Thomas McCann argues that, “whether the Iraqis choose to ratify their Constitution or not, the experience of their referendum will be a monumental success in the gestation of the Iraqi democracy.” He goes on to make the more forceful claim that a defeat could prove even more useful:  “No lesson could be more powerful than the voice of the people saying ‘No’ to governmental leaders and seeing what happens when

TalkLeft’s Jeralyn Merritt on Bush and Miers: I am at the 3 day annual meeting of the Lexis-Nexis – Martindale Hubbell Legal Advisory board. This is the board that Harriet Miers was on until 1999 or 2000, when she went to work full-time for Bush, who was then running for President. There are four ex-ABA presidents on the board (three of whom are here), and one former U.S. Attorney General.

Two Sides of the Sunni Vote: Deserted Polls and Long Lines (NYT): A heavy boom shook what was left of the windows in polling station No. 1, a provincial council building in the center of this embattled Sunni Arab city. Bursts of automatic gunfire immediately followed. The polls had been open for exactly three minutes, and insurgents here had already staked their claim on the vote. Iraqis vote in force

—You may as well stop right there, because the answer is no, I’m afraid.  Sorry, but the little guy somehow got it into his head his head that, were he to really study up on Constitutional Law, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg steps aside he might just have a chance at a nomination—having sent the President’s 2004 re-election campaign $93 dollars and a homemade jambalaya loaded with cajun-spiced scarab beetles. It’s

From the Washington Times: Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa erred twice in his eulogy of Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan calling the suicide an “assassination,” said an-Nahar. The public attorney who superintended an autopsy made the same mistake during a televised news conference. “The ‘tongue lapses’ buttressed a worldwide conviction that Gen. Kanaan was ‘willfully eliminated’ to cover up a high-level involvement of the Assad regime in Lebanon’s ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s

Attorney and frequent commenter Donald Quigley sends along this interesting bit of analysis regarding a Tenth Circuit Court decision that effectively does to the Commerce Clause what Kelo did for takings and eminent domain—namely, extended it to the point where there is no longer any logical constraint on its power. Writes Don: You may recall a series of BS Supreme Court decisions (e.g. Wickard, Raich) in which purely intra-state activities

In a long and interesting comment thread to this pro-Miers post by Beldar, which itself excoriates NRO for abandoning a pretense of neutrality (an odd demand of an opinion journal), Hans Gruber sums up his disappointment with the Miers nomination this way: […] Now [the President] hands us another nominee, this time a former Democrat and supporter of racial preferences, who has never written or commented publicly about any issue

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