Phil Russell

“This President never adequately laid out the facts for going to war with Iraq�perhaps, as it turns out, because the facts were not there.”

Quite a few people I know believe the former, but not the latter. (Me, too.) We openly dismissed the president’s case, but found sufficient cause to support the invasion for other reasons. We decry the President’s misleading efforts to support the war, but we encourage you to make a distinction between the war and the president’s conduct.

-Magik

Lessig decided to have Howard Dean blog here in his absence. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to read it. Just come back when things are more to your liking.

However, they were trying to forestall the endless bits which THEN would have gone on with the Dems screaming bloody murder claiming they’d disenfranchised the entire state of Florida.

Make sense?

As for you Tash: you insulted me quite clearly. You claimed I had not answered your questions.

The cease-fire is Resolution 687. Read it. It spells out pretty clearly what Iraq needs to do. Also note that it is A FORMAL CEASE-FIRE: the basic tenet of which is, should one side break the faith, the other is authorized to RESUME FIRING.

From that point on, it doesn’t matter what Resolutions 678 or earlier say; Resolution 687, as the formal cease-fire, matters. And Congress gave Bush the authorization to enforce it, along with all the other resolutions pertaining to Iraq, in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq, in October of 2002.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/10/attack/main525165.shtml

We clear yet, Tash? It’s not any of the earlier resolutions you quoted that matter, it’s 687, and Saddam broke that particular cease-fire over and over again.

The US Supreme Court had ABSOLUTELY no business giving a ruling in the matter of the recounts for two reasons.

1) The Florida Supreme Court was asked to rule on interpretation of FLORIDA election law. When the Florida Supreme Court made their ruling for a statewide recount that should have been the end of the appeals. It is quite clear over our entire history as a nation, the mechanical aspects of election standards and procedures are defined by the states, not the federal government. For a US Supreme Court that has spent 20 years talking about how states have the right to interpret their owns to decide to step in and decide matter is absolutely beyound me.

The US Supreme Court was telling the FLORIDA Supreme Court how to interpret FLORIDA election laws. In only THREE cases in our history has the US Supreme Court has ever overruled a state supreme court interpretation of state law and none of cases ever resembled the case this US Supreme Court ruled on. In fact the US Supreme Court knew their resoning was specious since they added a caveat to their ruling that, in effect said, don’t ever try this type of legal gymnastics again.

2) The US Supreme Court had absolutely no business intervening in this matter since there was a constitutional rememdy for a contested election as described in Article II, Section ! and later modified by the 12th Admendment. To summarize, if no person receives a majority of the Electoral votes, the House of Representatives shall make the decision where each state has a single vote. The person who receives a majority of the votes in the House of Representatives is the president.

I have no idea why we could not let the Constitution decide the matter. The electors in Florida were contested. At the time it was not clear who had the majority of the votes in Florida since the state was not allowed to count all the votes. Bush would have likely won the balloting in the House since he won more states than Gore.

Cheers.

If that was some attempt to insult me… nice try. Far be it from me to assume the presence of intelligence for me to insult.

Your vote was not robbed from you. You cast it. You lost. The Supreme Court had to be called in because of arguments over:

The procedure of a recount.
The legal time and situation when one can demand a recount.
The remedies once the recount has happened: e.g. can you demand ANOTHER recount using different rules than the last?

Your vote was not robbed from you. You cast it.

The two parties then bickered and bickered over recounting procedures. And that was fine. And then the Dems started playing the Race card. And that was worse. And then the Dems started looking for needles in haystacks, so to speak, and wanted things counted again and again and again until they won.

Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. The tactics of Boss Tweed in Tammany Hall do not elect Democrats in this day and age, nor do they elect Republicans. They stop disreputable people from ever trying to steal elections like that again, which is what happened in 2000 in Florida.