Toyah

ever feel like disappearing? like just dropping off of the grid, or least the grid of anyone that you know right now? yesterday i was told i need counseling...i doubt that, but i do feel like vanishing quite a bit. anyone know a magician with only the first half of his act practiced up?

As Vice President, Thomas Jefferson served as President of the Senate, and he wrote his Manual of Parliamentary Procedure to assist him in those duties. Section 41 of Jefferson’s Manual states that “[t]he voice of the majority decides. For the lex majoris partis is the law of all councils, elections, &c. where not otherwise expressly provided.” View the document here.

A NYT op-ed makes two claims about the present Dem filibuster of two of Bush's appointees to the federal bench, Texas Justice Priscilla Owen and California Justice Janice Rogers Brown.

First, the Times says that Owens' and Brown's strong political ideologies has produced conservative judicial activism on their part and make them unqualified for the bench. Of course, it is the job of the Senate to confirm or reject these individials, and they may do so on the grounds proposed, or other grounds. However, to confirm or reject them, they must have a vote.

Second, according to the Times, the Republicans' claims that the Dems use of the filibuster is unprecedented is factually dishonest. There seems to be some disagreement about the past use of the filibuster to stop other judicial nominees. On this point, a discussion of judicial nominations reproduced in the Washington Times is helpful. Here are some highlights:

>>Under the proper definition, prior to the 108th Congress, there were four filibusters against judicial nominations, including one Clinton nomination.

>>The Senate took 15 cloture votes on 14 different nominations (four of them Clinton nominations).

>>Eleven of those cloture votes passed, and those nominations were confirmed. Three of these were on Clinton nominations. These, by definition, were NOT filibusters. Four cloture votes failed. These were filibusters.

>>However, three of these were TEMPORARY filibusters, and the nominations were later confirmed.

>>The cloture vote on Abe Fortas's nomination to be Chief Justice on 10/1/68 failed on a vote of 45-43. This means he did not have support of a majority in the Senate, and the 43 votes for the filibuster included 24 Republicans and 19 Democrats. The vote of cloture functioned as a test vote on his nomination, and President Johnson quickly withdrew the nomination. His nomination was on the floor for four days, and he was not blocked by a minority. There were 64 Democrat Senators in 1968.

>>Thus, the current filibusters are ABSOLUTELY UNPRECEDENTED. They are the first permanent (as opposed to temporary) filibusters against nominations with majority (as opposed to minority) Senate support.

Today's Daily Texan (UT student paper/liberal rag) mentioned Hillsdale in an opinion column titled, "America's New Right: Conservative Counterculture," which discusses how, despite conservative "dominance" of politics and culture, the Right, according to the Texan, continues to plead as if it were an oppressed minority. Here is the relevant text:

Like the New Left three decades ago, the New Right has begun organizing educational alternatives to the Establishment. The New Left organized communes that embraced alternative lifestyles; the New Right embraces colleges that spurn the traditional liberal arts curriculum.

Young America's Foundation, for example, recently published a list of the "Top Ten Conservative Colleges." These colleges, unlike the stuffy bureaucracies that are public universities, offer "a holistic conservative experience," according to the Young America's Web site. Institutions like Hillsdale College in Michigan and Christendom College in Virginia give the student "an alternative to the liberal status quo, because they allow and encourage conservative students to explore conservative ideas and authors." These colleges "offer coursework and scholarship in conservative thought and emphasize principles of smaller government, strong national defense, free enterprise and traditional values."

The idea that these values aren't "status quo," is, of course, ludicrous. Conservative ideology dominates virtually every facet of American life, higher education included. . . .

I think this last sentence could have been issued by the Ministry of Truth. And HC "spurn[s] the traditional liberal arts curriculum"? Does he even know what "spurn" means? IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

An in-depth and more balanced treatment of Hillsdale was in an April 4 Washington Times piece about George Roche and his apparent reconciliation with his son, "I.V." Just in case the article is no longer on the internet, I have uploaded a .pdf of the article. It appears that Roche is staging a bit of a comeback, aided by some of his friends, who have created a web site dedicated to him: friendsofgeorgeroche.org. It appears that the most credible witness to the alleged affair between Roche and Lisa was Roche's son, George IV, and the fact that the son is no longer sure whether his wife and father were actually involved in an affair goes a long way to further undermine the truthfulness of Lisa's claims.

What's intriguing about evidence in the case is that there really isn't any. Mr. Roche's defenders argue that if these two well-known campus figures had been involved for 19 years, something - a note, a photograph, a witness - would have surfaced during the ensuing media frenzy.

In the absence of such proof, the most damning evidence against Mr. Roche became the testimony of his son. In the days after Lissa's suicide, I.V. Roche told a number of people, including a reporter, that he thought his wife was telling the truth.

....

"What I think was obviously true was Lissa and my father developed a close emotional relationship over many years. Something obviously happened, and I don't know what happened, and I don't know that Dad does, either.

"I'm not willing to blame my father for something I don't know about. You can go over and over the events of five years ago, or you can move on with your life, and that's what I've chosen to do."

His father describes the two as "completely reconciled."

According to the WT author, it was not any evidence about an affair, but rather the Conservative Media's knee-jerk condemnation in the Post-Lewisnky universe that convicted Roche in the minds of most who cared and required Roche's resignation.

Soon afterward, Mr. Roche and Hillsdale were described in the national newspapers and magazines as pious phonies whose conservative facades masked rotten cores. Some of the criticism was aimed from the right. Columnist Joe Sobran scolded Mr. Roche, and the National Review and the Weekly Standard published devastating critiques of Hillsdale.

One theory is that conservatives, after years of piling on Bill Clinton for ethical and moral lapses, felt the need to demonstrate evenhandedness by coming down hard on one of their own.

"A lot of folks, in the absence of any firm refutation or confirmation, wanted to draw the line and let people know that 'We don't treat these things the way liberals do by burying them,'" Mr. Roche says. "They wanted to contrast this with Clinton."

What is the truth? Only one man knows, and he claims innocence. In my opinion, it seems likely that George and Lisa did have some affection for each other, and if there were any adulterous contacts, they were few and far between or George IV would have at least suspected such. I would welcome a fuller accounting by George of the details of their relationship, and would be more likely to believe him if he included some admission of a relationship, even if the relationship never involved a violation of either person's marital vows.

Well I came up a few votes short of becoming pope. I've gotten over the rejection, and here are some thoughts on the new guy...

Tons of people up here at MSU were pissed that the new pope is "a conservative." Earth to liberals, this is the pope we're talking about! You were expecting Michael Moore? Plus, why are you all overly concerned if you're not even Catholic? Abortion will still be wrong, priests will remain male and unmarried, and there will still be 5:00PM masses on Saturday nights.

The new fellow is kind of old to begin with, so it will be interesting to see how long his pontificate lasts. I wouldn't have minded seeing a non-European pope, but I'm sure the day is coming soon. I just hope that this pope sticks to his guns and doesn't let the Church get Americanized. That doesn't sound like it will be too much of a problem.

one sugar mama

duties: be rich
support me
don't nag

Gleaned from a FRC newsletter:

Pro-family groups have called off a boycott of goods produced by Procter & Gamble. Nearly 400,000 citizens had pledged to boycott P&G because of their support for homosexual activism. Those monitoring the company's practices have concluded that it has now ended its sponsorship of offensive TV programs and homosexual websites. An executive who promoted the homosexual agenda within the company, and who was given a leave of absence to work for pro-homosexual special rights legislation in Cincinnati, is no longer working for P&G.

I didn't know there was a boycott, but if it had anything to do with this, then good for the "Pro-family groups."

Press release from Sen. John Cornyn's (R-TX) office:

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Senate Democrats plan a press event at Georgetown University today to try to defend their unprecedented use of supermajority requirements, and to attack Republican efforts to restore Senate tradition in the judicial confirmation process. In an effort to provide some context, I thought the following quotes from some actual Georgetown law professors might prove useful. Given their statements below, it’s not clear whether the professors will be allowed at the event:

Liberal Georgetown Law Professor Susan Low Bloch wrote on March 14, 2005 that, “Everyone agrees: Senate confirmation requires simply a majority. No one in the Senate or elsewhere disputes that.”

[These remarks were made in correspondence to Sen. John Cornyn. Her memo can be found here. Sen. Cornyn’s response to Professor Bloch pointed out that, unfortunately, several Senate Democrats disagree. Text of that letter can be found here.]

Professor Bloch has also condemned supermajority voting requirements for confirmation, arguing that they would allow the Senate to: “upset the carefully crafted rules concerning appointment of both executive officials and judges and to unilaterally limit the power the Constitution gives to the President in the appointment process. This, I believe, would allow the Senate to aggrandize its own role and would unconstitutionally distort the balance of powers established by the Constitution.”

Liberal Georgetown Law Professor Mark Tushnet has written that, “[t]he Democrats’ filibuster is . . . a repudiation of a settled pre-constitutional understanding.”

He has also written: “There’s a difference between the use of the filibuster to derail a nomination and the use of other Senate rules--on scheduling, on not having a floor vote without prior committee action, etc.--to do so. All those other rules . . . can be overridden by a majority vote of the Senate . . . whereas the filibuster can’t be overridden in that way. A majority of the Senate could ride herd on a rogue Judiciary Committee chair who refused to hold a hearing on some nominee; it can’t do so with respect to a filibuster.”
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Two articles worth reading:

The first, from NYT Magazine, is a discussion of libertarian and conservative philosophy in its relation to the courts, with emphasis on such men as Clarence Thomas, Richard Epstein, and Chip Mellor. From the author's spin, you would think judicial restraint and constitutional originalism were some alien species. It is long, but if you are unfamiliar with the undercurrents of liberal judicial philosophy, it will give you a good background.

The second, at Policy Review, is a defense of marriage from a libertarian standpoint. The author argues that a free government flourishes best under robust social institutions that do not rely on government for support and are relatively free from restraint. To that extent, the status quo of government sanctioned marriage between a man and a woman is preferable to a world in which marriage is replaced by an intricate set of contracts and enforcement mechanisms that invite ever more regulation and state intrusion into our most fundamental social institutions.

I've been reading Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum last night: very interesting stuff. He's going through the economic thinking that was current at the founding, which I have a hard time wrapping my mind around. A lot of mercantilist theories were still in vogue, along with a lot of modified free-market ideas, none of them quite in line with what we learned at Hillsdale College. Among other things, the "sinking fund" theory was an emerging idea, as was the concept of a national debt. Contrary to common sense, Hamilton especially realized that the debt could actually be used to create money.

The very act of creating a more-stable-sounding government would create confidence among investors, especially the Dutch (world bankers of the day). Restoring the perception of stability would also restore stability itself (it's all a game!).

As long as the interest on the debt can be paid, it's apparently actually good for a state to borrow money (is there any other way for a state to borrow money other than by bonds and notes?), as this effectively creates money in the economy that literally didn't exist before, which can then be applied to work and productivity in the economy generally.

Of course, what I learned growing up is that individual debt is always, without exception, bad. Lots of conservatives apply that to national debt, too, but what I'm reading now seems to indicate that is not necessarily true. I can't quite work out why that is, but I think it has to do with economies of scale (as compared to individuals), and perhaps also with the difference in revenue: if I stop working, I stop making money and then can't pay the interest on my debts, whereas a state never stops "working" and always has revenue from taxes, tariffs, etc.

It's one of those things that is hard to wrap my mind around. If I examine the trees, they individually make sense, but whenever I step back and look at the forest I get lost!

Check out Right Angle Blog by ??? for news and commentary on Ohio politics.

Novel way to force oneself to get out of bed.

If you haven't been following the pro-democracy move in Lebanon, you should be. Check out these pictures and blogging from Spirit of America. An amazing story.

I hope that our government is supporting the Lebanese, at least quietly.

Highlanders and fellow readers:
I have been keeping this somewhat on the down-low, but I recently was accepted to Regent Law School. Beginning this August I will begin law classes, as two of our fellow Highlanders finish school and begin their careers in law. I am really looking forward to my return to the academic world, and will keep everyone updated on any other news.

I was baptized April 1, 1995, when I was sixteen years old. As of five days ago, I’ve been a Christian for ten years now, and it seems like a good time to take stock. I was slow to take that step, because, as I told our minister at the time, it didn’t seem that becoming a Christian would do much for me: I’d grown up in the church and “knew everything.” You could ask me about instrumental music or Calvinism or the conflicting interpretations of baptism and I could give you all the “right” answers, so what would change if I was baptized and became a Christian?

April 1 was a Saturday, and I had decided earlier in the week that, come Sunday, I would be baptized. But Saturday, sometime in the afternoon, I became very restless. Couldn’t concentrate on anything, but I didn’t know why. We were living in Alaska then, and the only physical work there is to do in early April is to scrape the driveway free of ice, which I proceeded to do for a few hours, before concluding that I simply couldn’t wait anymore and wanted to be baptized, right now. So we went down to the church building and my dad baptized me, and then my brother, who had decided it was a good time for him, too.

Now it’s ten years later. As our minister said as I walked down into the baptistery, it’s true that no matter how much I thought I knew before, it didn’t compare to what I know now. Mostly I’ve found that black-and-white answers don’t work as well as they did when I was sixteen.

That really started becoming clear when I came to college: I met many people who were clearly deeply spiritual people, who walked what they talked and knew their Bibles as well or better than I did, yet according to what I’d been taught, they weren’t “real” Christians. I had to rethink that, and the question of who is a “true” Christian is something I’m still wrestling with. The church I attended did a few things that bothered me as “unscriptural”, like potlucks eaten in the building (problem: the building is intended for worship, not eating). I spent days pondering that before working out my solution, which was simply not to stay after the worship service. After four or five years, I eventually decided that, as things to worry about go, this was not very high up there and didn’t warrant being a principle of conscience, so I stopped worrying about it and now enjoy potluck with everyone else.

More seriously, I was also privileged---or not---to go through a church split, with a divisive minister. I recall having a long conversation with him, along with my best friend, in which he told us that our concept of Christianity was “nebulous.” After he had left, he sent us a letter in which he expressed surprise that we disagreed with him, although many preachers took his position, and expressing hope that we would return to the truth someday.

But not all the Christians I’ve met since 1995 were of that sort. The first day in church as an extremely green freshman, I met another wet-behind-the-years kid who happened to live in the same dorm, and even the same floor as I. What a coincidence, right? I wonder: Phil became the best Christian partner I’ve ever experienced. We worked together with nearly everything the church did, in the four years we were there. Although it’s been nearly three years since we graduated and he left for law school, I still miss his reliability and willingness to work. I never had to ask if he was there: I knew he’d be there.

There were many others besides Phil who were a strength and encouragement to me, some of whom attended very different churches. Yet all of them had a hand in making me the Christian I am today. I’m not sure if I’ve really become the strong Christian, the leader in the church, the mature spiritual person, that everyone thinks I am. Myself, I’m way too aware of my failings and mistakes. I really don’t think I do all that well: I just do what I can and hope that my best is enough for God.

I had a lot of confidence when I was sixteen that there was an answer to every question, if enough study could just be done. I’m not at all sure of that anymore. I think there are some things that can be known, those things which the scriptures are very clear about, and many more things that have to be left to the discretion of the individual Christian and to God. I’m not sure if that’s progress or not, but I know I’m ten years older and I haven’t given up yet.

Now that baseball season is here, Toolie and his '05 season trashtalk can be found at www.Tigers Weekly.com.

Here's a trivia question that was on this morning's cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee:

Who broke Ty Cobb's run of nine straight baseball batting titles in 1916?

A. Tris Speaker
B. George Sisler
C. Hal Chase
D. Harry Heilmann

Well, I need to post on this. I used to be just like you Anthony, this doesn't involve me, so I don't care too much; but I'll tell you, since my father's similar passing just a few weeks ago I haven't been able to take my eyes off the Schiavo news. I've been checking the news all the time to see if she's still alive and my heart breaks for her family that didn't want to terminate her. With my Dad we made the decision not to hospitalize him, because that probably would have meant IV's and feeding tube and we knew that in doing so we would probably be lead to the question of removing them; a question far worse. I think this case comes down to the question of what we as a culture should do in a case of doubt; AND WE AS A CULTURE CHOOSE DEATH. This has deeply saddened me. I will post more on this tommorrow (Friday).