LINK

I had never heard of the Quiverfull movement LINK until the Duggar family announced that they were expecting their 19th child. LINK The movement is pretty creepy. Their main goal is to have as many children as possible in order to give God another arrow for his quiver. (Why an omnipotent, all powerful being would need the help of a bunch of wingnuts is a bit of mystery but..)

The Republican former governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney negotiated a health care bill with the Democratically controlled Massachusetts Legislature that covers all citizens of the Commonwealth. LINK The negotiations began in the fall of 2005 and it became law in April 2006. Romney used his line item veto power to veto eight parts of the legislation. The Legislature eventually overturned all of these vetoes.

Just read about this in National Geographic.

Oxford University physics professor, Josual Silver, invented a do-it-yourself pair of eyeglasses that he hopes will make up for the lack of opticians in the developing world. You can read about it here.

The witness list for Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination hearings has been released LINK and there are a few 'interesting' people on the list.

One is former Major League pitcher David Cone. I assume he is going to tell everyone what a wicked awesome job Sotomayor did when she presided over litigation involving the 1994 Major League Baseball strike. The Democrats on the Judiciary Committee invited Cone to testify.

Yesterday the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). The final vote was 219 to 212. LINK

The Republicans, as is their way, didn't actually offer much in the way of honest debate about this bill. Instead they claimed its passage would cost each American household $3,000+ each year.

From the NYT link above:

Over in the troika election speech diary LINKEE a discussion arose about banning a certain lifetime member of the Forvm. It was suggested that a troika nominee could run on a ban [fill in Forvmateer's username] platform and if that candidate won it would create a mandate to ban the member. The elected troika member could then use that mandate to lobby the rest of the troika to ban the member in question. IMO, that isn't fair to the troika candidate/member.

The latest manufactured outrage over our President's justified firing of Gerald Walpin, an Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service has gotten me to thinking about the myriad "scandals" of the Clinton Administration. I thought I would just list as many as I could remember and their outcomes.

Here are some of the "scandals":

While the mods are busy spending their well earned mod quarterly bonuses (thanks to our new found Powell's & Amazon riches) I thought I would help them out by posting an open thread.

I also wanted to post a link to an article over at The Volokh Conspiracy. Guest blogger, Peter Leeson, writes about the laws put in place to stop the widespread piracy taking place during the Caribbean pirates’ heyday. LINK

ABC news reports LINK that: