So I have been asked if I regretted voting for Barrack Obama over John McCain for president of the United States in 2008.
John McCain does not stand for the protections of the Constitution for US Citizens.
Nope, I do not regret my choice. I regret that Republican Party failed to give me a viable alternative.
First off, for those not in the know, I was born in the South and I was raised in the South. Take that for whatever’s its worth in context for the following opinions.
So Earlier this month, April 7th, Governor Robert McDonnell of Virginia issued a proclamation that April is ‘Confederate History Month.” Beside the usual pot of hot water this create for a politician, McDonnell turned the temperature of his water by not even mentioning slavery in his proclamation.
This has cause all sorts of tirades and rants in the media and on the internet. One of the silliest I personally saw was CNN Analyst Roland Martin insisting that Confederate Soldiers were terrorists. I supposed it would have been too much of a stretch for the man to call them Fascists 60 years before fascism or Nazis 70 prior to that band of murderous thugs so he went for the current no-good and no question about term ‘terrorist.’ Just like the people who throw around, Fascists, Socialist, and anti-semtic as political insults Mr. Martin does himself no favor and achieves nothing for to degrade communication.
The soldiers of the Confederacy were fighting to defend a vile and evil institution and they were wrong to do so, but they were not terrorists. The Confederacy fought in uniform, followed the Laws Of War as they were understood at the time and were easily distinguished from the civilian population around them. (Yes, you can violation of these general conditions just as you can for any conflict any time.) To accept Mr. Roland definition is render the word terrorist meaningless except as a combatant you don’t approve of.
But what about Confederate History Month itself? How do I feel about that?
Damn stupid idea.
The Confederacy took up arms against my country The United States Of America. I will not celebrate anyone taking up arms against my country while I still defend her. Why not a Lt. Colonel Francis Smith day? Or how about Isoroku Yamamoto on a stamp?
There is a lot to celebrate about Southern Culture. We in the south have a culture that is rich and has much to offer, but I would not put the Confederacy as part of that we should celebrate. The USA is my country and I consider myself a patriot and I will not honor those who attack my country.
So if you follow political columnist at all then you should already be familiar with Michelle Malkin. Ms. Malkin is a very conservative opinion writer. She’s known for fiery opinions defended aggressively with a penchant for name-calling. Ms. Malkin’s frequent posting are aggressive, and in-your-face which has earned her plenty of die-hard supporters and an equal number of die hard critics.
I am in neither camp. I do not care for name calling and I feel whenever you you do so in an argument you do nothing but weaken your case. I find her blog to be depressing. There is very little joy in her posts and nearly every post is about something that has offended, enraged, or irritated her. That’s fine if that is what she wants. It’s her blog and she can put up anything she likes, but it make for a repetitive and angry tone. I seriously can not think of a post that was truly just happy or joyous.
I frequent her site because it is a very good reflection of where conservative thought and feelings are for a number of subjects.
For a woman who like to call people to the left or her Socialists and Communists I have been surprised lately with her love affair for Communism. Thought I am sure it is one born out of ignorance.
Recently she’s been posting that Conservatives need to have an “I am Spartacus” moment of resistance to the health care reform, base on the stunning scene from the movie “Spartacus“.
Here’s the scene:
Spartacus is one of my favorite films and I will be so happy in a few months when I have it on DVD, but the film is a communist allegory.
The film was based on the novel Spartacus written by Howard Fast, who was a communist. I don’t mean that in the current Republican way of anyone left of me is a communist, Mr. Fast was a member of the American Communist Party. He was so hot politically no publisher would touch the novel Spartacus and he was forced to self-publish it. On the audio commentary to the Laserdisc of Spartacus Mr. Fast made it clear that the story was a communist allegory about the rich and the workers.
The film screenplay was adapted by Dalton Trumbo, another Communist. Trumbo spent 11 years in prison for contempt of congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Spartacus was the first film he was credited with writing after the blacklist. (Thoigh he had written many just denied credit.) He was proud of having killed films in Hollywood that were deemed anti-communist.
I have no doubt that if either man was still alive today they would happy tell Ms. Malkin that in their view she and her fellow conservatives are more aligned with Marcus Licinius Crassus than with the workers uprising symbolized by the slave revolt in Spartacus. (To be clear I am not a communists and I ignore the communist allegory of Spartacus, but then I am not trying to lift the film for my own political ends either.)
I am deeply amused by the irony that a communist hater is aligning herself with communist writers and with what they saw as communist characters.
So in the first section of this rambling set of thoughts, I covered how some people feel that rights begin at conception, and that these people in general will draw a distinction between a fertilized egg and an induced pluripotent cell in terms of what is a person. (The fertilized egg being considered as person with the protections that implies. While the Induced Pluripotent Cell does not.) It seems that being a person in potential is the key factor.
In the second section of the missive I discussed the new field in biology, epigenetics which deals with the factors that govern when and how genes function and that these factor can be influenced by environment and these environmental influences have surprisingly been show to be inheritable.
Now it’s time to combine these two idea and see where they lead us.
With epigenetics we can now see that action we take today can have an adverse effect on generations down time from us. This is not a generalized or metaphorical statement, but a direct corollary of cause and effect. For example let’s hypothesize that smoking can have an inheritable epigenetic effect that makes your grand children much more susceptible to autism. This is pure speculation at this point but not an unreasonable one. So what rights of the unborn and unconceived grandchildren have? Does my choosing to smoke violate their rights? IF I know that my smoking can cause autism two generations downstream, should I be held criminally liable for smoking and the damages it creates?
Of course I could never have children, but this is an exception to human behavior not the rule. Most people want to have children and want families. So do those future generation have rights?
I am not answering that question. My intention was merely to pose it. Everyone has to find their own answers, but what we do know that is life, biology, and the realities of inheritance are far more complex than we generally give them credit for.
This is of course the classic question in the abortion debate. The prochoice side generally selecting some moment after concept and sometime only after birth for considering the unborn to have right and with the right-to-life side generally selecting some point before birth or right at conception.
I am not going to debate the merits of either side here. Abortion is a topic on which very few minds are capable of being changed. What I want to do is take the idea that the unborn have rights and play them back within our new understand of human biology. Continue reading
So I found the comparison chart I had seen a week or two on Health care reform. It shows just how similar the current – and just passed — Health Care reform package is to the one proposed by the Republicans in 1993 as a counter to the Clinton Health care Proposal. What was an acceptable Republican Proposal in 1993 turns out to have been nothing more than naked socialism!
(OR the Republicans were on a mission to had Obama a defeat — which is sound strategy is you win — and nothing Obama could have done would have won him Republican votes.)
Here’s the link to the original article.
The chart follows after the break.
So today is the day when we find out if the Democrats can manage to pass their Health Care Reform agenda. As I write this the vote is scheduled but has not yet been taken and so here are a few of my final thoughts on this. Continue reading
So, off the top of my head here are some correlations between select politicians and the D&D monster that best represent. This is list is for from exhaustive.
Bill Clinton: Come on this was a gimme, a Satyr. Nothign else fits this horny old goat.
Hillary Clinton: A harpy.
Sarah Palin: No doubt about it in my eyes, a Succubus. All charm and deception while she bleed you dry.
Barack Obama: A Rakshasa The shaping changing tiger that is smart, charming, and deadly. You never know exactly who he is cause he’s never in he real form.
Joe Biden: His’s the Gnome.
more when I think of them.
It has occurred to me that we might want to ponder the question; Is John McCain a vampire?
Let’s consider the interesting coincidences.
Vampires are hard to kill: John McCain has proven to be very difficult to kill. Over the course of his naval aviator career McCain survived five crashes, to of which were incidents where he aircraft was hit by missiles. He survived all of those events. (It is interesting to note that the fourth incident on the USS Forestal was a Zuni rocket from a friendly craft misfired and hit the plane John McCain was it. An accident? or did someone suspect he was a vampire?)
Even after surviving the fifth incident where he was shot down by enemy fire and severely wounded after ejecting, John McCain proved to be inhumanly tough. Surviving an enraged mob, and years of torture and mistreatment at the hands of a ruthless enemy.
Vampires do not tolerate sunlight well: John McCain is well known for his devotion to sun block and wearing of hats outdoors even on cloudy days. Despite this is has had two brushes with skin cancer. Again he’s tough to kill and clearly does not tolerate sunlight well. (I will point out that not all vampire explode in sunlight. Dracula in the novel of the same name ventured out in sunlight, it robbed him of his powers.)
Vampires have an unnatural ability to charm people: Clearly John McCain has supernatural charming power. He has survived political scandals that would have sunk others, yet he continued to win the loyalty of his voters. In 2008 when serious conservatives vowed not to vote for John McCain, they were strangely effected by election day and cast their votes for a man they despised.
Vampires survive by taking life force from others and extending their own lives with it: McCain second life as a politcian has been fuel by his younger wife’s Beer fortune. Clearly he has extended his life with her blood money.
But perhaps the most troubling thing and best evidence that John McCain is a vampire.
This is a response to a post this morning by political blogger Andrew Sullivan about Sarah Palin. Now Andrew has many fine traits as a political blogger, but among his down-checks is a bit of an obsession about Sarah Palin. Continue reading