The Chicago Tribune reports that a fire science expert retained by the State of Texas has concluded that there was no evidence of Arson in the December 1991 fire that killed Cameron Todd Willingham’s three children. Willingham was convicted of murder and was executed in 2004.

In a withering critique, a nationally known fire scientist has told a state commission on forensics that Texas fire investigators had no basis to rule a deadly house fire was an arson — a finding that led to the murder conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.

The finding comes in the first state-sanctioned review of an execution in Texas, home to the country’s busiest death chamber. If the commission reaches the same conclusion, it could lead to the first-ever declaration by an official state body that an inmate was wrongly executed.

Indeed, the report concludes there was no evidence to determine that the December 1991 fire was even set, and it leaves open the possibility the blaze that killed three children was an accident and there was no crime at all — the same findings found in a Chicago Tribune investigation of the case published in December 2004.

Willingham, the father of those children, was executed in February 2004. He protested his innocence to the end.

[...]

Over the past five years, the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation’s top fire scientists — first for the Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson.

There are two questions that remain now: (1) Will the Texas Forensic Science Commission rule that Texas executed an innocent man? I’m not sure. (2) If it does, will Texas do anything to reform its criminal justice system in response? My guess is: probably not. But I can always hope…

…we have a legal system, and to the extent that it delivers a just outcome is not something inherent in the system. To see why this is so, read this rather distubring article by Radley Balko over at Reason.com. Be advised the accompanying video and pictures are graphic and not pleasant. Here is a teaser,

For most of the last 20 years, doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West have served as expert forensic witnesses for the state of Mississippi. Until 2008, Hayne served as the de facto state medical examiner, dominating a criminal autopsy market in which prosecutors contract out examinations to favored private doctors. West, a dentist, served one term as the elected coroner in Forest County, Mississippi in the 1990s and partly through his work with Hayne became a popular bite-mark examiner among prosecutors.

[...]

When asked how abrasions on Oliveaux’s cheek not present when the video begins could later appear, Bowers answered, “Because Dr. West created them. It was intentional. He’s creating artificial abrasions in that video, and he’s tampering with the evidence. It’s criminal, regardless of what excuse he may come up with about his methods.”

Read the whole thing.

Via the LAT: Apparent suicide in anthrax case

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

The story notes that there was some suspicion about Ivins’ statements about alleged decontamination of anthrax spores.

The former official told The Times that Ivins might have hedged regarding reswabbing out of fear that investigators would find more of the spores inside or near his office.

The article also notes:

The family’s home is 198 miles — about a 3 1/2 -hour drive — from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., where anthrax spores were found by investigators.

All of the recovered anthrax letters were postmarked in that vicinity.

The article does directly state, however, that Ivins was going to be arrested for the attacks themselves. I am not sure if that is the result of obtuse writing by the reporter, or hedging based on a lack of full knowledge.

I think that it would be extremely helpful to know exactly what happened with those attacks, as it would help us flesh out how to understand those attacks in the broader war on terror discussion. Indeed, I blame those anthrax attacks, so soon after 9/11 (see this LAT piece for a refresher), for helping to fully catapult the nation into the direction of believing that we really were set to face repeated terrorist attacks from abroad onto the United States itself. Certainly it was one of the pieces of evidence that convinced me, at the time, that a generalized war against terrorist groups made sense. In retrospect, we all read too much into that attack, especially if it can be confirmed that the source of the attack was a mentally unstable government microbiologist.

The WaPo write-up is more explicit about Ivin’s alleged relationship to the attacks: Md. Anthrax Scientist Dies in Apparent Suicide

A federal grand jury was preparing to indict a Maryland bioweapons expert for his role in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and terrorized the country, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

Prosecutors were considering whether to seek the death penalty against Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked at an elite U.S. Army bioweapons laboratory in Fort Detrick. Ivins died Tuesday in an apparent suicide.

Newsweek has released a new poll and is excited by the huge change: “Glow Fading? The latest NEWSWEEK Poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by only 3 points. What a difference a few weeks can make.” This is quite amusing in that pretty much everyone agreed that the June 20th Newsweek poll was an outlier.

No matter. In a Newsweek Web Exclusive, Jonathan Darman explains,

Obama’s rapid drop comes at a strategically challenging moment for the Democratic candidate. Having vanquished Hillary Clinton in early June, Obama quickly went about repositioning himself for a general-election audience–an unpleasant task for any nominee emerging from the pander-heavy primary contests and particularly for a candidate who’d slogged through a vigorous primary challenge in most every contest from January until June. Obama’s reversal on FISA legislation, his support of faith-based initiatives and his decision to opt out of the campaign public-financing system left him open to charges he was a flip-flopper. In the new poll, 53 percent of voters (and 50 percent of former Hillary Clinton supporters) believe that Obama has changed his position on key issues in order to gain political advantage.

More seriously, some Obama supporters worry that the spectacle of their candidate eagerly embracing his old rival, Hillary Clinton, and traveling the country courting big donors at lavish fund-raisers, may have done lasting damage to his image as an arbiter of a new kind of politics. This is a major concern since Obama’s outsider credentials, have, in the past, played a large part in his appeal to moderate, swing voters. In the new poll, McCain leads Obama among independents 41 percent to 34 percent, with 25 percent favoring neither candidate. In June’s NEWSWEEK Poll, Obama bested McCain among independent voters, 48 percent to 36 percent.

He makes a nod toward reality with this:

Obama’s overall decline from the last NEWSWEEK Poll, published June 20, is hard to explain. Many critics questioned whether the Democrat’s advantage over McCain was actually as great as the poll suggested, even though a survey taken during a similar time frame by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg showed a similarly large margin. Princeton Survey Research Associates, which conducted the poll for NEWSWEEK, says some of the discrepancy between the two most recent polls may be explained by sampling error.

This is followed by a blithe return to pretending that both Newsweek (or is that NEWSWEEK?) polls are accurate and must reflect real movement. As OTB readers know, the previous poll showed an Obama advantage that was 14.5 percent higher than a RealClearPolitics average that included the outlier poll. How about now?

Well, surprise, surprise! It’s now perfectly in line with what the other polls — only 1.8 percent off the average but right in the flow of the other July polls.

Is the “glow” off of Obama? I’d love to see it. The data, unfortunately, don’t seem to support that conclusion. Here’s a graph of RCP’s McCain-Obama numbers since January:

McCain’s numbers are down slightly since Hillary Clinton’s concession while Obama’s are up a smidgen. (Note: The scale makes the variation look more substantial than it is.) McCain’s numbers have been as high as 47 and as low as 40 whereas Obama’s have fluctuated between 43 and 49. The gap between the two has never exceeded 4 points. So, we’ve got a very close race with very little movement that Obama has been leading, with brief exceptions, for months.

Beyond that, the usual caveats apply: We don’t elect presidents by national vote but state-by-state. We vote in November, not July. Registered voter polls such as Newsweek’s and CNN’s are less reliable than likely voter polls like Rasmussen’s. There’s a possibility that Obama’s numbers are somewhat inflated because people don’t like to admit that they don’t support the black candidate (although recent evidence for that phenomenon is scant).

Elsewhere:

• Ed Morrissey notes that the difference is likely that the previous poll grossly oversampled Democrats.

• Stacy McCain’s reaction mirrors mine: “The ‘rapid drop’ never happened, because Obama’s purported 15-point June lead never existed.”

• Digby believes Obama’s drop is real and offers this analysis:

Many people assumed those values were their own, and without a detailed analysis of his policies and his books, they were unlikely to think they were anything but orthodox liberal. This was, after all, a Democratic primary. So, when Obama did the predictable (although surprisingly clumsy) turn to the right and began to speak in somewhat unprogressive terms on things like the death penalty and faith based programs and FISA and abortion, they felt betrayed. The campaign had actually encouraged them not to know but rather to place their faith in Obama on a personal level.

I’ve been predicting that would happen for, oh, eighteen months now.  But I just don’t see any evidence for it.

Memeorandum has many more reactions: Chicago Tribune, Real Clear Politics,  NO QUARTER, American Power, Bucks Right, TalkLeft, Open Left, PoliGazette, Flopping Aces, THE GUN TOTING LIBERAL™, Wake up America, The Jed Report, Power Line, Hullabaloo, Eunomia, Lawyers, Guns and Money, TPM Election Central, THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, Gateway Pundit, Hotline On Call, Comedy Central, MyDD, Newshoggers.com, Blue Girl, Red State, Taylor Marsh, Macsmind, TIME.com, and Donklephant

A WaPo editorial takes the Supreme Court to task for a significant error in a recent decision:

There was quite a goof in the court’s 5 to 4 decision on June 25 banning the death penalty for those who rape children. The majority determined that capital punishment for child rape was unconstitutional, in part because a national consensus had formed against it. As evidence, the court noted that “37 jurisdictions — 36 States plus the Federal Government — have the death penalty. [But] only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for rape of a child.” Actually, only two years ago, Congress enacted a death penalty for soldiers who commit child rape, as part of an update to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Irony of ironies: The court has cast doubt on the constitutionality of an act of Congress based on the erroneous claim that the statute did not exist.

They go on to argue that the Court should rehear the case to hear arguments on how this error impacts the majority’s reasoning. Andrew McCarthy and Jennifer Rubin approve.

This presumes, however, that the decision was made based on the grounds stated, rather than the stated facts serving as a post hoc rationale for a decision already arrived at.

Photo credit: Margot Schulman/AP via Guardian blog

The NYT editorial board want you to know that they’re very disappointed in the Roberts Court, particularly its upholding of Indiana’s law requiring would-be voters to be able they are who they claim to be, allowing Kentucky to continue using lethal injection for convicted murderers who’ve exhausted seventeen years of appeals, and its ruling that the 2nd Amendment applies in DC. And, while they’re pleased with the string of decisions ruling accused terrorists have rights and sparing the lives of those who rape eight-year-olds, they note that many of those decisions were 5-4.

They conclude,

The court was teetering on the brink in this term. Voters should keep that firmly in mind when they go to the polls in November.

I suspect John McCain will make exactly that case, despite disagreeing with the NYT on most of the issues at hand. It could be a persuasive argument.

Remember the good old days when everyday events were coordinated by Karl Rove? Today could have counted as one but, alas, Karl Rove is nowhere to be found.

Child rapists can’t be executed, Supreme Court rules
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that child rapists cannot be executed, concluding that capital punishment for crimes against individuals can be applied only to murderers.

Patrick Kennedy, 43, was on Louisiana’s death row after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

The ruling stemmed from the case of Patrick Kennedy, who appealed the 2003 death sentence he received in Louisiana after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that execution in this case would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, citing “evolving standards of decency” in the United States.

FBI arrests hundreds in child sex crackdown
In a series of raids, authorities have arrested more than 300 members of prostitution operations and removed 21 juveniles from sex-selling rings, the FBI announced Wednesday.

FBI Director Robert Mueller announces the arrests of hundreds suspected in child sex rings.

The sweeps were conducted in 16 cities nationwide over the past five days, authorities said.

“Our top priority in these cases has always been to identify children victims and move swiftly to remove them from these dangerous environments,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

Mueller said this week’s sweeps bring to 433 the number of child victims recovered in the five years since the FBI began its Innocence Lost initiative. The program was designed to combat a growing problem of underage prostitution.

That makes for an interesting contrast: the executive branch (currently controlled by Republicans with an FBI head appointed by President Bush) is busting up child sex rings and protecting children while those latte-sipping libruls on the Supreme Court are sparing the most gruesome child rapists. Sadly, the left is but a shadow of its old self these days without Rove to play off of, so this story is not getting the exposure it deserves.

As far as the death penalty goes, I’m mildly against it. I don’t favor it and would vote against it at a state level if given a chance, but am strongly opposed to SCOTUS getting involved and overruling the desires of state residents. Allah goes into more detail about that here.

The Supreme Court has ruled that raping a child is not sufficiently heinous a crime to warrant capital punishment.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday outlawed executions of people convicted of raping a child.

In a 5-4 vote, the court said the Louisiana law allowing the death penalty to be imposed in such cases violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

“The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. His four liberal colleagues joined him, while the four more conservative justices dissented.

The ruling isn’t surprising, in that it follows thirty-plus years of High Court rulings limiting the death penalty to premeditated murder and treason. That doesn’t, however, make it a good outcome. Surely, the elected representatives of the people are better judges of which crimes most merit society’s harshest punishment than nine judges cloistered away from that society.

“The harm that is caused to the victims and to society at large by the worst child rapists is grave,” Alito wrote. “It is the judgment of the Louisiana lawmakers and those in an increasing number of other states that these harms justify the death penalty.”

But Kennedy said the absence of any executions for rape and the small number of states that allow it demonstrate “there is a national consensus against capital punishment for the crime of child rape.”

No, it doesn’t. It may show nothing more than that most states have acceded to the dictates of the Supreme Court. For that matter, what about Federalism? Doesn’t Louisiana get to have different laws than California?

And the defendant here was a particularly loathsome individual guilty of the most heinous of crimes: raping his eight-year-old stepdaughter. It’s not at all clear to me why this is less worthy of execution than, say, shooting someone for stealing your drugs.

Terrorist suspects detained at Guantánamo Bay (and presumably, anyplace else under American jurisdiction) have the right to file habeus corpus petitions in U.S. civilian courts the Supreme Court ruled today in a 5-4 decision. Further, Congress could not pass a law waiving these protections absent rebellion or invasion.

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts (David Stout, NYT)

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

The ruling came in the latest battle between the executive branch, Congress and the courts over how to cope with dangers to the country in the post-9/11 world. Although there have been enough rulings addressing that issue to confuse all but the most diligent scholars, this latest decision, in Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195, may be studied for years to come.

The justices rejected the administration’s argument that the individual protections provided by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 were more than adequate. “The costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody,” Justice Kennedy wrote, assuming the pivotal rule that some court-watchers had foreseen. Joining Justice Kennedy’s opinion were Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter.

The dissenters were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, generally considered the conservative wing on the court.

The 2006 Military Commission Act stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions filed by detainees challenging the bases for their confinement. That law was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in February 2007.

[...]

The detainees at the center of the case decided on Thursday are not all typical of the people confined at Guantánamo. True, the majority were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan. But the man who gave the case its title, Lakhdar Boumediene, is one of six Algerians who immigrated to Bosnia in the 1990’s and were legal residents there. They were arrested by Bosnian police within weeks of the Sept. 11 attacks on suspicion of plotting to attack the United States embassy in Sarajevo — “plucked from their homes, from their wives and children,” as their lawyer, Seth P. Waxman, a former solicitor general put it in the argument before the justices on Dec. 5. The Supreme Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina ordered them released three months later for lack of evidence, whereupon the Bosnian police seized them and turned them over to the United States military, which sent them to Guantánamo.

High Court ruling may delay war crimes trials (Mark Sherman, AP)
es were in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” Kennedy said federal judges could ultimately order some detainees to be released, but that such orders would depend on security concerns and other circumstances.

[...]

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The ruling could resurrect many detainee lawsuits that federal judges in Washington put on hold pending the outcome of the high court case. The decision sent judges, law clerks and court administrators scrambling to read Kennedy’s 70-page opinion and figure out how to proceed. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would call a special meeting of federal judges to address how to handle the cases.

The decision also cast doubt on the future of the military war crimes trials that 19 detainees are facing so far. The Pentagon has said it plans to try as many as 80 men held at Guantanamo. The lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s one-time driver, said he will seek dismissal of the charges against Hamdan based on Thursday’s ruling. A military judge had already delayed the trial’s start to await the high court ruling.

[...]

The court said not only that the detainees have rights under the Constitution, but that the system the administration has put in place to classify them as enemy combatants and review those decisions is inadequate.

[...]

In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized his colleagues for striking down what he called “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.” Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also dissented.

Scalia said the nation is “at war with radical Islamists” and that the court’s decision “will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

I fear Scalia is right on that score. That’s not, however, sufficient reason to abandon our most fundamental principles.

I’ll withhold final judgment until I’ve had time to read the opinion (which is over 70 pages!) and the dissents. I view this case in a different category than those dealing with U.S. citizens, which I considered slam dunk violations of the Constitution. Foreign nationals, especially those captured abroad, have less protection under the Constitution. Indeed, offhand it seems to me that our treaty obligations (Geneva, etc.) are a better basis for adjudicating these matters than the civil courts.

Lyle Denniston observes,

In a second ruling on habeas, the Court decided unanimously that U.S. citizens held by U.S. military forces in Iraq have a right to file habeas cases, because it does extend to them, but it went on to rule that federal judges do not have any authority to bar the transfer of those individuals to Iraqi authorites to face prosecution or punishment for crimes committed in that country in violation of Iraqi laws.

I was momentarily apoplectic until I re-read it and saw the “U.S. citizens” part. With that modifier, it’s a no-brainer.

Aside from whether the Justices got the law right, Cernig’s public policy take strikes me as quite right:

Some very bad people are likely to walk free along with the innocent because the Bush administration tried to walk around domestic and international principles of law, creating an entirely spurious new designation of “unlawful combatant” so that they could either hise detainees from due process indefinitely or, failing that, conduct kangaroo courts.

If they’d just stuck with the existing definitions, all the Gitmo detainees against whom they could build a real case under the actual rules of law, without torture and without rigging the courts, would have been tried as POW’s already. If found guilty, the death penalty would have been warranted in some cases. I would personally have had no problem with that.

Me either.

Kevin Raybould is more succinct:

If these people are prisoners of war, then treat them as such. If they are not, then they are criminals and should be treated the same as every other criminal in the care of the federal government. Inventing a third class of people that the executive gets to do with as they please cannot be an option under our constitution.

Most excited reactions:

• Damozel: “[A]nyone who can’t decide whether they hate the thought of an Obama presidency more than a McCain presidency needs to think long and hard about the implications of this 5-4 split. Federal judicial protection of individual rights, and individual privacy — and not only those of enemy combatants — are already hanging by a thread.”

• Michelle Malkin: “What’s that sound? The thunder of left-wing lawyers and Gitmo detainees jumping up and down for joy at the Supreme Court’s ruling this morning.”

• John Hawkins: “[T]his decision has nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with liberalism’s unending sympathy towards any enemy of our country.”

• Debbie Schlussel: “[T]he Supreme Court has announced to world that every terrorist, no matter how bent on destroying America–and regardless of whether or not the terrorist had any contact with American soil–now has a right to their own three ring court circus, MC’d by some ringmaster clone of Judge Ito and attended by his/her posse of O.J. jury replications”

Other reax (lawyers up front):

• Orin Kerr: “Nothing I’ve seen in the Court’s opinion so far is at all surprising, and it’s a big defeat for the Bush Administration.”

• Steve Bainbridge: “I take Scalia’s point and have some sympathy for the position. After all, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Yet, I am reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism that those who give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty or security.” He’s also interested that SCOTUS simply ignored Congress’ taking away their jurisdiction on this — which the Constitution gives them a plenary right to do.

• Marty Lederman: “[B]ecause the Government chose to detain these prisoners at GTMO for the very purpose of avoiding a judicial check on the legality of the detentions, the Court will ensure that the constitutional guarantee extends to the naval base.”

• Armando: “Apparently, the Supreme Court agreed with me and disagreed with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.”

• Ed Morrissey: “It seems absurd to apply criminal law to unlawful combatants captured during hostilities abroad. Will they require a Miranda reading, too?”

• Sean Hackbarth: “From my plain reading of the constitution I don’t see that it applies to non-U.S. citizens. . . . I think war-fighting has already gotten too legalistic with military leaders asking lawyers to approve actions to cover themselves.”

• John Cole: “ACTIVIST JUDGES! ACTIVIST JUDGES!”

• Matt Yglesias: “I bet all those dirty hippies who said that John Roberts would be another Scalia feel sorry now completely vindicated.”

• Radley Balko: “I guess the only question now is whether the administration feels it’s actually obligated to abide by the decision, or if it believes the president’s absolute power in wartime means that in addition to ignoring Congress, he can ignore the Supreme Court, too.”

memeorandum, doubtless, has even more links.

John McCain is vetting potential vice presidential candidates over the holiday weekend, Adam Nagourney reports for the NYT.

Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a one-time rival for the Republican nomination, have all accepted invitations to visit with Mr. McCain at his ranch in Sedona, these Republicans said.

This is not going to sit well with Chris Matthews. It should be noted, too, that Black says this visit is purely social, asserting “It has nothing whatsoever to do with the vice presidential selection process,” and observing that it would be “pretty awkward” to have an open competition with the guys all in one room.

In addition to Mr. Crist, Mr. Jindal and Mr. Romney, Mr. McCain’s guest list includes some of top his political counselors, among them Charlie Black, a senior strategist, and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, his frequent traveling companion and probably his closest colleague in the Senate.

If the gathering does not involve actual interviews, as some of Mr. McCain’s associates said Wednesday, it will provide Mr. McCain with a chance to know some potential running mates in a social context. Mr. McCain is known as a social and gregarious candidate and senator, and his associates said personal chemistry would be a key consideration in his choice.

The candidates all have their strengths.

As governor of Florida, Mr. Crist, 51, would bring a number of obvious assets to a Republican ticket, beginning with his popularity in a state that is almost always an electoral battleground — and where Mr. Obama appears to be struggling. His relative youth could also be an asset for Mr. McCain. In Florida, Mr. Crist has long been known for his affability and a campaign skills. Instantly recognizable because of his perpetual tan and striking white hair, Mr. Crist, who served as Florida’s attorney general before being elected governor in 2006, has also acquired a reputation as something of a hard-liner on law and order issues. He supports the death penalty, largely opposes restrictions on the rights of gun owners, early on earned the nickname “Chain Gang Charlie” because he favored allowing convicts to be used in road work, and has described himself as a “pro-life and pro-family” candidate.

Mr. Romney, a former chief executive who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination this year, has made no secret of his desire to join Mr. McCain’s presidential ticket. As a vice president, Mr. Romney’s business background — including running the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics — could address concerns about Mr. McCain’s ability to manage the struggling economy. Mr. Romney has also proven himself to be a prolific fund-raiser, although he spent enormous sums of money during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and still could not beat Mr. McCain. And geographically, he brings little to the ticket, since he is unlikely to put Massachusetts in play for the Republicans.

Mr. Jindal, who was born in Baton Rouge, La., to a family that had just arrived there from the Punjab area of India, took office as Louisiana’s governor in January after serving three years in the House of Representatives. Mr. Jindal, who was born a Hindu but became a Roman Catholic as a teenager, campaigned for governor as a social conservative, opposing human embryonic stem cell research and abortion in any form and favoring teaching “intelligent design” in schools as an alternative to evolution. But Mr. Jindal also has a reputation as a policy wonk, like the Clintons, with a specialty in health care issues. After graduating in 1991 from Brown University, where he majored in biology and public policy, and attending Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Mr. Jindal worked for the management consulting firm McKinsey and Company and was executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. He later served as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals and in the Bush administration as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for planning and evaluation.

Jindal is the most exciting choice among the three but all would sit well with the base without being viewed as wild-eyed and dangerous by moderates. On the other hand, McCain plans to make this race about national security and none of these men (or Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Rob Portman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, also listed in the piece as possibilities) have any serious credentials in that arena.

For what it’s worth, former Newt Gingrich spokesman and Washington Times editorial director Tony Blankley is lukewarm on all three of these choices and thinks McCain should find someone who’s very experienced on the national scene in order to “play to his strength.” His suggestion? “[M]aybe go with someone like a Governor Ridge or even a Lieberman, rather than trying to do a sort of a classic carry-a-state deal.”

Phillip Klein agrees, arguing that Jindal is too young (he’s 36!) and that “If Romney had truly closed the deal with conservatives, he would have captured the nomination.” I would agree on both fronts. Rod Dreher, though, loves him some Jindal but wonders if it would be a mistake for him to take the slot on what looks like a losing ticket.

Jindal’s a rising star and had positions of enormous responsibility as a variable kid. But he’d be a strange choice to be the candidate for one heartbeat away from the presidency on a ticket arguing Barack Obama’s too inexperienced to be trusted with the keys.

When all’s said and done, I actually expect McCain to take Blankely’s advice and double down on experience and national security cred. A McCain-Lieberman ticket would be a bold choice, although a risky one. I’d think Ridge’s ship has sailed. There’s always Condi Rice, a favorite among conservatives, but there’s not much upside for a candidate trying to persuade people that he doesn’t represent a third term for George W. Bush.

Sara Robinson has an interesting examination of the question of Barack Obama’s cult of personality.

She begins by a look at the literature on actual cults and shows why the Obama campaign doesn’t qualify. While worthwhile from a technical standpoint, though, that’s not really what the debate is about. Perhaps “cult” is a poor word choice but people understand the shorthand: He’s running on personality rather than issues.

Her retort to that, though, is well taken:

As I pointed out my very first week on this blog, the GOP didn’t come to power by talking about plans and policies; they did it by using strongly emotional appeals that grabbed people by the gut and didn’t let them go. Theirs was never a movement based on reason. It was, from the very beginning, a movement of hearts and souls. And it was that deep, emotionally sustaining commitment that drew people in so deeply that they were willing to give 25 years of their lives to bringing about the New World Order their leaders promised them. We may hate what they’ve accomplished — but we’re never going to be able to do better until we can inspire that same kind of passion for change.

And Obama’s doing just that. He’s tapped into a deeply pressurized seam of repressed fury within the American electorate, and he’s giving it voice, a focus, and an outlet. Are the results scary? You bet: these people want change on a scale that much of the status quo should find terrifying. Are they unreasoning? The followers may be — but as long as their leader keeps a cool head, that’s not as much of a problem right now as we might think; and the heat will dissipate naturally in time. Is this kind of devotion even appropriate? You bet. You don’t get the kind of deep-level change we need without first exposing and channeling people’s deep discontent. Obama’s change talk may be too vague for most people’s tastes (including mine); but the fact is that if we’re serious about enacting a progressive agenda, rousing people’s deepest dreams and desires and mobilizing that energy is exactly how it’s going to happen. And Obama’s the first candidate we’ve had in a generation who really, truly gets this.

At some level, I disagree with the oversimplification of the appeal of the campaigns waged by Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to bring Republicans to the presidency and control of the Congress. There were indeed rational policy platforms front and center in those campaigns.

Fundamentally, though, Robinson is right. Movements are based largely on appeal to people at the instinctual, visceral level rather than on the plane of platform.

Gingrich was a policy wonk’s policy wonk. But he was also a master of focus group-tested language. Take a look at the Republican Contract with America. Its legislative agenda combined wonkery with gut level rhetoric masterfully:

1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.

2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, “good faith” exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer’s “crime” bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools.

3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.

4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children’s education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society.

5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief.

6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world.

7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years.

8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages.

9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: “Loser pays” laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation.

10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators.

One can argue, certainly, that this is very policy driven. Without question, clicking through and reading the legislation (available at the link) gives you detail and substance. But there were no hyperlinks in TV Guide.

But look at the names: Responsibility, American Dream, Fairness, Common Sense, Job Creation, Family, etc. Brilliant, emotive appeal. What decent person could be opposed to these things?

From my standpoint, Obama is doing the emotive part without as much substantive backing as Gingrich and Reagan. But maybe that’s just a function of selective memory.

Photo: The Daily F.O.S Blog via Google

In the heated campaigning between Iowa and New Hampshire, the Clinton campaign has started to up the attacks on Barack Obama’s record. One of the more recent is the Clinton campaign’s complaint that Obama favors defendant’s rights and opposes mandatory minimums.

Hillary’s aides point to Obama’s extremely progressive record as a community organizer, state senator and candidate for Congress, his alliances with “left-wing” intellectuals in Chicago’s Hyde Park community, and his liberal voting record on criminal defendants’ rights as subjects for examination.

Along the same lines, ABC reported that Clinton aides gave the network various examples, of Obama’s controversial stands. The aides cited Obama’s past assertion that he would support ending mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes, pointing to a 2004 statement at an NAACP-sponsored debate: “Mandatory minimums take too much discretion away from judges.”

As Radley Balko rightly points out in response to the Clinton campaign:

To me, those both sound like pretty good reasons to support Obama. Is there a single issue where Hillary Clinton doesn’t support giving more power to the government? Abortion, I guess. But any others?

Indeed. One thing that has impressed me as I’ve read more about Obama’s record is that he’s been fairly consistent in working to reform the Justice system in favor of common citizens over the demands of prosecutors and politicians who want to sound “tough.” As Charles Peters points out, this was consistent even in Obama’s days as a state legislator:

Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced — by beating the daylights out of the accused.

Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.

This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama’s bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to “solve” crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.

[...]

The police proved to be Obama’s toughest opponent. Legislators tend to quail when cops say things like, “This means we won’t be able to protect your children.” The police tried to limit the videotaping to confessions, but Obama, knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning, fought — successfully — to keep interrogations included in the required videotaping.

By showing officers that he shared many of their concerns, even going so far as to help pass other legislation they wanted, he was able to quiet the fears of many.

Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.

I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot about Obama’s policy stances that I don’t agree with. However, it is rare to find a politician with the courage to stand up for the rights of the accused against the “tough on crime” rhetoric that pervades the political landscape. Frankly, I admire it a great deal and wish that there were more politicians out there with his guts. It’s easy to pander to the lowest common denominator of fear (I’m looking at you, Rudy Giuliani). It’s a lot harder to point out that the punitive, “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” attitude that dominates American policy is, in fact, ineffective and immoral.

Steve Benen mentions an interesting tidbit about the anti-Romney ad that Mike Huckabee doesn’t have the money to run on TV “refuses to run on principle”. Apparently, the ad criticizes Mitt Romney for the lack of executions in Massachusetts during Romney’s gubernatorial terms. As Benen points out:

Apparently, Huckabee — you know, the evangelical, pro-life Republican — is going after Romney for not having executed any Americans during his gubernatorial tenure.

I realize Republican politics are far more crass than norms should allow, but it’s disconcerting to think “You didn’t kill anyone” has suddenly become a criticism in conservative circles.

Frankly, I’m not surprised about using a “law and order” critique in Republican politics. Is it crass for Huckabee to use? Absolutely (disclosure – I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty. And, for that matter, the correctional system that we’ve developed in this country). But regardless of the merits of the death penalty, the funniest thing about this line of attack on Romney is that it shows Mike Huckabee’s manifest ignorance with the concept of the separation of powers and the job of governing. First of all, this is because there is no death penality in Massachusetts! So in order for there to have been executions under Mitt Romney’s term, the state legislature would have had to adopted one. They did not–even though Romney did introduce a bill to reinstate the death penalty.

The second problem with this line of attack is that even if Massachusetts did have a death penalty, the governor of the state would have nothing whatsoever to do with actual executions. That is, of course, the role of the judiciary. The only involvement that a governor might have is that of granting clemency or pardon to a convict on death row. (And, to his enormous discredit, Mitt Romney apparently never granted clemency or pardon once during his terms.)

This isn’t high level stuff here. Anyone with a basic high school civics class under their belt–or hell, anyone’s who’s ever watched a couple of episodes of Law and Order–knows perfectly well that the governor plays virtually no role in executions.

Explain to me why Mike Huckabee is surging in the polls again? Surely Republican voters are looking for some basic level of competence and decency in their candidates. At least, I hope they are.

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern.

Dave Schuler will be guest hosting tonight, although I may well wind up taking part as well if we don’t find another guest. The topics are up in the air, although TIME’s selection of Vladimir Putin as Man of the Year will be among those discussed.

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Update (Dave Schuler)

Happily, James decided to join me on the program this evening. It would have been mighty lonely without him. ;-) We discussed a range of topics including the lack of real news lately, Putin as Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”, the future of Russia, the primary silly season, New Jersey’s abolition of the death penalty, and nuclear weapons policy.

Gillian Gibbons, who was facing the death penalty for allowing school kids to name a teddy bear Mohammed, has been pardoned by Sudan’s president after the intervention of the British government.

A British woman jailed in Sudan for insulting religion was to be released on Monday after being granted a presidential pardon for insulting religion by naming a teddy bear after the Prophet Mohammed. Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir signed the pardon after meeting two British Muslim peers who flew to Khartoum on a mercy mission to petition for Gillian Gibbons’s early release after she was jailed for 15 days on Thursday.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown welcomed the news, saying he was “delighted and relieved” and that Gibbons would now be handed over to the British embassy in Khartoum “after what must have been a difficult ordeal”. “She was pardoned thanks to the mediation of Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi. She will be released in about an hour,” presidential advisor Mahjoub Fadl Badri told AFP as Beshir met the Muslim peers at the Republican Palace.

Gibbons, a mother of two who has only been in Sudan a few months, was arrested eight days ago after parents at the exclusive English school where she taught complained that she allowed young children to name the bear Mohammed.

The British Muslims, from Britain’s upper house of parliament, thanked Sudan and all those working behind the scenes for the pardon, and conveyed apologies from Gibbons for any offence she may have unwittingly caused.

A welcome outcome, indeed, but it’s amazing that it was allowed to escalate to this level. While I fully agree with my colleague Dave Schuler’s cautionary note about the need for Westerners to be mindful of local customs and mores when traveling, this was a ridiculously trivial and obviously innocent mistake. Clearly, since the Muslim children themselves thought it was proper to name the bear “Mohammed,” Gibbons could not have reasonably been expected to know otherwise.

Story via OTB News. Image via Deep Thoughts.