No Runny Eggs

For a while, I thought I broke BlogSpot, but at least that was just planned maintenance. On a more-serious note, CNET is reporting that Level 3 Communications has cut off its direct “peering” connections to Cogent Communications. It seems Level 3 wants payment from Cogent for the “privilege” to directly connect (“peer”) to it, while Cogent feels it’s large enough to continue the common courtesy for like-sized networks to have those peer connections. They couldn’t agree, so Level 3 shut off those connections to Cogent.

Bottom line; if your ISP has chosen sides, there’s a slew of websites you can’t get to until either Level 3 and Cogent reach an agreement or your ISP decides to “hard-wire” a back-door. For example, I as a RoadRunner customer can’t get to the Drudge Report because RoadRunner depended on Level 3’s “peering” to connect to the Cogent network.

Unnngh! My first typo (at least the first one I noticed). It’s fixed.
Update #2; where’s the blanking SpellCheck? :-)

I want to believe that Harriet Miers is a judicial conservative. I want to believe the President Bush can break the cycle of Republican Presidents nominating conservatives only half the time. However, we have essentially a blank slate for a nominee; one with no judicial experience (not necessarily a disqualifying or even bad item), no apparent writings on Constitutional law to help discern a likely judicial philosophy, a thin, contradictory public record, and as of Tuesday night, only words repeated from Monday that say that she is a judicial conservative. For every item that would indicate that she has conservative leanings (her opposition to efforts to repeal of the Texas sodomy law that was recently voided by the Supreme Court in 1989-from Time, support from Dr. James Dobson), there is one that suggests otherwise (her support for full gay rights in that same questionaire, Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid’s support of her).

At this point, her nomination resembles a mushroom. It looks a lot like one that is edible, but there are some markings that make it look like a poisonous ‘shroom. If you like mushrooms, there’s three things you can do:

1. You can ignore those markings, eat the mushroom like it was something you remember as edible, and hope you don’t get poisoned.
2. You can throw away that mushroom, believing it to be poison and maybe miss out on a good morsel.
3. You can study it more closely, identify it, and act accordingly.

The White House and other Miers supporters, like Texas Senator John Cornyn in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, are continuing to tell us to just blindly trust that she is a judicial conservative. Sen. Cornyn does succeed in making her, in another contest, er, context, Miss Congeniality, and in justifying most of the side issues, but all that does is polish up the mushroom. He does also promise that at some point, we’ll have evidence of her judicial philosophy. With the Senate’s track record of choosing, depending on whether a Dem Senate is facing a Pubbie President or not, politics or congeniality over a verification of a judicial philosophy, we’re likely going to find out whether the “instant proclamations” of judicial conservatism, not exactly backed up by anything, are accurate or not. Given that most “stealth” nominees turn out to be something less than judicial conservatives, I can only pray that we don’t get judicial food poisoning.

Check.

Keyboard’s hot.

Welcome to No Runny Eggs. I’m your humble short-order cook, pigskin prognosticator, political pundit, mumbling edit and all-around quiet guy, steveegg. Don’t mind the mess; I got this thing nice and cheap (namely, free), and since I got invited over to The Wisconsin Sports Bar, I figured I may as well have a place to hang my hat instead of just mumbling about in various blogs and Free Republic.