Author Archive
Hispanic Sotomayor faces the Senate
On her first day of questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hispanic Sotomayor vowed impartiality if she’s confirmed to the Supreme Court. This would represent a significant departure from her previous judicial philosophy of empathy. It was none other than Hispanic Sotomayor who said back in 2001, “Our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.” So approaching the bench with impartiality would indeed mark a significant change in her adjudicating.
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said in a speech at 2001 at the University of California, Berkeley, law school.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the senior Republican on the committee, said he is troubled by the sentiment he finds in the remarks.
“We remain focused on some fundamental questions about the philosophy of Judge Sotomayor as expressed in her statement on more than one occasion over a period of 15 years,” Sessions said Monday after the hearings ended for the day. “And they’ve expressed a rather serious critique of the classical ideal of blind justice.”
Sotomayor offered a polite, brief but firm rebuttal in her opening statement, her first substantive remarks since Obama nominated her in May to replace Justice David Souter, who retired last month.
She explained that her own experiences helped her listen to and understand the people who appear before her. “That is how I seek to strengthen both the rule of law and faith in the impartiality of our judicial system,” she said.
If those walls could talk
A Wilson County resident is in the process of restoring a 180-year-old cabin. Imagine that. A home right here in Wilson County that was built around 1829. That means it survived the Civil War.
Floyd, a teacher, is renovating a 180-year-old cabin on Holloway Road.
A neighborhood activist in Nashville, Floyd has seen development overrun many historic homes in Davidson County. Now she’s working to save one of the oldest structures in Wilson County.
“It’s nasty, it’s dirty. But everything is another layer of history,” she said.
Floyd has found old shoes tucked into the chinking of the cabin – a long-forgotten good luck tradition was hiding shoes in walls. She’s pulled off drywall, only to find wallpaper, and below that more wallpaper. And under that, muslin.
“When I pulled it off, it smelled like women’s perfume,” she said.
She said it will take “years and years and years” to get the cabin livable, but she’s willing to put in the work.
The green lifestyle
I don’t want to seem like I’m making fun of homeless people living in tents. There are many people out there who have fallen on hard times, and my heart goes out to them. At the same time, though, I couldn’t read this story without thinking this is how the global warming authoritarians would have us all live — except themselves. Algore would get to keep his Belle Meade mansion and his enormous energy bills. The rest of us would be forced to rough it.
Home these days is a cluster of tents covered by a blue tarp in a back corner of the Timberline Campground in Lebanon. Surrounding them are the tents, campers and recreational vehicles of other families in similar straits, living full time in campgrounds because they can no longer afford to live anywhere else.
No one knows how many people are living in campgrounds in Middle Tennessee. But visit any area campground and it’s easy to pick out the permanent residents among the vacationers.
Look for the decks built on to campers with scrap lumber, and gardens planted next to campfire pits. Look for the air-conditioning units hooked up to tents. Look for the children boarding school buses at the front gates, and parents closing up the camper before they head off to work.
Except the air conditioners. I don’t think Algore would let us keep the air conditioners.
After losing homes, families move into tents | tennessean.com | The Tennessean
Can we take this as a “yes?”
If you voted for Obama really believing he was going to cut taxes for 95% of Americans, then this joke’s on you:
At the June 29 White House briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked, with reference to health care legislation, if the president’s pledge not to raise taxes on couples making less than $250,000 is “still active.” Gibbs answered: “We are going to let the process work its way through.” What is your guess?
Actually, the joke’s on all of us, even those of us who knew he was going to do the opposite of what he said.
Saving the planet
Some days I am just stunned that otherwise intelligent people actually believe this stuff.
If the Senate doesn’t pass a bill to cut global warming, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer says, there will be dire results: droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening air pollution and more.
She says there’s a huge upside, however, if the Senate does act: millions of clean-energy jobs, reduced reliance on foreign oil and less pollution for the nation’s children.
A couple of points:
1. If we — God help us — pass cap-and-tax, does it mean we WON’T have any more droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, and damage to agriculture? All that will go away?
2. While it is highly disputable that cap-and-tax will result in less pollution for the nation’s children, it is indisputable that they’re going to be in debt up to their eyeballs paying for stupid liberal government programs.
Boxer faces ‘challenge of a lifetime’ on climate change bill – Yahoo! News
Next target for the global warming hucksters: the Internet
I wonder how much carbon dioxide gets emitted by all the wasted brain cells that are used to conjure up crackpot theories such as this:
Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.
This may not seem like a lot: “But in aggregate, if you consider all the people visiting a web site and then all the seconds that each of them spends on it, it turns out to be a large number,” says Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing.
Wissner-Gross estimates every second someone spends browsing a simple web site generates roughly 20 milligrams of C02. Whether downloading a song, sending an email or streaming a video, almost every single activity that takes place in the virtual environment has an impact on the real one.
Greening the Internet: How much CO2 does this article produce? – CNN.com
Thank you for your candidness, Algore
Algore tells us exactly what the global warming hoax is all about. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the weather.)
“Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore said, noting it was “very much a step in the right direction.” President Obama has pushed for the passage of the bill in the Senate and attended a G8 summit this week where he agreed to attempt to keep the Earth’s temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C.
Gore touted the Congressional climate bill, claiming it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating what he sees as the “crisis” of man-made global warming.
“But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.” [emphasis added]
Gore: U.S. Climate Bill Will Help Bring About ‘Global Governance’ | Climate Depot
Strength in numbers
I love it when Republicans stick together in opposition to liberalism, which how the GOP is treating the prospect of a second stimulus package. This is heartwarming, because for months it has seemed like Republicans have been afraid to oppose and criticize the Obamassiah. It’s almost as if some Republicans were afraid of being called “racist.” Democrats wouldn’t do that…would they?
Republicans lined up Sunday in opposition to a second economic stimulus package, a rare demonstration of unity from an out-of-power political party in search of a rallying cry against President Barack Obama.
Republicans called Obama’s $787 billion spending plan a “flop” and said it hasn’t fulfilled its hype. They criticized the White House for increasing the federal deficit and doing little to combat an unemployment rate that hit 9.5 percent in June.
“The reality is it hasn’t helped yet,” said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. “Only about 6.8 percent of the money has actually been spent. What I proposed is, after you complete the contracts that are already committed, the things that are in the pipeline, stop it.”
GOP unifies against any more stimulus spending – Yahoo! News
All-Star break
The annual three-day All-Star break is upon us. The home run derby is tonight, and will include Ryan Howard of the Phillies, who will be 
in his hometown (St. Louis) for the festivities. The All-Star game is tomorrow, with five Phillies on the National League squad. The Senior Circuit goes for its first All-Star game win since 1996, when the mid-summer classic was held in Philadelphia.
The Phillies enter the break riding a 5-game winning streak after going 9-1 on its just-ended homestand. The Phillies are 10 games over .500, and lead the second-place Florida Marlins by 4 games. By comparison, last year, when the Phillies ended up winning the World Series, they were 8 games over .500 at the break, and led the hated second-place New York Mets by one-half game.
Pepsi may as well change its name to ObamaCola
Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign logo:
Pepsi’s new logo introduced earlier this year:
Smirky is a Phillies fan
Okay, so there is one thing Vice President Biden and I have in common.
Vice President Joe Biden had a premonition at Citizens Bank Park on Saturday.
He had told his wife, Jill, that Ryan Howard was going to hit a home run in the ninth inning.
Howard did just that, a 420-foot, three-run, game-tying shot to left-center field. Raul Ibanez then doubled, and two batters later, Paul Bako singled him home to cap off an improbable comeback. The Phillies scored five in the ninth off Pirates closer Matt Capps to beat the Bucs, 8-7, in front of 45,209 fans and one vice president.
“It was incredible,” said Biden, donning a Phillies cap and posing for a photo with Howard outside the home clubhouse. “I loved it. You know, the thing about the Phillies is, you never gave up.”
Fightin’ Phillies walk ‘em off
The Phillies played the Pittsburgh Pirates tonight in the second game of their three-game set, with the Phillies winning last night 3-2. 
Tonight, Phillies’ ace Cole Hamels blew up early, allowing three dingers and 5 runs in the first two innings. The Phillies got on the board with three runs in the bottom of the sixth to make it a ballgame again, but then served up two more runs in the top of the 7th to fall farther behind. With the score still 7-3, Matt Stairs led off the bottom of the 9th with a solo home run to make it 7-4. It ended a string of 56 straight homerless innings for the Pirates’ pitching staff. Two of the next three batters reached base for the big guy, Ryan Howard, who responded by driving a 1-0 pitch over the left-centerfield wall for a three-run home run to tie the game at 7. The Phillies then loaded the bases, with light-hitting catcher Paul Bako delivering a game-winning single to left field, capping off one of the most exciting, come-from-behind victories of the season, literally snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. With the win, the Phillies have now won 8 of their last 9 games, improving their record to 47-38, lifting themselves 3.5 games ahead of the Florida Marlins. Right Minded got to enjoy the win using his free subscription to MLB-TV that lasts from today through the 21st. I may have to break down and buy a subscription.
It’s okay if government has to weather a recession just like everyone else
Tennessee revenue collections continue to come up short. In fact, times are harder now than they were 8 years ago, when it was so bad that we had to have an income tax, or else. Somehow, state government has tightened its belt and weathered this storm without sticking it to the taxpayers. When I read about the $26 billion deficit in California and their use of IOU’s, I realize how lucky we are to live in a low-tax state with a relatively small government.
Tennessee state tax revenue was $135 million below budgeted estimates in June, pushing the budget shortfall 11 months into the 2008-09 fiscal year to $1.146 billion, state officials announced Thursday.
Not only are tax revenues below the levels budgeted a year ago, they are also lower than the actual collections from the same period a year earlier.
State government’s two largest tax revenue sources — the sales tax and corporate franchise and excise taxes — continued to fall below actual collections for the same period in the previous fiscal year. Officials said the numbers reflect the troubled economy and the fact that people are spending less money on taxable items.
Tax revenue shortfalls push Tennessee budget into red : Mid-South : Memphis Commercial Appeal
All-Star outfield
Phillies’ right fielder Jayson Werth has been named as the replacement for the injured Carlos Beltran on the National League All-Star team. This gives the Phillies five members on the All-Star team, including the entire outfield of Raul Ibanez, Shane Victorino, and Werth.
Baseball history
With Chase Utley and Jayson Werth both homering for the Phillies in last night’s 9-6 win over the Cincinnati Reds — Utley’s was inside-the-park — the Phillies have become just the second team in major league history to have four players hit at least 20 home runs before the All-Star break. Raul Ibanez leads the team with 22, Ryan Howard has 21, and Utley and Werth both have 20. (The Toronto Blue Jays did it in 2000.)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s racist statement
Imagine if a conservative had said this:
In an astonishing admission, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she was under the impression that legalizing abortion with the 1973 Roe. v. Wade case would eliminate undesirable members of the populace, or as she put it “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
Of course, abortion disproportionately affects black women and their unborn children. We know going all the way back to Margaret Sanger that modern eugenics is inherently racist. Justice Ginsburg merely confirms that.
No, we’re rooting against Obama, and for the U.S.
Congressman Henry Waxman says the GOP is rooting against the USA by opposing the Democrats’ job-killing, economy-wrecking legislation. No, we’re actually rooting FOR America, which is why we’re rooting AGAINST Obama. If there’s a party that rooted against its own country, it was the Democrats during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who has had an eventful couple of weeks to say the least, believes House Republican opposition to climate change legislation and the stimulus indicates they’re cheering against the good ol’ US of A.
“It appears that the Republican Party leadership in the Congress has made a decision that they want to deny President Obama success, which means, in my mind, they are rooting against the country, as well,” the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman told WAMU radio host Diane Rehm on Tuesday morning, promoting his new book, “The Waxman Report.”
Henry Waxman: GOP “rooting against” USA – Glenn Thrush – POLITICO.com
Let’s hope for more headlines like this
This reminds me of 1994, when Democrats were trying to push through HillaryCare. Ultimately, the bill died under a lack of full Democrat support, and was part of the reason for the GOP sweep in the midterm elections later that year. Let’s hope for similar results this time all the way around.
The emerging bill “lacks a number of elements essential to preserving what works and fixing what is broken,” 40 members of the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate to conservative Democrats wrote in a letter to party leaders. To win their support, they said, any legislation would need to be much more aggressive in reining in the growth of health care.
Health care overhaul bill suffers another setback – Yahoo! News.
Cap-and-tax on hold
Senate Democrats are obviously feeling pressure from the public, and have put off cap-and-tax until after their August recess.
Michelle Malkin » Pressure’s on: Senate Dems put cap-and-tax on ice
Everything we’ve said about cap-and-tax is true
Michelle Malkin quotes senate.gov:
During a hearing today in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, EPA Administrator Jackson confirmed an EPA analysis showing that unilateral U.S. action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would have no effect on climate. Moreover, when presented with an EPA chart depicting that outcome, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he disagreed with EPA’s analysis.
Ahem. As I (and others) have always said, global warming has nothing to do with climate. It has everything to do with growing government and raising taxes. That’s all it is.
