BREVITAS

OBAMALAND

Unsilent Generation - In their zeal to show that she is a "moderate," Sotomayor's liberal supporters are downplaying all her most compelling qualities, while lauding her most conservative decisions. She has rejected the majority of racial discrimination claims, they crow, and sent most immigrants packing. On criminal justice matters, she is somewhere to the right of the man she will replace, Daddy Bush appointee David Souter. . . The most barefaced example of this rhetoric came on the eve of the hearings from New York Senator Charles Schumer, considered one of the Judiciary Committee's most liberal members. Declaring Sotomayor a "slam dunk," Schumer bragged: "She has agreed with Republican colleagues 95 percent of the time. She has ruled for the government in 83 percent of immigration cases, against the immigration plaintiff. She has ruled for the government in 92 percent of criminal cases. She has denied race claims in 83 percent of the cases and has split evenly on employment cases between employer and employee."

WAR DEPARTMENT

Raw Story - Defense Secretary Robert Gates is weighing a possible temporary expansion of the US army to ease the strain from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his press secretary said on Wednesday. Gates was discussing the idea, backed by Senator Joseph Lieberman, with senior officers to add 30,000 troops to the active-duty army, press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters. The possible expansion from the current strength of 547,400 would be designed "to get them through what is still a stressful period as we draw down in Iraq and continue to plus-up in Afghanistan," Morrell said.

HEALTH & SCIENCE

Scientific Blogging - With as many as 24 million people worldwide afflicted with dementia, researchers are looking for correlations in genetics, diet and environment. Since many of these people live in low- and middle-income countries, the solution to reducing instances of dementia may be a cost-effective one: more oily fish , according to a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. . . To examine the fish connection, a group of international researchers studied older people in 7 middle- to low-income countries. Data from 14,960 participants were analyzed. Dietary habits were assessed by using standard, culturally appropriate face-to-face interviews, and dementia was diagnosed by using validated culturally and educationally fair criteria. In each of the study countries, except India, there was an inverse association between fish consumption and dementia prevalence. These data extend to low- and middle-income countries previous conclusions from industrialized countries that increased fish consumption is associated with lower dementia prevalence in later life.

Christian Science Monitor - According to the Anchorage Daily News, hunters on Alaska's northern coast noticed a mass of thick, dark, viscous matter drifting in the ocean. Officials took a helicopter to investigate and followed a strand of the stuff that they estimated to be 12 to 15 miles long. The following day, they collected samples. Preliminary results of the tests conducted by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation found no hydrocarbon sheen. In other words, it's not oil. And it's not Sarah Palin's lip gloss. Instead, they found that the sample "primarily contained marine algae." But it's a kind of algae unlike anything anyone can recall seeing before. The Anchorage Daily News quotes Gordon Brower of the North Slope Borough Planning Department: "It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower . . .

SHOP TALK

Although your editor has done more than 700 radio and TV interviews, never before last night has he literally caused a station to go off the air. Although his actual role has not been confirmed by authorities, you can't get correlation much closer to causation than when, 27 minutes or so into an afternoon interview with Beth-Ann Kozlovich of Hawaii pubic radio, the station goes off the air because of a power outage that lasts into early the next morning. According to the Star-Bulletin, "About 900 Hawaiian Electric Co. customers, in a mix of high-rise residential and commercial customers, were affected. . . Hawaii Public Radio, with offices on Kaheka Street, went off the air." Meanwhile, at the Review's Freeport, Maine, headquarters, an emergency generator sat futilely a mere fifty feet away.