GOP senators vote 31-9 against Sotomayor. Compare: Dems were 42-4 anti-Alito, 23-22 pro-Roberts. GOP was 33-9 pro-Breyer, 41-3 pro-Ginsburg.
FLASH — SONIA MARIA SOTOMAYOR CONFIRMED AS THE 111TH JUSTICE AND FIRST HISPANIC JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES. (RT @BreakingNews)
SpaceWeather.com has the scoop on a possible Perseid outburst next Wednesday morning, in the wee hours:
This year’s Perseid meteor shower could be even better than usual. “A filament of comet dust has drifted across Earth’s path and when Earth passes through it, sometime between 0800 and 0900 UT (1 – 2 am PDT) on August 12th, the Perseid meteor rate could surge to twice its normal value,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. …
The filament was shed by Perseid parent comet Swift-Tuttle in the year 1610, and this is one of Earth’s first encounters with it. “In addition,” notes Cooke, “the main Perseid debris stream, which we run into every year, may be denser than normal due to a gravitational enhancement by Saturn. The total combination of these effects could result in as many as 200 meteors per hour (ZHR).”
Unfortunately, the bright gibbous Moon will rise several hours before the expected Perseid peak, creating a glare that will overwhelm the fainter meteors. But, as SpaceWeather notes, “even a fraction of 200 is a good show.”
The big question is whether that 200-per-hour projection will prove accurate: meteor rate predictions are notoriously iffy, as Becky and I learned when, the year after the 2001 Leonid meteor storm, we traveled all the way to Joshua Tree National Park to watch an expected second consecutive “storm” in 2002, and instead saw a relatively weak shower.
Still, I might just offer to give Loyacita her wee-hours feeding next Wednesday, so that I have an opportunity to step outside between 2:00 and 3:00 AM, look up, and see what I see. I’ll just need to position myself so that the Moon is behind our house. And bundle Loyacita up, of course. Baby’s first meteor storm? 🙂
In the course of talking about “Cash for Clunkers,” blogger Conor Friedersdorf makes an important, broader point:
Here’s the thing: “the right” is an utter disaster at the moment. You’ve got frightening numbers of people who think President Obama is an illegal alien who faked his Hawaiian birth certificate; adherents who get much of their information from a cable news network where many of the so-called journalists are shameless propagandists; a talk radio lineup of bombastic, juvenile opportunists whose hyperbole, intellectual dishonesty and general approach to public discourse does a disservice to their listeners and their country; a contingent of voters that cares most about national security, yet bizarrely thinks that an erratic former Alaska governor without any foreign policy experience is their preferred candidate; a conservative movement whose institutions are too often designed to cynically exploit the rank-and-file; and regional leaders too many of whom are unable to grasp that it’s unacceptable to send around e-mail forwards that traffic in pernicious racial stereotypes. Among other things.
So yeah, of course there are some nut jobs on the right offering poor arguments against Cash for Clunkers. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t sound arguments against Cash for Clunkers, or that the program is helpful, or practical, or targeted at anyone except financially interested parties in the automobile industry, or that any opposition to the program is merely ideological. [He then links, cites and quotes several “serious arguments” against the program.] …
As regular readers know, I think it is important to rebut absurd rhetoric and expose intellectually dishonest blowhards for what they are, but I also think that any assessment of a policy’s merits should be formed in response to the best arguments for and against it, not the noisiest or even the most prevalent critique on offer. Just because the right includes a lot of people making very bad arguments right now doesn’t make the people they’re arguing against right. It’s a lesson I learned when I saw the behavior of bombastic, juvenile folks on the left translate into support for President Bush’s bid to invade Iraq.
Let us recall Jane’s law: “The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.” A corollary is that those insane people end up inadvertently helping the smug and arrogant to advance their agenda, however foolish. We should resist that outcome as best we can — and one way to do so is to grapple with the right’s more sane writers rather than its most hackish cable news talking heads.
I am prone to make this mistake, in 2009 with the Know-Nothing Right as I was in 2003 with the Angry Left, and I encourage readers to call me on it when they see me doing so. Because Friedersdorf is absolutely correct — and, in spite of itself, the Right probably has some important things to tell us right now, just as the Left did in the early part of this decade. That many of the messengers have de-evolved into temporary (?) ideological insanity is no excuse to ignore their underlying message when it has some validity.
(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)
“Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy”: Best. Cliffhanger. Ever. Even better than “Mr. Worf… fire.”
Sounds like President Obama gave somebody a tongue-lashing:
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Wednesday said he had misspoken in calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Iran’s elected leader and that Washington will let the Iranian people decide whether Iran’s election was fair.
“Let me correct a little bit of what I said yesterday. I denoted that Mr. Ahmadinejad was the elected leader of Iran. I would say that’s not for me to pass judgment on,” Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One.
“He’s been inaugurated. That’s a fact. Whether any election was fair, obviously the Iranian people still have questions about that, and we’ll let them decide about that.”
Well, good. That’s what the administration’s position should be. Whether the damage from Gibbs’s misstatement yesterday is already done, I’m not sure, but I’m certainly glad he corrected it.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, there’s this:
Heh.
P.S. As an aside, the reason Gibbs was speaking from Air Force One is because Obama was in Northern Indiana today — proving once again that the Greater South Bend Area became the center of the political universe just as soon as I left. Argh.
