She understands and applauds your paranoid fears about your privacy. Although you failed, you worked hard to protect these fears, which, after all, are more important than catching her murderer after she had been declared a cold case. The criminal also has been linked to several rapes in New Orleans.

Proposition 69 scores its first victory. I hope it will be only the first of many. Just think, this man would still be free to rape and murder without it.

Are there any FOIA experts out there who could walk me through the process of submitting a FOIA request?

Bottom line: I want John Kerry’s military records. I don’t have time to submit the request now or I’d look into the procedures myself; this is a request for (near) future reference.

I see a primer on how to get started here; the site suggests that my first hurdle may be convincing the relevant agency that I’m a representative of the news media (a good test for bloggers’ rights, wouldn’t you agree?).

Any help would be appreciated.

Sorry I’ve missed some of this debate. I’ve been busy taking down a little project in my backyard. But here I am so lemme tell you why I’m so bummed about the Raich decision. It’s going to cost me a bomb.

My buddy Munir, he had this great idea. Why should we have to pay California’s inflated power costs when we can make our own electricity? Summer’s coming on, and those brownouts are coming around again, but the two of us were going to be sitting pretty.

It was kind of tough building our own light-water reactor. You have to know exactly what you’re doing or you could really screw things up. But Munir works for Berkeley at Livermore so he’s pretty good with this stuff. He knows when it’s okay to cut corners, and when you need to break out the double roll of Owens-Corning insulation. Besides, this was a pretty small one—just enough to send power to our houses. It didn’t reach the California power grid at all. We were ready to generate our own power, on a completely self -contained system that didn’t affect interstate commerce.

I was really excited about this arrangement—so much so that I found it difficult to focus. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD, you see, and I got a prescription for Desoxyn a while back. But that’s just too expensive, especially when—let’s face it—I can cook up my own. A little phosphorus, some Advil Cold and Sinus, some boiling gasoline for solvent, and presto, I’ve got my own supply of the key ingredient in Desoxyn, which is methamphetamine.

Meth, by the way, is a Schedule II drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act. That means that unlike marijuana, even though it is tightly controlled, it has actually been recognized to have some medical benefit. Sure, I tried the prescription stuff. But in the same way that medical-marijuana patients often claim they can’t get relief through Marinol, the non-intoxicating prescription marijuana derivative, the pharmacy’s ADHD stuff just didn’t do it for me. Nothing else gives me that extra-sharp focus like good old raunchy bathtub crank.

Like with the power plant, though, it’s okay. I mean, if the federal government can regulate what you make in your own poorly-lit basement lab cobbled together with stolen hospital equipment, well, we might as well just give up and start singing the Internationale cause the Commies will have won. In any case, I was only making enough medical methamphetamine for myself, and it was never entering the stream of commerce.

Well, mostly for myself, and for a small co-op of tattooed Aryan-Nation bikers, all of whom were by some strange coincidence also afflicted with ADHD. They were always glad to let me salve their troubled minds, especially since I would never charge them for it. That would be commerce, I explained. And they would nod sagely in their wild-eyed, road-weary way and be gone in a roaring cloud of dust and profanity, taking their vials of non-commercial “homeopathic Desoxyn” with them.

Anyway, I get easily distracted. I was telling you about our new nuclear power plant.

We just knew Raich would go through, and we could bring this creation online. The Constitution’s interstate commerce clause would no longer apply to us, and we would no longer have to worry about another one of those busybody federal agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose founding legislation is justified by…The Commerce Clause!

Which means, of course, that they couldn’t hold us to their fascistic licensing requirements had Raich gone through. If they didn’t like the way we stored our waste plutonium (padlocked root cellar, lined with concrete so no groundwater leakage, sign that says KEEP OUT DANGER PLUTONIUM STORAGE!!!),well– tough poop, bureaucrat. Who died and made you Hans Blix, anyway? Scalia might say of our arrangement (as he did in his concurrence) that this stuff is “one step away from commerce” but that’s silly; if you can’t trust people to handle thermonuclear explosives or addictive drugs responsibly, then you just can’t trust people!

To be honest with you, I thought this whole thing was a little too easy. I mean, it’s amazing to me that all these proudly hard-hearted libertarians, who are quite willing to let people die without health insurance, started suddenly caring about the suffering of cancer patients. I mean really, many of these guys were the same folks who were quite opposed to federal intervention in the hideous starving of Terri Schiavo. When that crowd started laying a guilt trip on conservatives about medical marijuana and cancer patients, I thought, what’s next, will they ask us to do it “for the children?”

Laying a guilt trip on conservatives is never the best strategy (especially coming from a libertarian). They’ll just come back with some BS argument about how common sense dictates that marijuana and wheat are not the same thing, and that drawing a slippery slope between them is an exercise in hyperbole. As is much of the anti-drug-war propaganda, but that’s a post for another time. I’ve got a cooling tower to disassemble. And the feds are probably going to get all finicky about my smallpox cultures, which are personal interest only, no commerce, believe me. Well, my personal interest and that of this little co-op, Achmed, Munir, Waleed…

Michael Kranish had his chance to do trust-me journalism about John Kerry and his military career. He failed, miserably — apparently slandering a good man in the process.

Now he is reporting on John Kerry’s military documents, and he wants us to trust him again.

No way.

Publish the documents.

Over on Power Line, John (né Hindrocket) wondered how many Democrats, other than the Seven Sirens, voted for cloture on the Janice Rogers Brown nomination. He speculated that, since there are 55 Republicans and a total of 65 senators voted for cloture, that if all Seven Sirens were among those, then “just a handful of additional Democrats voted to uphold the agreement made by their brethren.”

John is, as always, perfectly correct. The cloture vote roll call can be found here. Other than the Seven Sirens — Robert Byrd, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Ken Salazar, Joe Lieberman, and Daniel Inouye — only three Democrats voted to end the filibuster: Tom Carper (DE), Bill Nelson (FL), and Kent Conrad (ND).

Two Democrats, Herb Kohl (WI) and Frank Lautenberg (NJ), did not vote, joined by “Independent” Senator Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords.

So exactly as John predicted, only three Democrats not a party to The Deal voted to honor it. If Captain Renault were here, I think we all know what he would say.

Just a quick peep into the mind of the Left, and at what qualifies as “fair and balanced” therein.

Reporting on the cloture vote for Justice Janice Rogers Brown — which finally passed by 65 to 32, clearing the way for an actual vote (gasp) — AP evidently thought it was being a bit daring by actually quoting a supporter defending Justice Brown, instead of their usual tendentious characterization of the Right’s arguments. But take a look at all of the quotations from supporters and critics alike, along with AP’s own smug editorializing… everything that is opinion, in other words, rather than straight reporting of facts:

Brown is “one of the best nominations the president has made. She is a woman of integrity and ability,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala….

But Democrats have been blocking Brown because they see her as a conservative judicial activist who ignores the law in favor of her own political views. They are critical of her record as a jurist who supported limits on abortion rights and corporate liability and opposed affirmative action.

“Her record leaves no doubt that she would attempt to impose her own extreme views on people’s everyday lives, instead of following the law,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass….

“Janice Rogers Brown is one of President Bush’s most ideological and extreme judicial nominees,” said Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s no. 2 Democrat. Added Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee: “Judge Brown was the least worthy pick this president has made for the appellate court, and that’s based on her record….”

“This highly qualified African-American woman, the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper, has received appalling treatment by a group of hypocrites in the Senate, who always claim to support equal opportunity, yet refused to allow her nomination to even see the light of day,” said Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)….

“Janice Rogers Brown has a dangerous and extreme legal philosophy that is completely at odds with working families’ interests and values,” said Jon Hiatt, a lawyer for the AFL-CIO. “Her appointment to the D.C. Circuit would put workers’ rights and fundamental protections at risk.”

As my old DI used to say when we would line up for drill with one idiot (not me, I swear!) standing nose to nose with a lamppost and therefore completely unable to march… “what is wrong with this picture?”

I’ll give you a hint: the arguments against Justice Brown are that she has extreme political views; that she is ideological; that she would impose them on the country; that she doesn’t follow the law; that she oppposes abortion rights, corporate liability, affirmative action, and worker’s rights; and that she is “completely at odds with working families’ interests and values,” which last, by the way, is the final paragraph of the article.

And the arguments for Justice Brown are…?

Bingo. The anti-Brown quotations and opinion-mongering by AP provide harsh, specific, clearly articulated attacks on the justice (or the “conservative California Supreme Court justice,” as they call her). But the only two quotations in support of Justice Brown (no pro-Brown editorializing, natch) are vague, uninformative, nonresponsive to the charges of the critics, and in fact boil down to saying she’s “one of the best nominations,” has “integrity and ability,” and is “highly qualified.”

The conclusion is clear: obviously, there are no arguments in her favor! The charges against her must be devastating, because even her supporters can’t explain away a single one of them! They’re intellectually bankrupt! AP had to go outside the beltway to a conservative blacktivist to find a single person to say something nice about her!

Thus, once again, we see how astonishingly easy it is for the Left to win an argument… so long as they get to script both sides.

Remember how smart Kerry was supposed to be, in comparison to that retard Bush? Well, Kerry’s college transcript was released today.

Bush only got one “D” grade in his four years at Yale (a 69 in astronomy, the highest “D” grade available)- Kerry got at least four, including a 61 in geology (two points away from failing) and a 63 in a history course.

The highest grade that Kerry earned was an 89, one point above Bush’s highest grade of 88 (Yale’s grades at the time were on a scale of 0-100), but Bush received 88s in at least three classes.

Some of you might remember my curiosity on why Kerry chose to attend Boston College rather than, say, Harvard or Yale for law school. It couldn’t have been financial- Kerry was loaded. It couldn’t have been sheer competition, since Kerry came from a very well-connected family, and those universities relied on such things even more heavily then than they do today. It couldn’t have been reputation- Kerry had already returned from a combat tour in Vietnam and given highly publicized testimony to Congress. He had also mounted a serious campaign for the House of Representatives.

All of these features would make him a highly attractive candidate for admission to Harvard or Yale law. Both universities took a pass. I speculated that it was because he was so dumb as dirt that they didn’t want him. It looks like I was correct.

The newest unsupported charge of heinous behavior on the part of American forces doesn’t involve shooting at journalists; Ceci Connolly charged on Monday’s Special Report With Brit Hume that U.S. Soldiers and Marines have committed “close to a hundred” homicides of detainees in various prisons in our gulag.

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