"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that NASA Administrator Charles Bolden must have misspoken when he told Al Jazeera last month that one of his top priorities is to reach out to Muslim countries.
“That was not his task and that’s not the task of NASA,” Gibbs said.
Bolden either (a) accepts this public repudiation or (b) resigns.
Hey, since Bolden is a close personal friend of Smitty, maybe he could have a post-NASA career in blogging as our “space correspondent”!
by Smitty
Hotline On Call reports
The Senate Judiciary Committee will not vote Tuesday on the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, GOP aides said today.
GOP senators will use the ability of any committee member under the panel’s rules to put off a vote for one week, several aides said. They said committee GOPers want more time to review the nomination. Kagan returned written answers to questions for the record submitted by senators on Friday. “The committee will need time to review her responses” said a GOP staffer.
More on the scheduling implications at the link.
Elaine Donnelly at Big Peace fell short of endorsing Elena Kagan. Well short. Donnelly hammers Kagan’s testimony on the Witt case:
[Kagan’s] incoherent statement misrepresented the law and provided even more evidence that she has no professional interest in defending the military against legal attacks from civilian homosexual activists that she personally welcomed to Harvard Law School seminars several times.
After revisiting the testimony about Harvard recruiters, Donnelly concludes:
Members of the Senate need to take Kagan’s thin but instructive record seriously, and refuse to confirm her nomination to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Over at The Enterprise Blog, Douglas Smith (no relation) picks up the 2nd Amendment and pistol-whips the Kagan nomination:
The McDonald decision also underscores the importance of each nomination to the Supreme Court, and in particular the pending nomination of Elena Kagan. Already, many have raised questions regarding Kagan’s commitment to Second Amendment rights, citing her role in promoting gun control during her time in the Clinton White House and a memo she wrote as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall in which she stated that she was “not sympathetic” to a litigant’s claim that the District of Columbia had violated his right to bear arms.
The whole Second Amendment argument is a joke. The right to bear arms was as blatantly obvious to even the most casual citizen in 1783 as the use of English to compose the Constitution. The Second Amendment exists to ensure that the newly-minted Federal government couldn’t round up the weapons and engage in Chicago-style tyranny. Any navel-gazing nitwit trying to build castles in the air and say otherwise deserves to be ignored at best, and these Progressive justices shame themselves to say otherwise.
Finally, Senator Orrin Hatch, at NRO, reviews the abortion concern:
Ms. Kagan played a central role in developing and advancing the Clinton administration’s extreme position on abortion, including the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion. In a 1996 legislative-strategy memo, she labeled a “disaster” a proposed statement by a key medical group that there exist “no circumstances” in which partial-birth abortion is the only option. She drafted, and persuaded the group to adopt, language with a much more positive political spin. At her hearing, she offered the Judiciary Committee the implausible claim that she was merely trying to ensure that the medical group accurately expressed its own medical opinion.
In a 1997 legislative-strategy memo after President Clinton vetoed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, Ms. Kagan urged him to support substitutes offered by Democratic senators. This tactic was intended to siphon votes away from a veto override, and, because the substitutes would not pass, leave partial-birth abortion unlimited. She made this political recommendation, however, even though the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the substitutes were unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade. It appears that her personal or political views trumped her legal views.
So, irrespective of the kindly, engaging person Elena Kagan no doubt is in person, she’s as fit for the SCOTUS as, say, me. Her nomination represents an un-serious decision on the part of this Administration, and merits as much support as any of the idiotic, detrimental legislation currently moving through the Congressional digestive tract.
The extremism and wrongheadedness of this Administration should be met with a standing filibuster until next January.
But mainly Al-Qaeda terrorism:
Among the at least 64 people killed in the two devastating blasts that tore through outdoor gatherings in Uganda where hundreds of soccer fans were in the midst of watching the World Cup final was 25-year-old American Nate Henn. . . .
The selection of targets in the Ugandan capital of Kampala — a restaurant and a sports field where people were watching the game on large-screen TVs — ensured the bombs struck a broad mix of Ugandans and foreigners, including Americans. . . .
Al Shabaab, a fundamental Islamist group based in Somalia, today claimed responsibility for the attacks.
“We will carry out attacks against our enemy wherever they are,” Sheik Ali Mohamud Rage speaking from Mogadishu told The Associated Press.
“No one will deter us from performing our Islamic duty.”
So, with dozens of Africans and at least one American killed by terrorists in Kampala, guess who the NAACP decides to denounce?
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will propose a resolution this week condemning Islamic extremism racism within al-Qaeda the tea party movement.
The resolution, scheduled for a vote as early as Tuesday by delegates attending the annual NAACP convention in Kansas City, calls upon “all people of good will to repudiate the murderous terrorism racism of al-Qaeda the Tea Parties, and to stand in opposition to its drive to push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.” . . .
“I think a lot of people are not taking Islamic terrorism the tea party movement seriously, and we need to take it seriously,” said Anita Russell, head of the Kansas City chapter of the NAACP.
No matter what the problem, the NAACP’s solution is “blame whitey.”
Thanks to Bob Owens for this update on Crystal Mangum:
A Durham woman who falsely accused three Duke University athletes of rape four years ago will be in court Monday on a separate case in which she faces multiple charges, including attempted first-degree murder. . . .
Police said she assaulted her boyfriend, Milton Walker, set his clothes on fire in a bathtub and threatened to stab him.
University faculty to scream “raaaaacism” in 3, 2, 1 . . .
Yeah, I’m looking like a total chump, now that he’s guestblogging for Andrew Sullivan.
No word on what Weigel will have to add to the usual Sarah Palin obstetric conspiracy theories and Israel-bashing at Sully’s.
What next for Weigel? Guest-hosting the Alex Jones show?
UPDATE: Note Ace’s reaction, including the not-gonna-link-Sully-no-matter-what standard. Very few sites qualify for that extreme ostracism by Ace. Meanwhile, Weigel explains his Sully past. NTTAWWT.
Remember when Democrats declared “dissent was the highest form of patriotism”? Somebody forgot to explain to Ciro that dissenting about health care statistics is also patriotic:
(Via Big Government, Breitbart TV and Memeorandum.)
UPDATE: Dan Riehl has another video clip illustrating Rodriguez’s anger issues.
In order to drown out pro-life “sidewalk counselors” outside, the owner of Northern Illinois Women’s Center in Rockford was blaring WNTA-AM 1330 through loudspeakers. Kathleen Gilbert tells the rest of the story:
D.J. Doug McDuff’s scheduled talk show guest cancelled, and he opened the phone lines for comment.
Seeing his chance, Rockford pro-life veteran Kevin Rilott whipped out his cell phone and was on air within seconds, loud and clear outside the abortion centre where he was standing. Rilott took the opportunity to explain to McDuff and his listeners how the radio station, WNTA, was being used to silence pro-lifers’ attempt to help mothers in need.
McDuff, none too pleased, decided to take matters into his own hands. “God bless pro-lifers! God bless pro-lifers! God bless pro-lifers!” the D.J. shouted. . . .
The D.J. then gave Rilott airtime to explain how those who keep vigil outside the Rockford mill come “to offer love, help, and hope to mothers in need,” and to request prayer for mothers in need and an end to abortion. . . .
Read the rest. Evidently, the clinic owner really hates Christians:
“For years at this abortion mill we have seen a steady stream of vicious personal attacks, hatred for God, bigotry, racism, ridiculing people with HIV, and mocking of human life displayed in the windows of a so-called medical facility,” said Rockford pro-life advocate George Lambert.
Lambert lamented that “the local Rockford paper refuses to report about these attacks and our city council remains silent.”
Because, you know, that’s what it is:
The Obama administration’s recent move to drop rhetorical references to Islamic radicalism is drawing fire in a new report warning the decision ignores the role religion can play in motivating terrorists.
Several prominent counterterror experts are challenging the administration’s shift in its recently unveiled National Security Strategy, saying the terror threat should be defined in order to fight it. . . .
In the report, scheduled to be released this week, counterterrorism experts from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy argue that the U.S. could clearly articulate the threat from radical Islamic extremists “without denigrating the Islamic religion in any way.” . . .
[A]dministration officials have said that the use of inflammatory descriptions linking Islam to the terror threat feed the enemy’s propaganda and may alienate moderate Muslims in the U.S.
In the report, which was obtained by The Associated Press, the analysts warn that U.S. diplomacy must sharpen the distinction between the Muslim faith and violent Islamist extremism, identify radicalizers within Islamic communities and empower voices that can contest the radical teachings. . . .
“There is an ideology that is driving al-Qaida and its affiliates,” said Matt Levitt, one of the authors of the study on countering violent extremism.
We already knew that this “Don’t Call It Islamic Terrorism” policy was stupid, but it’s nice to have experts agreeing with common sense.