*KAY JAMES WORKS: The federal government in Washington, D.C., has often shut down if any snowflakes begin to fall from the sky. But not under conservative Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Kay James. Last Thursday, James decided to keep the government open despite a sizable snowstorm that started well before and ran well after the morning rush hour. Instead of declaring federal offices closed and giving hundreds of thousands of federal workers a free day off, James declared unscheduled leave could be taken by employees who could not make it in to work. James’ communication director Scott Hatch defended the decision on local radio station WTOP against disgruntled federal bureaucrats. "Taxpayers expect the federal government to stay open," he said. "We don’t need to make a decision for hundreds of thousands of individuals. They can make individual decisions."
*PADILLA IS A COMBATANT: A federal judge decided December 4 that the government could hold Jose Padilla indefinitely as an enemy combatant even though Padilla is a U.S. citizen. He did say that Padilla should have access to a lawyer. "In times of war, the President must be able to protect our nation from those who join with our enemies to harm innocent Americans," said Justice spokeswoman Barbara Comstock. Said Judge Michael Mukasey, "The President. . . has both constitutional and statutory authority to exercise the powers of Commander in Chief, including the power to detain unlawful combatants, and it matters not that Padilla is a United States citizen captured on United States soil."
*BEHIND THE TIMES IN AUGUSTA: Top editors at the New York Times have been caught red-handed trying to create the news and push their liberal agenda. Their Big Apple rival, the Daily News, reports that Times editors are trying to generate a one-sided outcry over the refusal of the Augusta National Golf Club to admit women as members by editorializing and suppressing dissenting opinions. After inveighing against the private golf club’s determination to make its own membership decisions, the Times editors "killed a column by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dave Anderson that disagreed with [an earlier Times] editorial about Tiger Woods and Augusta National’s refusal to admit women as members," the Daily News reported last week. "A column by sportswriter Harvey Araton also was zapped. . . because it differed with the paper’s editorial opinion about the golf club standoff." According to the Daily News, many Times staffers believe that the one-sided campaign has made the newspaper’s bias the issue, not Augusta National.
Public opinion, though, is not behind the Times. A new national survey of 1,000 adults, commissioned by the Center for Individual Rights found that seven of 10 Americans support Augusta’s right as a private club to make its own policy decisions on membership. Men and women alike agreed, by almost identical majorities, that the government has no business forcing Augusta to cease being a single-gender club. Perhaps nervous that she’s on the losing side, National Council of Women’s Organizations Chairman Martha Burk, who has led the campaign to force the club to take women as members, actually hung up during an interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show last week when she was vigorously questioned about why she thought a private club should be forced by outsiders to change its membership criteria.
*DAKOTA FRAUD: Several South Dakota Republican poll watchers and workers say they witnessed serious irregularities in last month’s senatorial election. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson eked out a 524-vote victory over Republican Rep. John Thune in the heavily conservative, pro-Bush state. But United Press International reports accusations of people being offered money to vote for Johnson, as well as at least 30 voters allegedly seen giving two or three names to election personnel before finding a name that appeared on the voter rolls-which they would use to cast their ballot. Poll watchers also reported the Democratic Party organizing voter rides from inside the polling place.
Johnson’s campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, dismissed the complaints as unfounded and uncorroborated and insisted the campaign was conducted honestly. When asked by a reporter about allegations that a driver was paying some people to vote Democratic, he responded, "I want the name of the van driver alleged to have paid people to vote. And I won’t respond to the charge until I see an affidavit from him saying he did it. Three people claiming to have been paid isn’t good enough for me to comment." In other words, the driver must admit he committed a crime before Hildebrand will pay any attention.
