Law

By now, most people have heard about The Associated Press report that Sen. Barack Obama has a distant aunt –- his deceased father’s half-sister -– living in Boston who is an undocumented alien. They may also know that Zeituni Onyango, from Kenya, was denied political asylum by an immigration judge four years ago.
As Josh [...]

After weeks of escalating Republican attacks on the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, for alleged voter registration fraud, it turns out the McCain campaign has its own fraud charges to respond to.
The Huffington Post reports that McCain has paid $175,000 to Lincoln Strategy Group, a political consulting group based in Arizona [...]

It looks unlikely that the next president will prosecute Bush administration officials for potential war crimes, to the frustration of some critics.

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday cleared the way for Georgia to execute a man convicted of murdering a police officer in 1989, though seven of nine witnesses in his case have since recanted.
Lawyers for the defendant, Troy Anthony Davis, now 40, had hoped the court would grant certiorari to review whether it is constitutional for [...]

Yesterday, the full Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals handed a surprising victory to state Republicans by requiring Ohio election officials to check all new voters’ registration information against existing databases by Friday.
As the Associated Press reports, the court, sitting en banc (all 16 judges), reversed the ruling just last week of its own three-judge panel [...]

Yesterday’s raid on Nevada offices of ACORN reflects the increasingly aggressive Republican attempts to derail voter registration efforts among poor and minority voters.
As The Washington Post reported, the Nevada chapter of the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, had planned a potluck dinner at its Las Vegas office Tuesday night to celebrate [...]

Update: A few hours after this item was posted, the AP reported that ACORN’s Las Vegas offices were raided by the FBI.
When the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, announced yesterday that it had registered more than 1.3 million new voters nationwide so far this year, it was a cause either for [...]

Ohio voters went to the polls yesterday for the first day of early voting, exercising a right in Ohio that the state’s Republicans had fought hard to defeat.
Because of an overlap between the beginning of absentee voting 35 days before Election Day, which started yesterday, and the Oct. 6 end of voter registration, Ohio allows [...]

John McCain has promised to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices who could radically alter the ideological makeup of the court.

In what may be a new low, earlier this week a Republican Party county chairman in Michigan told The Michigan Messenger, our sister site, that the party plans to use lists of foreclosed homes to challenge the ballots of people registered at those addresses who try to vote on Election Day. Though he’s since [...]