According to this long screed from one of George Soros’s minions (scroll down toward the end), something I wrote "hits the mark, a little uncomfortably so."

Reuters and the New York Times are reporting that the House of Representatives has just approved the Central American Free Trade Agreement (“CAFTA”) by a vote of 217 to 215. The Senate already approved the pact last month by a vote of 54 to 45. Once implemented, CAFTA will eliminate most barriers to trade and investment between the United States and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

As the Washington Post pointed out on Monday, CAFTA is expected to increase the gross domestic products of both the United States and its Central American trading partners. The agreement will also have a positive impact on American exports:

Today, 80 percent of exports to the United States from CAFTA signatories (Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic) already enter duty-free. Most U.S. products imported by CAFTA nations, however, face relatively high tariffs; CAFTA would immediately eliminate these tariffs on 80 percent of U.S. exports to CAFTA partners. The American Farm Bureau enthusiastically embraces CAFTA, projecting an increase in farm exports (wheat, potatoes, corn, soybeans, pork, poultry, beef and produce) of $1.5 billion per year.

A July 27 NY Times account of an AP interview (Tuesday) of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales provides a helpful prelude to the questioning Roberts will face on Roe v. Wade. I say "helpful" because it was only a matter of time before Roberts would have to clarify what he meant when he said, at his 2003 Senate confirmation hearing before joining the D.C. Court of Appeals, that the Roe precedent was "settled law." Here is the relevant cite from Gonzales:

"If you’re asking a circuit court judge, like Judge Roberts was asked, yes, it is settled law because you’re bound by the precedent," Mr. Gonzales said. "If you’re a Supreme Court justice, that’s a different question, because a Supreme Court justice is not obliged to follow precedent if you believe it’s wrong."

If you want to read interesting thoughts offered by smart people about Catholic judges, there is at the moment no better venue to visit than Mirror of Justice, a group blog "dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory." Among the nuggets currently posted are a snippet from an old Stephen L. Carter article on "The Religiously Devout Judge":

"The ideal of the objective judge was slain by the legal realists long before the critical legal studies movement resurrected it in order to kill it again. But the ghost of the objective judge refuses to go away. I doubt that the objective judge will die quietly, as long as liberals continue to think that letting a judge rest her decisions on a moral understanding is a good idea. Because once a judge’s moral understanding is permitted to play a role, the liberal argument cannot distinguish religiously based knowledge from other moral knowledge, or at least, cannot do so without arguments that require a bit too much cognitive dissonance. The aspirational model of the objective judge might offer the only path to sanity. And if we continue to pursue distinctions as crazy as this one, a path to sanity will be a useful thing to have."

And then there’s this link to an old First Things piece by Michael McConnell on the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances Act and a judge’s refusal to punish violators of it.

Mark Steyn hits with dead-on accuracy the problem with today’s kid movies in this review of Madagascar. Hollywood seems finally to have gotten the message that "G" or "PG" movies targeted at children can produce the big bucks. The problem is--with some notable exceptions like The Incredibles Hollywood is lazy about the way such movies are now produced. We took our two kids to a matinee viewing of Madagascar and, for our $30 we were treated to a plot that was unimaginative and characters that were (with the exception of the lemur Steyn notes and the penguins--all minor characters) uninspired.

The July 27 NY Times article "In Reagan’s White House ..." cites a few of Judge Roberts’s memos, including this priceless ditty about the least mentioned aspect of the upcoming Senate hearings on Judge Roberts, the U.S. Constituion:

On the 23rd of July there was a notice in the Ashland Times-Gazette on the passing of Rhea A. Wheeler, 101. Rhea was born in 1903, in Ashland County, and died a month before her 102nd birthday at the home of her daughter Elsie, in Burlingame, California. It was a competent notice, but prosaic. Not revealing enough.

I have known Rhea Wheeler for over ten years. I tried to see her every time I made a trip to California. Such visits, next to seeing my mother, were the highlights of any trip. I saw her last just two months ago. I readily admit that my visits with Rhea were selfish. Although I had reason to think she enjoyed my company, the truth is I took greater delight in her company than she did in mine. She probably didn’t know that.

What does one talk about with an intelligent woman who has lived five score and one year? To answer that you can talk with her about anything is true, but is not quite sufficient, for how she talked about the world—and it was almost never about herself—becomes a massive fact and fully reveals her character.

Rhea’s eyes sparkled when she talked. She always delighted in how the world wags, and everything in it for her was wonderful, fresh, sharp, and profitable. Everything in the world gave her joy, and nothing in it made her drowsy. She never ceased to wonder how many good things there are here in it and how beauteous mankind is. Rhea’s laugh was contagious because she knew that humor is mankind’s greatest blessing, and she wasn’t about to miss anything.

This Robin Wright artcile in the Washington Post from July 15th (OK, so I’m a bit behind in my reading!) is important. It argues that support for violence and bin Laden is down among Muslims, in some cases dramatically, according to Pew Research Center. The poll concludes: "Most Muslim publics are expressing less support for terrorism than in the past. Confidence in Osama bin Laden has declined markedly in some countries, and fewer believe suicide bombings that target civilians are justified in the defense of Islam." Although attitudes regarding Iraq were more divided, yet the support for terrorist/insurgent bombings dropped by 20% from last year. The results also show a widespread support for democracy.

This letter argues that it’s important for Solicitors General to have access to confidential advice from their subordinates. This op-ed, written by Walter Dellinger, who signed the letter, explains how the Roberts case is different.

Unlike Estrada, Roberts was writing memos not as a civil service lawyer but as a senior political appointee in a policymaking position, and the judgeship at stake isn’t any federal judgeship but the Supreme Court itself. These factors and the announced release of volumes of earlier memos to the White House counsel -- undistinguishable as a matter of law from memos to the solicitor general -- suggest that the memos to the latter will be made public as well.

I’m not sure why the first factor should make a difference when it comes to the importance of getting candid advice. As I understand it, executive privilege (analogous, if not identical) covers political appointees, as well as others. Indeed, the third factor suggests as much. If "political advice" is "undistinguishable as a matter of law from memos to the solicitor general," then the considerations that argue for privilege in one apply as well to the other.

This leads me to two conclusions, one about the Democrats (represented here by Dellinger) and the other about the Bush Administration. First, Dellinger’s second factor--that this is a Supreme Court nomination--makes all the difference, at least in his mind and in the minds of his allies. All bets are off. All other considerations are subordinate to this one. Second, people in the Bush Administration should of course know this, and recognize that by releasing any documents, they just whet the appetite for more. In the minds of Bush’s opponents, there is no principled distinction between one sort of document and another, one sort of position and another. Everything is an object of interest and inquiry.

We want to know, as Dellinger puts it, "what kind of person the nominee is," which means we need to know almost everything about the substantive positions he takes. However nuanced and carefully balanced--I’ll even use the word "judicious"--Dellinger’s use of this information might be (see the concluding paragraph of the op-ed), he’s got to be enough of a grown-up to know that the politicians and activists on the Democratic Left are just looking for ammunition. They’ll talk about "judicial temperament," but what they really care about is substantive positions. If all you cared about is judicial temperament, you could discern that by conducting a traditional (that is, pre-Bork) confirmation hearing.

Daniel Pipes simply quotes Bin-Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders to demonstrate that what the terrorists and suicide bombers want is nothing less than to establish Islamic Law throughout the world. (Hat-tip: NRO)

A team of doctors in is working on a face transplant. "After years of heated scientific debate over ethics and technical feasibility, the Cleveland Clinic last fall became the first institution to approve this novel surgery. Already Dr. Siemionow’s group is searching for its first patient." This will not be plastic surgery:

This is brutal, if unsurprising, news:

Mitt Romney vetoed a bill that would expand access to the morning-after pill, thereby keeping his campaign promise not to change Massachusetts abortion laws.

’’I promised the people of Massachusetts that as governor I would not change the laws of the Commonwealth as they relate to abortion," Romney wrote in a veto letter to lawmakers. ’’If taken soon enough, the so-called ’morning after’ pill performs as a contraceptive. But in some cases, it can also act to prevent the implantation of the embryo. To those who believe that life begins at conception, the morning-after pill can destroy the human life that was created at the moment of fertilization."

Since the bill was passed by apparently veto-proof majorities in the state legislature, the principal practical effect of this stance is to burnish Romney’s credentials for the 2008 primary season.

He explains himself to legislators here and to the readers of the Boston Globe here. His conclusion:

There is much in the abortion controversy that America’s founders would not recognize. Above all, those who wrote our Constitution would wonder why the federal courts had peremptorily removed the matter from the authority of the elected branches of government. The federal system left to us by the Constitution allows people of different states to make their own choices on matters of controversy, thus avoiding the bitter battles engendered by ’’one size fits all" judicial pronouncements. A federalist approach would allow such disputes to be settled by the citizens and elected representatives of each state, and appropriately defer to democratic governance.

Except on matters of the starkest clarity like the issue of banning partial-birth abortions, there is not now a decisive national consensus on abortion. Some parts of the country have prolife majorities, others have prochoice majorities. People of good faith on both sides of the issue should be able to make and advance their case in democratic forums -- with civility, mutual respect, and confidence that democratic majorities will prevail. We will never have peace on the abortion issue, much less a consensus of conscience, until democracy is allowed to work its way.

This may be a bit of good news. At least it’s confusing enough to seem like good news. The University of Washington announced this month that, for the first time since the women’s studies department’s creation in 1970, it will be led by a man, David G. Allen. He will be the only male heading any of the 10 women’s-studies departments in the country that offer a doctoral degree. He took the job because no women were interested, or qualified. Nancy J. Kenney, an associate professor of women’s studies, found this "depressing." "There simply aren’t enough women of the right type and interest to take over this position," she said.

Unrelated, but equally amusing, reserachers have discovered why cats are such finicky eaters: genetics. They found a dysfunctional feline gene that probably prevents cats from tasting sweets, a sensation nearly every other mammal on the planet experiences to varying degrees. "Because cats can’t taste sweets, they’re cranky," joked Joseph Brand, one of the researchers. Also see Kipling’s The Cat that Walked by Himself.

According to this article, Richard Durbin denies the incident discussed here. His denial prompted Jonathan Turley to claim that Durbin was in fact his source. Who’s not telling the truth?

Today’s NYT has more, including this nugget:

Mr. Cornyn called Professor Turley’s account of the discussion "troubling, if true." In his own meeting with Judge Roberts on Monday, Mr. Cornyn recounted, "I said, ’I hate to see somebody going down this road because it really smacks of a religious test for public service.’ "

He added, "I said, ’I hate bringing this up, but since someone else already has and I know it is going to come up, is there anything about your faith or religious views that would prevent you from deciding issues like the death penalty of abortion or the like?’ "

"Absolutely not," Mr. Cornyn recalled Judge Roberts replying.

Mr. Durbin declined to discuss the issue on Monday. A spokesman, Joe Shoemaker, said, "What Judge Roberts did say clearly and repeatedly was that he would follow the rule of law, and beyond that we are going to leave it to Judge Roberts to offer his views."

Of course, the Times does manage to misstate Turley’s contention:

Professor Turley cited unnamed sources saying that Judge Roberts had told Mr. Durbin he would recuse himself from cases involving abortion, the death penalty or other subjects where Catholic teaching and civil law can clash.

Here, once again, is Turley:

According to two people who attended the meeting, Roberts was asked by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) what he would do if the law required a ruling that his church considers immoral.

Even if it’s true that this was the question, and even if Roberts answered by saying that he would recuse himself if could not in good conscience follow the law (both Durbin and Cornyn deny that this is Roberts’s position), the Times got it wrong. No one has claimed, as the Times implies, that Roberts said he would recuse himself on every issue where the Catholic Church has a teaching that might be at odds with (someone’s understanding of) what the law requires or permits. The Times’s shorthand characterization of his answer makes it seem as if he wouldn’t touch any of these vexed issues at all. At most (and let me emphasize that this characterization is controverted), he has said that he couldn’t rule in a way that contradicted his conscience, and so would recuse himself. The Times makes it seem as if any time a matter on which the Catholic Church had a position came up, Roberts would back out. In other words, it construes his position in such a way as to suggest that serious religious believers would have a problem interpreting the law, a position that is at best a vast oversimplification (for reasons I offered in yesterday’s post) and at worst evidence of anti-religious animus.

Update: Win Myers has more here.

Update #2: Paul Mirengoff and Hugh Hewitt think Durbin tried to plant a story through Turley, only to have to back off when Turley actually quoted him. Hewitt’s advice to Roberts: always have a witness when you talk to Democrats.