[The Pew Research Center's] data show clearly that the political views of Democrats and independents are converging on one another and pulling away from the Republicans. In other words, it's not just that Democrats and Republicans are becoming polarized against one another—the conventional wisdom—but that Democrats and independents (two-thirds of the electorate) are becoming polarized against Republicans.

We are rightfully outraged when anyone attacks or desecrates our flag. Few Americans do such things and when they do they are subject to the rightful condemnation of their fellow citizens. They may be destroying a piece of cloth, but they do no damage to our system of freedom which tolerates such desecration.

If they are destroying a flag that belongs to someone else, that's a prosecutable crime. If it is a flag they own, I really don't want to amend the Constitution to prosecute someone for foolishly desecrating their own property. We should condemn them and pity them instead.

Christians and Christian organizations back the marathon because they are fed up with the Senate's inaction and the seeming impotence of the conservative majority, according to Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy for Focus on the Family.

"(GOP senators) are making the liberals very mad with this strategy, and that makes us happy," Minnery said.

If federal jurisdiction remains at its current level--or, worse, increases--judicial vacancies will aggravate the problem of too few judges and too much work. Currently, 82 of the 846 Article III judicial offices in the federal Judiciary--almost one out of every ten--are vacant. Twenty-six of the vacancies have been in existence for 18 months or longer and on that basis constitute what are called "judicial emergencies." In the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the percentage of vacancies is particularly troubling, with over one-third of its seats empty.

Judicial vacancies can contribute to a backlog of cases, undue delays in civil cases, and stopgap measures to shift judicial personnel where they are most needed. Vacancies cannot remain at such high levels indefinitely without eroding the quality of justice that traditionally has been associated with the federal Judiciary. Fortunately for the Judiciary, a dependable corps of senior judges has contributed significantly to easing the impact of unfilled judgeships.

* * *

Whatever the size of the federal Judiciary, the President should nominate candidates with reasonable promptness, and the Senate should act within a reasonable time to confirm or reject them. Some current nominees have been waiting a considerable time for a Senate Judiciary Committee vote or a final floor vote. The Senate confirmed only 17 judges in 1996 and 36 in 1997, well under the 101 judges it confirmed during 1994.

The Senate is, of course, very much a part of the appointment process for any Article III judge. One nominated by the President is not "appointed" until confirmed by the Senate. The Senate is surely under no obligation to confirm any particular nominee, but after the necessary time for inquiry it should vote him up or vote him down. In the latter case, the President can then send up another nominee.

Noting that the White House has been slow in nominating new judicial candidates, and so shares the blame for disrupting the federal courts, University of Massachusetts professor Sheldon Goldman said the GOP tactics are without precedent.

Opposition parties traditionally delay the confirmation of judicial appointments in a presidential election year but never in the first years of a president's term, said Goldman, a specialist on the nominating process and the author of a new book titled "Picking Federal Judges: Lower Court Selection from Roosevelt through Reagan."

"This is very much a major new wrinkle, and rather a disturbing one," Goldman said. "The pace has really been dragging. It is very seriously undermining the integrity of the judicial branch of government. This is a rather urgent matter."

Judges appointed by Clinton's Republican predecessors currently outnumber the president's appointees by three to one.

It is a shameful day in the state and in the nation when a public official, who stands for our motto, “In God We Trust,” and whose only crime was the display of the Ten Commandments and quotes from America’s founders acknowledging God, pays for his noble acts by being fired from the highest judicial office in his state, given to him by the voters.

God help us and have mercy on those responsible, for they know not what they do. [emphasis added]

Conservatives and moderates who vote for a Democrat senator in the mistaken belief he's reasonable, a nice guy and not just some tool of Little Tommy Daschle, this is what you get.

If America ever elects a Democrat president again (a likely event considering the increasing mobs of illegal aliens who are allowed to vote illegally, thanks to such criminal-infested states as California and New Mexico), will Republican senators have the nerve to unite against his left-wing nominees? Of course not.

"Next time someone asks why you are a Republican or why not a Democrat, just tell them that you can't be a Democrat because you are not a Racist and don't wish to be a hypocrite!"

The difference between Howard Dean and the rest of the Democrat candidates is that Dean comes across as a true believer to the base but he will not appear threatening to folks in the middle. More than any other candidate in the field, he will be able to present himself as one who cares about people (doctor), who balances budgets (governor), and who appears well grounded while looking presidential. To be sure, he doesn’t look that way to the GOP base, but that has no bearing on the election, because they will never vote for him anyway. He can appeal to the middle and Republicans can ignore his candidacy at our peril. We are whistling past the graveyard if we think Howard Dean will be a pushover.

Howard Dean’s appeal is closer to Ronald Reagan’s than any other Democrat running today....[Back when Reagan was running] (v)oters in the middle looked to the bigger picture where they saw a man of conviction who cared about them and had solutions for their problems. Howard Dean has the potential to offer a similar type candidacy.

Furthermore, the “far-left liberal” charge which Republicans have used effectively in the past to define Democrats has much less impact today than it used to. The problem here is that the GOP spent years warning America about the ills of a left-wing liberal Clinton presidency and how it would destroy the economy, ruin our children, and leave America a twisted wreck. Well, we survived and the economy actually did well during much of the Clinton years. America didn’t have a problem with Bill Clinton being a far-left liberal, they had a problem with his inability to tell the truth and his total lack of morals.

Certainly Dean has made some gaffes and needs a little more seasoning before the general election. But the only people paying attention right now are the diehards on the left and the right. [Ahem, clearly if you're reading this...] The voters who will actually determine the outcome of the Presidential race are currently checked out. They couldn’t pick Howard Dean out of a police lineup. And you can be sure that when they do begin to pay attention they won’t be searching back issues of the Hotline or the National Journal to research the guy. That’s insider stuff that is totally lost on the great majority of voters in America.

A new conspiracy theory is taking hold across the Internet. It goes something like this: Computerized voting machines bought from companies owned by major Bush/Cheney supporters are being used to fix elections all over the country in Republicans' favor.

You don’t really need to find out what’s going on
You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough alone

But Dallaire still blamed himself for failing to protect civilians caught up in the inter-ethnic conflict and that experience changed him so drastically that he says sadly that even laughing is different for him now.

He resigned his military commission in 2000 due to his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and attempted suicide by taking an overdose of prescription drugs.

A U.N. inspectors' report that said no evidence had turned up that Iran has tried to develop nuclear weapons is "simply impossible to believe," the Bush administration's top arms control official said Wednesday.

In the administration's first official response to the harshly worded report, which was circulated this week among members of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton noted that the inspectors had found evidence that Iran had conducted a secret nuclear program for 18 years, and that it had committed numerous breaches of its nuclear treaty obligations.

In a speech prepared for a dinner of the American Spectator, a conservative magazine, he disputed the IAEA's conclusion that "no evidence" has yet been found that the concealed activities were linked to a nuclear weapons program.
The administration believes that "the massive and covert Iranian effort to acquire sensitive nuclear capabilities makes sense only as part of a nuclear weapons program," Bolton said.

"In what can only be an attempt to build a capacity to develop nuclear materials for nuclear weapons, Iran has enriched uranium with both centrifuges and lasers, and produced and reprocessed plutonium," he said. "It attempted to cover its tracks by repeatedly and over many years neglecting to report its activities, and in many instances providing false declarations to the International Atomic Energy Agency."

[edit]

Bolton, however, said "the report's assertion [on nuclear arms] is simply impossible to believe." Despite Tehran's denial that it has any nuclear arms program, "the IAEA has amassed an enormous amount of evidence to the contrary that makes this assertion increasingly implausible," he said.

Finally, some say that the current filibusters are justified because some of President Clinton's nominees were held in committee.

But there is nothing new — or relevant — about a judicial nominee who is not confirmed due to lack of support from a Senate majority. At the end of the first Bush Administration, there were 54 judicial nominees who had not mustered majority support and thus were not confirmed. At the end of the Clinton administration, there were 41 such nominees. If a majority of senators chooses to defer to a committee's decision not to bring someone to a vote, that is the majority's right under our constitutional system for confirming judges.

The 30-hour debate on President Bush's judicial nominees began on a testy note Wednesday night.

After Republicans walked into the Senate chamber together to begin the extraordinary session, Democrats argued that their move was not a show of unity but rather a television stunt orchestrated for Fox News. They pointed to a memo from Manuel Miranda, a staffer for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), which said:

"It is important to double efforts to get your boss to S-230 on time ... Fox News Channel is really excited about this marathon and Brit Hume at 6 would love to open with all our 51 senators walking onto the floor -- the producer wants to know will we walk in exactly at 6:02 when the show starts so they get it live to open Brit Hume's show? Or if not, can we give them an exact time for the walk-in start?"

Democrats had unsuccessfully attempted to delay the debate until 8 p.m. to allow the Senate to first complete its work on the VA/HUD appropriations bill.

What chaps my hide about that is that Leahy and Hatch had a deal -- there were some folks who had problems that popped up on their FBI reports. So rather than embarrass the nominees, the nominations were quietly scuttled. Now, Leahy et al are beating Hatch up about it and Hatch is too much of a gentleman to rat on the deal.

We need to move beyond the game of playing politics with the federal bench, deliberately trying to influence the philosophical bent of justice. The judiciary was to be the nonpolitical branch, yet for the last four decades both presidents and Congress have worked to politicize it. Studies show that the outcome of lawsuits and prosecutions can be increasingly predicted by the political affiliation of the judges.

There's a way to depoliticize judicial appointments: Both parties in the Senate should adopt the use of the filibuster, not in exceptional cases but as a standard operating procedure for all judicial nominations. Require a super-majority for all judges. A super-majority represents the will of the people, while a one- or two-vote advantage simply jams the will of a slight majority down the throat of the minority. The Constitution requires super-majorities to approve treaties, to override a presidential veto, and to remove an official who has been impeached by the House of Representatives. The Senate has super-majorities in its rule. By imposing a super-majority requirement -- with the threat of a filibuster -- it will end this practice, never contemplated by the nation's founders, of presidents stacking the judiciary.

"I hate to see the American flag hanging out of every bloody station wagon, out of every SUV, every little Midwestern house in some residential area. It's easy to confuse patriotism with nationalism. Flag waving ain't gonna do it."

These senators defend their record by pointing out that they have tolerated the confirmation of many nominees and filibustered only a few — Miguel A. Estrada, who withdrew his nomination; Mississippi Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr.; Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla R. Owen; and Alabama Atty. Gen. William H. Pryor Jr. These senators repeat their record like a mantra: "168-4" — 168 of President Bush's nominees have been confirmed; four have been filibustered, meaning they've been denied up-or-down votes by a minority of senators.

Where I come from, it is wrong to treat people like statistics. Where I come from, you don't mistreat some people and then justify that misconduct by how well you've treated others. It is wrong to disrespect even one nominee.

This [third way feminist] movement will be a volcano that will erupt in a flow of soft, hot, empathic, breathing, authentic, vagina-friendly, relational lava that will encircle patriarchy and smother it. We will be the flood and we'll be Noah's arc.

"V" for Vagina, for vote, for victory.

Allen testified he used the word "queer" in its dictionary meaning from that time, or "odd, out of the ordinary, unusual. I did not use the word as pejorative; I did not use the word to denigrate any individual or any group."

A few minutes before addressing a California audience last Monday about homeschooling, Mike Farris's cell phone rang. One question: did he want to meet with the President before he signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act on Wednesday?

"I wasn't planning on being dead, so I said yes," Farris said.

At 12:15 on Wednesday an exclusive group of five conservatives chatted in the White House before meeting with Bush. Besides Dr. Michael Farris, the other four were Dr. James Dobson, founder and chairman of the board of Focus on the Family, Don Hodel, CEO and President of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council, and Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship.

At 1:00 they were called in for a half-hour meeting with the President. Farris said, "When he first saw me, he asked if I'd been pumping iron. I have lost ten pounds since he saw me in June, but maybe it was because I was wearing cowboy boots and looked taller." The room was set up with two chairs and two couches for the five who had been invited and the President, and then additional seats for the staff and press. Bush was sitting between Farris and Colson.

"We thanked him for taking a right stand on human rights," Farris said. "And abortion is a human rights issue." They also commented on the negative press that the President and the partial-birth abortion issue had been receiving. Bush replied that he didn't read or watch the news.

The president talked freely about his faith and how committed he is to the cause of defending human life.

I remarked to the president that the partial-birth abortion ban is simply part of a pattern that we’ve seen under his leadership. First, there was the legislation to stop sex trafficking; then the Prison Rape Elimination Act; then his efforts to stop slavery and genocide of Christians in the Sudan, an issue that may very soon have a successful outcome; and then, of course, the campaign to help AIDS victims in Africa and to promote abstinence; and the defunding of international agencies that promote abortion. We talked about how all of these things spring from a truth central to a Christian worldview: the dignity and value of every human being.

I told the president that this was the pattern followed by William Wilberforce, a conservative member of Parliament and a Christian. In the eighteenth century, he fought for twenty years to abolish slavery, the great abomination of his day, and as a result of that, a great spiritual awakening swept England. It is interesting that all through history conservatives with Christian consciences have done the great works that liberals only talk about.

This president has a deep concern for those in the margins of society—the helpless, “the least of these,” whom Jesus cares so much about.

While the president may nominate individuals to important positions, for example, actually appointing them requires Senate approval. The Senate becomes a “check and balance” on the president’s power. The only exception allows the president “to fill up vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.” The obvious reason for this very narrow exception is that, at a time when Senate sessions were shorter and recesses longer, vacancies in key positions could take months to fill. Thus America’s founders provided for an emergency mechanism to fill vacancies that occur during recesses, lifting the formal consent requirement but limiting length of service.

Senators each took an oath before God to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. To keep that oath, they must impose consequences for flagrant constitutional violations. Since the consequences must fit the violation, Mr. Clinton’s abuse of his appointment power requires that the Senate refuse to facilitate any further exercise of that power by refusing to confirm another federal judge.

Democrats will play the race card and lie about judicial vacancies. They will howl about how nominees are treated and whine about obstruction. Senate Republicans should tell them that 47 percent of the federal judiciary is more than Mr. Clinton should have been allowed to appoint in the first place. They should say that constitutional fundamentals are more important than partisan political points. Senate Republicans should say that the ends do not justify the means and that if Mr. Clinton will not honor his oath of office, they must honor theirs. Confirmations must stop.

The records the court ordered disclosed show the plaintiff's learning skills graded in numerical terms.

In handing down the ruling, presiding Justice Kunio Hamada said the evaluation points "are not influenced by a teachers' subjectivity and their disclosure will not cause problems to educational activities."

Hamada said, however, that disclosure of teachers' written assessments might hamper their teaching activities.

The guidance records are compiled and kept by school authorities. They contain records of each student's learning and other school activities. Teachers use the records as a reference when grading students' performance, and for documents used in entrance exams to enter higher grades.

After three weeks and more than 200 reader e-mail, snail mail and phone responses, it's time to find out what this Ann Coulter business is all about. It's time to decide whether the controversial conservative syndicated columnist will become a regular on our op-ed page. Starting Saturday, Nov. 22 and continuing for four weeks, Coulter's column will appear in the Erie Times-News for readers to judge for themselves. In other words, Ann Coulter is on trial.

"John Ashcroft loves America more than Howard Dean could ever know," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, said, calling Mr. Dean a "cruel, loudmouth extremist."

[Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee]'s reporting violations are the most egregious. Since the end of November 2002, TRMPAC has stopped disclosing to either the IRS or the state of Texas the amount of contributions raised from corporations and how these corporate funds have been spent. The Section 527 group was originally organized by DeLay as a means of raising and spending money from corporations and individuals in Texas state elections. TRMPAC's spending in support of electing Republican legislators has been widely credited with helping DeLay achieve his goal of securing Republican control of the Texas House of Representatives, which was needed to push a new Republican redistricting plan in Texas that would jeopardize incumbent U.S. House Democrats and ensure DeLay's continued status as House Majority Leader. TRMPAC has become the focus of a grand jury investigation as to whether TRMPAC violated the state's prohibition on spending corporate money in state elections.

Vice President Dick Cheney has in recent speeches mentioned the major bombings in Iraq this past summer in the same breath as the deadly strikes in Bali, Casablanca and Riyadh, which authorities say were carried out by Al Qaeda or groups affiliated with it.

The clear implication is that militants linked to Al Qaeda were responsible for the Iraq bombings, too. The attacks in Baghdad last month would appear to lend credence to that claim except for this: senior military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say there is no conclusive evidence pointing to a particular group — Al Qaeda or not — as the mastermind behind any of the major attacks in Iraq. "At this point it isn't clear who's responsible for those bombings," a senior American official said.

Increasingly alarmed by the failure of Iraq's Governing Council to take decisive action, the Bush administration is developing possible alternatives to the council to ensure that the United States can turn over political power at the same time and pace that troops are withdrawn, according to senior U.S. officials here and in Baghdad.

The United States is deeply frustrated with its hand-picked council members because they have spent more time on their own political or economic interests than in planning for Iraq's political future, especially selecting a committee to write a new constitution, the officials added. "We're unhappy with all of them. They're not acting as a legislative or governing body, and we need to get moving," said a well-placed U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They just don't make decisions when they need to."

"Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that [America] hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."

DR: You don't see yourself as antithetical to American values?

[edit]

PA: Look, Americans asked for me. Antithetical to our values? Where do you think I come from, kid, Mars?

DR: Well-

PA: There's a long history of any doo-dah batshit thing that makes governments look strong being passed when it's populace get scared. "Getting tough" makes people feel safe. Look, I could go on for days about Friedrich Nietzsche and how he tied all this up neatly with his whole "master state / slave state" thing, but it's a little hard to whip out "Nietzsche" without sounding like some liberal arts douchebag flailing at any conversational nugget while trying to get laid at a mixer.

DR: Nietzsche?

PA: Yeah, you know, society is either in advance or decline, it's either pushing forward or sliding back. Advance of society requires the bravado of desperation, see, once you're too comfortable and start looking for security rather than achievement, society starts to slide back towards tyranny. Hello!
Heh, you know, not that I'm tyrannical.

Several men, some brandishing bats, confronted picketers outside a strike-bound Albertsons market in Laguna Niguel, Calif., sending a 21-year-old man to the hospital, authorities said Monday.

Orange County Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino said five males showed up outside the market at 30241 Golden Lantern St. about 10:20 p.m. Sunday and taunted the strikers, challenging them to fight.

Three of them carried bats and began beating a 21-year-old striker, Amormino said, adding that the assailants fled when a security guard fired shots in the air.

On Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked planes were flown into the Pentagon across the Potomac River from the White House, into the World Trade Center in New York, and in Pennsylvania, killing some 3,000 people.

The National Park Service, responding to intense conservative criticism, is hoping to unveil next month what a spokesman said was a "more balanced" version of a video that has been shown since 1995 as part of an exhibit at the Lincoln Memorial.

Conservatives have been complaining for months that the eight-minute video -- portions of which have President Abraham Lincoln's speeches read by an actor while footage is shown of historic moments and demonstrations at the memorial -- implies that Lincoln would have supported abortion and gay rights.

The video begins with Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and Lincoln's condemnation of slavery. But it then shows demonstrations in favor of gun control, against the Vietnam War, favoring abortion, gay and women's rights, and against Soviet anti-Semitism. Marian Anderson is shown singing at the memorial after being barred by the Daughters of the American Revolution from singing at Constitutional Hall.

Then there are shots of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson and a quick shot -- that doubtless dismayed conservatives -- of the Clintons and Gores at the top of the memorial's steps.

The revision effort began after the conservative CNSNews.com reported on the video in February and some less than positive mail started flowing to the Park Service. Fran Mainella, director of the Park Service, and others looked at the tape and promised to work on it.

But it's far from certain that anyone's going to be happy with the new, more politically balanced version. The work is not expected to be done until mid-December or so, but spokesman Dave Barna said it was unclear how much, or whether, the original would be edited.

One change, he said, may be to show all presidents who have visited since the memorial was completed in 1922 -- that would be very quick shots of all but Gerald Ford and President Bush.

A second change would be to add some conservative events, Barna said. One problem seems to be that there haven't been many conservative demonstrations at the memorial, which has been a focal point for liberals for many years.

So the plan now, Barna said, is to add footage of the Christian "Promise Keepers" rally in 1997 and a Desert Storm march after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. One problem, however, is that neither event took place at the memorial, but on the Mall.

Rebels in northern Uganda have killed more than 100 civilians during five days of raids, the head of the regional government charged Monday.

The Lord's Resistance Army has been raiding villages in Lira district daily, and more than 100 bodies have been found between Wednesday and Saturday, Franco Ojur, the district chairman said by telephone Monday.

''Many more bodies are being discovered in the bushes and the death toll is about 100. Most people have fled the villages, but those remaining are discovering the bodies in the bushes,'' Ojur said. ''They are killing almost 20 people per day in Lira.''

Lt. Chris Magezi, an army spokesman based in Lira, 170 miles north of Kampala, said he could only confirm that about 40 people had been hacked to death with machetes and clubs since Wednesday in attacks by the rebels.