Daily News Roundup, 12/06/07: The Fight for Habeas Corpus

The Supreme Court is the big news today, as they are currently deliberating over cases regarding Guantanamo detainees that have been held for over six years. A lower court declared that the detainees, many of which are foreigners detained by their local police and handed over to the United States, do not have a constitutional right to habeas corpus. That question seems to be the central one currently: their right to present their case before a judge within a reasonable span of time. A lower court declared that the detainees have no constitutional right to habeas corpus, and any such rights granted to them would have to be statutory — which last year's Military Commissions Act ruled out during the last month of Republican control of Congress. Also brought up was the issue of the government being allowed to present evidence that only the judge can see and not the accused.

Today is a big day for Mitt Romney. He will be giving a speech on his faith in College Station today that has been widely compared to John F. Kennedy's speech on Catholicism and how it would affect his presidency. Most see this as a calculated gamble to try and recover some of the Christian evangelical vote that has been giving Mike Huckabee his upsurge. I'm interested to see exactly what Romney would say that wouldn't harm him in the Republican primary, but unlike most in the media, I don't really think the speech will have him coming out and saying something he hasn't said before. After all the press it's gotten, I have a feeling it's going to be a bit more moderate and decidedly more underwhelming than it's made out to be. The probability of someone in the audience yelling, "You, sir, are no Jack Kennedy!" is also low.

Cheney's made news again today, with a statement that we would all be wise to pay attention to: he believes that Iraq will be self-governing democracy by 2009. His words:

Cheney said that by the middle of January 2009, it will be clear that "we have in fact achieved our objective in terms of having a self-governing Iraq that's capable for the most part of defending themselves, a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a nation that will be a positive force in influencing the world around it in the future."

Boy, am I going to be happy to hold him to that.

I don't know one person that isn't amazed by how retail stores seem to put up their Christmas advertising earlier every year — often before Thanksgiving, seemingly unwilling to wait until after the next holiday is over to start on the one after. Apparently, in this presidential cycle that itself started early, the same sort of thing is happening with the primaries. A few weeks out from the Iowa caucus, reporting is already starting to get rampant on New Hampshire. Apparently, Clinton maintains a short lead there — though, unlike the leads Iowa she and Obama have held, this one is actually outside the margin of error. And Ron Paul will apparently be bearing down his oodles and oodles of dollars on the New Hampshire primary, though his campaign seems to be having a few infrastructure problems on its way. There's probably a Libertarian joke in there somewhere, but I'll leave that for you guys to figure out.

And finally today, the push for abstinence-only education statewide and nationally that has been ascendant since Bush took office has taken another blow. In what is a somewhat predictable follow-up to earlier studies showing that abstinence-only education does not have an effect on teen pregnancy, the National Center for Health Statistics is reporting that teen birth rates are up in the United States for the first time in 14 years. The birth rate dropped 34 percent between 1991 and 2005, but went up 3 percent between 2005 and 2006, which the center's officials call "a significant increase." The article notes that abstinence education advocates are trying to return the blame for the increase on contraception messages — a tactic straight out of the Republican playbook, of course. "If the other guys are in control, it's their fault; if we're in control, it's still their fault." Sure is a far cry from "the buck stops here."