Brent Bozell, Townhall.com

 

Dick Cheney clearly drives the liberal media nuts. As much as they'd like to bask in the glow of the new and glorious Obama Era, they simply cannot achieve that requisite state of nirvana with Cheney around. They spent eight long years packaging Cheney as some evil and deadly combination of Darth Vader and the Ebola virus. Now they can add to the descriptors a new title: Count Dracula. The man refuses to die.

 

That's why every speech he makes draws a ferocious chorus of media boos of outrage at the idea he would dare to think he has freedom to speak in the first place. CNN's Anderson Cooper was so flustered over Cheney's latest speech at the American Enterprise Institute that he asked Cheney's daughter Elizabeth: "If a Democrat was doing this in a Republican administration, wouldn't be the Republicans be saying, this is traitorous?"

 

This is just too rich. Read article.

 

Mark Steyn, NRO.com

 

What does a nuclear madman have to do to get America’s attention? On Memorial Day, the North Koreans detonated “an underground atomic device many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” as my old colleagues at the Irish Times put it. You’d think that’d rate something higher than “World News In Brief,” see foot of page 37. But instead Washington was consumed by the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who apparently has a “compelling personal story.”

 

Doesn’t Kim Jong Il have a compelling personal story? Like Sonia, he grew up in a poor neighborhood (North Korea), yet he’s managed to become a nuclear power, shattering the glass ceiling to take his seat at the old nuclear boys’ club. Isn’t that an inspiring narrative? Once upon a time you had to be a great power, one of the Big Five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, to sit at the nuclear table: America, Britain, France, Russia, China, the old sons of power and privilege. But now the mentally unstable scion of an impoverished no-account backwater with a GDP lower than that of Zimbabwe has joined their ranks: Celebrate diversity! Read article.

 

Morris & McGann, Vote.com

 

When the Japanese military invaded Manchuria in the early 1930s, Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan's own government watch nervously to see what the League of Nations and the Western powers would do. Now it is North Korea and Iran who are watching and wondering.

 

If the United Nations, and the powers it represents, is as impotent as was the League in the 1930s, it will send the same signal to other would-be proliferators: that the rest of the world will sit by and do nothing. By so blatantly flouting international opinion and U.N. resolutions, North Korea has essentially said to the rest of the world: "put up or shut up."

 

The irony, of course, is that North Korea is probably the single state in the world most vulnerable to international sanctions. It produces no energy of its own. If China chose to bring the country to its knees, it could do so in a heartbeat. But will they?

 

China is worried about triggering a flood of North Korean refugees across its borders and tends to be protective of its erstwhile ally.

 

But the real pressure point on China is Japan. If the Japanese signal that they will respond to the North Korean nuclear test with a decision to change its constitution and develop nuclear weapons itself, the impact on both China and North Korea will be intense. Read article.

 

Tony Rubolotta, NMJ.us

 

We are faced with the ultimate nightmare of any democratic republic, and that is the possibility of the tyranny of the majority voting liberty out of existence. Constitutional safeguards are only as good as those charged to safeguard them, and in this respect government officials in every branch of government who take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution have been the worst offenders. The integrity of our political process has been compromised by rampant voter fraud, a tidal wave of illegal campaign contributions and a complicit media. We won’t know just how permanent and deep the damage is until 2010, if we have that long and if it can be corrected at all. A change of the guard is no guarantee the rule of law will be restored.

 

What have others done when faced with the dissolution of their liberty by a majority bent on mob rule?

 

Marxist Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile in 1970 by a plurality of just over 36%. Realistically, left leaning votes totaled about 64%, a clear majority that favored socialist policies and agreed to an Allende led coalition. Allende’s reforms were mostly in the form of huge wage increases, but only for his supporters in favored unions. These were funded largely by property seizures of foreign and locally owned industries.

 

Once the economy had been plundered, the inevitable shortages socialism produces began to appear, food being the most critical. Chaos followed as Allende’s most strident supporters began taking over factories, shops and farms, erected barricades and armed to defend the property they had seized. Allende did nothing to stop the mobs or their illegal actions and ignored pleas by the Chilean congress to either resign or establish order. The army had remained politically neutral but Chile’s descent to Marxist mob rule was the last straw. Augusto Pinochet led a coup in September, 1973 to remove Allende and restore order. Read article.

James Lewis, American Thinker.com

 

We have the recent historical example of two deadly enemies who likely would have risked their own survival at the end of World War Two in order to destroy the United States and the West.

 

What makes us think that today's fanatics are not different? How often does Ahmadinejad have to threaten genocide for us to take it seriously? How many Sudanese Africans have to be killed by their jihad regime for us to take that seriously? How many North Koreans have to be starved to death by their own government for us to see?

 

Most people live in denial of clear and present dangers. We know this administration is full of such people. Obama's Chicago gang just told Israel not to defend itself. But the Israelis are a lot more morally serious about such things. It is simply not imaginable that they will allow the mad mullahs to have their own Armageddon weapon.

 

When Israel strikes out against its genocidal enemy, the Obama gang may try to punish them. But Menachem Begin showed the morally serious decision to make in such a case: You defend your people first of all.

 

Being approved by this Chicago Mob isn't even a close second. Read article.

 

Walter Olson, Forbes.com

 

OK, so Barack Obama's up for a fight: In picking Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, he went with the name on his short list most likely to rouse conservative opposition. Should we be surprised? Not really. His displeasure with the court's current direction was made clear during his years as a senator, when he voted against confirming Roberts and Alito.

 

A few quick points about why Obama appears comfortable with his nominee and believes she can be confirmed, followed by a few thoughts about the implications of her nomination for business law: Read article.

 

Stephen Dinan, Washington Times.com

 

With Judge Sonia Sotomayor already facing questions over her 60 percent reversal rate, the Supreme Court could dump another problem into her lap next month if, as many legal analysts predict, the court overturns one of her rulings upholding a race-based employment decision.

 

Three of the five majority opinions written by Judge Sotomayor for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and reviewed by the Supreme Court were reversed, providing a potent line of attack raised by opponents Tuesday after President Obama announced he will nominate the 54-year-old Hispanic woman to the high court.

 

"Her high reversal rate alone should be enough for us to pause and take a good look at her record. Frankly, it is the Senates duty to do so," said Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America.

 

But opponents have an uphill battle. Read article.

 

Editorial, No Compromise Media.com

 

With the recent Obama nomination for the United States Supreme Court of La Raza member, Sonia Sotomayor, it got me to thinking. I have often said, that whenever you want to really learn about something, you must first start at its inception, or its root system. Otherwise one will only see what grew on top, and never see, in this case, how rotten and ugly the root system is, and if those roots should be pulled out by it’s tap and burned in the fire! 

 

If you go to the website of La Raza, you will get the warm and fuzzy picture of an organization that appears to want to be helpful to those they think have been somehow been unjustly assaulted by the big bad bubby US government. However, a closer look at this organization reveals a dark past, that I am sure is now tucked away in some dark basement closet. 

 

The origins and history of La Raza (which means The Race) is of a rabidly racist and virulently anti-American character, inspired by Saul Alisky, Vladimir Lenin, and Che Guevara. Their goal is to create their version of a Utopian Wurker’s Paradise in the Southwestern US, and their target is the Mexican and American Hispanic population. This Utopian Wurker’s paradise is referred to as Aztlan. History bears out just how successful man’s attempts are at forcing the emergence of this Utopia. Read article.

 

Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO.com

 

It’s not the rule of law, it’s the rule of lawyers: That’s the central message conveyed by Pres. Barack Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a judge of the Second Circuit federal appeals court, to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court next October.

 

Obama and the lawyers in his administration are fond of invoking the rule of law. Yet that golden standard stands on the conceit, honored more in the breach than in the observance, that “we are a nation of laws, not of men.” It holds that there is an objective corpus of law — of the community’s reasoned consensus, shorn of passion, fear, or favor — under which we’ve agreed to be governed and to which those chosen to represent us owe their fidelity. It’s a nice ideal. Increasingly, though, our real governing standard is the one made infamous by the legendary litigator Roy Cohn: “Don’t tell me what the law is. Tell me who the judge is.”

 

Our ideal of judging was perhaps best explained by John Roberts during his 2005 confirmation hearings. The judge is like an umpire, Roberts mused. The umpire calls balls and strikes; he doesn’t design or alter the rules of the game. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The judge’s courtroom is the level playing field where even the visiting team can win if the law — the objective law — is on its side. Sure, the crowd and the local paper will root, root, root for the home team. The rules, however, don’t have a rooting interest. Justice is blind. The umpire is there to see that justice is done — not manufactured. Read article.

 

Thomas Sowell, NRO.com

 

The other day I sought a respite from current events by rereading some of the writings of the 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke. But it was not nearly as big an escape as I had thought it would be.

 

When Burke wrote of his apprehension about “new power in new persons,” I could not help thinking of the new powers that have been created by which a new president of the United States — a man with zero experience in business — can fire the head of General Motors and tell banks how to run their businesses.

 

Not only is Barack Obama new to the presidency, he is new to running any organization. One of Burke’s fears was that “we may place our confidence in the virtue of those who have never been tried.”

 

Neither eloquence nor zeal is a substitute for experience, according to Burke. He said, “eloquence may exist without a proportionate degree of wisdom.” As for zeal, Burke said: “It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion.”

 

The Obama administration’s back-and-forth on the question whether American intelligence agents who forced information out of captured terrorist leaders will be subject to legal jeopardy — even though they were told at the time that what they were doing was not only legal but a service to the nation — came to mind when reading Burke’s warning about the dangers of continuing to change the rules and values by which people lived. Burke asked how we could expect a sense of honor to exist when “no man could know what would be the test of honour in a nation, continually varying the standard of its coin”? Read article.

 

Tony Blankley, Rasmussen Reports.com

 

In 1845, the French economist Frederic Bastiat published a satirical petition from the "Manufacturers of Candles" to the French Chamber of Deputies, which ridiculed the arguments made on behalf of inefficient industries to protect them from more efficient producers:

 

"We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us.

 

"We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds -- in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country."

 

This famous put-down highlights the problem of claiming that protecting inefficient producers creates good jobs. Obviously, the money the

French would have wasted on unneeded candles could have been spent on needed products and services -- to the increased prosperity of the French economy. I mention this in the context of the Obama administration's assertion that by subsidizing alternative energy sources, it will create 5 million green jobs. Read article.

 

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