You Too Can Commit 'Mail Fraud'

The Daschle Campaign has claimed that the South Dakota Republican Party is responsible for an attack mailing because:

"We believe well over 1,000 churches have received this mailing, so the idea that a couple of college kids in their dorm rooms did this is incredibly absurd," Pfeiffer said. The complaint charges that students used the state Republican Party's resources to get out the message.

So I fired up BigYellow.com and entered the category "Churches" and selected the state "South Dakota" and immediatetly had 2233 hits. You can too by clicking here. Then it's a simple matter of cutting and pasting the entries a page at a time into Excel, firing up a few macros to unpack the addresses into a a flat database file, and running it through mailmerge in Word to print the envelopes. Less than one day's work for one person.

The Dems should really try and keep up on 1980's office technology. It's hurt them a few times in this campaign.

Oathbreaker for President

Eugene Volokh does his usually masterful job determining whether Article 3 of the 14th Amendmet could bar John Forbes Kerry from becoming president. The relevent part of the 14th Amendment says:

No person shall ... hold any office ... under the United States ... who, having previously taken an oath, as ... an officer of the United States, ... to
support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in
insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the
enemies thereof.

Professor Volokh concludes:

If Kerry's purpose was not to help the North Vietnamese, but to help the United
States or to help maintain U.S. compliance with its own laws and policies
related to military conduct, then he's not covered. And I have no reason to
think that Kerry's purpose was indeed anything other than to help the United
States, whether or not his actions in pursuit of that purpose may have been
misguided or excessive.

That may settle the issue of how a court is likely to decide an Article 3 suit brought against Kerry (and if he wins, one will surely be brought since I think any "US person" would have standing) but it does leave undiscussed the other issues involving the oath Kerry took when he became an Officer of the United States.

Kerry's service oath can be seen on this page from his service record. I've clipped the relevent potion here.

He took the traditional oath which reads:

I, John Forbes Kerry, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies forign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.