The Republican establishment blogs – i.e. Pajamas Media – are really are rattled by Ron Paul. But their attempt to rig the online polls to keep him down, if not out, have backfired:
It was all a very weird, very uneccessary lesson in how trying to control an online community eventually brings on extinction, or at least dwindling popularity.
Mitt Romney, for one.
A Pole wakes from a coma to find the world that Reagan, Thatcher, Wojtila and Solidarity created. John Fund remembers the Gipper’s role here – and the miracle of 1989.
Caddrick and Chaddsity Smith look on by a small swimming pool in the B.W. Cooper housing projects June 10, 2007 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The project is lacking in recreational areas. Before Hurricane Katrina, B.W. Cooper held about 1,000 families and was the city’s largest housing project, but it is now more than 80 percent empty. By Mario Tama/Getty.
Christian Wiman has written a beautiful essay on skepticism and faith in the American Scholar. Money quote:
There is a passage in the writings of Simone Weil that has long been important to me. In the passage, Weil describes two prisoners who are in solitary confinement next to each other. Between them is a stone wall. Over a period of time — and I think we have to imagine it as a very long time — they find a way to communicate using taps and scratches. The wall is what separates them, but it is also the only means they have of communicating. "It is the same with us and God," she says. "Every separation is a link."
Hat tip: Ross. Clive James writes about Wiman here. This is a simple but lucid evocation of how it feels when grace happens:
Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That’s exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be.
"Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times," – Niccolo Machiavelli. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty.)
I wondered when rural Americans would have serious second thoughts about him. Well, they have now. Heartlanders trusted this president and have sacrificed more of their young to the war he has bungled. Now, it’s payback time:
– A slight majority of rural voters prefers a generic Democratic presidential candidate to a generic Republican candidate.
– War support is declining. Forty-five percent of rural respondents said the country should "stay the course" in Iraq, down from 51 percent in 2004.
– Rural people have a personal connection to the wars. Sixty percent know someone serving in the wars. One quarter say they have a family member serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
– President Bush’s job performance ratings have dropped 10 points (to 44 percent approve) since the 2004 election.
Hat tip: Pollster.com.
Marty Lederman homes in on the critical detail in the al-Marri case: the Bush administration moved him from criminal to military detention solely in order to torture him, it appears. Money quote from the court:
The Government’s treatment of others [in the criminal justice system] renders its decision to halt al-Marri’s criminal prosecution – on the eve of a pre-trial hearing on a suppression motion – puzzling at best. Al-Marri contends that the Government has subjected him to indefinite military detention, rather than see his criminal prosecution to the end, in order to interrogate him without the strictures of criminal process. We trust that this is not so, for such a stratagem would contravene Hamdi’s injunction that "indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized." 542 U.S. at 521.
We note, however, that not only has the Government offered no other explanation for abandoning al-Marri’s prosecution, it has even propounded an affidavit in support of al-Marri’s continued military detention stating that he "possesses information of high intelligence value." See Rapp Declaration. Moreover, former Attorney General John Ashcroft has explained that the Government decided to declare al-Marri an "enemy combatant" only after he became a "hard case" by "reject[ing] numerous offers to improve his lot by … providing information." John Ashcroft, Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice 168-69 (2006). [My italics].
So it appears they decided to detain him in order to torture him. That’s not constitutional.
Another court defeat for King George.
The Dish 