J's Cafe Nette

Archive for July 2nd, 2007

The Appeals Court has refused Scooter Libby’s request to remain free on bail while appealing his conviction.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A federal appeals court Monday rejected former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s request to remain free on appeal after his March conviction on federal charges stemming from the leak of a CIA agent’s identity.

Libby, once Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, faces a 30-month prison term after being convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal agents probing the 2003 exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband had become a critic of the war in Iraq.

A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals found Libby has not raised a question for judges “that is ‘close’ or that ‘could very well be decided the other way’” — the standard for remaining free on appeal.

Barring further appeals, Libby’s term will start when the U.S. Bureau of Prisons decides where he will serve his time and sets a date for him to surrender. But his lawyers may appeal Monday’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rarely intervenes in these kinds of cases.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees the D.C. circuit, would decide whether to send any emergency petition to the full court.

It’s time now for President Bush to get involved in the Scooter Libby legal mess.

He needs to either pardon him outright or commute the jail sentence and let him appeal the rest of the conviction.

Non-violent offenders do not deserve jail time.

Major Update President Bush has commuted I. Lewis Libby’s sentence.

HT: Drudgereport

The Presidents statement can be found here.

Official Grant of Executive Clemency.

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Yaderlin Hiraldo Jimenez is the wife of missing Army Spec. Alex Jimenez, one of three US soldiers missing since May. The body of one of the soldiers was found shortly after their disappearance, but other than seeing an ID card, there has been no definite word on her husband.

Mrs. Jimenez entered this country illegally from the Dominican Republic in 2001.

She married Spec. Jimez in 2004, and he was trying to get a green card for her before he was deployed.

She had received notice to appear before a deportation hearing, but the judge put it aside and waited for the government to do the right thing.

Sen. John Kerry got involved by writing a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff a couple of weeks ago, and now she has been given a green card, meaning she will be able to stay here as long as she wants.

On Friday, Yaderlin walked into a Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Buffalo, New York. She left with a green card in her hand, guaranteeing she can stay in the U.S. for the rest of her life.

“She was moved to tears,” her lawyer Matthew Kolken, who went with her to the immigration office, told the Boston Sunday Globe.

“Her immigration problems have been solved in their entirety and now her focus is completely dedicated to her hope and desire that she’s going to see her husband again,” Kolken added.

The move came after U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said last month that his agency would “terminate” the deportation case against Yaderlin so she could stay in the country and apply for permanent resident status.

At the time, Chertoff said in a letter to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., that “the sacrifices made by our soldiers and their families deserve our greatest respect.”

…

Kolken said Yaderlin hopes to apply for citizenship so she can eventually vote. She also hopes to attend college, he said.

“She commented about how much she loved this country,” Kolken said.

The insurgents claim her husband and his comrade are dead and buried. The least we can do is give his wife the legal status he sought for her before he left, and pray he is still alive and will come home to her.

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I don’t call it the Big Bang but I call it Creation. Some people don’t believe in Creation and prefer to call it Intelligent Design.

I’m no physicist and don’t pretend to understand their mathmetical equations that prove anything, but they have the brain power to do so.

Here is an excerpt from an article at Space.com talking about looking beyond the Big Bang to see what was there.

Scientists could spot clues in the present day of what the cosmos looked like previously. If evidence of the past persisted after the Big Bang, its influence could be spotted in astronomical observations and computational models, Bojowald explained.

However, Bojowald also figures some knowledge of the past was irrevocably lost. For instance, the sheer size of the present universe would suppress precise knowledge of how the universe changed in size before the Big Bang, he said.

“It came as a big surprise that some properties of the universe before the Big Bang may have only such a weak influence on current observations that they are practically undetermined,” Bojowald said of findings detailed online July 1 in the journal Nature Physics.

One implication of this “cosmic forgetfulness,” as Bojowald calls it, is that history does not repeat itself-the fundamental properties of the current era of the universe are different from the last, Bojowald explained. “It’s as if the universe forgot some of its properties and acquired new properties independent of what it had before,” he told SPACE.com.

“The eternal recurrence of absolutely identical universes would seem to be prevented by the apparent existence of an intrinsic cosmic forgetfulness,” he added.

The only way this sinner saved by Grace can explain the Big Bang is God said it and Bang! It was done.

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When I first saw this piece in the New York Times I thought it was going to be a hit piece on Fred Thompson.

I was pleasantly surprised that it seems to be an honest report of the lobbying efforts by Mr. Thompson and his two sons.

WASHINGTON, June 29 — On Christmas Eve 1994, Fred D. Thompson Jr. was out of a job. A 34-year-old self-described late bloomer, Mr. Thompson had graduated from law school just two years before and practiced law only for his father, Fred D. Thompson Sr., who was about to be sworn in as a senator from Tennessee.

“I was out on the street, knocking on doors,” recalled the younger Mr. Thompson, who is known as Tony.

But attending Brentwood Methodist Church in Nashville that night, Tony Thompson ran into the departing incumbent senator, Harlan Mathews, a Democrat. Mr. Mathews invited Tony to join him in a Nashville lobbying business, a job that would let him capitalize on his father’s new position.

“I don’t just believe in the tooth fairy,” Mr. Mathews said. “A lot of people were seeking access — not necessarily unfair access, but seeking access — so Tony was employed in a number of areas where his father had made a reputation or his father’s advice or whatever was going to be valuable one of these days.”

Now the elder Mr. Thompson, who also worked as a lobbyist before and after his eight years in the Senate, is aiming for an even higher post, preparing a run for the Republican presidential nomination. In the folksy drawl that built him a lucrative sideline as a screen actor, Mr. Thompson is presenting himself as a reform-minded outsider taking on Washington, just as he did when he campaigned for the Senate as “Ol’ Fred” the “real live country lawyer,” and cruised Tennessee in a rented red pickup truck.

You’re going to hear a lot about Thompson driving around in a red pick up truck, but the truth of the matter is that he felt uncomfortable being someone he was not while running for the Senate the first time.

When asked what made him comfortable he said he’d like to just drive around the state in his pick up truck and talk to the voters.

He was advised to do it then, and he came from behind to win the election.

I checked a lot of sites that claim this was fake, but when I saw pictures of Bob Schrum on there I knew they were Democratic sites and would not be friendly in any way to Thompson and would paint the picture people on that site wanted you to see.

Kos also has an archived story saying the same thing, but I knew I had read this story not too long ago and searched for something that sounded at least similar to what I had read.

From Bloomberg is this excerpt:

In Tennessee, Thompson’s ability to manage his image proved to be one of his strongest assets. In 1994, he was trailing a Democratic opponent, Representative Jim Cooper, in the race for the seat vacated by then Vice President Al Gore. Thompson told campaign advisers that he wanted to ditch his suits for blue jeans, and began driving around the state in a used red pickup truck, said Bill Lacy, then a political strategist for him.

“Fred changed immediately,” Lacy said. “The message didn’t change at all, but he was able to create a role for himself and he was very comfortable in that role.”

The truck was credited with helping Thompson beat Cooper. It worked, Ingram said, because it rang true for Thompson, whose father sold used cars in rural Tennessee. “Fred Thompson was a truck driver long before we got the truck,” Ingram said.

Read the rest of the Times article and see if it seems fair to you. I thought it was a fair article.

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Friday I received a note from my doctor giving me my blood test results from Wednesday.

Despite taking the fish oil tablets and the prescribed medication he had told me to take for my trigylcerides, my triglycerides were still almost three times what the top part of normal should be.

My good cholesterol was low while the triglyceride readings made it impossible to measure my bad cholesterol.

This is a new problem for me. I am a type 2 diabetic and know I should not eat as much starch as I would like, but I’ve done it anyway.

Friday night I asked the Lord to keep me alive so I could stay alive. What I meant was to let me hold on until I can get back on an exercise program and diet of mostly fish and chicken, lots of non-starchy vegetables and get some weight off that will bring the triglycerides and bad cholesterol down and the good cholesterol up.

My knees have made it impossible for me to use the treadmill any longer, but I can go to the local park and walk on a fairly level part of the walking trail, building up speed and distance as time goes on.

In the meantime, I can use my stationary bicycle, as a bicycle is supposed to be better on the knees. When you’ve had two operations to remove cartilage from one knee and you have bone on bone you have, by definition, arthritis in that knee. Therefore, you tend to use the other knee for climbing stairs etc. and before you know it you have two bad knees.

I talked to a friend from church and he told me he got his triglycerides down by using cinnamon. I asked where he had heard about it and he said he had read about it in a magazine or online.

I searched online and found that cinnamon is helpful to blood sugar and cholesterol, so I’ve purchased cinnamon capsules, which are nothing more than ground cinnamon in capsules. I take two a day and use cinnamon in tea and other things to flavor them.

Check here for the benefits of cinnamon.

I might add I had half my thyroid removed about four years ago and need to ask this doctor to do a test on my thyroid levels since he’s a new doctor for me. My throat specialist said I shouldn’t need thyroid medication and every test so far has shown he is right, but things change and I want to have it checked.

My sugar levels are good and my liver is good, so I’m not completely falling apart unless the grease in my blood vessels clogs up like unchanged oil in a car.

Please bear with me while I go through this change, as I may get grumpy sometimes because I’m hungry. I know I’ll be outside doing things to help keep the blood flowing, but that should be in the early morning (I’m not a morning person) or in the evening when the heat and humidity have lowered enough to be able to breathe outside.

If you’re a praying person I ask for your prayers, and if you’re at risk as I am I ask you to join me in trying to get healthier.

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