As it turns out, today was a busy news day regarding the ordinarily quiet SCOTUS.  Usually, without any major decisions coming down, we hardly hear anything from The Nine*.  Here are three recent stories:

First, Butler University is cool with Chief Justice John Roberts attending his niece’s graduation this May, but think Roberts is simply too controversial to actually speak at the commencement.  While Butler is not usually into political commencement speeches (unless you’re Evan Bayh or Mitch Daniels), I think they are blowing a unique opportunity to have a brilliant and classy Justice speak to their Leftist-leaning liberal arts graduates.

Secondly, Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni is going to be open about her support for the Tea Party Movement from her website and lobbying group, Liberty Central.  So, predictably, some Lefties are upset that this will create a conflict of interest for her husband, while at the same time take advantage of the latest SCOTUS decision regarding lobbyist groups.  I think Ginni can do whatever she likes and her husband can recuse himself if necessary.

Finally, it seems like Justice John Paul Stevens is likely to retire before Obama leaves office.  Here’s what he had to say about retiring during the Obama Adminstration:

“I have a great admiration for [Obama], and certainly think he’s capable of picking successfully, you know, doing a good job of filling vacancies…. You can say I will retire within the next three years. I’m sure of that.”

Well, couldn’t he have come to this conclusion to retire two years ago?  Jerk.  But at least he’s leaving, likely to be replaced by an equally liberal rube.  So, it’ll continue to be 5-4 most of the time after he leaves, but at least another old Lib dinosaur moves on.

* I couldn’t resist — ancient, sometimes creepy, can do a lot of damage, they scare people, you can’t seem to ever get rid of them, and all they wear black robes… it just seemed to fit!

I heard a little buzz a few weeks back about some people who are upset with government who want to organize to get this country moving in the right direction by breaking the gridlock in Washington and get our representatives to be more representative.

Sounds great, right?  Kind of sounds like the Tea Party Movement, but you’d be wrong… it’s the fledgling “Coffee Party” movement, which seems to some in the MSM to potentially be “the next big thing.”

But I had to look into this myself.  I’m a Tea Party guy and would like to hear what the potential opposition has to say.

Here goes:  Annabel Park, the founder of the Coffee Party, was apparently upset at the pace of change in Washington due to Republican “obstructionism” (umm… until Scott Brown’s win less than two months ago, the Republicans could do virtually NOTHING to stop ANYTHING in Congress, but I digress) and upset at the angry libertarian tone of the Tea Party, so she set up a Facebook page and got lots of friends.  Of course, we all know that (most of the time) the amount of friends you have on social networking sites is inversely proportional to how cool you actually are, so being popular on Facebook doesn’t impress me.  I needed more to underpin my initial opinion.

Then I saw this: Park herself speaking about the origins of the Coffee Party.

My antennae went up immediately and numerous times during her soft-toned plea, as I’m sure yours did too.  So I dug a little deeper and discovered that (strangely enough) Park worked for BOTH the Jim Webb for Senate campaign and (you knew this was coming) the Obama campaign in 2008!  She’s even had an OpEd published in the Washington Post and has done research for the New York Times!  Uh oh.  That’s that I suppose.

So, is the Coffee Party an honest, open activist movement of a truly grassroots nature, or merely a trendy latte-sipping Leftist “astroturf” campaign from well-placed insurgents within the Obama Nation?  I looked for about ten minutes and got my impression pretty quick:  Coffee Party = Air America, the social movement.

Enjoy!

Watch CBS News Videos Online

At least his dad was a drunk — what’s his excuse?  … Oh yeah…

I kind of experienced what it must be like to be a Lib today when I read that in a CNN poll, 56% of the American people believe that “the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans.”

“But wait!” you say, “that’s not a Liberal position!”

No, but it is a poll of “adults” (the most unreliable kind of sampling) given on the phone (think about who’s more likely to be home and NOT hang up) from CNN (need I say more).  Many Libs I know tend to cling to unreliable crappy polls which reinforce what they hope people are thinking.  The MSM shovels that kind of stuff to them all the time, which keeps them miserable around election time.

I don’t like to buy into those polls, so what does one do with a bad poll with a great outcome?  I’d like to think that “adults” who are home talking to phone pollsters from CNN are more Liberal than the general public, so I’d like to think the real percentage is higher — but that’s the trap for an intellectually honest reader of polls.  I’d love to believe it, but I’d need to see more polls saying the same thing with better sampling.  It’s an encouraging thought.

Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig has died from complications resulting from an infection at the age of 85.  A distinguished Korean and Vietnam War vet, NATO Commander, and four-star general, Haig served under President Nixon and Ford as White House Chief of Staff from 1973-1974, and most famously as the State Secretary under President Reagan in the 1980s, uttering the much-maligned statement that he was “in control here in the White House” in the hours after the attempted assassination of Reagan (to be fair Haig was completely aware that Vice President Bush was actually next in Presidential succession, and was merely referring to his current situation in the literal White House at the time).   Haig was even an also-ran for the Republican nomination for President in 1988!  He was always an advocate for an aggressive American foreign policy and a staunch anti-communist with a distinguished military record.  A major figure of that era has died today.

The UK Daily Mail has published this article focusing on hacked ClimateGate scientist Phil Jones’ admission that there has NOT been any statistically significant global warming since 1995!  Ouch — that’s 15 years!

Think 1995 for a second:  Newt and crew take over Congress for the first time;  Jacques Chirac becomes President of France;  the Oklahoma City bombing;  DVDs first show up on the market;  Golden Eye and Toy Story were in movie theaters;  Tupac was still alive;  Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson were first married;  and on a personal level, I graduated from high school that June.

The significance of this is that Jones’ group’s data affected the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which sought to turn the clock back to the pre-industrial 17th Century at Copenhagen just a few months ago.  This keeps getting worse for the Eco-Nazis, even for the legitimacy of “climate change” given that it seems the Earth’s temperature may be subject to natural fluctuations.  Of course, it is, but to have the leading ClimateGate scientist admit as much is about as damning as you get to the enviro-crazy agenda.

Yesterday, the Pentagon announced the successful test of an airborne anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense system which used frickin’ laser beams on a modified Boeing 747 to destroy its target!   The Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) was just a test, but a pretty cool one.  Using a directed energy laser system, two of ALTB’s targets were destroyed.  Of course, the target missile has to be in its early boost phase and we have to know where it’s coming from, but it is a great start;  it’s cheaper and potentially more effective than our existing ABM system and this technology likely has the potential to be modified for ground or naval based applications.

I suppose SDI is not so out of reach!  Either way, I love the 80s graphics:

We’ve always joked that the typical liberal eco-nazi tactic when faced with bad winter weather is that the cooling is part of the warming.  That trend holds true today in a Time Magazine piece which is entitled D.C. Snowstorm:  How Global Warming Makes Blizzards Worse.  The premise is that warmer air leads to more intense storms, so D.C. and Philadelphia are seeing storms that they haven’t seen before.

If that argument were to hold true, then New England would not typically get harsh winter storms, as the New England States are traditionally cooler than the mid-Atlantic.  Yet the New England storms this year have been mild, while the mid-Atlantic storms have been fierce.  In the absense of any credible Global Warming evidence, and in fact with the evidence that we are entering a new mini ice-age, stories like this are last-ghasp tone-deaf attempts by the state-run media to push the liberal eco-nazi agenda of global warming before it all blows up in their faces.

H/T: Gateway Pundit

Well, duh, of course we do!  But, this is an actual billboard paid for by a “group of small business owners and individuals who just felt like Washington was against them” up in Wyoming, Minnesota.  Those who paid for the billboard want to remain anonymous, but their sentiment is made plain:  as much as George W. Bush may have tweaked this or that group, the new “hopey-changey stuff” isn’t really working out for the lot of us!

By the way, I knew I heard the phrase “hopey-changey” before last Saturday’s speech by Sarah Palin, and I have… from the one-and-only Mark Steyn nearly a year ago!  I’m glad Palin borrowed the phrase and brought it back to use on a wider stage.

Ronald Reagan (February 6, 1911 — June 5, 2004) would have turned 99 today.  As a rallying point to both Conservatives and Republicans, Reagan’s legacy continues to grow as the years go by.  Many historians have had to move on from their original “amiable dunce” interpretation of Reagan to grudgingly admit or contemplate the importance of both supply-side economics to rejuvenating a flailing economy and the “peace through strength” approach to foreign policy as lessons for future and current Presidents on how to deal with both domestic and foreign affairs.

Reagan also showed that a conservative candidate (running as a conservative) can win 49 states and change the direction of American politics, which had by 1980 veered too far off to the Left.  By 2012, I think the nation will have the same feeling about how far Left we’ve veered, and Reagan’s message of hearkening back to the real strength of America (her people, not her government) will sound very nice to the public once again.

By the way, only three other Presidents have been born in the month of February aside from Reagan:  two of them are Lincoln and Washington…  I’m just sayin’.