Nation-Building

a very thought-provoking comment at RedState caught my eye: Just wondering by Menlo I'm starting to wonder if the Supreme Court is a lost cause given the Democrat majority is likely to only grow. No one who is any good could get 60 votes for cloture with the current Senate makeup (or worse). Whether the President will cave in (as Reagan did) remains to be seen. Saying he would appoint people like Roberts and Alito is a mistake, since we know very little about where they stand. I was not very supportive of either after the confirmation hearings, and I'm still not convinced. It could be misleading to lump them in with Thomas and Scalia. There were actually a few judges about whom conservatives spoke very highly that I would oppose and one in particular I am glad left the whole judiciary. There is no meaningful way a Presidential candidate can say who he would appoint. Everyone is so different, and opposing sides use the same adjectives to the point where no adjective describes ...

Charles Kuffner has been doing yeoman's work in promoting Rick Noriega's candidacy to run against Senator Cornyn. via email, You may have heard that Cornyn has drawn a couple of serious Democratic challengers for next year. I'm an enthusiastic supporter of one of those challengers, State Representative Rick Noriega of Houston. I've blogged about why I want Rick Noriega to be my next Senator , but I'll give you the two-second overview: He's a strong progressive (100% rating from he Texas Planned Parenthood PAC, for example) with excellent credentials, and I think he's exactly the right person to run against Cornyn. You can read more about him here: http://www.ricknoriega.com/about.html - his website is still a work in progress, but that should be a good start. Noriega seems to want to avoid a primary , which is an unfortunate position to take. Still, as a candidate I agree with Charles he probably represents the best shot against Cornyn. The Texas liberal bl...

from eth same site, but it;s mirror image (rather clever dual branding!) My Conservative Identity: You are a Freedom Crusader , also known as a neoconservative. You believe in taking the fight directly to the enemy, whether it’s terrorists abroad or the liberal terrorist appeasers at home who give them aid and comfort. Take the quiz at www.FightLiberals.com In a way I am also pleased.

Earlier, we learned that the President's assertion of executive privilege amounts to claiming that any member of the executive branch, even former members who are not presently employed by the Executive, are immune to subpoena : the House Judiciary Committee announced that Miers was set to refuse to appear at a hearing today. Miers's attorney, George T. Manning of Atlanta, said in a letter to the committee that the administration's assertion of executive privilege gives her "absolute immunity" from being forced to testify on Capitol Hill. Now it seems that the Justice Department refuses to acknowledge the authority of Congress to pursue claims of contempt. Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action." But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to f...

via Thomas , this quiz on my liberal identity. My Liberal Identity: You are a Social Justice Crusader , also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains. Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com I am pleased.

I usually find OpinionJournal to be too partisan to be of use, but there's pretty solid analysis here of the Texas GOP's woes. Democrats haven't won a statewide contest since 1994, and Republicans hold comfortable majorities in the state House and Senate. Both U.S. senators are Republicans. And even with the loss of two tight congressional races last year, Republicans hold 19 of 32 congressional districts. There are, however, signs of trouble for the GOP. While Gov. Rick Perry won re-election in November, he achieved only a plurality in a four-way race that featured a Democrat and an independent as well as a former Republican turned independent (State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn). And Republicans lost two heartbreaking races in the past year. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a seven-term incumbent and the only Mexican-American Republican in Congress, lost to Democrat Ciro Rodriguez, who ran a haphazard campaign. George Antuna, a rising star who had worked for Sen. Kay Bailey Hut...

RedState decides to go after Al Gore's son. This reminds me of the way Rush Limbaugh used to insult Chelsea Clinton on the air.

at RedState , where else? Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Rachel Carson: Legacies of Mass Genocide Genocide? Rachel Carson woke up one morning, thought, there are way too many sons of Cain in the Dark Continent, let's see if we can scrub it some... and voila a plan was born? Unreal. And yes this is a Recommended Blog at RedState... par for the course. As always, those with the patience for reading the actual history of events will find that the reason that millions died from malaria in Africa was due to a number of reasons, none involving Rachel Carson . Rather, more due to lack of public health infrastructure, exploding population growth, and increasing resistance to DDT and other insecticides: Overseas, DDT was being phased out of the fight against malaria, but Carson and budding environmentalists were not the reason. In the 1950s, when the Global Malaria Eradication Program was launched, the U.S. had been a major financier of it. But as the years ticked by,...