Bush's pick

The president will be announcing his choice for O’Connor’s recently vacated Supreme Court seat tonight. The chattering classes immediately started claiming that they had it on good authority that he would be choosing Edith Brown Clement. Well, all that’s changed now and the talking heads of the MSM now have it on good authority that Clement is not the president’s choice.

Leave it to so-called mainstream reporters to report as “news” the fact that they have zero clue of what’s going on. Waiting for Bush’s announcement later in the evening is just too much to ask of these tools considering the entire profession suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder.

But if everyone’s playing the guessing game, I’ll go with Edith Hollan Jones.

Here's what Renew America has to say about Judge Jones:

Judge Jones has openly criticized Roe v. Wade, condemns "modish, untested philosophical notions" imposed by the Supreme Court "that would have left the [Constitution's] Framers aghast," and believes that the Framers' principles of limited government and personal virtue were derived mainly from the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. In January 2003, she told a University of Virginia audience that the nation's foundational values were Biblical.

Jones is critical of the legacy of the Warren Court, which she contends "extravagantly assumed the power to dictate new 'rights' not expressly stated in the Constitution and in so doing foisted its philosophical vision on the United States with consequences far beyond the Court's imagining."

Among areas Jones believes the activist Supreme Court has damaged American society are crime and punishment, pornography, family relations, public order, and youth and education.

Concerning the decline of religion, morality, and self-government in American society, Jones told a group of law students at the University of Texas in 2001, "I am hopeful that with the debacles of the twentieth century, we can recover the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution."

If I'm right, and Bush picks Jones, this is going to be one hell of a summer. I'm already looking forward the Left’s hyperventilating reaction; it should be entertaining. Besides, it will be nice to keep up with real news for a change. This Rove nonsense was old the first day it was reported on.

Must be that Viking blood...

A Swedish citizen who was held hostage by terrorists in Iraq for 67 days has vowed revenge on his captors. Ulf Hjertstroem, a 63 year old banker, has put a bounty on the heads of those “bastards” who kidnapped him:

"I want to take them out of the game," Ulf Hjertstroem, a 63-year-old oil broker who had lived in Baghdad for 14 years, told Expressen. […]

"I have now put some people to work to find these bastards ... I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one by one[.]"

This is the sort of talk I would expect from a Texan, not a Swede. I have to say I’m impressed by this man’s confrontational attitude. I’m sure he’ll be facing some harsh criticism from the pacifist wimps in the Swedish media/”intelligentsia.”

Hat tip to AYD

US denies the UN control over the Internet

Here’s some good news:

A unilateral decision by the United States to indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet's main traffic-directing computers prompted concerns Friday that the global telecommunications network could eventually splinter.

This issue has been getting little attention in the press, but in the last few years there has been an ongoing campaign on the part of internationalists to wrest control of the Internet’s domain name service – basically the master directory for the web – from the United States. And who, pray tell, would manage the Internet’s most essential of services?

The United Nations, of course.

A notable detail that should give people pause for thought is that China has been the most ardent proponents of this plan at the UN. Just imagine China, those champions of free speech who have implemented a country-wide firewall to keep Chinese citizens from gaining access to unfiltered news and information on the Web, having a hand in managing the Internet with the depots over at Turtle Bay.

Right now IP address allocation is managed by a non-profit organization based in the US; the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Opponents of ICANN claim that if the agency doesn’t surrender their control to some international body the Internet will fracture into several networks. But the prospect of a splintered Internet that they raise to create fear, I would raise as an argument to keep ICANN in place.

If there are countries/organizations that believe ICANN shouldn’t have sole control over the Internet’s management, then by all means, they should create a new network. If ICANN is so deficient, let Internet consumers and providers go flocking to a new Net. What’s there to fear but competition?

Personally, I trust the market is more than satisfied with ICANN’s stewardship of the Web.

Justice O'Connor resigns

I fear a blood bath.

UPDATE: The ink has yet to dry on O'Connor's resignation and the headline over at the NOW website reads:

Justice O'Connor Resigns... Women's Lives on the Line

Got hyperbole?