Americans don’t blame Bush for Katrina or its aftermath. Only 13% do blame him. CNN:

Respondents also disagreed widely on who is to blame for the problems in the city following the hurricane — 13% said Bush, 18% said federal agencies, 25% blamed state or local officials and 38% said no one is to blame. And 63% said they do not believe anyone at federal agencies responsible for handling emergencies should be fired as a result.

Somebody go tell Dan Balz and the WaPo. To a boar, everything smells like a truffle. To a Beltway journalist, everything smells like a political story:

When terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans came together in grief and resolve, rallying behind President Bush in an extraordinary show of national unity. But when Hurricane Katrina hit last week, the opposite occurred, with Americans dividing along sharply partisan lines in their judgment of the president’s and the federal government’s response.

The starkly different verdicts on Bush’s stewardship of the two biggest crises of his presidency underscore the deepening polarization of the electorate that has occurred on his watch. This gaping divide has left the president with no reservoir of good will among his political opponents at a critical moment of national need and has touched off a fresh debate about whether he could have done anything to prevent it.

Where to begin? The story is absolutely inconsistent with the polling results above, which seem to reflect common sense among the american people. Moreover, the 9-11 consensus is a myth. The 9-11 consensus was broken within a few weeks of 9-11. Here’s a CBS report from October 6, 2001, around the time that Tom Daschle launched a critique of Bush for not acting faster on Afghanistan (which war began 10/7/01):

When President Bush urged Americans after the Sept. 11 attacks to “go about their business” as usual, Congress, it seems, took his request literally. Within weeks, lawmakers and the Bush administration dispensed with their calls for harmony and were again sparring, this time over legislation proposed as a direct response to the terrorist attacks.

Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein thought the post-Sept. 11 cooperation between Congress and the White House would continue a little bit longer. The unity “ended earlier than expected,” Ornstein told CBSNews.com. “I thought it would last until at least mid-October.”…..

If you look at Enron, Abu Ghraib, Camp Gitmo, Camp Cindy, al Qa Qaa, Katrina, and a dozen other things, you come to an odd conclusion: to the MSM, the Democrats win every single fantasy election that take place in their newspapers between the real elections, which they continue to, um, lose with consistency.

We draw your attention to this Front Page Magazine article from a few years ago about the Louisiana senator, whose margin of victory, as with Governor Blanco’s (discussed here earlier) has now been relocated to other states. Note also that her threat to President Bush is not without precedent. We start in 2002:

Six years earlier Mary Landrieu eked out a 5,788 vote victory, much of her winning margin coming from stuffed ballot boxes lost and found in swamps. It was a grubby victory that stank of corruption, and a shamefully weak one for this daughter of a two-term Mayor of New Orleans whose Cajun last name carried statewide recognition and cache.

(Mary’s married name, which this “family values” Senator refuses to use, is Snellings.)…..

Before and after a recent televised debate with her Republican opponent in the December 7 runoff, Suzanne Terrell, the state’s election commissioner and year 2000 Louisiana presidential campaign chair for George W. Bush, Landrieu reportedly went into irrational fits of rage – at one point threatening her opponent with political extermination.

Snellings, whose brother, as you know, is Lieutenant Governor to the deplorable Blanco, is witnessing the dissolution of her family’s heriditary power base, and public exposure to the degree of corruption and incompetence endemic to Louisiana and New Orleans. Nothing about this story has been pretty or uplifting, save the generosity of the American people and the heroism of the American military.

In analyzing what we consider to be Governor Kathleen Blanco’s strange behavior of late, there is an additional factor that must be mentioned: her margin of victory just left town and is not coming back any time soon.

George Bush carried Louisiana by 283,000 votes in 2004 (1,102K v. 820K), a handy 57/42 margin over John Kerry, establishing GOP predominance in national elections. Voter turnout was 63% of the total adult population, versus 58% for the United States as a whole. However, Louisiana has been much more Democrat at the state and local level. Blanco beat Bobby Jindal by 54,567 votes in 2003 (731K v. 676K). There were a number of reasons for Jindal’s defeat: a failure to respond to some last-minute TV ads, perhaps low turnout, and, as Charlie Cook noted, “minority candidates tend to ‘over-poll,’ meaning that they do better in polls than they do on Election Day.” Blanco did well statewide, carrying 52 of the 64 groups of parishes, but her margin of victory was in New Orleans.

In New Orleans, Blanco polled 92,746 votes to Jindal’s 43,005 — a lead, for the Democrat, of 49,741 votes, almost her entire margin of victory. As was noted at the time by Human Events: “Only two days before the run-off, a tracking poll by Verne Kennedy, dean of Louisiana pollsters, showed Jindal ahead 44% to 41%. But a strong turn out of 46% in the black community (in which Blanco took 91% of the vote) provided the margin Blanco needed for victory.”

It is easy, we suppose, to make too much of all this. Louisiana is a conservative state, as evidenced by the 57% margin for Bush and the 78% vote against gay marriage in a 2004 referendum. Blanco is something of a pebble in the road of GOP domination of the entire south, and Jindal was endorsed by our friend Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans. Further, the 2003 election Blanco won against Jindal had low turnout — 73% of that in the Bush/Kerry election. So the trends appear clear enough.

Yet governors control some of the pursestrings and patronage, and that perhaps means something special in Louisiana’s picaresque political history, in which Huey and Earl Long and Edwin Edwards were governors, famous for their corruption or eccentricity or both. (Side note: you know that Edwards is a Democrat because the CNN story of his indictment fails to mention his party affiliation.) We are well past the time where Governor Edwards boasted that he had to be found in bed “with a live boy or a dead girl” to lose an election.

An important part of what is going on in Louisiana politically is being hidden from public view, by both sides. Democrats see power slipping away, as some critical vote centers have disappeared, at least temporarily. (Whether generations past and housepets vote absentee remains to be seen.) Republicans see equivalent prospects for consolidating power. Let’s grant that both sides are equally interested in relief and reconstruction: do you think for one second they leave their political instincts and ruthlessness at the door? And recall further that New Orleans was critical to Mary Landrieu’s victory in 2002. She is up again in 2008, and Blanco in 2007. There is a lot of power and money at stake in Louisiana over the next three years. Might the GOP take the recommendation of National Review to hold their 2008 convention in New Orleans? We shall see.

UPDATE

In the course of his lovely tribute to New Orleans today on his radio program, Harry Shearer reminded us of the depth and pervasiveness of corruption in Louisiana. For example, the last three insurance commissioners of Louisiana are serving time in the same prison as former governor Edwin Edwards. And you will recall that in Edwards’ last gubernatorial campaign, against David Duke, his bumper stickers proclimed: “Vote for the Crook — It’s Important!”

UPDATE II

In response to a question we posed to him, Jayson Javitz of Polipundit was kind enough to email us the following:

Two other points: Jindal lost to Blanco in a run-off election. Those heavily favor Democrats, because they’re held on the first day of hunting season. So, many rural and suburban Republicans don’t vote — because they’re out in the sticks with their guns and Quayle calls. Whereas Democrats down there have nothing to do but to vote against the evil Republican. Also, that lingering Democrat control of the state offices down there also applies in places like Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina. A Democrat Presidential candidate would not be able to take those states if their lives depended on it. But even to this day those voters are apt to cast ballots for Democrats at the local and state-wide levels. FWIW, methinks it will take another 15 years to get past that phenomenon.

Any Militaristic Government which can murder 3,000 of it’s own citizen’s in cold blood, as the Bush Regime of Terror did in N.Y.C. on 9-11-2001, could then be looked upon as Criminally Insane enough to use a Nuclear Generated Tsunami as a Weapon of Choice.

By Chuck Bowden. HT: Tigerhawk

Terry Eastland points out that Ronald Reagan, for whom John Roberts worked, did not have judges like John Roberts to put on the Court:

Notably, Mr. Reagan appointed to the High Court lawyers (Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy) less conservative than the young lawyers who worked for him at Justice and in the White House. But if Mr. Reagan did not have available to him a John Roberts to put on the court, a Reagan legacy is surely the pool of distinguished lawyers of conservative views who served him and in some cases as well his immediate predecessor and who are now of sufficient age to be considered for the Supreme Court.

Think of the leading figures of today’s conservative movement and the New Media. Who were their equivalents as accomplished professionals from 1975 -1985? It’s not an easy question, is it?

This is pathetic and wonderful, via Wes Pruden:

Joanie plucked gamely at the strings of her guitar, if not necessarily the heartstrings in the audience, and sang the anthems of the wrinkled unwashed from our most dissolute decade: “Song of Peace” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” She avoided what was arguably her greatest crowd-pleaser, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” an improbable tribute to the Confederacy. She clearly yearns for a reprise of the ’60s, when the war in Vietnam gave an exciting social life to the generation drugged on cheap sex and playing at make-believe revolution.

“This is huge,” she told the crowd of 200 or so spectators, wilting in the Texas heat and yearning only for a reprise of the air-conditioned comfort back at the motel. “In the first march I went to [during the war in Vietnam] there were 10 of us.”

Of course this is utter nonsense, and a further indication of how far these fools have fallen. Baez seems to have forgotten that there really were glory days for her career. Take the 1963 March on Washington, at which she was a headliner. The mid-point crowd estimate was 350,000; here’s an excerpt from a chronicle of that march:

The demonstrators gathered at the Washington Monument, where a stage had been set up for morning entertainment. Joan Baez [picture] opened the program with “Oh Freedom” and also led a rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” Other performers included Odetta; Josh White (Bayard Rustin had been his sideman thirty years earlier); the Albany Freedom Singers; Bob Dylan; and Peter, Paul and Mary, whose version of Dylan’s civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind” was then number two on the charts (after Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave”).

Before noon and ahead of schedule, impatient demonstrators began to march up Independence and Constitution Avenues to the Lincoln Memorial. The march leaders got word of this surprise development while lobbying on Capitol Hill, and they rushed to join the advancing throng. Enterprising march marshals opened a passageway for them so that they could be photographed arm in arm “leading” the march.

Press coverage was more extensive than for any previous political demonstration in U.S. history. A huge tent near the Lincoln Memorial held the march committee’s “News HQ.” The committee issued no fewer than 1,655 special press passes, augmenting the 1,220 members of the regular Washington press corps. News agencies sent large crews of reporters and photographers—some assigned to celebrities, others to everyday marchers, others to aerial coverage. Leading newspapers in many countries ran the march story on their front pages. It was also one of the first events to be broadcast live around the world, via the newly launched communications satellite Telstar. The three major television networks spent over three hundred thousand dollars (more than twice the march committee’s budget) to broadcast the event. CBS covered the rally “gavel to gavel,” from 1:30 to 4:30, canceling As the World Turns, Password, Art Linkletter’s House Party, To Tell the Truth, The Edge of Night, and Secret Storm.

No, Joanie Phonie, in 1963 or at any time during the sixties, you weren’t playing to 10 people or had an entourage that small. Joan Baez was 18 in 1959 when she performed at the first Newport Folk Festival, after receiving an invitation from Dylan. She played to a crowd estimated at 13,000 for that wonderful event. There were half a million people present when she played Woodstock a decade later.

Trying to pretend that 200 sad losers in a ditch in Texas is the beginning of something is just pathetic. It is, precisely, the end of something. It is a funeral for the sixties — that no one bothered to attend. (HT: Powerline)

Addendum

The fossilized remains of McGovern campaign chairman Gary Hart may be seen today in the Washington Post saying something like: “US out of Vietnam NOW! No negotiations! Smash ROTC! Off the pigs!” or some such. Sorry Senator and Joanie: the US may have its problems, but it has pretty well decided that you are not the solution.

The Washington Times excerpts Michael Barone’s introduction to the new Almanac, and provides a couple of tidbits we did not know:

• Conventional wisdom held that Republicans would raise much more money than Democrats, but that, too, was disproved. The Kerry campaign, the DNC and the Democratic 527 organizations spent $344 million on ads during the campaign. That was more than $55 million above what the pro-Bush forces spent. George Soros and the other wealthy contributors who were so instrumental in funding the Democratic 527s underwrote a TV campaign that “seethed with Bush hatred.” According to post-election surveys, however, the TV assault turned out not to be very persuasive overall. While the anti-Bush ads did connect with the Bush haters, “[a]n enduring problem for the Democratic Party,” Mr. Barone observed, could be the fact that “George W. Bush will not be on the ballot again.”

• Mr. Kerry won a 6.5-million majority in the 100 largest counties. More than 6 million of that majority was achieved in the 48 largest counties that had lost population since 2000 or grew by less than 3 percent. Democrats may not be able to increase their turnout by much in slow-growth or population-losing counties. Outside the 100 largest counties, Mr. Kerry lost by nearly 10 million votes. In addition, Mr. Bush won majorities in 97 of the nation’s 100 fastest-growing counties, where he achieved a popular-vote margin of 1.8 million, which was more than half of his national vote margin. This 1.8-million margin, while not as large as the one Mr. Kerry achieved in the 100 largest counties, is nonetheless “likely to increase over time, and can easily be increased even more by the kind of organizational effort mounted by the Bush campaign in 2004,” Mr. Barone argues.

We refer you once again to one of our favorite maps, illustrating Barone’s point just above. The blue spikes graphically display the high concentration of Kerry votes in the urban areas that Barone is discussing. Think of it: Kerry got a 6 million vote margin from areas that are stagnating or shrinking. This means nothing good for the GOP, of course, if the Democratic Party can broaden its appeal to the exurbs. That appears to us a a key question in a key battleground. The urban vote seems pretty much topped out for the Democratic Party, since, in our estimation, the dead and their housepets were already voting twice in 2004.

A lot of people are upset about this NARAL ad against John Roberts, and upset against CNN and some Fox affiliates for running it (see Captain Ed, for example).

We aren’t upset at all. In fact, we are delighted. This ad doesn’t “expose” John Roberts. It exposes NARAL for what they are: radical, extreme, and deeply dishonest (see FactCheck.org’s review). NARAL is in the process of publicly discrediting itself, and making a laughingstock out of its next, over-the-top, set of accusations. This won’t hurt Roberts, and is wonderful news for the next Supreme Court nominee, and the next, and the next……….

UPDATE

The ad is doing a nice job at creating fissures within parts, at least, of the NARAL coalition, via NYT:

Within the larger liberal coalition of which Naral is a part, there was considerable uneasiness about the advertisement, although leaders of other groups generally refused to speak on the record. One who did, Frances Kissling, the longtime president of Catholics for a Free Choice, said she was “deeply upset and offended” by the advertisement, which she called “far too intemperate and far too personal.”

Ms. Kissling, who initiated the conversation with a reporter, said the ad “does step over the line into the kind of personal character attack we shouldn’t be engaging in.” She added: “As a pro-choice person, I don’t like being placed on the defensive by my leaders. Naral should pull it and move on.”

Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and longtime Naral supporter, sent a letter on Wednesday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its ranking Democrat, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, respectively. Mr. Dellinger said he had disagreed with Mr. Roberts’s argument in the Bray case but considered it unfair to give “the impression that Roberts is somehow associated with clinic bombers.” He added that “it would be regrettable if the only refutation of these assertions about Roberts came from groups opposed to abortion rights.”

The Republican establishment has shied away from the issue of illegal immigration, as have the Democrats. Both the D’s and R’s have been on the wrong side of the issue, as these parents’ emotions show. The issue is not race: it is illegality. Indeed, it should not be a partisan issue at all. However, the party that gets with the program on the Illegality Issue will win new voters. The bonus for the GOP is that, were that party to take the lead, it might also win converts in the Democrats’ single most important voting bloc.

From the LAT:

For two hours, members of the audience of blacks, whites and Latinos spoke with a vehemence usually reserved for the dinner table — or late-night talk radio shows. They publicly aired views that are often muttered in L.A. but not spoken out loud. Councilman Bernard C. Parks, who sat on the meeting’s panel, voiced the view of many in the city’s political elite: “We should not pit groups against each other. Why do we have to look at it as blacks lose, Hispanics win? No one wins in this city without a coalition.”

But the audience of about 80, almost evenly divided among the three groups, had already formed a coalition — of anger. People would heckle Parks for the rest of the evening. Terry Anderson, a radio host who has long opposed illegal immigration, was one of several panel members who blamed illegal immigrants for, in their opinion, stealing jobs from blacks and crowding schools and neighborhoods to unbearable limits. “We have been invaded; there’s no other word for it,” Anderson said. The audience clapped and cheered.

Debbie Hernandez, a white member of the audience, said: “Blacks are losing their middle-class status because of illegal aliens. I am willing to go to the streets with my brothers and sisters over this.” Sherrie Johnson, a resident of Torrance, told Parks, “You aren’t taking a stand for the right side of the argument. “I believe the purpose of going through the steps to become a citizen is because it protects the country,” she said…..

Members of the audience repeatedly asked one panel member, Richard Alonzo, a district superintendent in the Los Angeles Unified School District, to reveal the number of students in L.A. schools who are illegal immigrants or to find out. He said the district doesn’t collect that information.

One questioner asked him for budget numbers, insisting they would prove that educating Latinos was more expensive than teaching other students. It’s a premise that Alonzo said was wrong. The numbers matter, Peterson said, because black students attend schools overcrowded by those who have no right to be there. Peterson, who moderated the discussion, is well known in the conservative media, appearing on Fox television talk shows as well as his own syndicated radio program.

“A lot of black boys and girls are dropping out, and it’s because their classes are overwhelmed with illegal Hispanics,” Peterson said. “Black children are mad about that; black parents are mad about that.”

As these citizens make clear, it’s not about race; it’s about Illegality. (HT: Polipundit)

(Background: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff did not cause the Great Depression. That law was passed in 1930, after the stock market crash had triggered the mother of all credit crunches — completely avoidable by the way — that we now refer to as the Depression. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was, however, a significant enhancement to the Depression’s cruelty, unnecessarily shrinking foreign trade for America and punishing further her businesses and workers.)

Since those dark days, free trade has become an article of faith for Republicans, and an identifier among national Democrats of economic sophistication. Possibly the high point of Al Gore’s Vice Presidency was his debate on NAFTA with Ross Perot in November 1993 at the Kennedy School of Government, broadcast on “Larry King Live.” Though Harvard Professor emeritus John Kenneth Galbraith called the debate “a marvel of incoherence,” the faculty thought Gore won, and since that time Gore’s performance is remembered in epic terms. Blogs proclaim that Gore crushed or smoked Perot. The Washington Post noted that some sentiment was “lopsidedly against NAFTA until Vice President Gore debated Perot on ‘Larry King Live’” and CBS News has said that “Al Gore cleaned Ross Perot’s clock” in the debate.

That was then, this is now.

Even in 1993 a majority of Democratic legislators was anti-free-trade. 102 Democrats voted for NAFTA, which was a minority of the 255 Democrats in the House. But 102 is still a solid and large number. In 2005, only 15 Democrats supported CAFTA.

A large majority of Republicans supports free trade, just as Bill Clinton and Al Gore did. But now the Democratic Party, by its vote on CAFTA, has become almost unanimously anti-free-trade, its numbers even larger than its anti-military votes. Hillary Clinton voted against CAFTA, reminding us not only of the limited appeal of the Dick Gephardt’s of this world, but of her bad instincts or bad ideas.

Michael Barone in RCP says this:

The bombings and attempted bombings in London have brought home to the American public that we face implacable enemies unwilling to be appeased by even the most emollient diplomacy. Yet, mainstream media coverage of Iraq has been mostly negative. But mainstream media no longer have a monopoly; Americans have other sources in talk radio, Fox News and the blogosphere. Bush’s presidency is still regarded as illegitimate by perhaps 20 percent of the electorate. But among the rest, the attempt to delegitimize him seems to be collapsing.

Do the numbers assuming that the 20% who think Bush illegitimate are all Democrats. 37% of voters in the last election were Democrats. Therefore, a majority of Democrats — 54% — think Bush is illegitimate according to this scenario. We were about to say how surprisingly large this number is, but, looking at the kooky and juvenile antics of leading Democrats today, we are really not that surprised after all.

Meg Kreikemeier in the Chicago Tribune:

On Nov. 5, Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC senior political analyst, said the following on “The McLaughlin Group”: “But the big problem the country now has, which is going to produce a serious discussion of secession over the next 20 years, is that the segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don’t pay for the federal government.

“Ninety percent of the red states are welfare client states of the federal government. They collect more from the federal government than they send in. New York and California, Connecticut, the states that are blue are all the states that are paying for the bulk of everything this government does … and the people in those states don’t like what this government is doing.”

Of course, as with most of what O’Donnell says, this is absolutely a wrong way to look at things. Meg Kreikemeier looks at the situation on a county by county basis. When you look at a map that we have previously displayed, it is amazing that O’Donnell got away with his canard for so long. It is pretty obvious in retrospect that the biggest Democratic strongholds in the big cities correlate pretty well with dependency on government:

From Bill Kristol:

Brad Joondeph, on the liberal website thinkprogress.org. Joondeph describes his experience as a summer associate at Hogan & Hartson 12 years ago, when John Roberts was his official “mentor.” He recalls of Roberts that “he could not have been nicer, more gracious, more encouraging. He offered mentoring advice to a snot-nosed, 24-year-old law student as if it were the most important part of his job.” Then Joondeph tells this anecdote:

“After returning to Stanford that fall, I was lucky enough to have my student note published in the Stanford Law Review. It was a rather presumptuous and self-righteous critique of the Supreme Court’s decision in Freeman v. Pitts, a school desegregation case from DeKalb County, Georgia. I argued that the Court was pulling the rug out from under Brown v. Board of Education by prematurely ending court-ordered desegregation remedies. As deputy solicitor general in the first Bush administration, Roberts had actually argued the Freeman case as amicus in support of the school district. I therefore (again, fairly presumptuously) sent him my note, in which I contended that, well, Roberts had been all wrong.

“A few weeks later, I received a two-page letter in response. Roberts wrote that the note was well researched and well written. (I was thrilled at the time, but I would now strongly disagree.) But he also offered a thoughtful critique of my analysis that was several paragraphs in length. This was more feedback than I had received from my professors in law school. “So I have nothing but a profound sense of respect for John Roberts: for his integrity, his intelligence, his humility, and his genuine human decency.

“All of that said, my best guess is that he would be a very conservative justice. And because he is so gifted and so decent a human being, he might become incredibly influential on the Court, moving it in ways that justices like Scalia and Thomas have been incapable. In short, he could ultimately be a progressive’s worst case scenario.”

The picture explained by Michelle Malkin and GOP Vixen.

Iowahawk, via LGF:

Make no mistake: no one should be fooled by the administration’s public relations efforts or ___JOHN ROBERTS___’s seemingly “moderate” appearance. ___JOHN ROBERTS___ has a record that suggests that ___HE___ would deny women the right to reproductive choice, stop important life-saving medical stem cell research by extending the Patriot Act to draft their unwanted fetuses, and turn these conscripted fetuses over to dangerous tax-supported ‘Creationist’ religious laboratories. The Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment, and America needs to know whether ___JOHN ROBERTS___ supports the GOP’s secret plan of a Rush Limbaugh Jesus army of unwanted, unquestioning fetus zombies who will be trained to urinate on the Korans of Guantanamo detainees.

John Tabin in the Spectator:

[H]e respects “vertical” stare decisis on abortion — the principle that lower courts must follow Supreme Court precedent. But that tells us nothing about his views on “horizontal” stare decisis, the idea that the Court should avoid overturning its own precedents. It is probable but not certain that, like Rehnquist, he would overturn Roe, for which many of the usual arguments for strong stare decisis do not apply; the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has certainly not promoted stability or predictability in the law. (On policy grounds, Roberts almost certainly opposes abortion; his wife was once Executive Vice President of Feminists for Life.)

Stuart Buck:

Justice Scalia said to a friend of mine that he and other Justices thought of John Roberts as far and away the best Supreme Court litigator in the country. I asked the friend why Justice Scalia said that, and (paraphrasing from my memory) the answer was something like this: “No matter how intense the questioning, Roberts is never flustered, and is always able to calmly answer any question whatsoever, while skillfully weaving in the substantive points that he wanted to make in the first place.”

And how about this as an indictment from the AP about Darth Roberts:

Roberts Has Backed Administration Policies

John G. Roberts has demonstrated strong backing for Bush administration policies, ruling against Geneva Conventions protections for detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in favor of keeping Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force records secret…..To liberals’ dismay, Roberts issued a dissent in a case involving the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act. The group People for the American Way said Roberts’ dissent indicated he may be ready to join the ranks of right-wing conservative judges who seek to severely limit congressional authority to protect the environment.

Scary.

It is impossible as an outsider to see no connection whatsoever between Chief Justice Rehnquist’s unexpected decision to remain on the court, and the elevation of his former law clerk John Roberts by President Bush. Professor William J. Stuntz of Harvard Law School in TNR:

Roberts and Bush appear to be cut from the same cloth. Bush is a bottom-line president who cares more about results than the supporting reasons. Roberts is a career litigator used to winning cases, not advancing theories — by all accounts intelligent, but without a reputation for flights of abstraction. He is less creative than Michael McConnell, another name often mentioned for the Supreme Court, but also more predictable than someone like McConnell, less likely to change his mind about premises and so end up with different conclusions.

In other words, more a Rehnquist than a Scalia. The current chief justice is famous for taking law clerks’ opinion drafts and cutting out all the reasoning; Rehnquist opinions often state the facts, state the Court’s conclusion, and go home. (Not so different from the typical answer at a Bush press conference.) One can barely imagine Justice Scalia doing that — the reasoning is what drives him, what he lives for.

If a Justice Roberts ends up following one of those two judicial models, it seems pretty clear which one he will choose: his former boss’s.

One thing is for sure in the unlikely event that Roberts were not confirmed: the value of being summa at Harvard and managing editor of the Harvard Law Review would go to zero — at least for conservatives.

In the post below, we said that Hollywood thinks it is anti-Bush, but is actually anti-American. This is an observation that can perhaps be applied to other groups as well.

From Captain Ed. Excerpt:

Now Judith Miller sits in jail because she won’t discuss her sources, and the New York Times wants to exploit the situation as much as possible. Sorry, but that’s Miller’s problem. The media created this issue by publishing Plame’s name — which never appears in Cooper’s notes. If the media wants the questions answered, then it will have to cooperate by uncovering its source(s) for the information. The only other way that this will ever come out is if the source admits to leaking the information, and short of torture, law enforcement agencies have no way to force that to happen. If the leaker keeps his or her mouth shut, no resolution will occur. That doesn’t indicate a cover-up, it demonstrates that we still can’t force people to testify against themselves. For those who can’t remember this, it’s in the Constitution, four amendments past the one that Miller and the Times claim as their prerogative to hide the wrongdoer — if in fact anyone can be cast as that.

The only people engaging in a cover-up are the media — the New York Times and Robert Novak. When they want this mystery solved, they’ll tell us who leaked the name. Until then, they’ll milk this for everything it’s worth to embarrass an administration they dislike.

The equivalent of the Rathergate memos is Cooper’s notes of his conversation with Rove — with this difference: the made-up Rathergate memos clumsily implicated George W. Bush in some questionable activity. The Cooper notes simply don’t say what the MSM lynch mob insist that they do.

There is almost nothing interesting about Wilson/Plame, aside from the new depths of degradation it reveals about the Old Media. Still, at this point we’d like to know Miller’s source for Plame’s name — it will only add to the farce if her source was a career Democrat at State or CIA.

We love to file these away for future use. Washington Times via Polipundit:

Census Bureau projections show significant population shifts over the next three decades. The share of Americans living in the Northeast and Midwest will fall from 42 percent to 35 percent of the population, while the South and West will rise from 58 percent to 65 percent.

Brookings demographer William H. Frey did a similar exercise a few months ago which we reported here.

In the course of arguing that Republicans owe a decent respect to the opinions of Democrats in the Wrestlemania that will be the Supreme Court confirmation process, Georgetown University Professor EJ Dionne says this:

Consider that since 1992 the Republican presidential vote has averaged only 44 percent and the vote for Republican House candidates has averaged roughly 48 percent.

We hope you’d give a failing grade if one of your students tried this bunkum — using old statistics (including Perot!) to give the misleading impression that the GOP and conservatism have not been in the ascendency for the last dozen years. Here’s one of our pieces on the subject, using a business metaphor, which we like to do from time to time. Here’s another good one, and another.

Here’s our point: using the “44 percent” figure is inflicting more torture on numbers than has ever taken place at Club Gitmo. To us, that reveals a lack of confidence from our opponents. Good.

Here’s what some Democrats are saying, via AP:

“To be meaningful, consultation should include who the president is really considering so we can give responsive and useful advice,” Kennedy said. Durbin said he “stressed the importance of finding a nominee in the political mainstream.” In a statement, the senator said he welcomed the White House effort “to reach out in a bipartisan manner and actively consult” with lawmakers from both parties.

We discussed the upcoming, weeks-long parade to the White House or Crawford here, and there are several reasons for it. We’d have a stream of maybe 12-15 leading jurists in for a chat, maybe a briefing before and a presser after and appearance of the Judge with the President for each one.

Make the opposition use its energy screaming that each judge was “outside the mainstream.” Get them to do to put out press releases 24/7 on each candidate and why s/he is a mortal threat to the survival of the nation, particularly minorities, women, the unarmed, the unkempt, and house pets.

15 would be a good number. 15 middle aged, lawyerly looking people, all MORTAL THREATS who are outside the mainstream. Perhaps 15 pictures would be worth 15 thousand words, and wear out and demoralize the competition as they struggle to new paroxysms of outrage with each one.