The Truth Laid Bear asks, so: I oppose the Miers nomination.

This post has been updated. I originally said I was neutral, leaning toward oppose. I've decided that oppose it is. For many reasons. My first gut reaction was to oppose her because I thought Bush had blown his chance at nominating someone who would really be on my side.

I would not go so far as to say that Miers is "about as sharp as a sack of wet peanuts," but from what I do know, she doesn't seem to be as sharp as she should be. I find myself wholly in agreement with this statement from Eric's Grumbles Before the Grave:

I am an elitist (and don't mind saying so). I want my elected representatives, my judges, my cabinet members to be the best and brightest, not the lowest common denominator. Miers is not the best and brightest. It has nothing to do with what school she attended, before someone jumps salty. I don't care what degree you have, or what school you got it from. Her written grammar in her questionnaire response to the Senate is awful. Her understanding of the basics of constitutional law seems even worse. Compare her to John Roberts and tell me she is the "best and brightest". You can't.

Emphasis is mine, of course.

And in spite of reassurances to the contrary*, I haven't been offered any real proof that she would rule on certain issues based on the constitution rather than her personal beliefs. Even if her personal beliefs are not contrary to mine, ruling that way is not for the Supreme Court, or any court for that matter. When it comes to the establishment of law, her personal beliefs are no more nor less valid than any of the judges who fall on the liberal end of the spectrum.

Not that my opinion matters, or anything.

*When other judges and politicians start telling me to "just trust us," or some variation thereof, I am immediately suspicious.

UPDATE: Click the link for The Truth Laid Bear Miers aggragation of blog posts.

I've always been a weather-watcher, but somehow I've never heard of this kind of warning before: the "Red Flag Warning."

"A RED FLAG WARNING MEANS WEATHER CONDITIONS WILL PROMOTE FIRES THAT ARE DIFFICULT TO CONTROL ACROSS THE WARNED AREA. A RED FLAG WARNING IS COMPLETELY SEPARATE FROM A LOCAL BURN BAN WHICH IS ISSUED BY LOCAL OFFICALS."

Basically it means we have relatively high winds and relative low humidity. Right now the humidity is 31% at my house, and the winds have been gusting all day (official report says winds gusting to 21 mph). I have seen these kinds of conditions countless times, but this is the first time I've ever noticed an actual warning issued about it.

And we can expect lows around 30 by Tuesday morning!

These are both blogs that I've been reading for a while and they might as well get added to the "official" blogroll. Hell In A Handbasket is, I'm sure, familiar to many, if not all, already. Mr. Rummel beat me onto the Blue Flypaper Blacklist by nine days.

The other is The Fatman Chronicles, which just yesterday made it onto the Blue Flypaper Blacklist.

UPDATE: Also The Smallest Minority, another well-known blog which needs no introduction from me. I've been reading it regularly for a long time and somehow forgot to include it in the list.

And usually, you'd think this means I was clip-blogging about something that probably happened near Laredo. No, wrong border.

Read the article in the Great Falls Tribune. It happened near Sweetgrass, MT, and there are a couple of items in this story that interest me.

According to a brief statement released by the Havre sector office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. officers encountered the man, who was driving a stolen vehicle with Illinois license plates, during their patrol duties.

As the officers attempted to question the man, he reached for his back pocket for what was later found to be a stun gun, according to the statement, read over the phone by David Bernard, assistant chief patrol agent out of the CBP's Havre office.

"In an act of self-defense, the agents discharged their service-issued weapons," Bernard said.

So, in this instance, even though the agents outnumbered the other guy two to one, it was still justifiable self-defense for them both to shoot him when he tried to pull a stun gun. Of course, they apparently didn't know what he was reaching for at the time.

The incident concerned Pellerin-Fowlie because Canadian customs agents are not armed, despite pushing for the policy change for years with the Canadian government.

"Our members are not armed and this man was heading to the Canadian border," he said. "We have been calling for the arming of our officers for some time."

It's a good thing our guys stopped him. Otherwise those poor Canadian border agents would have been completely at the mercy of a car thief with a stun gun.

Last month when I took this meaningless little test, it said it was worth zero. And now it's worth ten grand? Does not compute.

Here is a very well-balanced article (in my opinion, which probably means tht anti-self-defensers would think it's horribly biased) in the Wisconsin State Journal from a reporter who went through the entire coursework necessary to get a concealed handgun license in Minnesota, just so he could report on it:

My 'attacker' was just 15 feet away, which, I have to admit, was bad news for him. Even though it's been years since I've fired a handgun, hitting the green, life-size target was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

The more immediate question was: What was he doing there, and why won't he leave me alone? In real life, the green guy should have taken a cue from the Czech-made 9 mm pistol I was thrusting toward him and run off.

With a faint sense of something resembling pity, I fired on my impassive foe, ultimately sending 30 rounds through him although one or two probably would have done.

On the street, that kind of enthusiasm isn't something you want to explain to a jury. But in the safety of this basement shooting range Tuesday, it was the final step in my training to legally carry a concealed handgun - in Minnesota, at least.

I had spent most of the previous day with certified firearms instructor Gene German, seeking to learn what sort of training might be required here if the Legislature overturns Wisconsin's 133-year ban on carrying concealed weapons.

...that feel the heat of media bias. They'll distort anything to sell their bird-cage liners.

I must say that the Express-News, in this case, did set the record straight:

After noting the time and date, the 64-year-old geocacher scrawled these few words, 'This old geezer thought he' and then abruptly stopped. The logbook is dirt-stained and indented, marks apparently left when Chamberlain fell on it.

Chamberlain's death made newspaper headlines and the nightly TV news. Initial reports indicated Chamberlain accidentally died during a 'scavenger hunt' after a fall in an area where he wasn't supposed to go.

Reporters never followed up with an update after results of a medical examiner's autopsy were released. It revealed that Chamberlain had suffered a massive heart attack.

The news coverage annoyed members of the geocaching community. They thought it was slanted and gave their sport an undeserved black eye. On geocaching.com, 'Pete' wrote that 'the media is now, and always has been, interested only in sensationalizing things.

'They get a story first, and sometimes (but not always) get it right later when everyone has forgotten everything but the sensationalized version of what happened.'

Chamberlain's wife also was upset because the stories 'made it sound like Max was doing something illegal.'

It sounds to me like he died doing something he loved. Would that we all could go that way.

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