And Joins Team Romney

I posted here, here and here (and more) on illegal immigrant loving Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona.

In one post I said:

He’s Joe Arpaio, the scumbag sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He spends his time and official resources to help keep the Mexican border open and he stands ready to arrest anyone that interferes with the smooth flow of illegal aliens into the U.S. He was really ticked at the Minuteman Project and he works hard to avoid reporting immigration violators to federal officials.

At that time my accusations were sharp but I couldn’t get too specific because my son lived in the county (he was a source) and I did’t want to reveal that fact for obvious reasons. My son no longer lives there so I can re-state the charges and be more specific. I will do that in the near future although Arpaio now publicly claims to have changed his stripes and says he is enforcing immigration laws, at least those of Arizona. Of course he still hides under his desk when federal immigration laws are mentioned.

Now comes Kim Priestap @ Wizbang with:

I love Sheriff Arpaio, so I find this development very interesting:
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio joins Team Romney

So far

Is honor passe?

For weeks now Newt Gingrich has promoted an idea for an old-timey debate that would take place at Cooper Union College in NYC. His plan got my attention because in Newt’s frequent announcements he said the debate would be a one-on-one between him and Mario Cuomo, ex-governor of New York.

I have to say I was really excited and looked forward to a REAL debate. I know Newt and the governor are great orators and both can think fast on their feet, but there was another consideration for me. The thought of hearing liberal and conservative views aired without interference from some partisan asshole journalist sitting amongst the debaters sounded too good to pass up even if it is 18 months before Election Day.

Newt had said it would be a high level discussion on the issues we care about. He promised over and over that he and Cuomo would maintain civility and avoid the usual mudslinging that has become commonplace for national politicians.

Well… I fell into the trap and went out of my way to tune in although there’s a health issue in the family that caused me to miss the first hour.

So what did I get when I sat down to listen at 7:30pm e?

What a frigging joke! I got 40 minutes of Cuomo telling me what terrible men Ronald Reagan, George Bush 41 and Bush 43 are. I got 40 minutes of Republican bashing and Democrat praise and not one frickin new idea. He put on an uninterrupted 40 minute Democrat commercial. At one point he mentioned Bush’s tax cuts by saying we could pay for nationalized heath care if Dubya hadn’t given away all of our tax money to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

But here’s the worst part… When Cuomo finally sat down (late) there was Tim Russert, fresh from testifying against Scooter Libby and fresh from crowing on the Imus show that he had nailed [Plamegate] Bush, Rove, Cheney, et al in a grand sweep, straight into the federal pen.

Instead of Newt taking the stump, Russert got to decide what he could say in response to Cuomo’s diatribe.

I turned it off.

If Republicans had brains we would draft Thomas Sowell for President. Nobody articulates conservative principles better.

Four columns published yesterday should be framed for wall-mounting.

From High Court and Low Politics: Part I:

A recent book on the Supreme Court in general has a chapter on Justice Thomas that devastates what has been said about him in the media. That book is “Supreme Conflict” by Jan Crawford Greenburg.

What will come as a shock to many who read this fact-filled book is that the picture of Justice Thomas as a blind follower of Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom he often votes, is completely different from the reality.

Notes made by Justice Harry Blackmun during discussions of issues among the justices make it clear that from day one Clarence Thomas staked out his own position on issues, even when all eight of his senior colleagues took the opposite position.

Often it was Justice Thomas whose arguments won over Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Rehnquist — and sometimes enough others for a majority. …

From High Court and Low Politics: Part II

It is understandable that liberal Democratic presidents, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, loaded the Supreme Court with liberal, Democratic justices.

What is far harder to understand is how a whole succession of conservative Republican presidents — Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush 41 — managed to appoint so many liberals to the Supreme Court. …

From High Court and Low Politics: Part III

Years ago, a judge who had served with Anthony Kennedy, when both of them were judges in California, warned at a social gathering that Kennedy “is not a strong person.”

Others warned against Kennedy in Washington, as detailed in “Supreme Conflict,” but the Reagan administration went ahead and nominated him anyway.

Justice Kennedy’s record on the Supreme Court fully justified all these misgivings. …

From High Court and Low Politics: Part IV

The ugly and cheap circus atmosphere of Senate confirmation hearings is just one of the factors which cause top notch people not to be nominated, while others who are little more than warm bodies are seated on the highest court in the land.

According to “Supreme Conflict,” Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman was passed over as “too controversial” for a Supreme Court nomination, in favor of David Souter, who was the closest thing to a blank slate that any human being could be. …

AZCentral.com:

High court rejects child porn case of former Phoenix teacher
Feb. 27, 2007

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider the case of a former Phoenix high school teacher who was sentenced to 200 years in prison for possessing child pornography.

Morton Berger said his sentence was grossly disproportionate to his crime, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office argued that officers found 250 disks containing thousands of pornographic images of children, organized by age, sexual activity and sexual partners.

The former Cortez High School teacher was sentenced in 2004.

– Associated Press

# # #

AZCentral.com

Who said the system is broken?

In this case it worked to perfection.

Yesterday I posted on a story in Texas:

A House committee handed a stinging rebuke to Gov. Rick Perry by voting to rescind his executive order requiring pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

A friend that lives in Texas sent a note:

I found a link to the following on the Drudge Report today …”

My Way News
Studies: Circumcision Reduces HIV Risk
Feb 22, 2007

LONDON (AP) – Scientists say conclusive data shows there is no question circumcision reduces men’s chances of catching HIV by up to 60 percent – a finding experts are hailing as a major breakthrough in the fight against AIDS. Now, the question is how to put that fact to work to combat AIDS across Africa. …

… and the thought struck me that Rick Perry’s rationale for mandating inoculations of young, school-age girls with Gardasil would be, if rational adults would simply roll over, play dead, and abide it, just as applicable to an executive order requiring that all newborn baby boys in the Lonestar State be circumcised, and regardless of the parents’ religious or cultural beliefs and heritage!

In other words, from Perry’s perspective, government has a duty to insinuate itself into every facet of its citizens’ lives and all under the banner of promoting the common welfare.

Perry’s Merck-Gardasil rationale was spun as an anti-cancer crusade.

So wouldn’t it follow that if the Governor is concerned about the AIDS epidemic, he’d insist that all baby boys be circumcised, given the purported medical evidence of a link between AIDS’ transmission and uncircumcised, post-pubescent males?

Where this would stop, of course, nobody knows.

BTW: Did we mention… Perry claims to be a Republican. Of course there’s another fraudulent Republican from Texas. Unfortunately he rooked us into putting him in the White House.

Excerpts from Newt.org’s Weekly Recap:

Cris Wallace and Newt Gingrich, Fox News Sunday, Feb 18

MR. WALLACE: But to be fair, Mr. Speaker, you have also been a critic of the president’s new policy. You have called it inadequate, “an unsustainable middle ground.” And I want to put up what you said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Here it is. “If Iraq matters as much as the president says it does, then the United States must not design and rely on a strategy which relies on the Iraqis to win. On the other hand, if the war is so unimportant that the fate of Iraq can be allowed to rest with the efforts of a new, weak, untested and inexperienced government, then why are we risking American lives?”

So, the question is, if the president isn’t pursuing a plan for victory, and you seem to say he isn’t at this point, aren’t Democrats perfectly entitled to say we shouldn’t be sending more troops after the ones that are already there?

MR. GINGRICH: There’s a different — look, I can offer advice, the Senate can offer advice. Any American can offer advice. There’s a difference between offering advice, which I think we should do, and legislating. Senator Clinton said in New Hampshire the other day, that if it were a Democratic president, we’d get out of the war. Well, there’s a Democratic Congress. If they want to come in and say, we’re cutting off all funding, the president has 60 days to leave Iraq, we are prepared to take responsibility and we are rendering our judgment, that’s one thing. That’s not what they’re doing.

They want what I think is the worst of all worlds. They want the ability to undermine the president, the ability to cripple the Defense Department, while disclaiming any responsibility. And I think this strategy that Murtha and Pelosi have been very open about; in the Senate it’s not as open, but in the House they’ve been very open that they intend to gradually grind down our ability to be effective in Iraq, day by day, week by week, amendment by amendment. I think that is a very destructive approach to things.

>> Here’s the whole thing

And back to the good old days:

Newt in Human Events, 02/20/2007:

‘Come to Cooper Union’

As I’ve mentioned to you before here in “Winning the Future,” former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and I are doing something different on February 28 in New York City. We’re meeting at Cooper Union, the site of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous pre-presidential speech, to do something about the lack of debate in our presidential debates.

Here’s an interesting story about the debate coverage…

Or just go to Newt.org or AmericanSolutions.com.

CNN.com

NASA plan for unstable astronaut — duct tape, tranquilizers

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — What would happen if an astronaut became mentally unstable in space and, say, destroyed the ship’s oxygen system or tried to open the hatch and kill everyone aboard?

That was the question after the apparent breakdown of Lisa Nowak, arrested this month on charges she tried to kidnap and kill a woman she regarded as her rival for another astronaut’s affections.

It turns out NASA has detailed, written procedures for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. The documents, obtained this week by The Associated Press, say the astronaut’s crewmates should bind his wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him down with a bungee cord and inject him with tranquilizers if necessary.

…. >> Loopy astronauts…

What?… No clothes hangers?

Ibrahim Abdul Mu’min writes “I Am a Muslim” @ The Conservative Voice. Here’s a sample:

I denounce you… you madmen who hide behind my Islam. I reject you… you cowardly thugs who subvert the word of Allah to foster your gangster regimes while holding in ignorance and oppression millions of Muslims in your own countries. You are all heretics and apostates, betrayers of the faith of Islam! You hold in submission and terror the Muslim people of your countries and deny them the rights given by Allah and brought to this world by the prophet Muhammad (pbuh). The enemies of Islam are not outside of Islam; the enemies of Islam are not “The Jewish Media” or “the American-Zionist Conspiracy” … the enemies of Islam are the phony clerics, the assassins in the name of Allah, the insane suicide-bombers and the gangster royal families that are the lackeys of the Wahabi Islamic-Fascist movement so prevalent in the world today. The victims are not only the innocent people non-Muslims murdered by these maniacal heretics, but also the millions of Muslim people subjugated and oppressed by their Muslim leaders.

There’s more at TCV and the Free Muslim Coalition that has this credo declaration:

Taking our religion back one Muslim at a time

We believe in the re-interpretation of Islam for the 21st century where terrorism is not justified under any circumstances.

We believe in the separation of religion and state.

We believe that democracy is the best form of government.

We believe in the promotion of secularism in all forms of political activity.

We believe that equality for women is an inalienable right.

We believe that religion is a personal relationship between the individual and his or her God and is not to be forced on anyone.

Well thankfully, that didn’t take long.

Houston Chronicle
Panel votes to block HPV vaccine requirement

AUSTIN – A House committee handed a stinging rebuke to Gov. Rick Perry by voting to rescind his executive order requiring pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

Wednesday’s Public Health Committee vote was 6-3, with all the Republican members and one Democrat voting to reverse Perry’s order. Three other Democrats voted against the bill, which now goes to the full House for consideration.

Passage is all but guaranteed since 90 of the 150 House members have signed on as co-sponsors, said the author of House Bill 1098, Rep. Dennis Bonnen.

“I’m very pleased that the majority of the committee saw the wisdom of not putting every 11-year-old girl into a mandated situation of a vaccination that we don’t know all the facts about,” said Bonnen, R-Angleton.

….

Preventing future mandate?
In addition to rescinding Perry’s executive order, Bonnen’s bill would prevent the state from mandating the vaccine for school admission in the future.

…. >> Continued: The Houston Chronicle [Bold added]

…and the Anorexia Police. The first project is complete.