The Sixth U.S. Court of Appeals sent the battle over provisional ballots in the hotly contested OH-15 race back to the state courts according to a story in the Columbus Dispatch. The case centers on 1000 disputed provisional ballots in Franklin County, the home base of the Democratic candidate, Mary Jo Kilroy. The reason that the case got thrown back into the state courts is that the federal court said that when there is a dispute about state election law, it is up to the state courts to resolve it. Of course, everyone remembers how in 2000 the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Florida supreme court on a matter of state law. We will have to see what the Ohio supreme court does now. In all, there are 27,000 provisional ballots in Franklin County.
After years of saying he would never accept a timeline for withdrawing U.S.troops from Iraq because that would help the enemy, President Bush has accepted a timeline for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq: Dec. 31, 2011. Nobody noticed. After the U.S. leaves, Iraq will be run by a pro-Iranian government that opposes everything Bush wanted to achieve in Iraq. There has been no political solution about dividing up the oil revenue, so civil war remains an option for the future as well. However, since the agreement will be signed on Bush's watch, if Iraq devolves into chaos later on, the question: "Who lost Iraq?" will have a clear answer: George W. Bush. While this doesn't get Barack Obama off the hook entirely, for him an easy course of events is to carry out Bush's agreement and keep Robert Gates on as secretary of defense to see it through. As long as Obama doesn't have to make an executive decisions about Iraq but just carries out existing policy, he probably won't be blamed if things go wrong.