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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (65179)	8/8/2005 9:51:54 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 81568

bad breath polluting air

To: American Spirit who wrote (65179)	8/8/2005 9:57:55 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

BY JAMES TARANTO Monday, August 8, 2005 3:25 p.m. EDT Power to the Lawyers Is Hillary Clinton as brilliant a politician as she's cracked up to be? Here's a bit of evidence for the negative: "Clinton Says Lawyers Must Make Their Voices Heard in Washington" reads the headline of an Associated Press dispatch about a speech New York's junior senator gave at the American Bar Association convention in Chicago. Lawyers need to speak up more: Now there's a message sure to strike a chord with the public. One lawyer who seems to be taking Mrs. Clinton's exhortation seriously is Jeanine Pirro, district attorney of Westchester County, who, the New York Times reports, said today that she will seek the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Clinton next year. Conventional wisdom has it that Clinton is unbeatable, but Pirro--whose attributes, according to the Times, include "tough talk, quick wit, and good looks"--is probably the Republicans' best shot. The Times notes, though, that Pirro may have a problem: "the shadow that [her] husband, Albert J. Pirro Jr., has cast over her political career for nearly two decades": Democrats say she is vulnerable to questions of judgment in her relationship with Mr. Pirro, who was convicted of income tax fraud in 2000 and served 11 months in prison. The last time we saw Mrs. Clinton, she was wearing what did not appear to be a wedding ring. However, rumors persist that she, like Mrs. Pirro, is married--and who knows? Maybe it'll turn out that she is vulnerable to questions of judgment in her relationship with Mr. Clinton. Après Judy Miller le Déluge You've gotta love this editorial from today's New York Times: The United States is used to representing the high road when it comes to freedom of the press. If it fails to set the right example, countries with weaker traditions of civic rights are bound to notice. As the New York Times reporter Judith Miller enters her fifth week in jail for refusing to disclose a source, the repercussions are being felt abroad. Those "repercussions," according to the Times, include actions against journalists in Burundi, Nepal, Serbia and Montenegro (formerly Yugoslavia) and Russia. The Times' conclusion: By keeping Ms. Miller in jail, the United States is sending a signal to the rest of the world that it is O.K. to go after journalists as long as you invoke national security. That's not a good message to send. The most obvious objection to this is that it is a classic example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Given the long history of press restrictions under authoritarian regimes, it seems tendentious in the extreme to attribute such restrictions in the past five weeks to the "message" sent by Miller's jailing. Even more risible is the way the Times ducks responsibility for its reporter's current predicament. Miller would be walking the streets today but for John Ashcroft's decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. As we noted in February, in 2003 the Times' editorialists and op-ed columnists led the charge for the appointment of such a prosecutor to investigate the "leak" and subsequent publication of the information that Joe Wilson's wife, who worked for the CIA, had recommended him for his junket to Niger. That is, for its own partisan purposes, the Times advocated an aggressive government investigation into how a journalist came to publish accurate information about the government. That's not a good message to send.