I think I owe you folks an apology - that last entry was pretty feverish. Let that be a lesson to you: a steady diet of talk radio and little sleep through an entire week will have an effect on your brain.

Okay, that's a cop-out. I was pretty worked up, as you can easily tell. All of my information came from the radio coverage I was listening to of the debates on KKMS, and what little I was able to find on C-Span's website, Yahoo, and Google links. The people who were hosting and commenting on the radio coverage were Janet Parshall (who was the host of the show - I don't really know anything about her) and David Barton (of WallBuilders.com, whom I respect). They were interviewing numerous Republican senators. Each of them reiterated the information I quoted; the quotes from the Democrats were sound clips they played and things I saw on C-Span. I wanted to do more research on the things they had said, but I was already very tired and I wanted to post the information while the debate was still going on - when I posted, I think there were only a few hours left. I hesitated before hitting the "post" button, asking myself if I should really post it before knowing more about the issue, maybe let myself calm down a little, but I decided that I wanted to err on the side of timeliness and didn't want to water down my statements by sounding wishy-washy. Not that it excuses me, but the way I put it is how dire they made it sound on the radio.

Now, having railed against the secular media as much as I have, I should have had my skepticism up, but since they identify themselves as Christians and I'm somewhat familiar with David Barton, I was more willing to trust them. I listened again last night, hoping that they would go into more detail, and what few mentions they made about the event reinforced what I said. Unfortunately, when I'm listening to KKMS I'm usually not in a position to take notes - either I'm driving or my hands are full at work (I do a lot of sorting and scanning of bar codes), so I didn't write down the specific references to the Constitution, names, and laws that they mentioned.

As Michael pointed out in his comments on that last post, there seems to be a discrepancy between what the Senate website says and what the Republicans and David Barton were saying, so I assume they either believe that the first filibuster wasn't technically a filibuster (which is something I really want to hear the explanation of) or they're dismissing it as irrelevant (which would be hypocritical). The lack of the usual talk of women's and minority advocacy is a good thing in that it's not being waved around as reasons to vote the nominees in, but what upsets me is that if these people were aligned with the Democrats' ideology, they would be waved around. My point in mentioning it wasn't that I was upset that they hadn't been doing it, but that I knew they would be doing it if the nominees fit their ideology and the Republicans objected. I'm frustrated, and more than a little bothered by current trends in the political/judicial arena.

Anyway, as I said before, I'm a bit ashamed that I don't know more about the whole process, and it's something I'm going to be investigating this upcoming week. I'll try to be a bit more level-headed in the future when I talk about this kind of stuff, and mention exactly what my sources are for my information.