Iowahawk has the scoop in a message from the al Qaeda leader. Excerpt:

[T]he infidel progressives like to talk a good game. They’ll call you “freedom fighters” and “the resistance” and “Iraqi Minutemen.” But soon as you need some volunteers to take out a grade school full of collaborators, they’re like, “sorry dude, I’ve got to run off some International ANSWER fliers at Kinkos.”….

[T]he next time one of you chicken martyrs puts on a keffiya and starts babbling about “solidarity with the resistance,” remember this: just because we are planning to kill you last doesn’t make you our buddy.

Gee, just the other day we quoted an American young lady who said “I’m in solidarity with the courageous Iraqi resistance.” Sorry, dude.

This deliberate process of interviewing many judges, referred to below, could have an assembly line aspect to it. O’Connor, Rehnquist, then maybe Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens. Unlikely, of course, but this parading of judges does have that assembly line feel to it.

It is beginning to look as though the Supreme Court nominations are viewed by the Bush administration as a major set piece of the President’s second term, as reported in USA Today:

In his first response to questions about the vacancy since O’Connor’s surprise announcement Friday, Bush said he won’t rush a decision but wants her successor to be on the bench when the Supreme Court resumes work in October. He said he’s considering — “a good-sized” number of prospects. “I will begin to hone in on a handful of candidates over the course of the next few weeks,” he said. Then, he said, he will interview them himself.

So the game plan is to appear deliberate, consultative and reflective, and to spotlight a number of the leading candidates, since the news will profile them on the days of their visits to the White House or Crawford. The confirmation hearings would thus appear to take place largely in September, with the administration using the Court’s start date in October as a pressure point.

September should be a good month for TV advertising.

Jed Babbin has been eating red meat:

The liberals will suffer the most when — as is almost certain — Chief Justice Rehnquist also resigns and the President nominates a second judicial conservative. Howard Dean’s head may implode, others will spontaneously combust, and the rest will vanish into their psychiatrists’ offices. (I once recommended the purchase of Roche Pharmaceuticals and GlaxoSmithKline stock because they make Wellbutrin and Prozac. If you don’t buy them now, you really should die poor.) The libs, not Dubya, will suffer Confirmation Paralysis. It is thus precisely the right time to pull out all the stops, and accomplish some critical objectives.

For each liberal attack there must be a counterattack. Today we may learn from the Time magazine papers divulged to a grand jury that the source of the leak of Joe Wilson’s wife’s identity as a CIA agent was White House chief of staff Karl Rove. If it was Rove who leaked the story, the President and the Attorney General should defend Rove to the death for one simple reason: there was no crime committed. If it wasn’t, the Attorney General should order an end to this out of control investigation. And this would be a good time to go ahead — as publicly as possible — with the criminal investigation of Senators Rockefeller, Wyden and Durbin for their leak of the highly classified satellite program last December….

We don’t like the “new tone” business either. However, it seems clear that it is part of a conscious electoral strategy. If that is true, the private polling data must indicate that letting the frothers of the Left froth while appearing measured and moderate in tone is the superior path for winning elections. On that score, the reults seem clear and positive. So maybe we just have to put up with a poker strategy that, time and again, involves letting the opposition overplay their hand.

That may be effective, but it is incredibly frustrating, particularly in the age of the omnipresent media.

Brian Anderson in City Journal has a very helpful piece:

It’s worth understanding how our courts got into this mess, so we can see how imperative it is to get them out. The government by judiciary we now have is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. The original originalists, they imagined that a life-tenured, independent judiciary would merely interpret the law as the people’s elected representatives made it—including the supreme law embodied in the Constitution. But they would have no right to create law. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist: “The courts must declare the sense of the law, and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body.” For the Framers, that would be tyranny and should end in impeachment.

The Supreme Court took on the awesome powers it wields today with three big cases, at intervals of half a century.

The cases are Dred Scott, Lochner and Brown v. Board of Education.

All things considered, we’d rather be playing the Republican hand in the important nominations and confirmations coming up, even with the numerous GOP weak sisters in the Senate. The Democrats’ playbook is just so old and boring. The nominee is racist and extreme, will deprive women and minorities of fundamental rights — with quotes and decisions bent to fit the story line. This will be followed by an attempt to reframe the issue in some focused-grouped way, as the Dems frankly did a nice job with in the “Bolton as abuser” matter. Simultaneously there will be attempts to stage procedural delays, centered around some “critical” documents which the judge or the administration “stonewalls” on. Finally, there will be dramatic revelations and accusations by former associate of the judge at the last minute — a Thursday afternoon, if we had to guess — accompanied by calls to withdraw the nominee and/or postpone and vote.

How many times can you watch the same insipid movie without changing the channel?

Here’s a sentence we wrote in a post yesterday:

The objective of our Senate opponents will be to discredit and personally destroy the nominee to a swing vote seat.

We have no doubt that we are correct. Bork, Thomas, Owen, Brown, Pickering, Pryor, Bolton. Now whoever the President nominates to the Supreme Court in a few days will be characterized automatically as “extreme,” racist, outside the mainstream, and dirt will be dug up or manufactured by the Left to ruin the nominee and send a message to others. We’re used to this by now — but consider for a moment just how shocking this behavior is.

The United States has been becoming a more conservative country for a generation, and that trend picked up steam in the last dozen years, as Republicans have come to control the majority of state governments as well as Congress and the Presidency. You can like it, as we do, or you can dislike it, but it’s a fact, perhaps as much a fact of demographics and the ageing of the population as of anything else. Our point is this: the current trend towards conservatism in America is larger than any political party. It is the direction that the people have been heading for quite a while, and shouting simply is not going to change it.

We have always gotten a kick out of Ace’s parody of Howard Dean. In rough terms: “vote for my health care plan, you racist, sexist, homophobe, gun-toting red neck.” It contains more than a grain of truth.

In the stock market they say: the trend is your friend. As a rule you don’t make money betting against the general movement of the market. We have been in a bull market for conservatism for the most part since the days of Ronald Reagan. Again, you can like this or dislike it, but only a fool would invest without first understanding whether you are in a bull market or bear market.

Such simple wisdom seems absolutely lost on many Democratic Party leaders, from Dean to Kennedy to Durbin to Pelosi to Leahy. Every conservative judge or policy is a mortal threat to the country, another extremist ploy by the extremist Republicans. No matter that the national audience votes conservative, and becomes larger and more conservative as the years pass. They scream at the tide to stop rising.

The most bitter fruit of this hapless tactic is the poisoning of the minds of many Democratic Party members. Because the Party leaders have shown no restraint in their behavior and words, they have legitimzed a vast cadre of nut-jobs of the Left: a third of Democrats now believe that the United States is a bad country, “basically unfair and discriminatory.”

Probably we are wrong, but we feel that the coming Supreme Court nominations represent some kind of dividing line. If the Supreme Court gets more conservative, it is by no means the end of America; everyone except the hard Left believes this. Under the Constitution the President gets to pick Supreme Court nominees; it’s just the way things work. There should be no drama at all in a Supreme Court confirmation. Once again, however, we expect some Democrats to interpret “advise and consent” to mean “defeat by any means necessary.”

There is something diffrerent about this time, however. Perhaps it is that the Democratic meta-game is so visible now; you can even write the script yourself, down to precisely when the most Explosive New Charges! will be released for maximum drama and exposure in the complicit MSM, as Hugh Hewitt has done. Perhaps it is that the Democratic members of the Gang of 14 are deeply troubled that the Left of their party is driving them off a cliff. Perhaps we’re just tired of watching re-runs. Whatever the reason, we have the feeling that this time it may be different.

Of course, given the linguini spines of many Senate Republicans, we never discount the possibility that George Lackoff will be able to re-frame the issues surrounding the nominee and bring certain GOP senators to tears.

The more we think about this previous post, and secondarily, this one too, as well as the Rasmussen poll question below, the more troubled we are. A third of Democrats — 32% — think America is a bad country:

82% of Republicans think the United States of America is “generally fair and decent.” We think a large number of Americans would have agreed with this statement during much of our history. Only 50% of Democrats agree with that statement today, and a third of Democrats (32%) believe that our country is “basically unfair and discriminatory.”

Here are our questions for the 32%:

– if you believe the country is unfair and discriminatory, what do you think about the men and women who fight for the country? They kill in the name and for the cause of such unfairness and discrimination.
– are they not pigs and dogs, stupid or boorish or simple-minded folk who idiotically follow some evil leader out of misplaced loyalties or their own evil intent?
– are not the statements of Howard Dean (“evil” Republicans), Dick Durbin (“Hitler…gulag…Pol Pot”), and commentators like Jane Smiley (“unteachable ignorance” of the red states) reflections of the view that America is itself some kind of gulag of the coerced and the stupid?

The last point is the heart of the matter. If America herself is “basically unfair and discriminatory,” and you are one of the 32% who believe that, then there must be an evil coterie who keep America from changing into a good country. So if you are one of the 32% who believe America is bad, not only do you believe America is bad and that our soldiers are bad, or doing bad things, but you must believe that there is a majority, or power elite, that is so bad, so evil, and so powerful, that they prevent the country from changing as you would like.

A country cannot long endure if a third of its citizens believe it is a bad country. What happens to a political party, a third of whose members believe that their nation is a bad place, remains to be seen.

Here she is (HT: Gerry Daly):

As noted in a previous post, we’d nominate Janice Rogers Brown in a heartbeat. She’s just been confirmed by the Senate, for goodness sakes, and has gone through a recent FBI investigation. Further, the nomination would replace a white woman with a minority woman, making for very bad TV for her opponents, who have already been reduced to inanities like the idea that she would repeal child labor laws. She was explicitly covered by the agreement of the Gang of 14, which, theoretically, could exempt her from filibuster (hah!). Did we mention that she has just been confirmed by the Senate, or that she has just been confirmed by the Senate?

We are amused when we read endorsements by blogger-lawyers of great legal scholars for nomination to the Court. Guys, being a Supreme Court justice is not rocket science. Sure, you have to be a good lawyer, a student of judicial history, and a clear thinker, but following the Constitution should not be an arcane art. If it has become so, that is a problem whose solution should be greater simplicity, not complexity.

Getting a reliable conservative on the Court is all about politics. Period. Any conservative is going to be called an “extremist” whose views are well “outside the mainstream,” no matter who they are and what they believe or have written. The so-called front runners — Luttig, Roberts, McConnell — might as well be Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, since these names seem to get tossed around with abandon now. The reality doesn’t matter; they could be the finest legal scholars in the land. If their backgrounds are pristine, then the Left will make things up — the objective of the opponents is to keep a reliable conservative off the Court, and no weapon is out of bounds. To those who say Bush can get any nominee he likes confirmed, we say: Voinovich, Graham, Chafee, Snowe, DeWine, Warner, and God only know what other weak sister who can be reduced to tears by the big, bad Democrats.

We scratch our head when we read the whitebread Republicans who seem to think there is going to be some sense of propriety about this process; this confirmation process will have almost nothing to do with the competence and expertise of the nominee. Today’s situation is Bork to the nth power, Bolton on steroids. The objective of our Senate opponents will be to discredit and personally destroy the nominee to a swing vote seat. There are two plausible grounds for our opponents’ opposing Brown: (a) she hasn’t served on the circuit court for more than a month (though she was on the California Supreme Court for nearly a decade, and her situation would parallel Souter’s); and (b) while she was okay for a circuit court, that particular Senate confirmation is a lesser imprimatur than what is required for confirmation to the Supreme Court — she is thus too radical for the highest court. That is Joe Biden’s argument: “totally different ballgame“. Thus the list of attacks on her a lot shorter than what the Left will invent about some fresh meat that the President might serve up.

There is a third line of attack by the opposition, and we expect it to be used against Brown as it was against Bolton and Thomas: SHOCKING NEW ALLEGATIONS!!! Somebody from Brown’s past will likely accuse Judge Brown of misconduct, perhaps relating to events conveniently decades old. The MSM will go wild. Brown’s very recent confirmation by the Senate should help diffuse the credibility of this sort of faux Perry Mason moment. In any event, this tactic is to be anticipated whoever is nominated.

We’ll conclude on an upbeat note. David Wissing is running a contest for Supreme Court nominees — who, when selected, and when confirmed. We laughed when we saw this entry:

Hillary Clinton
Nominated July 11
Confirmed July 12

UPDATE

We found Peter Kirsanow’s NRO discussion of Judge Brown to be particularly helpful.

You keep doing the same things, yet you have less power. It must be maddening. Polipundit:

New York had 43 electoral votes. Now it has 31.
Pennsylvania had 29 electoral votes. Now is has 21.
Michigan had 21 electoral votes. Now it has 17.
Illinois had 26 electoral votes. Now it has 21.
New Jersey had 17 electoral votes. Now it has 15.
Massachusetts had 14 electoral votes. Now it has 12.

These were the large six states that gave Kennedy their electoral votes in 1960 and his “victory.” In 1964, they had 150 electoral votes. Now, these same six account for 117 electoral votes. That is a decline of nearly 30%.

In 2010, New York will lose another 2 seats, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, one seat apiece. These six states will lose another 6 electoral votes. That will take them down to 111.

That is a decrease of 35%. Life is rough if you are a Democrat today.

The piece notes that John Kerry would have won the last election if the electoral map of 1964 were still operative.

The first thing we want to say about the Democracy Corps poll is that it looks fairer to us than most polls we have analyzed. We haven’t compared every jot and tittle, but we have looked at things like the balance of Democrat and Republicans, the 2004 voting preferences of those interviewed (48/46 Bush), liberal versus conservative, and other matters. We specifically looked at internals such as church attendance, and found them to be quite similar to the exit poll results (we have also been critical of the exit polls, but that is another matter). The integrity of the poll’s internals compares very favorably with the tripe put out by CBS / New York Times, and others, which often appear to skew the demographics to produce results consistent with the pre-chosen stories.

The poll says that Americans are not happy about the war in Iraq (56% say not worth the cost), and are displeased with the economy (60%), with 48% strongly feeling that way. The poll also says that Republicans rank better on security and defense than Democrats, one of the several reasons that the Democrats have gained no ground, but rather have lost popularity as they have increased their attacks on the US military and the war. Here is one of the charts illustrating the point:

Note the cliff that the Democratic Party has fallen off since the November election. It looks to us like the relentless negativity and obstructionism of congressional Democrats has lowered the party’s positives and increased its negatives, for a net negative swing of 11 points since election 2004. Gee, maybe some of the negative sentiments of the electorate about the war and the economy come from the relentless negativity of elected Democrats and their media allies.

But the most unusual aspect of the poll is one we have seen time and again from polling organizations, and we can’t make hide nor hair of it.

In every single poll, including the one conducted moments before actual balloting in November 2004, Republicans lose control of Congress. The Democrats are always ahead, according to what people say, always, always, always. But they always lose. What on earth is going on?

It is tautological that actual Republican voters are underpolled in this and almost every major poll, since the respondents consistently state a preference for a Democratic congress, and consistently elect a Republican one. That is one systematic error that probably could be corrected by changing the number of “strong Republicans” (24% out of 36% total), or by some other appropriate means to reflect reality. As we have previously noted, 81% of Bush supporters were highly enthusiatic voters, versus the two thirds figure that the Carville poll uses.

The other element that the polls do not measure is Democrat vote fraud, endemic in urban strongholds, as we have discussed. The best method of dealing with this, in our opinion, is not polling at prisons, morgues, graveyards or pet cemetaries.

Conclusion

We think the Carville poll shows pretty clearly that Democrats are corkscrewing themselves into an even deeper hole by their relentless defeatism, negativity, bashing of the military, and obstructionism. We frankly don’t understand the negative views of the economy, since a GDP growth rate of 3.8% and unemployment rate of 5.1% or so are about as good as it gets. We further think that a couple of the biggest questions in the country were not even addressed by the poll. We would have been interested to get results on whether people believe, for example, that each party is strong in its support of American family values, our military, and people of faith. Those might have been some interesting and important results.

We wrote about the fraud in East St. Louis early in the year, and Gateway Pundit reports now that there have been convictions of the Democratic Party officials involved in the fraud. A trial for attempted murder will also take place.

Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker has written that approximately a quarter of the Democratic vote comes from African Americans. That estimate is certainly consistent with the electoral map, which shows an intense concentration of Democratic votes in a small number of urban areas, as we have noted on many occasions:

It is obvious to us that that there may well be a greater number of minorities indicted and convicted in these voter fraud schemes, as they come to be increasingly prosecuted. The prosecutions themselves have become almost inevitable as the frauds have moved from the “vote early and often” stage to a frenzy in which the dead and their pets try to vote twice or more — this is the bitter fruit of Democratic desperation at the polls. So we expect some charges of racism to be raised by the usual suspects, and we might add that “usual suspects” is perhaps itself an opportune phrase. However, to all the honest and upstanding election officials, of whatever persuasion, hue, bias and predeliction, we offer a simple solution to nasty government inquiries, and a timely one at that:

Ace dealt with this in some clever posts, (eg, “I love the America that can be,” but not the one that actually is). Michael Barone raises it today from the perspective of the Rove comments and the polling data. Here is the Rasmussen question he cites, showing that fully 32% of Democrats apparently think America is a bad country (“unfair and discriminatory”):

One reason that the Democrats are squawking so much about Rove’s attack on “liberals” is that he has put the focus on a fundamental split in the Democratic Party — a split among its politicians and its voters….

University and media elites, as Thomas Sowell writes in his forthcoming “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” promote a version of history in which all evils are perpetrated by the United States and the West and in which Third World tyrants are assumed to be the voice of virtuous victims. These elites fail to notice that slavery was a universal institution until opposed only by altruists in the West, in late 18th century Britain and 19th century America.

It comes naturally to those liberal politicians whose worldview is set by these elites to suppose that Saddam’s Iraq was the land of happy kite-flyers portrayed in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and that, as Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin said in a carefully prepared speech, American actions in Guantanamo are comparable to acts of the Nazis, Soviets and Khmer Rouge.

It comes naturally to Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean to proclaim that Saddam Hussein should be presumed innocent pending trial but that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay should be consigned to jail for offenses with which he has not even been charged.

Half the Senate Democrats attended the Washington premiere of Moore’s movie and laughed and cheered its ridicule of Bush and denunciation of American policy….

Disliking your country would appear a dead-end street for a party that wants to be a presidential majority. We’ll see what happens.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Durbin was spot on in his assessment of Guantanamo. That’s why he was so roundly attacked. He told the truth. And his message is of vital importance; the United States is better than this.

The issue of whether Durbin’s rhetoric crossed a line is small potatoes compared with the undeniable truth that American treatment of its prisoners has crossed many, many lines — of morality, of international law, of practical benefit.

But instead of discussing what goes on at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other prison camps, the right would prefer to get into a senseless argument about whether “we” are better than the Nazis or Saddam Hussein or the Soviets or Pol Pot or whomever a critic of Guantanamo might raise as a comparison. It’s a tactic the group running Washington now has used again and again: They’re quite deliberately changing the subject — from Guantanamo to words spoken on the Senate floor.

It’s not too late, as Durbin said of Bush in his speech: The senator should stop apologizing and keep up the criticism of the hellhole America’s military has created at Guantanamo.

Dick Durbin has done us all a favor by bringing clarity to the issue of the war. In our opinion, those who see American military the way Durbin does, or who claim to be undecided, do not want America to be victorious. To us, it’s really that simple.

Sounds to us like a pretty good reason to nominate him. Bloomberg:

[Senator Edward] Kennedy, 73, said he believes that the consideration on Rehnquist’s replacement should be more than just “replacing one right-winger for a right-winger.” Still, the Senate debate on any Rehnquist replacement would “clearly” be much different than the discussion about a nominee who would tip the ideological balance of the court. “It’s clear it’s going to have a significant impact” on the Senate debate that “Rehnquist is leaving and not” one of the court’s moderates, the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview.

He added that he thinks that two sitting justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, “would be completely troublesome” as nominees. He ruled out any possibility of Thomas being selected, while acknowledging that Scalia might be harder to defeat.

This should be some gooood TV.

Not always, but usually, we deal with the inanity and insanity of the girlie-man Americans, and wacko-left Democrats simply by making fun of them. After all, they’re losers, and they have been losing for over a decade now — badly, at every level of government. We understand their childish rage, and smile, remembering our own kids when they were two years old. (We hasten to add that we include a number of Republicans in the mix — they are the ones seen putting a “maverick” pin in their lapels for their MSM appearances.) We have ceased to take these people seriously as thinkers or moral arbiters — though we take them very seriously in the sense that a cornered rat is capable of doing anything to survive.

Yet their outrageous words and actions do wound many serious and thoughtful Americans. Powerline has reprinted a couple of emails from thoughtful readers who take the clowns’ words to heart, and are appropriately outraged. We suggest you read the comments.

We wrote about this in a big prior piece, but here it is in all its simplcicity in a Dick Morris column in the Hill:

According to The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, the number of “turnover” districts — “those voting for a House member of one party and a presidential candidate of the other” — has shrunk from 110 in 1996 to 86 in 2000 to only 59 in 2004.

The Senate would realign 62-38 if every state elected senators from the same party as the presidential candidate they supported, and nine Republicans and 16 Democrats would be defeated. But if we refine the calculations further and eliminate the swing states, which went narrowly for Bush or John Kerry in 2004, we have 3 Republicans from overwhelmingly Democratic states and 11 Democrats from states Bush carried handily.

The Republicans in deep-blue states are Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, which Kerry won by 54-45, and Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, which Kerry won by 60-39.

The Democrats who represent bright-red states are Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas (Bush carried it by 54-45), Evan Bayh of Indiana (Bush 60-39), Mary Landrieu of Louisiana (Bush 57-42), Max Baucus of Montana (Bush 59-39), Ben Nelson of Nebraska (Bush 66-33), 2002’s narrow escapee Tim Johnson of South Dakota (Bush 60-39), Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota (Bush 60-36) and Jay Rockefeller and Byrd of West Virginia (Bush 56-43.)

Define the terms as you like, but increasingly there is a Conservative party and a Liberal party, with a few social issues capable of flip-flopping some libertarian minded folk. The lines are being redrawn pretty clearly, and it’s about time. Part of the reason that the center-right blogosphere goes absolutely nuts over the transgressions of the MSM is that the Old Media are almost totally of the Liberal party. This not only gives them a prism to view the world which is maddening to conservatives who do not share their view of what is normative, but it causes them to ignore huge and important stories, of which this is one of the largest.

David Broder, anointing McCain as Senate leader. He finds McCain’s “third way” approach very appealing.

To be sure, McCain was only one of 14 senators — seven from each party — who forged an agreement to clear three of the roadblocked circuit court nominees at once, shelve two others, and reserve the option of future filibusters only for “exceptional circumstances.” And the deal forged in McCain’s office probably would not have been possible without the support of such Senate elders as Republican John Warner and Democrat Robert Byrd.

But no one else in the negotiating group has McCain’s national stature, and no one else is a likely presidential contender three years from now. So, while such would-be candidates as George Allen of Virginia and Sam Brownback of Kansas lined up behind Frist, McCain took the harder road and helped organize the bipartisan effort that averted the looming crisis.

He did that knowing he would incur the wrath of the conservative activists who want no barriers placed before their favorites for possible vacancies on the Supreme Court. But contrary to myth, the heroes of the far right rarely win presidential nominations — as witness the fate of Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson, among others.

If we are not mistaken, none of the gentlemen immediately above was ever elected to any office whatsoever, making them unfair comparisons with professional politicians.

But our central point is this: McCain is the most super duper Republican that David Broder can imagine. What is that worth? If the choice in 2008 were Hillary versus McCain, is there a probability above 0% that Broder would support McCain?

ADDENDUM

We rather prefer a non-third-way approach, as the WSJ helpfully outlined today:

Especially in the wake of this deal, our advice is the same as it was after Election Day last year. If Chief Justice William Rehnquist retires, promote Associate Justices Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, and replace him with a distinguished conservative jurist such as Michael Luttig, Ted Olson, Michael McConnell, Sam Alito, or for that matter Miguel Estrada. The President is granted the power to nominate judges under the Constitution because he is the only official elected by the entire nation. He shouldn’t cede that authority to 14 Senators in desperate search of political cover.

Actually 2030. Here’s a presentation by demographer William H. Frey, as reported by Ron Brownstein. Excerpt:

In 2000 and 2004, Bush won all 11 states of the old Confederacy, plus Oklahoma and Kentucky. In those two elections it netted him 168 electoral college votes. That meant Democrats had to win about 73% of the remaining votes to secure a majority — a hurdle they found a little too high each time.

Frey projects that those 13 Southern states would cast 173 electoral college votes after 2010, and account for 186 after the 2030 census. If Republicans can still sweep the South at that point, Democrats would need to win a daunting 77% of the remaining votes to construct a majority.

Here are the maps showing the unfortunate demographic trends for Democrats:

From the Frey pdf:

When Richard Nixon was elected to his second term in 1972, the collective Sun Belt states held only a 4-vote edge in the 538-vote Electoral College. Nixon’s advisors showed shrewd demographic foresight when they launched their well-known “Southern Strategy.”

By the time George W. Bush got reelected last year, the Sun Belt Electoral College advantage grew to 88. And if the new projections are on target, this advantage will rise to 146 votes after the 2030 census. The ongoing decline in fortunes for the nation’s “establishment” states as they lose clout to what was thought of as the “periphery” is fairly dramatic. Between now and 2030, Texas and Florida will gain another eight and nine new electors, respectively. During the same period, New York will lose six electors while Pennsylvania and Ohio will each lose another four….

Could Zager and Evans have been thinking about the Democratic Party?

Tolstoy was wrong, at least about the Democratic Party. We’ve explained that 3-4 million Democrats voted for George Bush in 2004. Time after time, the stories of the changelings are the same. Here’s one from the New York Sun quite similar to that of the fellow who gets our hat tip, and to so many more that we’ve heard. A bit from the Sun:

I didn’t have the foresight to figure it out in eighth grade when paleoconservatives backed Barry Goldwater. I supported LBJ who, we were told, would keep us out of war. It didn’t happen years later when the neo-conservatives switched to Ronald Reagan, the man who brought us back to a stronger sense of ourselves (after the disastrous term of Mr. Carter) and, at the same time, helped defeat an utterly despicable empire many of us assumed was unbeatable. But throughout this time, like some deep-seated neurosis, I had a nagging sense that something was off — I just couldn’t articulate it. There were signs (aren’t there always?) … the most obvious: I kept voting for Democratic candidates (McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis), but I was secretly relieved when they lost. The reason? I didn’t think they’d make good presidents. So why, you may ask, did I vote for them in the first place? Why did I hold on to this voting pattern as if it were an addiction? The simple answer: The power of family and upbringing is that strong.

If it has taken you over thirty years of reflection to switch, and the Democratic Party today has “even more odious people” than those named above as leaders, MoveOn.org is the wrong approach to getting you back into the fold.