Insiders see hint of Miers pullout

By Ralph Z. Hallow and Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 22, 2005

The White House has begun making contingency plans for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers as President Bush's choice to fill a seat on the Supreme Court, conservative sources said yesterday.
"White House senior staff are starting to ask outside people, saying, 'We're not discussing pulling out her nomination, but if we were to, do you have any advice as to how we should do it?' " a conservative Republican with ties to the White House told The Washington Times.
The White House denied making such calls.
"Absolutely not true," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.
But the conservative political consultant said that he had received such a query from Sara Taylor, director of the Office of White House Political Affairs.
Miss Taylor denied making any such calls.
A second Republican, who is the leader of a conservative interest group and has ties to the White House, confirmed that calls are being made to a select group of conservative activists who are not employed by the government.
"The political people in the White House are very worried about how she will do in the hearings," the second conservative leader said. "I think they have finally awakened."
"Absolutely false," Miss Taylor said. "Some of these conspiracy theories have risen to a new level."

Lawrence Littwin, a former executive director of the Lottery Commission, is eager to testify should the Senate subpoena him. Mr. Littwin claims that in 1997 Ms. Miers fired him after five months on the job because she was protecting GTECH, the controversial Rhode Island firm managing the lottery. GTECH had been mired in controversy for years, and in 1996 David Smith, its national sales director, was convicted in New Jersey in a kickback scheme involving a lobbyist.

Mr. Littwin has alleged that aides to then-Gov. Bush were worried that should GTECH lose its lottery contract, its top lobbyist, Mr. Barnes, would discuss efforts he claimed to have made to push a young George W. Bush to the top of the coveted waiting list for a pilot's slot in the Texas Air National Guard. (Mr. Barnes went public with those claims last year in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes.") Lottery Commission officials, including Ms. Miers, never detailed the reasons for the Littwin firing. Last week, when the Houston Chronicle asked about it, the White House replied, "Harriet Miers has never commented and will not now on what was a personnel matter."

Although skeptical from the start, we've restrained our criticism of the Harriet Miers nomination because we've long believed that Presidents of either party deserve substantial deference on their Supreme Court picks. Yet it now seems clear--even well before her Senate hearings--that this selection has become a political blunder of the first order.

Miers seems to have very few ideas and no particular skill at expressing them. Until now, that hasn't been disqualifying when it comes to Supreme Court nominations. After Miers, it will be. No future president will want to run the gauntlet the Bush administration is running right now.

Conservative defenders of the Miers pick attribute such violent and visceral reactions to snobbery: Our wise President is being second-guessed by a bunch of Beltway elitists and Ivy Leaguers who disdain the horny-handed daughter of toil nurtured at Southern Methodist University. But this charge is boob bait. Many leaders come from nowhere before rising to the top. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College; Richard Nixon went to Whittier College; Abraham Lincoln went to no college. Ms. Miers had as many advantages as these men, or more. She only has fewer achievements....

This [Bush's choice] is an elitism far more restrictive than anything Ms. Miers’ critics are charged with. Beltway/Ivy League elitism embraces anyone who works in the federal government, or who graduated from one of seven old colleges. The President’s elitism embraces anyone who works down the hall. He looked out over what Tom Wolfe calls “this wild bizarre unpredictable hog-stomping Baroque country of ours” and whom did he see? The woman sitting next to him.

It is said that at La Scala an exhausted tenor, after responding to repeated cries of "Encore," said he could not go on. A man rose in the audience to say, "You'll keep singing until you get it right." That man should be our model.

The grenades my gun fires are not rocket-propelled. RPG's are almost exclusively a terrorist weapon.

[K]ey conservative Judiciary Committee members have not indicated a preference, Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) in particular. If they were to join Brownback and Coburn to oppose her in committee, Miers is doomed.

You do know that Catholics are an extremely important demographic within the Republican Party, don’t you? And if we feel slighted . . . Well, let’s just say that you don’t want to mess with the Opus Dei contingent of the Federalist Society.

At this point in time, Operation River Gate mainly consists of targeted raids and searches for insurgent infrastructure such as weapons factories and ammunition dump. There have been twenty six caches of weapons uncovered since River Gate began. The latest find in the town of Anah (near Rawah) was enormous, and the discovery lead to further finds nearby.

The operation's goal is to deny al Qaeda in Iraq the ability to operate in the Western Euphrates River Valley cities and to free the local citizens from the insurgents' campaign of murder and intimidation targeting innocent women, children and men, officials said.

The Haditha Dam
(Army Corps of Engineers photo)

Miers also could be a captive of her law clerks, [legal historian and Roe cheerleader David] Garrow says, to a greater degree than other justices. "A federally inexperienced justice might have to rely more extensively on clerks who have had the benefit of circuit court clerkships." Law clerks now routinely write justices' rough first drafts.

But Garrow's fears are probably overstated, says [Souter biographer Tinsley] Yarbrough, a professor at East Carolina University. "If she senses that her colleagues or her clerks are doing that, she will probably push back."

Our Lady of the Rosary,
Victor of Lepanto

After the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II in 1453, Christendom was seriously menaced by the Turkish power. The decisive Christian victory in the naval battle of Lepanto, Oct. 7, 1571, which saved the world from this danger, was regarded as an answer to the Rosary. Today's feast recalls Lepanto and other similar benefits, and reminds us of the power of the Rosary in public and private need.

"He gave us the line 'Well, I've been told things that I can't share with you,' " Weyrich said. "That drives people up a wall."

Brownback, after three days of lobbying by White House aides to persuade leaders among evangelical conservatives to support Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers, emerged from an hourlong meeting with her Thursday and said he was prepared to vote against her.

The next topic is one that I bring up only with great reluctance for I do not want to give any appearance whatsoever of being soft on my desire to assure the complete safety and protection of children. The Charter for the Protection of Children has been interpreted to include mandatory “safe-environment training” for all children of or connected with the Church. In the diocese, we have indicated that such training must be made available to all children under our supervision in our Catholic schools but have not taken on the nearly impossible task of assuming responsibility for every child in the diocese.

As a result of this discrepancy between a new interpretation of the charter and our diocesan policy, the annual charter audit will undoubtedly find the Diocese of Baker, and me as bishop, “Not in Compliance” and will issue a “Required Action,” which I am prepared, at this point, to ignore. I say this not because I resist efforts to protect children, but rather precisely the opposite. There are a series of questions that I believe need to be answered before I could mandate such a diocesan-wide program of “safe-environment training.”

A few such questions follow: Are such programs effective? Do such programs impose an unduly burdensome responsibility on very young children to protect themselves rather than insisting that parents take such training and take on the primary responsibility for protecting their children? Where do these programs come from? Is it true that Planned Parenthood has a hand or at least huge influence on many of them? Is it true that other groups, actively promoting early sexual activity for children, promote these programs in association with their own perverse agendas? Do such programs involve, even tangentially, the sexualization of children, which is precisely a part of the societal evil we are striving to combat? Does such a program invade the Church-guaranteed-right of parents over the education of their children in sexual matters? Do I have the right to mandate such programs and demand that parents sign a document proving that they choose to exercise their right not to have their child involved? Do such programs introduce children to sex-related issues at age-inappropriate times? Would such programs generate a fruitful spiritual harvest? Would unsatisfactory answers to any of the questions above give sufficient reason to resist such programs?

Emerging from the Republican senators’ weekly policy meeting Wednesday afternoon, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. told reporters that grassroots conservatives were asking why Bush would “show the white flag when having a fight would really energize and motivate our supporters? And especially if you look at the politics of 2006, I think our folks were really ready for a fight. I think a Left v. Right fight is something that helps us. I think an internecine Right v. Less Right fight is something that doesn’t help us.”

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Oct. 4 - U.S. Marines on Tuesday launched their biggest offensive this year against al Qaeda guerrillas in western Iraq, the military saying 2,500 troops attacked militants around Haditha.

Two months after the last push against Islamist fighters ended with al Qaeda still in control, to the dismay of locals alarmed by its Taliban-style rule over civilians, Operation River Gate aims to stop the group operating in Haditha and two nearby towns, Haqlaniya and Barwana, a military statement said.

Dozens of helicopters streamed toward the Euphrates towns in a phalanx, seen by an Associated Press reporter. Rockets fired by choppers flashed in the pre-dawn darkness, followed by explosions and arches of tracer fire.

In Haditha, mosque loudspeakers urged residents to confront the Americans, but Marines said they encountered little resistance.

"Some of them may have gotten away. But those that are here, we'll get them," said Capt. Shannon Neller, of New York, commander of Lima Company in 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.

QAIM, Iraq Oct 2, 2005 — Hundreds of U.S. troops combed through a village near the Syrian border Sunday, breaking into houses and fighting sporadic gun battles with gunmen on the second day of a new offensive against al-Qaida insurgents. At least eight militants were killed, the military said.