Running at the Mouth

Our Administration Can Kick Your Administration's Ass

It's a well-known fact, sonny Jim, that President Bush is in phenomenal shape.  He's a sub-21:00 5K runner, and can bench press 185 pounds five times.  What I didn't know is that Condoleeza Rice is rock-solid as well, as she demonstrated last week on national TV.

This sits well with me.  People who have balance in their lives are better at everything they do.  And studies show that physical exertion stimulates sharp thinking afterwards.

[Link via Bud Norton.]

Boxer's Punch Drunk Writing

Mouthbreathing California Senator Barbara Boxer (who, to continue the Robert Byrd theme, referred to the former Night Rider as "the love of her life") apparently writes bad novels in her spare time.  (I had no idea.)  Anyway, NRO's John Miller has read her latest, so we don't have to (thank Christ):  Boxer Shorts.  [Link via Power Line.]  John humorously excerpts some great (by great I mean awful) bits, and one really disturbing bit in which a guy watches a stud trying to bang a mare who's totally not into him, from this largely autobiographical crapfest.  See if you can spot the cognitive dissonance by comparing these two paragraphs:

It had been a particularly intense day in [Senator Ellen Fischer's] D.C. office, with a steady stream of meetings, e-mails, and phone calls from organizations and constituents, all urging her to step up her opposition to Professor Frida Hernandez's nomination to the Supreme Court. There was little time left for any attempt to block the confirmation of the ultra-conservative professor. ... Ellen, a member of the [Judiciary] committee, had sought to challenge the nominee's strongly suspected bias against Roe v. Wade. ... Ellen knew that, once on the Court, Hernandez would help turn back the clock on Court decisions that Ellen believed were vital to the people.

(Emphasis mine.)  And:

That was a defining moment, when Ellen knew how she'd spend the rest of her life — that she'd been put here on earth to save its endangered children.

(Emphasis again mine).  Huh.  She must mean saving only those endangered children lucky enough to not have been killed in the womb.

They're Also Planning a Battered Women's Charity Event at O.J.'s Brentwood Estate

I honestly don't know what to make of this.  It has to be one of three things:  (1) Hillary Clinton has titanium balls; (2) Hillary Clinton is borderline retarded; or (3) Hillary Clinton thinks Americans, especially black Americans, are borderline retarded.  One of those has to explain why she thinks it's okay to throw a birthday party for former KKK Kleagle Robert Byrd at . . . wait for it . . . Frederick Douglass's house. 

When a possible Republican challenger to Hillary called her on it, Hillary whined that she was being "insult[ed] and attack[ed]."  Of course.  This is one of the Democrats' favorite tactics:  whenever facts, like Senate voting records for example, are presented that show a Democrat to be feckless, mendacious or hypocritical, they accuse a Republican of playing dirty pool and they whine that they're being "attacked."  If presenting facts is an attack, what about innuendo?  Or rumor?  Or fake but accurate documents?

In the article linked above, much is made about Byrd's membership being "brief" and "long ago," as if it was some harmless youthful indiscretion.  Byrd's subsequent actions, such as filibustering the 1964 Civil Rights Amendment, and using the "n word" in a 2001 interview, put the lie to that notion.  As Marathon Pundit points out (in a great turn of phrase), Byrd may have left the Klan, but the Klan didn't leave him. 

All I Need to Know About Alito

Admittedly, I haven't been following very closely the Alito nomination or that which was the Harriet Miers debacle.  Before today, all I knew about both was that bloggers whose opinions I trust and respect were high on Alito, and much less so on Miers.  Today, I read two pieces about the man that tell me all I need to know about the man, and convince me that he will be an excellent, thoughtful jurist.

This NYT piece demonstrates that Alito is careful about substituting his own judgment for that of the trial court's factfinder, and for that of the very participants in the case at issue.  Since appellate judges are not to invade the province of the factfinder, this obviously sits well with me.  It also sits well with me that when Alito dissented and the SCOTUS granted cert., Alito was usually right where his brethren were wrong.

Of course, that doesn't stop the NYT from from trying to make Alito out to be a neocon boogeyman:

In the several hundred cases he heard over 15 years on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Judge Alito dissented more than 60 times, often taking issue with decisions that sided with criminal defendants, prisoners and immigrants.

He frequently voted in favor of the government and corporations in these dissents. He generally deferred to what he called the good faith judgments of other participants in the justice system, including police officers, prosecutors, prison wardens, trial judges and juries. He appeared particularly reluctant to order new trials over what he called harmless errors in the presentation of evidence or in jury instructions.

To recap:  he doesn't coddle criminals or prisoners, he favors punishing immigrants who commit crimes in this country, recognizes that the big, bad government and bigger, badder corporations have rights, and likes cops.  And the NYT thinks this is bad?  (Which is pretty much how I know it's good.)

The LA Times interviewed former Alito law clerks, all of whom are liberal or independent.  They all love Alito, and found him to be conscientious in applying the law to the facts, regardless of the outcome.  I love this quote from former clerk Kate Pringle:

"He was not, in my personal experience, an ideologue. He pays attention to the facts of cases and applies the law in a careful way. He is conservative in that sense; his opinions don't demonstrate an ideological slant," she said.

I also really liked this quote from former federal judge Timothy Lewis:

"Alito does not have an agenda, contrary to what the Republican right is saying about him being a 'home run.' He is not result-oriented. He is an honest conservative judge who believes in judicial restraint and judicial deference."

Both of these quotes give stunning insight into how left-leaning people, and very smart, legally-trained ones at that who should know better, view the role of judges.  Judges aren't supposed to be idealogues.  They are supposed to apply the law to the facts regardless of outcome.  That Judge Alito is not an idealogue and is a careful jurist is what makes him a "home run."  Apparently, a judge in this mold would certainly not be a "home run" for the Left. 

To my mind, a judge "who believes in judicial restraint and judicial deference" is much more likely to read the Constitution and apply what it says, as opposed to applying those principles founded on "boy, I really wish the framers would have included this 'right' that I just made up, so I'll float some crap about penumbras or some such nonsense to get the outcome I like" jurisprudence that we've had so much of for the better part of three decades.  

Evan Bayh Cavalierly Disregards the Constitution

For all the bluster and propaganda from the Left about how President Bush and his evil theocratic cabal are destroying our Constitutional rights and liberties, the reality is that it is the liberals themselves who throw the Constitution away if following it would have an undesirable (to them) outcome.  Sandra Day O'Connor, despite being on the right sides of Kelo and Bush v. Gore, embodied this irritating tendency, which makes it fitting that the latest example of it should arise as a result of her retirement. 

In observing that Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) is starting his run for the 2008 presidential nomination, John Ruberry highlights this quote from Bayh, in which he addresses the Democrats' plans for the confirmation of O'Connor's replacement, in the New Hampshire Union-Leader:

Later, in an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, Bayh said he does not support litmus tests for judicial appointees but would not rule out the possibility of filibustering President Bush’s nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court bench.

“We’re going to play our constitutional role, which is to advise and consent,” he said. “Most of us feel that for something as important as a Supreme Court vacancy, that it should require more than a mere 50-50 vote.”

Emphasis mine.  I am not a Constitutional scholar, but I have actually read it, which is more than I can say for Bayh and his colleagues for whom he purports to speak.  Despite Bayh's "feelings" about what should be required to confirm a new Supreme Court Justice, the Constitution requires a simple majority and no more.  Here is Article II, Sec. 2, Clause 2:

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

Nowhere in that clause, or anywhere else in the Constitution for that matter, does the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice require a super majority of the Senate to confirm.  The fact that the first part of the Clause requires a 2/3 majority of the Senate to make a treaty indicates that no such super majority is required to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, as no "2/3" language is included in the second part of the Clause.  (As an aside, I wish all legislators had even an elementary grasp on statutory construction; if they did, maybe the legislation they draft wouldn't be so incomprehensible.)

Bayh's view is vintage Left:  now that a Republican is in power, let's be as obstreperous, shrill, whiny and dishonest as possible.  Never mind doing what the law or the Constitution requires, and never mind treating others the way we'd have them treat us (and, indeed, never mind the way they've treated us in the past, for example in the confirmation of Justice Ginsberg).  Let's be honest; if the shoe were on the other foot, every Democrat in Washington, not to mention the press everywhere, would be screaming bloody murder.

"Obtuse" Defined

I haven't been reading the Washington Post lately, which I regret.  How many masterpieces, like this one by Dana Milbank, have I missed?  It's no surprise that it's written by Milbank, who is rabidly anti-Bush.  What is surprising is that it purports to celebrate the very thing that lost the Democrats the 2004 election:  they stand for nothing except opposing President Bush.

The Democrats have lost the past six congressional elections and two straight presidential races. So why is Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Chicago liberal, so happy?

She's so happy because, like the rest of her party, she's dangerously delusion.  Or, she's a retard.

At the annual meeting of the Campaign for America's Future, a celebration of all things liberal, Schakowsky took the stage yesterday to the sound of "We are Family" and then sang a line and danced.

Okay, the "retard" angle is seeming more likely.

"It's so bad here in Washington that it's actually good for us," she said to laughter from a thousand liberal activists in the Washington Hilton ballroom. "It's starting to feel like 1994 when the Republicans took over the House and the Senate, and now the tables are turning with a vengeance."

Indeed.  When you've sunk to your lowest, there's nowhere to go but up.  But about those tables turning . . . Congresswoman, what evidence can you show us that the tables are turning?

<crickets chirping>

Congresswoman?

<crickets chirping>

Typical Lefty blather:  long on propaganda, short on evidence, and wholly removed from reality.

That overstates things.

Shut up, really?

After all, the Senate Democratic leader says it will take a "miracle" to reclaim that chamber. But Democrats do have something in common with the Republicans of 1994: Unified in their opposition to the president, they have swallowed, for now, their intraparty differences. Even the ideologues are on their best behavior.

"We have to be credible on national security," host Robert L. Borosage declared at the start of the conference.

Shut up, really?  John Kerry, call your office!

Schakowsky complained that "all of our soldiers still don't have up-armored Humvees."

Holy effing shit.  Could somebody please send the Congresswoman the memo saying that this tired, roundly-debunked talking point is off the Lefty list?  Please?

The day's featured speaker, Los Angeles Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa, delivered a paean to moderation. "I'm unabashedly a progressive, but I'm not a knee-jerk, either," he said. "You don't go so far out in front of people that they don't feel that you're connected with them."

John Kerry, please call your office!

Introduced to the crowd as "the future of progressive politics in America,"

I thought that was Barak Obama's gig.  How did he get on the Democrats' shit list?

Villaraigosa acknowledged he may have been the most liberal speaker of the state Assembly in California's history, "but I'm also known as the most bipartisan speaker in a generation."

By who?  I'm known as "shithead" around my house, but that doesn't make it so.

In recent years, this gathering has been a chance for what Howard Dean calls the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" to assert itself. But this time, centrists and liberals have called a temporary truce because of their shared battle against President Bush.

Ah yes, all those "centrists."  Please.  He's talking about the center of the Left Wing, which is comprised of those only slightly more conservative than Ted Kennedy.

"Both of us have our guns trained on the other party," observed Roger Hickey, who runs the Campaign for America's Future with Borosage, in between interviews with liberal radio hosts.

Interesting choice of words, considering how most of his brethren feel about firearms.  He better be thankful party members are rallying around their shared hatreed for our President.

The cease-fire will end, of course, whenever the Democrats regain power.

Amazingly, the Democrats don't see that, if they remain on their present course of blind opposition to the President's policies without alternative ideas, it will be a cold day in Hell before they regain power.  I hope they never see it.

And that's really my point.  The Left is rallying around the very thing that has cost them their power, the very definition of "obtuse."  They're a party of hate, not a party of ideas, and it's pathetic.

In This Race, Your Time Doesn't Matter

For the Pakistani men and women who will try to run a co-ed road race this weekend, their finishing times won't matter; what will matter is to have done it:

RUNNERS in Pakistan are to defy a government ban on mixed-sex events by participating in a race in Lahore on Saturday.

Police wielding batons broke up a race involving more than 100 men and women last weekend and made 30 arrests, including Asma Jehangir, a women’s rights activist. A number of athletes were injured in clashes with police before the crowd was dispersed.

Activists, announcing plans to stage another race, spoke yesterday of their determination to beat the ban and urged women and men to take part.

The race is not only about women's rights in Pakistan, but also about obtaining the right to peaceably assemble:

The Lahore administration has banned gatherings by four or more people and has given warning that violators will be punished. Despite the ban, organisers have appealed to rights activists in other cities to join the protest.

One of the purposes of the race last week was to draw attention to growing violence against women. An HRCP statement said that by using force to prevent it, the authorities had demonstrated their anti-women bias and contempt for basic rights.

Naturally, Muslim fundamentalists want to stop such vulgar, nay, obscene, mixing of the sexes:

The venue for the second race has yet to be made public in an effort to frustrate an Islamic youth organisation that has threatened to attack the race, saying that Islam did not allow women’s participation alongside men.

UPDATE (5/23):  It happened, with no outbreaks of violence.  Pakistani police, to their credit, seem to have focused on keeping the runners safe from protesters, rather than forcing the runners to disperse.  Like in the marathon itself, even the smallest step is part of the larger goal.

Good IDea

Well, maybe not good, but certainly not nearly as bad as many bloggers, liberal, conservative and libertarian, would have you believe.  It seems that many reasonable people have gotten themselves in a big damned tizzy over the proposed REAL ID Act.  No less than the estimable Instapundit "remain[s] unconvinced that this massive federal power-grab will make us any safer."  I remain unconvinced that this is, indeed, a massive federal power-grab. 

Let's put aside the debate over how the statute has been put to the Senate (as a rider in a bill increasing military spending and tsunami relief), which I admit is somewhat dubious, and instead focus on the practical concerns that bloggers are raising.  I might be whistling past the graveyard, but I just don't see how the creation of national ID will sound the death knell of liberty.

The most-linked piece explaining folks' concerns is this one, by security expert Bruce Schneier.  Schneier's piece is long on big scary propaganda and short on actual, persuasive evidence.  Schneier's main concern is identity theft; the rest is window dressing.  He asks us to "[a]ssume that this information will be collected by bars and other businesses, and that it will be resold to companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom." 

Schneier is begging the question here.  Why can't I just as easily assume that the states or federal government will ban all non-governmental scanning of the Real ID?  And, like Volokh Conspirator Orin Kerr, I can't imagine most people will just mindlessly acquiesce to having all of their information stored in some bar's computer database.  If TGIFriday's won't sell me an Oreo sundae unless I give up my vital statistics, I'll go elsewhere.  I also don't think that the technology will be cheap enough for any but the huge retailers and restaurant chains to afford anyway.  Moreover, as this defense of the Act points out, the information that will be embedded in the Real ID is already out there, to be grabbed by anyone.

What Schneier and the other opponents of the ID don't want to admit is that the ID will substantially curb illegal immigration.  They also don't want to admit that the ID will likely inconvenience criminals, not the law-abiding.  But because most people won't get behind proposals like, "let's keep our borders easily crossed" and "let's keep law enforcement more difficult than it has to be," they spew rhetoric about how we'll be tracked by Big Brother and have to give up our most private information if whenever we want to buy a Slurpee and a copy of Hustler at the 7-Eleven (and by "we" I mean "absolutely not me").  If they can do better, I'll listen.

Congratulations, Vanessa Kerry

Unlike her old man, Vanessa Kerry can honestly say she ran the Boston Marathon:  Vanessa Kerry Tops Her Dad.  She ran quite well, too, considering Boston is a hilly course and it was her first marathon, finishing in 3:31:05.

Thanks to Marathon Pundit for the heads-up.

Unless You're John Kerry

According to April Boyd, his spokeswoman, Mac Tonight John Effin' Kerry had minor outpatient surgery to repair cartilege in his knee.  She said the damage was caused by "years of soccer, hockey and marathon running."  Emphasis mine (obviously; as Ace pointed out the other day, nobody talks in boldface).  [Link via Wizbang!]

When John Kerry lied about being Irish, I was offended as an Irishman, but I let it go.  When John Kerry's Purple Hearts were questioned, I didn't have much to say; never having served or otherwise done anything valiant in my life, I had no standing to be offended.  Then the stories about John Kerry's fictitious marathon prowess went around, but I let them go, too; the fact that the guy is a liar was secondary to his appalling stance on U.S. foreign policy in terms of his fitness to be President.  But he's still lying about having run a marathon, Boston no less, and I will be silent no longer.  I'm tired of this jagoff getting a free pass.

First, even if everything John Kerry said about having run the Boston Marathon is true -- and it's not -- the statement given by his spokeswoman is still a lie.  John Kerry claims to have run exactly one marathon, some 25+ years ago.  Which "years . . . of marathon running" is she referring to?  As someone in the Wizbang! comments said (stealing the first joke that popped into my head, by the way), perhaps she meant years of chasing wealthy heiresses.  That, I'd believe.  Usually, public figures are excoriated in the press for making grandiose, easily disprovable statements.  Unless you're John Kerry.

Second, I am disgusted, both as a runner and as a man, that someone could be petty and insecure enough to lie about completing a marathon.  Training for and completing a marathon requires perseverence.  It requires mental toughness.  It requires focus.  For many, it requires a complete lifestyle change.  It requires a willingness to lay yourself bare and the courage to make yourself suffer.  That kind of commitment does not come cheap.  Unless you're John Kerry.

He is spitting in the face of everyone who has put in the miles in the heat, in the rain, in the snow, before dawn, and after sunset.  Everyone who started out too fast, or didn't drink enough water, or couldn't quite make it to the port-o-potty.  Everyone who felt the piano land on their back at 20 miles, but kept going.  Everyone who lost toenails and had blisters bleed through their shoes.  Anyone who endures all of that deserves and demands your respect.  Unless you're John Kerry.

The most laughable claim is that Kerry claims can't remember his finishing time (probably because he has no idea what a decent time is, so he wouldn't want to guess:  if he guessed too fast, it would be obvious he's lying, but if he guessed too slow, the lie might not have had the effect he was looking for).  Everyone who runs a marathon remembers what their time was, especially for their first (mine was 2:58:43).  You can't help it; it's such a life-altering experience that the time is seared -- seared -- in your memory (kinda like Christmas in Cambodia, eh Senator?).  Unless you're John Kerry.

Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of this whole thing is that Kerry thinks he still has to worry about his public image.  One-and-done Presidential hopefuls typically have the grace and decency to slip quickly and quietly into relative obscurity, like Mike Dukakis or George McGovern.  Unless you're a self-important, vain, lying douchebag like John Kerry.