.
The Coleman campaign says publicly that they are happy with how the recount is going so far:
The Coleman Campaign is very pleased that on a day when Al Franken's advantage in the recount process should have been two or three times what it was, they fell far short of what their clear expectations for success were going to be.
In the northern part of the state, where old "Eagle" ballot machines are located, the Franken Campaign must be extremely disappointed that the results were not what they had calculated - we believe that the vote advantage they expected that didn't materialize has created a serious dilemma for their campaign as they attempt to find ways to add more votes to the recount process.
In other words, the "big" Democrat advantage the Franken Campaign was looking for at in the first 48 hours of this recount is not the big Democrat advantage they have been telling their supporters around the country they were going to see.
At the moment, I don't have any inside information, but if I learn anything of interest I'll post it tomorrow.
UPDATE: A reader writes to explain the numerical discrepancy:
I am an observer on the recount.
The votes posted on SOS website are the actual votes counted and agreed to by both campaigns and don't include the challenges. To get to the real number for Coleman add Recount Number + Coleman Votes Challenged by Franken.
Assume most challenges will be overturned, which I believe to be the case since I have personally seen 30 challenged ballots from the last 2 days in Edina (from both campaigns). Unless the canvassing board does something crazy most challenges will not hold or will hold in equal proportion. I personally started the strategy of challenging the same types of votes as the Franken observers to ensure they would be handled equally by the canvassing board. As an insurance policy.
So Norm's number would be 534,475 +374 = 534,849 or 162 higher than Nov 4th count
Franken's number would be 494,808 + 360 = 495,164 or 234 higher than Nov 4th count
For a net gain of 72 for Franken so far if my math holds.
That's correct; I failed to add back the challenged ballots which are not being counted now for the time being. At the current pace, Franken would gain almost enough ground to reverse the result, but not quite enough. I believe the precincts in St. Louis County that use the machines that can fail to read light pencil marks were Franken's best hope for a big gain.
