Ut Humiliter Opinor

Ouch - now it’s really getting bad for Bush. From The Miers Blunder:

…so far the lesson we draw from this nomination is this: Bad things happen when a President decides that “diversity,” personal loyalty and stealth are more important credentials for the Supreme Court than knowledge of the Constitution and battle-hardened experience fighting the judicial wars of the past 30 years.

(Hat Tip: Captain’s Quarters)

I guess it’s time to pile on. The initial spin from the White House was that you don’t necessarily need great judicial experience on the Supreme Court. There is no Constitutional requirement to be a lawyer. Okay, that’s true. The assumption is that a person who can bring “real world experience” to the Court is a good thing.

I can support it under the following condition: that the nominee - instead of being an extraordinary legal mind - is an extraordinary citizen. Harriet Meirs’ background, while impressive, is not so extraordinary to place her above so many others in the country. I would expect someone to be a major national business or political leader to be considered over the many qualified jurists. Head of the Texas State Bar and being a one-term city council member just doesn’t impress me much.

For me someone “from the street” would have, for example, been a school superintendant for several years, been the a mayor of a major city for a decade or created and operated a large business. That would impress me a bit more, and make me think that a person from the street with have valuable insight the other Justices might lack.

Meirs hasn’t come across as impressive and just doesn’t seem like anything other that a stealth, crony pick.

It’s amazing to me that these people still exist. Frankly, the only reason I even wish to comment on them is to point out what real racism is. It’s not the arguments over quotas, team names or hurricane response. It’s this:

As the MasterBlogger himself would say, “Heh”:

Millers Big Secret

Note to reporters: There is nothing intrinsically noble about keeping your sources’ secrets. Your job, in fact, is to expose them. And if a very senior government official, after telling you something in confidence, then tells you that you don’t have to keep it secret anymore, the proper response is “Hooray, now I can tell the world” — not “Sorry, that’s not good enough for me, I need that in triplicate.”

From Martin McKeay’s Network Security Blog: Do you still trust electronic voting machines. Martin points to a recent entry at Brad Blog which is just frightening.

Now we get an insider’s view of the Diebold machines, and it’s not encouraging. An undocumented backdoor exists in the program that allows the modification of voting results, and it doesn’t appear to be a way to detect the modification. Why wasn’t this enough, by itself, to cause the electronic voting machines to be pulled?

It should be enough. If, as Brad Blog suggests, this backdoor was known, then Diebold will lose a lot of credibility. Looking at Brad Blog, I don’t agree with a lot of his politics, but that’s irrelevant when we’re talking about the security of our vote being controlled/manipulated by parties unknown.

Paranoid? Maybe. However, unlike Florida, there’s no paper trail, no hanging chad - just bits and bytes of data begging to be manipulated. Do you really want to trust Diebold and the federal government to somehow “fix this”?

A paper trail is a must in an election.

The Roberts hearings are starting today. Feinstein’s prepared remarks have been published. I don’t know yet if she has delivered them Sen. Feinstein’s prepared opening statement for Roberts hearing

In fact, over the past decade, the Rehnquist Court has weakened or invalidated more than three dozen federal statutes. Almost a third of these decisions were based on the Commerce Clause and the 14th Amendment. If Judge Roberts subscribes to the Rehnquist Court’s restrictive interpretation of Congress’ ability to legislate, the impact could be to severely restrict the ability of Congress to tackle nationwide issues that the American people have elected us to address.

But when Congress oversteps, the Court is there to check its power. That’s why it’s called “checks and balances”. Congress doesn’t have a blank check or unlimited scope in its authority, no matter what Senator Feinstein thinks.

By virtue of our history, and our sex, women have a perspective that has been recognized as unique and valuable. I try to represent and honor this through my role on the committee. With the absence of Justice Sandra Day OConnor, the Court loses the important perspective she brought as a woman - and the deciding vote in a number of critical cases.

One problem: Roberts has been named to replace Rehnquist, not O’Connor. O’Connor agreed to stay on until a replacement could be named.

In response, the Founding Fathers created a balance in the Constitution that provided for freedom of worship as well as for separation of church and state. In their efforts to protect against religious persecution, the framers established a secular government that would remain separate from religion.

They created a federal government that could not establish a religion. That’s why there is a prayer in the Court and Senate every day. There must be tolerance of religion in daily life, not separation from it.

The Associated Press has an article detailing the problems with getting that National Guard to Louisiana: National Guard Delay Likely to Be Examined

From the outside looking in, this has been a failure on multiple levels. Guard troops waiting for paperwork to be filed in Washington? Troops waiting for a phone call from the state of Louisiana to deploy? Blanco was apparently fearful of a political motive when Bush requested federal control of the situation. Add to this that New Orleans didn’t follow the city hurricane disaster plan, and you have a failure at every level of government.

Many people want to fault Bush, Blanco or Nagin (usually depending on their political affiliation). It will likely be some time before the paperwork is sorted out and the problems analyzed, but that’s what I think is really frustrating. If the bureaucracy is the reason for the delays, then steps need to be taken to remove it. We have FEMA and Homeland Security for a reason. Red tape isn’t it.

Michael Totten in The End of All Things sums up the strange survival guilt that I know I’ve been feeling the last few days:

If my city were flattened and I knew people in other parts of the country were carrying on as usual it would disturb me. How can you go on with your lives while we’re dying here? I suppose, though, from all outward appearances I must look to my neighbors as though I’m blissfully unaware of what’s going on now on the Gulf Coast. I’m not walking around with tears in my eyes. Maybe everyone is as rattled as I am yet, like me, they’re trying to pretend like they aren’t.

What really has been getting to me in the last 24 hours is the feeling of helplessness - of not knowing what I can do. Tsumani relief was easy - send a check. The charitable organizations will make sure it gets used right. However, New Orleans is close enough to us that survivors are coming to our city. Also, the cost levels are so different between us and other countries. If I send, say, $250, then that buys a few nights at a hotel, but these people need help not for days but months. What do we do over the long run that will make a real difference?

I know the real answer: bulk buying power of the entire US. However, when you know there are people nearby in need, a donation to the Red Cross just doesn’t seem like enough.

In the next few days, I’m sure I’ll find some way of helping that will seem beyond a “token” gesture. Those ideas usually come out of the blue when they are supposed to happen. In the meantime, I’ll have to put up with this eerie feeling of helplessness and guilt. It’s better than the ones in the middle of all of this, that’s for certain.

Two things jumped out at me today: one good, one not:

1) Texas Governor Rick Perry announced that evacuees from Hurricane Katrina staying in the Astrodome will be able to attend Texas schools for the duration of their stay. Perry’s never been much of a governor, but this was a class act.

2) Gas prices. What can I say? Yesterday, the Chevron by my office was $2.62. This morning, it was $2.69. This evening it was $2.89. Virtually every station on my commute home had the same price as well. Ten percent in 24 hours. That’s just obscene. I know there’s a loss of capacity from the hurricane, but I have a hard time believing we lost that much. We keep hearing about China, cars, refineries, formulations, etc. but it’s hard to justify a 200% price hike in five years.

Here’s some more fuel to the fire for the abortion/stem cell debate. Fourteen weeks is before viability, but the harvested cells are apparently good for a medical procedure.

I can see a day coming where perhaps women will be offered money for the cells of an aborted fetus for medical purposes, which is a really scary proposition.

I am an admitted waffler on abortion. I find it personally repugnant, but have a hard time telling someone what to do in regards to personal health and moral issues. Stories like this give me pause because the end game - where we trade one potential life for another - just seems terrifying to contemplate.

Fetal skin cells help heal burn wounds in children

The research team, based at University Hospital of Lausanne, obtained a 4-cm skin donation from a 14-week aborted male fetus. Cells were expanded in culture and used to seed collagen sheets, and then grown for two more days before the sheets were applied to the burn wounds. The fetal cells were used to treat eight children considered to be candidates for traditional skin grafting, approximately 10 days after their injury. As the cells biodegraded, they were replaced every three to four days. “These cells stimulate spontaneous healing of the wound through secretion of multiple growth factors,” Hohlfeld said. The average time to healing was 15.3 days after the first cell application. The cosmetic and functional results “were excellent in all eight children,” who had little degradation of the new skin with no retraction or breakdown of the healed surfaces, the research team reports. The one patient who had dark skin had recovery of skin pigmentation. The researchers estimate that the one fetal skin donation could yield “several million” skin constructs. “We only need one very small biopsy once, giving us the potential to treat thousands of people,” Hohlfeld pointed out. He considers it possible to obtain effective skin cells from miscarriages of second trimester fetuses.