Hitler Cats, Giuliani, Huckabee, Bad Teachers

For all those who have suspected that cats are evil, there is now a website devoted to cats that look like Hitler. I looked at their top four, and perhaps it's just me, but #3 reminds me more of Stalin.

Back on the serious matter of politics, Giuliani has recently been expressing his admiration for judges in the mold of current Justices of the Supreme Court Scalia, Alito, and Roberts. However, his judicial appointments as mayor had a decided leftward tilt. Now, admittedly, the judicial appiontment system there is more restricted, in which he was only able to choose from three applicants that had passed a screening panel for each vacancy, so he might not have been given the oppurtunity to nominate many judicial conservatives. However, the panel is appointed by the mayor (the article is unclear about whether each mayor appoints his own panel, or if each panel member serves a specified term, or what), so he did have some control. Plus, selecting only six Republicans out of his seventy-five total nominations (and fifty Democrats) is a poor track record regardless. My opposition to Rudy periodically lessens, but then there's always something like this to bring me back. Also, his position in the polls is greatly aided by the fact that many people have no idea where he stands on the issues, as pointed out here. (UPDATE: It seems Giuliani had much more discretion than implied, see here for details.)

There's pressure on former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to drop his declared presidential bid and instead take on democrat Mark Pryor for a Senate seat in 2008. I had considered Huckabee a potential candidate for my support for the presidential nomination, but he finished out his governorship in lackluster fashion, and I've discovered his illegal immigration views are all too similar to McCain and company. Still, I could support him in a run for the Senate, especially as he seems to be Arkansas Republicans' only real hope to take the Senate seat. There's an Iowa straw poll in August; a poor performance there could prompt him to drop out of the race in plenty of time to still make a solid run for the Senate.

There seems to be a boom in bad-teacher stories in the news. There's the middle school teacher (female) who had sex with five students, the substitute who taped students to their desks (which really seems much ado about nothing), an Italian teacher who cut her student's tongue with scissors when he wouldn't be quite, a Pittsburgh teacher who shared a sexual poem with a seventh grader, and, while it's not quite the same, the students caught trying to make a porn film between classes in the drama classroom. Those are only stories taken from headlines that appeared in the last 48 hours on the FOX News website.