Post Election

Well, Obama won. I hope he really is a Christian and that he spends time in prayer because he does not have the experience necessary to lead a country like this in times of crisis. Unlike some of the people who were against Obama, I do not think Obama is evil or a "bad man", I simply think he is wrong and that many of his ideas and proposed policies are, in the words of Sarkozy, "immature".

In a related story, Prop 8 passed so no marriage for me despite time, energy, and cash contributed to the cause. Why related? Well, a majority of the people that Obama pulled to the polls voted for Prop 8. All you pro-8/anti-Obama folks needs to send him a big ol' thanks, his people put the prop over the top.

In a perverse addition, Prop 4 failed so no adult notification for abortions on young women. Murder can continue without the counsel and notification of an adult. Just goes to show you the schizophrenia of California... homos get put in their (our) place but murder of the unborn misses this one small potential impediment.

Economically the wonderful people of this state voted even more debt. I have come to the realization that people here simply do not understand the concept of a bond. People, you have to pay for it. It is not free money.

So there you have it. Now the hard work comes...

Crumudgeon Voting

Well, I voted. I got to my polling place 15 minutes early and was second in line. They reindexed the polling places and mine was moved so I was a little nervous about the state not getting the address right (what, California screwing things up?) but it went fine.

My strategy for voting this year was rather simple:

I couldn't vote for Obama. I simply don't trust him. This man broke his very first promise of taking federal financing to fund his run for office so why should I trust him on anything else?

If you are an incumbent I voted against you. If you are a Democrat incumbent I voted Republican. If you are a Republican incumbent I voted Libertarian. I just want new liars in office, I'm tired of old lies (which is why I voted yes on Prop 11). Hopefully the new liars will be more creative.

On the props, if you directly cost money I voted against you regardless of my actual feelings about the prop. Why? If you ask this you simply are not paying attention to what is happening in this state. WE HAVE NO MONEY!. I'm sorry, but this state is already $14 billion in the red and we just passed the budget less than two months ago. We simply cannot afford to spend more now and it is not right to saddle the young with the thoughtlessness of the old. We have to straighten out the mess before we start piling on more debt.

And of course I voted NO on Proposition 8.

So yes, I voted like a "crusty, ill-tempered, usually older person"... I voted like a crumudgeon, but I felt like it was the appropriate way to vote this election cycle.

Heck, He Gets My Vote Then!

I'm sorry... this has to be the most simple-minded person ever to be on television. I am getting so sick of politics... between McCain not able to run a campaign to the Obama worshipers I can't stand it any more. Regardless of who wins I get screwed and the real problem is I don't think either candidate is proficient enough to get me to like it.

With Supporters Like This...

So Obama is the Messiah? When I see him walk on water and return from the dead after three days then I might believe...

Obama Supports Iraq Invasion?

Given that the "Obama Doctrine" as espoused in the second debate is based on morality (apparently even over national interest), I think that the pre-invasion situation in Iraq would warrant us going in to liberate an oppressed people. Thanks for the support Obama! I suppose that means if Obama is elected president we go next to what is probably the longest running conflict in modern history, Sri Lanka, followed by sending troops into Zimbabwe to oust that blight on humanity Robert Mugabe.

Taking My Father's Advice

When it comes to politics I tend to think like my father... that lawyers should not be allowed into politics. I find it interesting that the top of the Democrat ticket has two lawyers and the top of the Republican ticket has no lawyers. Hmmmm...

McCain Ad Foreshadows My Next Post

Sorry, been busy the last couple of days with work, homework, and taking my next wine certification exam so nothing remotely original at this point, but this ad gives you a thumbnail sketch of what I will be writing about in the next couple of posts.

New McCain Ad - Awesome

Don't hope for a better life, vote for one. This really struck me. I keep hearing "change" and "hope" from the Obama people but still have no clear idea on what he will do differently than any typical liberal. So far for an economic plan all I hear is "spend money on more programs". Now some prudent spending may be necessary, but there is really very little that I hear that will stimulate the economy to create new jobs. In truth the only "change" I hear is that government must be bigger, must have more control of the lives of the citizens. That isn't they type of change I want.

Cynical on Obama

This morning I was greeted with the yet another Obama/Wright story.
I'm sorry, but this really smells like an attempt by the Obama people to try to evade the fact that Obama sat under the teachings of a racist hatemonger masquerading as a minister of the Gospel. I can just see Obama's people talking with Wright saying "Barrack is really taking some heat. Go out and something that he can really denounce so he can say 'See, I disagree with my former pastor'." Is this too cynical? Watching Wright's interview I don't see so much more than what I saw in the released sermon videos. NOW Obama's "outraged"? NOW, just after the interview, he condemns the remarks? Let's get real... even the article says that Wright reiterated his charges against the United States. Of course, Obama uses his standard method of deflection of anything that could damage him... he called them divisive and said his supporters should just move on. Hopefully this story doesn't move on because it is just such things that provide insight into who Senator Obama really is. I mean, it's not like he really has legislative leadership or a voting record we can examine.

Elite

If I hear one more defense of Obama not being an elitist I think I will wretch. The arguments of the Democrats are so lacking in any logic that the mere fact people repeat it makes me want to suggest psychological counseling for them (or at least philosophical counseling). I saw three TV talk shows with three different Democrat pundits spouting the same two pieces of "evidence" to prove that Obama is not an elitist:

1. He was brought up by a single mother.
2. He is just now paying off his student loans.

Please, can anyone tell me what this has to do with being an elitist? Being an elitist has nothing to do with how many people reared you or how long it took you to pay off your college loans (perhaps had he not attended such elite schools he would have been out of hock sooner... or perhaps he should have taken a job that would have allowed him to meet his obligations in a more timely manner). Being an elite has everything to do with a sense of who you are compared with others, being "better" or superior to others. Take a look at what Merriam-Webster has to say about the definition of elite and then tell me how either of the aforementioned two points come into play on whether or not Obama is an elite. The man degraded a large number of folks in Pennsylvania on their beliefs, and please don't forget his backhanded statement on wearing a flag lapel pin (apparently only his definition of patriotism is true patriotism). When he isn't elitist he's patronizing.

I swear, the more I pay attention to this man I don't understand the magic.

Oh Hillary!

Looking At Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage

As you may know the California Supreme Court recently spent 3.5 hours listening to arguments on the issue of whether the state law defining marriage as the union of man and a woman is constitutional. This has the potential to be the biggest domestic issues verdict since 1948 when the California court overturned the state's miscegenation law in Perez v Sharp(for those of you suffering from a California public high school education, miscegenation comes from Latin meaning "to mix race" or for a more concrete definition interracial marriage). A ruling is due by June of this year. I have to tell you, after looking at arguments on both sides I have come down on the side that says the marriages should be allowed. This has nothing to do with being gay. As with many other issues I held that separate from the fact-finding and information processing activities. The issue for me comes down on the side of viewing it as a civil matter rather than a religious one. Personally, I think that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether and simply issue certificates of legal partnership. If particular religions wish to have marriages they can have a ceremony but these would have no legal legitimacy, simply being a religious ceremony. Thus the government would have no say whatsoever on whether or not a religion had to perform same-sex marriages and those that were gay friendly would be allowed to do so. What mattered in the eyes of the government for tax and legal purposes would be the certificate of legal partnership (call them civil unions if you wish).

OK, I know this is far too radical for most people to contend with (but thus far I have not heard of any coercive arguments against it), so let's look at the issue of marriage. The issue as it appears to me depends on the how you answer the question "What is the purpose of marriage?" For the moment I am going to remove the religious-based responses, those will be dealt with in a subsequent post. Once we leave the realm of religious responses the most common I have encountered are:

1. Marriage is between one man and one woman.
   
2. Same-sex marriage would threaten the institution of marriage.
   
3. Marriage is for procreation.
   
4. Same-sex relationships are detrimental to children.
   
5. Same-sex marriage would lead us to polygamy, incest, bestiality, etc.
   
6. Granting same-sex marriage creates a special right and you conservatives are against making more of those.
   

Each point deserves its own post but truth be told I'm too lazy to type them and I don't think you want to see all the clutter in the blog so I will try to my utmost to condense my responses to each.

1. This one is easy (remember, no religion as this is strictly a civil matter). Just who says that marriage is between one man and one woman only? Allowing same-sex marriage does not preclude one man/one woman, it just broadens the set of possible marriage combinations. Well, you might say, we needed to draw the line somewhere but I ask you "Why there?" Who gets to say where the line is drawn? Why, the majority you might respond. Be careful of going there especially in California because the polls were 2-1 against allowing interracial marriage when it was struck down. You can read the anti-miscegenation ruling here (and if you do pay close attention to Judge Traynor's opinion). Simply saying that marriage is between one man and one woman gets too close to creating a circular argument to be of much effect.
   
   
2. Just about as easy as the first one. First, how does allowing people to marry threaten marriage? If marriage is such a wonderful institution that carries with it beneficial societal and health benefits, why not encourage it? If we are honest, heterosexuals haven't been the greatest protectors of their ideal of marriage. If nothing else (and there is much more) think of the divorces that would not happen if gay people were allowed to enter into gay marriage rather than a sham heterosexual marriage that can end only in traumatic divorce. And isn't it possible that the other arguments of why marriage is great (such as the domestication effect on promiscuity) could apply at least in part to a male-male or female-female marriage? If you want to protect the institution of heterosexual marriage make divorce almost impossible to exist and make adultery punishable by death.
   
   
3. Oh please. If this were true then lets not allow marriage to those who cannot regardless of the reason, instant divorce to those who have procedures that disallow the creation of children, and make it law that all marriage must produce at least one child within the first three years of marriage else the union in delcared null and void. And who says that children cannot be produced within a same-sex union? A nice gay couple could donate sperm to a nice lesbian couple and voila, children! OK, bit of a stretch but you get the idea.
   
   
4. The literature on this one is at best mixed. The fact is, many gay couples raise children, adopted and occasionally their own from failed attempts at heterosexual marriages and what the literature does seem to indicate is difference is in the quality of the experience, not the sexual identity of the parents. Anecdotally, what seems to be detrimental is that narrow-minded parents raise narrow-minded children who seem to think it is OK to bully and harass children whose parents are gay. Now whose problem is this?
   
   
5. Ah, the famous slippery-slope argument. Lets be frank, allowing marriage at all could be the beginning of the "slippery slope" but that, like this argument against, is a bit silly. The argument is one used to generate fear, but unlike say the argument against allowing a mother to marry her son (which could be made on genetic grounds), allowing two men or two women to marry does not carry those potentially harmful outcomes and unlike polygamy a man-man or woman-woman union would not muddy the waters of rights and responsibilities of those entering the marriage contract. In the words of another writer: If we allowed Terri Schaivo to have two husbands and they disagreed on her care, then who gets the final word? This is exactly the sort of question marriage exists to answer. Polygamy not only wouldn't answer it, it would make it unanswerable. Such issues would not exist within a same-sex marriage.
   
   
6. And now a big one for conservatives like myself, but I don't see the problem that some of my conservative brothers and sisters do. If 95% of the country is already allowed the right to marry (I am assuming 5% of the population is gay because I am not quite convinced of the statistics pointing to the usual 10%), then how is extending that right to the other 5% creating a "special right"? Polygamous heterosexual can still marry a person of a sex they desire, they just have to pick one. The only marriage homosexuals can currently enter into are those that would be shams, lies, and deceitful from the beginning. By not allowing gay men and women to marry the only possible marriage union would be mendacious and fraudulent. so please tell me how this allowance is a "special" right.
   

Do you want to really know the real reasons people are against same-sex marriage? Here it is:

Fear. For some reason many straight people are afraid of "the different" or "the other".

Religious views. Sadly, many people confuse religion with civil law. Granted, many statutes are based on our religious beliefs (and they are wonderful) but some were misguided (prohibitions against interracial marriage or even pro-slavery stands were made on the grounds of some religious interpretation). We must be very careful on how religion carries over into the public square.

In my opinion the biggest is what I call the "ick factor". Rather than thinking of people who are gay, many in our society really view us in terms of how we practice sex (the one difference seems to be how straight men view lesbian sexual practice, something I simply don't understand). Many straight men just can't seem to past the sexual acts of gay people. Sorry, but for those of us on this side of the fence we don't quite understand what you get out of your practices either.

And away we go...

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Poor Michelle Obama

For the first time in her life she has felt proud of the United States? What a sad, sad person.

Ideology v Politics

Well, "Super Tuesday" has come and gone and the race for both the Republican and the Democrat parties has narrows to two people each (and that is a stretch for the Republican side where McCain holds a daunting delegate lead over Huckabee). I haven't said much about the election thus far mainly because of my disappointment in the available candidates. In a matter of public confession, I am 0/2 in my choices on the Republican side. I was initially leaning towards Giuliani who proved that when it comes to political tactics he is no Bill Clinton, then decided to mildly support Romney who after being sandbagged by the McCain-Huckabee team bowed out. Am I cursed? If so, I should throw my support to Obama just so he will lose (it is sad that my instincts tell me to fear the least experienced, the challenged, the least thoughtful of the bunch but I do... tells you about my faith in the American electorate).

But that isn't the purpose for the post. The main purpose came from an online article I read about a few days ago regarding McCain. It said that many Republicans consider him to be "a liberal and not a Republican." I thought to my self "Surely this is not right." I read it again and yep, that is what they said. Did you spot the problem? If not I'll tell you. Liberalism, like conservatism, is an ideology. Republican, like Democrat, is a political party. It is entirely possible to be liberal AND a Republican just as it is possible to be a conservative and a Democrat. Being a conservative or a liberal applies to how one views the world while being Republican or Democrat defines political policies. A more accurate assessment in the article would have been that Republicans consider McCain a "liberal and not a conservative" or even "more like a Democrat than a Republican". One statement defining his ideology and the other his politics.

Given this then, just what IS a conservative? It kinda depends on who you ask. There are economic conservatives, social conservatives, foreign policy conservatives. In the marketplace of ideas there is a vast, rich offering of conservative ideas to choose from. But if this is so, what is the issue with McCain? Is he conservative or is he not? To help examine this I turned an old "friend", one of the fathers of modern conservative intellectual thought, Russell Kirk. In his monumental The Conservative Mind, Krik provides six key canons of conservative thought which I will summarize as the following:

Belief in a transcendent order, or natural law governing both the individual as well as society

Belief in human plurality and natural diversity and a resistance to arbitrary systems of leveling and false equality

Ultimate equality is in the judgment of God and should exist before our courts, but again creating an artificial equality of condition means equality in servitude and boredom

Freedom and property are closely linked. Economic leveling is not the same as economic progress

Distrust of people who would remake society strictly on some abstract design. Custom and tradition can be a useful guide.

Change does not equal reform. "Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculation, and a statesman's chief virtual... is prudence."

This, according to Kirk, is the kerygma of conservatism. Conservatism isn't policy on school choice, abortion, tax reduction, illegal immigration and a host of other policies that form planks in a political party's platform. Conservatism is a world view. It's a true belief in diversity, that people are different, have different goals, dreams, talents and should be allowed to pursue them with the understanding that the outcomes will be different for different people. It's an idea that change for the sake of change is not the same as progress. It's a very firm belief in the law of unintended consequences. of understanding that while sometimes you have to take certain leaps it is wise to look before you jump. It's acknowledging that while not everything that happened has been good, not all of it has been bad and that the past can guide us to a better future if we are wise enough to examine it. Can you be a Republican and not hold some of these beliefs? Sure, but on the flip side it is possible to be a Democrat and believe them too. So is John McCain a conservative? Taking this view he possibly is. Is he a Republican? Well, that requires another post.

Time To Flush The Turds From Sacramento

Vote NO on Proposition 93! What a load of crap masterminded by Fabián Núñez and his cronies who are holding Sacramento hostage. If Núñez and his supporters win, 42 elected officials (parasites) would hold on to power, including Núñez and his partner in crime Don Perata. Both will be able to stay in power as head of the two branches of our state legislature. Oh but they are fighting to hold on. They try to spin it to make you think you are really shortening their terms in office from a total of 14 years to a total of 12 years. What they AREN'T saying is that it's not a reduction but an actual EXTENSION of their existing terms for another 6 years. If Prop 93 fails they cannot run again for the same office! If it does pass they can run again (and the way people tend to vote in California, will be elected again). They claim that experience is needed, but neither is a novice when it comes to politics and look where we as a state are now.

Remember, vote NO on 93. Push the level and flush the poop from the state capitol.

Where Oh Where Is Ron?

If Ronald Reagan were elected in the 2008 election he could use this portion of his first inaugural address almost verbatim... which is sad considering he would be a Republican president following a Republican president. But I guess that is the difference between being Republican and being Conservative:



For many reasons I really miss Ron. In recalling what Lady Thatcher said in her 1997 address to the Heritage Foundation about President Reagan I remember why:

Right from the beginning, Ronald Reagan set out to challenge everything that the liberal political elite of America accepted and sought to propagate. They believed that America was doomed to decline: He believed it was destined for further greatness. They imagined that sooner or later there would be convergence between the free Western system and the socialist Eastern system, and that some kind of social democratic outcome was inevitable. He, by contrast, considered that socialism was a patent failure which should be cast onto the trash heap of history. They thought that the problem with America was the American people, though they didn’t quite put it like that. He thought that the problem with America was the American government, and he did put it just like that.

The political elite were prepared to kowtow to the counterculture that grew up on American campuses, fed by a mixture of high-brow dogma and low-brow self-indulgence. Governor Reagan would have none of it...

Silly Democrats

I was shocked, amazed, stunned... the party of compassion and openness (as the Democrats like to pompously trumpet to the world) could be done in by that old bugaboo, race. Imagine my surprise when I read this article about the spat between those two paragons of "change" who claim to represent "new ways of thinking", Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. First of all, Obama's rejoinder to Clinton's remarks about Obama raising false hope doesn't really address what she was saying. Now don't get me wrong, I am not a Hillary supporter at all, but I clearly think that she was attacked out of context because what she said about Senator Obama has at least some ring of truth to it. And I am sure that her response about LBJ was not intended to diminish the work of MLK. The whole reaction stunned me until my sensible conservative mind took over and reminded me that this is what happens when you turn politics into pandering to special interest groups. And let's face it, the Republicans have their own problems with interest groups (look at the extreme religious right trying to bully the others in the old fusionist coalition), but what happened between Hil and Barack looks down right silly in comparison to what could be taken on the Republican side as actual ideological differences. The scary part is, if the Democrats control everything are we all going to have to watch what we say about or to anyone with whom we disagree? Are we witnessing the death of free speech?

Jackie Mason's Political Statement

I don't know where Mr. Mason's political predilection lies but this is interesting. Yeah, it's not terribly deep, but then again most of the candidates aren't either...