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Judge Sotomayor And The Constitution

From Heritage.org

The Senate Judiciary Committee is conducting hearings this week on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's Supreme Court nominee.

Yesterday's hearings included questions about her views on the role of judges and the Constitution. She explained that her use of the expression "wise Latina" was intended to inspire, not to indicate that her heritage would bias her rulings. Judge Sotomayor also told Senators that the controversial 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade is "settled law" and based on a Constitutionally-defined "right to privacy."

The Heritage Foundation continues to educate lawmakers and the public about why it's important that judges remain faithful to the Constitution.

For example, thanks to the generous support of Heritage members this week, we will be distributing copies of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution to every Senator. This is a complement to our ongoing efforts to educate members of Congress on their proper role in judicial confirmations.

In addition, we're reaching out to the public to make clear the important issues at stake. For example, Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner reminds the nominee that the job of a Justice is "to consult [the Constitution] for guidance, not foreign laws or policies." He explains that "U.S. citizens are subject only to laws made by American legislators -- not foreigners at the United Nations, in Europe or in Zimbabwe."



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Of Course The CIA Was Plotting To Kill Bin Laden

Another Phony Scandal
The Democrats have trumped up a charge
that the CIA failed to notify Congress that it was contemplating plans to kill or capture top al-Qaeda figures. What a ludicrous gambit.
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Even The Faithful Finally Reporting It

CBS: Obama dropped six points in a month

How bad has Barack Obama’s decline at the polls become?  Even CBS has finally realized it.  Both approval and disapproval numbers have moved sharply over the last month, and in the wrong direction, as voters have discovered that Obama hasn’t a clue about the economy and creating jobs.  You’ll be surprised to discover where CBS thinks he’s losing support, too

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News

"If done right -- and the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee got off to a good start today -- these hearings could help inform the country about who Barack Obama is because this woman, Sonia Sotomayor, is a reflection.   She is a radical who reflects the beliefs of Barack Obama, including his own racial attitudes."

Justice Ginsburg Reveals Real Motivation Behind Roe v. Wade
Planned Parenthood was founded as part of the eugenics movement to abort minority populations, which is why liberals are dead-set on Medicare funding for abortions.

General Powell attacks Rush for saying the patent truth. If Rush said that a white judge was better than a Latina, they'd call him a racist -- and they'd be right. That's what Sotomayor said.
 
President Obama Tells the Truth: His Stimulus Working as Intended
It's hard to believe, but Obama's goal was to destroy as much of the private sector as possible, so destitute citizens will look to the government to save them.

''Obama says he had 'incomplete information' on the economy. Since we already know that the stimulus has failed in its stated purpose, why trust these same people with national health care?   How in the world can they have all the information on health care?"

"One thing that does slightly worry me about Governor Palin is this whole third-party business.  Yeah, it's remote but it's still a possibility out there. There are a lot of people pushing a third party movement -- and third parties lose. It's not the way to go."


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Perhaps

The lock-up-your-opponents bills of 2009?

Would Congress ever pass legislation that would allow the executive to determine at its own discretion whether political opponents had crossed the line into domestic terrorists and build camps in which to keep them?  Sounds like something out of 20th-century totalitarian systems or dystopian fiction.  Mark Tapscott says it’s not fiction, and he warns readers about an effort by Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) to do just that:

Rep. Alcee Hastings - the impeached Florida judge Nancy Pelosi tried to install as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee until her own party members rebelled - introduced an amendment to the defense authorization bill that gives Attorney General Eric Holder sole discretion to label groups that oppose government policy on guns, abortion, immigration, states’ rights, or a host of other issues. In a June 25 speech on the House floor, Rep. Trent Franks, R-AZ, blasted the idea: “This sounds an alarm for many of us because of the recent shocking and offensive report released by the Department of Homeland Security which labeled, arguably, a majority of Americans as ‘extremists.’”

Another Hastings bill (HR 645) authorizes $360 million in 2009 and 2010 to set up “not fewer than six national emergency centers on military installations” capable of housing “a large number of individuals affected by an emergency or major disaster.” But Section 2 (b) 4 allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to use the camps “to meet other appropriate needs” - none of which are specified. This is the kind of blank check that Congress should never, ever sign.

It’s not paranoid to be extremely wary of legislation that would give two unelected government officials power to legally declare someone a “domestic terrorist” and send them to a government-run camp.

However, the designation of domestic terrorist groups — a necessary and critical process for keeping the peace — should not fall into the hands of just one person.  That process needs oversight and consensus to be credible and fair.  Congress should have some involvement, especially in oversight.  Holder could be the greatest AG in the history of the US but still should not have the absolute authority to make that designation, especially after the track record of the DHS in using vague parameters and broad-based smears of legitimate political protest earlier this year.
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Knee-Jerk

New York Daily News blames “gun culture” for McNair murder

Steve McNair apparently died not at the hands of his mistress in a murder-suicide but at the hands of the “gun culture” of America.  So decides sports writer Mike Lupica in the New York Daily News, who must have leapt to his typewriter within minutes of the wire services announcing McNair’s death in order to indict millions of Americans who don’t kill people but manage to own firearms responsibly.  In doing so, he martyrs a man who clearly had other issues than the national “gun culture”

For the record, the murder of a boyfriend, as this appears to be, is slightly more likely to happen by knife instead of gun.  Statistics from the DoJ on murders of intimates from 1990-2005 show that 47% of murdered boyfriends get stabbed to death, while 45% of them get killed by guns.  Would Lupica attribute that to a “knife culture”?  Would the plurality of knife murders be “progress” for Lupica?

Had Lupica paused long enough to do some actual research, he would have found that murders of intimates have dropped over the last 30 years, and that the use of guns as the weapons had declined even faster than the overall drop:

But why let facts get in the way of accusing every gun owner in America of McNair’s murder?



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Networks Mostly Mute On Democratic Scandals

MRC Study: Networks Highlighted GOP Governor Sanford's Scandal, But Are Mostly Mute on Scandals Embroiling Top Democrats

In the week since South Carolina’s Republican Governor announced he had flown to Argentina to carry on an extra-marital affair, the broadcast morning and evening news shows have gone full bore on the scandal, cranking out 49 stories even in the midst of other major stories like Michael Jackson’s death and the continuing repression in Iran.


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Repent, Heretic!

The Obama Inquisition on climate change

Barack Obama promised to return science to its “rightful place” in government, but at least on climate change, it seems that Obama has the Inquisition in mind as the government model.  When a dissenting voice at the EPA warned that the global-warming theories on which Obama had predicated his policies were falling apart, the administration did not champion a scientific approach to the debate.  Instead, it took the ages-old method of silencing the scientist, as Kimberly Strassel reports

Carlin’s comments didn’t “help the legal or policy case” for the Obama administration?  Actually, Carlin’s scientific analysis undermined the entire reason for those legal and policy choices.  The effort to silence Carlin didn’t come because the EPA and the White House could easily refute the analysis.  They silenced Carlin because they couldn’t refute it.

Now that Carlin has blown the whistle, the Obama administration has embarked on another ages-old strategy: character assassination.  They have dismissed Carlin as an economist, when he actually has a degree in physics — from CalTech.  They have derided his work as “sham science,” even though it relied on peer-reviewed studies.  They’ve done everything but actually use the scientific method to rebut Carlin, which demonstrates the commitment they have to the “rightful place” of science when it comes to policy in this administration.



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All Bets Off?

Did Sotomayor help smear Bork?

Republicans have questioned how hard they should fight against Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.  After all, they have objected the loudest to the dirty tactics unleashed by Democrats in their successful blocking of Robert Bork and their smearing of Clarence Thomas.  Now, however, the AP reports that the group that Sotomayor helped lead took sides in the political battle against Bork that kept him off the bench in 1987

Does this change the ground rules for Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing?  After all, apart from the beating Thomas took from Howard Metzenbaum, Ted Kennedy, and Joe Biden, the Democrats, the Bork hearing created the poisonous environment that exists to this day on judicial nominations.  If Sotomayor took part in that effort, she’s a political figure — much more so than Bork at the time, and therefore fair game.

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Ready For Another NAFTA Dance?

Canada - the new tax haven?

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Priorities

Coups, interference, and the shifting standards of Obama

It’s difficult to make sense out of the foreign policy coming out of the White House under Barack Obama.  On the one hand, Obama insisted that he could not interfere with the internal politics of the “sovereign government of Iran,” refusing for days to even condemn Iran for its flagrantly violent repression of dissent.  When Honduras’ military staged a coup, though, Obama apparently had no such reticence in involving the US on behalf of deposed President Manuel Zelaya — a close ally of Hugo Chavez

Zelaya was violating his country’s constitution with his referendum that would have, Chavez-style, repealed term limits on the presidency.  The Honduras Supreme Court ruled the referendum illegal, and the military refused to distribute the ballots.  Instead of backing down, Zelaya fired the head of the military, which precipitated the ouster.

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Another Friday Night Dump

The rank dishonesty of the Obama administration

Jim Geraghty first wrote that all of Barack Obama’s promises come with expiration dates, and broken promises from politicians are nothing new, of course.  However, one usually expects politicians — especially those running on hope and change — to either remain true to their professed core values and the issues that fueled the most passion on the campaign trail, or at least explain their change in the daylight.  Obama did neither, nor did he apologize to the man he besmirched endlessly on the campaign trail while adopting the policy that Obama most demonized as a candidate.

Obama has essentially endorsed the detention policies of George Bush without the courtesy of apologizing for slandering him over the last two and a half years.  Obama and his allies screeched endlessly about indefinite detentions, and not just in Gitmo, either.  They specifically railed against the holding of terrorists without access to civil courts in military detention facilities around the world, specifically Bagram, but in general as well.  Not even six months into his term of office, Obama realized that Bush had it right all along.

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