IsThatLegal?

"Though he be a gentleman, remember, Eric Muller is also a lawyer."
-- Sparkey of "Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing"
"Relentlessly sensible and often important."
-- Michael Froomkin of "discourse.net"

Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning, facing a tough challenge from Dr. Dan Mongiardo, and speculation that he is losing touch with reality (in the medical sense of that term), surely did not help himself yesterday when he talked about the attacks of "November 11th."

Orin, Orin, Orin. You link to the story about the burglars who returned to, and got caught at, the scene of the crime trying to silence a talking parrot, but you don't say that they were afraid the parrot would sing!

This was a gimme.

On the one hand, it seems incredible to me that the Roman Catholic priest at this Cheyenne, Wyoming congregation would tell his congregants so bluntly that to vote for a pro-choice candidates is a mortal sin.

On the other hand, I wasn't giving Kerry/Edwards much of a shot in Wyoming anyway.

Governor Bush (in his last year in office) gives us the finger.



This is a frat boy who never grew up.

UPDATE: A prediction. When the far right of the blogosphere gets around to commenting on this lovely little gesture, they'll love it for its,uh, manliness, and they'll gleefully contrast it to the video of girlie man John Edwards prepping for a TV appearance by grooming his hair. Mark my words.

UPDATE: Yup. I was right. Big time. And at my favorite site, no less!

How 'bout that?

I'm still waiting for the announcement of the opening of the new Hillel chapter at King Abdul Aziz University.

Mount St. Helens is really beautiful this afternoon.

Fellow lawprof and old buddy Peter Friedman is election-blogging from Ground Zero--Ohio, that is. He's a designated election challenger for Cuyahoga County. Interesting stuff. Check it out.

Something truly fascinating is going on over at Instapundit. Glenn Reynolds is away for a few days, and in his absence, the blogospheric equivalent of a psychotic break is occurring. The two constituent pieces of the blog's unique personality are quite literally coming apart before our very eyes.

Instapundit (and I refer to the blog here, as distinguished from Glenn the person) has two key pieces to its blog-persona. One is the right-of-center political commentator/advocate; the other is the reasoned lawyer/law professor. Many would say that the former dominates the latter, and it's certainly the case that Instapundit covers straight-up law topics infrequently. But the reasoning lawyer is, I think, an important aspect of Instapundit's voice, even when the blogged subject isn't law.

To my eye, Glenn usually does a good job of either keeping these two things humming along together, or at least maintaining the appearance that the two are running together. I think that's a big part of the blog's appeal, and rightly so (no pun intended).

Look now at how Instapundit (the blog) is handling the al Qa-Qaa explosives story. One of the people guest-blogging, Michael Totten, is in advocate mode, doing his level best to spin the story to the President's advantage.

Another of the people guest-blogging, U. of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, is approaching the subject judiciously, rightly condemning the notion of a news organization's sitting on a major story until the eve of an election while simultaneously recognizing that the Bush Admininstration has only itself to blame for trying to keep the story under wraps.

And the really interesting thing is that the two aren't talking to each other. They're both there, under the Instapundit banner--reason and spin--each speaking to us separately, rather than together as they usually do.

Very interesting to watch.

Josh Marshall has been just breathtakingly good on the al Qa-Qaa story. Start here and scroll down.

Oy vey.

Just what we need: an appellate process that might drag on well past Election Day.

First off, how did this liberal grandmother who is only trying to help terrorists manage to slip into a Bush-Cheney election event?

Secondly, doesn't Cheney's reply to the grandmother's question about when she'll get some peace back in her life sound remarkably like Michael Dukakis's famously chilly answer about what he'd do if his wife were raped and murdered?

Her grandson Steven D. Conover, 21, was among the U.S. soldiers killed last November when insurgents in Fallujah shot down the Chinook helicopter he was riding in.

Devastated by the loss and the fear of what else could happen, Hobbs said her health deteriorated to the point where she suffered kidney failure the month after her grandson's death, putting her in a wheelchair.

Cheney spotted her in her wheelchair in an audience of rabid Bush-Cheney supporters and invited her to ask him a question.

Hobbs asked Cheney, "Is there anybody who knows a time limit" for pulling out of Iraq? "I have four over there. ... I had one killed. ... I'd like a little peace."

Given to understatement, the vice president calmly replied: "I appreciate very much obviously the sacrifice they made. ... If you put an artificial date on it, what with the terrorists just waiting until that day arrives, Americans withdraw, and then they'll reinsert themselves, that's not acceptable."

At least he didn't use the F-word.

You don't know the meaning of "parochial" until you've lived in Wyoming.

Barbara Cubin, Wyoming's Congressman-for-Life, is going after Ted Ladd, her Democratic opponent, because he lived in Massachusetts until he was ten years old.

Even though she has received the majority of her (vastly superior) funding from out-of-state corporations, she's also criticizing him for accepting $36,250 from people who live in Massachusetts.

And even getting money from people who live in Wyoming isn't true enough to Wyoming values for Mrs. Cubin. Some of Ladd's contributors, she notes, live near Jackson. (For the uninitiated: Jackson is a popular relocation destination for well-to-do people originally from outside Wyoming.)

It's hard to think of something that would make me smile more than to see Barbara Cubin unseated. She is an embarrassment. It's not likely to happen, I know. But it's long overdue.

I wish Chief Justice Rehnquist a full and speedy recovery.

On the subject of "speedy," though, I find it curious that the Court is already telling us that he'll be back at work next Monday, about 8 days after his tracheotomy. Not only is it hard to imagine how anyone could know how the Chief will actually be feeling by next Monday, but the ordinary recovery period for a case without special risk factors or complications is two weeks. And there are reasons to suspect that the Chief's is not an entirely ordinary case. Plus he's 80 years old.

Odd, that.

UPDATE: It has been suggested--correctly, I think, on reflection--that this post is "too clever by half," so let me re-post here an elaboration that I posted in the comments last night.

What I imagine is that the Chief understands that there's a presidential election in a week and he wants his health specifically, and the Court generally, to play as little a role in it as possible. If that is actually what is leading him to predict a return to business in a week, I think it's both admirable (in the sense that he's plainly devoted to his work and to the institution) and troubling (in the sense that he might be taking medically contra-indicated steps in order to keep a muzzle on a political issue).

The New York Times: "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished from Site In Iraq."

Butthead: "Dude. They vanished from al Qaqaa."
Beavis: "Heh-heh. Al Qaqaa. Heh-heh."
Butthead: "Cool."
Beavis: "Al Qaqaa. Al Qaqaa! Heh-heh."
Butthead: "The New York Times just said 'al Qaqaa.'"
Beavis: "Maybe they took the stuff over to al Peepee. Get it? Al Peepee. Heh-heh."
Butthead: "That's stupid, Beavis."

Note to Gender Studies and American Civilization majors:

Read this article on Laura Bush from the Washington Times.

Discuss.

Page limit is twenty. (But you could write a dissertation on this piece if you wanted to.)

Twice today my laptop has said to me, a propos of nothing, "What would you like me to say? You may type anything."

I haven't the faintest idea why this is happening.

If the voice coming from my computer were John Ashcroft's, it might make some sense, but in fact the voice is that of a British woman.

Has my laptop been possessed by the ghost of Queen Elizabeth I or something? Why is this happening?

The Bush campaign's most recent ad is called "Wolves."



If you haven't seen the ad, an image from which appears above, the Washington Post describes the ad thusly: "Scurrying is heard as the camera plunges deeper into the woods and pans sunlight-speckled trees. Shadows move through the brush before animals are seen amid the forest. Then, the ad reveals the type of animal: A pack of wolves rest on a hill. As the commercial closes, the predators stir, moving toward the camera. 'In an increasingly dangerous world, even after the first terrorist attack on America, John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence budget by $6 billion,' an ominous voice says in the ad. 'Cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.'"

Some are comparing the ad to Reagan's famous "bear" ad from the 1984 campaign.

I'd like to suggest a different pedigree for "Wolves."

The Reagan campaign, it turns out, did not come up with the idea of depicting the enemy as a terrifying or disgusting animal.



These were the juxtaposed images from the opening scene of the notorious 1940 Nazi film "Der Ewige Jude" ("The Eternal Jew") by Fritz Hippler.



These images are from the 1854 book "Types of Mankind" by Josiah Nott and George Glidden.

And then, of course, there is this 1936 book, "Trust No Fox," by Elwira Bauer. It was published by Julius Streicher's Stürmer Publishing House, with a print run of 100,000. It was used in elementary schools throughout Germany.



The Bush campaign is tapping into an old and proud tradition with "Wolves," isn't it?

Shame on them.

UPDATE: This post is neither a defense of terrorists nor an equation of our current Administration with Nazis. It is an encouragement to think about the historical precedents for equating one's enemies with animals, about the consequences that might flow from depicting human enemies as non-human, and, most importantly, about the risks that might flow to innocent people from a strategy of comparing Arab Muslims to vicious animals.

Hey, check this out. Somebody on a right-of-center blog is linking without hostility or contempt to an item from a left-of-center blog!

You don't see too much of that anymore. (Or vice versa.)

(Courtesy of Atrios.)

Fasten your seatbelts, folks. The assault on Teresa Heinz Kerry begins in earnest. (Now headlining at Drudge.)

... someone has made a documentary about Glenn Tilbrook's career as a solo artist.

Talk about obscure.

But I'd see it in a heartbeat.

Sally Greene has posted a list of prominent Democrats, Republicans, and pundits, along with an indication of whether each served in the military (and if so, when and how).

I could be wrong, but I think I might see a pattern. You have to look hard for it, though. It's not like it jumps out at you or anything.

Sally wonders whether the information (which she did not compile, but was forwarded to her by an email correspondent) is accurate. I do too.

UPDATE: I agree that the list might create a false impression through selectivity. It doesn't look too terribly riddled by omissions to me at a first glance, but I don't really know for sure. One point of information: a commenter noted that to be fair, we'd have to make sure to account for both sides of the same government institution. And the list, to be sure, only mentions certain Republican Justices of the Supreme Court. So let's check out all the Democrats on the Court who might have served in the military. Ummm, uh, let's see. All the Democrats.... Hmmm.... Oh, right. Breyer. Yup. He was in the army.

FURTHER UPDATE: Lots more information about who served and who didn't can be found here. (Warning: the tone of this page is even more partisan than the thing that I initially linked to off of Sally Greene's blog, but it does offer more information.) For a list of the members of the 106th Congress (note: that's not the current one) who served, click here. That list, I think, makes crystal clear that neither political party has any monopoly on military service, or on patriotism.

. . . this is what an Instalanche looks like.

UPDATE: For the uninitated, this is a grid showing the hits to this blog, by hour, earlier today, before and after getting linked by Instapundit.

Michael Froomkin is right about a lot of things. This time it's the White House's (mis)handling of Bush's bulge.

And he's right about Georges de Paris looking like a guy you'd bump into at the Leaky Cauldron, too.

A reader informs me that this blog has been blocked by the Seminole (Fla.) County Public Library.

It's hard to know what got me on the banned blogs list. Perhaps the librarian is a big fan of Duran Duran. Or of Siegfried and Roy.

Or maybe it's the dog.

Seriously, this seems like an odd censorship policy to me. There could be a story here. Drop by your public library and see whether you can reach the blogs you like to read. (Unless they're, uh, you know, not safe for work.) If you can't reach some of them, ask your librarian why not, and leave a comment here.

Sally Greene asks a fascinating question: if blogging had been possible in the past, how might it have changed history, or at least what we now know about history?

Think of the possibilities:

MarchOnSelma.blogspot.com

The Manzanar Blogring

www.DeepThroatBlog.com

Interesting.

It is nothing short of scandalous that XTC and Squeeze have both vanished while these lame-ass hacks get a second shot.

Michelle Malkin claims that she does not support the internment of Muslims in the United States.

Dan Koffler proves that she does.

And when I say "proves," I mean proves.

Gil Asakawa has a few choice words for Michelle Malkin in the Denver Post.

I especially enjoyed this passage:

You’re a terrific package, Michelle: an attractive Filipina who is telegenic and fearless with your opinions who already has a track record with a previous book called “Invasion” that railed against immigration. You’ve been a darling of the right-wing media, as a syndicated newspaper columnist and a Fox News commentator. You’re controversial, and the media love controversy.

But I wonder, if the next terrorist attack turned out to be by a Filipino, and the U.S. took your advice and turned to racial profiling, if you’d be proud to go into a concentration camp with your family, just because you might be a terrorist, or your parents. Or your kids.

We know they’re not, but could the government know? And, should they care?

It’s better, right, to lock up everybody who looks like the terrorist? Who shares the culture, who maybe knows how to cook lumpia and learned to dance the Tinkling at a Filipino community center as a child, or attended church with a Filipino congregation, or who speaks Tagalog and might be making nefarious plans in a language that we “real” Americans can’t understand?

Come on, Michelle, do you really think it was OK to lock up children because they learned traditional dances and song, or went to Japanese school on Saturday mornings and they may have been brainwashed into loyalty for the Emperor of Japan?

I hate to pop your bubble, lady, but most [Japanese Americans] I know - today as well as the ones who were young back then - HATED going to Japanese school instead of playing with their friends on Saturdays!

As a kid who endured Hebrew School for years, I've been waiting for somebody to make that last point.

The Densho Project, a marvelous organization gathering and digitally disseminating Japanese American history, has put together a very useful overview of the debate about Michelle Malkin's book "In Defense of Internment."

Which is more worrisome: some British citizens' writing in support of John Kerry to individual voters in Clark County, Ohio, or Vladimir Putin's telling the world (and all American voters) that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for terrorism?

About 10 days ago I predicted a strategy of attacking Teresa Heinz Kerry.

It's starting to look like I was right.

Edward Hasbrouck notes that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is deploying a new screening system at airports that relies on human observation to identify potentially suspicious travelers.

In plain English, this means that TSA agents will now be allowed to pull people aside for questioning because of how they look and act.

Edward seems to argue that any airport questioning program that "takes a longer, harder look at individuals who have ethnic, religious, nationality, and appearance factors in common with the Islamic extremist Middle Eastern men who have initiated war against us" is "clearly illegally and unconstitutional discriminatory."

At least as a theoretical matter, I'm not persuaded that this is so. I can imagine a careful, narrow, respectful, and vigilantly supervised program that would allow agents to use appearance and behavior as factors in risk assessment.

As a practical matter, though, I can't imagine the TSA applying such a program carefully, narrowly, or respectfully, and I don't imagine that the supervision of such a program will be up to the task of preventing the sorts of excesses and abuses that have always accompanied racial and ethnic profiling.

Ralph Luker is seeking substantiated reports of plagiarism by academics (specifically historians). Can anyone help him out?

. . . are not greatly exaggerated.

I am the organizer for this conference (.pdf file) commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Japanese American civil liberties cases of World War II, to be held November 5 and 6 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

One of the hats I wear for the conference is that of a presenter, which means that I have to have a paper to present. I'm writing a piece about the 100 internees from the Poston Relocation Center in southwestern Arizona who resisted the draft in 1944.

I'm buried in microfilm and old court records, and don't expect to emerge until after the conference. Except as needed to maintain sanity.

So blogging from now through early November will be lighter than usual.

Debate has swirled over the weekend on the hidden meaning behind the President's reference to the Dred Scott decision in Friday night's debate.

The conventional wisdom now is that the reference to Dred Scott was a coded signal to the right-to-life movement that he intends to appoint justices to the Court who will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

I think that's right--more on that below, along with another possible decoded signal--but the most important thing about the Dred Scott line is that the President undoubtedly botched it big time. Who honestly thinks that the President is so worried about losing the vote of the committed right-to-life voter that he'd say something bizarre, incomprehensible, and idiotic about a nearly 150-year-old slavery decision so as to send a coded signal to his base? Surely Karl Rove had scripted some sort of moderately articulate point about the perils of judicial activism on hotly contested matters of personal freedom--something comprehensible and calculated to win over a few voters on the fence--that Bush just totally mangled.

On the Dred-Scott-as-Roe-v-Wade point, though, there is an encoded message that the blogosphere has still missed. Remember: Bush volunteered this point about Dred Scott in response to a question not about abortion, but about the kind of Justice he'd appoint to the Court. And it turns out that you don't have to google into the world of right-to-life advocacy to find the analogy of abortion rights to slavery rights. Consider this (to my eyes rather beautifully written) commentary on the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 opinion in which the Supreme Court reaffirmed rather than overturned Roe v. Wade:

There is a poignant aspect to today's opinion. Its length, and what might be called its epic tone, suggest that its authors believe they are bringing to an end a troublesome era in the history of our Nation and of our Court. "It is the dimension" of authority, they say, to "cal[l] the contending sides of national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution."

There comes vividly to mind a portrait by Emanuel Leutze that hangs in the Harvard Law School: Roger Brooke Taney, painted in 1859, the 82d year of his life, the 24th of his Chief Justiceship, the second after his opinion in Dred Scott. He is all in black, sitting in a shadowed red armchair, left hand resting upon a pad of paper in his lap, right hand hanging limply, almost lifelessly, beside the inner arm of the chair. He sits facing the viewer, and staring straight out. There seems to be on his face, and in his deep set eyes, an expression of profound sadness and disillusionment. Perhaps he always looked that way, even when dwelling upon the happiest of thoughts. But those of us who know how the lustre of his great Chief Justiceship came to be eclipsed by Dred Scott cannot help believing that he had that case--its already apparent consequences for the Court, and its soon to be played out consequences for the Nation--burning on his mind. I expect that two years earlier he, too, had thought himself "call[ing] the contending sides of national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution."

It is no more realistic ... in this case[ ] than ... in that to think that an issue of the sort they both involved--an issue involving life and death, freedom and subjugation--can be "speedily and finally settled" by the Supreme Court, as President James Buchanan in his inaugural address said the issue of slavery in the territories would be. See Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, S. Doc. No. 101-10, p. 126 (1989). Quite to the contrary, by foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.

The author of these words was Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion in Casey. That's right: the comparison of the Court's abortion cases to its slavery cases is right there in the U.S. Reports, and the Justice who made it is still young enough to have quite a few good years ahead of him as Chief Justice.

Now there's a coded signal for ya.

We all laughed when President Bush talked about the "internets" in last night's debate.

Turns out there is more than one. There's the one we can access. Then there's this one. And if you look carefully, you'll see that the President's gets all the good stuff.

My vote for bizarre-o answer in tonight's debate:

MICHAELSON: Mr. President, if there were a vacancy in the Supreme Court and you had the opportunity to fill that position today, who would you choose and why?

BUSH: . . . I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.

Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the kind of person I wouldn't pick.

I wouldn't pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn't be said in a school because it had the words "under God" in it. I think that's an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.

That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America.

Don't know about you, but I take great comfort from our President's willingness to state clearly and in public that he would not appoint a pro-slavery Justice to the Supreme Court.

Over the next few days, be sure to follow the multi-part story of Michael Froomkin's Kerry-Edwards lawn sign.

My, oh my. Look at the crap that Instapundit is now drawing attention to:

That's right. Our enemies will dance if John Kerry wins the presidency.

And if that's not reason enough to make you pull the lever for George W. Bush, then there may not be any talking to you.

I know, I know: I link to Malkinfan. But I think he's joking.

Mike Litwack over at Malkinfan, the Michelle Malkin fanblog, is calling for mass loyalty trials and a redesignation of African Americans as "ethnic Africans."

John Allore liveblogged last night's Bailey-Potter debate.

Perhaps this is ancient conventional wisdom, and I don't know it because I don't get out enough.

But here's my prediction: if the presidential race stays this tight for the next couple of weeks, or if the numbers start to show Kerry/Edwards pulling ahead, Teresa Heinz Kerry will be destroyed. Destroyed in a way that even Hillary Clinton couldn't imagine.

"Tonight, John Edwards will argue the greatest malpractice case of all time."

So says my colleague Joe Kennedy in an op-ed published in today's Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer.

Noting that Edwards is "the best trial lawyer since Lincoln to participate in a presidential campaign," Kennedy (himself a former trial lawyer) outlines the common-sense argument that he thinks Edwards should make on Iraq:

"The troops know that there are too few of them to do the job right, know that there were no weapons of mass destruction and know that the Iraqi people no longer see them as liberators. The troops do need to hear why they must risk their lives to finish the war that the president waged so rashly.

"The answer to this question is one that Edward is well suited to give because it is rooted in fairness and common sense, two simple virtues that Edwards always appealed passionately to in arguing his case before a jury.

"America must finish this mistaken war because we must leave a conquered country better than we found it, a standard that in Iraq's case requires stability but not necessarily a perfect democracy.

America must finish this war because while Iraq was not the source of worldwide terror that Afghanistan once was, it could become one if we don't fix the president's mistakes. Kerry and Edwards will correctly finish the war that Bush mistakenly began because it is the right thing to do and the safe thing to do."

"To win tonight," Kennedy argues, Edwards "will need to convince the American people that their president and vice president committed malpractice in how and when they took this nation to war."

Personally, I suspect that Edwards would be best advised to turn the focus to domestic issues as much as possible tonight; that is where the Kerry/Edwards ticket is strongest, in my view, and it's also where the presidential debates are headed. But to the extent that the debate tonight focuses on the war, I like the trial lawyer's advice in Kennedy's column a lot.

Looking downward and inward, into his basement, Clayton Cramer runs into subhuman demons that are devouring him.

Sometimes dreams are just so obscure.

By now you've undoubtedly watched the debate Zapruder film of Senator Kerry's walk to the podium over and over again. And isn't it frustrating how quickly Kerry moves his hand from pocket to podium? He moves so fast it's damn near impossible to see what he's holding.

But the crack technical staff here at IsThatLegal has been hard at work with a digitally enhanced copy of the debate footage and has managed to identify and isolate one frame (a nano-fraction of a frame, actually) in which we can clearly discern what Kerry brought to the debate with him:



Senator Kerry, however, was not the only one breaking the carefully negotiated rules. In all of the fuss over what Kerry had in his pocket, the blogosphere has missed this:

JFK, in excruciating frame-by-frame images.

Why do I feel like I'm being shown the Zapruder film?

This is getting tiresome. Another radical-left, civil-liberties-absolutist, ethnic-grievance-industry-supporting rag rips apart Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment."

This time, it's the Wall Street Journal.

From Friday's edition:

IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT

By Michelle Malkin

(Regnery, 376 pages, $27.95)

IN 1942, the U.S. put about 112,000 American civilians of Japanese ancestry into internment camps for the duration of World War II. A little less than two-thirds were U.S. citizens and more than a third were permanent resident aliens. Most historians regard FDR's internment policy as a wild over-reaction to a nonexistent threat, a form of collective punishment that forced loyal Americans from their homes and earned them, in 1988, a settlement of more than $1.65 billion. Michelle Malkin thinks internment was a swell idea.

"In Defense of Internment" tries to show that FDR's policy was justified, but Ms. Malkin's narrative works against her argument. She says life in the camps was not that terrible and offers as evidence the fact that many residents were barely guarded and many were encouraged to find outside work. But that's also evidence that few inside the camps posed a national-security risk. She notes that most adults in the camps held dual Japanese/American citizenship but mentions only in passing that, before Japan changed its laws in 1924, anyone born to a Japanese father was a Japanese citizen. After the law was changed, only a handful of parents in the U.S. took the affirmative step of registering their children for dual citizenship.

Ms. Malkin argues that FDR had access to secret Japanese messages that revealed a possible fifth column, but she never tells us what specific information FDR had that showed the Japanese community as a whole to be a threat. She argues that FDR, during the war itself, could not have known how loyal most Japanese-Americans would prove to be.

Perhaps. But we know this today, which makes her conclusion all the more disturbing: that President Bush should take a page from FDR's book and practice a form of collective punishment in the war on terror. She does not call for Arab or Muslim internment camps, but she would like to see a policy of ethnic profiling at airports as well as Muslims locked out of certain jobs in the military. She hopes for a constitutional amendment that would establish a separate court system for terror suspects, one with less "liberal" rules and rights.

Mr. Bush prefers to target individuals suspected for wrongdoing, and let us be glad for that. The last thing we need right now is a draconian policy that would harm the innocent and alienate the very communities we need the most help from. Varying the famous maxim, Ms. Malkin actually remembers the past but wants to condemn us to repeat it.

-- Brendan Miniter

Before there was Michelle Malkin, there was Howard Coble--the Greensboro, NC congressman who made a splash in early 2003 when he came out in favor of the Japanese American internment of World War II.

For the first time in a while, Coble has a Democratic opponent--Will Jordan, an attorney (and alumnus of UNC Law School--hooray!). Today Ed Cone profiles Jordan in his weekly column in the Greensboro News-Record.

Jordan's got a website--www.jordan4congress.com. Check it out!

From the local newspaper:

"After watching the presidential debate Thursday night, two UNC students ended up slapping each other while fighting over who Jesus would vote for in the election."

I share a birthday (September 5) with Raquel Welch.

An unlikely pairing, to be sure. But nowhere near as unlikely as this one.

(October 1 happens to be my brother's birthday, too, and he takes more after the President than the Chief.)

Sally Greene, summertime guest-blogger here and now the prolific author at her own Greenespace, has written a lovely account of her evening with medical miracle man (but not moral saint) Paul Farmer. Check it out.

(Greene also heard author Tracy Kidder, who wrote a book, Mountains beyond Mountains, about Farmer that I recently read and modestly enjoyed. She was far less impressed with Kidder than she was with Farmer.)

I have to assume (though I have not yet taken time to check) that Right Blogistan is beginning to latch on to John Kerry's use of the phrase "global test" when speaking of the right of the President to launch preemptive military action to protect the United States.

Here, in context, is what Kerry said:

LEHRER: New question. Two minutes, Senator Kerry.

What is your position on the whole concept of preemptive war?

KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.

No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

Here we have our own secretary of state who has had to apologize to the world for the presentation he made to the United Nations.

I mean, we can remember when President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis sent his secretary of state to Paris to meet with DeGaulle. And in the middle of the discussion, to tell them about the missiles in Cuba, he said, "Here, let me show you the photos." And DeGaulle waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a result of what we've done, in that way? So what is at test here is the credibility of the United States of America and how we lead the world.

Now go to C-SPAN and watch this part of the debate. (It's at around 57:30.)

This was one of the very few moments--perhaps the only one--when Kerry was briefly searching for words, and as a result, expressing an idea less than precisely. (Note the pauses, the hand gesture, the brief glance out into space, before the words "global test") (Note also that the President had to stop and search for words--sometimes at length--at least once in the majority of his answers.)

In the context of (a) first directly asserting that he would never cede the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States, and (b) then following with that superb anecdote about de Gaulle's willingness to trust John Kennedy on the Cuban missiles, and (c) studding his entire presentation with the need to work with rather than defy and humiliate our allies, there can be no doubt that the extemporaneous phrase "global test" was a shorthand for the notion that along the way to an ultimate decision on preemptive military action, Kerry would work with our allies in good faith.

UPDATE: Sho 'nuf. As they try to find something that'll stick, they're finding their way to the "global test" line, just as I predicted.

Brad and Britt, the middle-of-the-roadish morning guys on our local commercial talk station (WZTK Greensboro) were of the view this morning that John Kerry won last night's debate. This was pissing off some of their listeners.

But you know what? Brad and Britt are right. Kerry looked and sounded presidential, handled the President's repeated charges of inconsistency gracefully, and spoke (for the most part) in clear, succinct phrases that ordinary people could understand. The President certainly did not embarrass himself, but seemed off his game, impatient, and sometimes irritated when Kerry was speaking. Scoring it point-wise, the debate was probably close to even (with Kerry slightly up, in my view.) But in the larger context of the campaign, for the challenger even to tie the President in a debate entirely on the President's strongest (arguably only) issue strikes me as a major victory for the challenger.

UPDATE: Martin says in a comment to this post that he thought Kerry's gaffe was in saying that American preemptive military action would need to meet "a global test." I agree that this was Kerry's weakest line. It was obvious to me that in that moment Kerry was sort of searching for words, and the words he chose were not the best. I don't think it's as big a problem as Martin does, though. The Republicans might argue that Kerry meant that he'd never act militarily without global permission, but that's a stretch. In the context of the thrust of Kerry's presentation, it's far likelier that he meant that before making a final decision on American military action, the President should engage with our allies in good faith.