OK, score one for Miers

Fascinating that this warrants a full story by the AP.

So Miers once owned a gun. So what? The story says it was a .45 revolver, which sounds like a good piece of iron to me. Between that and the crap “reporting” about the content of personal notes on birthday cards makes me wonder what the AP’s smoking. Concentrate on the real matters of import, fella’s, assuming you can find any.

OK, Hugh, now you’re starting to get irrational

I’ve been watching the unfolding conflict in the center-right of the blogosphere over the Miers nomination and have commented a bit on it myself. I am struggling to lend any credence to Hugh Hewitt’s position on the matter – that the Miers nomination is wonderful and any of us who support Bush on any matter whatsoever should be supporting him now – mainly due to my respect for the man and his contributions to the blogosphere and political thought in general. Mr. Hewitt has, unfortunately, lost me big time with this small post:

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If those disappointed by the Miers nomination want to assure that a Michael Luttig or a Michael McConnell never get nominated much less through the Senate, they will pursue tactics that will diminish the Senate majority so that the constitutional option is off the table.

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…combined with this closing comment in another post:

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To put it bluntly: There is zero advantage and plenty of harm in defeating Miers, including the very obvious encouragement of the previously fever-swamp argument that Bush was a lame duck. It is also certain that a crucial slice of the evangelical base will perceive in the rejection of Miers a rejection of their status as equal partners in the governing coalition. Even if that slice is small –and it does not appear small to me at this point– it is strategic. Concern over the direction of SCOTUS –an issue second only to winning the GWOT– counsels support of Miers. Even those convinced it is a blunder ought to now turn their attention to the Iraq elections and away from Miers until the hearings are underway.

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Illogical. Condescending. Want this translated? Here you go: you idiots are making Bush look bad so you all need to just run along and let the grownups (ed.: like Hugh) handle this incredibily important decision and don’t bug us until it’s over.

Apologies to Hugh, but President Bush has had 2 chances to nominate Luttig or McConnell and hasn’t done it either time. What proof does he have that the President would do so given a 3rd chance? Or a 4th? Or an 8th? And may I also point out that we – all of us, including those of us who think this nomination wasn’t the right choice and, by the way, who don’t happen to be members of the knighted evangelicals – worked very hard to put a clear majority of Republicans in the Senate along with a Republican President in the White House so we could get judges both nominated and confirmed that would bring the judiciary back from the unelected legislature it’s become? That Senate majority has had nominations before it that would have done this and they, also, didn’t make the right choice. Is there proof that they will suddenly grow the spine we worked hard to allow them and confirm either of those 2 worthies even if they had them as nominees? To advance the theory that speaking out in opposition to this kind of decision is the cause for the bad nomination makes no sense whatsoever.

I would also ask Hugh Hewitt to advise us as to when we’re supposed to speak our minds on this matter, if not now? Harriet Miers won’t be coming up for election in 2008 or 2010. Once this decision is past, it will be impossible to undo and it is our right and our responsibility to both oversee and to speak up on decisions such as these. If Harriet Miers is a person who will judge the law of the land through the lenses of “racial diversity” by allowing universities to discriminate against whites or by thinking that political speech needs to be regulated, then she’s the wrong person for the job and defeating her grants a helluva lot more than zero advantage. My recommendation to someone who is arguing that opposition to this nominee smacks of elitism is for that person to avoid elitist commentary themselves.

The Miers nomination continuing to fracture conservatives.

I have already written about the Miers nomination and my one, overriding concern about her being confirmed to the Supreme Court. I am informed by a reader that there have been cases in recent history where “Justice” was the first title of judgeship worn by person. Reader Waco Kid tells us:

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There’ve been some pretty good Supreme Court Justices for whom Supreme Court Justice was a first job as a judge. Robert Jackson, William Rehnquist, just to name two. And John Roberts has been a judge for what, a year and a half? He promises to be an outstanding Chief Justice. It’s probably no coincidence that Jackson had Rehnquist for a clerk, and Rehnquist had Roberts. Each of the latter two seems to have learned from his mentor lessons that don’t require previous experience as a judge. But what does seem to matter is experience in considering the sort of issues which come before the Court — constitutional issues. Jackson, Rehnquist and Roberts all had lots of that experience before joining the Court. If Miers has had that sort of experience, then the conclusion (premature, of course) we could make now is that she does not have the intellectual discipline required of a Justice who would help move the Court back into its proper role as an interpreter of law, rather than its self-asserted role as policy-maker. Without knowing more, we can only surmise that the president’s actions in signing the McCain-Feingold Act, and in supporting racial affirmative action for the purpose of achieving racial diversity (rather than for the more limited purpose of providing a remedy for harm caused by identifiable racial discrimination) were taken with Miers thumbs up. If this is true, then we might as well let Ruth Bader Ginsburg pick one of her ACLU buddies for the Court.

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Excellent points, and they dovetail with my concern perfectly. Jackson and Rehnquist, as pointed out, might not have been judges before their nomination, but their close working relationship to the high court gave them plenty of experience in how things work there from the Justices’ perspectives. If Miers had such a previous mentoring relationship with someone on the Supreme Court, I haven’t heard about it. It would be a fairly significant datapoint, too, so I would think the Bush administration would be plastering that all over the walls. They aren’t. I conclude she doesn’t have such a relationship under her belt.

More to the point of my concern is the part about Miers’ role in supporting the “diversity” crap from the University of Michigan cases (see the Bollinger case, specifically). I don’t know if she was involved in advising the President to sign the accursed McCain-Feingold Act. If she was, and said she supported it, then she’s precisely the kind of person I’d want as far away from the Supreme Court as is humanly possible. The reader’s point, and my own, is that we don’t have the information to make the call and that is unacceptable in a nominee to the Supreme Court. That President Bush and the Miers supporters don’t know this is troubling. More troubling is their resort to name-calling when concerns like these are raised. (I’m an “elitist”? That’s being insensitive to elitists, trust me.)

Ed Morrisey of Captain’s Quarters had an editorial in the Washington Post yesterday that sums up the conflict in the realm of the Right pretty well. Michelle Malkin has her excellent-as-usual roundup of the situation over on her blog. She’s got a link up to an informal survey over on RightWingNews. The disappointment with this nomination isn’t the sole domain of, as Hugh Hewitt has said, the right-wing elitists, or as other bloggers have called them, “the right-wing fanatics.” It’s much more pervasive than that. President Bush better get ahead of this one and work on the fractures that he, himself, has caused in the party’s base. Otherwise, he’s going to leave a very broken road for those that follow.

Good fences make…

There is no arguing that the border of this country with Mexico is about as watertight as a screen door. In many, many places the border is marked with a sign and a metal rail, easily crossed. Where a serious fence is in place, however, the incidents of illegal border penetration are reduced to near zero. That’s why a new push is on to build such a fence along the entire border, from the Gulf to the Pacific Ocean.

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Now, a group of border activists are pushing for a new, bigger fence — more like a Berlin Wall — from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. “If we don’t stop the illegal immigration problem at the border, the problem will grow in far more dangerous ways … because illegal immigration from Mexico provides easy cover for terrorists,” says one national television ad sponsored by Weneedafence.com, a project of Let Freedom Ring, Inc. The TV spot focuses not on the politically charged issue of illegal Hispanic immigration but border crossers who may be a security threat, especially those caught who originated from suspected sponsors of state terrorism.

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The groups are quite up-front that this isn’t an anti-Latino thing or even an anti-immigration thing. It’s an anti-illegal-immigration thing and I think it’s about damn time. As I have said on many occasions, I have no issue with immigrants who come here openly and in compliance with our laws. Those that don’t, I do have a problem with and it’s entirely reasonable to put up barriers to stop the practice. The story mentions Hispanic rights groups making the comment that good neighbors build bridges, not fences. I believe they build both and such good neighbors actually use the bridges they build. They don’t sneak under them and then claim that their neighbor’s being a jerk when said neighbor complains.

SpaceshipOne joins aviation titans at Smithsonian

Burt Rutan’s SpaceshipOne has been donated to the Smithsonian Museum’s Air & Space collection and now hangs beside the Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and Yeager’s Bell X-1, the “Glamorous Glennis.”

SpaceShipOne’s designer, Burt Rutan, and its financier, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, were on hand as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum took ownership of the 28-foot star-spangled spacecraft.

A year ago, Rutan and Allen captured the $10 million Ansari X Prize when SpaceShipOne dashed to the edge of space twice. The prize was aimed at encouraging space tourism through the development of low-cost private spacecraft.

Rutan told several hundred visitors in the building’s giant lobby that he was pleased the Smithsonian so quickly recognized the importance of SpaceShipOne.

“I knew that the significance would be known and understood by everyone in 10 years,” said Rutan, 62. “I’m extremely pleased to see it here this early.”

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This is definitely as it should be. SpaceshipOne is a marvel of engineering and a proof to the concept that the state-run That’s-The-Way-We’ve-Always-Done-It&trade path to space ain’t the only game in town. NASA’s people are the geniuses everyone thinks they are, but Rutan is, too, and NASA needed a little shaking up. If we could just get NASA applying their mass to the methods pioneered by Rutan… well, it’d be a wonder to behold, let’s just say that.

Congrats to SpaceshipOne and Burt Rutan, again!