J's Cafe Nette

Archive for October 2nd, 2007

I have always admired Justice Thomas but had not heard him speak in a public forum at length for a while.

This 60 Minutes interview reminded me why I hold him in such high regard.

This man speaks from the heart. No rhetoric, no soundbites, just realism.

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Yesterday reader Shirley asked if we knew anything about Charlie Gibson also calling fake soldiers phony soldiers.

Today I have found the video that shows the report that was on ABC news. The phrase used was “phony veterans”, but speaks of the same man Rush Limbaugh talked about that got a speech and letter to his employer from Harry Reid.

Will Harry Reid and company send the same kind of letter to ABC News and make a speech about Brian Ross or Charlie Gibson from the floor of the Senate? I doubt it.

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I’ve been reading around the internet that there is a report that a group of Christian leaders met privately in Salt Lake City. The purpose was to clandestinely plan to get a third party candidate that would meet every one of their goals for issues in the election.

I have no idea if this is true or not, and speaking as a born again Christian, I value my vote too much to have anyone tell me how to vote.

Suppose they find that perfect on every issue candidate and decide to back him or her? What happens?

What happens in a few words is Hillary Clinton becomes our president.

We would still have a pro-abortion president, a social liberal with a socially liberal congress to back her up, and the most important thing is we would completely lose any hope of having a balanced judiciary for the next twenty years or more.

Now I don’t know about you but the court judges and justices are probably second or third on my list of priorities after homeland security.

Some of our SCOTUS justices are hanging on by a thread and we can depend on them retiring if a democrat is president with a democrat congress.

There goes your abortion fight, your gay marriage ban and new law made out of whole cloth will replace it all. We will see all kinds of new reasons for allowing something not allowed by law or constitution now. We’d even get back to foreign law if we had to.

Bill Clinton never would have won the White House if Ross Perot hadn’t run and taken some of the Republican protest voters with him.

Clinton never had a majority of the vote.

The Michelle Malkins and Polipundits of this world would be able to whine about illegal immigrants for the rest of their lives if we have a third party candidate.

Conservatives and conservative/moderates, don’t throw away your opportunity to improve things because you don’t like everything about the eventual nominee.

Think about what decisions the nominee would make once in the White House and weigh them. Heck, make two columns on a piece of paper and put their pros on one side and cons on the other. Then do the same for the other major party candidate. That should tell you how you should vote without taking your pastor into the voting booth with you.

My pastor stays out of politics and I’m glad he does. His calling is to preach the Gospel and not be a political influence in this country.

The courts actually have the most authority in this country because the Supreme Court decisions cannot be challenged.

I have yet to see a president get any changes in the abortion laws except to sign a bill passed by congress. Then it goes to the SCOTUS for them to decide its merits.

Think about it when you step into the primary booth. Vote for the candidate you think can win the election and not just do a protest vote for Ron Paul who has no chance at all.

Then think about it again when you vote in the general election. Do you really want a liberal court system in our country for the next 20 or more years?

That’s what’s at stake here. Use your head and forget utopia.

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On Sunday Senators Trent Lott and Chuck Schumer debated the S-Chip program on Fox News Sunday.

After reading the full transcript I can’t understand how the Congresscritters who voted for this increase realistically plan to pay for the program.

Senator Schumer says it’s pay as you go.

In one way or another, they lose out for the rest of their lives in many ways. So we think it’s important to cover as many kids as we can.

The president could disapprove any waiver above 200 percent. He recently approved one as high as 350 percent for New Jersey. And so I don’t think that’s the real argument people are against it.

And second, we are very responsible on this. We pay for it. We Democrats have adopted a plan, which the Republicans never did when they were in office, called pay-go. Any new program has to be paid for.

This is fully paid for and will not increase the deficit. We do it by raising the tobacco tax.

The plan is to raise the tobacco tax to $1 per pack. Apparently someone has studied this and says it’s the less affluent people who smoke so it would actually be a tax on the poor to pay for the program.

Then there’s the question of encouraging people to quit smoking. If the poor do most of the smoking and the government wants people to quit smoking where is the money going to come from to pay for this insurance?

Senator Lott:

But one other thing. This bill has a typical Washington sleight of hand. It’s got about a $40 billion shortfall over a 10-year period, and they fund it with a 61-cents-a-pack tax increase, bringing it to $1, and say, “By the way, that will discourage people from smoking.” That’s good.

But the problem is if people do stop smoking, you won’t have the money and the program won’t be paid for. Then you’ll have to either cut the program or raise taxes somewhere else. Typical Washington — now you see it, now you don’t.

This is a program I, frankly, was unaware of until now. It’s supposed to make sure poor children have health insurance, which is a good idea as far as it goes.

The problem is it’s not just children of poor families getting the insurance, and the president (any president) has the authority to bump up the income level in any state. President Bush has done so in a couple of instances, including a 350% increase in income eligibility in New Jersey.

Now I know New Jersey is more expensive to live than where I live, but 350% more?

Then we have the unintended consequences of adults getting on the program also.

WALLACE: Senator Schumer, I’m going to get to that in a moment. But let me just ask you about one other aspect of this, because I want to move on to another key point here.

As Senator Lott points out, it doesn’t just cover children, although it’s overwhelmingly children, about six million, but 700,000 adults are also covered by the program now, including some adults without children. Why should that be allowed?

SCHUMER: Right. It shouldn’t, and the bill phases that out and puts strong incentives on the states to get the adults out of the program. It should just be for kids. And that’s what the bill works for.

But let me tell you this. To do what President Bush wants to do, take a million kids off the rolls, not increase, not even stay the same, but decrease because 700,000 adults are covered, and that number’s going down — that’s not fair to those kids.

LOTT: Hey, Chris, let me make two points right quick. First, Chuck is right. This administration and the previous administration, but especially this one, gave too many waivers to too many states. That is a part of the problem.

But here’s my point. We do need to move the program up. We need to make it a better program. Now, we can fight. We can have a partisan political charge, counter-charge, or we can come together with a solution to make sure that low-income kids are really covered.

Do the Democrats want to do that, or do they want an issue? That’s what’s at stake.

WALLACE: … to Senator Lott’s question, do you want an issue or do you want a compromise?

SCHUMER: Well, it clearly was a compromise. The senior Republican on the Finance Committee, Senator Grassley, hardly a free- spending liberal — the number two senator on the Finance Committee, Senator Hatch, one of the most conservative Republican senators — not only voted for this — that’s not the case — they were involved intimately in the negotiations.

They were with Senator Reid and Senator Baucus, our two leaders on this issue, for hours, days, weeks, coming up with this program. They’re proud of the program.

You can see it in their speeches — not just Pat Roberts, but Senator Grassley said the president hasn’t read the bill. Now, he doesn’t usually talk like that about the president.

So this is a broad bipartisan bill with the broad support of the American people, 70 percent, 80 percent, and you do have a small number of Republicans who are very, very conservative on this, whose values, I think, are out of whack with America’s values in saying that kids shouldn’t get covered.

And they always come up with this reason or that reason not to support it. But this is a tempered, moderate bill.

WALLACE: Senator Schumer?

SCHUMER: It’s careful. And it’s gotten broad bipartisan support.

WALLACE: Senator Schumer, let me ask you, what’s going to happen if the president vetoes this and you can’t override him? Will the Democrats keep voting and sending this bill to the president?

SCHUMER: Yes. We do have enough votes already to override the president in the Senate — 51 Democrats, 18 Republicans, 69…

WALLACE: Yes, but not enough in the House.

SCHUMER: That’s enough. We’re somewhat short in the House. From what I’m told, there are some House members, mainly Republicans but a few Democrats, who might change.

But my guess is we will not have enough to override in the House. Speaker Pelosi has said, and I agree with this, that she is going to try and send this issue back to the president over again because it is so needed, so desperately needed, by our kids and with such broad support.

LOTT: That shows it’s just totally politics. Now, the president’s going to veto it. It’s going to be sustained. We need to sit down and make some changes so that we can actually get broader support and the president can sign it.

That’s the way it works here in this city. There’s at least three parties to every negotiation — the House, the Senate, the Republicans, the Democrats and the White House.

So, like trying to set a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq the Democrats are determined to waste precious legislative time on legislation they know will be vetoed and not overridden in the House.

Why? Senator Lott said it quite well. It’s totally politics and the Democrats don’t really care if it passes or not. It’s a political issue and that’s all that matters.

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Certainly whoever chose this name for a line of bedding must have had a temporary brain freeze.

It doesn’t sound as if it was intentional, but boy, it was not too bright.

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For those who are interested there is a review of the Supreme Court Docket at Review Journal.

Of the cases referenced the one which will garner the most attention from me involves the Voter ID issue.

• Voter ID: Democrats want the court to toss out state laws that require voters to identify themselves at the polls. Oh, the humanity! Maintaining the integrity of the electoral process is an important matter. The identification requirement is a minimal burden that the justices should uphold.

I believe the states should have the right to decide this issue for themselves. I do not think any court should infringe on decisions made by legislatures in the best interest of their state as long as they do not violate the US Constitution.

The docket does not appear to be overcrowded but as is usually the case, each individual decision will be viewed by certain individuals or groups to be of importance to them. Here are a few of the other issues the Justices will address this session.

The most high-profile case on the court’s calendar is probably one involving Guantanamo detainees. Lawyers for some of those held at the Cuban base will maintain that a U.S. law allowing the indefinite imprisonment of terror suspects should not prevent challenges in U.S. courts to their confinement.

and

• Child porn: Is it a crime to promote child pornography by talking about it even if you don’t possess it? That’s what the justices must determine in a case involving a man whose conviction was overturned after an appeals court ruled that a federal law criminalizing such activity is unconstitutional. The prohibition against actually possessing such images is not at issue.

The balance of the docket may be viewed at the link above.

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How could your heart not go out to this young boy and his family?

A boy of 12 suffers from so many allergies that he is able to eat only five foods.

Tyler Savage is violently ill every time he is given dishes containing dairy products or wheat, gluten, eggs, lactose and soya.

The sole foods he is allowed are chicken, carrots, grapes, potatoes and apples.

To help him survive, minerals and vitamins are pumped directly into his stomach through a tube.

Tyler started to fall ill at the age of six when even a morsel of food would leave him writhing in agony from sickness and diarrhoea.

His mother, Lynne Savage, 43, said: “We asked for help but kept being told that he was suffering from a stomach infection. As a result his weight dropped drastically.

“He ran out of energy really quickly and couldn’t do the things other children were doing. He just seemed to be getting worse and worse.

“It’s been a real struggle. We didn’t know what to do.”

Tyler – from Earls Colne in Essex – was seen by a paediatrician at Chelmsford’s St John’s Hospital and had his appendix removed in December 2005.

Although the operation was a success it failed to solve the problem and he was referred to Colchester General Hospital for further tests and treatment.

That shed no light on the mystery illness and in April last year Tyler was sent to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London for checks on his stomach and bowels.

The tests led to a diagnosis of eosinophilic enteropathy, a rare and condition in which the intestines produce too many white blood cells.

While there has been a method devised through modern medicine to provide this young man the nutrients his body requires to function normally, any time one hears of a child being afflicted with a difficulty such as this, you step back and realize how lucky and blessed you are if you have raised healthy children.

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