• NEWS FLASH: MARIO CUOMO IS STILL ALIVE!

    • 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 Nats

    • 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.

  • The state of the Yankees

    • 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.

  • Tonight’s music.

    • 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…