Yesterday I commented on Mort Kondracke’s column on the filibuster of nominees to the appellate courts. I mentioned the views of Jonathan Turley, a liberal scholar of the law and judiciary, which Kondracke himself had referenced. Well, what should appear in my local paper this morning but a column on the subject by Turley himself?

The decision to nuke or not to nuke has obscured the real issue: Are the Republican nominees qualified or are they flat-Earth idiots? As a pro-choice social liberal, I didn't find much reason to like these nominees. However, I also found little basis for a filibuster in most cases. Indeed, for senators not eager to trigger mutually assured destruction, there is room for compromise.

Turley then goes on to analyze each of the judges that the Democrats label extremists who are unfit for the bench – or who they object to because a Republican president is not deferring to their home state Democrat senators. He indicates that the judges in question are generally well-qualified and within the mainstream of the law. In most of the cases he shows that the criticism is either wrong or insignificant. So strong are his objections to the use of the filibuster that he says, “For nine of the Republican nominees, Democratic opposition looks as principled as a drive-by shooting.”

Only three of the nominees present a problem for Turley.

Democrats are on good ground in filibustering William J. Haynes II, who signed a memo that appeared to justify torture of POWs and suggest that the president could override federal law — an extreme view that preceded abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Then there's 9th Circuit nominee William G. Myers III, a former mining lobbyist who, as an Interior Department official, advocated extreme-right positions on Native American and environmental issues, often in contravention of accepted law. Given the centrality of such issues to the 9th Circuit, there is reason to bar his confirmation.

Finally, there is the closer case of Priscilla R. Owen. She has a "well-qualified" ABA rating, but she is also indelibly marked by a prior public rebuke. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, her colleague on the Texas Supreme Court, said she engaged in "an unconscionable act of judicial activism" in restricting a minor's access to an abortion. That and other charges of activism leave Owen damaged goods for confirmation.

Of these three, I agree on one – the Haynes nomination. It is not that I think that Haynes was necessarily wrong in his position, because I don’t. But at this time, I think the issue is one that is too radioactive. Haynes might be a good nominee in a couple of years – just not now.

I’m not sure about Myers. Do his political positions prevent him from being an acceptable candidate for the judiciary – or at least for the appellate level, beyond which most cases never go? Perhaps. That he lacks experience on a lower court troubles me, because it prevents determining if Myers has an appropriate judicial temperament. I would not be troubled by his confirmation, but would not be troubled by his rejection, either. I just don't see his nomination as a hill worth dying for.

And then there is Priscilla Owens, on whom I steadfastly disagree with Turley. She has been a good justice here in Texas, and while I have disagreed with her position on a number of issues, I have accepted the reasonableness of her rulings. Turley wants to write her off because of an ad hominem attack by one of hercolleagues, the current attorney general. Frankly, I find that to be a pretty weak argument, given that the same statement could have been made against then-Justice Alberto Gonzales in the same case. More to the point, the ABA rated her well-qualified (the alleged “gold standard” for nominees, according to Senate Democrats at the time of Owens' original nomination) and the people of Texas have overwhelmingly reelected her to the bench since that case was decided. Those two facts, taken together, show that she is not an extremist, and is eminently qualified for the federal appellate bench.

Overall, however, I agree with Turley. Now, are there enough honest liberals -- more to the point, enough honest liberals in the Senate -- for such clear thinking to carry the day?

The New York Times – the former “paper of record” for important news in the United States – has long accused Pope Pius XII of being silent in the face of the Holocaust, and of being “Hitler’s Pope”. The fact that it contradicts the evidence contained in its own pages – in one instance the paper called Pius “a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe”, and in another “a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent.” Yet recent scholarship has examined the New York Times response to the Holocaust. The results are damning – a paper published by a German-Jew buried the most important (and horrific) news of the twentieth century in the bowels of the paper rather than make it front-page news. At least that is the claim of one recently published book, Buried by the Times.

The author, Laurel Leff, a professor of journalism and a former reporter for TheWall Street Journal, has done a fine job of research in the archives of the paper of record. Others could have done that, but nobody has. More important, she has brilliantly analyzed the reasons Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the German-Jewish publisher of The Times, brought Jewish self-hatred to a head long before the rubric gained popularity.

In 1939, when the Nazis began to destroy the Jews of Poland, what bothered Sulzberger was Franklin Roosevelt's casual remark that Jews were a "race." He got FDR to call them a "faith," which settled the issue of the Warsaw Ghetto for him.

On the eve of Thanksgiving 1942, the State Department confirmed that 2 million Jews were dead in Europe, and it allowed Rabbi Stephen Wise, the leader of American Jewry, to announce the news. The Times didn't send a reporter to the press conference in Washington. Instead, it ran a short from The Associated Press - on page 10, surrounded by turkey ads.

What if FDR had announced the news? Then, even a scared Jew like Sulzberger would have been afraid to keep it off the front page. And if that happened, millions of Jews could have been saved.

What if Sulzberger and the Times had spoken out? What if they had actively covered the story of the extermination of Europe’s Jews? They might well have forced Roosevelt to speak out. Instead, over the course of 6 years they buried over 1100 stories in the heart of the paper, somewhere between the police blotter and the grocery ads.

One can always argue that Pius XII didn’t say enough, but it is estimated that the Catholic Church saved between 750,000 and 1,000,000 Jews during the war, much of it with the active encouragement and support of the pope. The charge that Pius was “Hitler’s Pope” is a blood libel.

On the other hand, it seems clear that Sulzberger and the Times were certainly in the pocket of the Roosevelt Administration – and that the muting of the Times at the behest of an anti-Semitic president most likely resulted in the deaths of millions because it allowed the malignant neglect of the Jews at a time when they most needed help. As such, would it not be fair to say, using the standard the New York Times has applied in recent years to Pius XII, that Sulzberger was “Hitler’s Publisher”, and the New York Times was “Hitler’s Paper”?

The Democrats keep telling us that religion based attacks on political opponents are unacceptable and run contrary to the values of the Constitution. If that is truly the case, what is Senator Ken Salazar doing making these comments?

"I do think that what has happened here is there has been a hijacking of the U.S. Senate by what I call the religious right wing of the country," Salazar told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference Wednesday.

He singled out Focus on the Family by name, objecting to full-page newspaper ads the ministry's political arm recently placed, targeting 20 senators in 15 states.

"I think what has happened is Focus on the Family has been hijacking Christianity and become an appendage of the Republican Party," Salazar said in an interview. "I think it's using Christianity and religion in a very unprincipled way."

Uh, Senator – who are you to call their religious faith into question? Is that not a religious attack? Isn’t that the exact sort of “unprincipled” behavior to which you are objecting?

Imagine this – you and a group of co-workers regularly buy lottery tickets as part of a pool. The drawing is held and the guy who buys the tickets announces that he has a winning ticket – but that it isn’t one that belongs to the group, but is instead one that he bought for himself. You and the rest of the group are out of luck.

Three hospital employees who thought they were about to split a second-place Mega Millions jackpot worth $175,000 are suing a co-worker who insists he bought the winning ticket for himself.

"I felt betrayed," said Veronica Edmondson, who is among the trio of Mount Sinai Medical Center office workers suing John Piccolo, the office's regular designated lottery ticket buyer. "We trusted him with our money."

Edmondson, 30, of the Bronx, said joy turned to anger when Piccolo called in late for work on Nov. 3 - a day after the drawing.

"Don't be mad at me, but I just won the Mega Million second prize," he told her, according to court papers.

"I exclaimed: 'We won, John!' to which Mr. Piccolo responded: 'No, I won,'" Edmondson said in an affidavit.

Edmondson told the Daily News yesterday that Piccolo offered to give her a Mega Millions umbrella that officials handed him when he picked up his check.
"He said, 'There is nothing you can do. The courts won't take it.' He even had the nerve to come to work and show us the receipt for the money with the taxes taken out of it," she added.

Guess what – Piccolo was dead wrong. The courts will take such suits – and have so far ruled in favor of the co-workers.

In a decision made public yesterday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Marylin Diamond said his co-workers have a convincing case.

She refused to throw out the lawsuit and froze $81,750 of the $109,000 Piccolo collected after taxes.

Piccolo offered each person in the pool $1,000 - but later halved it to $500 saying he needed money for a down payment on a house. "He offered some money because he thought it was the right thing to do," said his lawyer, Thomas Weiss.

No, Mr. Weiss, the right thing for your client to have done would have been to not rip off his co-workers. I’m hoping that by the time he is done paying damages, attorney’s fees, and court costs, he ends up deep in a financial hole – maybe to the tune of $175,000.

One of the many “crimes” for which Pope Benedict XVI is often chastised is the “silencing” of heterodox theologians. In reality, all that actually happened was that their licenses to call themselves Catholic theologians were revoked. Want proof? Here is one of the silenced theologians, Father Charles Curran, offering his critique of the new pope's election and the continued push for Catholic orthodoxy, from his tenure-secured job teaching at Southern Methodist University.

I grew up as a typical pre-Vatican II Catholic. I entered the seminary at 13 and became a priest 11 years later, never questioning church teachings. But as a moral theologian in the 1960s, I began to see things differently, ultimately concluding that Catholics, although they must hold on to the core doctrines of faith, can and at times should dissent from the more peripheral teachings of the church.

Unfortunately, the leaders of the Catholic Church feel differently. In the summer of 1986, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the powerful enforcer of doctrinal orthodoxy around the world, concluded a seven-year investigation of my writings. Pope John Paul II approved the finding that "one who dissents from the magisterium as you do is not suitable nor eligible to teach Catholic theology." Cardinal Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — told the Catholic University of America to revoke my license to teach theology because of my "repeated refusal to accept what the church teaches."

I was fired. It was the first time an American Catholic theologian had been censured in this way. At issue was my dissent from church teachings on "the indissolubility of consummated sacramental marriage, abortion, euthanasia, masturbation, artificial contraception, premarital intercourse and homosexual acts," according to their final document to me. It's true that I questioned the idea that such acts are always immoral and never acceptable (although I thought my dissent on these issues was quite nuanced).

Unfortunately, the Vatican — which was already moving toward greater discipline and orthodoxy — was having none of it. Seven years earlier, it had punished the Swiss theologian Hans Küng because of his teachings on infallibility in the church. Later, Cardinal Ratzinger "silenced" Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff, an advocate of liberation theology, for a year. Just recently, Ratzinger said U.S. Jesuit Roger Haight could not teach Catholic theology until he changed his understanding of the role of Jesus Christ.

Gee, imagine that. If you are teaching things that run directly contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church, you can’t run around calling it Catholic theology. One would have hoped, of course, that fundamental decency and a sense of honesty would have prevented folks like Curran from making such claims. It didn’t, and so Catholic authorities acted to clarify the situation for the world – you cannot use the forum of a Catholic college or university to put forth ideas that diverge from Catholic truth while claiming that they represent authentic Church teachings.

Curran, of course, is distressed by the advent of the pontificate of Benedict XVI. The result is a call for the rejection of the teachings of the Church. If one is looking for evidence in support of the actions taken against him two decades ago, one need look no further than his continued rejection of those teachings and his attempt to undermine them in the minds of others.

One of my buddies grew up in Ridgway, Illinois – the Popcorn Capitol. One of the questions he could never answer for me was why some kernels didn’t pop.

Well, the latest scientific research from the Popcorn Board out of Chicago gives us a potential answer.

It's long been known that popcorn kernels must have a precise moisture level in their starchy center -- about 15 percent -- to explode. But Purdue University researchers found the key to a kernel's explosive success lies in the composition of its hull.

Unpopped kernels, it turns out, have leaky hulls that prevent the moisture pressure buildup needed for them to pop and lack the optimal hull structure that allows most kernels to explode.

"They're sort of like little pressure vessels that explode when the pressure reaches a certain point," said Bruce Hamaker, a Purdue professor of food chemistry. "But if too much moisture escapes, it loses its ability to pop and just sits there."

The findings may help popcorn breeders select the best varieties -- or create new ones -- with superior hulls that yield few, if any, unpopped kernels. But for now, there's no way to screen out potential old maids before they end up in bags of popcorn.

Hamaker and his associates compared the microwave popping performance of 14 Indiana-grown popcorn varieties and examined the crystalline structure of the translucent hulls of both the popped kernels and the duds.

I’ll admit, it isn’t rocket science (and living so close to Johnson Space Center, I know plenty of rocket scientists), but maybe it will one day guarantee that that every kernel is “good to the last pop”.

What a world we live in! The faithful (and the faithless, for that matter) are invited to write to Pope Benedict XVI at his new email address.

Got a prayer or a problem for the new pope? Now you can e-mail him. Showing that Pope Benedict XVI intends to follow in the footsteps of John Paul II's multimedia ministry, the Vatican on Thursday modified its Web site so that users who click on an icon on the home page automatically activate an e-mail composer with his address.

In English, the address is benedictxvi@vatican.va. In Italian: benedettoxvi@vatican.va.

Vatican spokesmen could not immediately be reached for comment on how many messages Benedict may have received already.

Pope John Paul II also had an email address, and made use of computers and the internet.