One Bit of Good News

Yes I am late on mentioning this, but my home state finally has a Senator designate, and thank the lord it is Al Franken.

I used to work for the State of Minnesota and met Norm Coleman while he was the mayor of St. Paul on numerous occasions; I'm still trying to get rid of the oily feeling. Norm Coleman is at best an opportunist, at worst a crook, and Minnesota will be much better for not having him as their representative any more.

The Minnesota State Canvassing board certified the results showing that Al Franken won the Minnesota Senate recount, beating Coleman by 225 votes. However the race is still “in limbo,” as the Board’s declaration started a seven-day clock for Coleman to file a lawsuit protesting the result. Norm Coleman held a press conference yesterday afternoon, not to concede of course, but to announce that he's filing yet another lawsuit. Funny how when he was in the lead he said he would not drag it out and would concede if he were in the situation he now finds him self. Guess he was lying.

You can see Keith Olberman report on this here:

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Of course the far-right is trying to create a narrative that Al Franken's success in Minnesota is illegitimate. Joe Scarborough and Ann Coulter have been saying all kinds of nonsense, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, is just making things up with this wretched editorial, which was then picked up by Faux Noise (especially Faux & Friends, Bill Orally and Sean Fathead Hannerty).

Of course any real journalism proves that the far-right arguments don't stand up to any scrutiny. Their complaints are in fact baseless.

Earlier this week, Nate Silver went paragraph by paragraph, and showed exactly why the Wall Street Journal editorial was completely wrong.

Even better, the Minnesota Assistant Chief Judge, Edward Cleary, who is a member of the Minnesota state canvassing board, wrote an entertaining letter to the Journal, questioning the editorial board's integrity.

As a member of the Minnesota State Canvassing Board, appointed pursuant to statute, I have attended all nine Board open meetings held the past seven weeks. I am knowledgeable about the proceedings as well as Minnesota's election laws. Our members (two Supreme Court Justices, two District Court Judges, and Secretary of State Ritchie) came from all political backgrounds, openly expressed our opinions at the meetings, and can hardly be accurately described as "meek", unless you mean "meek" by New York in-your-face standards. Your groundless attack on Secretary Ritchie reflects poorly on the author; Ritchie worked assiduously at avoiding partisanship in these proceedings.

As to the Board as a whole, all of our major votes were unanimous. We consistently
followed the law in limiting our involvement to a non-adjudicative role, declining both candidates' attempts to expand our mandate. Further, we painstakingly reviewed each challenged ballot, some more than once, to confirm that we were ruling in a consistent manner.

One can only assume, based on the tone of the editorial, the numerous inaccuracies, and the over-the-top slam at Al Franken ("tainted and undeserving?") that had Norm Coleman come out on top in this recount, the members of the Board would have been praised as "strong-willed, intelligent, and perceptive."

We won't hold our breath waiting for that editorial to appear.

Watch Bill O'Reilly as he eacts to the news that Al Franken will most likely be the next Senator of Minnesota here:

LibertyAir Blog

Headzup: The "Quaint" Posse Comitatus Act

If you have never checked out Headzup, you really should; they are hilarious. In this video President Bush is asked about the deployment of 20,000 troops on U.S. soil in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Read more about this story below.



LibertyAir Blog

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terroristattack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Political scientist Dr. Steven Taylor writes about his concern on this subject:

There are two key problems here. The first is that the function of the military isn’t domestic security and second, the military is already rather busy at the moment (and for the foreseeable future).

First, the military isn’t designed or trained for domestic responses. Training for a nuclear attack or an invasion is one thing, assigning an active-duty combat brigade to a specifically domestic task is yet another.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Cato Institute are troubled by what they consider an expansion of executive authority.

Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security.

“There’s a notion that whenever there’s an important problem, that the thing to do is to call in the boys in green,” Healy said, “and that’s at odds with our long-standing tradition of being wary of the use of standing armies to keep the peace.”