There was a big stink in the news yesterday regarding Justice Sam Alito's first vote as a Supreme Court Justice. To read the AP's take on it (and the way the pundits reacted to the AP piece), you'd think that Sam Alito was putting on a very convincing conservative act...but now that he's in the high court, we find out that he's a FLAMING LIBERAL COMMUNIST/SOCIALIST!!!! STOP THE PRESSES!!! IT'S TIME TO PARTAAAAYYY!!!!!!!!!!!


The truth of the matter is that this isn't a big deal. For one thing, you can't judge someone's ideology by one vote. For another thing, this wasn't Samuel Alito opposing the death penalty - he voted to uphold a lower court's decision. There is a very high standard for overturning lower court's decisions, especially in death penalty cases. Finally, Alito said in his confirmation hearings that in matters pertaining to the death penalty, when the court was evenly split, he would vote against enforcing the death penalty as a matter of judicial courtesey (which is traditional).



The other big stink was about this stupid cartoon of a quadriplegic soldier representing the US Army, with 'Dr. Rumsfeld' telling him, "I'm listing your condition as 'battle hardened.'" Now, I think that this cartoon was in poor taste, but beyond that, the thing that struck me more than anything was how poorly drawn it was - how did this kind of schtik make it into the Washington Post? Many members of the military were offended by the cartoon, and several of the joint chiefs sent a letter to the Post telling them that they did not appreciate the cartoon.

Now, I don't routinely watch Hannity & Colmes, but I heard that they had the 'artist' of the cartoon on last night's show, and both he & Alan Colmes called the letter 'censorship.' This shows how liberals want to re-define censorship. At no time did the government prohibit the Post from printing the cartoon; no one has been jailed for the printing of the cartoon. Disapproval and disagreement are not censorship. This is the same misconception that gets Hollywood libs so out-of-whack: they just don't understand that the people cannot censor you: censorship is an action taken by the government.

And even though it isn't censorship, I think this cartoon provides quite a lesson for all of the America-haters out there: for the past week or so, there have been stories out of the Middle East and Europe about a cartoon depicting Mohammed, where his turban is a bomb, with the fuse burning. What happened to the Washington Post for the anti-military cartoon? They got a letter from the Joint Chiefs. What happened in the wake of the anti-Muslim cartoon? Riots. Protests. I even read a report about a Middle-Eastern shopkeeper who was dragged out into the street and beaten for not removing Danish goods from his shelves (the cartoon was originally printed in a Danish paper).

This should also provide a lesson to the Anti-Christian crowd, who laud Islam as a 'religion of peace,' but see Christianity as a bunch of violent fundamentalists who want to take over the world: Muslims riot and protest over a stupid cartoon, but when Kanye West posed as Jesus on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, what happened? It made the news for a few hours...then faded away. Maybe conservative Christian America isn't as bad as they all say.