extreme Catholic 

 
Rudy Giuliani is given a gift.

Rudy coincidentally was in London on 7/7. If you haven't been following his story, he is out of government and now runs Giuliani Capital Advisors, an investment bank.

(Full disclosure: while I admired Rudy as mayor, I do not want him to be the Republican nominee for President in 2008).

Rudy knows how to respond to terrorists. It's a shame that he turned down the Homeland Security job. It's a shame that he's declined to run against Hillary in 2006 -- I believe because he believes that she is unbeatable.

Rudy has been on every talk show I listen to, include Rush Limbaugh, who very rarely has guests on.

His points are great: We need to make our targets harder for them to hit. We need to take the war to their territory. We need to do the things that make their efforts difficult or even impossible.

For everyone who wants terrorism on the front page and Natalee Holloway off the front page this is a gift. We need to respond like New York and London and not like Madrid.

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 10:09 AM   Permalink  

 
Farewell James Doohan. May his soul rest in peace.

USA Today has a good obit on Star Trek's Scotty, James Doohan. I didn't know this but he was a veteran of the Normandy invasion.

I met him at a Star Trek con back in the 1970's (after the show was cancelled and before any of the movies).

For people who were kids like me during the original run of the series, all of the cast were enormously popular, memorable, and influential in their optimistic but not boring version of the future.

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 11:15 PM   Permalink  

 
Networks that never were

The world is TCP/IP but this wasn't always so. Another stack of protocols were intended to replace TCP/IP in the early 1990's. These protocols were part of a family called OSI for Open Systems Interconnection. It represented an attempt by the companies that had rejected TCP/IP (notably IBM and Digital Equipment) to impose a standard using the hammer of government mandates to have a better mousetrap.

It failed because of its complexity and inertia from its backers to produce what the TCP/IP backers had do: cheap working code available as open source.

Someone at Slashdot was recently thinking about this as well.

One Protocol to Rule Them All? Maybe Not (Datamation) discusses the last commerical customers using DECNET.

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 10:03 PM   Permalink  

 
Supreme Court Math

The fact that Bush and not Gore or Kerry is nominating the replacement for O'Connor is a good thing, but one vote doesn't change much.

There are still five justices sitting on the court, a majority, who have affirmed Roe v. Wade: Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Souter, and Stevens.

With Roberts there are only 4 votes to reverse Roe: Rhenquist, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas.

For five reverse Roe votes, not only Rhenquist needs to be replaced with a justice like himself able to reverse Roe, but one more justice who has affirmed Roe (i.e. Ginsberg who is 72 or Stevens who is 85)

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 7:51 PM   Permalink  

 
John Roberts is good choice

There's no doubt that he is an originalist. However, it's going to be difficult to appeal to the public that he's outside the mainstream.

They can always demand more documents from Roberts time in the executive branch.

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 10:14 PM   Permalink  

 
Sign, Veto or Some Combination: Pataki and the Emergency Contraception Bill

As Gov. George E. Pataki prepares to decide the fate of a bill to make emergency contraception available to women and girls, his associates say one of the courses he is considering is a compromise.

For weeks, those on both sides of the issue have been saying that what the governor does on this bill will be an indication of whether he will run for the White House.

A simple veto could indicate that he was trying to win support among Republican voters nationwide who are opposed to abortion, they said, and simply signing it could show that Mr. Pataki was thinking of New York voters and of seeking a fourth term as governor.

I want to focus on a few stories that aren't headlines in the Catholic blogs right now. This bill permits high dosage RU-486-type Plan-B-type drugs to be sold over the counter to anyone.

These drugs are being abused by pregnant women to abort unborn children. The drugs have also been given secretly to induce abortion as well without the consent of the mother.

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 5:09 PM   Permalink  

 
The Question we are all asking

Is Clement another Souter?

A judge with a thin, generally conservative record, who wants to go with the flow in the Supreme Court and doesn't embrace the idea that the text of the Constitution should be interpreted as it was written as Scalia and Thomas believe it should be.

We thought we elected Bush not to give us another Anthony Kennedy or David Souter.

Update: Bush defenders like Limbaugh and Hannity are drinking Bush Kool-Aid today. The point isn't that we have to wait and hold off judgment on her conservative credentials -- it's that Bush appears to have put up someone who's not clearly an originalist.

This appointment might be the only one that Bush will have. Let him keep his campaign promise on this one.

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 1:38 PM   Permalink  

 
She would be 65 today.

28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne died in a car driven off a bridge by Senator Edward Kennedy. Now its been 37 years since 1968.

His failure to promptly report the accident may have killed her if there was an air pocket in the car.

His motive for now reporting the accident promptly was concern that he might be tested for being drunk and not being able to control the publicity around the incident.

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 11:54 PM   Permalink  

 
Excellent post at the Belmont Club

The fight against Islamic terrorism is often yoked to other and less desirable goals. Whether used to promote a national ID card, the European Union, the cause of British New Labor, or certain Israeli political parties the fight against terror rarely rises to the pure vision expressed by President George Bush: to overthrow the corrupting influence within a world religion and to bring freedom to the dysfunctional societies of the Middle East and South Asia. But then, Islamic militants have used a variety of local issues -- from Kashmir to Timor; from Mindanao secession to returning to Granada -- to advance their own agenda. Viewed up close the "bloody borders of Islam" consist as much of local political conflict as they do of the worldwide issues like Iraq or the restoration of the Global Caliphate. On the level of ideology the fight may have been between an 8th century religious creed and the democratic ideal, but its local manifestation is always going to be Bush against Kerry; Aznar against Zapatero.

But not only has radical Islamism stirred up local mischiefs, it has also functioned as a bellows to fan the flames across other smoldering divides: the conservatives versus the Left; Europe versus America; the Third World versus the First World. It is almost as if the historical narrative, after seeming to settle into the smooth patch of the 1990s, had been reanimated across its entire spectrum by the Islamic disturbance, which shook things loose from their momentary stoppage and got things flowing again. Although the War on Terror is ostensibly a fight against the nihilism of radical Islam, it is probably much more: just how much more history will presently tell us. Radical Islam may find they are in the grip of larger forces whose power they have unleashed, which in their arrogance they sought to control only to find that events have acquired a dynamic of their own.

The only thing I can add is that if the strategy and tactics of the Republicans are not up to the job, and clearly the Democratic party's appeasement/surrender strategy is not an option, there might be a political movement to send Muslims "home", whereever that might be, or to plant a cross, swastika, 50 star flag, or fasces on top of the Kaaba and solve a problem festering since 636 AD in the event that peaceful co-existence doesn't appear to work out.

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 8:02 PM   Permalink  

 
Psycho attacks two NYPD officers and statue of St. Anne with the Blessed Virgin Mary

Two Officers Recovering After Queens Shootout : 1010 WINS

A man with a history of psychiatric problems shot and critically injured two police officers outside a church where he had fired at a statue of the Virgin Mary early Sunday, police said.

The officers, shot several times each, were lucky to be alive, the police commissioner said.

The gunman also was injured in the shootout outside Saints Joachim and Anne Church in Queens Village, police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

CBS News has a video link

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 10:15 AM   Permalink