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is that the radical Islamics absolutely are pulling for Obama to win.

Experience needed? The long history of nonjudge justices.
Nearly half of justices had no prior experience on the bench.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – John Marshall is widely revered as "the great Chief Justice," but before joining the Supreme Court in 1801 he had never served a day in judicial robes and lost the only case he argued at the high court.

Earl Warren had worked for 18 years as a prosecutor and was three times elected governor of California. But he had no prior judicial experience. Nor did William Rehnquist, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis.

The nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has sparked debate over her qualifications. Does she have the intellectual heft and constitutional dexterity necessary for the job? And how does her experience compare to the résumés and stature of prior justices?

"People are still learning about Harriet Miers. Hers was not a name that quickly came off everybody's lips when people [asked] who are the most qualified people for the court," says David Yalof, a political science professor and expert on Supreme Court nominations at the University of Connecticut.

But Professor Yalof adds, "The issue has never been most qualified, the issue is qualified."

Who is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is a determination made on a nominee by nominee basis by at least 51 US senators. There are no set rules for qualification. Although every past justice has been a lawyer, 41 of the 109 justices had no prior judicial experience.

But many of the justices who lacked hands-on experience as a jurist nonetheless had achieved a high level of accomplishment and stature as intellectual or political leaders prior to their nominations.

"Judicial experience is not a prerequisite, but what you look for in place of judicial experience is distinguished experience as a law professor or public official, and Miers really doesn't have either of those two," says Michael Comiskey, a political science professor at Penn State University at Fayette.

One key consideration, scholars say, is the goal of the nominating president.

"She clearly doesn't have the kind of symbolic significance that presidents are sometimes going for in choosing justices - those who you put on the bench because you expect them to be great justices," says Keith Whittington, a politics professor at Princeton University and visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

President Reagan tried it, unsuccessfully, with the nomination of Robert Bork and succeeded with Justice Antonin Scalia, he says. "Earlier in the century Oliver Wendell Holmes was in that mold. Louis Brandeis was in that mold," Professor Whittington says.

s that the radical Islamics absolutely are pulling for Obama to win.

Just remember, in the words of Hillary Rodham Clinton, "the last man standing .....may just be a woman".

The superdelegate movement toward Mr. Obama, of Illinois — giving him a net gain of six on Friday alone, with more expected — increased the pressure on Mrs. Clinton, of New York, to at least refrain from divisive remarks, particularly after her comments on Wednesday that lower-income white voters would not support Mr. Obama if he became the Democratic nominee. Aides now say she regrets the comments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/us/politics/10clinton.html?ref=politics

Clinton advisers say attacks on Mr. Obama are no longer enough to change the momentum or the outcome of the nomination race. So continuing to attack him on the campaign trail, at this point, would probably inflict more long-term harm on Mrs. Clinton than on Mr. Obama, her advisers said.

The Obama camp has even more reason than just that big score to celebrate with a special happy hour -- according to both the New York Times and ABC News, Obama has now overtaken Clinton and leads her in the two outlets' superdelegate tallies. (A lot of the big media outlets have their own unique tallies; in some, Clinton still leads or is tied with Obama.)

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/?last_story=/politics/war_room/
2008/05/09/obama_superdelegates/

We're wasting our collective breath at this point. The press is now calling Obama "the presumptive nominee".
That's probably because most of them haven't really looked at the survey percentages and delegates for the remaining states, or considered what would and should happen to the total delegate and popular vote counts if Florida and Michigan were factored in.
There is also the fact that some media outlets such as CNN and truly embarrassingly MSNBC are so clearly favoring Obama over Hillary.

When even they can see that Hillary has lost this, it's not a good sign.

JEDI GIRL SAID:
I have friends in Iran....oh.. my goodness... will I be labeled a terrorists for this.... spoke with them. Let me start way back. I went to college at the age of 40 and they are friends I made there,... a well known International University... and they lived in fear of telling others where exactly they were from. They would say Saudi Arabia, etc.

Anyway... the 'street word' is that the radical Islamics absolutely are pulling for Obama to win. Doesn't mean it's saying Obama is 'their man' to use a phrase. It just means what I heard. Nothing more or less. Might be a tad exaggerated/emphasized... but, I trust my friends as sources.

Clinton lost the race months ago, but in my opinion, she signed her letter of resignation when she said she'd OBLITERATE Iran... If I had only READ that quote instead of hearing it with my own ears, I would have bet my life that it was a quote from BUSH. (presuming he could pronounce 'obliterate')

in response to a question about Iran attacking Israel with NUCLEAR weapons

Clinton told some 1,700 AIPAC supporters that the US must take any step to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

"U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons," she said. "In dealing with this threat ... no option can be taken off the table."

"To deny the Holocaust places Iran's leadership in company with the most despicable bigots and historical revisionists," she added. Clinton excoriated the Iranian administration's "pro-terrorist, anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric."

"We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force," she added.

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies made public Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is most likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies "do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, the report says, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that the enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

But the new estimate declares with "high confidence" that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt "was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/03/america/cia.php

Anyone who knows anything about nuclear weapons knows that once you have sufficient weapons-grade uranium, which is easy to produce from nuclear reactors, it is easy to produce a nuclear weapon for a country with any degree of industrial base.

MG, I don't know the origin of that news release you're quoting

We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely.

We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame. (INR
judges that Iran is unlikely to achieve this capability before 2013 because of foreseeable
technical and programmatic problems.)

_Ibid

The National Nuclear Security Administration reports "an astounding 146 percent increase" from 2006 in atomic bombs and warheads that were dismantled in Fiscal Year 2007, which ended Sept. 30. The agency's goal was a "49% increase."

Impressive numbers. Trouble is, the NNSA's press release does not note the actual number of weapons that were dismantled. Why? It's classified, which makes it hard to evaluate the claims and progress.

Three years ago President Bush set a goal of reducing the nation's stockpile 50% by 2012.

An NPR report in June looked at the dismantling program, including frustration around its secrecy, which dates to the 1990s. One estimate puts the U.S. nuclear arsenal at 10,000 weapons (pdf). AP (which reported the dismantling news Sunday) says 6,000.

NNSA did say "Last year, NNSA permanently dismantled the last W56-type nuclear weapon in the U.S. stockpile. Currently, NNSA is dismantling W62 and the B61 modifications 3 and 4, which will continue for several years."

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/10/us-reports-asto.html