URLs Du Jour (8/1/2005)

Ah, we made it to August.

  • Hugh Hewitt points out some significant omissions in Senator "Chuck" Schumer's list of questions for Judge Roberts to answer before the Senate Judiciary Committee: nothing about Kelo (or eminent domain generally), nothing about Goodrich (or gay marriage, or the Full Faith and Credit clause generally). Looking on my own at Schumer's List, I don't see anything about Raich either; although there's a section about the Commerce clause. Comments Hugh:

    The left never seems to understand that their grandstanding highlights exactly those qualities which most disqualify them from power. Schumer wants attention to his questions and the hearings in which they will be asked? We can only hope that all the networks give him gavel to gavel coverage.
  • Continuing in the SCOTUS vein, also amusing is Power Line's evisceration of Howard Dean's brain-dead comments on the ideological provenance of the Kelo decision:

    The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is. We think that eminent domain does not belong in the private sector. It is for public use only.

    So that leaves us to wonder: does Dean know the dissenters in Kelo were Thomas, Scalia, O'Connor, and Rehnquist? If not, OK, he's an idiot. If so, he apparently thought his audience were idiots, and could be easily fooled by this faux-populism. Let's see, to whom was he speaking? … oh, the College Democrats of America. Hm.

  • And still continuing in the SCOTUS vein, Andrew at Confirm Them detects Senator Christopher Dodd hallucinating about the Privacy Clause of the Constitution.
  • But let us abjure partisanship for a bit; the folks at Cato show why the recently-passed Energy Bill is bad, and ditto for the Highway Bill and the Gun-liability legislation. All three had heavy Republican support, so it's pretty depressing for us folks who had briefly hoped, way back when, that the GOP could be trusted with the car keys. The one slightly good thing: my very own Senator, Judd Gregg, voted against the Highway Bill, unafraid to be on the small end of a 91-4 landslide. (My other very own senator, John Sununu, couldn't manage to make the vote.) And both Sununu and Gregg voted against the Energy Bill. So good on them.

    And (by the way) The Smartest Woman In The World agrees.

  • And, via Galley Slaves, the inspiring story of how the author of a series of dirty joke books turned into a certified 99.44% humor-free feminist. Well, maybe not that inspiring.

Last Modified 2012-10-26 10:14 AM EDT