Some Links From My Friend Kevin

My friend at Microsoft, Kevin Schofield, just posted a bunch of interesting links in his blog. First, here's The Onion's take on the flap about the Bush documents. Next, from the hometown newspaper of Crawford, TX (where the President has his ranch), here's an editorial endorsement of John Kerry. Third, a link to a video montage from the Republican Convention. And fourth, a link that thoroughly (though not necessarily authoritatively) debunks the (too often heard, especially lately) claim that the USA was founded as a Christian nation.

Finally, and I can't believe that this was already three months ago, Keven posted a brief article that covered the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. I had actually been planning to post about that, but Kevin beat me to the punch, so I held off. Kevin had noticed the exact same thing that I had intended to post about: the incredibly unlikely agreement of Justices Stevens and Scalia, the Court's most liberal and most conservative members respectively. They dissented jointly from the 6-3 decision, but not because they believed that the Court had ruled in the wrong direction. They dissented because they believed that the Court had not spanked the Bush administration hard enough for having denied habeas corpus to so-called "enemy combatant" prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Stevens and Scalia almost never agree. I bring it up now, because that decision gives me some hope that, if the upcoming election does result in litigation that goes to the Supreme Court again this year, perhaps enough of the Justices are so offended by the current administrations disdain for the Constitution that they will put politics aside this time, and render a decision that starts to restore some of our faith in separation of powers and our electoral process.

The final outcome of the Hamdi case, by the way, is that the administration decided just a week or two ago that, rather than allowing him a hearing in court as had been ordered to do by the Supreme Court, they would now release him and deport him to Saudi Arabia (with some conditions attached), because he is "no longer a threat". They're in compliance with the ruling, technically, but they are denying the American people one crucial bit of information, which is whether a fair hearing would or would not have established that Hamdi's designation as an enemy combatant was in fact just. I have little doubt at all that the vast majority of the Guantanamo prisoners are bad people, fully guiltiy of what they are accused of, but despite the Supreme Court rulings, it looks like we'll never really know, and we'll never really know just how far the administration's disdain for due process has gone.