Katrina still a powerful storm hours later, hundreds of miles north

This image, from ABC Channel 5, shows a car in a flooded intersection last night, August 30, in the wake of the rains dumped by Hurricane Katrina... in Cleveland, Ohio.

For the storm to still pack that kind of punch when it reached the shores of Lake Erie gives you some sense of the power and magnitude of this hurricane.

This car is not in a flooded streambed. This car is just off the road surface. Note the pole and the trucks on the roadway in the background. And Lakeshore Blvd., for those not familiar with the Cleveland area, is about as far north as you can get without landing in the lake.

Three things to think about

THREE THINGS THAT WE MUST THINK ABOUT IN THE YEARS TO COME:
COWS, THE CONSTITUTION, AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

COWS

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington. And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give them all a cow.

CONSTITUTION

They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years and we're not using it anymore.

TEN COMMANDMENTS

The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a Courthouse! You cannot post "Thou Shalt Not Steal," "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" and "Thou Shall Not Lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians! It creates a hostile work environment!

(Anybody out there know anything about the origin of this one?)

The Boys of Camp Cindy

This is NOT a photoshop image or retouched photo. This is an AP photo available on Yahoo News here.

Factcheck: anti-Roberts ad "false" and "misleading"

In the last post we pointed you to Power Line's exposure of the despicably slanderous falsehoods contained in an attack ad launched against Judge Roberts by a pro-abortion group.

Factcheck.org is in agreement, pronouncing the ad both "false" and "misleading":

An abortion-rights group is running an attack ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers “supporting . . . a convicted clinic bomber” and of having an ideology that “leads him to excuse violence against other Americans” It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.

The ad is false.

And the ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn't deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics. Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too. Roberts argued that blockades were already illegal under state law.

The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures are of a clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question.

Anybody heard all those lefty voices denouncing this pile of garbage?

Anybody heard that CNN has returned the $150,000 or whatever they've already been paid, and declined to run the ad?

Yeah, me neither.

(Originally posted at GeoBandy)

Bogus ad begins character assasination attack on Roberts

John Hinderaker at POWER LINE has the lowdown on a despicable anti-Roberts media campaign now underway:

As a close observer of the political scene, I suppose I should be shock-proof. But what NARAL did today shocked me. It began running an anti-John Roberts television ad featuring Emily Lyons, victim of a 1998 bombing of an abortion clinic in Alabama that was carried out by Eric Rudolph. The ad goes as follows:

Announcer: "Seven years ago a bomb destroyed a woman's health clinic In Birmingham, Alabama."

Lyons: ""The bomb ripped my clinic. I almost lost my life. I will never be the same."

Announcer: ""Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber."

Lyons: "I am determined to stop this violence, so I'm speaking out."

It is not easy to fit so many lies and distortions into a 30-second commercial. The case referred to by NARAL is Bray v. Alexandria Clinic; you can read the Supreme Court's opinion here. The Bray case was decided in 1993; John Roberts was one of six Justice Department lawyers who signed an amicus brief on behalf of the federal government, and he argued the case for the government. You can read the government's brief here.

After providing, as usual, links to the original source material, POWER LINE discusses in detail the somewhat technical legal aspects of the case, and reaches the following conclusion. Which is, I might add, correct:

So NARAL misrepresents the Bray case in every particular. Roberts didn't "support violent fringe groups" or a "convicted clinic bomber." He supported the federal government's position on a specific question of law--correctly, as the Court found. NARAL's reference to a "convicted clinic bomber" is especially outrageous. The Bray case had nothing to do with a bombing by Eric Rudolph or anyone else, and Rudolph attacked the Birmingham clinic--the bombing that is referred to in the NARAL ad--eight years after Roberts wrote the brief on the Section 1985(3) issues.

For NARAL to suggest that John Roberts has ever done anything to support violence against abortion clinics (or anything else) is so far outside the bounds of civilized debate that one can hope that, even in today's far-gone Democratic Party, sane voices will be raised to denounce NARAL's advertising campaign.

Unfortunately, I’d bet those “sane voices” denouncing this disgusting slanderous crap will be few and far between. Remember, you are talking about the party that plopped Michael Moore down in a box of honor at its convention. The party that still thinks Dan Rather is a “journalist” and Jimmy Carter is a “statesman”. I wouldn’t count too much on a whole lot of sanity out of that crowd. This is the party that never once denounced, or even debated, any of the slanderous nonsensical Bush-bashing babblings of the 2004 campaign.

An election which, by the way, Bush won…by a majority vote.

Dear Abby

From an e-mail I received:

Dear Abby,

My husband is a liar and a cheat. He has cheated on me from the beginning, and when I confront him, he denies everything. What's worse, everyone knows he cheats on me. It is so humiliating.

Also, since he lost his job five years ago he hasn't even looked for a new one.All he does is buy cigars and cruise around and joke with his pals, while I have to work to pay the bills.

Since our daughter went a way to college he doesn't even pretend to like me and hints that I am a lesbian.

What should I do?

Signed, Clueless


Dear Clueless:

Grow up and dump him.

For Pete's sake, you don't need him anymore. You're a United States Senator from New York, act like it.

"Stinkhorn" sets off search for corpse in Germany

The odor given off by an unusually large fungus in Germany was so foul that it sparked off a police hunt for a corpse, authorities said Sunday.

A spokesman for police in the eastern city of Dresden said that following reports from local people about the smell, five officers and a sniffer dog went to investigate in a forest close to the German-Czech border.

"Then they discovered this gigantic stinkhorn," he said, referring to the fetid-smelling, oddly-shaped fungus with the Latin name Phallus impudicus. "Those things really do stink."

Police called off the search and retreated from the malodorous fungus, which German media said was over 20 cm long, much bigger than stinkhorns usually grow.

(Photo of stinkhorn fungus from Google archive)