So much of what we hear about the youth of today is negative. This story demonstrates the positive side most of us recognize exists.

Person of the Week:Ana Slavin and Nick Anderson

While some teens might use the Internet to catch up with their friends, Nick Anderson and Ana Slavin took a look at social networking Web sites and realized they were teeming with potenital young donors for a charitable cause.

The Massachusetts teens decided to raise funds for the plight in Darfur and challenged other teens across the country to pitch in through Facebook and MySpace.

“I think our generation has a general willingness to be activists and to go out and do good things,” Slavin said. “But we, as teenagers, have always been kind of overlooked, and to be given this kind of empowerment the students and teenagers have really just taken off with it.”

Slavin and Anderson have become so notable they were invited to Capitol Hill this week to speak out on the crisis.

The success these young Americans achieved is revealed in the article. It would be nice to think that when they appeared before Congress a few legislators took notes on hard work and perseverance.

Congrats you guys..you make America proud.

What wonderful news! It appears Senator Tim Johnson is recovering at a pace which will allow him to resume his duties in the US Senate.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., absent from the Senate since suffering a brain hemorrhage late last year, is likely to return in September, if not earlier, Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday.

Reid, D-Nev., said Johnson undergoes physical and speech therapy five days a week and has recovered 90 percent of his speech, although his right side remains weak.

“He and his family and the doctors are trying to decide whether he will come back in September or July, but he’s really doing quite well,” Reid said.

The Johnson family must be elated with this progress. Who would have thought the day he was hospitalized we would read such an encouraging prognosis so soon..continued progress Senator and we will be watching for your return.

I was both surprised and saddened today by the news that General Pace will be replaced as the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Surprised because less than a week ago I had read that Secretary Gates was planning to nominate this fine Marine for another 2 year term. Saddened because after reading this it all became crystal clear.

Switching course, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Friday he has recommended Adm. Mike Mullen, currently chief of naval operations, to replace Gen. Peter Pace as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Gates said he had originally intended to seek another two-year term for Pace, but concluded that would have resulted in a divisive Senate confirmation focusing on the Iraq War.

“It would be a backward looking and very contentious process,” Gates said at a Pentagon news conference.

Pace has been either chairman or vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the past six years—a period that covers the Iraq war.

But Gates said that after consulting with senators in both parties, he had concluded that “the focus of his conformation process would have been on the past and not on the future.”

If this is the real reason for the Secretary’s decision, I find it weak and indefensible. Take a look at the distinguished military record of this Marine and tell me what Senator or Congressman if properly doing their job would challenge his credentials. Does the Secretary believe just because the person sitting in the chair at the hearings will have a new name, that the grandstanding and questions will be all that different?

I have only briefly read on the General’s proposed replacement, Admiral Mike Mullen. His bio shows him to be a very capable officer in the US Navy with adequate experience. Congratulations and wishes for success would be offered if he is confirmed as the new Joint Chiefs of Staff but for me, it will be laced with a bit of disdain, not for the Admiral but for those who once again based their decision on the unwillingness to take on Congress.

Happened upon this after writing the original post but it reaffirms all that is said above.

I cannot tell you where this happened or how I know, but it’s a true story that happened last night.

An emaciated illegal male checked into a hospital emergency room yesterday sometime, complaining of excruciating pain in his digestive tract.

He was passing blood in his urine and from his rectum.

Diagnostic tests revealed something in his digestive tract that was not normal. I’ll tell you what it was later.

He was taken to surgery and operated on, at which time a tape worm measuring almost 45 inches was removed from his gut.

The tissue surrounding the tape worm was scraped to be checked for illegal drugs.

The tapeworm, before meeting its demise in a bucket of alcohol, was dissected enough to get any fluid from it to send off to see if it had illegal drugs in it.

The theory is this man was a drug mule, someone who swallows plastic bags of drugs to smuggle into a country and then hopes to pass the bags as nature takes its course.

This man’s problem was his tapeworm was eating all his drugs and it finally got big enough to make him sick enough to risk going to a hospital and being caught as an illegal.

Big deal on being caught. His life was saved and he’ll probably get deported, only to try again, but the worm had done so much damage to him he probably will never be able to eat regularly again.

Lately I have been telling you how fed up I am becoming with politics.

It hasn’t been something that happened suddenly, but something that has been coming on for maybe the last ten years.

I grew up in an actively political home, and politics was something I ate, breathed and slept. Now I don’t care.

I have always exercised my right to vote in every election, whether it was a local election only or one that had national implications.

I have been proud of my participation in voting; a very precious right we all have and should use.

Now I’m beginning to wonder if I will even vote in the next Congressional and Presidential election.

While having my quiet time with God last night I heard myself saying, “Lord, please lift someone up who is capable of leading this country, and show us who that person is.”

This tells you how I feel about our current crop of presidential candidates in both parties.

History shows us the great dynasties have lasted about 200 years and then began to collapse from within.

Are we another Rome in the making? Has our time in leadership gone for good? Is it time for a new Roman empire, comprised of the EU states?

I can’t and I won’t blame just this president. It is something we have seen happening really since the sixties when everyone was protesting everything in the streets.

We have made a society of people who are dependent on the government for everything from cradle to grave, and have forsaken our heritage of helping our neighbors and family members through hard times.

We hold no one to a higher standard of helping themselves if we help them to get there.

Now we are fighting over immigration and can’t come to any consensus because the children of immigrants are so set in their minds they are the only ones with the right solution they would rather let it all go if they can’t get the whole cake.

There is no silent majority taking to the streets and public forum to demand justice. There are only Democrats and Republicans, and the ones we hear from are the very ones who are destroying our beloved country.

I am an American before I am a Republican.

Today, I shed a tear for a country I was raised to love, honor and respect.

While the news out of Washington has been the immigration bill there is other business being discussed or not discussed.

Senate Republicans are threatening to shut down the Senate if judicial nominees are not acted upon.

Here we go again!

Republican leaders yesterday threatened a “total shutdown” of Senate business if Democrats keep holding up President Bush’s appointments to the federal bench.

“It could cause major meltdown,” Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, said after Democrats postponed a committee vote on the nomination of Leslie H. Southwick to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

Mr. Lott said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, was “very mad” about judicial appointments and could bring the narrowly divided chamber to a standstill if Democrats don’t speed up the confirmation process.

“It could be total shutdown here pretty soon.”

Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican and member of the Judiciary Committee, said the delay on Mr. Southwick, a former Mississippi state appellate judge, was par for the course.

“It is clear that the Democrats intend to slow walk judicial nominations and throw up as many roadblocks as they possibly can,” Mr. Cornyn said.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Mr. Southwick deserved more scrutiny due to his potentially racist and homophobic rulings.

Mr. Leahy bristled at the Republican threat of shutdown.

“They should say that to me if they feel that way,” he said. “Look at the record. I’ve moved the nominees much faster … than either of the two [previous] Republican chairmen. Numbers are pesky little things. It is a fact.”

But how many have you moved in the first almost half-year of the present Congress, Sen. Leahy?

Mr. Leahy was referring to the 20 circuit court nominations confirmed by the Senate during his tenure as chairman for roughly two years, counting the five months of the current session and the combined 17 months from the 108th Congress and part of the 107th Congress when control switched midsession.

The former chairman, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, presided during two years in which 16 circuit court judges were confirmed, according to tallies provided by Mr. Leahy’s office.

At the time, Republicans struggled as the majority to pass Mr. Bush’s appointments over Democratic filibusters.

The Senate confirms an average of 17 circuit court judges in a session, moving at a rate of about one per month when in session.

With just three confirmed in the first five months of this year and Mr. Southwick’s nomination possibly put off until July, the Senate is on a schedule to confirm about half the usual number of circuit court judges.

Yes, facts are stubborn little things, and whenever a well-qualified candidate as judged by the ABA is put forth from this administration he gets bogged down in racial discrimination or homophobic investigations.

He is criticized for joining a decision that reinstated a state worker fired for using a racial epithet and a decision granting custody of a child to the father rather than the lesbian mother. He is also criticized for favoring an employer’s right to fire employees over workers’ rights.

I wonder how many other rulings he made that are not being criticized.

To be fair, we certainly don’t want a racist on an appeals court, but is he really a racist? I haven’t checked his record to see.

All I want to know is why in the dickens can’t the Congress actually get together and do something?

At the rate they are going they may as well pack up and go home for the rest of the session. Without pay. The whole bunch of them.

After a couple of days of wrangling to get the new immigration bill through the Senate, in the end the Senators couldn’t agree on whether or not to extend debate and Senator Reid withdrew the bill, saying he hopes to revisit it this year.

Supporters of the bill could only muster 45 votes to limit debate and move the bill to a final vote, while 50 votes, made up of mostly Republicans, voted to extend debate so they could try to get more amendments into the bill.

All but seven Republicans voted against ending debate, with many arguing they needed more time to make the bill tougher with tighter border security measures and a more arduous legalization process for unlawful immigrants. Thirty-eight Republicans and Sen. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent, opposed the procedural tactic.

All but 11 Democrats supported the move, but they, too, were holding their noses at provisions of the bill. Many of them argued it makes second-class citizens of a new crop of temporary workers and rips apart families by prioritizing employability over blood ties in future immigration.

Thirty-seven Democrats and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, voted to advance the measure.

If this measure doesn’t come up again this session of Congress, we have lost our best chance at beginning to solve our immigration problem, but of course those far-right and far-left members of both parties don’t see it that way. They’d rather gripe about it than actually put forth the effort to support a bill that can be a foundation for a better overall bill later on.