On Fri, 1 May 2009 10:45:08 -0700 (PDT), riverman wrote:

On May 2, 1:38*am, wrote:
Immediately after Specter switches parties, Souter announces his retirement - to
be effective as soon as a replacement is in place. *Unfortunately, Specter
switching sides eliminated him as the necessary potential vote to get an iffy
nominee out of committee, and it is, um, "speculated" (in the DC sense - IOW,
Specter's people first "speculated" it...) that if any midstream rule-bending is
attempted by Dems, Specter will vote "no" on principle (or at least to avoid
looking like a complete servile hypocrite, whatever one's leanings suggest to
them).

And as an aside to Ken, guess whose wisdom, fairness, bi-partisanship, good
looks, and all-around gosh-darned-wonderfulness the Dems are praising as a R
who'll vote for the best nominee regardless...? *Here's a hint - it's not Phil
Graham...

HTH,
R


You rarely see a post with such innuendo and unspoken implications as
this. Nice job saying something without actually saying it, rdean! (or
is that too transluscent?)

--riverman
(BTW, what are you talking about?)

Much of the media was all aflutter (or maybe a-twitter...) over Specter
switching parties, but he votes nay on Obama's budget, and then, he's the
possible/probable go-to guy for a yea vote on getting an iffy nominee of Obama's
for SCOTUS out of committee - by current rules, at least one R must vote yes to
get a nom out of the committee. Specter certainly knew that and I'm pretty sure
Souter would have, too. I've heard, um, "speculation" (again, DC style) that
most middle-of-road types of both parties intend that any potential noms need to
be, well, middle-of-the-road types - they better be somewhere between Souter and
Roberts, and another Sandra Day O'Connor-type would be OK, but some half-assed
Ruth Ginsburg-wannabe (I'm not sure even an actual RBG clone would fly) would
not.

TC,
R

And this just hit my in-box:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/cap...l?hpid=topnews