Politics Potpourri
I'm about as motivated to write a well considered post as I am to pour lemon juice on my paper cuts, but too much has happened recently to be silent. I'll throw all the recent events here, and you can discuss whatever floats your goat.

Supreme Court Upholds Assisted Suicide

Oregon has a law allowing doctors to assist in their patient's suicide. The US Supreme Court recently upheld it. I actually agree with the SCUS decision because I don't see anything in the Constitution prohibiting what Oregon is doing, and even murder is a state not a federal crime. I think Oregon's law is terrible, however. It is simply allowing murder for the mere reason that the victim consents. This is another step towards the religion of consent that I wrote about before. I'm happy to argue the evils of assisted suicide in the comments, and it certainly deserves its own post in which related terms like withdrawal of care and refusal of care are defined and explained. I do not believe there is ever a medical reason that a patient who is receiving optimal care including psychiatric care and aggressive pain control would ever want her life ended. The broader point is that as a Conservative, I believe in judicial restraint. I understand the difference between a terrible law and an unconstitutional one. I can watch Oregon do things that I think are wrong and understand that it is neither under my nor under the Supreme Court's jurisdiction to do anything about it. Liberals have no such modesty. Abortion must be a right in Utah, according to them, because they know better than the citizens of Utah.

Ford Does the Right Thing – Unions Mixing the Kool-Aid

Organized labor in the US has never been weaker and has nowhere to go but down. Ford just announced that in the next 6 years it will lay off over 30,000 jobs, (that's a quarter of its workforce) and close many plants. It had no choice. Its market share was circling the drain and it was hemorrhaging losses. This is obviously horrible in the short term for the workers but good in the long term for everybody. Businesses are realizing that in a global economy remaining uncompetitive by paying artificially inflated wages and benefits is no longer an option. Workers will have to realize that belonging to a union does not make them more valuable, just more expensive, and that the ultimate arbiter of their value isn't the greedy shareholder bogeyman, it's the customer. Union leaders will expand on the trends of the last few years and spend increasingly more on friendly (i.e. liberal) candidates as a desperate last gasp to prevent the marketplace from affecting them. They will fail.

Next Target in the Axis of Evil – Iran

We've been telling you that Iran's going to get smacked for a year now, and the rhetoric is really heating up recently. The relevant new development is that even Europe is talking tough. Germany refuses to rule out any options, a thinly veiled threat. France declares that a nuclear strike against terror-sponsoring states is an option. And of course, leading them and cajoling them is the US. Remember when we were told that the insane Bush-Chimp-Cowboy's maniacal unilateralism in Iraq will leave us isolated? When does that start?

Prediction: a massive multi-day multiple target assault on Iranian facilities by summer by US forces after the entire UN-diplomacy gambit is allowed to run its impotent course. This will be met by harsh rhetoric from Syria and of course from Iran, and a deafening silence from the gov'ts of Egypt and Saudi Arabia who will be too busy sweating and buying escape villas in Europe. What is less clear is whether this will help internal Iranian dissidents. - served up by Doctor Bean @ 10:59 PM