There are tens of millions of Americans who obtain all their news from the liberal media, and they include people who vote Republican as well as those who vote Democrat.

The onslaught of criticism of Bush for nominating Harriet Miers from within the ranks of the Republican party and conservative columnists and bloggers is beginning to make us look bad — all those back seat presidents elected Bush to the job and now want to micromanage him, all in the interests of their own intra-party political interests.

You are all giving the left the best promotion you can for their attempt to enlarge their base on Capitol Hill during the midterm elections. How? By sending a message to the voters that the Republican Party not only hasn’t any confidence in the judgement of the man we reelected to the job of our nation’s leader, but that we’re just as willing to crawl into the same politics-first quagmire occupied by the Democrats that has lost them so many elections these last several years.

And they are already exploiting the situation.

Some Senate Democrats are jumping in the middle of a Republican fray to defend Harriet Miers from conservative criticism that she isn’t qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

That doesn’t mean Democrats will vote to approve President Bush’s longtime confidante for the high court or give her an easy time at a Senate confirmation hearing.

No, but they’ll make as many political points as they can defending her prior to the hearings, since their input will oppose the rhetoric of the “ultraconservative” anti-Miers crowd.

“All the trashing is coming from the right wing of the Republican Party,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said in a conference call with reporters. “I really think it’s despicable what they’re doing.”

Yeah, let’s make a spectacle of ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, and let the left use it to help win back some seats in 2006, maybe even the White House in 2008. As a team, this makes us look like Charlie Brown’s All Stars.

Since Harriet Miers was nominated to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor at SCOTUS, there has, of course, been the expected thunder of conflicting voices, raised in a variety of arguments. Unfortunately, the bulk of this disagreement seems to be occurring on the starboard side of the aisle.

She hasn’t got the experience of some of the others who might have been nominated, she’s not enough of a hardliner, there’s insufficient paper trail to know where she’s really coming from, one fellow conservative blogger with whom I tend to agree on most issues even linked to a site that showed Miers sitting on a couch beside Dubya, looking overjoyed, and it was supposed to be “proof” that Miers is a liberal waiting to come out of her political closet the minute she hits the Court, because the picture was reportedly taken at an Anti-Defamation League event about eight years ago. The ADL is as left wing as the ACLU, but as I understand it, Harriet Miers was once a Democrat. Then she became a Republican.

I was pretty liberal until Jimmuh Cahtuh was president, and that guy, bless his soul, turned me into a Republican. I very enthusiastically voted for Reagan in the next election.

So I understand that people can wake up politically, and that an old photo or a reference to something as trivial as attending a conference on the “wrong” side of the aisle so many years ago may not be relevant today. Or it might, who’s to say?

We reelected George W. Bush to serve a second term as President Of The United States. This is the equivalent of a board of directors{the voters} hiring a CEO(POTUS). We are telling him that we have confidence in his ability to carry out the duties of his office.

Part of his job is nominating people for various high-profile positions, including those of Supreme Court Associate or Chief Justice, for Congressional approval and confirmation.

You hire or promote based on the premise that someone knows what he/she’s doing, then you allow that person to get on with things, you don’t appear at the person’s shoulder every five minutes to micromanage. You let him/her do his/her job. Period.

We gave George Bush the authority to nominate different people for different jobs, so let’s stand aside now and let him do his job.

We have our share of special interests here on the right and they’re all bickering, and that accomplishes nothing. We all want specific things, but it is a rule in life that we can’t all have everything we want, there needs to be some compromise.

The right is becoming too much like the left with its internal “my way or the highway” attitude. This has to stop, we’re turning into a Tower of Babel while we all speak the same language. How does that compute?

We are not a Sunni vs Shiite situation, we are the U.S.A.

What we need to do is suck it in, no matter what it is, and rally behind the man we reelected to the Presidency. We hired him to do a job, let’s shut up and let him do it.

A couple of days ago, Michael at Flight Pundit tagged three people, including Romeocat, Mad Dog Vinnie and yours truly, to fill in the questionnaire below. Thank you, Michael, and may the bluebird of happiness….

Well, here are my responses:

5 things I plan to do before I die:
1. Own a cabin cruiser, 25 feet +
2. Spend at least 6 months in Israel
3. Get a few books published
4. Figure out how to use my digital camera
5. Make it to at least 1 Carnival in Rio

5 things I can do:
1. Successfully manage a business
2. Design an all-faceted, customized physical security environment
3. Professionally train physical security people
4. Royally irritate liberals(a habit I find difficult to break)
5. Shoot accurately with a rifle or pistol

5 things I cannot do:
1. Figure out all the little settings and doohickies on my digital camera{see “things to do,” above, #4}
2. Anything overly technical on a computer
3. Eat yogurt
4. Fly an airplane
5. Do the Macarena

5 things that attract me to the opposite sex:
1. Self confidence
2. Sexy eyes
3. Sexy lips
4. Real intelligence
5. Passionate about hobbies, interests, work

5 things I say most often:
1. Another day in Paradise!
2. La misma mierde, diferente dia (keeping in mind that I live in California)
3. What’s up?
4. Let’s talk about it over {lunch or} dinner at your favorite restaurant
5. But that’s NOT Uncle Sam’s JOB!

Yesterday was a tiring one, what with a six hour flight from Boston to San Francisco aboard a 757. I don’t know where that extra hour’s flying time came from, I haven’t seen any speed limit signs sticking out of passing clouds and using high fuel prices as an excuse won’t cut it because the slower you go, the more fuel efficiency you burn off.

I usually fly United, but this time I flew American, and I think I’ll stick with them in future travel. Six hours is a long time to be cooped up in an airplane any way you look at it. I was in 1st Class, and the purser and a flight attendant(a second one helping out during the meal service) made the long flight go quickly. The food{I had a steak with a pepper glaze and spinach mashed potatoes} was better than any previous cooked meals I’ve ever had on an airplane, they even cooked the steak to order, in my case light-medium rare. They were very forthcoming with wine, liquor, desserts and were constantly handing out things to eat.

Hats off to the TSA people at Logan!

Unlike their colleagues at O’Hare, Reagan National, Dulles and Orlando, these folks were real pros, both in their attitude and in the performance of their duties. Conversations with some of them revealed both healthy senses of humor mixed with total professionalism and more general intelligence than their coworkers at other airports.

And something else, which could only serve to support my complete admiration for the security staff at Logan — This is funny!

Some time before I left on my trip in early September, someone gave me a mini Victorinox{Swiss Army Knife}as a token gift or whatever, and I dropped it into my notebook’s carrying case and forgot about it. Naturally, that’s my one piece of carry-on luggage when I travel, and that Victorinox knife I’d forgotten existed passed through security at four airports, in my carry-on luggage, only to be discovered, finally, by the Transportation Security people at Logan!

There was no problem, we’d been having dialogue and understood we were on the same side, so I had no objection to their keeping it per their SOP. Hell, I didn’t even remember owning it, anyway.

I suppose that since Logan was the airport at which 9/11 hijackers boarded two of the four aircraft involved, there’s a certain amount of understandable “never again” attitude. One of the things that struck me as different in the TSA personnel at Logan was their easy way with people passing through their checkpoint. It flowed, and for me, well… I travel differently than many people in some ways that tend to earn me extra scrutiny… I won’t say why, because that would only give terrorists a useful look at another thing that might get one of them caught should one happen to read this blog. At any rate, even though such things are an inconvenience, the TSA people at Logan made it a smooth procedure(No, I don’t get strip searched or the rubber glove, get your mind the frick away from there!).
Another thing that amazed me at Logan was that they didn’t waste their time searching my suitcase. The lock is one of those that are made in a series to which the TSA has master keys. If you don’t have one of those, they’ll cut your lock if they decide they need to get in and look. My suitcase is an Atlantis, and they include a TSA lock.
The contents of my suitcase at any given time compose a quagmire, and at the tail end of my month-long trip, coming home, we’re talking major chaos. At most other airports that my bag’s been checked, I afterward found the obligatory notice from the TSA inside that they’d searched it. At Logan they didn’t, probably because their government security crew knows what they’re looking at when they look at an X-ray of a piece of luggage.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time for reading anything on line — as soon as I got home, I went back out to buy coffee and other basic necessities, since then most of my time has been spent going through a month’s worth of mail of the USPS, UPS and FedEx variety, and we’re talking a lot.

So this morning, before hitting the rack as I will soon, I’ve been exploring a few of my favorite blogs.

In the Eminent Domain Strikes Again Department, Ogre’s Politics And Views details an ongoing example of the deterioration, due to corruption and government policy supported by the Supreme Court, of our American right to own property in our country.

Sister Toldjah! links us to Michael Yon in another example of the human compassion within our military forces that you won’t read about in the liberal Mainstream Media.

Debbie Schlussel talks about a complete waste of skin named Josh Rushing.

Me? I’m about ready for some serious slumber, so I’m saying goodnight for now, and “Ah’ll be bock!”

I just received an email from RightMarch, an organization headed up by a patriotic American named Bill Greene whom I met while I was in Washington recently to support the Roberts nomination and to counterprotest against the anti-war/anti-troops/anti-Bush/anti-America wingnuts who showed up along with Michael Moore’s friend Cindy Sheehan.

Here is the content of the email:

Should the U.S. Supreme Court — or ANY U.S. court — use *foreign* law to interpret the U.S. Constitution?

I wholeheartedly support Mr. Greene and RightMarch and would urge all right thinking Americans to do the same. You can sign up for their Conservative Alerts to be emailed to you when you visit their website.

During my perusal of today’s Jewish World Review, I came upon this oh-so-true column by the great Mark Steyn about the lameness of today’s media, and thought I should share it. It’s titled Media Deserves Blame For New Orleans Debacle, but it doesn’t stop there.

The facts they put in front of us were wrong, and they didn’t talk truth to power. They talked to goofs in power, like New Orleans’ Mayor Nagin and Police Chief Compass, and uncritically fell for every nutso yarn they were peddled. The media swallowed more bilge than if they’d been lying down with their mouths open as the levee collapsed. Ten thousand dead! Widespread rape and murder! A 7-year-old gang-raped and then throat-slashed! It was great stuff — and none of it happened. No gang-raped 7-year-olds. None.

More?

Four years ago, you’ll recall, we were bogged down in “the brutal Afghan winter.” By “we,” I don’t mean the military but the media. The line on Afghanistan was that it was the white man’s grave. Actually, it was the grave that was white; the man was more of a blueish color thanks to temperatures “so cold that eyelids crust and saliva turns to sludge in the mouth,” according to Knight-Ridder’s Tom Ifield. “Realistically,” reported New York’s Daily News, “U.S. forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options.”

Er, no. “Realistically,” U.S. forces turned out to have a window of four years, which is how long they’ve been waiting for the “fast, fast approaching” (ABC’s ”Nightline”) brutal Afghan winter to show up. It’s Knight-Ridder’s news reports that turn to sludge on your lips. The “brutal Afghan winter” is a media fiction.

Go ahead, read the entire column. Next time you open up the New York Times, whose online version is now charging a subscription fee to read their op-ed’s or special features, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post or any other MSM newspapers, watch CNN, CBS, ABC, or NBC news shows, think about Steyn’s column, then wonder how much truth you’re reading vs how much fiction.

President Bush has nominated White House Council Harriet Miers to replace retiring Associate Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, causing something of a stir among Republicans and the usual scramble for anti-Bush nominee ammunition in the leftist Mainstream Media.

The Democrats naturally won’t like the fact that Miers, like newly sworn-in Chief Justice John Roberts, doesn’t leave enough of a judicial back-trail for them to sink their teeth into while opposing the confirmation of a Bush nominee for the sole reason that she is, well, a Bush nominee. Right-o, Dems, don’t let anything like the good of the country or other picayune details like patriotism stand in your way, just follow the party line and obstruct the president any way you can over every issue possible.

The leftists over at the Village Voice have already brought a guilt by association angle out of the closet, going back to the days when Miers was Texas Lottery whip, and I won’t be terribly surprised if that scandal becomes a focal point of the portside attacks.

Miers was chair of the state lottery commission from 1995 to 2000, at a time when the agency was tied up in a case involving Gtech. That’s the company that ran the lottery, and was accused of alleged kickbacks and illegal contracts. The case also involved former lieutenant governor Ben Barnes—the same pol who claimed to have helped the young Bush get into the National Guard.

Hmmm, was accused of…

Never a judge, Miers is a longtime GOP functionary, and has pumped thousands of dollars into the campaigns of right-wing GOP stalwarts in Texas—from Phil Gramm to Kay Bailey Hutchison. It must be noted that in 1988 she gave money to Democrats—$1,000 to Al Gore in his first try for president and $1,000 to Lloyd Bentsen for Senate.

That’s pretty much Spin City, as referring to “thousands of dollars,” in the minds of most readers, assumes high five digit to six digit figures. In reality, all of Miers’ listed contributions over the years total out, according to Newsmeat.com to a walloping $14,770.00, broken down thusly:

$10,500.00 to Republicans, $3,000.00 to Democrats and $1,270.00 to special interests.

Harriet Miers’ total net worth is not much over half a million dollars, so she definitely cannot be classified as a “mega-rich” Republican, and therefore the amount of money she has contributed to whatever causes she saw fit to help with is about average in some circles, less than average in others and by no means exceptional. Personally, I could care less how much money she’s donated to whom or what, I’m more interested in how she’ll perform as a justice in SCOTUS. I only brought it up because we all know some Senate Democrats will consider such things as being of “great import” and make political hay as always, since the President has once again presented them a target with a bulls eye only slightly smaller than the head of a pin.

Reading her bio, I can’t fail to be impressed by Harriet Miers, I mean here’s a woman who’s demonstrated that she could have broken the six digit income barrier a long time ago in the private sector, but selflessly devoted her legal and leadership talents instead to public service.

Important also, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal article, is the fact that she served as an attorney, prior to joining the Bush staff, in the “real world” of business Law, and brought that experience with her to Washington, concentrating on doing a good job rather than on being any kind of political “hack.”

Ms. Miers also has more of a business track record than many of the other candidates whose names were floated in recent days. The White House biographical sheet made a point of noting her experience as a lawyer for major corporations.

The choice “should be heartening to business lawyers who often feel that [Supreme Court] decisions aren’t connected to the realities they deal with,” said Reginald Brown, a former associate White House counsel in the Bush administration who now represents financial institutions in Washington. “She’s a conservative, but better known within the White House for her careful attention to detail than for waging ideological battles.”
Politicians across the spectrum have been bracing for a fight over Mr. Bush’s nominee because Justice O’Connor, a moderate on social issues, has been the swing vote on key questions like abortion and campaign finance. Chief Justice Roberts, in contrast, succeeded the late William Rehnquist, and was seen as swapping one conservative vote for another conservative vote.

There will, of course, be accusations of Bush “cronyism” coming from the left. Again, from the WSJ article:

Eager to rebut any charges of cronyism, the White House produced statistics showing that 10 of the 34 Justices appointed since 1933 had worked for the president who picked them. Among them were the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, first tapped for the court by Richard M. Nixon, and Byron White, whose president was John F. Kennedy.

As I said after Mr. Bush first nominated Roberts as the replacement for O’Connor prior to the death of former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, I believe the Miers nomination, too, to be an attempt to offer up a moderate candidate that most Democrats in the Senate, despite their party’s “oppose Bush no matter what” policy, could accept without turning the confirmation hearings into a bloodbath of filibustering and embarrassing{for them} invective.

This does much to demonstrate that our President, unlike most of those politicians representing our nation’s Democratic Party, is a true gentleman.

Certainly, Republicans were, for the most part, hoping for a nominee whose track record reflected a solid, hard right political perspective to counter the liberal leaning side of the Court and there were a number of potential candidates who would have met that criteria, but as we’ve seen in the last couple of years, the President has been reluctant, for whatever his reasons may be, to take advantage of the conservative majority in both the Senate and the House and institute much needed changes.

Personally, I think he’s squandering the “chance of a lifetime,” but he’s the guy I’d vote for to serve a third term if it was allowed and I’ll go with his choice of nominee. He and Miers have worked together for many years now, and it is to be presumed that he knows where she stands on issues that will come before the court in the years to come.

Here is an excerpt from her bio, linked above:

Ms. Miers has a long and distinguished professional career.

From where I sit, no matter what kind of anti-Bush partisan politics the Democrats, snivelling under the leadership of their America hating socialist liberal masters offer up, Harriet Miers seems eminently qualified for the position of Associate Justice.

The past week, I’ve been staying at the Doubletree Suites Times Square in New York, where just because they say they feature high speed Internet doesn’t make it altogether so.

To be fair, they do have wired Internet, as most large hotels through an outside firm. Theirs, however, was a complete nightmare — nearly everything I tried to do encountered “Cannot find page,” or “Page unavailable,” even such mundane tasks as deleting an email, commenting at another blog, opening an email, replying to an email or accessing my gmail.

I attempted to post several times and the posts were lost as soon as I tried to publish them.

I finally reached the boiling point and got things moving here between the outside company’s tech support and the hotel’s engineering department, and it turned out that there was some intense technical problem in the hotel’s server that involved bandwidth and some other factors well above my own IT knowledge base.

They seem to have done something, what I don’t know, that makes the system here work better, though not enough so to throw a major party over, as much as I’d like to just for partying’s sake. There are still significant problems.

But then, for those of you who are planning to come to New York and are looking for a hotel, I can’t say I’d recommend Doubletree Suites. This is my second time dealing with this chain, the first being about two and a half weeks ago when I attended a conference in Orlando and upon arriving at a Doubletree there, found that they’d screwed up my reservation — this time was different. They had the accommodation I’d requested, but…

Unlike in other large hotels I’ve stayed at, these folks have too many employees who don’t speak sufficient English in positions where they should, given the fact that this is the U.S. of A., where English is coin-of-the-realm. On too many occasions, orders I put in or things I requested were interpreted quite differently than what I had asked for.

Earlier today, I received a call from the front desk telling me the debit card I’m using here had been declined and they needed a second form of payment. This was impossible, trust me, and I called my bank and was reassured that they had not declined anything. So I called the desk back and had a short conversation with them, and it turned out that they had screwed up by trying to use an approval code a second time, and that never works. The desk manager straightened that out in a hurry.

There were a few other screwups I won’t bother getting into.

One of my other gripes has been the fact that for a shameless $2.50 per cup, they serve some cheap, cardboardy canned coffee that prompted me to go out and buy a pound of Starbucks for use in the in-room coffee maker. At $379.00 a night, you’d think they could at least spring for some decent coffee, but these folks are too cheap and greedy for that. I’ve had better coffee than theirs at greasy spoons in poor, sleazy neighborhoods.

The employees in this hotel are friendly and outgoing and attempt to be as helpful as you could want, but the organization here is a complete goatfuck and they can only work with what they have.

To their credit, they did back out the charges for the lame Internet access, which comes out to $10.00 a day.

For all I know, this post may not make it to the Web. If it does, great.

In short, this is the last time I will ever stay at a Doubletree and I’ll most definitely tell friends about the mistake it would be if they did.

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading up to Boston for three days, to a great hotel that promises first class Wi-Fi.

I will continue posting from there.

Cindy Sheehan arrived in Washington, D.C. the other day and set up her portable Camp Wingnut on the Mall, disgustingly close to the Washington Monument. On Friday afternoon when I went to see it and take a few pics, I was reminded of footage of the end of Woodstock, a few raggedy looking burnouts wandering aimlessly, only this one was adjoined by a field of miniature white crosses that could have been a graveyard for gerbils. Only a few were marked, probably by parents who had lost children in Iraq and were willing to demean their mortal sacrifices and their very memories by adding their names to Cindy’s grotesque little travelling sideshow. The ditch lady must have decided that she’s better off not labelling the crosses as she did in Crawford and risking having the parents of fallen warriors again show up to rip crosses bearing their own dead children’s names out of the ground, admonishing that, “You don’t speak for us, Cindy!”

Earlier that day, I had been to Walter Reed, where I had been fortunate, and indeed privileged to meet a few of the young men who had been permanently disabled during combat operations in Iraq. One such soldier, who had lost both his legs, told me that he had been learning to walk with on one prosthesis and was working to master the second. He spoke as though he were describing a new stereo he was buying for his car, no bitterness at all, and said that his injuries were simply a product of war, and that war became necessary when talk was realized to be unproductive. Here was a young man, probably as many as three decades my junior, and he filled me with so much awe and so much respect for him that when I shook his hand and thanked him from the bottom of my heart for his sacrifice, I felt it was totally inadequate. I mean, how can you thank someone enough for giving so much for love of his country?

I asked him about the anti-war liberals who have been holding Friday evening “we support the troops” vigils outside the main gate of the Army hospital complex and how they were viewed by the troops within. He smiled as he told me how on one such Friday night, a motorcycle club called Rolling Thunder had roared in on their Harleys and run the liberals off, and the look of appreciation in his eyes answered my question more than adequately.

The brave heroes at Walter Reed are totally aware that the “we support the troops” vigils are pure malarkey attended by people with liberal anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-America agendas who do not speak for the troops. Even knowing that their transparency fools no one, however, these liberals will continue to play act, while bashing the war and attempting to send a message to these wounded soldiers that they sustained their injuries for naught.

That same Friday evening, the liberals manning the gate experienced a change of program: A number of conservatives had come to town to mount counter-protests against Sheehan’s and other left wing groups’ who had been massing for their own anti-war rallies. Organizations like RightMarch, FreeRepublic, ProtestWarrior,Move America Forward and others, as well as a lot of just plain pissed off conservatives like me were there for Support The Troops and Their Mission Weekend(unfortunately, other business in New York has prevented me from being able to remain all weekend), and a bunch of us turned up to face off with the vigilistas on that evening. There weren’t as many as one might have hoped, about 120 on our side and 50 or 60 on the leftards’ side.

They had prior claim to the sidewalks on both sides of the main gate of the hospital complex, we were opposite them in the same positions and signs abounded on both sides of Orange Street. There were police on hand to insure a nonviolent event.

Pictures I took will follow when I’ve learned how to get them in here, hopefully very soon. I’m still learning my way around the technology herein.

One of their signs said, “Support the troops, give them their full benefits,” whatever that meant, and had us scratching our heads, another said, “Quiet Zone, Soldiers Healing.” Behind the “quiet zone” sign, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, someone else, it seemed, a tambourine, and before long the liberals began singing. All in all, they were majorly pitiful and we were soon making amused bets as to whether or not they were going to start singing “Kumbaya.”

People driving past would swerve toward whichever side they agreed with and honk their horns, often shouting their approval and/or waving. Surprisingly enough as the District of Columbia is a liberal city, we received a lot more “honks” than they did and every single vehicle that drove out of Walter Reed honked for us, ignoring the lefties altogether, knowing them for what they were and what they represented.

When darkness descended, the liberals lit candles, and we were surer than ever that they were about to burst into “Kumbaya.”

Our side definitely had louder shouters than theirs whenever shouting was needed, and it was really a lot of fun.

Abruptly, at about 9:15, the leftards began to disperse. I learned the reason pretty quickly: On Friday nights, a restaurant in Washington called Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steak House has groups of Walter Reed patients over for a free steak dinner. They go there by bus and return around 9:30, and for some reason the vigilistas want to be gone before the bus reappears, returning the troops to the hospital.

I’d like to think these treasonous liberals prefer to slink away in shame rather than face true patriots who have sacrificed so much for their country, but somehow I doubt it, as the left has already shown us with profound eloquence that shame is something they know nothing about.

I refer you, readers, to a post that so succinctly describes the bias of the Mainstream Media today in its reporting on Iraq that only a complete imbecile could walk away after reading this and still believe that they are getting any kind of fair and unbiased accounts from that quarter. The post is here, at GM’s Corner.