Supreme Court's bizarre decision

Unfortunately, the United States Supreme Court has fallen victim to the spurious reasoning that the National Rifle Association has spread about the Second Amendment. It invalidated the District of Columbia's gun control regulations. (See this site, though the post is in agreement with this stupid opinion.)

Though the opinion is stupid, it is the law of the land. Just as abortion opponents have to live with Roe v. Wade, we will have to live with District of Columbia v. Heller, the worst U. S. Supreme Court opinion since Plessy v. Ferguson. It means that it is going to be difficult to control gun violence, but of course there will be many further challenges to determine what can legally be done to control guns in this nation.

Real issues and fake issues

It doesn't take fake issues to demolish Barack Obama as a reasonable candidate for the presidency. Real issues will do. For example, why try to claim that Obama is really a Muslim? — clearly he isn't, and in fact Muslims should be OK as candidates, if their principles are consistent with the U. S. Constitution, but what kind of a Christian is he? He was baptized into the Christian church by none other than Jeremiah Wright, who also married him to his wife, baptized their children, and ran a church that Obama attended for two decades. Obviously Obama's idea of what Christianity means cannot be too different from Wright's, despite what he might claim now in 2008!


Similarly, it is perfectly all right for Obama to decline public financing if he feels he can run a better campaign that way. What is not acceptable is to make lots and lots of speeches defending public financing, promise to run a publically-financed campaign, and only when it becomes obvious that you can do better by declining to participate, reversing such an oft-proclaimed position.

Barack Obama's radicalism, his hypocrisy, and his near-total lack of sufficient experience: these are the real issues on which Barack Obama's campaign will falter.

The issue isn't Bush, it's Obama!

The presumptive Democratic candidate for President, Senator Barack Obama, is trying with all his might to make this 2008 Presidential election into a referendum on President George W. Bush. He cannot be allowed to do this. President Bush is not a candidate in this election. Senator Obama is.



There are two major issues in this election, and both have to do with Sen. Obama's desirability for the office of the Presidency. The first has to do with Obama's near-total inexperience. Do we want to have in the highest office of the land a man who, four years ago, was an obscure State Senator in Illinois (whose legislature is not even a full-time one)? And the second has to do with Obama's extreme radicalism. He keeps trying to paint himself as within the mainstream of American politics. But this is a man who got into the State Senate as an activist endorsed by the Marxist organization known as ACORN and funded by a man who was proud of the attempt to destroy the Pentagon! This is also a man who sat for twenty years in a church founded by people such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, with his "God Damn America" sermons, who now claims that he never noticed the extreme anti-American tone of the Rev. Wright, and who only now, after 20 years, leaves that church!



We need to heep our eyes on the real issue in this election: It isn't Bush, who is not even running. It is Obama, whose election would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States.

The California gay-marriage decision - more comment.

People are suing to get the courts to stay this decision. If I were a judge, my questions to these people would be "How does it hurt you if these people get married? What injury do you sustain that gives you grounds for legal action?" So far, I've seen nobody explain any way in which anyone is harmed by permitting gay marriage, except that they think a priest would be compelled to officiate at one where it violates his principles, and this is of course nonsense. I've never heard of a clergyman compelled to officiate at any marriage against his principles, and rabbis refuse to officiate at interfaith marriages and Catholics refuse to officiate at marriages involving divorced people already.

An interesting post about Barack Obama

I just saw this post. It's something I have thought about myself, and thought I should mention it here. Even the title, "Is Obama Al Smith or John F. Kennedy?" reflects my ideas. I've often said that Obama breaks the ice for African-Americans, as Al Smith did for Catholics, but remember that Smith lost.

More about Barack Obama's history

Is Barack Obama too radical to be President? I certainly think so. Look at this site (with an explanation on this site), this site, this site, and this site, for a start.

The American public needs to know about this.

Obama, presumptive Democratic nominee

Today we will probably find that the primaries will either give Barack Obama enough delegates to be nominated or come so close that Hillary Clinton will need to give up.


No great surprise. For the last month or more, he's been so far ahead that she had no hope of catching him. But she kept trying. And I can't say I wasn't happy she did, because all the negatives she raised will only help John McCain in November.


What I'm really wondering is how she can (as she will have to, to prove her loyalty to the Democratic Party) campaign vigorously for him, without being called on some of the things she has said to imply Obama's unsuitability for the office. (I don't mean to say he's suitable for the office; but then I'm not going to have to come back and defend him after making the kind of remarks she did!)


To leave the references to Hillary Clinton behind, did anyone notice that Obama finally had to formally leave the Trinity United Church of Christ (Jeremiah Wright's former pulpit)? But it would seem to me that to discover, after 20 years as a parishioner, that the church was spreading ideas he didn't like, is a sign of naïveté that ill befits someone seeking the Presidency. So this decision was really too little and too late to change anything in my mind.

The kids in Texas

The State of Texas seems to have done something far beyond what they intended to — they have created public sympathy for the polygamist group that calls itself the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints.


By taking 400 kids from their parents, and dispersing them to foster homes all over the state, they created a scene of scared kids who (when the court found that the State had acted unlawfully, and had to return them to their parents) showed how glad they were to be with their parents again. Those pictures of a mother hugging her young daughter probably made more people tolerant of the oddness of the FLDS church than ever would have been before Texas acted.


It's probably a victory for religious freedom and the First Amendment. But 400 scared kids were quite a price to pay.

Fidel for Obama!

Looks like Sen. Barack Obama got himself a new backer: Cuba's Fidel Castro! (see this story.)

Of course! They are both of a similar mind — America is evil and needs to be changed.

One more reason to support John McCain for president!

"Failed foreign policy"?

Barack Obama keeps referring to "Bush's failed foreign policy." Well, to me it looks like one that is succeeding, although not yet completely. When George W. Bush became President, Saddam Hussein was slaughtering Kurds and anyone else who disagreed with him in Iraq, and the Taliban was presiding over an Afghan government that would criminalize a kid for flying a kite, or a girl for going to school. Today, Saddam Hussein is in his grave, and the Taliban is fighting a rear-guard action to try to take back portions of Afghanistan, while both Afghanistan and Iraq have governments that are far closer to democratic than the ones they replaced. I would call that success, not failure — at least partial success, anyway.

Meanwhile, Sen. Obama has proposed a foreign policy that truly can be described as failed. One might ask — how could his foreign policy be considered to have failed, when it hasn't been tried? Well, it has been tried — not in the United States in the 2000's, but in Great Britain in 1937! A certain Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister that year. Like Obama today, he believed you could talk to genocidal dictators in the same way as you might to honorable men who lead democratic governments. He met with Adolf Hitler in Munich, Germany, and gave him what he wanted, control over the nation that was then called Czechoslovakia. And he returned from Munich proclaiming that he had brought "peace in our time." "Our time," apparently, lasted two more years, until Hitler invaded Poland and World War II began, at least for the European nations. (We stayed out of it until we were ourselves attacked by Hitler's Japanese ally.)

But Sen. Obama doesn't seem to know this history. He wants to show that the way to go is the way that Chamberlain tried 70 years ago. It failed then, and it won't work now.

The California Supreme Court's gay marriage decision

We have often, on economic and foreign policy matters, found common cause with the people who call themselves conservatives. But on most social issues, they are on opposite sides of the issue from my own feelings. I am sure this will be equally true with regard to the new California Supreme Court decision.

I have never understood why conservatives, who believe that in the economic sphere the government should be minimally involved, letting the market mechanisms do their thing, suddenly, when the issue is social, take the position that the government should take a stand and ram that position down the throats of the people. If two gay people get married, who does it hurt? It certainly doesn't affect a straight person's ability to marry whomever he or she wants.

Some people have said that there is no equality issue here, that gay people are trying to win special privileges that straight people do not have -- I suppose, because straight and gay people alike have the right to take an opposite-sex spouse. Well, Anatole France is quoted as saying: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.” Obviously, just in the same way as rich have no particular reason to "sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread," gay people have no particular wish to take an opposite-sex spouse.

Some people have claimed that, by requiring the state to recognize gay marriage, the rights of clergymen who do not want to officiate over such marriages are somehow interfered with. Well, to my knowledge, no Catholic priest has ever been forced to officiate at the marriage of a divorced Catholic, and no Jewish rabbi has ever been forced to officiate at an interfaith marriage. If clergymen are now allowed to refuse to marry people whom their own religion forbids to get married, they certainly will continue to be allewed to do so. We are talking about state recognition of marriages, and we live in a country with Church/State separation.

Another point is that, in a referendum, the California citizenry voted to ban gay marriage. I am sure that in any Southern state (and possibly some Northern ones) the citizenry, if provided with a referendum vote on the subject prior to 1954, would have approved of segregation. But we do not allow the majority to take away the minority's rights. That is a fundamental principle of the American democratic system.

So I cheer the California decision.

A letter-to-the-Editor that I fully endorse

The following letter appeared in today's Washington Examiner paper. It was so good that I repost it here as my own thoughts:

Barack Obama will be judged by friends he kept

Re: “Don’t judge Obama by Rev. Wright’s words,” From Readers, May 5

Let’s put this to rest for once and for all: Barack Obama will be judged by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s actions. Any reasonable person who sat through 20 years of this mean-spirited, anti-American rhetoric and did not walk out in disgust must have either been in a coma or agreed in part to what was being preached. You are judged by the friends you keep, the views you display and the morals you practice. All of which can be influenced at your religious center of faith. If John McCain or Hillary Clinton had been attending Aryan Nation meetings or KKK rallies, you bet they would be scolded and berated. Unfortunately, folks, it goes both ways. Get over it!

This country has finally broken the barrier keeping women and African-Americans from becoming serious contenders for the presidency. But they should certainly count on the fact that they will be vetted — as would any other candidate — on the way they view the world. I, for one, want to know that before I cast my vote.

Marc Sieracki
Springfield

So NOW He's "outrageous"???

The latest news is that Barack Obama has called Jeremiah Wright's comments "outrageous." Really, it's taken him this long to see the kind of racist demagogue that Wright is? You'd think that 20 years in the Trinity UCC would have given him time to observe Wright! I really can't believe Obama is just now discovering what Wright thinks about the USA, about race relations, and such!

Can Obama really distance himself from Wright?

Now Sen. Obama says that the Jeremiah Wright who is expressing himself in such racist terms "is not the same man I've known for 20 years." Can we really believe such nonsense? There are lots of signs that this is not so. I certainly do not believe him; I put more credence in Wright's words that Obama is saying what he has to now because he is a politician!

Romney for VP?

There is a move afoot to nominate Mitt Romney for VP on the McCain ticket. While I was opposed to Romney for the top spot — his vacillation on the issues worried me — for VP I think that's not a bad idea at all. As this site states, Romney would bring a lot to the ticket. The only thing I wonder about: Would John McCain be willing to take him as VP nominee? It is clear that Romney would take the offer — he's even said so, and his withdrawal speech made it clear that he wants to unite the party. But I've seen word that there is not a very good feeling about Romney in McCain's mind — there were some problems between them even before this campaign.

Obviously, we don't know what — if any — communications there have been about this between McCain's and Romney's associates. But I would like to see McCain/Romney as a ticket in 2008.

One positive thing you can say about Obama

He knows how to play by the rules. He's taken extreme advantage of the Democratic Party's rules in this primary season. When Hillary Clinton wants to see that the people of Michigan and Florida get counted, Obama points to the Democratic Party rules and makes sure everyone understands that they can't be counted under those rules. (See this post.) He wins big in caucus states, where only small numbers come out so that a few voters can influence a lot of delegates. Meanwhile, in the big states with lots of delegates, he relies on the proportionality rules that the Dems have put in place, so even if he loses, he still gets a slew of delegates. Many people (including Bill Clinton) have pointed out that if the Democrats had allowed winner-take-all primaries and (like the Republicans) a number of major states had used them, Hillary would be leading in the delegate count, probably by a lot. This, among other things, is why John McCain got the Republican nomination relatively early, while the Dems are still going at it.

Of course, the actual Electoral College system used in the general election does use winner-take all (at least in 48 of the 50 states). So Obama vs. McCain would be fought under different rules. I wonder whether Obama will be able to re-orient his candidacy to play by the different rules that will apply for the general election.

Obama, the divider.

I just saw a new blog post, which says it better than I could, about Barack Obama. Read it here.

The Supreme Court's death penalty ruling

The Supreme Court has just ruled that the death penalty could continue. And I approve. Sure, in many countries around the world, public opinion has gone against the death penalty, and the US has come in for criticism for maintaining it. But I feel that not having the death penalty for murder actually cheapens human life — namely, the lives of the victims.


If a person who has killed someone gets anything less than the death penalty, the punishment has not suited the crime. Nothing short of the death penalty can pay for taking another's life, and for that reason nothing short of the death penalty is a fair punishment for such a crime.

Appeals to humaneness make no sense here; the murderer was not sparing of the lives of his victims, so why should we be more sparing of the perpetrator's life?

Obama ... unite the country?

I keep seeing supporters of Barack Obama claiming that he can unite the country. This seems to be the most incredible claim I could imagine.

Obama has been rated the most liberal member of the entire Senate in 2007 by National Journal. He outdoes Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, and Senators like Russ Feingold and Tom Harkin. How can such an extremist unite the country?

John McCain has worked with liberal Democrats like Feingold and Ted Kennedy to introduce legislation; in fact, his ability to do this hurt him among very doctrinaire conservative Republicans. But even he could not find common ground with Obama. If this is so, how can anyone expect copperation between Obama and someone not of the extreme left?

What a choice!

If I were faced with making a choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, there is no question but that I'd go with Clinton. She is clearly as dishonest as her husband, and both Clinton and Obama are very much more liberal than I am, but while Obama is a radical with the "throw out everything and start over" mentality of a visionary, Clinton is more of a pragmatist, who might be dissuaded from trying to implement radical changes by a need to play practical politics.

But fortunately, I don't have to make this choice. By the time I see either name on a ballot, he or she will have beaten the other, and the competition will be John McCain. And I don't have to think about who will get my vote. It will be McCain.