As noted in an earlier post, a political action committee ? Texans for a Republican Majority ? that House majority leader Tom DeLay of Houston created is the subject of a grand jury investigation in Austin. Yesterday, the Chronicle and the Austin American Statesman report that the investigation turned to Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick and six other Republican lawmakers Thursday as Travis County prosecutors subpoenaed records of the speaker’s race. the primary issue in the investigation is whether Texans for a Republican Majority improperly used corporate contributions to help finance the campaigns of more than 20 Republican candidates for the Texas House of Representatives in 2002. Campaign finance watchdog organizations believe the investigation will affect whether “soft money” ? that is, unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals ? will become a primary financing source for state and local elections.

For those interested in a thorough analysis of President Bush‘s service record in the Air National Guard, you should read this Bryon York article. If you prefer to criticize the President on this issue regardless of the facts pertaining to his Air National Guard service, then you should ignore Mr. York’s article.
Meanwhile, Phil Carter of the Intel Dump blog pens this objective Chicago Tribune op-ed on why President Bush’s Air National Guard service record matters as a campaign issue.

The NY Times reports that a political action committee ? Texans for a Republican Majority ? that House majority leader Tom DeLay of Houston created is the subject of a grand jury investigation in Austin. The investigation follows a complaint filed with the Travis County District Attorney last year by Texans for Public Justice campaign watchdog group.
According to sources for the Times article, the primary issue in the investigation is whether Texans for a Republican Majority improperly used corporate contributions to help finance the campaigns of more than 20 Republican candidates for the Texas House of Representatives in 2002.
Campaign finance watchdog organizations believe the investigation will affect whether “soft money” ? that is, unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals ? will become a primary financing source for state and local elections.

This pragmatic Washington Post editorial (free registration required) calls on Senator Kerry to clarify his position on several key issues, including the following:

The most important confusion surrounds Mr. Kerry’s position on Iraq. In 1991 he voted against the first Persian Gulf War, saying more support was needed from Americans for a war that he believed would prove costly. In 1998, when President Clinton was considering military steps against Iraq, he strenuously argued for action, with or without allies. Four years later he voted for a resolution authorizing invasion but criticized Mr. Bush for not recruiting allies. Last fall he voted against funding for Iraqi reconstruction, but argued that the United States must support the establishment of a democratic government.
Mr. Kerry’s attempts to weave a thread connecting and justifying all these positions are unconvincing. He would do better to offer a more honest accounting. His estimation of the cost of expelling Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 was simply wrong; and if President Bush was mistaken to think in 2003 that there was an urgent need to stop Saddam Hussein from stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Kerry made the same error in 1998.

The Austin American-Statesman (registration required) reports that University of Texas law students, lawyers and civil rights advocates are contending that Army Intelligence questioning of people on the UT campus in Austin was an unjustified attempt to dampen free speech on the campus. The agents visited the UT Law School this past Monday to request a list of participants in a Feb. 4 conference at the UT Law School on women’s issues in Muslim countries. When informed that the conference was open to all citizens and that no such list existed, the agents interviewed students and asked for the contact information of the female who organized the conference.
Although the investigation of this conference is perhaps a bit over the top, the self-righteous reaction of some UT students and faculty members is even more so. The United States is at war, and reasonable intrusions on U.S. citizens’ civil liberties during war time are legal. Denouncing intelligence agents publicly simply because they are doing their job reflects a widespread attitude in current American society that it is unnecessary to sacrifice for the war effort. I am quite glad that the parents and grandparents of these UT students and faculty members did not have the same attitude during WWII.

The NY Times reports today on an interesting study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies that concludes that Texas, generally thought to be the death penalty capital of the U.S., actually sentences a smaller percentage of people convicted of murder to death than the national average because the conventional view fails to take into account the large number of murders in Texas.

“Texas’ reputation as a death-prone state should rest on its many murders and on its willingness to execute death-sentenced inmates,” wrote the authors of the study, “It should not rest on the false belief that Texas has a high rate of sentencing convicted murderers to death.”

As a percentage of murders, Nevada and Oklahoma impose the most death sentences, at 6 and 5.1 percent. In Texas, the percentage is 2 percent. The rate in Virginia, another state noted for its commitment to capital punishment, is 1.3 percent. The national average is 2.5 percent; the median is 2 percent.
Using the same analysis, the study concluded that blacks are actually underrepresented on the nation’s death row in that blacks commit 51.5 percent of all murders nationally, but only comprise 42 percent of death row inmates.

One of the most perplexing stories recently is this one pertaining to the documentary that The History Channel recently ran regarding conspiracy theories that link the late former President Lyndon Johnson to the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.
What is most perplexing about this story is that it appears that no one at The History Channel performed even the slightest amount of research on the subject of this documentary before allowing it to air. If they had, then they would have read Gerald Posner‘s 1994 classic “Case Closed,” which is the definitive book on the Kennedy Assassination. In that book, Mr. Posner systematically and dispositively debunks each one of the conspiracy theories that have been promoted over the years regarding the Kennedy Assassination and describes in an equal amount of detail how Lee Harvey Oswald pulled off the assassination by himself. That The History Channel allowed the foregoing documentary to air without at least a rebuttal from someone of Mr. Posner’s stature is a serious affront to President Johnson’s legacy and the Johnson Family.

As noted in this earlier post, Ryan Lizza of the New Republic Online has been writing a terrific blog from the Democratic Party presidential campaign trail. Today’s entry focuses on the demise of the Wes Clark Campaign, which one Democratic pundit characterized as “Michael Jordan playing baseball.”

In a time when our country is at war, this article is simply an excellent example of remarkably poor judgment. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for the link.