Daily News Roundup, 11/15/07: A Debate You Can See From Space

Yet another Democratic candidate debate will be held tonight, this one in Las Vegas at 7 p.m. Central on CNN — which we will, of course, be liveblogging. One person who probably won't be following along on our liveblog? Representative and Senate candidate Rick Noriega, who will instead be attending as a guest of the Democratic National Committee.

This is obviously a great boost for the Noriega campaign, as was last week's Austin fundraiser hosted by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The increased visibility should help substantially in raising out-of-state donations, which, as the article points out, are pretty much necessary to raise the kind of money that will be needed to run against Cornyn.

As far as the debate goes, after Clinton's beating at the hands of her opponents and the moderators in the last debate, she is probably looking to regain some face and to fight accusations of vacillating on issues. Edwards and Obama, on the other hand, will be looking to capitalize on that chink in her armor. Personally, I'll be just as interested in seeing how exchanges between Edwards and Obama play out. Both have a vested interest in joining forces to knock off the frontrunner, but there have been some notable attempts by the Obama camp to distance the candidate from Edwards, not the least of which have been Obama's regular digs at Edwards on the stump. I'm curious to see whether that ends up coming up in this debate as well. That, and whether Biden can make another strong debate showing and still be universally snubbed by the press.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey's first priority as head of the Justice Department clearly is not making friends. Just a few days into his tenure, he already has taken up arms against Senator Patrick Leahy (who, we may note, opposed his confirmation) by opposing Leahy's modifications to the FISA law, going so far as to say that he'd recommend that the president veto it. Like Bush needs encouragement to veto a bill coming out of Congress. Leahy's bill is meant to be a substitute to the bill cleared by the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier, which is likely to pass and has support from the Bush administration. A major difference between that bill and Leahy's is that the Intelligence Committee bill gives immunity to telecommunications companies that complied with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program, severely limiting the ability to find out exactly how extensive the program was and what excesses it involved.

A lobbying effort took place yesterday that I'm not sure I've ever quite seen the likes of before. House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican in the Senate Judiciary Committee, were hand-delivered a letter — which President Bush also received — from the president of the Iraqi Bar Association and a number of top Iraqi lawyers. Turns out they also met on Tuesday with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and White House special counsel Emmet Flood. They were — get this — lobbying to get Iraqis incarcerated in Iraq due to blanket security sweeps by American forces a timely trial. Currently, per the Hill article, the wait for a trial for this sort of thing is anywhere between three months and two years. Clearly someone should have told them before they came that we don't really believe in habeas corpus anymore. From the article:

“We all have an interest in justice and as American lawyers tell us, justice delayed is justice denied,” wrote al-Minshidi, the Shiite president of the bar association. “Moreover, a people’s respect for the rule of law, which is the keystone of a lawful society, is also affected by the mere appearance of injustice.

“We ask that more resources be made available to expedite the investigation and trial of all prisoners held by multinational forces in Iraq,” he wrote.

I can't tell you how honestly sad it makes me that it is the Iraqi legal system that is trying to remind us of what a legal system is supposed to stand for.

Speaking of incarceration without jury trial, a 2003 handbook on Standard Operating Procedures in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility somehow made its way onto the Internet. (EDIT: The old Miami Herald link has been taken down; here's another to Wired with the same story.) It's an eye-opening look into the running of the facility. The article has a link to the document itself, for your perusal.

Texas' "castle doctrine," allowing deadly force to be used in defense of one's property, may be getting some closer scrutiny. A man in Pasadena, Texas shot and killed two suspected burglars escaping from his neighbor's property yesterday. And talk is that such a thing may actually pass scrutiny in Texas:

"If the homeowner comes out and says, 'My neighbor had a greater right of possession than the people trying to break in,' that could put him (the gunman) in an ownership role," LaFon said.

The Texas Penal Code says a person can use force or deadly force to defend someone else's property if he reasonably believes he has a legal duty to do so or the property owner had requested his protection.

The article also highlights the unintended consequences of the "castle doctrine" to the neighborhood of the individual. It's worth a read.

Finally today, climate change deniers took another blow to their shoddy science. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program — which falls under Bush's administration, in case you're wondering — are reporting that contrary to prior claims, the North American environment can only soak up a third to a fourth of the carbon dioxide emissions we produce. The rest, of course, would be held in the atmosphere. This most likely doesn't come as much of a surprise to our readers. But coupled with the fact that our coal-fired power plants are among the worst emitters of carbon dioxide in the nation — producing nearly double the CO2 as No. 2 Florida — this points to a particular responsibility on us to improve air quality in our state.