J's Cafe Nette

Archive for May 24th, 2007

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Please welcome Barb from The Barb Wire, who will be doing postings on faith-issues.

She has her own blog and will be cross-posting her posts from the Barb Wire to here when she feels she has a good post we’d all be interested in reading.

Please give her a big welcome!

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Byron York of National Review gives his take on the interrogation of Monica Goodling, late of the Justice Dept., yesterday:

Those were significant issues. But they weren’t enough to capture the attention of some committee Democrats, for whom there were more important questions to consider. Questions like: Where did Monica go to law school?

The short answer is Regent University Law School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. The longer answer was provided by newly-elected Tennessee Democratic Rep. Stephen Cohen. Cohen had apparently read Wednesday morning’s edition of the Los Angeles Times, which described Regent this way:

Regent University claims 150 past and present members of the Bush administration among its alumni. Accredited by the American Bar Assn., the law school boasts of a “distinctive” Christian-based mission “to bring to bear the will of our Creator, Almighty God, upon legal education and the legal profession,” according to its website.

A quick student of the Times, Cohen asked Goodling, “The mission of the law school you attended, Regent, is to bring to bear upon legal education and the legal profession the will of almighty God, our creator. What is the will of almighty God, our creator, on the legal profession?”

Goodling seemed perplexed. “I’m not sure that I could define that question for you,” she said.

“Did you ask people who applied for jobs as [assistant U.S. attorneys] anything about their religion?”

“No, I certainly did not.”

“Ever had religion discussions come up?”

“Not to the best of my recollection.”

Cohen pressed. Hasn’t the Justice Department hired an unusually large number of graduates of Regent?

“I think we have a lot more people from Harvard and Yale,” said Goodling.

“That’s refreshing,” said Cohen, a graduate of the University of Memphis School of Law. “Is it a fact — are you aware of the fact that in your graduating class 50 to 60 percent of the students failed the bar the first time?”

At that point, hisses and hoots began to be rise from the Republican side of the dais, and, for just a moment at least, 2141 Rayburn sounded a bit like the House of Commons. Goodling assured Cohen that she had passed the bar the first time around.

What was particularly odd about the moment, at least for a hearing not devoted to the state of U.S schools, was that it was the second time the subject of higher education had come up in the space of just a few minutes. Earlier, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was very concerned that Goodling had asked about the political leanings of a job seeker named Seth Adam Meinero, “a graduate of Howard University, one of the top, outstanding law schools in the nation.” (Rep. Cohen did not protest, even though Howard’s bar-passing statistics don’t measure up to Regent’s.) Goodling said she regretted making a “snap judgment” about Meinero’s supposed political leanings, although she stressed that Meinero ultimately got the job he was seeking.

Rep. Jackson Lee also caused a few observers to scratch their heads when she opened her questioning of Goodling this way: “Allow me just to simply begin a series of questions, Ms. Goodling, and I would ask that they — your answers — be as cryptic and as brief as possible, however truthful, because we do have a shortened period of time.”

“Cryptic?” whispered one reporter. “Did she say cryptic? I think she did.”

Indeed she did. But Goodling did not follow Rep. Jackson Lee’s directions. In fact, her answers were quite clear and direct.

That is, when she got the opportunity to answer the questions put to her. Later in the hearing, Jackson Lee, by then taking a temporary turn in the chairman’s seat, had to restrain fellow Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, who was so anxious to question Goodling that he seemed uninterested in her answers.

“So you all bypassed a chief of [the Civil Division] and went to somebody who had no experience in management simply because they were a liberal?” Ellison asked Goodling.

“No, not at all,” she answered. “There were other reasons involved in the decision.”

“Now — “

“To clarify, we — “

“No, I don’t need a clarification,” Ellison said. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Well, I would like to complete my answer.”

“Well, I don’t need an answer.”

“Be cryptic”? “Well, I don’t need an answer”? That’s why I used the word “interrogation” in the post. This is a wild goose hunt and may catch the wild goose, but it seems they really don’t want to hear everything that is pertinent to this investigation.

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According to this article snakebites are supposed to be on the rise this year.

“With the increase in reported snake activity and the advent of warmer climatic conditions, we may be witnessing the start of a very busy snakebite season. We have worked very hard as an organization to help ensure hospitals are stocked with adequate supplies of antivenom,” said Jackie Beltrani, Director of Institutional Sales and Specialty Marketing for Fougera. “We are confident that in partnership with the poison control centers we will be able to meet the challenges of the 2007 snakebite season.”

I hate snakes! I don’t go close enough to them to find out if they’re venomous or not.

A few years ago our neighbor had the creek that ran between our properties filled with a culvert and covered with dirt so he’d have more lawn. On the first scoop of dirt the city workers pulled up was a copperhead. Thankfully, I wasn’t home at the time or I would have died of sheer fright.

Did I mention I hate snakes? I guess if I decide to walk the north quarter of an acre I’ll have to carry a loaded .22 to shoot off the head of any snake I see near me.

I hate snakes.

Here’s an addendum to the story:

CAIRO, Egypt — Customs officers at Cairo’s airport on Thursday detained a man bound for Saudi Arabia who was trying to smuggle 700 live snakes on a plane, airport authorities said.

The officers were stunned when a passenger, identified as Yahia Rahim Tulba, after being asked to open his carry-on bag, told them it contained live snakes.

Tulba opened his bag to show the snakes to the police and asked the officers, who held a safe distance, not to come close. Among the various snakes, hidden in small cloth sacks, were two poisonous cobras.

The Egyptian said he had hoped to sell the snakes in Saudi Arabia. Police confiscated the snakes and turned Tulba over to the prosecutor’s office, accusing him of violating export laws and endangering the lives of other passengers.

According to the customs officials, Tulba claimed the snakes are wanted by Saudis who display them in glass jars in shops, keep them as pets or sell them to research centers.

The value of the snakes was not immediately known.

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I wonder how he’s managed to not have a stroke if this is the type of “commenting” he does.

Thanks to Outside the Beltway for the video.

Special Hat Tip to Sister Toldjah <):)

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The Captain has a post about domestic terrorists.

He does his intro and then posts this angry letter by the sister of the one charged with terrorism:

MY BROTHER IS considered one of the biggest domestic terrorists in the country. You probably haven’t heard of him, and I think that’s odd. After all, he’s dangerous. He’s trying to overthrow our country. He “doesn’t like our freedoms,” or so President Bush has said of terrorists in general, so I suppose that applies to my brother too.

Let me tell you a little bit about him. He likes the History Channel. He’s a Trekkie. He cried (in secret) at the corny 1980s movie “Turtle Diary.” He’s good at fixing things. And, most important, he has devoted his life to stopping animals’ suffering. To this end, he has broken the law. He crept into animal laboratories to free dogs. He dismantled corrals to release wild mustangs. He impersonated a fur buyer to film the treatment of minks. He put himself between whales and whalers despite warnings that his boat would be impounded and that he would be jailed. And nearly 10 years ago, he burned down a horse slaughterhouse in Redmond, Ore. It is for this final act that the U.S. government considers him among the ranks of Osama bin Laden, Eric Rudolph and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. …

Don’t let me give you the impression that I think arson is something to be taken lightly. I do not. The irony is rich in this case: I was a San Francisco firefighter for 13 years. I was angry and dismayed that my brother chose arson as a route to stop animal suffering. But “a classic case of terrorism”?

If he hadn’t set fire to the slaughterhouse he wouldn’t be considered a terrorist. I wouldn’t like to see horses slaughtered either, but I wouldn’t think to burn the place down.

Read the rest of the story here.

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The US Military identified the remains of the US Soldier found in the Euphrates River as PFC Joseph Anzack, Jr.

The military confirmed Thursday that the body found a day earlier in the Euphrates River south of Baghdad was that of Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr., who had been missing since militants ambushed his unit nearly two weeks ago.

A commanding officer identified the remains recovered from the river, but DNA tests were still pending, military officials told Anzack’s family.

“They told us, ‘We’re sorry to inform you the body we found has been identified as Joe,”‘ the soldier’s aunt, Debbie Anzack, said Wednesday. “I’m in disbelief.”

How it breaks my heart to hear of any of our heroes killed over there, and how I sympathize with those who carry the burden of notifying the families of the lost.

Rest in peace, PFC Anzack, and may God comfort your family in the knowledge you will all be reuninted one day never to be separated again.

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I don’t watch “The View” but I read there was a catfight between sweet Rosie O’Donnell and Elizabeth Hasselbeck. See it for yourself:

This is the video that started it all:

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Bob Shrum, political adviser to many Democrats including Al Gore and John Kerry, started out before the 2004 campaign as a supporter of John Edwards.

That soon changed, as this story in The New Republic shows:

Shrum discovered Edwards during the North Carolinian’s first Senate campaign in 1998. Shrum writes that, after his encounter with Edwards, he telephoned his business partner and declared, “I think I just met a future President of the United States.” But that view would change dramatically.

Shrum went on advising Edwards for several years, including as Edwards was contemplating his vote on the fall 2002 Iraq war resolution. In the one passage of the book already widely leaked, Shrum recounts how he and other political advisers pushed Edwards into a vote for the resolution that Edwards–and, even more so, his wife, Elizabeth–didn’t want to cast. The episode didn’t make Shrum look great. But the real damage is to Edwards, who comes across as a cipher taking orders from his handlers. As Shrum puts it: “[H]e was the candidate and if he was really against the war it was up to him to stand his ground. He didn’t.”

It goes on to infer Edwards really didn’t want to vote for the Iraq war but let his advisers tell him how to vote.

Shrum decided to go with Kerry. By now, he was coming to see Edwards as a lightweight–”a Clinton who hadn’t read the books,” as he puts it. Edwards didn’t take the news well. Shrum writes that, in a dramatic early 2003 phone call, Edwards told him: “I can’t believe you would do this to me and my family. I will never, ever forget it, even on my deathbed.” The relationship has been poisoned ever since.

That surely helps to explain why No Excuses repeatedly portrays Edwards as a hyper-ambitious phony. Nowhere is that clearer–and more startling–than in a passage recounting Kerry’s first meeting with Edwards during the summer 2004 running-mate selection process. Kerry had qualms about Edwards from the start, Shrum writes, but grew

even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he’d never told anyone else–that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he’d do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade’s ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before–and with the same preface, that he’d never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn’t pick Edwards unless he met with him again.

It’s a stunning story–enough so to strain credulity. When I asked one person close to Edwards about it, he argued that Shrum’s account makes no sense because Edwards had publicly recounted similar versions of the funeral home story before–and thus wouldn’t possibly have claimed on either occasion that he was telling it for the first time. The person cites a 2003 Boston Globe story in which Edwards’s pollster, Harrison Hickman, recalls warning Edwards that his first run for the Senate could be a nasty experience: “And John looked at me and said, ‘If you’ve ever had to get up on a medical examiner’s table and hug your son goodbye, you know that there’s nothing worse that can happen to you,’” Hickman recalled. Whether this disproves Shrum’s account will be up to readers to decide. (An Edwards campaign spokesman adds that, as with other instances in the book, Shrum wasn’t present and is relaying secondhand information.)

It has to be difficult for a parent to lose a child, but for that parent to tell the most sacred secrets of that moment to a virtual stranger for the sake of demonstrating his ability to be a Vice Presidential candidate is something beyond the pale to me.

But the two men didn’t coexist happily. The Kerry campaign was upset that Edwards didn’t use more aggressive rhetoric on the campaign trail, Shrum writes. And Shrum portrays Edwards as not entirely ready for prime time. In a prep session before Edwards’s one debate with Dick Cheney, Shrum writes, “Edwards came across as unsure and nervous.” The session adjourned so Edwards could spend more time reading his briefing books. Shrum writes that Kerry later told him “that Edwards called [Kerry] before the debate in a state of ‘panic.’ He was worried; maybe he wasn’t ready; could he pull this off? Kerry, who thought Edwards was suffering a peculiar but baffling case of stage fright, told his running mate that he’d … do a great job.” (Though Kerry was ultimately disappointed in Edwards’s performance, Shrum writes.)

Shrum says that, in the end, Kerry “wished that he’d never picked Edwards, that he should have gone with his gut” and selected Dick Gephardt. And the feelings between Kerry and Edwards seem fairly mutual. After Kerry reached out to Edwards in the wake of his wife’s disclosure of a recurrence of cancer, Shrum writes, “Kerry told me that the Edwardses simply stopped returning calls or talking to him and Teresa.”

And, this insincerity, my friends, is why Edwards doesn’t stand a chance to win the Democratic nomination for president.

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From the Politico.

Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania sent a note of apology to Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan Wednesday, the day after a divided House denied Rogers a vote to officially reprimand the powerful senior Democrat.

Murtha apologized for his “outburst” in a handwritten note Rogers received Wednesday morning, the latter’s office confirmed. This marks his first acknowledgement of an episode between the two lawmakers on the House floor.

Last week, the powerful Democrat allegedly threatened to deny Rogers any future spending projects in defense bills after the Michigan Republican challenged his earmark request for $23 million to prevent the administration from closing an intelligence gathering facility in his western Pennsylvania district.

Republicans have called the tirade a flagrant abuse of House rules.

Now can we all make nice and get along for the sake of our country?

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For those of us old enough to remember that fateful day in November, 1963, the memories when prodded even slightly, become vivid again..

I was in school when news came over the loud speaker that President Kennedy had been shot. The hallways and classrooms became eerily quiet and after dismissal, the walk home produced a silence which was deafening.

The hours and days that followed were some of the saddest I remember…Walter Cronkite with tears announcing the President had died..the pictures of the widowed (former) First Lady at the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson, the solemn funeral and the final salute to his father from a very young “John-John.”

Lee Harvey Oswald..who had been accused of taking the life of our President and Jack Ruby who then took his as we watched in horror. Questions, unanswered to this day died when Oswald took his last breath.

Hearings began in Congress, not many of which meant much to a nation in shock..remember Senator Specters “Magic Bulllet Theory”? It seemed to make no difference, all we knew was that someone had been taken from us in an instant that we could never replace.

Funny how you can put these facts and events in the subconscious until you come across an article like this.

JFK Lone Gunman Theory Flawed

New research finds flaws in the evidence used to implicate lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The findings are based on updated bullet analysis techniques and throw a wrench in the case-clinching evidence previously cited by experts to rule out a second assassin.

“By properly reanalyzing the bullet fragments, our nation has a chance to shatter a myth about the JFK assassination,” said study team member Cliff Spiegelman, a statistician at Texas A&M and an expert in the analysis of lead in bullets.

Many scientific and conspiracy theories have been tested through the years on this subject and perhaps in the end this one will have merit. Will it make any difference to those of us who remember? The images and events will always remain and maybe, just maybe, the mystery keeps this part of history alive.

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