Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

I had thought that the former New York governor had died a while back, and he might actually have, but Mario Cuomo delivered the Democrat response to the President’s weekly radio address Saturday [text].

Now, the Republicans in the Senate, instead of dealing with his litany of failures, are threatening to claim ownership of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, hoping to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they can not get from the proper political bodies: the Congress and the presidency.

How will they do this? By destroying the so-called filibuster, a vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate that allows the fullest possible debate before one of the president’s choices for the Supreme Court or other federal courts is allowed to take his or her place on the bench. That would be a change so undesirably destructive that it has been called the nuclear option.

Blah, blah, blah. He’s wrong, of course, on all counts. For instance, the filibuster has NOT been a “vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate” for judicial nominees. It’s a Daschle innovation.

Plus, allowing judicial nominees to clear the Senate with a simple majority vote has not been called the nuclear option because it is “so undesirably destructive.” The term “nuclear option” was coined by then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott because the change would shake things up.

It’s time for Mario to return to the empty silence of the tomb from whence he came.

The Washington Nationals had their game at RFK Stadium delayed for about 2 ½ hours. My wife assumed it was by rain, but my sources tell me that the DC ballgame was delayed by a Democrat filibuster.

Yankees 4, Blue Jays 3. Chien-Ming Wang pitched his first MLB game, going 7 innings and giving up only 2 runs. He didn’t get the win, though, as Toronto’s Corey Koskie tied it with a homerun off Tom “Flash” Gordon in the eight.

But Tony Womack knocked home Bubba Crosby in the bottom of the Ninth to win it.

Kurt Attenberg’s first symphony. He’s not bad, but there’s nothing special here. (I had heard him compared to Sibelius. Nope. That’s quite a bit to which to live up…

Meet the Press (NBC): Host Tim Russert will talk to White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, GOP Senator George Allen of Virginia, and the loutish, insufferable Christ Dodd of Connecticut..

FOX News Sunday: Host Chris Wallace talks with Card.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer, will chat with Senators Chuck Hagel, Sam Brownback, and Dem Whip Dick… Durbin.

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos interviews Nancy Pelosi — who will again have nothing new to say — and Pat Robertson.

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolfgang Blitzer chats with Card, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and the entire lollipop guild.

I will review and summarize the shows for Sunday’s Rightsided Newsletter, to which you can subscribe for free by visiting the web site at http://rightsided.tripod.com, or by sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe [AT] topica.com.

It will arrive if your inbox shortly after it is completed early Sunday afternoon.

Also, look for it at Redstate. Heck, look for everything at Redstate.

Representative Tom Osborne (R-Nebraska), who won reelection in Nebraska’s third CD with 87-percent of the vote, has announced that he is running for governor next year.

A former college football coach two decades removed from open-heart surgery, he first has to win the Republican primary against Governor Dave Heineman — who is filling the shoes of elected Governor Mike Johanns now that he is at the Ag Department — and Omaha businessman David Nabity.

Now who’s going to run against Ben Nelson? I’m sure the NRSC was hoping that Osborne would look their way, but they could look to Johanns in much the same way that they got former HUD Secretary Mel Martinez to run for Bob Graham’s old seat in Florida last year.

QUOTE OF THE HOUR

From Reuters:

“No one can expect to hear reasonable words from Bush, once a cowboy at a ranch in Texas. His remarks often stun audiences as they reveal his utter ignorance.”

That quote actually came not from an Al Gore speech, but rather from a more reputable source: a spokesman at the North Korean Foreign Ministry. They adopt as their own line the propaganda they hear coming from the American left.

On a side note, North Korea’s KCNA news service reports that “general march for a massive turnout on day of May 13 anti-U.S. action.” The same story proclaims that since North Korea has declared that it was a nuclear power and could stand up to the United States, the U.S. has lost its position as “the world’s only holder of supremacy.”

From Newsmax (caveat), here is Senator Clinton blaming the President for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that “a senior Pentagon intelligence official might have overstated the position of analysts when he told a Senate committee Thursday that the U.S. believed North Korea had the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device.”

In a follow-up statement Friday evening, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, “North Korea has a theoretical capability to produce a warhead and mate it with a missile, but we have no information to suggest they have done so.”

It would be nice if someone would diplomatically slap them silly.

From a Bloomberg.com story:

“Three decades after the last U.S. helicopters left a city once known as Saigon, a parade marking the communist victory featured logos of American Express and MasterCard, and the nation’s president touted the country as a great place for overseas investors to do business.”

Metaphysically, the Vietnamese communists have LOST THE WAR. All that remains is to physically remove the monsters and allow the nation to rebuild freely.

[The quote was gleaned from a good piece on Arthur Chreknoff’s weblog.]

We have the new column on the Rightsided Newsletter web site.

It’s The Election Fraud/Illegal Immigration Connection, by Justin Darr.

He doesn’t see a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, per se; rather, it is something with the same effect.

Enjoy.

And when you’re through, subscribe FREE to the twice-weekly Rightsided Newsletter. (You can subscribe by sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe [AT] topica.com. We ask for no other information, and you will receive no e-mail other than the newsletter by doing this. For more info and the latest RSN, check out the RSN site.)

Friday night, all is kewl. I’m going to be positive: Frist will force the rule change and the Democrats (and the MSM) will huff and puff. This will be an entertaining matter about which to blog, and I might start doing Chuckie updates.

Bolton will escape the Foreign Relations Committee on the 12th. Hagel wants to be President and Voinovich does not want to be tossed metaphysically from the caucus. I’m going out on a limb when I say this, but I think Linc Chafee is a decent human being who’s not going to be a stick in the mud over this.

The Dems will continue to find nothing on Tom DeLay, and this will go away. Toe-sucker Dick Morris will go on FOX and declare this entire incident a harbinger of Hillary’s inevitability. (He’s got to sell the books.)

For real this time. My wife wanted me to see THIS STORY:

More than 1,000 toad corpses have been found at a pond in an upscale neighborhood in Hamburg and over the border in Denmark after bloating and bursting.

[ . . .]
One German scientist studying the splattered amphibians has a theory: Hungry crows are pecking out their livers.

“The crows are clever,” said Frank Mutschmann, a Berlin veterinarian who collected and tested specimens at the Hamburg pond. “They learn quickly from watching other crows how to get the livers.”

Mutschmann said, based on the wounds, it appears that a bird pecks into the toad with its beak between the amphibian’s chest and abdominal cavity, and the toad puffs itself up as a natural defense mechanism.

But, because the liver is missing and there’s a hole in the toad’s body, the blood vessels and lungs burst and the other organs ooze out, he said.

No kidding.

More Gliere, from The Red Poppy ballet.

Here are two more cartoons from Aidan:

Governor Arnold Schwarzengger

The ACLU at work

The Cybercast News Service {CNS} reports that Marymount Manhattan College (MMC) in New York City will be dropped from the directory of schools officially recognized as Catholic. Why? They are giving an honorary degree to Senator Hillary Clinton next month.

“The decision to honor one of Congress’s most outspoken and strident advocates of abortion ‘rights’ was just the latest episode in a long history of secularization at Marymount Manhattan College,” said Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society and one of the sources who confirmed the archdiocese’s action.

The ruling came from Cardinal Edward Egan of the archdiocese of New York.

One would think MMC be pleased no longer to be affiliated with an institution which proscribes the deaths of the unborn.

After two years of U.S. troops in their homeland, the Iraqi people are understandably angry and impatient.

From Iraq the Model:

The resistance is even weaker than to confront a new born army just starting to stand on its feet.
They made every Iraqi citizen their target.
How bad and evil are those who support this resistance and cheerfully parrot its victories over the Iraqi police, children and women.
Do they realize how sick they make me feel? Do they realize that making the people an enemy is a losing strategy?
We are so angry and sad in a way no one can imagine and our response will be strong and sharp against all those who back terrorism and advocate it.

Do they really think they can destroy a dream built with blood, sweat, pain and suffering!?
You who are smiling at today’s massacre, I tell you that these coward attacks will not stop the Iraqi tide.
What you wish is not going to happen and you will not get away with what you did and you will not escape the punishment.
Remember that freedom lovers will remember everything and they will not forget anyone who stood against them even with a word.
You may think that we’re weak right now and unable to protect ourselves, we may seem stumbling but this new born country will become a powerful giant soon and will then seek justice for its people.

We are not going to be evil like you and we will not seek blind revenge but we will seek justice through our State of law and then you shall be judged as you deserve.

Nothing can stop us from finishing what we started and what happened today will not pass unpunished.

The US press boasts about THIS as proof that Bush/Rumsfeld/Bolton is a failure and the war on terror is a lost cause because of bumbling. They warned us to vote for JF Kerry. But the words of blogger Mohammed shared above show how empty the snarky questions really are.

On the web site of the Rightsided Newsletter, we’ve the new column by James Attitcus Bowden, ABCs of the Religious Right.

Check it out.

And when you’re through, subscribe FREE to the twice-weekly Rightsided Newsletter. (You can subscribe by sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe [AT] topica.com. We ask for no other information, and you will receive no e-mail other than the newsletter by doing this. For more info and the latest RSN, check out the RSN site.)

The State of Georgia have at long last ended the Democrats’ era of Jim Crow.

The governor [Republican Sonny Purdue] signed four bills that repeal segregation-era laws. The laws have not been enforced in years, but they remained in the code. Perdue said that removing the laws is not only a symbolic gesture, but also a substantive one.

Erick Erickson has the story.

Chris Dodd of Connecticut has a bill before Congress which would forbid the prosecution of reporters who did not disclose their sources to federal criminal investigators.

Additional members of Congress have joined the Dodd effort because of other cases around the country, notably those of New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.

They face jail time for refusing to testify about their confidential sources before a federal grand jury investigating the disclosure of a CIA undercover officer’s identity.

This is news, according to the Hartford Courant, because Dodd has managed to get Congressman Mike Pence (R-Indiana) and Senator Dick Lugar (R-Indiana) in on sponsorship. Lugar had sponsored a bill which would cover only print journalists, but he’s signed on to Dodd’s bill which would protect people who write for news-only internet sites. (One assumes this would include weblogs.)

Of Dodd’s bill:

Sen. Dodd’s bill would prohibit the federal courts, Congress and the executive branch from forcing journalists to reveal their sources, regardless of whether they had promised to keep them confidential. The ban would include journalists’ notes, negatives and files. According to the bill, journalists would only be forced to reveal a source if such information would be decisive in a legal case, could not be obtained elsewhere, and would be of absolutely vital public interest.

Dodd’s bill is S.369, To establish protections against compelled disclosure of sources , and news or information, by persons providing services for the news media.

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz knows what’s hurting the President’s ABC News/WashPost ratings:

Gas prices have been rising. The stock market has been in a swoon. The economy is not exactly inspiring confidence. All that has got to be hurting Bush. When people feel economic anxiety– and see that their leaders appear more obsessed with one brain-damaged woman, parliamentary procedures and fiddling with their retirement money–that’s when you suffer in the polls.

Actually, it’s the coverage of the economy which is bleeding confidence, but far be it from the Post’s press guy to fathom the role of the press in the nation’s self-perceived temperature.

“One brain-damaged woman”? This is a nation that obsesses with little girls who fall into wells, missing children, goofy pop stars, and Martha Stewart at Camp Cupcake. But Terri Schindler-Schiavo carried the media’s qualifier: “Brain-Damaged.” Somehow, she becomes less than human to those who tell the story (media) and those believe them.

We have a problem, Mr. Kurtz. The President has a problem. And you are covering it. It’s your beat.

For the very first time ever, this President was given his regular A.M. intelligence briefing not by the Director of Central Intelligence, but by newly-minted National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. This is how it will work under the control of the legislation and rules foisted upon our government by the partisan, unelected 9-11 Commission.

It’s unlikely that the intell will be handled any better or that we as Americans will be any safer, but at leastthe politicians can feel good about themselves for having done “something” and the MSM can trumpet the innovation.

Good luck to all.

The $2.6-trillion federal budget for next year passed the House on a Party-line. It is purported to contain tax cuts and spending… not decreases, per se, but increases by a lower rate. The Democrats voted no, but things are getting done despite the partisan venom.

We’ll see what the Senate does. Senators have lately been reciting from the high school civics books, that the Senate is the “cooling saucer” and “deliberative body,” but that is nonsense. The Seventeenth Amendment, which provided for the direct election of Senators, has turned it into a glorified version of the House of Representatives.

(the more complete commentary is below)

The President handled himself and the questioners rather well. His new plan, though it might save Social Security, would convert it from a retirement plan to a redistributionist one, though it has been gradually becoming that, what with the taxes on Social Security income.

See my review of the conference below.

The Dems are betting their foreseeable future that McConnell doesn’t have the votes to modify Senate rules to allow judicial nominees to pass by a simple majority.

The offer is “a big wet kiss to the far right,'’ said Reid of Nevada. In remarks on the Senate floor, he described the proposal as a “slow-motion nuclear option'’ to strip the Democrats of power to block judicial nominations by President George W. Bush.

Expect the rule change if an only if the Senate Republican leadership is certain of the 50 votes needed to let Vice President Dick Cheney’s vote break the tie and pass the initiative.

They lost, 3-1, to the California Anaheim Disneyland Los Angeles Angels.

Gliere’s ballet The Red Poppy. I’ve Act III going right now. The entire thing is 90-minutes long, and I don’t even get to see anyone dance.

Here are two more from Adian, as he starts to take more direct aim.

I was at my sister’s birthday dinner, so I missed the bit about Social Security. I heard him say that part of his job was convincing people that there is a problem with Social Security, and he mentioned reassuring Seniors that they are going to get their checks. I also heard him mention that an option for private accounts which he would propose is to invest them in U.S. Treasury bonds, which is what the Congress has put into the fund after it raiding over the past several decades.

I’m hearing in a summary that he proposed increasing Social Security payments to those in lower income brackets while decreasing it for those in higher brackets. This strikes me instantly as a major shift in the nature of social security, from a retirement program to a socialistic income-redistribution scheme. Pox on that idea.

I liked the question about the troops tied up in Iraq, do we have so many there that he feels limited in what he’s able to do with North Korea in Iran. The President said that we had plenty of troops, and he turned to address North Korea. He said he is expanding the treatment of the country from a “bilateral approach” — the U.S. vrs. Kim — to a regional one, He underscored the People’s Republic of China being involved.

Dave Gregory asked him a question about the religious right taking over our political system — faith used in political debates. The President thinks religion is a personal matter. He disagrees with those who would say confirming the judges is a matter of faith vrs. anti-faith. A mischaracterization of Senator Frist’s involvement with the FRC special.

The President said that al Qaeda “has been severely diminished.”

He intoned: “John Bolton can get the job done at the U.N. … It makes sense to put [as U.N. ambassador] someone who is skilled and is not afraid to speak his mind.” He said Bolton assured him that he thinks the United Nations is important but that it must be reformed.

He spoke of the political climate in Washington. He’s disheartened by those who treat everything as a “zero sum game,” what’s going to hurt whom politically.

Of the Republicans, he said: “I’m proud of my party. Our party has been the party of ideas.”

Bill Sammons of the Washington Times asked him if the partisan politics being played on Social Security and the judges is going to affect the rest of his agenda. The President said that the rest is passing: “We are making progress.”

He wants an asbestos reform bill. It sounded like what he said, though I’m not sure why he would want to reform asbestos. (It’s one of Specter’s projects.) This brings to mind my wife’s remark, that the sound on my TV was a few seconds behind that on hers.

Did they let any Bill Clinton fans out to watch the speech? (They usually watch cartoons in those places, I think.)

The Majority Leader has a compromise to end the judicial filibuster impasse, as sent in a letter to Harry Reid.

Here’s the summary (below the fold):

(more…)

Colorado Senator Ken Salazar, the freshman Dem, has changed his mind. On Tuesday, the told Colorado Springs’ KKTV that Focus on the Family, who oppose the Democrats’ filibuster of the President’s judicial nominees, “are the Antichrist of the world.”

On Wednesday, Salazar back-tracked, pointing out that the group has been mean to him and that he “meant to say this approach was un-Christian, meaning self-serving and selfish.” Needless to say, it is Salazar’s position on preventing a floor vote for the President’s judicial nominees which is self-serving and selfish, but he’s a freshman Democrat. He’s lost before he’s even begun.

Here’s an a man teaching English in Japan, a PhD candidate and blogger named Peter G. Epps, who invents a term: “post-structuralist fundamentalist.” He describes his blog, Comment Me No Comments, as “‘post-structuralist fundamentalism’ by Peter G. Epps.”

Along comes Nassau Community College with a will to call its Annual Multidisciplinary
Conference: “Passionate Intensities: The Construction of Postmodern
Fundamentalisms.”

I agree with Mr. Epps, he “wuz robbed.” But there is solace to be taken for a poet, and Epps mentions sonnets in his blog’s introduction.

“Post-structuralist fundamentalist” is iambic pentameter; “postmodern fundamentalisms” isn’t much of anything. It’s kind of a “mauve” term.

We have on the web site of the Rightsided Newsletter:

Breaking Judicial Filibusters: High Noon For Conservatives, by Christopher G. Adamo.

Three Cheers for Stalinism!, by Isaiah Z. Sterrett.

Enjoy!

And when you’re through, subscribe FREE to the twice-weekly Rightsided Newsletter. (You can subscribe by sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe [AT] topica.com. We ask for no other information, and you will receive no e-mail other than the newsletter by doing this. For more info and the latest RSN, check out the RSN site.)

As I said would happen, the House has tossed out the fairer ethics rules and reverted back to the ones they used prior to this Congress. The impression which should be given is that of Speaker Hastert being the adult in this situation and saying, “Enough of the nonsense.”

The ball is now in the Democrats’ court. They had better produce good stuff on Tom DeLay or be subjected to humiliation as partisan clowns. If they actually have the goods on the Majority Leader, it is best to let him retire to bloviate and propound with that dreadful Gingrich.. I’ll have plenty to say on the image I’d like the new leader to project.

If they’ve nothing big on DeLay, the man should be able to plan and to lead in peace and the Democrats can return to their minority status. (They’ve learned how to project power beyond their means; that they’ve done it under that shrill sow Pelosi speaks more of the House GOP than it does the Dems themselves.)

The American Civil Liberties Union Wednesday celebrated the one year anniversary of the public release of the Abu Ghraib snapshots.

Top officials have not been held accountable, while low-level members of the military have been prosecuted and “an unwarranted cloak of secrecy continues to shroud the treatment of prisoners,” the ACLU said.

No cake and party hats that I saw, though, as they provided the Abu Musab Zarqawi and his band o’ mutants with more anti-U.S. propaganda. If they were serious about protecting the civil liberties of Iraqi prisoners, they would do so in a way which would not give comfort to those who would undermine Iraqi civil society.

The ACLU is a band of frauds.

Mike Mussina threw tonight — one cannot realistically call it pitching — so they were bound to lose. A-Rod smacked another home run, but they left a skillion runners on base in scoring position. The Angels deserved to win this game.

Alexander von Zemlinsky first symphony. We call it post-Wagnerian romanticism. He refused to follow the path of his weird brother-in-law, Arthur Schoenberg, who held a grudge for that, among other things. He taught Alma Mahler, Gustav’s wife and a notorious women of loose morals and huge appetites, and Gustav got him a position at an opera which Mahler then left. Mahler’s replacement fired Zemlinsky, hardly anyone paid attention to him until he was four decades in the dirt.

It’s now been over sixty years since the Nazi-escapee (Jewish wife) died in exile in the land of exiles, U.S.A.

I just got the CD, this is my first time listening to ‘t. Good stuff, first impression.

Here are two more cartoons from Aidan:

Professor Jane Christensen of Weslyan College

President Dennis Dease of St. Thomas U. in Minnesota

The editors at Townhall.com have editorialized in support of John Bolton and called for some action.

If Bolton holds on through the smear campaign and wavering Republican Senators are pressured into supporting the president’s nominee, then Republicans will have shown their seriousness.

If the Bolton nomination fails, an equally clear message will be sent. The message will be that when push comes to shove, Democrats are holding the cards in our nation’s capital. Democrats will be emboldened in future (and current) nomination fights.

That’s why the White House needs to come out in full force for its nominee. That’s why Senate Republicans need to make up for their woefully inadequate performance so far by defending and promoting the president’s nominee. And that’s why conservatives everywhere need to let the wavering Republican Senators know that we’re watching.

Voting for Bolton isn’t enough. Chafee, Voinovich, and Hagel need to voice support for Bolton now, shoring him up as he is forced to endure the Democratic smear campaign facilitated by Voinovich’s delay.

You’ll never get committed support from Chafee. Voinovich, maybe. Hagel, if he feels like it, he could be a staunch as anyone.

At Confirm Bolton, David Frum declares:

The [Washington] Post quoted an anonymous Democratic staffer saying, “[Powell] has let it be known that the Bolton nomination is a bad one, to put it mildly.”

Stories like these do not (obviously) appear in newspapers by accident. Powell is not merely going to war against Bolton. He is declaring war before the whole world.

Frum suggests that this move on Powell’s part is both ego- and financially-driven:

It’s widely expected in Washington that Powell and his old deputy and friend Richard Armitage will soon launch a consulting firm together on the model of Henry Kissinger’s immensely lucrative Kissinger Associates. The success of the Powell/Armitage firm will greatly depend on whether Powell and Armitage are perceived to possess continuing influence.

That seems a tad cynical, but it is a better motive than mere sabotage.

HarperCollins has signed a deal with the Ronald W. Reagan Presidential Library to publish the diaries President Reagan kept while he was President.

“Each day during his eight years in the White House, Ronald Reagan recorded his innermost thoughts and observations in his personal diary,” said Frederick J. Ryan, Jr., chairman of the board of trustees for the Reagan Presidential Foundation.

“Although they were not initially intended for publication, we feel that these volumes offer an unprecedented insight into the Reagan presidency,” he said.

Edmund Morris, who wrote that official bio of the President, tells us that he has seen the diaries and they are dull. Reuters, whose report I linked, tell us that Reagan was divisive but was historically interesting for meeting with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

For those of us who remember his Presidency, it will be additional written affirmation that he was a great man with a firm grasp on the world’s situations. Personally, it will be another warm reminder of those pre-Clinton days, when the Soviet Union was being nailed to the wall and it was morning in America.

They are due out in 2006, though you’ll be able to see them in Simi Valley for that.

The Senate Democrats found it in their hearts to confirm another of the President’s District Court nominees, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Seabright, 45, was confirmed by a vote of 98-0 to sit on the U.S. District Court of Hawaii.

This was a district court nomination, where activist judges lack the opportunity to be active and to write law favorable to extra-Constitutional liberals from the bench is kept to a minimum. Hawaii’s Democrat Senators Inouye and Akaka both endorsed Seabright, but this cannot be taken as an example of fair and open mindedness by Senate Democrats. There was nothing about which to be either fair or open-minded.

My local cable access “has issues” — I’m jotting this from AOL dialup — so I won’t be here for a bit. (For how long, we don’t know.)

Tune your television to C-SPAN2 for debate on the Dems’ filibuster of judicial nominees.

GOOD MORNING!

Olympia Snow, the Maine Republican, is consumed by the idea that a bitter minority of Senators should have the power to filibuster judicial nominees, denying them an up-or-down Senate vote. Well, Maine’s Portland Press Heraldreports that her Maine Republican colleague, Susie Collins, is getting it hot and heavy from advocates of the President’s nominees.

A full-page ad Sunday in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, which was paid for by Democrats in Action LLC, asked whether Collins would support “bullies” - Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

Collins’ offices have received thousands of calls on the subject from out-of-state phone banks, said spokeswoman Jen Burita. But Collins said the hundreds of calls she’s received from Mainers are about evenly divided on the subject.

“I do not have a lot of interest in what outside special-interest groups are saying on this issue in their attempts to influence my vote,” she said. “I’m going to base my vote on what I think are the best interests of the Senate and my country.”

This, of course, means that she will vote the way the wind is blowing when the vote is taken. Keep the pressure on!

According to the Washington Post, House Republicans have backed down on a Ethics Committee Rule Change. It’s a PR thing, the paper reports.

To avoid further bad press, the Republicans will allow ethics complaints to longer indefinitely on a tie, meaning that the committee’s five Democrats can keep alive a pointless investigation of a Republican even if the five Republicans disagree. The committee’s five Republicans can also do the same to a Democrat.

It will lead to further wastes of lawmakers’ time and taxpayers’ money, but they get to make the rules. Under pressure from Democrats and their special interests.

I question why anyone would manufacture a glass patio table. I also question those who would purchase them, and I did have misgivings, but…

There are a lot of questions.

At a rally in Portland, Oregon last may, candidate JF Kerry complained that the President did not talk to Opec about the high price of oil. He promised that he would “jawbone” them if elected.

“Well, I haven’t seen any jawboning, have you?” Kerry said. “All I read about are sweetheart deals with Saudi Arabia.”

At the time, I remarked:

There are no sweetheart deals, and there has been plenty of jawboning. This jawboning is being done in a jawboning partnership with such nations as France and Germany: multilateral jawboning.

The President has been jawboning Abdullah in Crawford, if we may use JF Kerry’s term, and the prices are supposedly sliding.

Cool deal.

Kerry’s jawboning himself. (Smitten with the jawbone of an ass, I presume.)

We got 7 great innings from Carl Pavano, and the Yankees defeated the Los Angeles Angels, 12-4. Colter Bean, the kid brought up to take Jaret Wright’s roster spot, gave up a run in relief. Alex “A-Rod” Rodriquez had four hits tonight, three of which were home runs. One of which was a Grand Slam. The Angels kept pitching around Matsui, who has been hot, to get to A-Rod, which is very stupid, thus the Angels deserved to lose.

Antonin Dvorák’s Cello Concerto in D, which tonight is a serenade to my late patio table, which is now in pieces in a garbage bag, in a box on our patio.

The next one will be made of wood. I don’t care if I have to make it myself. (I’m not a carpenter, but I know One.)

I mentioned earlier that Karl Rove is confident the John Bolton will be confirmed in two weeks. Bill Frist is also confident

“The allegations are being to my mind very successfully debunked one by one,” said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican. “I’m optimistic at the direction it’s taking.”

The Foreign Relations Committee has 20 questions for Bolton, “including requests for e-mails and telephone logs relating to confrontations he has had with intelligence analysts.”

Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, according to Reuters, is traveling in Alaska and cannot be reached for comment. She had said that she was concerned about the account of Melody Townsel. Per the Frist quote above:

The committee was deposing Melody Townsel, who worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kyrgyzstan and said Bolton angrily chased her through the halls of a Russian hotel, threw things at her, and shoved threatening letters under her door in a dispute over a foreign aid project.

Republicans released a letter from the head of the consulting firm that had hired Bolton as legal counsel on the project in Kyrgyzstan in 2000 and who disputed Townsel’s account and accused her of a poor performance.

Since the writing’s on the Democrats’ wall as far as the filibustered seven, it’s unlikely that they will give on Bolton. This could lead them to dispensing more garbage accusations, which could be made to explode in their collective face.

Do you remember November 12, 2003? It’s the day the Republicans began their filibuster-a-thon in an attempt to score political points from the Democrats over judicial filibusters. That evening at 10:53p, I wrote the following:

A point of contention in the earlier hours of tonight’s debate was the Republican claim that this was the first time in history that a judicial nominee had ever been filibustered. No, hissed Senator Chuckie Schumer (D-New York). What of Abe Fortas, President Johnson’s 1968 nominee to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? Fortas had been filibustered, by Senators from both political parties, for a week, then the Senate voted cloture by a simple majority. (The rules were different then.) Not everyone who voted cloture for Fortas supported his confirmation, though, and Fortas asked President Johnson to withdraw his nomination when he saw that he did not have the votes to be confirmed. Chuckie’s is a flawed example.

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You might remember the Al Franken/Janeane Garofolo talk radio network, Air America, supposedly to supply talk and information to the masses who… well, hate Bush. You know, the majority who don’t want no war for oil and letting bin Laden get away and ramming through legislation to blah, blah, blah, kill wildlife. Or whatever they’re into these days.

The network is still around, but as Byron York tells us in NRO, it’s difficult to pin down how they’re doing.

But not in New York city:

The new Arbitron ratings for Winter 2005, which covers January, February, and March, show that WLIB, the station which carries Air America in New York, won a 1.2-percent share of all listeners 12 years and older. That is down one tenth of one point from the station’s 1.3 percent share in Winter 2004, the last period when it aired its old format of Caribbean music and talk.

And Limbaugh is beating Franken in that liberal Mecca.

But Air America will continue for as long as some rich putzes are willing to underwrite it. If you want to listen, visit the link above. I’ve been meaning to do so, but something always comes up.

Like Karl Rove indicated earlier (see below), so Bill Frist has told Las Vegas Harry to get the hook and stuff his cheap deal. He wants a vote on each of the seven nominees; Reid wants to appear diplomatic and to save face.

Karl Rove spoke to USA Today and Gannett Monday, telling them that the reported Dem judges deal — offering confirmation for a few in exchange for a no-filibuster pledge –was a “political gam[e].”

“We believe that every judicial nominee deserves an up or down vote,” Rove said.

Two new columns on the Rightsided Newsletter web site:

James Atticus Bowden - Why Europe Deserves To Die: The new Pope understands why Europe will die.

Judston Cox - Socially Moderate, Wishy Washy Christians.

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GOOD MORNING!

According to it, two-thirds of Americans surveyed oppose the “nuclear option,” and 51-percent oppose Social Security private accounts. Since both of these options could be phrased by a pollster in such a way that even I would probably oppose them, this survey should bother no one.

The President’s approval rating amongst 1,007 dentists surveyed people claiming to be adults stood at 47-percent.

[NOTE: Bulldog Pundit (at Ankle Biting Pundits) lays quick waste to this survey this morning.]

[NOTE: Erick Erickson takes a critical look at the poll for Redstate.org.]

The New York Times this morning editorially opines that the Republicans are against showing “an unwholesome disrespect for traditional American values like checks and balances.” Their editorial board continues: “[T]he assault on judges is part of a wide-ranging and successful Republican campaign to breach the wall between church and state to advance a particular brand of religion.”

No substantiation.

They accuse the President and Congress of “urn[ing] over issues bearing on women’s reproductive rights to far-right religious groups opposed not just to abortion, but to expanded stem-cell research, effective birth control and AIDS prevention programs.”

First, it is editorially reprehensible to link manipulative experimentation on human embryonic stem cells to effective birth control and AIDS prevention. And opposing wrong-headed programs which purport to effectively prevent pregnancies or AIDS is not wishing all women to be pregnant and all males under age 40 to be die a slow, painful death.

I would recommend that the paper’s editorial board resume taking its medication before it infects an entire class of gullible editorial readers with its rabies.