The Weekly Enlightenment

Well, I've been without internet and on vacation for a total of two weeks now. Sorry I haven't sent anything out, I thought we were getting disconnected one day, and it appeared to be a day early. Anyways, I don't have many stories, and even if I did, they would be slightly outdated.

So here is what has been bugging me the last couple weeks...

President Obama and Vice President Biden keep insisting they have been misreading the economy. How exactly do we know they aren't misreading Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, etc.? Their "misreading" doesn't exactly give me confidence about them.

Great point by Rush Limbaugh that the bad economy is a backdoor to universal health care. For some reason, health care is tied to your employer. Besides hampering small businesses with this added cost (which likely reduces your salary that you could use to purchase your own insurance), if businesses are doing bad, that means more and more businesses will close or lay off people. Then that affects their health coverage. So the higher unemployment, the more people will be clamoring for universal care.

Democrat senator Pat Leahy said don't rush to judgement on Sotomayor. Yet it was fine to do that to Roberts, Alito, Clarence Thomas, or even Robert Bork. In Bork's case, Ted Kennedy went to the floor of the Senate to oppose him less than an hour after Bork was nominated. Nothing like rushing to judgement. For the transcript of Kennedy's speech see this. Back-alley abortions, segregated lunch counters, yes, no rush to judgement there.

Why is it so important to have a woman on the court? I want the best people on the court. If it was all white men, or black men, or all women, or all Hispanics, what difference does it make? I'm not saying the current crop by any means is the best and brightest, but I am against making their gender or race the sole reason for their hiring.

The big talk in any Supreme Court nominee hearing is stare decisis, which means respecting precedent. Where was the love for stare decisis before abortion, criminal rights (Miranda, warrants, confessions, lawyers), campaign finance, property rights, etc. It just means respecting laws liberals like.

Another great point from Rush: Sotomayor says O'Connor can't mean what she said when O'Connor said a wise old man and a wise old woman will reach the same conclusion...what prevents Sotomayor from saying the Constitution doesn't mean what it says?

If Obama had been a Republican, would the media have been celebrating the first black President? We can see if Palin gets the nomination, we'll see if the media is celebratory about the first woman President. Democrats think all black people should think alike and support Obama because Obama is black like them. Will they do the same with women if Palin is the nominee?

Finally, a great suggestion from Ed Morrissey. If there is a right to health care, isn't there a right to legal care? Of course Democrats wouldn't go for this, trial lawyers are one of their biggest constituencies.

The Weekly Enlightenment

Another great week. The biggest news was of course of Sarah Palin resigning as governor of Alaska. It's really no surprise. Multiple ethics complaints have been brought against Palin, all of which have been dismissed, but they keep bringing them. Obviously it takes time and money to fight these battles in court, and all the time is spent NOT being the governor of Alaska. Much speculation is that it is to run for President in 2012. May or may not be true, we'll have to see. Since it is all speculation, for now we just have to take it at face value. For this decision, however, Palin has been the target of a lot of vitriol from the press. Which is weird. For someone who is supposed to be irrelevant and stupid, they sure are focusing a lot of time on her. You can be assured when the press and Democrats attack someone, it's not because they actually are stupid or irrelevant (Rush Limbaugh has been called irrelevant many times throughout the past 20 years). It is because that person threatens their power. Palin connected with ordinary voters as being not part of the Washington establishment. She rallied conservative voters, many of whom would not vote for the maverick McCain and were demoralized from out of control Republicans. If she were really irrelevant, it would not be necessary to even bother with her, but they are. And she isn't.

Great point by Mark Steyn and Sean Hannity: Biden now says they didn't know how bad the mess was. But during the campaign, Obama kept saying it was the worst crisis since the Great Depression. Was he understating the problem by comparing it to the Great Depression? Of course not. Election year, trying to spin the economy as the fault of Bush, fine. But there's no way they underestimated how bad it was unless their talk before the election was deceitful.

Nuke reduction. Obama talked with Medvedev of Russia about reducing our nuclear arsenal. Put aside the question of whether Russia would actually reduce its arsenal. The whole idea behind this is that if only America would reduce its nukes, other countries would follow suit. So basically it is the same thing we always see with Obama, that no matter the circumstance, it is America's fault.

MUST READ
* Obama declares the Constitution optional.
* Simple economics. Insurance raises the price of medical care.
* This is what climate change is all about.

Silly Liberals
* Liberals stuck in the abstract.
* Why is Obama not standing by the people of Honduras?
* Releasing violent criminals has been part of the left's backwards justice system for years. Just another example.
* I doubt this would not be considered a hate crime. Hate crimes are just a tool to start regulating thoughts.

Energy
* It appears T. Boone Pickens is scrapping his wind energy plan. It's just not feasible that wind power will take over our energy needs.

Abortion
* Abortion from its inception was to root out undesirable races. Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood explicitly wanted to root out blacks. Now you have it from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.