US Politics

Check out this Chuck Norris political endorsement. I love it, it is hilarious.

I think the departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense may be stretching it a bit with The Epic of Gilgamesh: Clinical Practice Guidelines for Post-Deployment Health Evaluation and Management, where Gilgamesh comes back from war with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and his friend comes back with Gulf War Syndrome (via Boing Boing).

Via Commonwealth Conservative

I have to say that this letter from Sen. McCain to Sen. Obama is possibly the most hilarious use of irony in a political contest I have seen since Sen. Proxmire. The beginning paragraph:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership’s preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.

I have not written about the appointment of Judge John Roberts to fill the supreme court opening created by Sandra Day O'Connor yet, partially because I have not yet developed an opinion of the man. What I do have an opinion about is the process President Bush used in the selection of Judge Roberts. Althouse writes about how the White House isglad it had Souter-phobia in the selection of Roberts, and well they should - it does no one a service when a candidate of any stripe turns out to be a chameleon, their true beliefs veiled.

Everyone is playing the politics of this. Drudge is reporting Hillary will support Roberts (hat tip: Hans). And Captain Ed reports on the efforts of some Democrats to delay the nomination by going on a fishing expedition.

But I can not say that I have any particular faith that this would be a good justice of the Supreme Court other than my fundamental faith in President Bush's personell skills. I'd prefer to have more than that to go on, but I won't second-guess the president.

Writing in Q & O, Dale Franks asks a very interesting question: would the successful overturning of Roe v. Wade be the end of the Republican ascendancy? The thesis of the argument is, "Once Roe disappears, the GOP loses the lever they've had for the last thirty years to manipulate an increasingly important constituency, the Religious Right."

I disagree with Mr. Franks' thesis on a number of points. First off, "Roe is the settled law of the land," as Justice Roberts so eloquently put it. Except in presidental races, Roe does not bring out a substantial number of voters because there is no risk that a gubernatorial race will have a significant impact on abortion policy. In fact, a great many more of these elections would become highly relevant to those with strong abortion morals. The Religious Right would have to hit every election hard to contain the spread of permissive abortion laws, every time. That means they would already be at the polls on election day, and could easily throw the lever for Brownback for President while they vote for their local guarantor of abortion stringence.

This would no doubt lead to a dilution of the organs of those who are stringently anti-abortion in the national political debate. Again, however, the fact that Roe is settled has led to a lack of cohesion on the part of these groups. The Moral Majority is no more, and there is no currently comparable group.

I believe it would be a wash, nationally. What it would do is remove abortion as an issue, which would generally relieve some of the tendentiousness and avarice in the partisan politics in Washington.

...at least until Congress attempted to re-regulate abortion, probably under some perverted view of the Commerce Clause.

Norman notes that the biggest polluter in the Chesapeake is Pennsylvania. I wonder if Governor Ehrlich can't work on some cross-border cooperation on this.

From the Cybercast News Service, we hear the latest libel from a Democratic demagogue, Paul Begala. He seems to think that the existence of the Bush tax cut is a clear and present danger to his children.

Begala's presence on the panel created a stir when he declared that Republicans had "done a p***-poor job of defending" the U.S.

Republicans, he said, "want to kill us.

"I was driving past the Pentagon when that plane hit" on Sept. 11, 2001. "I had friends on that plane; this is deadly serious to me," Begala said.

"They want to kill me and my children if they can. But if they just kill me and not my children, they want my children to be comforted -- that while they didn't protect me because they cut my taxes, my children won't have to pay any money on the money they inherit," Begala said.

This begs satire. It's as if the Republicans are black-pajamaed ninjas creeping into Mr. Begala's house at night to murder them in order to keep them from overly confiscatory taxes. Henry Hyde as a katana wielding master assassin. It's insane.

The real point is that Democrats are arguing from emotion. They want power, and they don't have it. So the people that took it away are bad, nasty people. Anyone who feels bad about being the minority power can grasp the feeling. This is shown in the endemic attitude that despicable vile defamations may be false while being essentially true. How can something demonstrably false, like the assassination-based tax policy of the republican party, be true? Because it reflects or confirms the emotion of impotent rage the Democrats are feeling.

I search my memory to think of a time when this kind of overheated rhetoric was used before. I can only think of the Gilded Age, when presidential candidates were confronted by chants about their illegetimate children and other beyond-the-pale tactics. I'll leave it for a later post to probe that deeper.

Michelle Malkin reports comprehensively. Among the Virginia blogosphere, Shaun Kenney takes Begala on, and Commonwealth Conservative takes note as well.

The WaPo reports:

The commission, which is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats and needs a majority vote to approve new policy, is expected to decide the issue this fall. Ellen L. Weintraub, one of the Democratic commissioners, said the FEC appears to have all but decided against regulating bloggers and is now hashing out what, if anything, it needs to do to protect them against government oversight. The FEC could give all bloggers the media exemption, or it could massage other provisions in the law to provide what some said would amount to similar protections.

But some bloggers said they won't be satisfied with anything other than the media exemption. To do otherwise, Moulitsas of Daily Kos said, would be "creating artificial distinctions between what should be media."

"Keep in mind, this isn't the unbiased, free and fair journalist exemption. It's the media exemption. It applies as much to 'The Daily Show' as much as it applies to partisan pundits as much as it applies to you at The Washington Post," he said, referring to Jon Stewart's satirical news program on cable's Comedy Central. "There's no reason why bloggers should be treated any differently."

Moulitsas is completely correct.

I have no clue whom the President will choose to nominate to replace Judge O'Connor, only that he will continue to stay true to his axioms: he will follow what he sees to be the correct process in selecting the person, and he will make his choice based on a small number of simple yet comprehensive axioms that he uses in managing his decisions as Chief Executive. Being a republican, I of course give him the benefit of the doubt and see the other side as a den of viputerating abydocomist slander-mongers, and so I am as sure that the President will make as wise a choice as it is in his power to do as I am that that person, regardless of merit, will be tarred and feathered in so many ways that competent jurists will scatter to the winds rather than undergo that gauntlet. SCOTUS Blog prepares the way for this, by reviewing the way the opposition plans to run a direct appeal to the public in the style of a direct-election campaign, with an emphasis on outcomes instead of process, as well as a mighty helping of slander.

Althouse is predicting Chief Justice Rhenquist will retire so that instead of having two all-out wars over the court, we can consolidate into one handy-dandy all-out war. And Pejman notes the gentle handling that Ruth Bader Ginsburg got at the hands of congress, and discusses the chances of that happening again.

As we contemplate the coming battle, we should consider this refreshing reminder of the historical perspective on the job of the Supreme Court, from the St. Louis Post Dispatch. (hat tip: Q and O)

Alexander Hamilton, defending the Constitution in the "Federalist Papers," assured his compatriots that laws would be judged only according to the actual words ratified by the states. "There is not a syllable in the plan which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution," he wrote, acknowledging that "if courts interpreted laws according to the spirit rather than the letter, it would enable the court to mold them [laws] into whatever shape it may think proper. With this power, the judiciary could become more powerful than the expressed will of the people."

One Man's Trash has a fascinating article about North Carolina Governor Mark Easley, who uses Hank Hill as his guide to politics. It's a mark of the torpor that has enveloped the Democratic party in the south that when Gov. Easley tries to frame his arguments so they could be understood and accepted by a cartoon character, it is a significant advance.

I also disagree with the note in the article that says Hank has no party affiliation. There is an episode where he clearly states his political affinity with George W. Bush, and while his faith in Dubya is shaken he returns to it in the end.

I was considering recommending the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet's symposium on how the proposed FEC rulemaking on internet communications affects bloggers, but a little of the credibility went out of the sails when I saw they had misspelled proposed as "purposed". I think I'll just tell people to catch the video afterwords.

The strategy the Democrats are using to decide which of the Bush judicial nominees to oppose is examined in this Weekly Standard article that I was pointed to by Ann Althouse. The point of the article, which I recommend strongly, is that Democrats oppose certain Bush nominees specifically because they are both conservative and a minority. This combination they find to be an unacceptable threat to their racial stranglehold on minority politics.

Ann makes a good point that it is possible that Bush is participating in the flip side of the coin, nominating minority judges specifically to create dissonance in the Democratic alliance of interest groups. But heck, isn't that just affirmative action?

The New York Times previews the likelyhood for a bruising battle for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The article posits the President may opt for a difficult nomination fight to exhause the Democrats, thus allowing him to slip some others through. I think the state of the Democratic Party, wherein reflexive anti-Bushism is the only real credo, will not let that happen at this time.

Michelle Malkin provides a good overview of the Democratic Party's opposition to reforms that might reduce voter fraud. Given the black eye the election process has gotten with Christine Gregoire's "victory" in Washington State on the back of the worst vote accounting processes that side of Broward county, it seems highly scandalous the systematic opposition the Democratic Party has to any kind of measures to prevent vote fraud.

Between these two items - the perfidious opposition to minority conservatives and vote reform - I really think the Democratic Party has taken paths of opportunism that have led it to immoral positions.

There is a fun article over at RedState on Hillary Clinton. To quote:

Michelle Malkin discusses a line of Kill Bush products over at CafePress. They have since been cancelled and removed, but it's still revolting.