CALIFORNIA YANKEE

Atlantis To Be Launched On September 6

NASA set September 6 as the new date to try and launch Space Shuttle Atlantis. Liftoff time is scheduled for 12:29 p.m. EDT.

On Tuesday, NASA decided to let the shuttle weather Ernesto at the launch pad and halted a rollback of Atlantis to the Vehicle Assembly Building. That proved to be a good decision with Atlantis suffered no damage from Ernesto.

Image: Atlantis stands on Launch Pad 39B just before the rotating service structure was moved into place to safely cloak the shuttle from Tropical Depression Ernesto. Photo credit: NASA/KSC

Avoiding The Constitution

California's voters' recent tendency to vote overwhelmingly Democratic in presidential elections results in the presidential nominees practically ignoring the state. Being ignored causes the state's legislators to feel slighted. Like a spoiled child demanding attention, the lawmakers are trying to change the Electoral College so that presidential campaigns must engage in some "serious sucking up" to California's powerbrokers.

To soothe their hurt feelings, and ensure they are no longer ignored by presidential nominees, the legislature passed a law designed to make an end run around the U.S. Constitution and elect presidents by popular vote.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the legislation requires that California's electoral votes go to the nominee who gets the most votes nationwide — not the most votes in California.

The legislation AB 2948 is part of the Campaign for the National Popular Vote's "Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote."

The Group's website explains the Constitutional end run:

A federal constitutional amendment (requiring two-thirds of Congress and 38 states) is not required to change the state laws that currently specify use of the winner-take-all rule. Nationwide popular election of the President can be implemented if the states join together to pass identical state laws awarding all of their electoral votes to the presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The proposed state legislation would only come into effect only when it has been enacted, in identical form, by enough states to elect a President—that is, by states possessing a majority (270) of the 538 electoral votes.

The U.S. Constitution establishes a legal vehicle for the proposed coordinated state action, namely the “interstate compact.” Examples of existing interstate compacts include the Colorado River Compact (which divides water among seven western states) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (a two-state compact). Interstate compacts are enacted by states in the same way they enact ordinary legislation. It is settled constitutional law [that] an interstate compact is [a] legally enforceable contractual obligation among the states belonging to the compact and all of their officials.

Supporters of this proposal to amend the Constitution without actually amending it hope that enough other states pass similar laws to make up a majority of the Electoral College votes. That could be as few as 11 states. Similar legislation is pending in five states: New York, Illinois, Missouri, Colorado and Louisiana.

Growing up as a rural country bumpkin, I appreciate the protection the Electoral College offers the less populous rural states, keeping power from being even more heavily concentrated in the more urbanized states.

The Electoral College keeps small states from being ignored. If presidents were elected by direct vote, a candidate would only have to focus his campaign on the dense population centers, such as New York City, Boston and Philadelphia, to win an election. The "national" campaign could take positions that benefit the population centers and harm those in the rural areas.

Governor Schwarzenegger has not taken a position on the bill. I urge the Governor to veto it. If it is indeed a good idea to elect presidents by popular vote, let's debate the issue and amend the Constituition instead of doing an end run around it.

Gingrich On Speaker Pelosi

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich thinks that Democrat Nancy Pelosi becoming the next leader of the House and third in line to the presidency would be a disaster:

"The prospect of her bringing San Francisco values and a whole attitude on foreign policy that is, I think, an attitude of weakness and appeasement and surrender, I think, would be a disaster for the country," the outspoken Republican said.

I'll tell you when I disagree.

Atlantis Turned Around

NASA has reconsidered the decision to move Space Shuttle Atlantis to Vehicle Assembly Building and will let the shuttle weather Tropical Storm Ernesto at the launch pad.

Weathering the storm at the pad instead of the safety of the Vehicle Assembly Building, will make it possible that Atlantis could be launched as early as next week.

The turnaround decision came as the projected path for Tropical Storm Ernesto was further west than first expected. Atlantis began the return trip to the pad still atop the crawler-transporter.

Image: Atlantis heads back to Launch Pad 39B where it will ride out Tropical Storm Ernesto. Photo credit: NASA.

Lieberman Still Leads

The latest Zogby/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted August 15-21 found Senator Lieberman 10 percent ahead of Greenwich millionaire-antiwar candidate Lamont. The Lieberman, the Democrat's 2000 vice-presidential nominee's support for the Iraq war has so angered his party that he lost this month's primary election. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Senator Lieberman is running "strong among GOP voters, men, and in the suburbs."

The Zogby numbers are in line with the August 10 - 14 Quinnipiac University poll finding Senator Lieberman leading Lamont by 12 percent, 53 percent to 41 percent among likely voters. Republican candidate Schlesinger remains an embarrassing non-factor in the race.

Schlesinger Says He Can Win

Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Alan Schlesinger, met with the Republican Town Committee in Bristol on Monday. He told the Republicans leaders, he can win the Senate race, if the Republican party rallies behind him:

Schlesinger said that if the press doesn’t write him off and conservatives recognize that they’d be better off with him than Lieberman, he can take advantage of Democratic confusion and slip into the Senate the same way Lowell Weicker did it in 1970 under similar circumstances.

Here's a news flash for Mr. Schlesinger, the press has already written him off. So has Republican party. With each new poll Schlesinger sinks further into the quicksand of single digits. In an August 15 through 21 Rasmussen poll Schlesinger was at 6 percent, an August 10 - 14 Quinnipiac poll put him at 4 percent, and most recently, August 15 through 21, Zogby found the Republican at 2 percent.

What a missed opportunity for the Republicans. The November election, with a weakened Democratic Senator Lieberman and the Democratic nominee, Greenwich millionaire-antiwar candidate Lamont, splitting the Democratic vote was a great opportunity for the Republicans to pick up a Senate seat.

Instead the Republicans have a "candidate" who can find a silver lining in an ian nuclear attack upon the United States:

He told the Republican Town Committee at Nuchies that the country faces "a nightmare of cataclysmic proportions" in the decades ahead because of the whopping Medicare and Social Security payments it has promised to retirees who will soon explode in number as baby boomers begin to leave the work force.

Or at least the nation faces that crisis "unless blows us away with a nuclear weapon," Schlesinger said. He said that "the one silver lining" of an ian attack is that it would "solve the problem" of dealing with the financial crisis.

Schlesinger is proving to be worse than a non-factor in the race. His campaign is an embarrassment. It is such an embarrassment that local Republican committees are starting to abandon Schlesinger. The Killingworth Republican Town Committee voted to withdraw its endorsement of Schlesinger.

At Political Wire, Kevin Rennie posts a dozen more Republican Town Committees may follow. According to Rennie, the committees may even go so far as to endorse Senator Lieberman.

Connecticut Woman To Lead Muslim Group

The Hartford Courant reports Ingrid Mattson, a Canadian convert to Islam and an Islamic law scholar at Hartford Seminary, has been elected president of the Islamic Society of North America.

Mattson is the first female president of the Islamic Society, the largest Muslim organization in North America. The Islamic Society is an umbrella group that represents Muslim associations for youths, college students, engineers and others, and also provides support to Muslim chaplains and North American mosques.

Ian Markham, the dean of Hartford Seminary said Matson's election "speaks to the determination of [the organization] to reflect authentic Islamic values about the importance and equality of women."

It is interesting that the Islamic Society would elect a women leader when the religion separates men and women during worship. According to the Courant, women have had prominent roles outside of religious services, founding and leading some Islamic groups throughout North America. Nevertheless, that doesn’t rise to the level of equality for women achieved in Western society.

Leftist Destabilization Of Mexico

Mexico's electoral court unanimously rejected most of the 240 complaints leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador filed challenging last month's presidential election in Mexico.

That wasn't good enough for Obrador. Reuters reports Obrador refuses to accept defeat and said the top electoral court had shamed Mexico by upholding the July 2 election result.

The initial results showed the National Action Party's conservative candidate, Felipe Calderon, won the election by 0.58 of a percent or 244,000 votes out of 41 million ballots. The Court's action did not change that initial outcome.

The Associated Press reports a partial recount won't erase Calderon's lead, but the judges held off declaring a winner.
The court also put off until next week a decision on the request by Obrador to annul the election entirely, but the New York Times reported that the court's action virtually assured Calderón of being named president:

The judges said in open court today that the tribunal had ordered the votes from scores of polling places annulled for irregularities found during a partial recount, but that the final result would not change. They also made it clear they found no evidence of fraud.

“Based on all the annulments that were deemed necessary, all the parties lost a considerable number of votes, but that did not affect the result,” Magistrate José Alejandro Luna Ramos said.

[. . .]

All told, the court annulled 81,010 votes for Mr. Calderón and 76,897 for Mr. López Obrador after recounting ballots in about 9 percent of the precincts to satisfy legal challenges. Crossing out those votes gave the leftist candidate a slight boost of 4,183 votes, far fewer than he needed to catch up, electoral officials said.

According to the Times, Obrador's accusations have become more and more outlandish over the last month, going so far as to claim the court itself had been bribed:

On Sunday, Mr. López Obrador told a large crowd of supporters that any ruling that put Mr. Calderón in office without recounting all ballots “would be an abuse of the people’s rights, a rupture of the constitutional order and a coup d’état.”

[. . .]

Mr. López Obrador has called for a national assembly to be held in the city’s main square, the Plaza de la Constitución, on Sept. 16 to decide the future of his campaign of civil disobedience to “save democracy” and “purify public life.” He has suggested the assembly could name him president of an alternative government.

In an earlier article the Associated Press covered the leftist sore-loser plans to form a parallel government if he is not declared the winner. Obrador told supporters that they should decide whether to name a president or leader of a peaceful, civil resistance movement:

"What is chosen during the convention will have representation and that representation can be a legitimate president of the republic or, if the convention chooses, a head of a resistance government or the coordinator of peaceful civil resistance," he said.

The former mayor says his supporters will continue to block streets and cripple traffic in Mexico City for years if the Federal Electoral Tribunal doesn't grant his demand for a full recount.

Why can't leftist losers just accept it when they loose, instead of doing their best to throw the country they want to lead into chaos? And when civil unrest in Mexico slows that nation's economy, what is the United States to do as more illegal aliens cross the border looking for better opportunity and stability?

Driving While Canine

The Associated Press reports a woman in China gave her dog a driving lesson. As you might expect, the dog-driven vehicle collided with another car.

The woman said her dog "was fond of crouching on the steering wheel and often watched her drive:"

"She thought she would let the dog 'have a try' while she operated the accelerator and brake," the report said. "They did not make it far before crashing into an oncoming car."

No injuries were reported, although the vehicles involved were slightly damaged, it said.

Like the tag line says, you can't make this stuff up.

Storm Delays Atlantis Launch

NASA will roll Space Shuttle Atlantis back to the safety of the Vehicle Assembly Building before effects from Tropical Storm Ernesto would be felt at the Kennedy Space Center:

"We'd like to get off the pad tomorrow morning if at all possible," said Launch Director Mike Leinbach. "Based on tomorrow afternoon's local weather, we'd much rather be back in the VAB earlier rather than later."

The launch window for this mission extends to September 13, but NASA was hoping to launch Atlantis by the 7th to avoid any conflict with a Russian Soyuz rocket also bound for the International Space Station. Atlantis will require eight days of launch preparations once it is returned to the launch pad.