No, I’m not referring to Kim Il-Jung, that’s Crazy Kim. In my totally unbiased opinion, Crazy Kim is a lot less sexy than Stupid Kim, a.k.a. Kim Bauer. Hank Stuever of the Washington Post has an interesting article on Kim Bauer, titled Run, Kim, Run! It’s worth a read if you watch 24, probably not worth the trouble if you don’t. I do have to take issue, however, with one observation:

This season, it seemed for a time that Kim had smartened up, and even taken a self-defense class or two. Fleeing her psychotic wife-beating boss, she grabbed her big purse.

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Justene Adamec wonders aloud if it is realistic for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have a war plan ready to deal with three terrorist nations the President hasn’t even heard about. I’ve never served in the military myself, so I can’t answer that with certainty. It is my na

24 is one of the few TV shows I watch regularly, so I was pleased to learn that James Dente has recently started a blog dedicated entirely to the show. It’s an interesting site, with one major drawback: it’s based in the UK, where Season 2 has not yet begun airing. Interesting how they are eight hours ahead of us in real life, but 12 hours behind us on TV.

The good news is that Jack Bauer, unlike our real-life President, seems to have finally mastered the word “nuclear.” The bad news is that his daughter DKim has just encountered a cougar. Rumor has it that Elisha Cuthbert, the actress who plays DKim, actually did something as dumb as her character and ended up getting bitten by that cougar as a result. Time will tell.

If Colin Powell’s compelling presentation to the League of United Nations didn’t convince you that it’s time for us to get rid of So Damned Insane, surely this will.

Last week, I weighed in on what I thought to be a rather far-fetched use of the pardon power. There, in the fictional series 24, fictional President David Palmer promised, for tactical reasons, to pardon the fictional villain Nina Myers for the forthcoming fictional murder the equally fictional Jack Bauer. Now, however, ” George Ryan, the real-life “Republican” [OK, that part might be fictional after all] governor of Illinois, has done something much much more outrageous, by pardoning 167 real-life villains for 167 real-life murders of real-life victims, with no appparent purpose whatsoever (other than to insult 167 grieving families, that is). Nevermind that Illinois voters have long supported the death penalty overwhelming, that they have consistently chosen pro-death penalty candidates (including the 1998 version of George Ryan, I might add) over the few political suicidals who dared to oppose it openly. Never mind that aside from a few high-profile, cases, the overwhelming majority of these 167 murderers did not even contest their guilt. None of that matters now. All that matters is that the bully Ryan doesn’t like the law, and he’s the governor, so the law doesn’t count. Even his successor, ultra-liberal Democrat Rod Blagojevich, labeled Ryan’s action a “big mistake.”

Anti-death penalty folk will no doubt tell you this was the right thing to do because Illinois’s system is broken or, as they prefer to put it, “arbitrary and capricious.” I’ll grant them that. Any system that allows one man, acting on a whim, to effectively nullify a law that has consistently enjoyed overwhelming among both the populace and the legislature, and whose constitutionality is not seriously in question, is arbitratry and capricious indeed. Maybe the U.S. Supreme Court will jump in and strike down the Illinois governor’s pardon power on that basis? I’m not holding my breath.

Link via Justene Adamec.

UPDATE: Today’s Los Angeles Times (requires free registration) ran five letters to the editor on the topic. Incredibly, four out of the five letters were in support of Gov. Ryan’s actions. In an eerie coincidence, so was this unsigned editorial. All this points to the obvious conclusion that 80% of all L.A. Times readers are staunch opponents of capital punishment. Either that, or…?

SECOND UPDATE: OK, somebody at the L.A. Times got this one right (see Jan. 14 entry).

For those who haven’t been following 24, here are enough facts to bring you up to speed: terrorists have planted a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, which is set to go off later today (each day in the show is spread out over an entire season). The government’s only hope of finding the bomb rests with Nina Myers, a dirty agent from the first season who was imprisoned for her crimes, which included the murder of Teri Bauer, the wife of the lead character (Jack Bauer). Nina has already been offered a conditional pardon for her past crimes, in exchange for the government’s successful location of the bomb prior to detonation. Now, however, she’s got Jack at gunpoint and has increased her demands: she wants a pardon for murdering Jack, too – which she hasn’t yet done. President Palmer, the nation’s firstsecond black President, has reluctantly accepted her offer.

I don’t know a lot about pardon law, but last night’s episode (select 3:00 to 4:00 p.m.) got me thinking as to how this sort of thing would pan out in a real-life crisis. The 24 web site has some interesting information on the pardon power (click the tab for 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.), but it still leaves some questions from tonight’s episode unanswered. Specifically:

• Can a promise to pardon someone form the basis of a legally enforceable oral contract? If so, what are the damages for a breach? Also, doesn’t this create an odd tension between state contract law and the federal Constitution? On the flip side, if the pardon is not enforceable, does this mean that President Palmer can play it cool, wait for Nina to provide all the information she is going to provide, and then tell her “no deal” before she kills Jack? [For this thought experiment, let's ignore the usual contractual defenses, e.g., illegality, duress, unconscionability, etc.]
• Does the power to grant pardons for “Offences against the United States” extend to offenses against an individual state, or only to violations of federal law? If the latter, then the pardons are as good as worthless: “we can’t execute you, but California can!”
• Can a President, a governor, or anybody else ever pardon someone for a future crime? If not, why doesn’t the usually savvy Nina character understand this? And if so, then where does this theory stop? Could a President pardon his friends, his family, himself, etc. for “all the crimes they may or may not have committed in the past, all the crimes they may or may not be committing right now, and all the crimes they may or may not commit in the future?”

As always, any comments, including idle speculation, would be more than welcome.

Eugene Volokh has said just about everything there is to say on the topic, so I’m not going to re-hash it all here. I would like to note, however, the irony in the TV drama 24, in which the lead character, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) says “nucular” but his ditzy daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) pronounces the word “correctly.” Query whether this distinction was meant to be part of the script, or whether it is just a quirk of Kiefer’s idiolect vs. Elisha’s.

UPDATE: I just watched a few re-runs of the first part of this season, only to hear Jack scream “noo KLEE ur” at Joseph Wald. Then I saw this week’s promo, when he told Nina there was a “nucular” bomb set to go off. Go figure.

UPDATE x2: Rachel Lucas has an interesting discussion on the topic of “nuclear” vs. “nucular.”