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Well what have we here! Did you bother to see how many judicial nominations that the Republicans approved of clinton's during his first term? Or see the detailed reasons why they were not approved?

They didn't start holding up nominations until after impeachment when clinton was trying to stack the courts with his cronies and very liberal, let's make the law, judges. And the last six months of clinton's presidency, he really tried to stack the Court with very liberal judges and a lot of them unqualified.

Even the very liberal ABA approves of the vast majority of these judges, but that isn't good enough for Leahy and the rest of the RATS. In fact daschle and company said originally that Bush should make no nominitions as he wasn't the legitimate President. I guess you agree with that too!

The problem is that these judges would be approved if they ever reached the Senate floor -- leahy won't even let the Committee vote on them so they can get to the floor.

As for those two liberal RATS from Michigan, if I were the President, I would make recess appointments of the most conservative judges I could find for Michigan!

Actually, no, I'm not aware of the specific reasons why any of the Clinton nominees were blocked. I presume it's because the Republican Senate didn't approve of their politics, much as is what's going on now in the Democratic Senate. While I'm sure that one can paint some of Clinton's nominees as "very liberal, let's make the law" types, I'm sure that the current Senate can similarly paint some of Bush's nominees as being too conservative and willing to bend the law to suit.

Making recess appointments is certainly within Bush's powers, so if he's got the guts for it he should do just that. Of course, the problem is that if he does, and then the judges involved lose their seats two years later, they then also then lose their livelihoods. So they may not want recess appointments. But that's up to them.

Ask me to hold no brief for Tom Daschle. I'm not a constitiuent of his, and don't approve of a lot of things he does. I think that games were played with the Florida results, but the Supremes have spoken and that's that.

I will also say that I looked at the "butterfly ballot" and don't see any problems with it. We use a similar one in Illinois, where you have to flip through about 12 pages during Presidential years, as we also have retention ballots on state judges, plus state and local initiatives.

What's interesting is that in Illinois, they now have machines that read your ballot before it goes into the ballot box and checks to see if you failed to vote for any candidate in a given race, and if you voted for more than one candidate in a given race. It spotted me not voting for a candidate in a race (it doesn't say which one, you have to look). Picked up numerous errors statewide. I think this is going to be useful, it should cut down on the number of spoiled ballots.