She’d already have been forced to withdraw.

Eva Rodriguez in the Washington Post:

I’m surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.

Sotomayor’s most quoted comment is, “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.” Under often very effective questioning by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she essentially disavowed her statement. She explained that she was trying to play off of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s assertion that a wise old man and a wise old woman should be able to reach the same conclusion in a case. “My play…fell flat,” Sotomayor said in response to Session’s question. “It was bad, because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that’s clearly not what I do as a judge.”

A fair reading of Sotomayor’s record on the federal trial and appellate courts clearly shows that that is not what she’s done thus far. But Sessions’ questions were aimed at understanding how she would implement this judicial philosophy if she’s confirmed to the Supreme Court, where she would be far less restrained by precedent. I found it hard to believe that Sotomayor has now come to the realization that her words left a wrong impression. After all, she delivered similar lines in roughly half a dozen speeches throughout the years. Her explanation came across as dodgy at best and disingenuous at worst.

Discuss.

But not the real rich, like George Soros:

…Panels led by his Democratic Party have stepped up activity on legislation that would meet Obama’s goal of guaranteeing all Americans health care coverage, but they remain far from resolving the thorniest issue — how to come up with about $1 trillion over 10 years in new taxes or savings to pay for it…

…Senators were cool to one of the most controversial parts of the House Democrats’ bill, the so-called millionaires’ tax on the wealthiest Americans to pay for the expanded coverage. The tax starts at 1 percent on income of $350,000 a year and hits 5.4 percent for millionaires.

Once again – they are not taxing “the rich” they are taxing “high income earners”. The rich, when we think of “the rich” are people like the aforementioned Soros…or Buffet, or Gates, or Rockefeller…people who are fabulously wealthy and who don’t have to work for a living. “Tax the rich” schemes do not effect these very wealthy people for the simple reason that they have little or no taxable income – its not like Soros pays himself a million dollars a year so that Pelosi can take 5.4% of it to pay for health care. No, nothing like that at all – Soros has various tax dodges (all agreed to by the very same liberal Democrats who say they want to “tax the rich”) which allow him to spend whatever he wants on whatever he likes, but pay only minimal amounts of income tax, if any at all.

So, why do it? Because the rubes who make up the base of the Democrat party simply don’t think things through and thus don’t understand they are being conned. Additionally, it allows the Democrats to act like they are paying for this trillion dollar health care boondoggle when they know very well they’re not…but that isn’t the point. The point, boys and girls, is simply to get it enacted in to law, allow vast numbers of Americans to become dependent on it, and then sock the middle class with the taxes which will actually be necessary to pay for it.

Cruel. Cynical. Stupid. Ie, liberal.

One would think Al Franken would attempt to be more serious an a Senator.. especially when so many people worked hard to steal the election for him… but, apparently he thinks this is all just an SNL skit.

Sen. Al Franken is attempting to refute someone’s argument that relates to the word “abortion” not appearing in the Constitution.

Al Franken: “Are the words ‘birth control’ in the Constitution? Are you sure?”* Is his tone as off-putting to everyone else as it is to me?

The newest senator began by saying that he was surprised Sotomayor wanted to become a prosecutor from watching Perry Mason, since the prosecutor, Berger, lost every week except one. He concluded, “What was the one case in Perry Mason that Berger won?” After saying that she couldn’t remember the name of the episode or the case, Franken asked Sotomayor, “Didn’t the White House prepare you for these hearings?”

A little on the silly side for a guy who needs to show the rest of the country that Minnesota still takes its representation in Washington seriously.

He may be even more an embarrassment than Barack Obama.

Its raining soup out there, but we’re stuck with dimwits who think that shuffling paper around will solve our economic problems:

Dozens of fruitful wells beneath the rich Bakken shale in North Dakota continue to fuel a hunch among oilmen and geologists that another vast crude-bearing formation may be buried in the state’s vast oil patch.

Lynn Helms, director of the state Department of Mineral Resources, said recent production results from 103 newly tapped wells in the Three Forks-Sanish formation show many that are “as good or better” than some in the Bakken, which lies two miles under the surface in western North Dakota and holds billions of barrels of oil.

“I think it’s a big deal and we’re pretty fired up about it,” Helms said.

Drill, baby, drill. We have 275 billion tons of coal in our ground, 30 billion barrels of oil, 238 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and we invented nuclear power…and that is just proven reserves. Lord only knows what we’ve missed because we’ve been slack in using our own natural wealth. We don’t have a shortage of energy, dear people; what we have is a shortage of good sense. We need to make, mine and grow more of our own things and we have vast and scarcely tapped energy resources – all we lack is the will to exploit them to their fullest extent. Obama talks about creating “green jobs”, as if windmill manufacturing will some how solve our energy problems, and replace the millions of jobs lost in the manufacturing, mining and farming sectors of our economy over the past few decades…meanwhile, we’ve got enough coal in the ground to last us nearly three centuries…certainly enough for us to slowly and carefully transit from carbon to non-carbon energy sources, don’t you think?

Potential wealth is the stuff you’ve got in and on the ground in its natural state. Actual wealth is what you’ve got when you have in some way modified natural materials into something usable. Wealth is not Wall Street pinheads and DC bureaucrats shuffling paper around and maintaining a good old boy network where you go from DC to Wall Street and back again in an endless cycle of well paid jobs which produce nothing of worth.

We ran up a massive amount of debt thinking that we could ponzi-scheme ourselves on to easy street – at least as long as we lived, and who cared what came after. Well, “came after” is here, today. Those who warned back in the 1930’s that welfare State nonsense wouldn’t work were right; our grandfathers should have listened to them, but the siren song of getting something for nothing drowned out common sense. So, here we are, flat broke and trillions of dollars in debt – a good portion of which is owed to Chinese tyrants who threaten our lives and our global position with their massive and entirely un-called for military buildup. Do we really want change? Then we’d better start changing – and that means giving up the get rich quick schemes of the past and getting back to work.

From the man who arguably founded the modern study of law:

“No enactment of man can be considered law unless it conforms to the law of God” – William Blackstone

Ouch! From liberal Louis Michael Seidman – hammers on Sotomayor’s testimony (scroll down):

Speaking only for myself (I guess that’s obvious), I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise—to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results—is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith. What does it say about our legal system that in order to get confirmed Judge Sotomayor must tell the lies that she told today? That judges and justices must live these lies throughout their professional carers?

Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth. Legal academics who defend what she did today have no such excuse. They should be ashamed of themselves.

To me, of course, judging should only be about applying law to the facts – but if you’re to be a liberal judge, that isn’t what you hold to be correct. And Sotomayor certainly is no conservative jurist – so, why is she lying about her own views or, if you wish to put it charitably, being a moron? Because even with a 60-Seat Senate majority, liberal jurisprudence is politically toxic. Its not so much that the Democrats couldn’t muscle her through – they could, because at least one or two GOP Senators (and probably more) will vote to confirm even if she’s in favor of clubbing baby seals to death. No, its because Democrat Senators up for re-election in red States don’t want to have to defend a vote in favor of liberal, judicial activism to the folks back home. Voting for the first hispanic Justice is great – voting for a liberal kook who will invent constitutional law out of thin air is less great.

Rush Limbaugh commented yesterday that if Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” remark was available on good quality video, she wouldn’t be getting confirmed. Here is an excellent example of the dishonesty and cowardice of our modern politics. Everyone knows she’s a kook leftist, but as there’s no televised proof of this, the fact that she says she’s not a kook leftist is going to be held as sufficient by the gathered Senators. As long as Sotomayor doesn’t spill the beans in the hearings, all will be well – and so she just blandly states what everyone knows to be false; making the claim that she’s not a kook leftist in judicial get-up.

Mr. Seidman, God bless him, is outraged that Sotomayor doesn’t show the courage of her convictions and wishes that people had a better understanding of the issue, so that Sotomayor’s dissembling would be un-necessary. Poor man – he doesn’t realize that people understand the issue perfectly well, and thus the issue – as it were – is being shoved under the rug in favor of non-issues which poll better in focus groups. A dishonest obscuring of the truth is necessary to get Sotomayor on the court – and she appears to be mercenary enough to play the game (hey, its a well-paid life appointment requiring minimal work and no thought at all – thought will be provided by NARAL and the ACLU). And this should come as no surprise – after all, it took a dishonest obscuring of the truth to make President Obama palatable to the American people.

So, what can we do? Not much – but we can start to figure out ways to trick liberals in to admitting to their views. Do that, and we’ll have 80 Senate seats, and then we won’t have to play these silly games any more.

From Mark Steyn:

According to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, we only have 96 months left to save the planet.

I’m impressed. 96 months. Not 95. Not 97. July 2017… In April, Prince Charles predicted that the red squirrel would be extinct “within ten years,” which suggests that, while it may be curtains for man and all his wretched works come summer of 2017, the poor doomed red squirrel will have the best part of two years to frolic and gambol on a ruined landscape.

So, unless you’re a squirrel, don’t start any long books in 95 months’ time, because time is running out! “Time is running out to deal with climate change,” said Steven Guilbeault of Greenpeace in 2006. “Ten years ago, we thought we had a lot of time.”

Really? Ten years ago, we had a lot of time? Funny, that’s not the way I remember it. (“Time is running out for the climate,” said Chris Rose of Greenpeace in 1997.) So what’s to blame for this eternally looming rendezvous with the iceberg of apocalypse? As the British newspaper the Independent reported:

Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned. . . . And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.

He then got in his limo and was driven to his other palace.

A liberal is someone who believes that everyone other than himself will have to sacrifice to save the planet. Its ok for the privileged elite to continue to be privileged and elite because…well…because they donate money to environmentalist causes and add glitz to environmentalist causes and….and….and just who do you think you are asking questions? Just do as you’re told, dammit…

According to Rasmussen:

Republican candidates continue to lead on the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot as Democrats fall to their lowest level of support among voters in recent years.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 40% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 37% would choose the Democratic candidate.

A 40/37 split doesn’t sound that bad for Democrats, until you realize that the split was 47/41 in the Democrats favor on election day last year. So, the GOP support hasn’t really changed, but the Democrat “brand” is being battered to pieces – guess there’s just so much Reid and Pelosi that people can take. Watch Obama to start distancing himself from that Toxic Duo.

We’re not a Christian nation?

The Definitive Treaty of Peace 1783

In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity.

It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third, by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith, duke of Brunswick and Lunebourg, arch- treasurer and prince elector of the Holy Roman Empire etc., and of the United States of America, to forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore…

…Done at Paris, this third day of September in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three. (emphasis added)

This is, as it were, the baptismal certificate of the United States of America – the treaty by which Britain, in the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity – acknowledged the independence of our nation…and they did it in the year of our Lord, 1783. Now, our liberal friends like to point to one (1) treaty with some north African barbarians where we say we’re not founded on Christianity – but I think this treaty carries a bit more weight in demonstrating American beliefs. Not just a belief in God, but a belief in the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So, stick that in your atheist pipe and smoke it, if you like – but we are a Christian nation, and have been from the start.

A brave woman who is making the rest of us look like cowards:

The woman at the center of the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion rights ruling was arrested today at the confirmation hearing for Sonia Sotomayor among a wave of anti-abortion protesters who lined the sidewalks outside the Senate office buildings and several of whom made it into the hearing room and disrupted in an attempt to disrupt the proceedings.

Norma McCorvey, 61, of Texas, better known as “Jane Roe” in the famous Roe v. Wade case from January 1973, was arrested after she and another protester started yelling during the opening statement of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), according to Capitol Police. McCorvey, whose pursuit of the right to access to abortion in the early 1970s led to the ruling that has been a pivotal part of every Supreme Court nomination process since, eventually become a notable opponent of the procedure.

As we’ve said, we can’t stop Sotomayor – only a complete screw up on her own part (unlikely as the Senate Democrats have carefully coached her on what to say, and will put all sorts of roadblocks up against any GOP attempt to get at the truth about her) will derail this nomination…but the bottom line of Sotomayor and all liberal judges is an insane and inhuman defense of Roe…but the wheel is turning, and the time of these liberals is passing.