Old Crow Medicine Show

Best YouTube debate question ever.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case DC v. Heller and decide whether or not Washington, DC's 31 year ban on handgun ownership will stay or go.

The court accepted a case on the District of Columbia’s 31-year-old prohibition on the ownership of handguns. In adding the case to its calendar, for argument in March with a decision most likely in June, the court not only raised the temperature of its current term but also inevitably injected the issue of gun control into the presidential campaign.

The federal appeals court here, breaking with the great majority of federal courts to have examined the issue over the decades, ruled last March that the Second Amendment right was an individual one, not tied to service in a militia, and that the District of Columbia’s categorical ban on handguns was therefore unconstitutional.

Heller is a test case manufactured by Robert A. Levy, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian "think tank" in Washingon.

Despite the strict gun laws, DC is not without gun violence. In fact, DC saw it's 169th murder of the year in the senseless shooting of Timothy Spicer, a 25-year-old cook at the famous Ben's Chili Bowl restaurant.

I don't expect any new arguments, but it will be interesting to see what this Court does. I assume the conservatives are going to go for broke in case they don't get the White House in 2008.

One thing that I did learn recently, though, is that the argument about whether or not the 'militia' language in the amendment has any contemporary meaning may be moot.

10 USC 311 clearly defines the modern militia as:

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

Who knew? So, it looks like (a) I'm a militiaman and (b) most women don't have the right to bear arms.

Lovely.

Thanks, Schumer! Thanks, DiFi!

WASHINGTON (CNN) — In his second day on the job, Attorney General Michael Mukasey leaped into the political fray, telling a key Democratic senator he opposes his electronic surveillance plan and would recommend the president veto it if it is passed.

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., on the eve of crucial committee votes to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Mukasey was adamant in opposing Leahy's plan for changing the law.

Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell co-signed the letter released Wednesday night by the Justice Department.

From Jonathan Cohn's New Republic article, Creative Destruction:

The single biggest source of medical research funding, not just in the United States but in the entire world, is the National Institutes of Health (NIH): Last year, it spent more than $28 billion on research, accounting for about one-third of the total dollars spent on medical research and development in this country (and half the money spent at universities). The majority of that money pays for the kind of basic research that might someday unlock cures for killer diseases like Alzheimer's, aids, and cancer. No other country has an institution that matches the NIH in scale. And that is probably the primary explanation for why so many of the intellectual breakthroughs in medical science happen here.

There's no reason why this has to change under universal health insurance. NIH has its own independent funding stream. And, during the late 1990s, thanks to bipartisan agreement between President Clinton and the Republican Congress, its funding actually increased substantially--giving a tremendous boost to research. With or without universal coverage, subsequent presidents and Congress could ramp up funding again--although, if they did so, they would be breaking with the present course. It so happens that, starting in 2003, President Bush and his congressional allies let NIH funding stagnate, even though the cost of medical research (like the cost of medicine overall) was increasing faster than inflation. The reason? They needed room in the budget for other priorities, like tax cuts for the wealthy. In this sense, the greatest threat to future medical breakthroughs may not be universal health care but the people who are trying so hard to fight it.

via - Paul Krugman

The Senate approved the nomination of Michael Mukasey, despite "the former district judge’s contention that he did not know whether the interrogation tactic known as waterboarding constitutes illegal torture under U.S. laws."

The vote was 53-40.

6 Democrats voted to confirm:

Bayh (D-IN)
Carper (D-DE)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Nelson (D-NE)
Schumer (D-NY)

Five presidential candidates didn't think it was important enough to vote:

Biden (D-DE)
Clinton (D-NY)
Dodd (D-CT)
Obama (D-IL)
McCain (R-AZ)

I just read paragraph one of Sen. Shumer's op-ed in today's NYT:

I AM voting today to support Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general for one critical reason: the Department of Justice — once the crown jewel among our government institutions — is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations.

The Boston Globe gets it.

In his Senate confirmation hearings, Mukasey refused to say whether he thought interrogation methods such as the simulation of drowning, known as waterboarding, should be considered torture. Showing fairly shallow knowledge for the next standard-bearer of justice, he said, "I don't know what's involved in the technique. If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional."

One would think that by now the Democrats would have developed the spine to stand up to such nonsense nearly seven years into George W. Bush's presidency, which has sunk America's global moral standing with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, the prison torture scandal of Abu Ghraib, and the many killings of innocent Iraqis by soldiers and contractors.

...

Mukasey may be no Alberto Gonzales, but he has already signaled that he will be guided not by his own moral and legal compass, but by Bush's.

With every rationalization that lets the Bush administration off the hook, the Democrats render themselves meaningless.