I love good corporate-techie backbiting. The new MSN search engine has interesting results for the query “more evil than god”.

Surprise! Firefox and Google make the list.

While I enjoyed taking the LSAT in a fit of college-senior insanity, I opted not to go to law school. So everything I know about the legal system, I’ve learned from watching Law & Order. Thus, I found this statement about the new Matthew Shepard report worrisome:

“The interviews [given by Shepard’s killers] apparently violate the plea agreements the two men signed at their sentencing. According to reports, the men agreed never to talk to the media about the case as part of the agreement that spared them the death penalty.”

This sounds like what amounts to a non-disclosure agreement being attached to a criminal proceeding. Is that SOP with pleas? And if so, why? Doesn’t that make it harder for wrongly-convicted people to prove their innocence? Hugh, Beldar, Glenn, SoxBlog, Law Jedi, help me–you’re my only hope!

Note: I am NOT suggesting that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson–the men who brutally murdered Shepard–are innocent. They’re obviously guilty and deserve their fate. Although I’m intellectually (if not emotionally) glad that they weren’t given the death penalty, since some of us theocons really are bothered by capital punishment.

(And yes, contra Andrew Sullivan, I’m not wild about Gonzales’s record–or Bush’s pre-presidential glibness–concerning the death penalty. But what Sullivan seems not to understand is that Gonzales was upholding existing law, which is what he gets paid to do. What good theocons would prefer is to change the law, not tut-tut in disapproval of people who faithfully execute laws we don’t like.)

This International Herald Tribune story is most notable for the following section:

“Islamic scholars have generally prohibited the discontinuation of life support machines, since the Koran advises: ‘Don’t throw yourself into death.’ Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, reacted violently to press reports yesterday that Palestinian officials had arrived in Paris to ‘pull the plug’ on Arafat.”

So the Koran says “Don’t throw yourself into death”? This section of the book should, perhaps, be more widely publicized in the Middle East.

Yes, this is a little awkward: I’m the only one willing to go out and defend John Kerry against his newly-minted Democratic detractors. I should get hazard pay for this.

My argument is that Kerry was a pretty good candidate who ran a flawed campaign. He was probably the best option on the table for Democrats and, although he lost, he didn’t wreck the party, and by the way, it probably isn’t entirely his fault. I know, faint praise.

But I’d like to further posit that I don’t know if it’s going to be possible for any Democrat to win the White House with the crazy Michael Moore left hanging like an albatross around their neck. In order for the Democrats to become a viable national party again, they’re going to have to excommunicate the rabid, nutball left. And that’s going to require a pretty ruthless political mind.

Can a Democrat pull that off? Let me just say this, if Bill Clinton had been running in 2004, he wouldn’t have had a Sister Soulja moment–he would have a Michael Moore moment.

What’s going on over at weeklystandard.com?

Peter Berkowitz has a piece on how Bush should reach out to Democrats; I have a piece defending John Kerry; and Terry Eastland is launching what appears to be a subtle attack on Alberto Gonzales. It’s madness, I tell you!

Eastland’s gentle complaint about Gonzales is that he has no big-pond management experience and has very little on his résumé to recommend him for the job of attorney general in a post-9/11 world. That sounds about right to me. Particularly since there were two other obvious candidates on the table: Larry Thompson and Jim Comey.

You’ll remember that Bush telegraphed his opposition to Comey a couple weeks ago, on the grounds that, while he was highly qualified for the job, he wasn’t loyal enough. In case you’re struggling to remember the exact words, here they are, courtesy of an anonymous Bush official: “The White House always wants to make sure the administration is staffed with people who have the president’s best interests at heart. Anyone who resists that political loyalty check is regarded with some suspicion. The objective in staffing is never to assemble the best possible team. . . . [Comey] has shown insufficient political savvy. The perception is that he has erred too much on the side of neutrality and independence.”

Larry Thompson does not seem to have similarly raised the Austin hackles. So let’s hope that his passing over is because the president has larger things in mind for him, perhaps even the Supreme Court.

But back to Gonzales. While his actual qualifications may be a little on the thin side, he does have two things going for him: (1) He’s a long-time Bush confidant; and (2) He’s Hispanic.

The first part speaks for itself. But as for the second, Gonzales closed his introductory remarks the other day with a troubling sentiment. He said:

“Finally, to our President, when I talk to people around the country I sometimes tell them that within the Hispanic community there is a shared hope for an opportunity to succeed. ‘Just give me a chance to prove myself’–that is a common prayer for those in my community. Mr. President, thank you for that chance.”

The job of attorney general is bigger than an individual–this appointment isn’t about advancing Gonzales’s career and “proving himself” (or at least it shouldn’t be). That the incoming attorney general sees his appointment this way is troubling. That the president is taking “a chance” with one of the most important jobs in the fight against terrorism is, too.

Scott Johnson gets a good start on the debunking of Arafat. Unfortunately, this is a task which is going to require lots of work (hard work!) from people over the next several days to put Arafat’s life in perspective.

Anonymous is “curious to know why I don’t hear more from conservatives over the need for ensuring accuracy and transparency of new technology voting processes. Aren’t accurate vote counts fundamental to a democracy and in every American’s interest?”

Good question–to which there is only a less than satsfactory answer: Conservatives are loath to boss around local governments and insist on some uniform technological standard when there’s no clear need for one. Miscounts can be corrected, recounts required by legislativea action, and so on.

Also, the only way of guranteeing a perfectly accurate count everywhere is to insist every locality use the same perfect machine. But for one thing, perfect machines don’t exist.

Anything less than a perfect vote count may be, technically, a violation of the democratic principle, but only in the rarified realm of abstraction, where the perfect need not bother with reality and human fallibility.

In reality, nowhere is democracy in better shape than here in the United States. We are long past the time when ballot-box stuffing, dead-men voting, vote purchasing, and actual vote suppression were all practically routine and resulted in distortion much, much greater than the glitch-type problems we see today.

Victorino isn’t around to note this story since he’s going to the chapel to get ma-a-ar-ried. But if China’s sending a boomer into Japanese waters, isn’t this just one more indication of Chinese military boldness that should worry us?

Correction, 11/11/04, 5:04 p.m.: As alert reader C.G. notes, this is not a “boomer,” it’s a fast-attack sub. Having spent waaay too many hours playing the PC version of Hunt for Red October, I have no excuse for this mistake.