CALIFORNIA YANKEE

McCain: 'No Confidence' in Rumsfeld

Senator John McCain said today that he has "no confidence" in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, citing Rumsfeld's handling of the war in Iraq and the failure to send more troops.

Speaking to The Associated Press McCain said his comments were not a call for Rumsfeld's resignation:

Asked about his confidence in the secretary's leadership, McCain recalled fielding a similar question a couple weeks ago.

"I said no. My answer is still no. No confidence," McCain said.

McCain says an additional 80,000 Army personnel and 20,000 to 30,000 more Marines would be needed to secure Iraq:

"I have strenuously argued for larger troop numbers in Iraq, including the right kind of troops - linguists, special forces, civil affairs, etc.," said McCain, R-Ariz. "There are very strong differences of opinion between myself and Secretary Rumsfeld on that issue."

When asked if Rumsfeld was a liability to the Bush administration, McCain responded: "The president can decide that, not me."

It bothers me that everyone but those in charge think we need more troops in Iraq. Can all these people be wrong?

Elections Director: "Absentee Ballots Mistakenly Rejected"

The Associated Press reports that the Elections Director in Seattle's King County said Monday that hundreds of absentee ballots were mistakenly rejected in the heavily Democratic County:

Logan said election workers mistakenly rejected 561 absentee ballots because they thought signatures on the ballots did not match original voter registration records.

However, he said that the signatures simply were not on file in the county's computerized voter registration system and that original registration records should have been checked.

"We need to correct the error and count those votes," Logan said in a statement.

A statewide hand recount, the third count in Washington's gubernatorial election, is under way after Republican Rossi came out ahead first by 261 votes, then in a mandatory machine recount by 42 votes.

Washington's Supreme court was to hear arguments this afternoon on the Democratic Party's lawsuit seeking to clarify ballot-counting rules:

Republicans say it's an effort to change the rules after the game has already been lost.

"The issue at hand is do we abide by the rules or do we change the rules midway through the election," Lane said Saturday.

The Democrats say they're trying to ensure that every vote gets counted.

Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire, in a letter on her Web site, said "the Democratic Party has gone to the Supreme Court to fix mistakes that kept legitimate votes from being counted before."

The count them till the Democrat wins approach is raising an interesting question: Which counting method is more reliable and accurate? Human or machine?

According to the Associated Press, experts tend to favor the machine recount.

The fact that Washington moved away from hand counting paper ballots decades ago, and has used machines and computers to tabulate the votes that are cast in a variety of ways -- by punch cards, fill-in-the-oval optical scan or ATM-style touch-screen indicates that the Washington legislature thought machines were more accurate.

So why does the law still allow the losing side to call for a third count?

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge posts that if Gregoire ends up winning after this recount, there needs to be a very serious Federal investigation as to whether there was vote fraud in King County.

All Things Policy, Matt Schuh is concerned that the voting irregularities are becoming so regular.

UPDATE II: At White Pebble, Patti posts that she thought she had it bad, living in Ohio.

Michelle Malkin calls the Washington gubernatorial race a neverending election.

At Blogs For Bush, Mark Noonan posts that the Democrats are out to steal the election.

Peterson Gets Death

The Jury decided that Scott Peterson gets the death penalty for the murder of his wife Lacy and their unborn child.

Peterson was convicted of two counts of murder in the deaths of his wife, Laci, and her fetus. Prosecutors say he strangled or smothered his wife on or around Christmas Eve 2002 and dumped the body in San Francisco Bay.

As California Yankee posted last month, I oppose the death penalty in cases such as Peterson's where there is a question about his guilt because we make mistakes. The number of convicted murderers that have been cleared and released years after being convicted numbers in the hundreds.

Peterson will br formally sentenced on February 25. The judge has the option of reducing the sentence to life.

Judge Offered For Sale

A disgruntled litigant, who is being evicted from her apartment listed a Manhattan housing court judge for sale on eBay.

The New York Times reports that the judge would go to the highest bidder and included free shipping. After four days, the highest bid was $127.50.

The ad titled "Judge for Sale," showed a picture of the judge listed a number of accusations criticizing the way the judge dispenses justice.

According to the Times the unhappy litigant claims that the listing was intended as a joke.

The judge fails to see the humor:

"I'm outraged that eBay would post this," the judge said from his home on Long Island. "I'd like to know their rules for this. I'd like to know what investigation they did before they put this out there."

Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman told the Times that the ad offering the "judge for sale" violated a number of eBay rules including misleading title, misleading description, unauthorized use of a photo, unauthorized use of a name, and an illegal product.

Mr. Durzy also explained that it was also a violation to list this ad under the heading "Sporting Goods, Archery, Arrows, Shafts."

Abbas Apologizes To Kuwaitis

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas apologized to Kuwaitis on Sunday for the Palestinians' support of Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait:

Asked by reporters about Palestinian support for Saddam's invasion, Abbas responded: "Yes, we apologize for what we have done."

The Kuwaiti government, in a reconciliation gesture to the new Palestinian leadership, had said Abbas was welcome and apologies were not important.

According to the Associated Press, Abbas' visit remained controversial in Kuwait:

A group of lawmakers said in a statement Saturday that they "absolutely reject the visit ... before the PLO offers an official apology to the Kuwaiti people for the sin it committed against Kuwait."

The wasn't the first time Abbas has tried to make amends to the Kuwaitis. Last year, Abbas condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in an interview with the state-owned Kuwait News Agency, stating that the Palestinian leadership's position was "incorrect." Abbas didn't apologize then.

Arafat supported Iraq in its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Some 450,000 Palestinians lived in Kuwait before the invasion. Most of the 450,000 Palestinians living in Kuwait were expelled or pressured to leave Kuwait after it was liberated.

Eyeglasses For Afghan Children

U.S. Army Sgt. Caleb Wines is returning to Afghanistan with luggage filled with children's eyeglasses.

Wines, who is an optical laboratory specialist, has been taking part in military-sponsored humanitarian missions to help the elderly Afghan population get proper eye care and eyewear. Wines has also met with young patients in need of glasses.

According to the Houston Chronicle, Wines had few options for those youngsters — the only frames available to him to distribute were large, military-issued frames:

"The main focus were the elderly who could properly wear the glasses," he said. "We saw the kids who had eye injuries from, like, mine incidents."

His problem was featured in a military publication that Wines distributed to family and friends via e-mail, including colleagues at the Eye Clinic of Texas in League City.

Details of Wines' trying to fit youngsters with the large, clunky military frames inspired his co-workers to find frames for the Afghan children.

Dr. Allan Fradkin, an ophthalmologist at the clinic, persuaded the Safilo Group, one of the clinic's main vendors, to donate 50 pairs of frames to help. The clinic pulled additional frames from its inventory to increase the donation to more than 150.

[. . .]

"I am always amazed by the generosity of my fellow Americans to help the less fortunate," Wines said. "This donation will help our cause and the Afghan people more than I can express."

Wines will perform eye exams on Afghan children and then custom-cut the lenses to the donated frames based on individual prescriptions.

Wines is an Army reservist called to duty in February. He was trained as an optician in the military and is a semester shy of earning an engineering degree from Texas A&M University at Galveston.

You've got to love these soldiers of ours.

Space Station Crew Told To Ration Food

Reuters reports that the International Space Station (ISS) crew has been told to ration food:

Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov and American Leroy Chiao have been asked to cut out calories equal to three cans of Coke from their daily diet -- around 10 percent of their daily allowance and an amount that would be little noticed, NASA said.

Supplies have been tight at the ISS since Columbia was destroyed during re-entry in February 2003.

The crew has enough food to maintain a balanced diet for approximately another month. A Russian Progress supply ship carrying food and other supplies is scheduled to be launched on December 24 and reach the space station two days later.

If they do not receive fresh supplies, the astronauts would have to evacuate the station and return to earth.

Pentagon Ousts Official Under FBI Investigation

The Los Angeles Times reports that John A. "Jack" Shaw, the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary for international technology security, was ordered to leave after he refused to sign a letter of resignation:

"He was asked to discontinue his service," a senior Pentagon official said.

Shaw was under investigation by the FBI on allegations that he tried to steer Iraqi reconstruction contracts toward friends:

Shaw allegedly tried to steer two contracts, one involving telecommunications and a second involving dredging at an Iraqi port, to companies linked to longtime friends or clients of longtime friends.

According to the LA Times, Shaw has portrayed himself as a whistle-blower who was being unfairly asked to resign for having highlighted problems with the cellular phone licensing process:

"I cannot submit my resignation to you until it is clear that the well-orchestrated campaign to obstruct justice and suppress the findings of my office has been properly addressed and stopped," Shaw wrote in a letter to Rumsfeld.

Shaw made news late in the presidential campaign, when he said that missing 380 tons of explosives had removed by Russian commandos before the March 2003 invasion. A story California Yankee posted about here and here.

The times reports that Shaw's remarks on the missing explosives were the breaking point that led to the demand for his resignation:

Shaw said in his letter that he was asked to resign for having exceeded his "authority and brief."

Shaw defended his decision, however, saying that he had to get the information about the Russian commandos out as quickly as possible in the heat of the campaign.

"I realized I was probably the only person in the country who could disprove the story" of the missing munitions, he said.

Nanny Forces Kerik Withdrawal

Bernard Kerik joins Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, President Clinton nominees who withdrew their names from consideration because they had employed an illegal immigrant and failed to pay Social Security taxes. Lani Guinier, Clinton's nominee for head of the Justice Department's civil-rights division also failed to pay taxes for a domestic worker and withdrew her name, but there was a lot more to that story.

In a statement released last night, Kerik revealed:

In the course of completing documents required for Senate confirmation, I uncovered information that now leads me to question the immigration status of a person who had been in my employ as a housekeeper and nanny. It has also been brought to my attention that for a period of time during such employment required tax payments and related filings had not been made.

While I have already initiated efforts to fulfill any outstanding reporting requirements and tax obligations related to this issue, it is my belief that upon disclosure of this matter the intense scrutiny that it is likely to generate will only serve as a significant and unnecessary distraction to the vital efforts of Department of Homeland Security.

According to the New York Post the nanny, a Mexican native, was hired to help his family living in New Jersey while Kerik was stationed in Iraq last year to train Iraqi policemen:

But she handed over immigration papers that were not hers, sources said.

[. . .]

“When he was going over the Senate confirmation forms with two lawyers, they discovered that all the information that she gave didn’t pass the smell test,” said a source close to the 49-year-old former NYPD commissioner. “She claimed to him that she was legal. She claimed she had papers, but we can’t verify that she did. “He had to withdraw his nomination, because you can’t head INS [the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which falls under the umbrella of homeland security] if you can’t be sure of the papers of someone you employed.”

That's exactly right, you can’t head Immigration and Naturalization Service if you can’t be sure of the papers of someone you employed.

Kerik probably could have withstood all the other dirt that was being raised about possible conflicts of interest and other issues and still been confirmed, but having employed an illegal alien he cannot be considered for head of homeland security.

Sharpton Was Paid To Campaign for Kerry

The Associated Press reports that Al Sharpton was paid $86,715 by the Democratic National Committee to campaign for Kerry and other Democratic candidates.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Sharpton admitted he was paid for travel:

"They asked me to travel to 20 or 30 cities to campaign, and I did that," Sharpton said. "What am I supposed to do, donate the cost of air fare?"

As usual the Reverend Al wasn't being totally forthcoming. According to the Associated Press, Sharpton was paid for more than travel:

But records show that while most of the money was to reimburse travel expenses, Sharpton was paid $35,000 as a "political consulting fee" 15 days after the election.

So when Sharpton was at Kerry's side when Kerry was trying to connect with black voters it wasn't necessarily because Sharpton thought Kerry was the best candidate, it was because Sharpton was paid a "consulting" fee.

None of the other eight Democrats who were once in the race were paid travel reimbursements or consulting fees.

UPDATE: At Catain's Quarters, Captain Ed posts that payments to Sharpton amount to a shakedown by Sharpton or a payoff by Kerry.

At Outside The Beltway, James Joyner posts that a $35,000 "consulting fee is rather odd considering that the Kerry campaign isn't paying some of the people who were actually its employees.