A federal judge ruled today that bystanders injured in the raid to capture Elian Gonzalez can sue Janet Reno. Reno had claimed, that because she had been serving as attorney general at the time, that she was immune from civil suits over the consequences of her actions.

The judge's decision was a stinging rebuke:

A reasonable officer in Reno's position would know that the law forbade her from directing the execution of a warrant in a manner that called for unjustified force against bystanders.

Now that the judge has cleared the way for the suit, discovery should be progressing on schedule over the next few months. Reno's deposition ought to be availble to the media no later than next summer. W
» posted by Mike

Even as the GOP's hopes of re-taking the Senate get slimmer, their chances of running up the score in the House get fatter. Just this week, the redistricting plan most likely to be implemented in Texas sent Dems reeling. The plan would

...likely end the House career of Democrat Ken Bentsen and would threaten the reelection of at least four other Democrats: Charles W. Stenholm, Jim Turner, Max Sandlin and Chet Edwards [and would] produce at least three new GOP seats -- including the two new seats added to the delegation because of the state's population increase in the 2000 census.

Dem strategists are running scared today:

The Texas plan, which some Democrats suggested could result in the loss of as many as nine seats, would put the GOP so far ahead in the national competition to win a majority of at least 218 seats that the odds of a Democratic House would become prohibitive given the declining number of marginal, competitive seats across the country.

"I can't tell you how bad this is," a Democratic strategist said yesterday. "If this stands, and we have to live with just a one-seat gain in California, it is going to be very hard to win the House back."

Nationwide, with plans in place and expected to be in place, the GOP expects to pick up 8 - 10 seats. Not quite the 15 - 30 seat gain that I once predicted, but still enough to put the chamber out of easy reach for the Dems until 2012. W
» posted by Mike

Four of us went to see the Dar Williams show at the 9:30 Club last night. All I can say is, wow. Dar's live performance had me floored. She took songs that I thought I knew and made them absolutely pop, as if listening to the albums weree two-dimensional, and seeing her live was 3D. Of course, the club was packed with fans who knew every word to every song, sang along without any encouragement, and basically fed right back into the whole experience. After the disappointment we had last fall, I'm glad we finally got to see Dar headlining live... it was so worth being persistent. W
» posted by Mike

By now, almost all of y'all have heard that Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect has been yanked off the air following his sharp criticism of the American military recently. As one might expect, liberals around the globe have - rightly - rallied to his defense. These folks were noticably silent when the Boston Globe fired its only conservative columnist two years back. And you can bet every penny of junior's college fund that they were standing on the sidelines cheering when the National Review axed Ann Coulter's syndicated column.

One nexus of the Maher controversy is White House spokeman Ari Fleischer's remarks that people "ought to watch what they say." Oddly enough, Maher wasn't criticising the current administration, he was lambasting the last one, when he said: "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away; that's cowardly."

So why does everyone seem to think this is the product of some super-secret White House plan to get Bill Maher? W
» posted by Mike

Kevin takes the Supreme Court to task for treating former President Bill Clinton just as they would any other lawyer who had been disbarred. As the sidebar on the story clearly tells, any time a lawyer is disbarred in any jurisdiction, other courts in which the lawyer is admitted routinely follow suit - several other lawyers were apparently disbarred in the same ministerial action. So, since Clinton has said he will appeal the decision, the only question is - why does he think he's entitled to special treatment? W
» posted by Mike

That story about the U.S. giving $43 million to the Taliban? It's false:

The truth is contained in the transcript of a briefing given by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who on May 17 announced the $43 million grant; it was aimed at alleviating a famine that threatened the lives of four million Afghans. Far from handing the money over to the Taliban, Powell went out of his way to criticize them, and to explain the steps the United States was taking to keep the money out of their hands.

" We distribute our assistance in Afghanistan through international agencies of the United Nations and non-governmental organizations, " Powell said. " We provide our relief to the people of Afghanistan, not to Afghanistan’s ruling factions. Our aid bypasses the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it. "

Isn't it just like that wacky corporate-owned conservative media to slant a story like that? Thank god for the alternative press.... This is exactly the kind of misrepresentation I hope to avoid in WOIFM.

Link from Glenn. W
» posted by Mike

Lots of good reading over at InstaPundit. Glenn uncovered a Michael Kinsley article noting that racial profiling and affirmative action are two sides of the same coin.

You can believe (as I do) that affirmative action is often a justifiable form of discrimination, but you cannot sensibly believe that it isn't discrimination at all. Racial profiling and affirmative action are analytically the same thing. When the cops stop black drivers or companies make extra efforts to hire black employees, they are both giving certain individuals special treatment based on racial generalizations. The only difference is that in one case the special treatment is something bad and in the other it's something good. Yet defenders of affirmative action tend to deplore racial profiling and vice versa.

While Kinsley thinks that discrimination is sometimes "justifiable," I don't. Both racial profiling and affirmative action are deplorable.

Racial profiling is based on a logical fallacy: since criminals are X times more likely to be of a particular ethnic background, police are therefore justified in treating all members of that ethnic category as if they were criminals. But, just because (for exmaple) all the hijackers on Sept. 11 were Middle Eastern does not make all persons of Middle Eastern descent hijackers. But racial profiling is an official sanction for our society to think and act that way. It's no different than if Congress passed a resoluion stating that X group are lazy, and X group are dishonest, and X group are drunkards, and X group are organized criminals.

What liberals and racial apologists often choose not to see is that affirmative action works the same way. Just because some group members have more or fewer advantages than members of other groups, does not mean that the every member of the group is. Like racial profiling, affirmative action functions rest on group assumptions without regard for individual circumstances. That fact flies in the face of our Declaration that "all men are created equal," and more importantly, our Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that American's laws will protect each American equally without regard to race. Anything less is the moral equivalent of treating a person as a criminal based on his ancestry. W
» posted by Mike