The FISA Act And The Definition Of 'US Persons'

One of the critical points argued in regard to President Bush's angry pushback on the NSA leak is that his executive order violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). People have the impression that FISA requires warrants from the FISA judge, but that isn't what FISA says at all. In fact, FISA gives the government wide latitude in warrantless surveillance of international communications even when one point originates in the US -- as long as the person in the US does not qualify as a "US person":

(i) “United States person” means a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence (as defined in section 1101 (a)(20) of title 8), an unincorporated association a substantial number of members of which are citizens of the United States or aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or a corporation which is incorporated in the United States, but does not include a corporation or an association which is a foreign power, as defined in subsection (a)(1), (2), or (3) of this section.

Note that a US person must either be a US citizen or someone lawfully admitted to the US for permanent residence. If someone resides in the US on a visa and not a green card, they do not qualify, nor do they qualify if they get a green card under false pretenses. FISA authorizes warrantless surveillance in its opening chapter:

(1) Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that—

(2) An electronic surveillance authorized by this subsection may be conducted only in accordance with the Attorney General’s certification and the minimization procedures adopted by him. The Attorney General shall assess compliance with such procedures and shall report such assessments to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under the provisions of section 1808 (a) of this title.

In fact, the only people who need to make this call are the President and the Attorney General, and it doesn't even make the accidental or tangential exposure of communications with US persons a crime. It only requires that the AG ensure that mitigation procedures have been applied to ensure compliance with FISA. The only way that one can violate this law is if the law gets intentionally violated. In other words, one would have to prove that Bush intentionally ordered the surveillance of a qualifying US person.

Since the targets within the US got identified through intelligence developed through captures of al-Qaeda agents and their equipment, it seems rather unlikely that they had contacts with many US-born American citizens. Most AQ assets enter countries on student visas -- which does not qualify them as a US person under FISA and therefore does not extend them the protection of warrants prior to or during surveillance.

As the New York Times undoubtedly discovered during its research, the NSA probably never broke the law at all, and certainly nothing uncovered in their article indicates any evidence that they did. Neither did President Bush in ordering the NSA to actually follow the law in aggressively pursuing the intelligence leads provided by their capture of terrorists in the field. The only real news that the Times provided is that the US didn't need the 9/11 Commission to tell it to use all the tools at its disposal -- and hence the angry speech given by the President this morning.

I don't blame him a bit for his anger. I suspect that many will be angry with the Times by Monday -- mostly for suckering them into foolish knee-jerk reactions.

Long Day: The FM Update

Many thanks to all the CQ readers who have left comments and e-mails for the First Mate, who has now been in the hospital for two days over what was supposed to be a three-hour maintenance visit. The bleeding that started yesterday continued today -- again, nothing than produces much volume, but as long as it continues they can't proceed with the rest of the tasks left from Friday. Now it looks like she may be stuck there through Monday.

Oh, and that biopsy that started the whole problem? They never got kidney tissue. All they got was a bit of fat tissue. They're going to have to do that over again, too.

Needless to say, the FM is not a happy sailor tonight. But she's well and in good hands, at one of the nation's highest-rated hospitals according to US News & World Report. She wants me to thank all of you for your kind thoughts and prayers and wishes you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah.

Why Did The Gray Lady Play Coy With Its Scoop?

One of the eyebrow-raising revelations from the New York Times scoop on the secret NSA operation to intercept international communications came from the story itself, which acknowledged that the Times held back from publishing the story for a year. Today, the Washington Post's Paul Farhi takes a look at why the Times spiked the story for so long -- and why it decided to publish now:

In an unusual note, the Times said in its story that it held off publishing the 3,600-word article for a year after the newspaper's representatives met with White House officials. It said the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, "arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny." ...

The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster. ...

"Officials also assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions," Keller continued. "As we have done before in rare instances when faced with a convincing national security argument, we agreed not to publish at that time."

Translated, it means this: the New York Times ran it by their own legal staff to determine whether the program, as reported by Risen and Lichtblau, actually constituted an illegal activity by the government. The answer, obviously, was no. The NSA has the authority to review international communications without warrants -- in fact, that's supposed to be part of its raison d'etre -- and the definition of "international" as anything crossing an international border, including that of the US, might have policy implications but does not break the law. The revelation would not have done anything other than possibly weaken our counterterrorism efforts.

It published now for two reasons, one a typical media convention and the other to beat its own reporter to the scoop. With the Patriot Act up for renewal, the current headlines finally provided a political context that would make this story a blockbuster -- not because it describes illegal activity, but because it plays into the fears the Left have of the rise of an Orwellian Big Brother government from the Bush administration. Ironically, this comes less than a month after the same newspapers giving this story red headlines provided breathless coverage to the 9/11 Commission's "report card" on the government's progress on counterterrorism -- which condemned the White House and Congress for not doing enough to protect Americans from attack.

The second impetus to publish came from the upcoming release of James Risen's book, "State of War", due to be released in less than a month. The story would lose its impact and the Times would lose its investment in the development of it if the book came out first. Also, it doesn't hurt to have its reporter on the best-seller list, and the explosive nature of this leak will almost certainly propel the upcoming Risen tome to the top of those lists, at least briefly.

Once again, what we have is nothing more than a manipulative effort by the Gray Lady in particular and the national media in general to paint the administration in the most unflattering light. Almost none of the coverage provided so far includes the data that Risen and Lichtblau reported on the international nature of the calls, the identification of the targets through other intelligence, and continuous involvement of Congressional leaders. In other words, the only people who should find this of concern are those who want to kill Americans in droves, and thanks to the NYT and its leakers, they now know about that effort.

Those 3K Iraqis Sure Do Get Around

The three thousand trained Iraqis that Joe Biden says comprises all of the independent Iraqi security forces have a very full plate, according to the latest from the Washington Post. The American forces have already begun tasking Iraqi battaliions -- those that Biden says don't exist -- with holding territory in the most contentious parts of Iraq, and they are finding them succeeding in doing so:

The U.S. military is scaling back combat forces in regions of Iraq's Sunni Triangle that were once fiercely contested, freeing thousands of troops to shift to other trouble spots or to go home without being replaced, according to senior military officials.

The U.S. drawdown in parts of central Iraq is a new and important indicator of commanders' confidence in Iraqi security forces in a region long ravaged by lethal insurgent attacks. In Iraq's east-central Diyala province, for example, the U.S. military expects by next month to have cut the number of ground combat units by two-thirds -- a reduction of about 3,000 troops, according to U.S. commanders here.

Who was it that said, "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down"? Was that the Man Without A Plan? It seems that the plan has been in place for quite a while, and that Slow Joe Biden couldn't recognize a trained military or security troop if he tied Biden's shoes for him.

Americans will continue dropping back into contingency bases, supplying logistical support for the growing and more competent Iraqi Army, much as it does for the various NATO forces in Europe -- like the Dutch, for instance, who insist that they cannot provide their own security more than 60 years after their liberation from the Nazis. (I don't hear Slow Joe demanding an exit strategy and a timetable for training the Netherlands to operate independently from the US, by the way.) We will remain available for support missions and continue to supply intelligence, weapons, and communications for the Iraqis, but we will increasingly find ourselves freed up for other tasks in the region and/or for return home.

Again, I know that this holds no surprise for people who have paid attention to the clearly stated mission given by the administration over the past three years, but for those who have spent that time chanting "BUSH LIED -- PEOPLE DIED!!" and have not heard about this "plan" thingy, welcome back to reality. This is what success looks like.

Presdent's Address: Live Blog

I will be reviewing the rare, televised weekly address by George Bush on the filibuster of the PATRIOT Act renewal. It will start in three minutes ...

9:07 - PA tore down the "wall" and received large bipartisan majorities ...

9:08 - The law did exactly what it was designed to do. Bush makes a powerful point when he says that the terrorist threat will not expire in two weeks.

9:10 - Surprise! Bush went on the offensive on the NSA leak -- he stresses that the NSA only worked on international communications, not domestic. He called the leak "illegal", and he took complete responsibility for the program.

9:12 - The program gets reviewed every 45 days, and the White House has to reauthorize it each time. Bush says he has done so over 30 times, and Congress has received "over a dozen briefings" -- hardly a surprise for Capitol Hill.

9:13 - Why does the sound keep cutting out on CNN?

9:13 - He finished, more in a minute ...

9:14 - Russ Feingold says that we have to have laws allowing this operation -- but that's not true. The NSA has ALWAYS had the authority to intercept international communications; it's part of the NSA charter to do so. Feingold also argues that whatever is not explicitly legal is somehow prohibited under American law, but the opposite is true. In order for something to be illegal, it has to be explicitly made so by law. Anything unaddressed remains legal until the Legislature makes it illegal. Feingold made the opposite argument several times -- and that speaks much more towards an American tyranny than anything Bush said or did.

Final - I found it encouraging that Bush went on offense today, scolding a minority of Senators who are too squeamish to help preserve the vital part of American defense that has kept the nation safe for the past four years. I especially found his unexpected and welcome ownership of the NSA program encouraging and heartening. Running away from the issue would have prolonged the notion that the effort had broken the law, when a careful reading of the NYT story shows exactly otherwise. Congress had ample opportunity to stop it as well, receiving a number of briefings -- which Feingold confirmed but dismissed since he didn't get included in it -- which clearly shares the credit and responsibility across all branches of government.

I was going to comment separately on Bush's upcoming Oval Office address, scheduled for tomorrow evening, but it seems appropriate to tie it to this address. It is the first Oval Office address since May 2003, and it caps a recent effort by the White House to take back the momentum on the Iraq War and its support on home.

I'm happy to see Bush re-engage the home front on the war. It is absolutely unconscionable that we have not heard directly from the President from the Oval Office, the world's most powerful venue, in two and a half years on this subject. I don't know where the President's political staff has been over that period of time, but the eschewing of this venue has been a disaster for Bush. The President has enough difficulties in getting his message through a hostile media filter -- and they have simply forgotten to use the most powerful tool in their hands to combat it. We shouldn't go three months without such a speech, keeping us updated on progress on a war which by its nature does not lend itself well to landmarks and metrics. To go thirty months without seeing the familiar environs of the President's primary work area is simply self-defeating in the extreme.

Sunni Leader Predicts Secular Coalition For Iraq

One of the Sunni political leaders expected to compete for leadership positions in the next Assembly has predicted that Shi'ite religious parties will not win enough seats to form a government and pledged to work with secular Shi'a and Kurds to create the new executive in the first four-year Iraqi National Assembly, the AP reports this morning. He also acknowledged the efforts by native insurgents to stand down during the election to allow the political process to overtake violence, an effort that most hope will bring an end to the terrorist attacks in Iraq:

A leading Sunni politician on Saturday reaffirmed his party's commitment to being part of a coalition government and thanked insurgent groups for refraining from attacks during this week's parliamentary elections.

Adnan al-Dulaimi, a former Islamic studies professor who heads a Sunni Arab bloc expected to have a voice in the new National Assembly, said a power-sharing government was important to "safeguard the rights of Iraqis."

Earlier he predicted that Shiite religious parties will be unable to form a government — even though they are widely expected to take the largest number of seats. That would open the door to a coalition of Sunnis, secular Shiites and Kurds, al-Dulaimi said in an interview Friday.

That may be a bit of wishful thinking. The Shi'a religious bloc will likely get the first opportunity to form a government as their numbers appear to indicate they will take the plurality of seats, among over 300 separate parties contending for representation. However, the religious parties will not form a government on their own; they won't have the majority necessary to act unilaterally. Even if they did, the Shi'ite politicians understand the need to bring partners into the government in a broader, more representative manner. Two of the leading Shi'ites have already discussed the necessity of bringing Sunnis into the action in some manner, and the secular Sunnis would certainly present less problems for a coalition than trying to mix religious enemies for a national-unity government.

The most important development, though, is the unspoken assumption by all of these politicians of the legitimacy of the elections. Given the circumstances of the election, with the Coalition armies providing security and the omnipresent threat of Islamofascist violence all around, it is remarkable that Iraqis have gleefully accepted the elections as a reliable and desirable indicator of public trust. That sense of legitimacy, especially powerful as it has arisen without much comment at all, will act to delegimize the insurgents and pressure the native contingents to stand down permanently and join the legal processes for political determination. That, in turn, will allow all forces to focus on the foreign zealots run by Zarqawi and destroy them.

Expect to see Zarqawi take his network out of Iraq in the near future, possibly relocating to either Syria or Iran while the borders remain relatively fluid enough to allow it. Don't expect either country to be happy to host him, but don't expect them to stop him from his terrorist attacks, either. Zarqawi may well make the decision for us which state sponsor of terrorism will appear next on our radar screen.

NSA Snoops And PATRIOT Acts = 4 Years Of No Attacks?

Many in the blogosphere have commented on the two big stories of the day -- the New York Times revelation of the NSA operation to conduct warrantless wiretaps on international communications, and the filibustering of the extension of the Patriot Act. I have read the Times article in depth and read some of the commentary on the leak, including the Power Line demand that the leak get treated the same as the Valerie Plame fiasco-in-progress. I predicted the PATRIOT Act filibuster earlier this week, and considering this new story, am not surprised in the least to see it succeed.

Let's review what the Times has to say on their big scoop, on which they sat until the day after the Iraqi elections:

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches. ...

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said. ...

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

One has to bounce around the article to put this together, in typical NYT fashion, but the core of the issue is this: the NSA and the administration defined international communications as including those where one end -- and one end only -- occurs in the US. Anything else still requires a warrant, as the Times acknowledges. Moreover, this effort did not take place in darkness. The FISA court did get informed of the issue, and the leaders of the oversight committees in both houses of Congress from both parties took part in the decision. It does not appear that the Bush administration sought to hide this from the other two branches of government, but sought to include them in the oversight of the new process as much as possible within the secrecy needed to conduct the program during wartime.

And the program paid off. Information developed during the NSA effort kept al-Qaeda from destroying the Brooklyn Bridge in 2003 when Iyman Faris got captured before he could initiate the attack. He pled guilty to terror-related charges and is now serving a long prison sentence for his part in the conspiracy. If one reads further into the long and detailed article, the Bush administration received precedential decisions from courts that acknowledged the executive authority to wage war included a broader authority to set the parameters of espionage in order to guarantee security. Clearly, the administration has sought to comply with the letter of the law while getting the best possible information as quickly as it could to prevent another devastating terrorist attack.

While the White House played offense in Afghanistan and Iraq in the forward strategy against al-Qaeda terrorists -- in the latter country, we have squared off against the AQ first team for at least two years now -- this proves that the American government has not neglected its defense. It has deployed all of the assets at its hands to keep the terrorists from gaining a toehold inside the US as much as possible to do so. The use of wiretaps against the tech-savvy Islamist terror groups has apparently not only kept them from effectively coordinating for attacks, but it has also led to the discovery and exploitation of unknown AQ and other resources, which led to other domino-style discoveries.

It shows that the four years of attack-free life that Americans have enjoyed since 9/11 was no accident, but the fruits of hard work and delicate intelligence service by dedicated men and women. And now the question is whether that defense has been hopelessly compromised by the NYT leak and publication, as well as the PATRIOT Act filibuster.

After carefully reading through the story, I would say that the revelation of the NSA program doesn't damage our defense nearly as much as a reversal on PATRIOT might, and that hasn't yet happened. In fact, it could serve us well to have this debate now, four years out from 9/11 and outside the pressure of a presidential election during a second term which means that the current administration does not have a stake in a re-election campaign. But let's be clear about the stakes involved in this debate: does the Constitution allow the United States to take the necessary actions to defend itself against asymmetrical warfare without unduly curtailing individual liberties? Does the Constitution require us to sacrifice thousands, perhaps millions, of our citizens to murderers and infiltrators simply because we might not like the idea of international communications being subject to random monitoring?

I would argue that it does not -- and the professional way that the Bush administration handled the NSA program demonstrates that perfectly well. The White House engaged the leadership of both political parties and made partners of the other two branches of government to make this a success. It kept the operation secret as long as possible, it did not use the data to abuse the citizens of the US for any reason; it conducted its operations within the letter of the law, although perhaps outside the spirit that some see it containing. It succeeded at the balancing act required of it, and they deserve great credit in their administration of the project.

I share the mistrust of big government and its power to spy on their own people. One only needs to see the example of the Mukhabarat in Saddam's Iraq to understand that, or for that matter, review some of the more distasteful COINTELPROs of the Hoover dynasty at the FBI. The Times account does not even hint at that kind of corruption and revolting abuse of power at the NSA, but instead a fixed eye on the legal lines and the focus on true national security. People have every right to be nervous about the necessary tactics for defending the nation during this time of war -- but they have the responsibility to give the evidence of the operation a mature evaluation.

In those terms, with my wife, son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter still alive along with the 300 million Americans that Islamofascists have wanted to kill in massive numbers for the past four years and more, I'd say we have struck the right balance between security and liberty for these circumstances. Those who want to strip us of all defenses out of an overstretched notion of the Fourth Amendment should remember that without security, civil liberties do not exist at all.

Addendum: Please see postings at various blogs such as Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, the threads on The Corner, and numerous links and excellent original commentary at Instapundit as well. I had to save this in stages in order to make sure my virus program updates didn't eat my work, so if you've seen the (cont) note earlier, you know what I was doing ...

Tough Day

Sorry for the long absence and the silence on the two stories of the day. I've been preoccupied with an unexpected complication for the First Mate all day long and just started to catch up with e-mail and news feeds. The FM has to have some routine maintenance tasks for evaluating her transplants every six to nine months, including a biopsy, which normally is no big deal -- just a half-day in the hospital and an evening of bed rest. In the past, I'd take the day off and hang out, hospiblogging, but today I decided to go into the office and get some work done, as this has always been a non-eventful task.

Until today, of course.

Apparently, the biopsy ruptured a small blood vessel and forced the doctors to stop the other tasks about halfway through the procedure. When the bleeding continued (a very small amount, but just persistent), the doctors decided to admit her overnight and keep an eye on the situation. I bounced back and forth between the office, the dogs at home, and the hospital tonight. The doctors are very hopeful this will all resolve itself in the morning and they can continue the procedures and send her home -- but in the meantime, I'll be bouncing around a bit.

I'll probably miss my MOB party tomorrow, unfortunately, and we'll be putting off the last of the Christmas shopping, but other than that, this isn't a big deal -- more of just an unexpected, Murphy's Law headache. Now that I'm home for the evening and the mutts have decided that they're stuck with Daddy for the night, I can get back to the headlines and find out what the heck happened all day long. I'm sure that CQ readers are way ahead of me on these topics, but that's usually true anyway.

Palestinians Choose War, Again

As long as we're talking democracy, we can check in on the results of another recent round of elections in the Middle East. In the Palestinian territories, the results of recent municipal voting show that the terrorist group Hamas has gained significantly over the slightly-less-terrorist ruling party of Fatah. Hamas won over 70% of the vote in this last round of local elections before the parliamentary elections which will determine which set of terrorists runs the West Bank and Gaza Strip:

The Hamas militant group won local elections in the West Bank's largest cities, according to preliminary results released Friday, dealing a harsh blow to the ruling Fatah party just six weeks ahead of a parliamentary poll.

Hamas swept more than 70 percent of the vote in the West Bank city of Nablus, highlighting the fierce challenge posed by the group to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, which suffered a split Thursday when a group of young leaders broke away. ...

A Hamas victory in the Jan. 25 parliamentary poll could torpedo efforts to renew long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and damage the Palestinians' relationship with the United States. Hamas is sworn to the destruction of Israel and responsible for dozens of suicide bombings. The group is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.

"If the Hamas was ever to become a dominant force in Palestinian politics, that would be the end of the peace process," said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev.

Hamas' welfare programs, coupled with its fierce resistance to Israel's occupation, have won it grass-roots support among Palestinians who are fed up with Fatah's corrupt government and its inability to rein in lawlessness in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Hamas is the reason for the lawlessness in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That has long been part of their plan to undermine the crumbling Fatah party -- create enough chaos while their own security forces guarantee security for their supporters so that Fatah has no chance to either disarm Hamas nor to establish the rule of law. Only the Israelis could break that cycle, but the international community wanted Israel to butt out. Now the inmates are truly in charge of the asylum, and Israel will eventually be forced to deal with them regardless.

Besides, the Palestinians have made themselves clear in their reasonably free and open elections: they want war and support terrorism. Not only have they consistently voted in favor of the most reliably anti-Israel faction, the lack of a counterbalancing "peace" party makes it clear that Palestinians have no interest in peaceful co-existence with Israel. They have repeatedly chosen the no-negotiation platform of Hamas over that of the Abbas approach, which at least keeps the door open to a negotiated end to hostilities.

It's time the world took the Palestinians at face value. They want a war with Israel. Let them have it -- and let the Israelis fight it without undue restraint, and let it continue until we finally get a resolution to the ongoing headache of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Canadian Debate Piles On Martin

It may have been a four-way affair, but at the beginning of the first national televised debate in the Canadian elections, it looked more like a tag-team wrestling match, with the three opposition parties taking turns reminding voters exactly why Paul Martin and his Liberals have to go. Martin, for his part, appeared to focus on Bloc Quebecois's separatist sympathies in his rebuttals rather than address the Adscam corruption that stripped him of his grip on power:

The early section of the debate was dominated by the sponsorship scandal. It took just seconds for sponsorship to become a cudgel in the hands of the prime minister's political rivals as they took turns pounding Martin on the topic. Duceppe, in his element in French, led the charge against Martin's scandal-plagued Liberal government, which he described as having "lost the moral authority" to govern.

"The sponsorship scandal is an incontestable issue," Duceppe said during a two-hour question-answer session that was largely civil, focused on policy and devoid of the kind of angry back-forth exchanges that have defined past debates. "Justice (John) Gomery ruled that the Liberal party brought itself into dishonour and that a system of bribes was in place."

Martin shot back that Duceppe and the Bloc were interested in capitalizing on the scandal only so long as it serves to tear apart the country. "They want to put an end to this Canada that generations of Canadians and Quebecers have built, this Canada that is the envy of the world."

Harper may have done himself the most good after giving the Francophones their best look at him for this election. Given a tough question about what he would do if he found out one of his children was gay, he replied that he would love his children unconditionally regardless of their orientation. He also pledged to avoid using the constitution to block gay marriage and to abide by whatever resulted from a free Commons vote on the issue -- a far cry from the radical reactionary that Liberals had attempted to make him on the campaign trail. (A "free" vote is one in which the party does not demand unity from its members, I believe, allowing each MP to vote his or her conscience rather than support a party platform.)

Harper may have performed well enough to shake off some doubt about his readiness to lead Canada. Martin, on the other hand, keeps moving from rage to rage in a transparent attempt to shake off the stain of corruption. Will that work? Not for long, I suspect, especially with the other three leaders apparently determined to hold his feet to the Gomery fires.

Ask Not What Windmills Do To My View ...

One of the more laughable hypocrisies of the environmental movement has been the proposed windmill farm called the Cape Wind project. The proposal involves the installation of hundreds of windmills in an area that should capture enough power to generate a significant amount of clean energy -- the kind of energy that environmentalists normally insist be part of our future. Most of the time, this kind of government spending gets high marks from limousine liberals like Rep. Robert Kennedy Jr, but not when the project gets built where their limousines park, as Kennedy's fine NIMBY whine in today's New York Times explains:

AS an environmentalist, I support wind power, including wind power on the high seas. I am also involved in siting wind farms in appropriate landscapes, of which there are many. But I do believe that some places should be off limits to any sort of industrial development. I wouldn't build a wind farm in Yosemite National Park. Nor would I build one on Nantucket Sound, which is exactly what the company Energy Management is trying to do with its Cape Wind project.

Environmental groups have been enticed by Cape Wind, but they should be wary of lending support to energy companies that are trying to privatize the commons - in this case 24 square miles of a heavily used waterway. And because offshore wind costs twice as much as gas-fired electricity and significantly more than onshore wind, the project is financially feasible only because the federal and state governments have promised $241 million in subsidies.

Cape Wind's proposal involves construction of 130 giant turbines whose windmill arms will reach 417 feet above the water and be visible for up to 26 miles. These turbines are less than six miles from shore and would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Hundreds of flashing lights to warn airplanes away from the turbines will steal the stars and nighttime views. The noise of the turbines will be audible onshore. A transformer substation rising 100 feet above the sound would house giant helicopter pads and 40,000 gallons of potentially hazardous oil.

According to the Massachusetts Historical Commission, the project will damage the views from 16 historic sites and lighthouses on the cape and nearby islands. The Humane Society estimates the whirling turbines could every year kill thousands of migrating songbirds and sea ducks.

Kennedy goes on and on like this without once mentioning that the people who would miss the stars in the sky at night have the last name of Kennedy, one of the wealthy families with permanent compounds on Martha's Vineyard. he invites all Americans to come out and visit to understand the view and ecosystem at risk with this project, but I doubt he's willing to put us all up at the family cabin for a couple of weeks. After Kennedy gives a laundry list of why, despite the support of most environmental groups, this project isn't as feasible as an on-shore facility, he then suggests moving it farther off-shore as a solution:

If Cape Wind were to place its project further offshore, it could build not just 130, but thousands of windmills - where they can make a real difference in the battle against global warming without endangering the birds or impoverishing the experience of millions of tourists and residents and fishing families who rely on the sound's unspoiled bounties.

In other words, damn the cost and the 40,000 gallons of hazardous oil, dead birds, and all that -- get the turbines out of my sight and I'll be happy to support Cape Wind.

Let's face facts. Kennedy has a point about the entire project, but doesn't want to make the final connection. The energy created by Cape Wind on any scale will be more expensive, more difficult to transmit, and more difficult to maintain than what gets generated now by unsubsidized commercial generation. It may be cleaner, but the actual manufacture and maintenance of the turbines isn't exactly clean, and the requirement for plenty of lubricant on site will always mean that petroleum is part of the equation and a potential for a minor spill now and then. Wind power will never generate enough electricity to replace any other source of power; at best, it will only add a little more flexibility to the grid.

It's nothing but a boondoggle for the environmentalists, a pork project designed to capture the votes of the limousine liberals who support it. Obviously, as Kennedy proves, that support only extends to the sacrifice of not actually having to see it. Typical.

Gray Lady's Editorial Page: What Elections?

In my post below, I ask whether the world has finally gotten the message that all people of all backgrounds want and deserve freedom, as demonstrated by the Iraqi elections. Media watches might expect that serious newspapers around the world will address the lessons to be drawn from this historic event. Not at the Paper of Record^TM, however; the message -- and the elections -- seem to have escaped the attention of the editorial board at the New York Times.

The RSS feed for the Opinion page at the Times just updated with tomorrow's articles. Here's what readers of the Times will see addressed by the opinion leaders of what was once the most influential of all American dailies:

* Don't rush to renew the PATRIOT Act (even though it's about to expire after four years)
* The Red Cross may not be motivated to fix its problems
* Chad hasn't benefited from its discovery of oil (but then again, neither have we in ANWR)
* A demand for moral clarity on torture

Wait -- perhaps one of their guests addresses it instead. Er, no. Tim Harford talks trade reform to benefit poor farmers, Robert Kennedy really likes wind power until it blocks his view of the stars (more on that later), and Pankaj Mishra writes about the West vs Islam ... in Turkey. Even behind the Times Select Firewall of Sanity, Paul Krugman forgoes his usual Chicken Littlism on Iraq in favor of discussing conflicts of interest in health care.

Did the Times miss the story? Or are they just hoping that the rest of us did?

UPDATE: The Washington Post editorial board passes on the elections as well. Instead, they talk torture, ANWR drilling, and a recount in Virginia's election for attorney general. I guess that Virginia election is much more significant for comment this particular day than Iraq's emergence as a democratic nation in the middle of a collection of Islamic tyrannies and kleptocracies. At least, however, one of their guest op-eds addresses the topic, even if Susan Rice wants to throw a little cold water on the celebration.

The LA TImes doesn't do much better.

Have We Gotten The Message Now?

It will take weeks for the accurate count of votes cast in today's Iraqi elections to get finalized, but one common strain has come through in all reports during this historic day -- the Iraqis stood together as never before in their history. For a variety of reasons and motivations, all factions except the foreign terrorists of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi embraced the ballot over the bullet for the first time since the British cobbled together the nation of Iraq after the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. Millions of Iraqis from all factions -- ethnic, secular, geographic -- turned out despite the dangers of the Islamofascist lunatics that would rather kill Muslims than see them vote for their own leaders, and in defiance of the skeptics around the world who claim that Iraqis simply aren't worth the bother of liberation.

Look the people with purple-stained fingers in the eye and tell them that. I double-dog dare you.

One voter said: "This is stability, at last". Another, with tears in his eyes, told me: "This is the beginning of a new Iraq. I am so happy." ...

Ali al-Musawi, a Shia Muslim originally from Sadr city said: "Iraq is like a ship in a storm being tossed form left to right, and now we need a new captain to take us to land and to safety."

One man hoped the election would bring an end to the occupation, but this would depend, he said, on maintaining unity. "Stability can only come from unity. When we have stability," he said, " then the Americans can go."

Initial estimates of the vote approach 15 million, about the same number as estimated that are eligible to vote at all. In previous elections, the chaotic nature of the coverage and the exit polling led to somewhat inflated numbers, and I suspect we'll see more of the same here. My guess is that with the Sunni participating enthusiastically and the Shi'ites more engaged in the parliamentary elections than in the slam-dunk plebescite that established the constitution (at least throughout most of their base) in October, the final count will come in around 13 million. That still represents close to a 90% voter turnout -- a mark unequalled for free multiparty elections in the West, and an indication of the thirst for liberty the long-oppressed Iraqis have.

The only losers in this election will be those who have told us over and over again that democracy could not be imposed at gunpoint. That the cut-and-run Coalition of the Gutless could still today stand and make that argument is a testament to the enduring power of freedom: stupidity and cravenness is no crime. The Iraqis didn't get democracy imposed on them at gunpoint at all. They had their oppressors removed at gunpoint -- and then the Anglo-Aussie-Italo-Polish-etc-American coalition kept them from falling prey to even more oppressors by gunpoint while they slowly took charge of their own destiny. No one who has watched the three free elections in Iraq this year could possibly describe the march to the polls as being "at gunpoint". These people rose up as a nation -- perhaps in this election especially for the first time -- in defiance of the guns and bombs of their erstwhile oppressors to take their nation back from them.

In doing so, they made fools of the people around the world who sold them short, who criticized George Bush and Tony Blair and John Howard for having the guts to stick by the Iraqis to make sure they got their chance at freedom. Those purple fingers point in accusation to those who doubt the power and desire of freedom, who claim that all forms of government have legitimacy depending on the kinds of people over which they rule. The purple fingers pull the mask off a global media effort to cast the situation in Iraq in the worst possible light to belittle the effort made by the West to rescue millions from hopeless tyranny and in so doing, keep their own people safer.

The purple fingers point the way to change the Middle East and turn it into a dynamo of philosophy, production, and freedom. They tell us we're winning, if some of us would only listen.

Who Will Investigate The Liberal Insider Trading Scandal?

The insider trading scandal continues to fester this week as none of the normal agencies that would have jurisdiction have yet to announce any sort of investigation. The Medisys trades may only have been the tip of the iceberg, according to a CQ reader with knowledge of Canadian financial markets, and a check on the winners from the run on income trusts on November 23rd might demonstrate why Canadians may not get an investigation at all -- at least until the Americans decide to check into the action.

On Tuesday, Ontario House member Michael Prue (NDP - Beaches/East York) stood to query the Minister of Government Service, Gerry Philips, on why he had not initiated an independent investigation into the series of trades on income trusts that took place just hours before Goodale announced an end to taxation on these investment products, boosting their value considerably. Philips replied that the Ontario Securities Commission has the responsibility to perform oversight on any such trades, and that the new chief of the OSC, W. David Wilson, had to make that decision. Prue replied:

Minister, W. David Wilson, your new chair of the Ontario Securities Commission, has been silent to date on this matter. One only has to take a quick scan of the Elections Canada Web site to show that Mr. Wilson is an avid financial supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada, the only party to which he donates money. Mr. Wilson has already been forced to recuse himself from investigations into the Royal Group due to a potential conflict. You agreed with that. Today, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, the federal NDP critic, has asked Mr. Wilson to recuse himself again. I am asking you this question: Will you support the effort and will you order Mr. Wilson to recuse himself in this situation?

It turns out, however, that David Wilson has more reason to recuse himself than just his party affiliation. Wilson received his appointment as chairman of the OSC after working as CEO of Scotia Capital Markets until his official appointment to the OSC on November 1, 2005, just twenty-two days before this event. Why is this important? One of the revelations to come out in the last couple of days is a previously undisclosed meeting that Finance Minister Ralph Goodale held with Investment Dealers Association earlier on the 23rd. Shortly after this meeting ended, unusual volumes began trading in income trusts such as Yellow Pages, Aeroplan, Superior Plus, and BCE (a dividend equity).

A look at the trades for November 23rd shows that Scotia Capital played a large role in moving the shares of these products. Look at Yellow Pages as an example; in the PDF, Scotia Capital is broker #85. SC starts off by selling large chunks of Yellow Pages at $14.12 right from the opening bell. Through 10:30, they're still primarily selling even though the price has moved up to $14.36. Beginning at 11 am, they suddenly begin buying in small amounts, and then at 11:26 start buying in higher volumes -- almost 20,000 between 11:26 and 11:29, even though the price had moved up to $14.50. SC sells off a couple of thousand shares later in the hour at $14.65, and then nibbles most of the next couple of hours. At 14:22, SC suddenly starts selling again at $14.60, dumping several thousand shares while the price drops a few cents. Starting at 14:57 and continuing through the end of the session at 16:00, the stock explodes in volume, with a number of players pushing the stock price over $15.00 by the closing bell.

Or, for that matter, take a look at the trading pattern and volume for equity product BCE. The following large-volume trades took place with the major investment brokers on the Toronto Stock Exchange:

10:15:35 50,000 shares Scotia Capital
10:36:48 100,000 shares Scotia Capital
10:39:21 50,000 shares Desjardins
11:43:45 98,400 shares TD Securities
14:53:08 100,000 shares CIBC World Markets
15:42:59 50,000 shares Blackmont
15:56:36 50,000 shares CIBC World Markets

After the day was over, SC parent Bank of Nova Scotia shares rose to their highest level all year, $47.10, the next day. The stock peaked at $1 per share on the 24th, better than a dollar an hour higher than the stock price on the 22nd, a day before Goodale's meeting. Scotia Capital played a major role in moving large transactions for all four trusts on November 23rd.

All of this could just be a coincidence, of course, but the notion of coincidence keeps getting brought up as a possible defense, one that sounds weaker with each invocation. But unless the OSC decides to pursue an investigation, no defense will be necessary. And it appears that despite Wilson's words that "[d]eterrence is achieved when everyone knows with certainty that the enforcement of regulations will be impartial, swift and uncompromising", the ties to his former company have put the OSC chief in a position where he wants to take as much time as possible deciding whether he wants this investigated at all, let alone independently.

The Conservatives and the NDP should continue to press for a federal, independent investigation into the November 23rd trading activity. However, if they don't get it, the Americans may wind up riding to the rescue. BCE also trades on the NYSE, as does Bank of Nova Scotia. The SEC and its far more independent management might well choose to start looking into any unusual trading patterns inside the American exchanges. That could let Wilson off the hook -- or perhaps make his life a lot more complicated than it already is.

UPDATE AND BUMP: I'll let this one ride on top today. The key part to remember is that either the OSC or the RCMP would have to investigate this if anyone does at all, and unfortunately David Wilson gets to make that call for the time being. Eventually it will fall to the Ontario provincial government if Wilson punts, who will likely not have too much enthusiasm for exploring yet another Liberal Party financial scandal.

Trashing What Isn't Broken

In the days after 9/11, Americans resigned themselves to the inevitability of a series of terrorist attacks on our homeland. We tried to do whatever we could do to minimize the possibility of such an attack, but we all prepared ourselves and tried to do what we could to remain vigilant against terrorists. One element of that vigilance was the PATRIOT Act, which gave law enforcement the same kinds of power to pursue counterterrorism as they do in investigating child pornographers and organized crime suspects.

That proved to be successful; we have yet to experience another successful attack on American soil, more than four years later. After that tremendous success, when key provisions of this legislation have reached a critical expiration date, the Democrats propose to force the calendar back to 9/10 and filibuster the renewal of the PATRIOT Act:

The real fight will be later this week in the Senate, when Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, plans to try to force an end to debate on the bill so it can be voted on before Congress adjourns for the year. The Patriot Act, which was modified in the bill now under consideration, expires at the end of the year.

Other key Democrats such as Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also have said they will support a filibuster. Four Republicans -- Sens. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, Larry E. Craig of Idaho, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- said yesterday that they will join Democrats in opposing the legislation, even helping block a final vote on its passage. ...

"Last week, Democrat leadership offered a cut-and-run strategy in Iraq," Frist spokesman Bob Stevenson said. "Now they're siding with the ACLU instead of the Fraternal Order of Police in the war on terror."

If a filibuster succeeds and the two sides fail to reach a compromise that the House signs off on, the Patriot Act will expire. The campaign ads against Democrats would write themselves, Republicans said yesterday. But Democrats said they are confident that such a political strategy won't work this time. "Republicans are spinning themselves so hard, they're forgetting that there's bipartisan opposition to this bill," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said.

Really? It passed out of the House on a bipartisan vote of support, 251-174. Reid and his spokesman must have some math issues if they can't determine that Democrats in the House understand the stakes involved. The Senate Democrats have decided on yet another path for their obstructionism, this time on national security. If Democrats think that's a political winner for them, given the four-year track record of PATRIOT keeping us secure without any significant complaint of law-enforcement overreach, then they have proven once again that their party has no business being in charge of national security.

Anti-Alito Campaign Losing Momentum

The New York Sun reports that the "grass-roots" efforts by PFAW and Alliance for Justice to generate a groundswell of opposition to the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court has so far failed miserably. A nationwide 'educational' tour has generated almost no interest at all, and on-line petitions have only received 55,000 endorsements instead of the targeted million or more:

A grass roots effort aimed at fueling opposition to Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito has become a target of mockery for the nominee's conservative allies instead - the latest skirmish in an ongoing turf battle among interest groups almost four weeks ahead of the confirmation hearing.

Earlier this month, the liberal activist group Alliance for Justice kicked off a nationwide tour against Judge Alito in which members travel from town to town distributing literature and organizing events against the nominee. Starting in Colorado, the so-called "Rolling Justice" tour stopped in 26 cities in nine days.

But, according to conservative activists, the tour is a disaster. They point to a companion Web site, www.rollingjustice.org, where supporters can follow the tour and post comments online: After more than a week of postings from a tour leader, the site has generated one response, from a woman named "Kendra Sue," who wrote: "Oh my goodness. You are really braving the cold for a good cause. Keep up the good work ..."

The executive director of the Committee for Justice, a key White House ally in the confirmation process, Sean Rushton, said photos on the Rolling Justice Web site suggest weak attendance and a lack of press attention. Of the photos on the site, the largest group pictured is sitting at a restaurant table. A link inviting visitors to get involved leads back to the main Rolling Justice page.

The hearings for Alito begin in less than four weeks. So far, as Brian McGuire notes, the two well-funded leftist activist groups have yet to buy any major ad time for their attacks on Alito. Christmas season undoubtedly has something to do with that; not too many people will focus on poltical campaigns, especially on something this esoteric. However, it also seems to show exactly how far outside the mainstream PFAW and AFJ have placed themselves in their incessant politicization of the appellate courts. Just as with the Roberts nomination, they cannot appear to catch fire with their torch procession against Bush nominees.

Why? Perhaps they simply don't understand that a majority of people voted for George Bush in large part because we wanted nominees like Samuel Alito and not Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Both PFAW and AFJ have acted as though the election was some sort of cultural irrelevancy or abnormality, and both pretend that unfettered access to abortion on demand with no restrictions of any kind represents the mainstream position of Americans. It doesn't., and the self-delusion of the Left has once again led to its humiliation.

On the other hand, with the low turnout, the choice of restaurants for photo ops becomes much wider. That's at least a small consolation.

Martin's Potatoe

Sensing a chance to exploit the always-present undercurrent of resentment towards Canada's southern neighbor and largest trading partner, Prime Minister Paul Martin took an opportunity given to him by American ambassador David Wilkins to sound tough and stand up to Wilkins' rebuke earlier this week that "the US is not on the ballot" in the upcoming election. Tory leader Stephen Harper backed away from Wilkins' criticism of Martin (who went unnamed in Wilkins' statement), claiming that the ambassador's speech had been "inappropriate":

Paul Martin enthusiastically tore into an election-time spat with the United States yesterday, firing nationalist rhetoric from a B.C. softwood-lumber mill only one day after U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins warned Canadian politicians against campaign chest-thumping.

At the same time, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, in his first comments on the issue, called the ambassador's intervention "inappropriate" -- as federal party leaders appeared to calculate that rebuking the United States is good electoral politics.

NDP Leader Jack Layton, whose party has been losing support to the Liberals, came closest to defending the U.S. ambassador. He said Mr. Wilkins discovered Mr. Martin's electioneering bent when he started "whipping up the rhetoric" to get elected after failing to deliver results on Canada-U.S. issues.

Unfortunately for Martin, he wound up with his foot in his mouth when he made his attack on the American ambassador. The Prime Minister, who should have worked closely with the envoy of his largest trading partner since his appointment last April, couldn't even get his name right for his prepared speech yesterday:

Mr. Martin, however, made tough talk against the United States his theme of the day. At a softwood-lumber mill in Richmond, he fired shots over the continuing trade dispute around U.S. tariffs and then, misnaming the U.S. ambassador, made no apologies.

"Ambassador Williams is a man for whom I have the greatest respect," Mr. Martin said. "All I will simply say is I am going to deal with issues that are important to the Canadian people. . . . I will deal with them as they arise and I will call it as I see it."

He couldn't ask someone to double-check Wilkins' name? Martin supposedly has held high-level contacts with the American ambassador for months on the softwood lumber issue and other NAFTA concerns. Perhaps part of Canada's problem stems from Martin's inability to recall exactly who represents the other side of those negotiations. When George Bush ran for president in 2000, the media ridiculed him as a bumpkin because he couldn't name every world leader of every country; I believe he missed Musharraf in Pakistan at the time. Here we have a sitting head of government who can't even properly name the most key ambassador in the diplomatic corps in Ottawa -- for prepared remarks.

That leads me to my Daily Standard this week, "Liberal Party Meltdown". It recounts the opening missteps of the ruling party's efforts to campaign for its continued grip on power in Canada and their unusually self-destructive remarks that include Scott Reid advising the media that "Alberta can blow me". Apparently, the foot-in-mouth disease starts at the top in this election.

Iraqis Turn Out In Droves, CNN Reports, While Negotiated Truce Holds

At this point in the Iraqi election polling, it appears that the day has provided a smashing success for democracy. Christiane Amanpour of CNN reported moments ago from Baghdad that the turnout in Sunni areas has been surprisingly high, compared to what she experienced in the last two elections. Here's a rough transcript of her report, coming at midday in Baghdad, talking live with anchor Soledad O'Brian:

SO: What are you seeing there?

CA: Well, Soledad, we are at a polling place at a school not far from our office here in Baghdad, which has been turned into a polling station. There are police outside, there are Iraqi Army outside. These people have been maintaining the security -- in fact, they have been sleeping at these polling stations for several days before the election. .... All day, it's been quite a steady stream of people coming to vote. In Baghdad, we're not so surprised because we've seen this, particularly in the Shi'ite and mixed areas in the last two elections. There was January and the referendum in October.

But what really surprised me was the turnout in the Sunni population. We went to a place called Dura in southern Baghdad. It's quite a violent place, it's quite a poor place, it's mostly Sunni, but the turnout was high there. They said that they had made a mistake, basically, by sitting out the last election. They wanted their voice heard, they wanted to be counted, and so they're going to the polls today. ... The one thing most people have said is that they don't want a religious state here or a religious government.

Nic Robertson also reports from Ramadi that the violence has not kept the voters there from going to the polls -- a major shift from January, when only one person cast a ballot in this Sunni terrorist area. The "militias" have provided the Ramada residents with security to get them to the polls, and Robertson reports that a celebratory atmosphere has developed at these stations.

Part of the reason for the high turnout and relatively low violence over the past few days appears to be secret negotiations between the American military command and some native insurgent groups for a cease-fire, according to the Washington Times. The truce got approval from the highest ranks of the US command in Iraq and looks to have been mostly successful, although the policy did not have unanimous support among the command officers:

After months of painstaking dialogue, U.S. officials have persuaded most of the main insurgent groups to cease violence for today's election and its immediate aftermath, U.S. officials said yesterday. In return, the U.S. military agreed, despite severe internal disagreements, to halt "offensive operations" during the period, U.S. Embassy officials said on the condition of anonymity.

Polls opened today at 7 a.m., as expected, for the historic vote, but moments later a loud blast sounded in the capital, according to witnesses quoted by wire services. There were no immediate reports of any casualties or damage. ...

The decision to negotiate, taken by the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, met with resistance from several of his fellow officers. It was then decided to make no public statement, but simply to act on the new orders in secret.

U.S. forces are thought to be fighting dozens of different insurgent groups, making it difficult to measure the effort's success. Moreover, the time frame for the agreement, which also included several days prior to the vote, is not clear. Nevertheless, the agreement has generally held up, despite some notable exceptions, such as Tuesday's killing of a leading Sunni politician in Ramadi. On the same day, U.S. forces raided the city.

Casey rolled the dice on this election day, hoping that the time had finally come to encourage the native "insurgency", which has a more anti-foreigner than Islamist bent, to buy into the political process. Those left out of the negotiations, such as the Zarqawi faction, obviously will continue to attempt their operations to disrupt the elections, but the lack of widespread violence may indicate that Zarqawi's ability to conduct such operations has been severely curtailed. Casey may have chosen wisely here -- and the vote might finally convince the Sunni to either lay down their weapons or to join the new Iraqi security forces and serve the newly elected democratic republic, under the civilian command of the National Assembly.

A few more tough hours remain, and then the courage of the Iraqi people will have taken the voting itself as far as it can go. After that, it falls to the election workers and the interim government to bring the results to fruition as Iraq prepares for its first peaceful and civilian transition of power in its history.

Nation On The Edge Of Forever

Day is dawning at this moment in Iraq -- Election Day, when the Iraqis freely select their first constitutional government in decades. Some estimate a turnout of ten million voters in the elections today, and while the biggest concerns will be about security, no one believes it will discourage anyone from making their way to the polling booth. Just the same, like a broken record, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued his traditional Election Day threat, making the even seem more official:

With Iraqi exiles starting to cast their ballots, including in Zarqawi's home town of Zarqa in Jordan, a statement issued by his branch of al-Qa'eda announced "a blessed conquest to shake up the bastions of non-believers and apostates and to ruin the 'democratic' wedding of heresy and immorality".

There were sporadic shooting and bombing attacks at polling stations yesterday, and several candidates have been killed in recent weeks. But overall the level of violence seemed to have dropped in the run-up to the poll. ...

In Tahrir Square posters were hung depicting Zarqawi dressed as a blood-red monster with the motto: "He wants to destroy elections, democracy, progress." There are growing signs that Sunni Arabs, who have led the insurgency for more than two years, will vote in unprecedented numbers.

Even with the media relentlessly focused on death tolls and bombings, it began to appear that the rate of violence had scaled down significantly. That may have come from a temporary pause in operations among the Ba'athist insurgents, the remnants of the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Those forces, primarily Sunni, have instead switched to defending the Sunni minority in order to guarantee a high turnout for Sunni voters and their slate of candidates. The rumored strong turnout appears to have been encouraged by these native terrorists, keen on ensuring that the Sunnis get represented in the four-year government in much better proportion than their boycott left them last January.

We will find out soon enough whether that strategy paid off and whether the Sunni make themselves a part of the new and democratic Iraq. Hopefully the results will encourage these native "insurgents" to give up the bullet for the ballot permanently, further isolating al-Qaeda and Zarqawi. It won't fail for lack of courage on the part of the ordinary Iraqis, who proudly display their purple fingers as the new symbol of defiance and courage. The cowardice of the terrorists cannot hope to triumph over them.

Carl Levin Can't Handle The Truth

Democratic Senator Carl Levin has pledged to block an appointment for President Bush's choice of Pentagon spokesman based on the supposed attitude problem of the nominee, J. Dorrance Smith. What has caused this political obstructionism to rise again, this time in the Senate Armed Services Committee? Senator Levin doesn't appreciate what Smith thinks about ... al-Jazeera:

J. Dorrance Smith, the nominee, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in a closed session about an opinion article in which he accused U.S. television networks of helping terrorists through the networks' partnerships with al-Jazeera.

The article has sparked concern among committee members and has prompted Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) to pledge to defeat Smith's nomination to be assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

"I have deep concerns about whether or not he should be representing the United States government and the Department of Defense with that kind of attitude and approach," Levin said after yesterday's hearing.

What got Levin's knickers in a twist? Smith wrote this about al-Jazeera and its influence on American media:

In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal in April, Smith wrote: "Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and al Qaeda have a partner in Al-Jazeera and, by extension, most networks in the U.S. This partnership is a powerful tool for the terrorists in the war in Iraq."

Smith also singled out U.S. networks, saying: "Al-Jazeera has very strong partners in the U.S. -- ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and MSNBC. Video aired by Al-Jazeera ends up on these networks, sometimes within minutes."

Does Levin dispute this? The AJ network often shares its video with the American outlets, who then rush to get it on the air. AJ also maintains open contacts with Islamofascist terror groups, a well-known fact and one which usually nets it access to the latest in al-Qaeda propaganda straight from Osama or his number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Smith, in other words, gave an accurate depiction of the flow of information. So what's the problem?

Well, Levin represents Michigan, which has a significant Arab-American and Arab-immigrant population, and al-Jazeera has some credibility in that community. Levin wants to pander for their support, and rather than simply allow Smith to become spokesman for the Pentagon -- a political post that will disappear when Bush leaves office -- he wants to play petty politics instead. All it does is make Levin look ridiculous. He wants to chew up political capital to keep a qualified candidate from talking at a podium? Unbelievable.

Of course, if successful, it means that the Pentagon will need a spokesman. Fortunately, I know someone with experience at that position ...

This should convince Levin to lighten up.

Europe Botching Afghanistan Duties

When we first went into Afghanistan to take out the Taliban, the action had the backing of Europe, which promised its support for the effort and its aftermath. The operation got handed to NATO in a move lauded by the American media as a model of how we should have handled Iraq. Now it appears that NATO has botched the mission, with the various European countries that pledged their support to help build the newly democratic nation reneging on their promises, according to The Scotsman:

BRITAIN is set for a U-turn on its commitment to send thousands of troops to fight in Afghanistan next year, with some in the army now questioning whether the mission should be abandoned altogether.

Military commanders say that lessons have not been learned from the run-up to the Iraq war and that political prevarication has left them unable to make adequate preparation for the mission, which had been expected to involve up to 5,000 troops.

Instead, an additional fighting force of only about 1,000 soldiers - almost certainly paratroops - is expected to be sent to Helmand province, in the south of the country, probably backed up by Apache helicopter gunships.

The US brought NATO in when the UN would not cough up troops, and it did so under pressure from Congress and the media to be less "unilateral" in the war on terror. Without US leadership, however, the entire effort has become "shambolic", as one British officer called it, and those nations that demanded a voice in how the war got waged have walked away from their responsibilities. The Dutch refuse to send their contingent of 1,000 men at all unless the United States provides them with "security", for instance. Does the Netherlands have such a weak fighting force that they cannot deploy without having someone else do the firing for them when challenged? Apparently they do -- but that doesn't keep them from telling us how to wage war, it seems.

How about the Germans? The Germans pledged to train the Afghanistan security forces, a task that started after the fall of th Taliban, well before we started handing over sovereignty to the Iraqis in June 2004. Since that time, the Americans have trained over 200,000 Iraqi security troops, with over 45,000 able to operate independently with American logistical support. They have taken charge of a number of military bases in their own country and hold their own territory against steadily-weakening insurgents. In comparison, the Germans have trained all of 200 police officers since December 2001 -- all of which disappeared in Kabul shortly after their release into the field.

So much for the notion of military leadership by international committee. If America, the Brits, and the Australians assume leadership of the War on Terror, it's because we know how to fight and win it. The uselessness of the biggest complainers in Europe has never been made more clear. It also shows that we took the right path in Iraq and have worked wonders in a very short period of time to get the country and its security back on its own feet -- and that leaving it to others to finish the job will result in disaster.

Paper Of Rumor And Urban Legend

The Confederate Yankee catches the New York Times with its pants down, reprinting rumor as fact and getting caught on a single-sourced story that attempts to discredit the upcoming Iraqi elections. Dexter Filkins reported this morning that trucks inbound from Iran had carried forged ballots for the Iraqi elections with the intention of skewing the results for the Shi'ites:

Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said. ...

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Iranian truck driver told the police under interrogation that at least three other trucks filled with ballots had crossed from Iran at different spots along the border.

The official, who did not attend the interrogation, said he did not know where the driver was headed, or what he intended to do with the ballots.

The seizure of the truck comes at a delicate time in Iran's relations with both Iraq and the United States. The American government has said Iranian agents are deeply involved in trying to influence events in Iraq, by funneling money to Shiite political parties and by arming and training many of the illegal militias that are bedeviling the country.

Now this would be quite a story, if true. The Iranians want to see a Shi'ite-dominated government rise up from the ashes of Saddam's Sunni-led military dictatorship, presumably one that can get warped into a theocracy that would bring the Kurds and the Sunni under their heel. The Kurds feel reasonably autonomous now and probably do not have too many worries about this, but the Sunni -- already suspicious of the Shi'ites and their thirst for revenge -- will be ready to believe the worst. This development could undermine the entire election process and put Sunni intransigence back into high gear ... if it was true.

Well, apparently it isn't, according to Reuters:

The head of Iraq's border guards denied police reports on Wednesday that a tanker truck stuffed with thousands of forged ballot papers had been seized crossing into Iraq from Iran before Thursday's elections.

"This is all a lie," said Lieutenant General Ahmed al-Khafaji, the chief of the U.S.-trained force which has responsibility for all Iraq's borders.

"I heard this yesterday and I checked all the border crossings right away. The borders are all closed anyway," he told Reuters. ... "I contacted all the border crossing points and there was no report of any such incident," Khafaji said. ...

Iraq's frontiers are closed for the period of the election.

Oops! I guess Dexter Filkins and the several layers of editors at the Paper Of Record^TM didn't think to check out the well-reported fact that the roads in and out of Iraq on both the Iranian and Syrian borders had been closed. That makes it pretty difficult for eighteen-wheelers to sneak in and out of the country. They tend to get bogged down in the sand and dirt otherwise, making it hard to put the ballots into the polling places. And how exactly were these tankers supposed to get the ballots into the boxes anyway -- pump them into election stations with a hose? The boxes are watched by election judges and a few thousand outside auditors.

It turns out that Filkins' source either works for the Defense ministry's intelligence unit or passed along a rumor that got sourced from there. Stories based on anonymous, single sources can do tremendous damage, especially to a reporter's reputation and that of his newspaper. Perhaps the Gray Lady should think about that before jumping in with both feet to repeat stupid and easily-debunked urban legends such as these.

Syria: Assassinated MP A 'Dog', Says Israel Runs US

The Syrian regime of Bashar Assad will not comply with any more investigations into a continuing series of political assassinations in Lebanon of anti-Syria politicians, if the reaction of their UN ambassador gives any indication. Speaking in closed session, Fayssal Mekdad compared murdered MP Gibran Tueni to a 'dog' and blamed Israel for the suspicion under which the Assad regime finds itself:

Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Fayssal Mekdad, likened slain Lebanese legislator Gibran Tueni to a dog yesterday and indicated that Israel leads American policy on his country. American and French officials, meanwhile, vowed support for Lebanon, but shied away from pushing for sanctions against Syria in the aftermath of yet another damaging report on that country's role in Lebanon.

America's U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, said he would ensure that international pressure on Syria is "unrelenting." When asked why he did not refer specifically to sanctions, which the U.N. Security Council has decided to employ against individuals involved in the killing of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, he said only, "The council's word is at stake now." Mr. Bolton's words seemed designed to challenge some in the 15-member body who have advocated a softer line on Syria.

Mr. Mekdad blamed Israel for his country's increased isolation and dismissed the Lebanese Cabinet's request to expand the Hariri investigation to probe six other alleged political assassinations. The request came after Monday's bombing in Beirut that left four people dead, including Tueni, an anti-Syrian legislator and journalist. It was endorsed last night in a French proposal for a Security Council resolution.

"So now every time that a dog dies in Beirut there will be an international investigation?" Mr. Mekdad said to an Arab diplomat during a closed-door council session, according to a diplomat who heard the conversation but asked to remain anonymous.

Mr. Mekdad will need to report back to his government that the American and French representatives at the Security Council both back a Lebanese request to expand the Hariri probe to include Tueni's murder -- and that 'dogs' that use car bombs will wind up leaving their paw prints at the door of Bashar Assad. Syria had jollied the US along up to a few months ago, but with the Iraqi elections under way, they know the time has grown short for their regime. Soon the US will have a massive force on the Syrian eastern frontier, free to take action if desired by George Bush to continue prosecuting the war on state-sponsored Islamofascit terror -- and Assad knows that only two major targets still exist for Bush in that conflict. The continued attacks on Lebanon will not just give Bush an extant reason to select Damascus for the next phase, but may finally pull France in as an ally, given French interests in freeing Lebanon from Syria's political and economic grip.

Tick tock, Bashar.

A True World Series And Its Best Possible Ambassador

Baseball has decided to embrace a world vision this year by creating an international tournament of national teams, based loosely on the format used by the Olympics in past years. Instead of those Olympic competitions, which occurred in the middle of the major-league season and wound up as amateur and minor-league tournaments, the World Baseball Classic will feature the best players in the world competing for their native countries -- the US, Japan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Mexico, and others. The venues will be in Japan, Puerto Rico, and the US, with the final games in San Diego's Petco Park.

MLB has selected one of my favorite baseball legends for its ambassador to the first WBC: Tommy Lasorda. As I wrote in a comment on his site, who better to represent the love and passion we Americans have for our national pastime than the Hall of Fame manager who has devoted his entire life to baseball -- especially Dodger baseball? The only regret I have is that the WBC missed an opportunity to hold at least some of its games at Dodger Stadium, still the most beautiful of all MLB ballparks -- and privately financed, I might add. If they had played a couple at Chavez Ravine, I could have at least seen the stadium while I watched the games on television.

Congratulations, Tommy. I know you've wanted to see a true World Series for many years, and this will get us as close as we can get. I think the US will have a tough time making it into the finals against the global competition that we have encouraged for years, but you will remain to remind everyone that the sport has been an American gift to the world.

Has The War Turned The Corner ... At Home?

The blogosphere has long resigned itself to the lack of coverage given by the Exempt Media to positive developments in Iraq. While we have read about increasing enthusiasm for voting on the milblogs and some of the secondary professional media outlets, the market leaders such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post have almost exclusively focused on body counts and bombings while ignoring everything else. When the Gray Lady sees fit to start reporting that even the Sunni of Saddam's hometown have committed themselves to democracy in the upcoming elections, it might indicate that defeatism has finally jumped the shark:

The guerrilla war found fertile ground in Tikrit, and defiant Sunni Arabs boycotted the elections in January.

But turnout in the parliamentary elections on Thursday is expected to be high, reflecting the shift in attitude of many Sunni Arabs toward the American-engineered political process.

"Last January, the elections were quite different than they are now," Wael Ibrahim Ali, 61, the mayor of Tikrit, said as he strode Tuesday along the grounds of the palace where Mr. Hussein used to celebrate his birthdays. "The people refused to vote, and now they see it was a wrong stand or wrong position."

This Sunni-dominated province of Salahuddin had a 29 percent turnout in January, one of the lowest in the country. In the past year, though, Sunni Arabs, who make up a fifth of Iraq's population, realized they had shut themselves out of the transitional government.

While this story appears at the top of the NYT's web version, the links on it indicate that the story ranks 11th out of 16 for the Times' International section -- below such articles as the amazing face-transplant story from France and the de-facto legalization of prostitution in Tijuana, hardly a development at all for the unfortunate border town of Mexico. Still, Edward Wong's piece reveals that the media has now recognized that with the vote underway, their depiction of Iraq as a irretrievable shambles will not long stand up to the coverage coming this week.

In this case, even the soul of Saddam's support base, Tikrit, has prepared for life in a democratic Iraq. They have a good political motivation for their efforts, of course; their earlier boycott left them to the tender mercies of the Kurds and the Shi'ites over whom they once ruled with Saddam's iron fist. After spending a year chafing miserably with almost no one representing them in the interim Assembly, the last thing any of them want is four more years of disenfranchisement. They will turn out in droves this week to the polls for the simplest of reasons, and the one that makes democracy work in any pluralistic society: self-interest.

It doesn't mean that they don't miss the old days of favor under the dictator in Tikrit, but they do recognize that those days will not return. Now they hold their election with politicians promising to push for better security in order to "end the occupation", a sentiment that the Coalition would not dispute. Their embrace of the ballot over the bullet will create an expectation that their politicians must follow through on their promises or be held accountable, and even the Sunni of Tikrit might learn to appreciate their ability to influence policy much more directly, and debate it much more openly, than when Tikrit's most notorious son utterly dominated Iraqi politics for over three decades.

The Sunni participation puts the last of the building blocks in place for the establishment of a consensus democratic republic. The reporting of the Times indicates that the American media might finally start recognizing what will shortly become obvious to all whether they do so or not: that a free Iraq exists, thanks to an administration that steadfastly refused to listen to the Chicken Littles of the opposition and the whiners of the Exempt Media at home. The war may finally have turned the corner in the only place it could be lost -- here in America.

CQ On The Air Tonight

I'll be on the air with Rob Breckenridge in a few minutes at CHQR, the Calgary radio station that has often been kind enough to invite me on their show. I hope you can listen in on their Internet stream -- and check out Rob on a regular basis.

UPDATE: Sorry for the short notice, folks -- but I had a series of appointments and couldn't post this until just before air time. We talked about Stanley Williams and his execution, and Rob gave me plenty of time to discuss it with his audience. Calgary has a fine show in The World Tonight -- I hope that more people discover it through their website.

Has Abbas Gotten Serious?

The Palestinian Authority has done something remarkable the past few days; they have arrested dozens of islamic Jihad operatives in response to attacks on Israel, a unique demonstration of authority that PA president Mahmoud Abbas had long avoided:

Masked Palestinian security forces have arrested dozens of Islamic Jihad activists in a series of overnight raids across the West Bank in recent days — an operation the Palestinian Authority says is aimed at bringing those behind attacks on Israel to justice.

However, the biggest crackdown on militants since Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas took office a year ago has netted only low-level operatives, and some suspect the goal is to appease the United States and Israel rather than crush the militant group.

At the same time, analysts and Israeli security officials said the arrests have sent an important message to the Palestinians — and Israelis — that militant groups can no longer operate with impunity.

"It is a symbolic way to tell everybody, 'I am serious,'" said Israeli security analyst Boaz Ganor.

Has Abbas finally gotten the message from Israel and the US that his continued defiance of his obligations to disarm the militias made him and the PA irrelevant in future negotiations? Perhaps. With Ariel Sharon moving ahead with his unilateral securing of Israel and redefinition of the borders between the West Bank and Israel proper -- including Jerusalem -- Abbas could watch the doors close on his opportunity to influence the literal parameters of his proto-state as well as the figurative parameters of peace. The US has made clear that we would prefer to negotiate these points with a serious partner for peace from the Palestinian side -- but that so far, we haven't found one.

Islamic Jihad gives Abbas the safest route to pick up some sorely needed credibility. They have the most radically Islamist philosophy and have the lowest political backing in the territories. Even so, it looks like Abbas has carefully picked his detainees to ensure that he doesn't overly anger IJ commanders -- who I suspect will see their street thugs back under their command soon enough anyway. Abbas doesn't have the juice to go after Hamas, whose political popularity probably surpasses his own Fatah faction and would touch off a civil war.

Can Abbas play this game for long? Unfortunately for him, no. The Palestinians have made it clear that they do not want peace with their neighbor -- they want a war of annihilation, and Hamas and IJ give them that chance. Abbas' only hope is to make a deal quickly with the Israelis and the US and hope it's good enough to convince ordinary Palestinians to change their minds. Otherwise, one way or the other, Abbas will shortly be out and the war will be back on again.

A Prosecutor's Rebuttal

My posts on the Stanley Williams execution and my opposition to the death penalty has generated a number of comments and e-mails. One e-mail comes from a prosecutor who wrote such a good argument that it deserves a wider exposure, even though he disagrees with my position. I suspect it speaks for a number of CQ readers.

I'm a big fan of yours, and I read your blog daily. As a prosecutor in Los Angeles, I appreciated your comments today regarding the disgusting glorification cum martyrdom of Tookie Williams, particularly as you are personally opposed to the death penalty.

I'm not a good enough theologian to even try to convince you of the moral propriety of the death penalty, but I would like to take a stab at the LWOP argument. It seems to me that it isn't enough to say that the people of California could have simply chosen to keep a killer like Tookie locked up forever. Getting rid of the death penalty means that we have to also consider the foreseeable consequences of guaranteeing criminals that they can kill as many innocent people as they want, for whatever reason at all, without even facing the theoretical possibility of placing their own lives at risk.

A few examples to make my point: Suppose we have a career criminal with a long record of violent felonies, what we in California would call a "three-striker", who knows that he will be sent to prison for the rest of his life if he is ever caught committing a new offense. When he goes to rob the local convenience store, he doesn't want to hurt anyone - he just wants the money. But he also knows that, as there is no death penalty, he will face the exact same punishment (life imprisonment) whether or not he kills the clerk, the only witness to his crime. He would be a fool not to do so. If he happens to bump into a police officer on the way out, he may as well kill him too - there is no extra charge, so to speak.

If we somehow manage to catch the "three-striker" and place him on trial, it will be in his best interest to sabatoge his own trial by killling witnesses, jurors, prosecutors or judges. After all, if we can't convict him, he goes free. (Remember that scene from the movie Traffic, where the druglord walks?) And even if we manage to successfully prosecute him for one of these new murders, he will still only face the same life sentence that he was sure to get in the first place.

If we do manage to put a murderer like Tookie away for life, he can then kill anyone he wants to - inside or out of prison - with complete impunity. What are we going to do to him - give him two life terms? In California, we presently have something like 30,000 inmates serving life terms (29,999 as of 12:01 AM!) Most of them have little or no prospect of ever being paroled. I would not like to be there on the day that they are told that they have been given a license to kill.

In short, we can be unreasonably tolerant in granting appeals and delays which put off the actual day of reckoning for decades or more (in California, were looking at about a 25-year process), but I cannot see how we can get rid of capital punishment altogether without creating powerful incentives for criminals to commit murders that they would otherwise not do. I would not want to be the legislator who had to explain to a prison guard's widow that we knew that we had created a system of justice that refused to set any punishment for the lifer inmate who killed her husband. I take these situations, where potential killers are facing or already serving life sentences, to be the "rare or practically non-existent" cases for which the Catholic Catechism permits the use of the death penalty.

CQ reader Jeff Norris also sends this link by e-mail from The Atlantic Monthly, which covers a Brookings Institute study that surprisingly finds that each execution deters eighteen potential murders:

Support for capital punishment is, of course, usually associated with the political right. But the lead author of a new paper making what might be termed the "big government" case for the death penalty is the noted liberal scholar Cass Sunstein. The paper draws in part on a study conducted at Emory University, which found a direct association between the reauthorization of the death penalty, in 1977, and reduced homicide rates. The Emory researchers' "conservative estimate" was that on average, every execution deters eighteen murders. Sunstein and his co-author argue that this calculus makes the death penalty not just morally licit but morally required. A government that fails to make use of it, they write, is effectively condemning large numbers of its citizens to death—a sin of omission like failing to protect the environment or to provide adequate health care. "If each execution is saving many lives," they conclude, "the harms of capital punishment would have to be very great to justify its abolition, far greater than most critics have heretofore alleged."

Peeking Out Of Putin's Pocket

Gerhard Schroeder lashed out at his critics yesterday after accepting a cushy job with the Russian state=owned oil company Gazprom just weeks after approving a major project while still Chancellor. He threatened to sue anyone accusing him of "sleaze", while new Chancellor Angela Merkel says she wants a debate on a code of conduct for politicians re-entering the marketplace:

In remarks made to the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, Mr Schroeder says the allegations against him are "nonsense" and announces that he is taking legal action - although he does not give any details about this.

Mr Schroeder and President Putin signed the deal to build the gas pipeline underneath the Baltic Sea 10 days before the general election in September - earlier than originally planned.

Politicians and the media have suggested there was a conflict of interest, with Mr Schroeder allegedly feathering his nest while acting in a public capacity. "Schroeder ruins his reputation" was one front-page headline on Tuesday. But Mr Schroeder said he was only offered the job on Friday last week, the same day that his appointment was announced.

And if anyone believes that, Honest Ger has a bridge he can sell you over the Rhine.

Even if Schroeder can be taken at face value here and we buy the notion that his résumé just happened to get to Gazprom through Monster.com, the fact that a former Chancellor of Germany airily dismissed an opportunity to take over a ministry in a unity government to lick the boots of Vladimir Putin has to appall ordinary Germans.

At least, we hope it does. The Germans certainly deserve better than this.

The Last Hours Of Tookie

Stanley "Tookie" Williams has run out of options for avoiding his long-delayed execution, having lost both his bid for clemency and his final appeal to the US Supreme Court this evening. Retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor likely got the call, as the 9th Circuit comes under her jurisdiction, which might cool the ardor for her from the Judiciary Committee Democrats at the Alito hearings next month, but really means nothing much at all. Since no one had any significant new arguments to present on Williams' behalf -- supposedly one witness surfaced after over a quarter-century that might have had something to say about one of the four murders that put him on Death Row -- the only hope Tookie had was clemency, and the Governator terminated that possibility earlier in the day:

Schwarzenegger said he was unconvinced that Williams had had a change of heart, and he was unswayed by pleas from Hollywood stars and capital punishment foes who said the inmate had made amends by writing children’s books about the dangers of gangs.

“Is Williams’ redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?” Schwarzenegger wrote less than 12 hours before the execution. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption.”

He added: “The facts do not justify overturning the jury’s verdict or the decisions of the courts in this case.”

Again, I oppose the death penalty, primarily on two grounds: religious and practicality. I don't think the state should take a life unless the person represents a present threat to the safety and security of the public, or a threat to the national security of the US or our allies. I also don't think that the death penalty saves us any money, and needlessly clogs our appellate courts with frivolous motions and delaying tactics. When we have the person locked up, he should stay locked up -- and I mean locked up for good, and none of the Club Fed treatment, either. Three hots and a cot, and anything else depends on how well the prisoner behaves. That to me settles the entire case in a relatively expeditious manner without having twenty years of legal motions keeping the case alive.

So why am I not up in arms about Tookie? As I wrote earlier, the people of California decided that they do want the death penalty. It has withstood challenges from political opponents because it has a bipartisan appeal to Californians, with some estimates as high as 70%. One day, perhaps, they will change their mind and commute the sentences of people like Williams to LWOP. Until then, the people deserve to get the justice they've chosen.

More than that, however, I'm disgusted by the actions of the celebro-activists that continually degrade the anti-execution cause by attempting to transform murderous thugs like Tookie Williams into misunderstood geniuses who deserve special consideration after murdering people in cold blood. Tookie executed his victims brutally and without a hint of compassion. To this day, he has not shown any remorse for the crimes which got him on Death Row. Instead of remembering the victims, the Hollywood moral midgetry has once again decided that the criminal is their hero -- and it appalls me even though I disagree with his execution.

Tookie Williams spent his life victimizing his community, creating criminal gangs that would kill thousands in turf wars, and brutalizing the defenseless, taking at least four lives by his own hand that could have contributed meaningfully and positively to the community. For that track record, he deserves to spend the rest of his life in a small cell contemplating how he wasted his own life and others. Perhaps he might truly repent at some point, although he obviously hasn't now. However, for that list of crimes, the only redemption can be found in the next life, not here -- and certainly co-authoring a few "Just Say No To Gangs" kids' books weighs pretty lightly against the maelstrom of destruction for which Tookie is responsible.

If the celebrities want to do something about the death penalty, I'd suggest trying to convince Californians that LWOP means no release, ever, under any circumstances except innocence. They could start by ending their peculiar practice of promoting the murderers as heroes and ignoring their victims. Once the public no longer has to listen to ridiculous arguments about the brilliance and courage of people who shoot helpless victims in the back and can focus on the issues of the death penalty itself, then perhaps we can convince people that we can live without executions and all the lunacy they entail.

UPDATE: Baldilocks has a must-read post on this from the Ground Zero Tookie helped to create:

Leaving aside those who oppose the death penalty for moral/religious reasons, few of you have seemed motivated to move into my South Central LA neighborhood to see what “Tookie” and his Crip co-founder Raymond Lee Washington (who’s burning in Hell right now) have wrought for the last thirty-odd years. And I know that you won’t be choosing to live here anytime soon. That’s understandable; however, don’t tell me that we should coddle these TERRORISTS like “Tookie” and those he created if you don’t have to put up with them. (Okay, you can tell me, but you can expect a barely polite response and that’s if I’m feeling generous.)

Secondly—and this is especially for people like Jeremy: black people are thinking, functioning humans who, when adult and without some actual mental deficiency that they can’t control, are just as responsible for their actions as are members of any other race of people. We’re not murderers by nature (that is, any more than any other set of humans are). Therefore, we don’t need a separate, lower standard of behavior in any area, whether it’s education, employment or criminal justice.

When black people do well, they deserve recognition; when they do wrong, they deserve the consequences—no more or no less than any other.

Read the rest; the target of her ire is a 19-year-old clueless commenter, but it might just as well be the celebrities that have elevated Tookie to martyr status. Also check out the Anchoress, whose angst at her indecision on the death penalty results in some fine introspection.

About The Ad ...

I have received a few e-mails objecting to the MS-NBC ad running in the Premium strip, asking me why I approved the graphic and/or why I don't cancel it. It's a fair question, and I'll throw the comments open for debate on the topic.

First, on the ad itself, the graphic shows the outline of a female torso and the word "Porn". I don't find the outline objectionable; I've seen bra ads that reveal much more. In fact, the ad just above it features a woman modeling an anti-ACLU T-shirt that has more curve (and a much more realistic image), and yet I don't consider that objectionable either. The word "porn" has appeared on this blog in the context of discussion and debate; I don't shy away from it, although sometimes I spell it "p0rn" to keep the Googlebots from delivering me fresh readership under false pretenses.

MS-NBC has made an initial ad buy with Henry Copeland of BlogAds that could assist him in opening up blog advertising to Fortune 500 companies on a regular basis. As a client of BlogAds, that means a larger and more lucrative advertising market for CQ and a better opportunity to expand the work I do here as a result. We were warned ahead of time on the MS-NBC ad, told that it would be as tasteful as possible but would probably still generate some controversy, and given the opportunity to opt out. I felt that as long as we didn't display realistic nudity, it would not create a serious problem.

The ad itself is due to rotate out either tonight or tomorrow, I believe, in favor of another topic altogether. In the meantime, if any CQ readers find the image offensive, I understand your feelings. However, I don't agree, and I hope that those who disagree with me can respect that as much as I respect their differing opinions.

The comments section is now open for the debate ...

Salon's Commitment To Freedom As Constant As Wind Direction

Earlier in the Captain's Quarters archives, I wrote about the threshold of democracy in relation to Afghanistan. The measure of a democrat, I wrote, isn't whether he supports the results when he wins, but when he loses. Until one accepts the results of elections even when they go against their wishes, they do not practice democracy but hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy oozes from Salon's latest effort from Cary Tennis, and the magazine itself should explain the reason for their continued presentation of Tennis. Not only does his latest "advice" show him as a pseudo-democrat, but singularly lacking in basic understanding of the American political system:

At a certain point in the near future, if the current oligarchy cannot be removed via the ballot, direct political action may become an urgent and compelling mission. It may then be necessary for many people in many walks of life to put their bodies on the line. For the moment, however, although pressing and profound questions have arisen about whether the current government is even legitimate, i.e., properly elected, there still remains a chance to remove this government peacefully in the 2008 election. (Or am I living in a dream world?)

I do think this regime's removal is the most urgent matter before the country today. And I do think that at a certain point the achievement of that goal might take precedence over our personal predilections for writing, teaching and the like. We might be called upon to go on general strike, for instance. We might be called upon to set up camp in the streets for weeks or months, to gather and remain in large public squares as the students in Tiananmen Square did, and dare government forces to remove us or to slaughter us in the streets.

This is all terrible and rather fantastic to contemplate. But what assurances have we that it is not all quite plausible? Having discarded the principles that Jefferson & Co. espoused, the current regime seems capable of anything. I know that my imagination is a feverish instrument. But are we not living in feverish times, in times of the unthinkable?

First, let me state the obvious. George Bush and his "regime" will be out the door on January 20, 2009. Bush cannot run for a third term in office, and Dick Cheney is as likely to run as he is to get elected -- in other words, almost no chance at all. Even middle-school students know that Presidents can only serve two terms. Tennis' vapidity demonstrates that he knows less about the topic than most children, a reality that reflects on Salon's continued publication of Tennis.

Second, if the opposition party had fielded a candidate that appealed to more voters than Bush in 2004, he wouldn't be President now. They had ample opportunity to select a presidential hopeful from a wide range of candidates, including Joe Lieberman, who I think could have beaten Bush. Instead, the radical wing of the Democrats first tried pushing Howard Dean, and when that failed rallied behind John Kerry, who perhaps embodied the worst of the Democratic field in 2004. Vacillating and arrogant, Kerry never appealed to any other instinct except not being George Bush. Negations don't win presidential elections in America -- never have, and likely never will. Blame Democrats for choosing poorly.

The level of hostility towards democratic choice by Tennis boggles the mind. In his piece, he openly endorses violence against the duly elected government as a rational option when elections don't go his way. Does Salon endorse that view? Do their advertisers, such as NY Times Select, the History Channel, and United Airlines?

Salon should be ashamed to have published this dreck, and owes an explanation and an apology to its readers. (h/t: Instapundit)

The Eighty Percent Lie

A new poll by ABC/Time shows that the Iraqi polling numbers tossed around by Democrats for the past month in defense of their cut-and-run "strategy" were bald-faced lies. The Oxford study underwritten by the network and news magazine determined that not only has Iraqi optimism increased dramatically throughout 2005, more than half of those polled believe that the US should stay in Iraq until Iraqi security services have been fully trained:

An ABC News poll in Iraq, conducted with Time magazine and other media partners, includes some remarkable results: Despite the daily violence there, most living conditions are rated positively, seven in 10 Iraqis say their own lives are going well, and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve in the year ahead.

Surprisingly, given the insurgents' attacks on Iraqi civilians, more than six in 10 Iraqis feel very safe in their own neighborhoods, up sharply from just 40 percent in a poll in June 2004. And 61 percent say local security is good — up from 49 percent in the first ABC News poll in Iraq in February 2004.

Nonetheless, nationally, security is seen as the most pressing problem by far; 57 percent identify it as the country's top priority. Economic improvements are helping the public mood.

Average household incomes have soared by 60 percent in the last 20 months (to $263 a month), 70 percent of Iraqis rate their own economic situation positively, and consumer goods are sweeping the country. In early 2004, 6 percent of Iraqi households had cell phones; now it's 62 percent. Ownership of satellite dishes has nearly tripled, and many more families now own air conditioners (58 percent, up from 44 percent), cars, washing machines and kitchen appliances.

There are positive political signs as well. Three-quarters of Iraqis express confidence in the national elections being held this week, 70 percent approve of the new constitution, and 70 percent — including most people in Sunni and Shiite areas alike — want Iraq to remain a unified country. ... Preference for a democratic political structure has advanced, to 57 percent of Iraqis, while support for an Islamic state has lost ground, to 14 percent (the rest, 26 percent, chiefly in Sunni Arab areas, favor a "single strong leader.")

This looks like the progress that Joe Lieberman mentioned when he returned from his last visit from Iraq and tried to explain to his colleagues that preaching disaster and falling skies simply didn't match reality. Another point also demonstrates the lies that Democrats have used in trying to scare the American public into losing the war. It turns out that 80% of Iraqis don't want the Americans out "right now", but only 26%. In fact, 52% want the US to leave no sooner than when their army and security forces have received adequate training to handle internal and external threats by themselves -- which is exactly what the Bush administration plan requires.

Will we see Jack Murtha apologize for using bogus numbers provided from biased sources? Highly doubtful. Instead, I predict that Murtha will continue to spout the obviously bad survey numbers as he clings to the remnants of his national relevance, and that the Democrats try to bury these new numbers as soon as possible.

The Incredible Lightness Of Being Hillary

The Washingtom Post reports today on the missing 800-lb gorilla in the national debate on the Iraq War. Hillary Clinton has largely made herself AWOL from the debate, testing various formulations of vague anti-Bush criticisms without tipping over into anti-war rhetoric. That has led to criticism from both liberals and conservatives and left most wondering exactly where she stands on the war and the strategy needed. Hillary, however, isn't talking about it:

At a time when politicians in both parties have eagerly sought public forums to debate the war in Iraq, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has kept in the shadows.

Clinton has stayed steadfastly on a centrist path, criticizing President Bush but refusing to embrace the early troop withdrawal options that are gaining rapid favor in her party. This careful balance is drawing increasing scorn from liberal activists, frustrated that one of the party's leading lights has shown little appetite to challenge Bush's policy more directly and embrace a plan to set a timetable for bringing U.S. forces home.

Clinton is confronting the Democratic Party's long-standing dilemma on national defense, with those harboring national ambitions caught between the passions of the antiwar left and political concerns that they remain vulnerable to charges of weakness from the Republicans if they embrace the party's base. But some Democrats say, the left not withstanding, her refusal to advocate a speedy exit from Iraq may reflect a more accurate reading of public anxiety about the choices now facing the country.

In truth, Clinton is doing nothing of the kind. She's keeping her mouth shut as much as she can on the topic in order to avoid getting drawn into the battle -- a kind of political cowardice that will likely backfire on her in 2008. She hasn't confronted anything or anyone, at least not in the way that Joe Lieberman has, and to a lesser extent Steny Hoyer. Those two have attempted to resurrect the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, taking a realistic view of the progress in Iraq and recognizing the stakes involved.

Lieberman hasn't gone in for the "if I knew then what I know now" ploy that Kerry and others have used over the past two years. First, as everyone saw from the results of the 2004 elections, that dog doesn't hunt. In 1998, safely part of a Democratic majority, all of these people voted to make regime change in Iraq the official US policy and used not just WMD but Saddam's genocide, oppression of his people, and the promise of change that democracy would bring as reasons for their vote. Hillary's husband signed it into law. The only two things that changed since 1998 was that the Republicans took over the government and, after 9/11 and the realization that threats couldn't fester into imminence before taking action, demanded that Saddam meet the terms of the cease-fire and his international obligations -- and then implemented what had been US policy for five years.

Lieberman says he'd still vote for that action, regardless, because the world is better off without Saddam in power in the Middle East. The counter argument inevitably leads back to arguing for Saddam's continued rule in Iraq, in continued defiance of his obligations. Hillary has nothing to say on that topic. "Confronting"? What a laugh! She's busy retreating, pulling her own version of a cut-and-run in order to save her own political skin -- and her allies and opponents have all begun to realize it.

If she has a plan for Iraq, this is the moment to offer it, because events are about to overtake the Democrats very quickly. The voting for the new, constitutional National Assembly has already started. The insurgencies have started to fall apart, struggling against each other while both lose relevance in an Iraq where even the Sunnis have begun to embrace the ballot over the bullet. By 2008, the only perspective will be retrospect, and Hillary's subterranean record will not provide much opportunity for "told you so" in either direction. Kerry, Dean, Pelosi, and others will be discredited -- but only the Liebermans and the Hoyers will reap the benefits. The debate dodgers will have little or no credibility and will have exposed themselves as singularly lacking in leadership when their party most needed it.

Hillary, in other words, exposes herself as a lightweight. If she doesn't want to talk about policy, then her only reason for being in politics is sheer greed for power. Democrats should remember that, both in 2006 and in 2008.

UPDATE: "regime change in" Iraq, not Iran. Thanks, Blank:NoOne for catching that. (Note to self: find eyeglasses before posting.)

Did Syria Notch Another Murder On Its Guns?

Another anti-Syrian Lebanese politician died in a car-bomb attack this morning, a day after the UN heard the latest report on the last victim of Syrian assassination, Rafik Hariri. The circumstances provide an eerie sense of deja vu in the case of this journalist-turned-MP:

Gebran Tueni, a prominent politician and journalist, was among those killed in a car bomb attack in Lebanon, police have said.

Mr Teuni's armoured SUV car exploded as it was driving through the mainly Christian Mekalis area of east Beirut.

Three other people also died and 10 were wounded in the blast.

Mr Tueni, 48, was a well-known journalist and fierce critic of Syria. He was elected to parliament in this year's election.

Tueni had only just returned to Lebanon from Paris, where he had published his anti-Syrian newspaper in hiding from Assad's security forces. The 48-year-old journalist had been back in his native country for just hours when the bomber struck. His newspaper, An-Nahar, lost another reporter in June to a car bomb in Lebanon as well, Samir Kassir.

That sounds like a long string of coincidences -- or a pattern which points in only one direction: Damascus.

In yet another "coincidence", UN investigator Detlev Mehlis presented his latest interim report on the murder of Hariri to Kofi Annan. The BBC reports that it confirms Syrian government involvement and includes "concrete evidence" implicating high-ranking officials in the Assad regime. The UN should release that report shortly, although this time I suspect someone will take the time to convert it to a PDF rather than leave it in Word format. It will demonstrate a pattern of arrogance and oppression that Assad could not abandon when he retreated from Lebanon in the face of American and French ultimata.

The Syrians must pay for their transgressions in Lebanon. Clearly, the threat of further UN investigations has not terrified them into stopping their assassinations of hostile Lebanese politicians. The Americans and the French must demand a complete withdrawal by the Assad regime of both Lebanon and Iraq of Syrian intelligence personnel immediately. Any failure to comply should be met with a couple of shots across the bow -- perhaps a nighttime air raid that takes out the Syrian air force as a starting point, just to get Assad's attention. It's time to start looking at the next state sponsor of Islamist terrorism and clearly a direct actor in international terror themselves.

Liberals: Poor Parents Are Drunks

So much for the Liberal concern for the poor and downtrodden. Liberal Party leader Paul Martin will have a lot of explaining to do about comments made earlier by two of his aides on the Tory plan to give cash back to families for child care expenses. Trying to discredit Stephen Harper's new initiative for child-care tax credits, Martin aides Scott Reid and John Duffy told Canadian television viewers that the money would probably go for beer and popcorn instead of child care:

The federal Liberals scrambled Sunday to control the damage from their first serious gaffe of the election campaign after a top aide to Paul Martin suggested Canadian parents could blow any extra child-care money they get from Ottawa on beer and popcorn. ...

The Conservatives would provide tax credits worth $250 million a year over five years to private companies and non-profit day-care operators. But the centrepiece of their program would be to pay parents annual allowances of $1,200 per child under age six.

That money could be used to pay for child care, but Reid noted there's no guarantee that would be the case. "Working families need care that's regulated, safe and secure," he said. "Don't give people 25 bucks (a week) to blow on beer and popcorn. Give them child care spaces that work."

Duffy saw nothing wrong with the comment - and in fact repeated Reid's assessment and stretched the reasoning a little further. "'There is nothing to stop people from spending (the Tory cash allowance) on beer or popcorn or a coat or a car or anything," he said.

Canadians might be shocked to hear the Liberals assume that poor and working-class people would rather spend money on beer and popcorn than care for their children. However, conservatives of all stripes understand that leftists naturally assume that everyone except the anointed few have no ability to run their own lives, making regulation necessary so that government makes all the decisions for these poor, benighted folks. Rarely do liberals -- or Liberals -- come right out and say this as Reid and Duffy did today. It gives a rare honest look into the paternalistic nonsense that modern liberalism espouses, if usually a bit more smoothly than this.

Martin, who has to explain Adscam and now a burgeoning scandal involving possible insider trading benefitting a friend's income trust company, can add this foolishness to the baggage his desperate party has put on itself this election season. He tried to express his confidence in the ability of Canadians to make the right choices to adequately care for their own children, but whan a party leader has to come out and actually explicitly make that statement, it's not a good harbinger for the rest of their electoral season.

CQ Reader Gets His Eagle

Many of our CQ community come from a younger demographic than I sometimes imagine. Although I have been interested in politics since Watergate, when I was ten years old, most people don't start finding politics and policy debate very exciting until they have gone through at least an election or two as a voter. As you may imagine, I'm always pleased to hear that young men and women in high school and college follow CQ and other blogs, keeping up with the latest in politics.

One of our regular readers, Sean Skelton, has also had time to be active in the Boy Scouts of America, serving his local community as well as participating in ours. I heard from his family that Sean has passed his final BSA review and will shortly receive his Eagle Scout award. As a former Scout myself -- one who only made it to First Class before getting involved in other extracurricular activities -- I know how hard one has to work to achieve the ultimate rank in the Scouts. Not only must the Scout win a significant number of merit badges, but he must perform three community-service projects. Only after that and a review of his work will the BSA grant the rank of Eagle. Needless to say, not many make it, but those that do invariably are a credit to their families and their community, all of whom benefit from such a fine young man.

Congratulations, Sean, and be sure to send us a picture of your ceremony.

Native Terrorists Warn Zarqawi: Back Down For Elections

The London Telegraph reports that the Iraqi "insurgencies" may come to loggerheads this week when the Iraqis go to the polls. The native Iraqis have made it clear to the Zarqawi faction that they intend to provide a clear road for Sunni voters to cast their votes and get the representation they need in the new, regular National Assembly:

Iraqi insurgents have signalled a major shift on January's parliamentary elections, urging Sunni Arabs to vote and warning al-Qa'eda militants not to attack polling stations. Ba'athist loyalists boycotted Iraq's last set of elections and intimidated would-be voters out of participation.

Now guerrillas in the volatile Anbar province say they are prepared to protect voting stations from al-Qa'eda fighters.

Ali Mahmoud, a former army officer and rocket specialist under Saddam's Ba'ath party, said: "We want to see a nationalist government that will have a balance of interests. So our Sunni brothers will be safe when they vote."

The rhetoric sounds even tougher than one would imagine between competing factions of an effort with the same primary goal -- to remove the Americans from Iraq by scaring them out of the country, a tactic that so far has only been effective against the Democratic Party leadership. One of the former Ba'athist leaders of the Saddamite remnants has openly called Zarqawi an "American, Israeli and Iranian agent who is trying to keep our country unstable so that the Sunnis will keep facing occupation". It doesn't sound like the Iraqis who went underground have appreciated Zarqawi's attempts to exchange one foreign occupation with another foreign tyranny.

It demonstrates that the Iraqis, even the Sunnis, have begun to understand the importance of the upcoming elections and the fact that Americans won't leave until the country has been secured for democracy. They're not ready to turn in their weapons yet, but a strong showing for the Sunnis at the ballot box might result in a deal for the native Iraqi insurgency to turn in their weapons to the new Iraqi Army. That will place even more pressure on the Zarqawi network to give up and get out.

It's beginning to look a lot more like victory -- everywhere but in Howard Dean's office and the American media, which continues to ignore these developments.

Biggest. Anticlimax. Ever.

New York Times Magazine, according to Editor & Publisher, had a report on the blogosphere that would create a storm of controversy. The Michael Crowley report would show that while liberal blogs outnumbered and in some cases outdraw conservative bloggers, the right side has more effect on politics because of the nexus of talk radio and Drudge.

As it turns out, that's all Crowley had to say. He should sue E&P for lifting his entire 283-word article for their 360-word description of it. Crowley offers no support, no research, not even a hyperlink to the two bloggers he mentions in his threadbare blurb. As for his central assertion -- that conservatives have superior message discipline because of orders received on high from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Drudge -- Michelle Malkin takes that down with a series of of references to high-tension debates on the right this year, primarily the abortive Harriet Miers nomination earlier this fall.

If any one article proved how out of touch the Exempt Media truly is regarding the blogosphere, Crowley's is it. And if E&P wanted to demonstrate that its reputation for news analysis is vastly overblown, they've managed to do it here.

Bill Frist, Post-Spine Transplant

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist warned Democrats today that any attempt to filibuster the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court would result in the Byrd Option, which would strip the minority of the filibuster tool permanently for confirmations on appellate-court nominations. His statement gives the strongest indication yet that the GOP has counted heads and determined that enough Senators will back the rules change to make it a reality:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Sunday he is prepared to strip Democrats of their to ability to filibuster if they try to stall Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court.

"The answer is yes," Frist said when asked if he would act to change Senate procedures to restrict a Democratic filibuster. "Supreme Court justice nominees deserve an up-or-down vote, and it would be absolutely wrong to deny him that."

In recent weeks, Senate Democrats have questioned whether Alito, a federal appeals court judge, has the proper judicial temperament and ideology to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Several Democrats have said that Alito's views on issues such as voting rights and abortion could provoke a filibuster unless he allays their concerns about his commitment to civil rights. Alito's confirmation hearings begin Jan. 9 in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Alito has had his share of abuse come at him from the media over the past two months, most of it written out of whole cloth by axe-grinding "journalists" who fail to do even a minimum of research before publishing their opinion as fact. The latest and perhaps most egregious example came from Knight-Ridder's Stephen Henderson, who claimed that he could not find a ruling in a discrimination case in which Alito ruled for an African-American woman. Hugh Hewitt spent thirty minutes checking a law-system database and came up with three examples proving Henderson wrong.

The sound and fury coming from Democrats on Alito has been so hypocritical that the removal of the filibuster will seem like an anticlimax, a way to keep them from gumming up the works and one less opportunity to embarrass themselves. Democrats confirmed Alito to a seat on the federal appellate court fifteen years ago without demanding to review every scrap of paper from the Reagan Administration; back then, they seemed less interested in partisan bickering than fulfilling the traditional role of the Senate in confirming qualified nominees. Now that Alito has fifteen years of judicial experience on the bench, what do the Democrats want to review -- his hundreds of written opinions or thousands of decisions on the bench? No -- now they want all the Reagan-era privileged communications as a way to evaluate him as a judge.

It's a moronic approach on its face. The Democrats should be embarrassed to employ it, but if they do, then the GOP will be happy to restrict the debate that it creates and take away the one point of leverage that the Democrats still have in case John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves the court during Bush's term. Does anyone really think the Democrats are foolish enough to risk that? I certainly didn't -- but that analysis relies on Democrats acting rationally, an assumption that may give them too much credit these days, considering their current leadership.