How 'Interesting'

So this is weird...

Check out page A12 of the Times Union today.

Skin cancer 'vaccine' sees progress

Huh. That struck me as a bit odd.

So I dug through my archives.

Interesting.

"Cancer vaccine passes the test"

"Merck suspends lobbying for vaccine"

Etc.

All those stories about Gardisil portrayed it as a "cervical cancer vaccine", despite the fact that it is not a cancer vaccine, it's supposed to prevent the virus that causes many cases of cervical cancer. Yet the paper never described it as a 'vaccine'.

Odd, now this "novel treatment...called a cancer vaccine, even though it treats disease rather than prevents it" rates a pair of 's around 'vaccine'.

The story itself drops the 's, but just seeing a more accurate headline is interesting.

Wonder why the change in heart at the AP.

editoriaLIES

Gazette, May 24, 2009:

Since assuming the responsibilities of commander in chief, he has moved closer to George W. Bush than to the American Civil Liberties Union, even changing his mind in two cases (he now says he won’t release photos of abused detainees and will continue to use military commssions). That is something Bush seldom did...

Bush seldom said he would do the exact wrong thing and then do the right thing, instead? Instead he just did the right thing the first time? Is this supposed to be criticism? ;)

Cheney’s speech Thursday, which included an unapologetic defense of torture

And there's your lie. Insert typical 'entitled to your opinions, not your own facts' line here. Cheney, of course, did no such thing in his speech. That's like watching someone make a grilled cheese, which you have arbitrarily call a steak, and then saying he just prepared a steak. Untrue.

==

Gazette again, the 25th:

Indeed, smaller cars (and higher gas prices) are the norm in most parts of the world. The nice thing is that when most Americans start driving them, the impact on global oil consumption might even make gas prices fall.

Now do you understand why editorialists continually espouse ridiculous ideas that fly fully in the face of economic reality and why they pine for socialism, thinking that works as well? Yes, when something drops in demand in the short term, the price may drop. But when something trends downward, what happens? I could wander off into a full description, but let's just keep it simple and blunt - when demand drops long-term for oil the oil producers do not lower prices significantly, they cut production to inflate prices. That is what will happen.

Roundup Of Randomness

Charles Krauthammer:

The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an "enormous failure." Obama suspended them upon his swearing in. Now they're back...

Observers of all political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government. Victor Davis Hanson (National Review) offers a partial list: "The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e. slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e. the surge) -- and now Guantanamo."

Jack Goldsmith (The New Republic) adds: rendition -- turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets -- claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus -- to detainees in Afghanistan's Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo...

The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys, brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established.

That's happening before our eyes. The Bush policies in the war on terror won't have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.

--

Maybe we could put the Gitmo terrorists in the Utah nuclear waste dump that Obama refuses to use.

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Every letter or editorial I read from liberals demanding that Cheney shut up brings a frothing algore to my mind as David Limbaugh reminds us:

It must have slipped their minds that radical environmentalism's high priest, former Democratic Vice President Al Gore, has gallivanted the world over, maliciously excoriating the Bush administration. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there was ever the slightest complaint from the Democratic decorum police.

Does this ring a bell? "He betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place."

How convenient, also, for Democrats to overlook that Cheney didn't start any of this. He isn't going about the country leveling unprovoked attacks against the administration. He is responding to Democratic attacks and thuggish threats to criminalize Bush administration policies.

--

If It's a Smart Car, Why Does It Look So Stupid?:

Meet the only car that ought to come with a mandatory Mensa membership – the so-called Smart Car. It’s already the car of the present for micro Europeans, but if environmentalists have their way, it might be the kind of car that will be your future. There’s really only one problem – even this dorky motor scooter of a car doesn’t meet Barack Obama’s new mileage standards...

That’s not an easy standard. Only two – the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid – meet that standard in 2009. In other words, the Smart Car, which gets 36 mpg, falls 3 mpg short of the goal. Not so smart after all...

American car companies will be forced to cut size, cut luxuries and make all-around worse cars to meet these draconian mandates.

The only reason Obama can do this backed by smiling auto execs is because, thanks to the bailouts, he’s now their unofficial boss. We now have, in the words of a friend of mine, “Twelve lawyers and a community organizer deciding what cars we get to drive.”

--
John Hawkins with a few hits and misses:

Liberals believe that...

1) ...it's impossible to come to any sort of reasonable compromise with conservatives on anything, but that we can fix our problems with nations like Iran and North Korea by just sitting down and talking things out...

17) ...when someone despises America, we need to ask, "What have we done to make him hate us?" -- but, when someone despises liberals for what they're doing to the country, they conclude that person must be ignorant, bigoted, or evil...

20) ...when they looked at information from our intelligence agencies and concluded that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, they were just mistaken -- but when George Bush looked at the same info and drew the same conclusion, he was lying.

--

Thomas Sowell randomly randoms:

Random thoughts on the passing scene:...

If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a "stimulus," then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.

Just days after Colin Powell informed us that the American people were willing to pay higher taxes in order to get government services-- and that Republicans therefore needed to stop their opposition to taxes-- California voters resoundingly defeated a bill to raise taxes in order to pay for the many government services in that liberal state...

One of the most important talents for success in politics is the ability to make utter nonsense sound not only plausible but inspiring. Barack Obama has that talent. We will be lucky if we escape the catastrophes into which other countries have been led by leaders with that same charismatic talent...

Much discussion of the interrogation of captured terrorists ignores the inescapable reality of trade-offs. The real question is: How many American lives are you prepared to sacrifice, in order to spare a terrorist from experiencing distress?

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Is the hidden purpose behind the credit card bill in reality quite obvious? More government dependence? Probably. By making it less likely for banks to loan you money (via a credit card that they will not offer to poor credit risks, as they now will not give a mortgage to poor credit risks (I'm not talking about insane credit risks)), that means people will have to turn elsewhere for assistance. Charities? Well, Obama and friends have been temporarily thwarted in their attempt to rein in charitable giving by taking away tax breaks for it, but expect to see a return. What does that leave after you've tapped out your normal sources? Uncle Obama and his big green printing press - feed in rich people and watch the dollars fly out...until there are no more rich people to feed the mill...

Driving While Latina

(This may not make complete sense...bear with me...)

You've all heard of it...DWB - Driving While Black. It's a charge that civil rights activists make when cops pull over a black guy driving a fancy car in a 'white' neighborhood at night for 'no reason other than because he is black'. Probably happens, for that matter, not so much I would hope nowadays as less neighborhoods are easily defined as 'white' (although it's easy enough to define minority neighborhoods by their predominant color of residency it seems). More simply it's defined as 'profiling', a reasonable law enforcement technique that, like most things in life, can be abused. Essentially, in a 'white' neighborhood in 1989, a cop that routinely is assigned to that area observes a young black man driving a fancy car. Maybe he rolls through a stop sign just a hair and now he gets pulled over. That's pretty much what we're talking about, cops spotting something out of place and assuming the worst, that the car is stolen.

Turn that around for a moment. What would minorities say if you asked them what they would assume about a well-dressed white guy in a nice car driving slowly through the hood? Dollars to donuts they're going to give one of two answers...either he's looking to score drugs or he's looking to pay to scratch some jungle fever itch. Am I right? Am I wrong? Would they instead just assume he's looking for a friend's house in an area with few house numbers? That he's just completely lost? Suuuuuuure. And cops assume the same thing, they don't set up hooker stings or monitored crack purchases in 'white suburban' neighborhoods. They follow patterns and try to meet expectations of what people expect to encounter. And why do they expect it? Experience. Reality. Common sense.

Which rolls me ever so slowly to Judge Sotomayor and her she's-young-enough-to-know-better comment: "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 who hasn't lived that life."

Why does this on-the-surface racist comment bother me, personally? Maybe not for the reason you might expect. Yeah, it's bad enough that someone young enough to know better is spouting such racist nonsense (although if it's true that she's a member of the extremely racist La Raza as is being reported, that is quite troublesome to me - certainly more troublesome than some alleged connection between Roberts and the Federalist Society). But I'd be willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt on that. No, here's my beef: I believe that justice should, indeed, be blind. If a law sucks then a judge should still obey it to the letter of the law until it is changed by lawmakers (or struck down). It is not the place of a judge to make that kind of call. Now, sentencing, that's another kettle of fish. Yeah, I can see how life experience could (and, yes, should) help a judge make determinations when allowed and appropriate. If the possible term is 5-10 years and circumstances mean that 5 is more appropriate, then by all means give them 5 years. But if it's a 10 year minimum, that doesn't mean you let them off with 5.

Here's the kicker.

Let's take Judge Sotomayor at her word. She's hearing some sort of case where her life experience makes her more "wise" in determining the outcome of the case than her white male colleague. Assuming each has followed the law I have no problem with her saying that she might have more insight than he in getting to the truth of the matter - maybe understanding the social pressures of the situation, the language nuances a bit more, etc. Again, as long as each follows the law.

Now, having said that, if I were a senator, I would sure as hell want to know if Judge Sotomayor would agree that, presented with a case about a 'white' country club where some older white guys may have been conducting insider trading, that a white male justice might, indeed, with the "richness of his experiences", might be able to come to a better "wise" conclusion than she?

I'll be honest, unless something more troubling emerges, as a Senator my vote could probably be won or lost based simply on her answer to that one question.

You see, if I can try to put it another way...Why is justice blind? The whole point of America (that's hyperbole, folks) is that everyone is created equal. That means no Kings who can get away with murder. It means Bill Clinton can be dragged before a judge for sexually harassing a woman. It means that every citizen (note the careful wording please) has an expectation that they will be treated equally under the law. Hell, we've written exactly that into the Constitution, the highest law in the land. Does it happen, well, no, of course not. But everyone has and deserves to have that expectation and should rail and cry against it if they don't get it. Everyone deserves to be treated equally. A rich white kid should be treated the same by a judge as a poor black kid if they each steal a car. It matters not if the rich white kid has been perpetually abused by his parents his entire life and picked on by everyone at his hoity-toity private school or that the poor black kid has two loving parents and an inexpensive, but safe and comfortable home to live in. They should not be treated differently just because of the color of their skin.

That's why justice wears a blindfold in so many representations. That's why this troubles me so much. What conceivable benefit can there be in saying you know better than someone else about someone else's situation? Does the Judge really believe that being poor and struggling to get where you are means that you can better interpret what lawmakers meant when they wrote a law? It flies in the face of what we are taught to believe about America - that everyone is created equal and that we all have the right to be treated the same. Now comes the Judge telling us that some of us can better decide what is 'right' because of their circumstances, not just in a particular case where it may be true, but as a generalization. If I may interject one final hackneyed phrase...come back and see us when you've walked a mile in all of our shoes, Judge, before you tell us that you have some mystically greater ability to perceive wisdom because of the wear on your shoe leather.

I'll leave you with Jonah Goldberg: "Clarence Thomas understands what it is like to be poor and black better than any justice who has ever sat on the bench. How's that working out for liberals?"

3 Headlines

Just saw these three headlines in a scroll and couldn't help but shake my head...


N. Korea could opt for devastating ground war

First Lady: White House garden blooming

President Obama stops at Five Guys for hamburger



Write your own punchline, I have to go throw up now.

Are Dems Sacrificing Murtha For Pelosi?

Can it be? Are the Democrats and their public relations wing (the press) throwing Murtha under the bus to distract from the fact that Democrat Speaker of the House has said that the CIA routinely lies to Congress and deliberately planted false evidence against her years ago in their records to contradict her on waterboarding terrorists?

Kinda looks that way to me. Also, you'll kindly note the Friday afternoon release, a well-established trick of the media and politicians:

A Pennsylvania defense contractor who got millions of dollars in congressional earmarks from Rep. John Murtha has been blocked from doing business with the Navy amid allegations of fraud.

Word of the suspension came during an annual trade show featuring defense contractors gathered in Johnstown, Pa., the heart of Murtha's congressional district. Seven of the world's largest defense contractors, who have been among the veteran Pennsylvania Democrat's biggest campaign contributors over the years, helped bankroll the "Showcase for Commerce."

During a brief news conference Friday at the Johnstown event, Murtha turned aside questions about the suspension of Kuchera Defense Systems Inc., a family-run business that has supported him with $60,000 to his campaign and to his political action committee since 2002.

Over the past two years, Murtha has secured $14.7 million in congressionally directed funds known as "earmarks" for Kuchera to perform work for the military, a tiny slice of Murtha's earmarks overall.

Asked about Kuchera's troubles, Murtha said, "What's that got to do with me? What do you think, I'm supposed to oversee these companies? That's not my job. That's the Defense Department's job."...

At the Pentagon, Navy spokesman Lt. Clay Doss said the Navy suspended Kuchera Defense Systems on April 23 for "alleged fraud, including multiple incidents of incorrect charges, defective pricing and ethical violations." Doss declined to elaborate.

Kuchera is one of two firms with longtime ties to Murtha that were raided by the FBI in recent months in a Justice Department criminal investigation of campaign fundraising involving defense contractors.

In the last two years alone, Murtha has directed $78 million in earmarks to clients of a Washington-area lobbying firm, PMA, the second business that the FBI recently raided. A former staffer on Murtha's subcommittee, Paul Magliocchetti, left Capitol Hill to start the lobbying firm in 1989, the same year Murtha became chairman of the subcommittee.

From 2005 through 2007, more than one out of every five dollars Murtha collected in campaign contributions came from PMA lobbyists or their clients — over a million dollars in all, according to Federal Election Commission records.

In a 15-month span ending March 31, employees of the seven defense contractors sponsoring the Johnstown show this week put over $200,000 into Murtha's campaign account. The seven are Lockheed Martin Corp., the Boeing Co., BAE Systems PLC, Northrop Grumman Corp., General Dynamics Corp., Raytheon Co. and DRS Technologies Inc...

Oh, you bet I'll have my ears pricked for coverage in our dailies and be comparing it to the attack dog reporting surrounding Ted Stevens and Duke Cunningham. You betcha!

Mainstream Media Is MIA

(update below - originally posted 5-27-09)

Time for another kick in the head from the reality mule for those that deny there is a blatant liberal media bias (c'mon, they routinely admit it) determined to forsake their 'sacred' duty to be a constitutionally empowered watchdog on government and instead cheerlead for the Teleprompted Won and do more to cover up for him than any plumbers did for Nixon.

This one's easy, a kick in the head as I said. First, the unions, which we all know supported Obama/Biden with all the weight of their members' money, clarified by remarks Biden made to them on March 5 at an AFL-CIO gathering:

You all brought me to the dance a long time ago, and it’s time we start dancing.

That pretty well sums up the attitude of Obama and Biden to the unions. The result?

That would be made possible by the automaker's new contract with the United Auto Workers union, details of which were revealed Tuesday. If ratified, the agreement would give the union a 17.5% stake in a restructured GM...

You'll note that the attempt by Obama to give unions nearly 1/5 of GM (reports later in the day suddenly find another 2.5% targeted for unions, making it fully 20%) as a reward for this contracts directly causing the failure of the company (non-union automakers have suffered, but not gone under in the current economy as the US companies joined at the hip with unions have) is actually a steep reduction. Obama tried to give the unions 39%, about two fifths of the company as their payback - which only fell through because the people that actually are entitled to payback, the bondholders, balked at such a ridiculous plan.

And, dovetailing nicely, I see this post from Kevin at Wizbang - click through for linky goodness:

The evidence presented so far, though far from complete, appears to show a correlation between owners who donated to GOP candidates and dealerships getting closed. As they say correlation is not causation, so it's too early to infer that the closings constitute some sort of political hit list...

Joey Smith, who appears to be the person doing all the primary research on the list dealers (sic) being closed, has noted one high profile partnership that not only isn't suffering any closings, but appears to getting it's (sic) six markets cleared of competitors.

The auto group, The RLJ-McLarty-Landers Automotive Partnership, is owned by Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), Mack McLarty, former Chief of Staff to President Clinton, and Steve J. Landers, a long-time auto dealer. While Johnson was an avid Hillary supporter, he's a long-time deep pocket for Democrats and McLarty campaigned for Obama.

Though nearly 25% (24.8%) of all dealerships are being closed, none of the RLJ dealerships are being closed, and in the five of the six markets RLJ serves (the sixth is still being analyzed) 11 of the 13 competing dealerships are being closed. That's nearly 85% (84.6%) of the competition eliminated.

Again, it's bloggers doing the work that the press doesn't want to do. And to think, liberals want to regulate and restrict the speech of bloggers, who are the ones actually acting as a check on government, and give new rights, specifically get out of jail free cards, to the press, who is doing nothing but covering up for the government.

Oh, and if you were wondering if I'm just making stuff up and portraying them in the worst possible light, well, let's just say "research". While some of the following hits are probably near misses, I think my search - using the following three terms "Cheney", "secret", and "energy" in the past 9 years will provide a fairly accurate count of the number of times the press tried to portray Cheney's "secret" meetings with energy companies on ways to improve the energy situation in America as suspect if not evil. Kindly recall that the government actually had to go to court over this and Cheney was vindicated in a court of law over his consultations.

NYT: 281 hits
Times Union: 80
Daily Gazette: 13 (removed 10 that showed up early that were random word hits)

281 hits from the NYT...31 per year, more than 2 1/2 every month on average for 9 straight years (there are still hits from this month showing up).

But Joe Biden tells the unions that it's time to pay them back in leaked comments from a union gathering and...nothing. In fact, while we're at, let's check...

"Biden", "dance", past 3 months:

NYT: 0
TU: 0
Gazette: 0
The Record, The Saratogian, NYT Magazine: 0

Watchdog? No. Lapdog.

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UPDATE

IBD presents the growing case against Obama re: Chrysler - it's only looking worse (in this case 'worse' is defined as increasingly dictatorial/fascist):

Earlier this month, Chrysler announced it was seeking permission from bankruptcy court to kill franchise agreements with 789 of its 3,181 dealers to save costs. Dealers, many of whom ran profitable businesses, told the media that the news was devastating.

Aside from the loss of a business, many of these franchisees may have something else in common: It looks like all the dealers who are losing their Chrysler franchises, with only a single exception found so far, have links to the Republican Party...

Has it also directed the company to end its contracts with dealers who dared give contributions to the Republican Party and its candidates? The mainstream media seem less than curious. But the new media haven't shied away from asking the question.

"Many of the closed dealers were also major donors to Republican candidates and political action committees, a review of campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission shows," Kenneth Timmerman wrote at NewsMax.com...

WorldNetDaily reviewed all 789 of the dealerships the company wants to close. It found that "owners contributed at least $450,000 to Republican presidential candidates and the GOP, while only $7,970 was donated to Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign and $2,200 was given to Sen. John Edwards' campaign. Obama received a combined total of only $450 in donations."...

WHO Abandons Millions Of Africans To Malaria Death. Again.

In a stunning piece of placing politics above the lives of poor africans, WHO has reversed itself on life-saving DDT, relegating a child "every 30 seconds" to death from malaria because DDT "might" have long term affects that no study so far has shown. Green Hell tears them a new one, read it all:

So the WHO wants to phase-out the “highly effective” DDT because it is “potentially” harmful. But what does “potentially” harmful mean and does it offset a-dead-child-every-30-seconds?

Next, the WHO says,

DDT and its residues build up in the food chain, and it is potentially harmful to wildlife and to humans, if not applied in accordance with WHO guidelines and recommendations.

So the WHO wants to phase-out DDT because some applicators don’t use it properly? Isn’t it worth ensuring that DDT is used properly (whatever that actually means) given that a child dies every 30 seconds from malaria?

Just Say NO

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Rahm Emanuel

-

President Barack Obama warned Thursday that if Congress doesn't deliver health care legislation by the end of the year the opportunity will be lost, a plea to political supporters to pressure lawmakers to act.

"If we don't get it done this year, we're not going to get it done," Obama told supporters by phone as he flew home on Air Force One from a West Coast fundraising trip.

-

As nearly every reputable economist is saying, this typical, rather ordinary recession is ending on schedule later this year with an apparent bottom already reached. No wonder they want to hurry before it is blatantly true even to the sheep that elected these fascists.

First Actually Troubling Thing On Sotomayor

This is actually the first thing that's turned up that actually troubles me, not just could potentially be troubling (well, the part about how hispanic women are more 'wise' than white guys is a little disturbing, too). She signed off on an opinion that says the 2nd amendment doesn't apply to the states, only the federal government. This is a rather odd take given the pretty clear statements in Heller that even the 9th Circuit didn't miss:

In Maloney v. Cuomo, Sotomayor signed an opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that said the Second Amendment does not protect individuals from having their right to keep and bear arms restricted by state governments.

The opinion said that the Second Amendment only restricted the federal government from infringing on an individual's right to keep and bear arms. As justification for this position, the opinion cited the 1886 Supreme Court case of Presser v. Illinois.

“It is settled law, however, that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right,” said the opinion. Quoting Presser, the court said, “it is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state.”...

The meaning of the Second Amendment has rarely been addressed by the Supreme Court. But in the 2008 case of Heller v. District of Columbia, the high court said that the right to keep and bear arms was a natural right of all Americans and that the Second Amendment guaranteed that right to everyone.

The Second Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled, “guarantee(s) the right of the individual to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed.’”

“There seems to us no doubt,” the Supreme Court said, “that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

Sotomayor, however, said that even though the Heller decision held that the right to keep and bear arms was a natural right--and therefore could not be justly denied to a law-abiding citizen by any government, federal, state or local--the Second Circuit was still bound by the 1886 case, because Heller only dealt indirectly with the issue before her court...

The Second Amendment is the only part of the Bill of Rights that the Supreme Court has not specifically extended to the states through a process known as incorporation, which involves interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment to read that no state can deprive its citizens of federally guaranteed rights.

The Fourteenth Amendment reads, in part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States … nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Sotomayor’s decision rejected the Fourteenth Amendment’s incorporation doctrine as far as Second Amendment was concerned, saying any legislation that could provide a “conceivable” reason would be upheld by her court.

“We will uphold legislation if we can identify some reasonably conceived state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the legislative action. Legislative acts that do not interfere with fundamental rights … carry with them a strong presumption of constitutionality,” the appeals court concluded. “The Fourteenth Amendment,” she wrote, “provides no relief.”

Sotomayor’s ruling ran to the left of even the reliably liberal San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in the April 2009 case Nordyke v. King that the Second Amendment did, in fact, apply to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, heavily citing the Supreme Court in Heller...

The White House is having a rather difficult time explaining away her seemingly racist statement, also, refusing to admit that if a white guy had said "My experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman." he'd be getting a great big 'don't let the door hit you on the way out'. As this statement isn't in an opinion or directly related to a ruling, it's still just a 'what if' sort of thing, though, although it does seem to show that her statue of justice probably isn't outfitted with a blindfold.

Among the controversies surrounding Sotomayor is a comment she made during a speech at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law in October 2001.

In that speech, she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Fielding questions for about 10 minutes on Sotomayor’s comment, Gibbs was at times dismissive.

“I think we can all move past YouTube snippets and half-sentences and actually look at her honest-to-God record,” he said at one point during the questioning. (Imagine if a single Democrat had said this about Sarah Palin...oh, the swooning!)

Throughout the press conference, Gibbs continued to tell reporters to look at her record while being pressed to explain the comment. Gibbs finally said, “She has lived a different life than some people have based on her upbringing.”

Gibbs was first asked to respond to a blog-posting by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who wrote, “Imagine a judicial nominee said, ‘My experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.’ Wouldn't they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism. A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

Gibbs responded, “I think anyone involved in this debate should probably be exceedingly careful with the way they decide to describe different aspects of this...

The presidential spokesman continued that the statement must be viewed in context, and said reporters have not read the entire speech.

“Americans should read all of what she talked about, read a couple of sentences past that,” Gibbs said.

Several reporters immediately said they had done so. Gibbs expressed skepticism toward at least one reporter.

In that section of the speech, Sotomayor was speaking specifically about ethnicity. She also was speaking at a symposium entitled, “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.”

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging,” she said, leading up to the more famous statement.

“Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases,” said Sotomayor. “I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle.

“I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise,” she added.

At that point, Sotomayor said: “Second, 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 who hasn't lived that life.”

She followed that up saying, “Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society.

“Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group,” Sotomayor said.

“Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown,” she added.

Life Can Be Funny

You know, it's sort of funny - not funny 'ha ha' but, indeed, funny 'uh oh'.

Bush campaigned in 2000 on focusing on domestic issues, not trying to meddle in the world as Clinton had done. Of course he ended up focusing mightily on foreign affairs - repairing useless relations with newly-elected, conservative leaders in Europe, expanding ties with Eastern Europe, freeing 50,000,000 people living under crushing, terrorist-supporting, murderous regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, taking the fight to world-wide terror organization, etc. While not ignoring the domestic situation (tax cuts that sparked historic economic growth and a historic period of job growth as well as notably low unemployment), foreign affairs certainly dominated the presidency of Bush.

Obama campaigned on 'fixing' our relations with the world (by that meaning the world's vocal minority of liberals that keep losing elections). However, to date, he's been practically ignoring the rest of the world as multiple terrorist, murderous regimes race for nuclear proliferation and threaten our allies with nuclear destruction. Instead he is focused on domestic issues like taking over the domestic auto companies and banks.

Funny how life gets in the way of campaign plans, isn't it?

Question

The socialists in the government have already trampled one amendment - becoming intermingled with the press by offering them special deals, thereby effectively destroying any 'independent' status of the press, at least in those newspaper markets affected. There can be no guarantee that from now forward those papers are anything better than Pravda, delivering the government's line.

What will happen to other amendments...the 10th for instance, should the federal government "bail out" California or another failing socialist utopia of a state (like NY)?

Calling The Shot

Sotomayor will probably be confirmed unanimously by the Senate, likely with a few abstentions or absentees. Maybe one or two dissents. Unlike Democrats, who recently began voting against nominees based on litmus tests, as admitted by Chuckie Schumer, and not qualifications like ABA stamps of approval, I suspect the GOP will continue to vote for nominees that are qualified, as they voted for the ultra-liberal but qualified Ginsburg. Not so long ago Democrats also held to this standard, voting overwhelmingly for Scalia who was very qualified. Lately, though, Democrats have abandoned this Constitutional duty as they ignore too much of the Constitution, voting against the highly qualified Roberts and Alito because they don't like them.

I fully suspect that the GOP will continue to vote for qualified individuals and, though she is quite liberal with some troubling hints of a judicial activism streak and quite troubling views on property rights, she is definitely 'qualified' with a long and deep resume. The GOP will likely vote in her favor, affirming that the Constitution grants the President the right to choose Supreme Court justices, with the Senate granted only the right to approve if they find the candidate qualified. Unlike the Democrats who had the unmitigated gall to demand that Bush "consult" with them before nominating judges, I doubt we will see any such nonsense from the GOP at this point (who cannot stop a confirmation if it gets out of committee, but who can certainly vote their displeasure and deny unity).

Something in the 95-1 range, maybe?

Ha!

Nancy Pelosi should admit that she knew about waterboarding but has had a change of heart. It takes a big person to change his/her mind after realizing he or she was wrong.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

oh dear oh dear oh dear...now THAT is some SERIOUS denial!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Arguing Against Sotomayor

If you want the arguments against Sotomayor in a nutshell - IBD obliges:

...But Hispanic ethnicity didn't stop Senate Democrats, then in the minority, from spending 28 months successfully blocking Honduran-born Miguel Estrada's 2001 nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by President Bush.

Estrada's life story was inspiring too. Knowing little English, he immigrated to America at 17 to join his mother after his parents' divorce. A few years later, he was graduating with honors from both Columbia and Harvard Law.

A November 2001 internal memo from the staff of current Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., explained that Estrada was "dangerous" owing to his "minimal paper trail, he is Latino and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment."

Consider the blatantly racist analysis — "he is Latino." In other words, conservative plus nonwhite equals "dangerous." It was exactly that kind of thinking that led Senate Democrats to turn the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings into an X-rated circus in 1991.

By contrast, a spirited effort against Judge Sotomayor would be in spite of her being Hispanic, not because of it, as was the case with the Democrats' assault on Estrada — the first-ever filibuster of a Court of Appeals nominee.

The National Journal's Stuart Taylor hit the nail on the head over the weekend in an article asking what the reaction would have been had then-Judge Samuel Alito been found to have said the reverse of Sotomayor's claim of Latina judgmental superiority: "I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn't lived that life."

Obviously, he would have been condemned as a white supremacist.

Yet speaking at Berkeley's Law School in 2001, Sotomayor asserted that "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would \[as judge\] more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Moreover, Judge Sotomayor is clearly a liberal judicial activist. Speaking to Duke Law School in 2005, she contended that "the Court of Appeals is where policy is made."

She then added jovially that "I know this is on tape and I should never say that because 'we don't make law,' " as she made quotation marks with her hands. "I'm not promoting it and I'm not advocating it. You know . . . ," she added with a grin as the audience laughed.

She confirmed that activism last year in ruling against New Haven firemen victimized by reverse discrimination. Sotomayor was accused by a fellow 2nd District judge — Clinton appointee Jose Cabranes — of issuing a one-paragraph "opinion that lacks a clear statement of either the claims raised by the plaintiffs or the issues on appeal" plus "no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case."

The Supreme Court is widely expected to reverse her weak decision next month...

She could easily end up being the single most liberal justice ever to have sat on the nation's top court — forever seeking opportunities to apply "the richness of her experiences" to "make law," rather than judge...

There are a lot of what-ifs involved...and I don't think that's enough reason to override a president's authority to nominate. However, there is enough here to justify deliberate, directed questioning to find out more during hearings.

Careful Deliberation?

Slightly, but only slightly disturbing:

"I have absolutely no idea about the science of global warming. But if the science is right, we have relegated ourselves to killing the world in the foreseeable future. Not in centuries to come but in the very near future."

That's from something Judge Sotomayor said in a hearing for Connecticut v. American Electric Power Company Inc. If wishes were fishes...

That's a somewhat troubling thing to say on several levels. First, clearly for her "the science" is all on the algore side, which, of course, is being eroded day by day as the 'deniers' continue to grow and discredit the modelers and their failed models. Second, if you have "absolutely no idea" about something, it seems like a court hearing is the wrong time to weigh in on them in a one-sided fashion.

Still, this is fairly minor and there's no indication that her ignorance of the subject affected her consideration of the merits of the case, which would be rather refreshing from the left of the court. However, given the Won's stated aims for a justice, it seems that she wouldn't fit his desired mold if that is truly how she would operate, that is, with a blindfold.

Some History More Historic

Wow, talk about "historic" overload on the nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court...and she's not even the first hispanic, despite the hyperbolic cries of Obama's lapdogs in the press.

Did Bush receive such acclaim? Let's see:

Bush makes Colin Powell the first black Secretary of State: "Bush", "Powell", "historic" in the past 9 years: You're not going to believe this...I can't believe it. ZERO hits in the TU and Gazette. ZERO! Let's mix it up...Bush, Powell, and first black in the past 9 years.

12-17-00 NYT: "Now General Powell will get the chance to channel some of that star power to a Bush presidency. As the nominee for secretary of state -- the first black who will hold the post -- he brings 35 years of military service with him, including four years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff both for the Bush and the Clinton administrations." snoooore

Bush makes Condi Rice the first black female Secretary of State:

1-25-05 - Cynthia Tucker column in TU mentions it as a historic first in a piece attacking Bush

Rather pathetically, the Times actually seems to drag down Condi on 12-18-00: At 46, she will not be the youngest national security adviser in American history. McGeorge Bundy was only 41 when he became national security adviser to President John F. Kennedy; Henry A. Kissinger in the Nixon administration and Richard V. Allen in the Reagan administration were only 45. Nor is she the first black national security adviser. Retired Gen. Colin L. Powell , the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Mr. Bush 's choice for secretary of state, served as national security adviser in the final year of the Reagan administration. But Ms. Rice will be the first woman to hold the job. wow, hey, great

This rather weak comment from the Times 12-23-00: "Gen. Colin L. Powell , if confirmed, will be the first black secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice's selection as national security adviser is also pioneering."

there you go...pretty pathetic, eh?

Winners And Losers

I'd like to excerpt merely two short passages from the paired, deliberately or not, speeches of President Teleprompter and ex-Vice President Cheney. You can read the rest at the following links.

Teleprompted Won:

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. And I believe that those decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that — too often — our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight, and all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.

Yet, who was it that, on his second day in office held a dog and pony show to declare the closing of Gitmo - despite not having any clue what he was going to do with the terrorists housed there - uncertainty that lingers today, months later? Who was "hasty"?

Cheney:

What is equally certain is this: The broad-based strategy set in motion by President Bush obviously had nothing to do with causing the events of 9/11. But the serious way we dealt with terrorists from then on, and all the intelligence we gathered in that time, had everything to do with preventing another 9/11 on our watch.

Flip To The Flop, To The Flippy...

And they said Kerry was a flip-flopper!

For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush's military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an "enormous failure" and a "legal black hole." His campaign claimed last summer that "court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists." Upon entering office, he found out they aren't.

He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate "consequences" for "a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones" on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama agreed on April 23 to American Civil Liberties Union demands to release investigative photos of detainee abuse. Now's he reversed himself. Pentagon officials apparently convinced him that releasing the photos would increase the risk to U.S. troops and civilian personnel.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bush's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year, facing increasing violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a "quagmire" and ordered more troops to that country. He isn't calling it a "surge" but that's what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama promised to end the Iraq war by withdrawing all troops by March 2009. As president, he set a slower pace of drawdown. He has also said he will leave as many as 50,000 Americans troops there...

Mr. Obama campaigned on "responsible fiscal policies," arguing in a speech on the Senate floor in 2006 that the "rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy." In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he pledged to "go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work." Even now, he says he'll "cut the deficit . . . by half by the end of his first term in office" and is "rooting out waste and abuse" in the budget.

However, Mr. Obama's fiscally conservative words are betrayed by his liberal actions. He offers an orgy of spending and a bacchanal of debt. His budget plans a 25% increase in the federal government's share of the GDP, a doubling of the national debt in five years, and a near tripling of it in 10 years.

On health care, Mr. Obama's election ads decried "government-run health care" as "extreme," saying it would lead to "higher costs." Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a de facto government-run health-care system. Even the Washington Post questions it, saying, "It is difficult to imagine . . . benefits from a government-run system."...

In both cases, though, we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called "the projection of appealing images." All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image "becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself." Such an approach can work in a campaign, as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected, as he is finding out...

Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.

-Karl Rove

SCOTUS, Etc

Lots going on today with the Supreme Court, eh? We'll certainly see the return of a count tomorrow - the Sotomayor Watch! Whoohoo! I'll put on my tinfoil future predicting hat and declare that the liberal Sotomayor will be described as a "moderate". Actually, who needs the hat - I've got piles of evidence on which to base this eminently defensible hypothesis.

But that's not all that's going on. Three decisions came out today. You'll likely need a more legal-ly blog than mine to really grasp them, but for the layman:

Haywood v. Drown is a local case, NY local that is. The liberals essentially dealt a further blow to States' rights, in this case striking down the explicit right of states to set up their own courts, by declaring that NY courts must deal with a federal lawsuit. At least that's how it looks to me. Thomas writes a novel of a dissent compared to the brief majority opinion from Stevens.

Montejo v. Louisiana is a bit of an odd duck - at least to me. The conservatives, joined by Kennedy, issue an opinion written by Scalia that agrees with the result from the LA Supreme Court, that a guy's written confession written after he waived his miranda right to an attorney, but also after being appointed one by a court where he made no effort to accept or deny one, but before he actually met with his attorney, was able to be used against him in court. The LA court decided it based on a precedent that SCOTUS has now stricken down as unnecessary and sent the case back to LA in case the defendant wants to make a different argument to suppress the evidence. Sort of weird if you ask me.

Finally, Abuelhawa v. US is a unanimous decision. Basically the guy called a drug dealer to buy cocaine, which is not a felony (selling it is). But he was charged and convicted of felonies of using the phone to make it easier for the drug dealer to commit the felony of selling cocaine. Follow that? Looks like a no-brainer to me and the court, too. The slip opinion's only 10 pages long.

Oh, and in California, the State's Supreme Court overwhelmingly (6-1) decided that the court was not, in this case, a supervoter, able to strike down a properly-enacted vote banning the de-definition of marriage in CA with the votes of 4 people overruling millions. How's that 'momentum' going, Rex?

In The News

Gazette only edition for this morning...haven't read the TU, yet. But what a bunch of stuff to mention...

How about that story where the NY Times is now saying they had the dope on Watergate but never put it together to break the story? Great. Now if they'll just be straight with America on the fact that they deliberately killed (not 'missed the boat on') a story linking Obama's campaign to the corrupt ACORN organization via illegal campaign coordination we can start to take them seriously again...maybe.

Then there was this very interestingly worded piece from the AP that showed up:

President Barack Obama avoided a racial controversy on his first Memorial Day in office by sending wreaths to separate memorials for Confederate soldiers and for blacks who fought against them during the Civil War.

"(A)voided a racial controversy? Interesting. How was it interpreted when Bush did this? As "avoiding racial controversy"?

Yeah, right. 1-22-03, Maureen Dowd column (in the NYT and TU):

For all the talk about how Republicans were morally re-educated by the Trent Lott fiasco, Mr. Bush is still pandering to an unspoken racial elitism.

He resubmitted the nomination of a federal judge with a soft spot for cross-burners. And, as Time notes this week, he quietly reinstituted the practice -- which lapsed under his father in 1990 -- of sending a floral wreath on Memorial Day from the White House to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, where those nostalgic for the Old South celebrate Jefferson Davis. Why on earth would the president of the U.S. in the year 2003 take the trouble to do that?

Gee, Maureen...why would a partially black president in 2009 do that? Would it be to "avoid racial controversy"? Incidentally, in a following column she had to issue a correction because there was no "quiet reinstatement", the practice was never discontinued. M'eh, facts shmacts, right, Mo? I know we're all breathlessly awaiting her next piece which will decry the actions of the current president.

You can laugh now.

There's more in this article to 'laugh' at, though.

Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, a customary presidential undertaking on Memorial Day. He also had one sent to the Confederate Memorial there, a traditional practice but not well publicized. Obama also took the unprecedented step of sending a wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington's historically black U Street neighborhood.

That memorial — to the 200,000 blacks who fought for the North during the Civil War — had been mentioned as a compromise in recent days...

Among those who signed petition is 1960s radical William Ayers. The University of Chicago education professor helped found the radical group the Weather Underground that carried out bombings at the Pentagon and the Capitol. Republicans tried to link Obama and Ayers during the presidential campaign because they lived in the same neighborhood and served on a charity board together.

The Gazette piece ends here. This is so pathetically political cover for their savior. "(T)ried to link"? Um, Obama did that. "(L)ived in the same neighborhood and served on a charity board together"? You've got to be kidding? "(R)adical"? Is that what we call people that bomb police stations, kill cops, and try to blow up our own troops attending a dance with their girlfriends and wives? That's not what I would call someone that did that, unrepentently. And how about the "launched his political career in Ayers' living room" part? And the other board they served on where he was handpicked? Lived in the same neighborhood my fanny. That's a load of rotten carp. The election is over and they're still lying about this.

Here's something the Gazette cut out:

Later in the day, the president headed to Fort Belvoir, Va., to play golf.

I guess Bush's refusal to keep playing golf while our troops are fighting terrorists is another policy that the Teleprompted Won has reversed. Of course Bush was mocked for saying he couldn't continue to play golf while receiving reports of people being killed fighting and resisting terrorists. No mockery of the Won for getting back into the swing of it, you might say.

Finally, there was this sort of silly story on the front page about a surge in suvivalist interest. Again, the link I've provided is the full story, the Gazette hacks off the end. Nevertheless, in neither story will you find any reference to Obama and the fact that some of the recent surge (I might even be inclined to think a majority) could be attributed to a fear of what he's going to do to the economy. This angle isn't even pursued. Why? Because it would probably never even occur to a liberal writer or editor. To them this all seems silly and evidence of a cracked skull...after all, everything is always wonderful under communists and fascists.

Right?

Get Sick Again? Hospital Won't Want You

Well, this is certainly not rationing of health care:

In a cost-saving measure tied to the proposed expansion of health care, the Obama administration is seeking to reduce hospital readmission rates by rewarding or penalizing hospitals through Medicare payments...

Almost one-in-five hospitalizations of Medicare beneficiaries results from readmissions of patients who were discharged from the hospital in the last 30 days, according to the White House...

“To improve this situation, hospitals will receive bundled payments that cover not just hospitalization, but care for 30 days after the hospitalization. Hospitals with high rates of readmission will be paid less [through Medicare] if patients are readmitted to the hospital within the same 30-day period.”

Anyone have an elderly relative? Anyone know how often they get sent to the hospital from nursing homes or assisted living communities? Thought so. Well, if they're on government health care (you know, the one that liberals that write to newspapers say is the only way to fix health care) the hospital is going to get even less than they do now to treat them. Boy, if that isn't a recipe for world-class medical care, I don't know what is! I guess if you can't save money by making wounded vets pay for their own service injuries, then you stop paying hospitals to take care of the poor and elderly. Of course they could just keep them there for a while longer, reaping fat payments for that. Again, have you an elderly relative? Ever been told that the best thing for them is to get them out of the hospital where they tend to invariably pick up something nasty that could kill them? Now I'm not saying Obama wants to kill off the expensive-to-care-for elderly or nuttin', but he does want to pay hospitals more to keep them hanging around for an extra month. Where, exactly, is the incentive to get them out of the virus swimming pools of hospitals where their care costs a fortune and into other care facilities? Hmmm???

You know, I do believe it's time for another chorus of "We told you so!"

Might As Well Started Getting Outraged

Walter Williams:

President Obama's articulated criteria for his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court is: "We need somebody who's got the heart to recognize -- the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

What is the role of a U.S. Supreme Court justice? A reasonable start for an answer is the recognition that our Constitution represents the rules of the game. A Supreme Court justice has one job and one job only namely; he is a referee. There is nothing complicated about this. A referee's job, whether he is a football referee or a Supreme Court justice, is to know the rules of the game and make sure that they are evenly applied without bias. Do we want referees to allow empathy to influence their decisions? Let's look at it using this year's Super Bowl as an example.

The Pittsburgh Steelers have won six Super Bowl titles, seven AFC championships and hosted 10 conference games. No other AFC or NFC team can match this record. By contrast, the Arizona Cardinals' last championship victory was in 1947 when they were based in Chicago. In anyone's book, this is a gross disparity. Should the referees have the empathy to understand what it's like to be a perennial loser and what would you think of a referee whose decisions were guided by his empathy? Suppose a referee, in the name of compensatory justice, stringently applied pass interference or roughing the passer violations against the Steelers and less stringently against the Cardinals. Or, would you support a referee who refused to make offensive pass interference calls because he thought it was a silly rule? You'd probably remind him that the league makes the rules, not referees...

The relationship between Supreme Court justices and the U.S. Constitution should be identical to that of referees and football rules. The status of a person appearing before the court should have absolutely nothing to do with the rendering of decisions. That's why Lady Justice, often appearing on court buildings, is shown wearing a blindfold. It is to indicate that justice should be meted out impartially, regardless of identity, power or weakness. Also, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Men should know the rules by which the game is played. Doubt as to the value of some of those rules is no sufficient reason why they should not be followed by the courts." The legislative branch makes the rules, not judges...

NY Times Admits Killing Obama/ACORN Story Last Fall

TimesWatch seems to sum this whole sordid affair out pretty well. If you're unfamiliar (which you probably are if you rely on mainstream media for your news), what happened was that there was a NY Times reporter that was getting some great dirt from someone with inside info on ACORN, you know, the ones registering Mighty Mouse to vote for Obama in exchange from some crack. They had run some great pieces exposing the corrupt ACORN underbelly. Then there appeared the roots of a story about illegal campaign collusion between the Obama campaign and ACORN right before the election. They couldn't get anyone on the record so they kept a lid on the story (you'll recall how well they kept a lid on bogus, ludicrous stories about McCain having an affair, right?). They claimed that without someone 'on the record' they wouldn't run it. Well, guess what? They got someone to agree to go on record. Right then that ACORN insider suddenly became unreliable and the story was killed. In defending the paper, their ombudsman admits that the New York Times did, indeed, kill a story with on-the-record info from a reliable source used on numerous other stories that would have showed, just before the election, that the Obama campaign was illegally conspiring with fraudster voter registration group ACORN, a group that Obama had previously lied about working for (he did, said he didn't).

And they wonder why their paper is dying? Follow the link for much more:

A former ACORN employee, Anita Moncrief, told Times reporter Stephanie Strom that she had evidence of "constant contact" between ACORN's Project Vote and the Obama campaign -- that the campaign had provided a list of donors it could use to solicit contributions. But although Strom had used Moncrief as a source in previous stories about ACORN, the Times pulled Strom from this story. Why?

On Sunday, the paper's Public Editor Clark Hoyt tackled the accusations against the Times, defending his paper vociferously against what he called misleading attacks by Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly was not persuaded -- in fact, in his Monday night Talking Points segment, he declared war on the Times.

But even the pro-NYT Hoyt confirmed (between the lines) that the paper had made a decision not to run with the charges that might damage the Obama campaign, although first Hoyt dismissed the charges of Times partisanship as "nonsense."

What's In A Name?

Turns out it's not so much what's in the name as who the President is when the name changes. I present for your enjoyment a heaping helping of editorial bias, served up luke-warm.

Remember this? Times Union, 11-21-06 editorial: "Going without - The federal government's definition of what used to be known as hunger shows a lack of common sense"

So here we are, with Thanksgiving upon us and the Christmas holiday season to follow. Times of bounty and riches, with reminders of the less fortunate in our midst. It's a common enough theme, with writers from Charles Dickens to John Steinbeck to draw upon. Oh, and George Orwell, too.

It turns out that there's someone in the federal Department of Agriculture with the sort of thinking that Mr. Orwell was so quick to expose. It's that person's doing - or, worse, persons' doing - that somewhere along the way redefined what used to be called, in simplistic times, hunger. Now it's known, in government speak, as "very low food security."

Let Mark Nord, an Agriculture Department sociologist, explain. The word hungry isn't "a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon" of being among the least able to put food on the table, he told The Washington Post. Thus the new terminology, which has all the trappings of what a like-minded bureaucrat might call a very low common sense index.

What's in the water, and the food as well, at the Agriculture Department? Back during the Reagan administration, the USDA's way of dealing with cuts in funding for school lunch programs was to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable. Now this...

What the Agriculture Department finds to be a more scientifically palatable description for people without enough to eat might be deemed to be more politically palatable as well...

One more wish. That the bureaucrats who come up with mouthfuls like "very low food security" will have to eat their words.

Ignore the nonsense about the ketchup, that has come back to bite the press really hard on the rear end. No, instead focus on the fact that an entire editorial was written to criticize the clarification of hunger to a more gov-speak term meaning 'ain't gettin' enuff food not on purpose'. With me so far? The Gazette threw a dart at it also in an editorial on 5-18-07:

But the story of Albany's bishop trying to eat a healthy meal for just $1.16 still provided food for thought in a region where hunger -- or "food insecurity," as the government now calls it -- is more prevalent than many people realize.

Got it? So now we've got shots from both local dailies, one full and one jabbing the needle in the midst of another story.

What's my point?

Well, did you happen to catch the editorials or even vague sideswipes at the Big Won's head of homeland conservative-bashing saying that the policy of the admininstration should be to move away from talking about 'terrorism' and instead call acts of terror 'man-caused disasters'?

Napolitano tells the German news site Spiegel Online that while she presumes there is always a threat from terrorism: "I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur."

No? That's because neither the Gazette nor the Times Union editors wrote anything about the head of Homeland Security refusing to say "terrorism" and instead saying "man-caused disasters".

What about the efforts of the administration (when this broke they apparently took a cue from the Big Guy and threw some junior employee under the bus to cover themselves) to replace the term 'war on terror'? Is that a bigger subject than 'hunger'?

An Office of Management and Budget e-mail sent to the Pentagon a few days ago said: "This Administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT]. Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.'"

The denials are unconvincing, at best. Did you see the editorials mocking the administrion for trying to get people to stop saying 'war on terror' and talk about 'overseas contingency operations'?

No?

Probably because there weren't any.

Is that a little ketchup there on the editorial page?

From "Transparent and Open" To "Put nothing in writing"

Have to remind myself to add this to the "broken promises" counter. Most of this is easy enough to figure out, you can scratch it yourself and see what it smells like.

Item 1: The laughable White House website "Transparency and Open Government" makes us guffaw with:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government...

Government should be transparent...

Government should be participatory...

Item 2: A new report about those CAFE talks from an environmental publication:

There was a simple rule for negotiations between the White House and California on vehicle fuel economy: Put nothing in writing.

Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board, and Carol Browner, President Obama's point person on energy and climate change, were key in crafting a plan to impose the first-ever national carbon limits on cars and trucks. The emissions standards, announced yesterday by the president in the Rose Garden, would bring federal requirements in line with levels sought by California over much of the last decade.

In an interview yesterday, Nichols said Browner quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials. Browner started the talks soon after becoming Obama's special assistant on energy and climate, a position that gives her wide-ranging authority to coordinate top officials at the Council on Environmental Quality, U.S. EPA, and the departments of Energy and Transportation...

It was then that Nichols and Browner decided to keep their discussions as quiet as possible, holding no group meetings and taking care to not leak updates to the press. This strategy, they felt, would help facilitate fast progress outside the media frenzy that often dominates Washington politics.

"We put nothing in writing, ever," Nichols said. "That was one of the ways we made sure that everyone's ability to talk freely was protected."

when I was a kid there was a saying for this..."Do as I say, not as I do."

Duck!

Iran tests missile with range that can hit Israel

Iran test-fired a missile capable of striking Israel, U.S. Mideast bases and Europe on Wednesday — a show of strength touted by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as he battles for re-election next month against more moderate opponents.

Remind me again, Mr. President, why we shouldn't be 'wasting' money on missile defense systems and should be promising Russia we'll not put missile defense systems in the countries of our allies in Europe?

Newt Needles Nan

From Newt's current brief:

The case against Nancy Pelosi remaining Speaker of the House is as simple as it is devastating:

The person who is No. 2 in line to be commander in chief can't have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. America can't afford it...

The controversy swirling around Speaker Pelosi isn't political - she may think it is, other liberal Democrats may think it is, and the media may want it to appear that way.

But this isn't about politics. It's about national security...

Prior to her now infamous press conference last week, Speaker Pelosi insisted that the CIA had not told her in 2002 that waterboarding and other enhanced techniques were being used. At last week's press conference she went beyond this position to assert that "the only mention of waterboarding at [the September 2002] briefing was that it was not being employed."

In contrast, Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, wrote a memo last Friday to CIA employees in which he stated that "our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of [Al Qaeda terrorist] Abu Zubaydah, describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed.'"...

But Speaker Pelosi did not confine the question to the reliability of memory. Instead, she made the allegation last week that the CIA intentionally misled her - misled Congress - and not just once, but routinely.

"They mislead us all the time," she said.

She charged that the CIA, deliberately and as a matter of policy, violated the law by lying to Congress.

And with that allegation, Speaker Pelosi disqualified herself from the office she holds.

And the question that remains is why? Why would Speaker Pelosi escalate the small skirmish she found herself in over the 2002 briefing into a full-scale war with the CIA?

Perhaps it's because if America knew that Speaker Pelosi consented, fully informed and without complaint, to waterboarding back in 2002, it would reveal the current liberal bloodlust over interrogations for what it is: The Left's attempt to hunt down and purge its political opponents...

If Nancy Pelosi believed that waterboarding was justified in 2002 - just like Porter Goss, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Tenet - then a policy of selectively using enhanced interrogation techniques in carefully circumscribed ways in order to prevent future attacks - in other words, the Bush Administration policy - is vindicated.

But rather than admit that President Bush, when faced with an array of difficult choices, made the hard choice that kept the nation safe, Nancy Pelosi has instead retreated into the cheap sanctity of ignorance. She didn't know, so she claims. That's why she didn't do anything about it.

But President Bush did know. It was his job to know, and he made the tough choices needed to save American lives.

It was Nancy Pelosi's job to know too. But to avoid culpability for the choices she supported, she's now telling us she didn't know. And she's calling the intelligence officials who say otherwise liars and criminals...

Democrats owe it to their country and our national security to replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

Oh, Get A Grip

The saying has gone out of vogue a bit, but sometimes it's really les mots juste. Get a grip!

FEC dismisses complaint over Palin clothing

The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint over the $150,000-plus designer wardrobe the Republican Party bought to outfit vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the good-government group that filed the complaint, argued that candidates aren't supposed to use donor money for personal expenses such as clothes. The FEC ruled Tuesday that the ban doesn't apply to party money, however...

The Republican National Committee told the commission that party money rather than candidate campaign money was used for the purchases.

"We have no information to the contrary," the FEC wrote in its decision...

Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director, argued that the commission's decision opens the door for political parties to buy lavish wardrobes for candidates to use, and that contributes to the public's cynicism about politicians.

Seriously. Get a freaking grip. Yeah, boy howdy, now political parties are going to be decking out the candidates like Liberace. Or, I dunno, they might buy a woman some fancy designer shoes to make the press go all ga-ga? I mean, when I sit around gabbing about politics with friends, family, co-workers, etc the first thing that comes up is the sharp threads they be sportin'. I would never vote for anyone not decked out in the latest fashions from Paree...would you? How gauche!

Seriously, lady - get a grip. And given the fuss raised by the RNC buying Gov. Palin enough outfits to campaign constantly for a couple of months, I hardly think we need to be worried about the public being snookered by gussied-up pols wearing borrowed duds. And I really, really don't think that most of America is voting by designer label. I have little doubt it's a popularity contest, but a What Not To Wear To Get A Vote it ain't. And there have to be better things to occupy the time of self-described ethical watchdogs than whether or not a political committee can buy clothes for a candidate so they don't have to campaign non-stop for who-know-how-many-months in the same suit.

Hey, didn't the Speaker of the House just accuse the CIA of deliberately lying to Congress, only to be rebutted by documents that proves she's the liar? Isn't that something that should be consuming pretty much all the resources of an ethics watchdog?

Linux - Third And Probably Staying There

So, it happened again. I tried Linux. And, as with my previous effort a handful of years ago, I realized why people aren't using Linux.

Sure, it all sounds great. Read any homepage for one of the big Linux systems. Page after page of Windows bashing and bragging about how absolutely freaking stellar Linux is in comparison (particularly their flavor, but all flavors as long as they're Linux, really). Linux can do this! Linux won't do that! Get it, it's awesome!

Bullpuckey.

I was having some problems, so I thought, with Windows a while back. Random crashing, weird errors. I thought the OS was just breaking down after a few years of use. So I decided, hey, let's try this Linux thing everybody's talking about. Well, it turns out that the problem was a failing motherboard, so no amount of OS changing was going to solve that little dilemma. Still, this was before the problem was identified. I was able to pick up a copy of XandrOS for free (after rebate) and thought I'd give that a try.

Well, it installed OK (this was after the computer was rebuilt and working again). Made a partition for itself and I was able to dual boot, etc. What did I get for my effort? Instead of smooth, easy to use Windows XP I was treated to what looked like Windows-for-juniors. Smoother graphics and fonts all meant to look a little less sharp than Windows, a little 'hipper' I guess, more appealing to a younger crowd. It proved to be nearly impossible to do normal things. Nearly everything you wanted to do involved inputting obscure technogeek settings that I hadn't a clue how to obtain or correctly insert. So pretty much nothing worked right in terms of hardware. The absolute basic stuff worked, sure. Hey a clock! Great. Still, I couldn't help feeling that I was trapped in some bizarro world of super-genius children that wanted a Playdoh look while still doing nearly everything at the command line level. No thanks. Windows pretty much already did all that stuff automatically for me. As an added bonus it was extraordinarily difficult to remove the Linux partition, I had to contact Norton tech support to get help removing it with Partition Magic. No thanks.

Now recently I treated myself to a new laptop (not really, I saved up for it). A big, shiny, mid-level black Acer with Intel Core 2 Duo (sorry, AMD, I'm still in favor of your chip plant :) but everyone said the Core 2 Duo was the way to go) running the "dreaded" Vista - the "very dreaded, avoid at all costs" Vista 64 bit, actually. In the end I decided that 1) getting full use out of my 4 GB of RAM would be useful going forward; and 2) it seemed like most software makers are allowing themselves to be cajoled into going down the 64 bit path and things will only get smoother. Face it, people are always going to want more power, not less, and that means 64 bit's the wave of the future. So I bit the bullet and went for it. Now, I'm not thrilled with Vista, having used it a bit before buying this laptop. I mean, I don't loathe it and it is indeed not as bad as advertised, but I still thought a brand new laptop with oodles of free drive space would be a spanking great time to try Linux again - surely it'd improved over time? And maybe it would be a nice change from the sometimes-clunky Vista. And, if it was no good, I could easily restore my laptop since I hadn't put much on it, yet.

Ugh. I came up with what is supposed to be one of the greatest, most stable, most easy to use OSs around...Ubuntu. Free. Easy to install. Plays on 64 bit machines. Score! Yeah, right. First, my laptop has no interest in making a new partition for Linux to reside on. OK, maybe my bad. Still, the point I'm making here is that for the average user (and I consider myself a step above that, although not a mother-may-I giant step, still a decent step) this was not going to be easy. So, despite some subtle warnings to the contrary about using Ubuntu to make a partition and having Windows stick out its tongue at it, I went for it. It took Ubuntu literally HOURS to shrink a partition on the laptop, something that Vista did in, oh, 5 seconds (before it refused to format that space). Literally. I also played around with Ubuntu running off the install disc. Whoopee. Guess what? Playdoh fonts and appearance (not widescreen, by the way) coupled with a need for in-depth, intense command line level ability to actually make anything work. I guess I should be glad that it at least was able to run the screen, keyboard, and trackpad at all. I would have had to spend a couple hours of doing research to get it to connect to our wireless router. I popped up the 'connect' window and recognized about half the stuff I needed to put in - the passcodes, security type, all that stuff, fine, I had to do that to run it on Vista...but there was other stuff that simply made my mouth gape. Again, before the mockery starts...I can effortlessly set up a new laptop on a wireless router, even with extra layers of security as well as configure the router for the settings I want (hiding it from our neighbors, choosing enhanced security features, etc.) and have connected 3 different laptops to a router without effort. I had no clue how to get on the internet with Ubuntu. I would have had to log onto Vista, go online, and scour through discussion forums to come up with, hopefully, settings to use. Now you tell me how the average user is going to figure that out? Needless to say, after watching Ubuntu spend HOURS trying to simply shrink a partition (not even format the new one) that's mostly empty, I promptly went into Vista to get rid of it.

Not so fast. As predicted, Vista didn't like that partition. However, it immediately booted into some sort of startup utility, fixed the problem in about 10 minutes, ran scandisk, and the problem was utterly gone. I expanded the main partition back into that empty space (about 3 seconds) and put the Ubuntu CD in the trash, down only the cost of a blank CD and a couple of hours of my time (mostly watching Ubuntu struggle to partition a mostly blank disk).

If that's the best Linux has to offer the community of people that want to get off Windows, Linux isn't supplanting Windows or Mac's OS anytime soon. It pops up and you go 'ooh, pretty!'. But then it doesn't do anything. You need obscure command line codes to actually get it to do anything. Which is, apparently, most of the fun for Linux users. Because they can't possibly enjoy, you know, web browsing, writing emails, or whatever, not when they can sit around writing command line code, making fun of each other's efforts to write command line code on geek forums, and telling everyone how superior Linux is to Windows.

Yeah, Windows has issues. You have to run security stuff because there are viruses. Big deal. I've had one virus, about 10 years ago and it was tied to something I knowingly downloaded years ago and it never actually did anything bad. McAfee, which you basically only need to buy once in your life, kicked its fanny. You buy it once and then every year you buy the new version from an online site and get a rebate for the full price when you send in the old disc. Couple bucks shipping for good security. Or go with free AVG, also a piece of cake. And there are other options. Unless your computer sucks it's not going to eat up all of your resources, either, I think the only people that make that complaint really need to just spend $30 at Crucial and get another GB of memory, or play these insane new games that suck resources like a vampire at a blood party.

And, yeah, Windows, to be 'user-friendly' tries to anticipate what you want to do and shouldn't maybe be doing. If you get all geeked up writing code, you probably don't want Windows telling you to rethink modifying that setting...what are you doing, dave?

Fine. For that minute portion of the world, get Linux. Enjoy. But at some point it's time to wander into a Best Buy and just be quiet and listen and watch. You're not like those people! They want to press a button and see their OS pop up. Another click and they're surfing the web, printing coupons, emailing their Aunt, etc. Boom, reservation at a hotel. They don't want to have to program their wireless card before they do that. They don't want to wade through geek speak trying to find a utility to do what Windows provides with 2 mouse clicks. And when they run it they want to see a nice window pop up with the result, not a mysterious line of code telling them why you can't do that, dave...

If you love Linux, have at it. But if this is as far as Linux has come, a non-intuitive, do-it-yourself-or-not-at-all command line OS for geekery that has a Windows-like facade that makes you think 'hey, this is just like Windows, only less functional!', then Microsoft and Apple have little to fear. It's nothing but a command line OS with a think veneer of a facade that mimics Windows so that they can get people to use it before they realize...they can't.

Feeling Protected?

Democrat protectionism doing more damage than thought to US and global economy, despite Teleprompter Won's assurances:

But there's a fly in the ointment, actually several flies. One is that Congress has not given up attaching protectionist legislation to other bills. Another is that much of the money allocated to infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and the like is being spent at the city and state level where Nafta rules do not override "buy American" provisions or sentiment.

The Washington Post cites examples such as the town of Peru, Ind., which told a Canadian supplier it was rejecting sewage pumps that were made near Toronto. John Hayward, president of Hayward Gordon, the Canadian pump-maker, says many U.S. towns have told him they can no longer buy his products because of stimulus provisions.

Work done on a construction project at Camp Pendleton was literally pulled out of the ground when someone noticed Canadian pipe fittings had been used. The fittings were made by a Toronto-based company that had been doing business in the U.S. for 60 years. The company had supplied plastic pipe to be used in a new health care facility at the Marine Base north of San Diego.

"Many Canadians believe the issue" of U.S. protectionism "was settled when (Obama) came into Canada back in February and made assurances that all is well. But it's not," says Veso Sobot, spokesperson for IPEX Inc., the company that sold the pipe. "We've never seen such a wave of protectionism as at this moment."

Other Canadian companies doing business with state and local governments in the U.S. report being forced to sign affidavits that all their materials were made in the U.S., or they will not be allowed to do business here.

The Toronto Star last week complained of "a plague of protectionist measures in the U.S." Already a number of Ontario communities with a combined population of around a half million have retaliated by barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts.

Companies on both sides of the border appear to be drowning in these "watered-down" buy-American provisions. Duferco Farrell Corp., a Swiss-Russian partnership that took over a closed steel plant near Pittsburgh, is on the verge of shutting down because its global supply chain does not jibe with current definitions of "made in USA."

The plant employs 600 people, but has had to furlough 80% of its work force. A steel pipe maker literally down the street recently canceled an order for Duferco's steel coils because part of the production process is outside the U.S. That firm is shifting its orders to firms with 100% U.S. production to meet the new stimulus regulations...

In case you were wondering, yes, protectionism was another element that helped turn a standard recession into "the Great Depression".

Is America Over American Idol?

It's kinda looking that way to me. Despite the fact that this year featured a pile of pretty talented singers, you have to wonder about the finals. And this is just a continuation of last year. Look at the last 4 finalists that have floated through on "America's" votes.

Last you we had the Davids. David Archuleta is the stereotypical cute high school kid who looked like he would be the most popular kid at the school's annual coffee house performance night. The winner, David Cook, was the clean-cut, smooth voiced almost-rocker. The term 'non-threatening' is practically screamed.

But, boy, in 2009 it's like non-threatening to the extreme. You've got the baby-faced poster boy for 'non-threatening' who takes any song and makes a boring acoustic plod out of it. And the gay, over-the-top, should-be-on-Broadway theater pretty boy that can't seem to get out of falsetto.

What do these 4 top vote getters tell you about "America's" votes?

Yeah, more than just teenaged girls are watching American Idol, but are they taking over? Are other demographics leaving the show? Looks that way to me. Otherwise the one, true singer in the bunch, Allison, would have won running away with it. That girl's the second coming of Janis Joplin if she can put some songs together.

==

Well, the final's show trend says I'm right:

* Season 5 - 32 million viewers - 12.3 rating/24 share
* Season 6 - 25.3 million viewers - 9.7 rating/27 share
* Season 7 - 27.1 million viewers - 10.1 rating/28 share

There’s a caveat, last night’s numbers are preliminary. The final numbers are expected to reflect a bump in “Idol’s” performance once the show’s three-minute overrun into the 9 p.m. hour is taken into consideration, maxing out at an 8.4 or 8.5 rating in the demo.

Dancing with the Stars, on the other hand, drew 20.1 million viewers, holding onto its audience from last year.

In The News

So I'm all set to write off the Times Union, oh well, nothing to mention today, when I come to the last section. Boom, great column (as usual) from Kristi Gustofson. I'm reading and reading and get ready to read the end...go to page 4 I'm told. Yeah? Not so much. Happily the column was at least completed and not just snipped into oblivion on page 17 or something like that. I have to admit, though, that this is the first time I've heard that women are so averse to the word 'panties'. Why on earth do manufacturers keep using it if women loathe it so much?

Then, unfortunately killing my buzz, so to speak, I glanced at the grammar column and find the grammar lady going after FoxNews. THE GRAMMAR LADY! The press really does not get it. Conservatives do NOT want to have to read carp like that (and it is utter carp, polls consistently find FoxNews to test out the least biased) in their newspaper and they certainly don't want to find it in columns by the farking grammar lady.

Editor with a brain to the Times Union ASAP!

As for the Gazette, I was rather taken aback by the story about the couple trying to shop only at stores owned by blacks. I must say, I can't imagine dedicating myself to shopping only at white-owned stores. In fact, I think that I'd soon be facing civil if not criminal lawsuits aplenty if I started walking into stores and asking if they were owned by whites and then, if they weren't, saying "Oh, I only shop at white-owned stores" and walking out.