Mrs. Sharpton Leaves Al

According to my friends at Lone Star Times, after 23 years of marriage, Kathy Sharpton has left her husband, former Democrat presidential candidate, Rev. Al Sharpton.


I can only assume it is because the defeat of John Kerry guarantees that Al won't become the nation's first Secretary of Racism and Anti-Semitism.

Arlen Specter -- Rebel Without A Clue

Fresh from having had his Senate seat saved for him by President Bush and fellow Pennsylvanian Senator Rick Santorum, prospective Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter has had the audacity to warn the President not to select conservative pro-life nominees for the Supreme Court. Already there are hints of a possible revolt against the elevation of Specter to chairman.

When asked Wednesday about Specter's impending chairmanship, another Republican on the panel, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, did not offer a ringing endorsement.

"We'll have to see where he stands," said Cornyn, a close friend of Bush who worked to get all of the president's nominees through the Senate. "I'm hoping that he will stand behind the president's nominees. I'm intending to sit down and discuss with him how things are going to work. We want to know what he's going do and how things are going to work."

We need to encourage Cornyn and other conservatives on the committee to abort a Specter chairmanship. If you need any more reason to question Specter's judgement, all you have to do is look at this quote.

Specter also bemoaned what he called the lack of any current justices comparable to legal heavyweights like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo and Thurgood Marshall, "who were giants of the Supreme Court."

"With all due respect to the (current) U.S. Supreme Court, we don't have one," he said.

Though he refused to describe the political leanings of the high court, Specter said he "would characterize myself as moderate; I'm in the political swim. I would look for justices who would interpret the Constitution, as Cardozo has said, reflecting the values of the people."

Thurgood Marshall as a giant of the court? Marshall was hardly a giant as a justice (though he was probably the greatest courtroom advocate of his generation). Even a cursory reading of his opinions shows a sloppy jurisprudence which was more concerned with reaching a desired result than providing a reason for that result which was grounded in the Constitution.

On the other hand, we have a Chief Justice who is one of the great historians of the Supreme Court, and two associate justices (Scalia and Thomas) whose opinions are scholarly masterpieces of originalism and textualism. No giants on today's Supreme Court? Only if one isn't looking for them!

And as for the Cardozo quote, I need only note that such a jurisprudence would leave the Republic without the anchor of the Constitution, for "reflecting the values of the people" is usually the excuse a judge uses to substitute his own views for the text of the Constitution itself.

Chronicle to Bush -- Repudiate Your Principles To Unite Country

With exit polls showing that moral issues were a key issue for American voters who returned President Bush to office, the Houston Chronicle had this little bit of advice to offer him.

Bush could demonstrate his sincere desire for a more united nation by discouraging the use of wedge issues and spurious constitutional amendments that have no chance of passage and would erode states' prerogatives and individual rights if they were adopted. When he has an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice, as he soon might, Bush could nominate a jurist who is respected on both sides of the aisle, one likely to respect the precedent set by Roe v. Wade.

So, what needs to happen is that the President needs to repudiate the voice of the majority that elected him in order to gain the support and cooperation of those who will never support or cooperate with him!

But then they go on.

Bush will need a measure of Democratic cooperation to battle the problems the nation faces: uncontrolled deficits that could hobble the economy; an insurance crisis that threatens the health care and solvency of middle-class families and the profitability of the companies they work for; widespread resentment of U.S. foreign policy around the world, particularly among Arabs and Muslims who prefer tyranny and chaos to U.S. hegemony.

Yeah, I suspect he would need some help from the Democrats to battle many of those "problems the nation faces," which appear to have been taken word for word from the Democrat Platform adopted in Boston this summer.

But most disgusting is the unwarranted cheap shot at Talmadge Heflin, whose defeat had been a major goal and editorial policy of the Houston Chronicle for months.

While liberals might seem to have more to gain from a conservative administration's offer of harmonious cooperation, conservatives also must adapt and bend or be supplanted. Southwest Houston, where a Democratic newcomer unseated the Republican chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, offers a telling example. Perhaps the constituents of the diverse district found appealing Hubert Vo's history as a hardworking immigrant. Perhaps they resented state Rep. Talmadge Heflin's family values. These include making it harder for some children to get health insurance, and using the courts in an unjust attempt to take a child away from its mother.

Kicking a man when he's down, and using half-truths to do it is pretty low -- but typical of those who set policy for that paper.

VICTORY!

President Bush was reelected.

John Kerry has conceded, showing great grace and class. I hope he genuinely means the things he said in his concession.

May God bless our reelected president and our nation in the years ahead.

Well, We Survived!

Precinct 333. had a good day yesterday. We voted over 1400, and had over 700 early vote. That means that given our registration 0f 3100, we had a total turnout of over 67%.

Special thanks to several people.

Janet, my Democrat counterpart who served as alternate judge, was a joy. She is proof that people of good will exist on both sides of the aisle.

My darling wife, the Loyal Opposition, came and worked for me despite feeling less than her best. That's why I love her.

Northstar, from TPRS, helped make my day a lot easier by picking up some of the slack when I didn't even realize I needed it. I may disagree with him, but he is a good guy.

And thanks as well, to all my other clerks. and to the library staff.

John Kerry's Daddy

No, not George W. Bush, who is going to kick Kerry's butt on Tuesday.

John Kerry's REAL daddy.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Vin Suprynowicz writes about the life and philosophy of Richard Kerry, whose membership in the Achesonian pro-appeasement wing of the State Department was well known as far back as the days of Harry Truman. He became involved in the internationalist movement in the 1950s, wrote a book opposing the Vietnam War as early as 1965, and was still criticizing the anti-Communist ideology of the Dulles brothers (and every administration between Eisenhower and Bush 41) in a book published in 1990, the year AFTER the Berlin Wall fell.

A lot of folks have moaned that the current presidential campaign has us "re-fighting the war in Vietnam." It goes deeper than that. This campaign, in many ways, is a replay of the isolationist debate of the 1930s, as revived in the "Better Red Than Dead" leftism of the 1950s.

President Bush believes the way to defeat Islamic terrorism is pretty much the way we defeated first Hitler and Tojo -- and then Russian communism. Use a full-court press; take the war to them on their own turf.

But John Kerry doesn't see the need to fight a war at all. That's what all this "nuance" business is about. It's all a misunderstanding, you see, based on American "ethnocentrism" -- on the notion that America is somehow "exceptional," that we can or should set some kind of shining example of freedom to the other cultures in the world.

That's all wrong, apparently. It represents an oversimplified "either/or" dualism, when what we need to do instead is embrace "a more sophisticated relativism."

Whether it be the communists murdering millions in pursuit of the lunatic collectivist vision of a couple of German crackpots, or Islamic mullahs beating women who go out in public with their arms uncovered and executing college professors who theorize that Mohammed might once have shaved his armpits -- and clownishly blowing up our occasional skyscraper -- we have to get over this "us vs. them" nonsense. The answer is to consult, to negotiate, to reach a compromise.

With Joe Stalin. With Mao Tse-Tung. With Pol Pot. With Osama bin Laden.

Branding these people "communists" or "terrorists" or "mass murderers" is "just name-calling," see. No one culture is superior to any other. And these guys are reasonable; they'll compromise. Maybe if we just offer them Czechoslovakia. ...

Yep -- that's the choice we face on Tuesday. The will for victory over our enemies, or the repudiation of American foreign policy since WWII and its replacement with a policy of negotiation in the face of murderous evil.