I was going to link to Orrin Hatch’s excellent piece, but Feddie beat me to it. But the comment by “Dolly Madison” below Feddie’s post is worth promoting to its own blog post. My info is that Puryear is being horribly abused (in other words, a typical smear job from the left), and I hope to write extensively on the case soon. Meanwhile, though, Dolly’s post, and the link therein, are important reading.  This is where the judge wars spread to the District Court level — which is a sad and terrible development.

The Texas Democratic convention took place this weekend, and if this LA Times story is anything like accurate, it was not all sweetness and light. You can see U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Clinton supporter, being heckled by Obama supporters in Houston, here.

As hard as it is for me to get out of bed in the morning, I might need to get me one of these.  It’s an alarm clock that will donate money to your most hated charity/organization every time you hit the snooze button.  Of course, mine would be the Yankee Society of Wearing Black Socks with Sandals and Shorts At the Beach.

Nanotube: This will definitely test your reflexes.

Questionaut: Geared toward the older grade school / middle school crowd, but a really interesting game nonetheless.  I could listen to level 6’s soundtrack all day and level 8 is pretty clever.

Senator Clinton is currently crowing that she “is ready on day one to be Commander-in-Chief of our economy.”  (The line comes at the end of this 2-minute video clip.)

Egad.  Wrong, wrong – on every level, in every way possible.

I was glad to see Feddie bring back SA — even before he invited me to return to the party.  I’m happy once again to be a part of it.

Feddie already was kind enough to post a link to my column today that delves a bit more into the case of Riley v. Kennedy, about whether the Alabama Supreme Court must submit its decisions to be precleared by DoJ under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. I am afraid that in a 700-word column for a general audience I could not really do justice to the important legal issues implicated in this case, nor could I adequately explain the fascinating and complicated history of the state laws and political developments involved. Do read the case for yourself. Suffice it to say that it could be one of the most important cases in years in that it goes right to the heart not of just one constitutional principle, but two — namely, federalism AND separation of powers. I blogged on this case earlier in the week, very inadequately. And I must do a mea culpa; in my haste to write the blog post, I misstated a basic fact, which reader Jay kindly pointed out. It was not a federal appeals court that made the earlier, moronic ruling, but a federal DISTRICT court –the ruling of which is directly appealable to the Supreme Court without an intermediate 11th Circuit review.

…don’t go wrecking our fun:

He was in Washington this week to promote his idea for holding a “superdelegate primary” in June, in which the 795 party bigwigs would gather to hear one last time from Clinton and Obama before casting a final vote.

Rather than allow the horse-trading and bloodletting go on all summer, he’d get it over with during a two-day business meeting in a neutral, easily reached city like Dallas.

“Invite the candidates to come and talk if they want, and then literally call the roll,” he explained. “We should not go through the summer and have a divided and exhausted Democratic Party. The inescapable conclusion is: OK, you’ve got to find some way to bookend and bring it to closure earlier. How do you do that? Do it in June rather than August.

This really tickled me.

Yea! Another defeat for the Bushies who have gone off the rails! Rather than try my own analysis of today’s Medellin decision about the applicability of a decision by the International Court of Justice on Texas courts, I defer to the excellent analyses by Ed Whelan and Andy McCarthy.

Conservative, pro-life Catholic Chris Cox gets another boost for Veep, this time from the Wall Street Journal. See my post at The AmSpec blog.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a new journal of Christian thought by Houston Baptist University. We call it The City. The journal is aimed at the educated layperson in the church. Advisory editors include Francis Beckwith, Adam Bellow, Joseph Bottum, Hugh Hewitt, and Ramesh Ponnuru. Subscriptions are free. The link to subscribe (please do) is:

http://www.hbu.edu/hbu/The_City_Journal_of_Christian_Thought.asp

The first issue is available in limited numbers to those who sign up now. Our editor, Ben Domenech, has done a wonderful job. It is really quite beautiful and contains essays by Louis Markos, Robert Sloan, Joseph Knippenberg, Francis Beckwith, Ryan T. Anderson, and many others. The second issue will become available this summer.

As a conservative, I really couldn’t understand the absolute fawning and adulation that Obama has been getting from many on the left and not a few on the right.  But, this afternoon it dawned on me…he’s the Hypnobama!  If you don’t get the joke, click here or here.

You know, if I had some graphic design skills, I would photoshop a picture of Obama, replacing his eyes with the Hypnotoad’s.  Just a thought to any of y’all out there with such talents.  There’s sorta one out there, but it’s premise is that the Hypnotoad should be Obama’s running mate.  Wrong!  Obama doesn’t need it; the senator’s power to gain undue fawning and receive unthinking adulation is far more potent than that amphibian’s!

All glory to the Hypnobama!

Just wanted to say hello to everybody, and to thank Feddie both for re-starting this excellent site and for again inviting me to be a regular participant.

Substantively, for now I do not have time for a full analysis of this case, but I will say I concur entirely with the Thernstroms and the states of Florida, South Carolina, Alaska, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, South Dakota and Virginia, in support of Gov. Riley of Alabama, and against the utterly wrongheaded position of the increasingly misguided Justice Department. I was there in Mobile when this case started, and the position of the federal appeals court and the Justice Department is so mistaken as to be sickening. The issue is this: If a state law calls for the governor to fill mid-term vacancies in lower offices via appointment, and another (new) state law (approved by the Justice Department) supercedes it, but the NEW state law is found unconstitutional, then does the governor AGAIN need Justice Department pre-clearance to start filling vacancies by appointment, as was the status quo ante? Of course not. If a law is found unconstitutional, the status quo ante of course automatically applies, without needing Justice to weigh in again in advance. To think otherwise is just flat-out idiotic, not to mention a violation of federalism and fairness.

But Justice stepped in to overturn Riley’s appointment of a black Republican to a vacant seat in a black majority district, reasoning that to have a white Republican governor make the appointment rather than to leave it to a new vote of a black-majority district would somehow be a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court should rule in Riley’s favor.

As Hunter points out, after you cut through the rhetoric, Sen. Obama is a pretty standard leftist Democrat.  The proof is in the numbers.  The American Conservative Union gave him a rating of 8 out of 100 in 2005 and again in 2006.  Three of his four votes (link (vote #14), link, link) where he sided with conservatives concerned pork barrel spending.  While making him better than pork-a-sauruses like Trent Lott and Ted Stevens, it’s hardly sufficient reason for right-wingers to support him, especially when John McCain is fairly decent in that area (one of the few areas where he’s mostly conservative, anyway).

 Yes, Obama’s a great orator on bridging the partisan divide or whatnot, but I’ve yet to see sufficient evidence that he’s not going to be anything other than a leftist Democrat if elected.

Try again, Mr. Kmiec.  

Doug Kmiec is one of my heroes. I’ve always admired him and have long been proud of Pepperdine for getting him on their faculty. Like Feddie and many others, I’m disappointed to hear he is endorsing Obama. However, I am not as shocked as other conservatives.

I remember that not long after Obama exploded onto the national scene with a smashing victory over last-minute replacement opponent Alan Keyes, he was the direct object of a plea by William Stuntz for politicians to bridge left-right divides. At the time, I realized that Obama had a gift. The gift is to speak in such a way as to cause people of good will to simply forget voting records. Obama claims to transcend politics and many believe him. Doug Kmiec seems to be one of those people who believe.

The problem, as I’ve noted many times to friends going through pangs of extreme Obama sympathy, is that he is simply reflexively leftist in his rhetoric. I’m sorry, but there is no other way to put it. It would be one thing if he were the second coming of Robert Casey championing pro-life ethics and blue-collar economics, but friends, he ain’t. Obama may oppose demonizing pro-lifers, but he doesn’t oppose abortions of ANY kind. That’s the simple fact.

Pay attention to Doug Kmiec, though. He is the beginning of a wave. There will be many evangelicals and other Christians who will vote for Obama despite all empirical evidence of his party line values.  He understands the language we desperately want to hear and he knows how badly we want to feel as though someone respects us.  That is the insight he masterfully employs.

Much obliged to the Fedster on (re-)inviting me to blog on SA, though I’ve been around lately helping SA’s Fearless Leader on the technical side of things ’round here.  A little info on yours truly: I’m Mississippi-raised, Tennessee-residing, barbecue-eating, conservative-politicking, computer programming, Ole Miss-loving Southern Baptist.

Ah, it’s good to be back!

Friends, I’m so pleased to be invited back by Mr. Feddie, Esq.

Where else can a fella get together with a group that understands Catholic social thought, pork barbecue properly prepared, the virtues of the Tennessee River, conservative politics, and SEC football?

This is the place and you all are my kinda folks.