Good morning!

  • Senator Gordon Smith.

    • Here’s a story from Oregon’s Salem Statesman Journal, dealing with their moderate Republican Senator Gordon Smith. The man’s a candidate for “bipartisan compromise,” or whatever, but he draws the line:

    Smith said that’s because he thinks that the president has a right to an up-or-down vote on all judicial nominees.

    “My tenure here has shown me that we have a dysfunctional system when it comes to the executive calendar,” Smith said Thursday in an interview with the Associated Press. “I really do feel the presence of litmus tests that disqualify people from the left and the right from serving on the bench really begins to do damage to a vigorous judiciary.”

    Under Senate rules as practiced for the past several years, “the unwritten, the unrevealed and the unaffiliated now are the only (nominees) who can get through,” Smith said.

    Senate Dems have indeed vowed to make life difficult for President Bush, whom they still view as an illegitimate President, having “stolen the vote” from Democrat Al Gore in 2000 (Smith did not say this, though.)

  • The poet Domique de Villepin.

    • The poet de Villepin has been named the new French Prime Minister.

    “It’s a catastrophe, a real catastrophe,” said Philippe Moreau Defarges, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations.

    “People will come out on the streets to show their anger. It’s a man who has never been elected, who doesn’t represent the people at all. This will turn out badly.”