CT Politics Blog

Last night I attended Libertarian candidate Bob Barr’s speech. It was refreshing. I liked how he focused on giving power back to the states in everything from defining marriage to drug laws. The federal government has taken over too much of what should be controlled by the states. I’m a fan of having less central government and I liked what Bob Barr had to say. I didn’t agree with him on everything necesarily. I’m a Ron Paul supporter, and the two of them certainly don’t take all the same stands on the issues. I really liked him nonetheless.

Perhaps the best thing he said was that it was the President’s job to protect and “expand” the liberty of the American people. I’d never heard anyone say it like that before. To protect our liberty isn’t enough, because with the laws that are on the books now we’ve already been losing some of it. The President should try to give Americans more freedom, rather than merely trying not to encroach on what freedom is already there.

What I really liked, besides his platforms, was that I felt like he was telling the truth. If anything he said wasn’t accurate, I got the feeling that that would be because he didn’t know that it was inaccurate rather than that he was trying to sell us something. This is not to say that I think what he said was inaccurate. I don’t. I just mean he seemed like a genuine, likeable human being and most of them don’t. Most of these politicians remind me of used car salesmen when they speak. They try to sell me junk with a smile and maybe a jingle about experience or change. I thought it was really nice to hear someone speak that I really felt seemed like a person with integrity, someone I would actually like to know in person. For the record, I’m not one to be easily pursuaded. I may very well be one of the biggest cynics going. It just warms me up inside to hear from someone who seems like a good person. It gives you (or at least it gives me) a little faith that maybe there are some people in government that are still working for the liberty of the American people.

This is just the first blog I will write on the subject. It covers only one aspect of the currently forming North American Union. The issue is immigration, and Congressional refusal to seal up our borders aids the Bush administration in their globalistic plans to effectively terminate the US as a nation and blend us into a North American Union with Canada and Mexico. Why do you think he won’t seal the borders, and why he imprisoned the minutemen? He doesn’t really want the borders sealed and our laws enforced. 

President Bush and others are following a blueprint laid out by the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2005 they wrote it up as “Building a North American Community.” The document pays lip service to national soveriegnty while saying that borders between the three countries should be completely opened up and there should be completely free, unregulated trade between the three countries, and that law enforcement and economic policy should be approached trinationally.  Bush then followed by meeting with President Fox of Mexico and creating the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.” In that document it was stated:

“To that end, the Task Force proposes the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders that “our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary.” Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.”

It then goes on to explicitly state that there should be no regulations between people of the three countries as they crossed [used to be] borders. You can see the CFR document at http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/NorthAmerica_TF_final.pdf

It is horrible to know that we have someone in office that does not have the interest of the United States at heart at all. For our safety and sovereignty, it is absolutely necesary to control and regulate our borders. I have my own idea of how we should seal up the border. I personally believe we should arm militia men all along the border so that where ever anyone would try to cross, they would be within firing range. I would post a sign, in Spanish as well as other languages, before that point giving everyone a fair warning that if they try to run across that line without showing legal documentation, they will be shot. If they do not heed the warning and try to slip across our borders anyays, then shoot them. Is it harsh? Yes. Will it get the job done? Yes. For the record, it won’t mean having to shoot thousands of Mexicans and others every year. When Juan and Pedro, for example, reach the border and Juan sees that when Pedro tried to cross he really did get shot, Juan will think twice before running across the border himself. If he didn’t think twice, he wouldn’t be very bright. Sorry, but it is the survival of the fittest, people. We are a sovereign nation with a right to defend our borders, and if people from other nations lead us to make illegal immigration a capitol offense, then so be it. We should do what we need to do to seal our borders.

The proposed bailout act in Congress, which may go up for a vote as early as tomorrow, is the death of free market economy. One financial analyst, Jim Rogers, goes as far as to say that if this atrocious thing passes, our economy will be more communist than China. This is welfare and socialism for the rich now. I won’t even discuss the stupidity and irresponsibility of most of these homeowners who took these loans to buy bigger houses than they could afford. In order to save them from what they have earned, we will now not only be shouldering their mortgages as a country, but shouldering the stupidity of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. It is called The Patriot Act of Finance. God knows anything that has “Patriot Act” in it is going to be a disaster. Moreover, it basically gives the United States Treasury over to one rich man. Hank Paulson has the power to buy out any debt or sell any that he wants at any time, up to 700 billion dollars at one time. Basically, he can make an infinite number of transactions. WORSE, the Act says that there will be no board or group authorized to examine his actions or veto any of them. One man can do whatever he wants with your tax dollars. Hank Paulson, if you are wondering, is a CEO of Goldman Sachs who is merely on leave right now. And if this heinous Act goes through, he has unchecked control over the US Treasury. If even that doesn’t frighten you, this should. In this Act, financial institutions in America are referred to as “financial agents of the government.” Can you say communism? Here’s what it says. “Designating financial institutions as financial agents of the Government, and they shall perform all such reasonable duties related to this Act as financial agents of the Government as may be required of them.” Wake up America, politicians and bankers are doing everything they can to destroy everything our country is and make us serfs. And much like the Patriot Act appears to have been written before 9/11, this Patriot Act of Finance appears to have been written before the market collapse. You can’t trust the government. The sooner everyone wakes up and sees that, the better. Even if this was the result of the market collapse it would be a dangerous, wrong, and anti-American thing to propose. The fact that this started before then just shows how much you can’t trust them. Do everything you can to contact your local representative and make it clear this is not acceptable. It’s time for Americans to speak up!

With the Vice Presidential candidates finally out in the open, we enter the wild, bewildering, chaotic calm before the storm that is Election Day. And I have to say that I am enjoying it. It’s real interesting. Like a flock of birds all fighting for the same crumb. They all exercise different beliefs and exhibit dissimilar personas.

We see Barack Obama donning his classic “dream of the future” pose. Obama, who doesn’t look like “all those other presidents on the dollar bills”, is progressive and hopeful and calls on all American citizens to work towards a great America. His weapon of choice, his zest for change.

And then there’s McCain. For six years he was a POW in Vietnam. So he claims to truly understand what freedom means. He has frequently bombarded Obama with campaigns labeling him “the biggest celebrity in the world.” This resulted in Paris Hilton running for President. God forbid.

After a long political drum roll, Obama announces Senator Joe Biden of Delaware as his Vice Presidential pick. And I got to say I like Joe. He’s a perfect choice for Obama. He’s got the same enthusiasm for change that Obama represents. He has good foreign affairs experience. And he is not a “yes man.” Obama certainly does lack in experience so it’s good to have Biden backing him up. Also he just has that signature smile that goes well with Obama’s “dream of the future” look.

And now the political arena is graced with the lovely, yet exhilarating Sarah Palin of Alaska. Who would have thought? I would say that Palin was an interesting choice for McCain. We have Palin who designates herself the typical “hockey mom”. At first glance some make mention that she epitomizes the Average American Woman. Yeah. In a sense that the Average American Woman is a former Alaskan beauty pageant contestant as well as a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. She is extremely conservative which sort of concerns me. Anti-abortion as well as pro-gun and against same sex marriage. An unknown, my hypothesis is that McCain was looking for the Woman Vote.

Palin has been calling out Obama and Biden. Many say that she upstages Obama. Another fact that I found interesting is that she apparently attends a church that claims that they hold the cure for homosexuality. Ouch.

More is to be said of this election. Just recently McCain has gained the lead in polls. Just last week he had been down seven points and now has gained four points over his opponent Obama. Interesting. But as we all know, the elections do not work on yardage. You can run so far and yet still fall short.

Should I chalk this up to temporary insanity? I think McCain picked Sarah Palin to get women voters and maybe to pick up some Hillary supporters who are unhappy with Obama. Maybe it is that idea that women will vote for someone just for being a woman? I don’t know. McCain couldn’t have made a dumber decision. How can she appeal to the family values crowd? Her teenage daughter is pregnant. Moreover, and this is much worse, she went back to work three days after her last baby was born. This isn’t a poor woman and there is such thing as maternity leave. You only get brownie points for having five children if you’ve actually spent time with them and raised them. Anyone can give birth five times. That just isn’t special. I don’t see a family oriented woman. I see a woman who is leaving a pregnant daughter, a young disabled child, and three other children in a time of trouble in her family to run around the country campaigning. If her family can’t count on her, neither can the rest of us. McCain certainly lost the environmentalists when he picked Palin. She was in favor of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Palin also opposed listing polar bears as an endangered species because she was afraid that doing so would interfere with a proposed natural gas line. And this is just my opinion as usual, but I don’t see how many Christians he is going to get to vote for him just because she is prolife. She is also against contraceptives, whereas most mainstream Christians are not. I think this sets women back. It was a great thing for women in terms of health, life expectancy, and career choice when contraceptives became available. You probably can’t pull off having a career if you have 8 kids or something like that. Being able to limit the number of children they have allows women to plan to stay home with them awhile and then go back to work, or keep working but only have a few children so that they have time to pursue family and career. I see Sarah Palin as a potential set back to women. She may court the vote of the very far right, but beyond that I don’t see her as very appealing to voters.

It’s been ugly. And it’s going to get uglier. Obama’s promise of a “clean campaign” was blatantly broken this week. It wasn’t exactly dirt free before but now it’s out in the open.

Candidate housing surprisingly has become the new issue to grace the political arena. Earlier this week McCain was asked how many houses did he owned to which he replied “unsure.” When asked, a member of his staff responded “at least four.” Obama approved a negative ad that portrayed McCain’s opulent housing situation as a hindrance to his ability to understand the kind of lives most Americans lead. His answer: “It’s seven.” But other news sources have speculated that it could be as much as ten.

It’s disappointing but the Road to the White House is now a race to dig up dirt on the opposition. I had hoped that Obama would take the road less travelled as promised, but many feel that his succumbing to devious tactics was inevitable and implied long before.

McCain had constantly attacked Obama’s lack of experience labeling him the “Paris Hilton of politics.” One ad released illustrates Obama seeking to remake America in his own image by imprinting his face on the dollar bill. This act I found extremely shameful and did nothing to help McCain’s campaign. And then there is Obama’s dollar bill comment. Representatives from both sides argued whether or not this indicated that the race card was being played. An even bigger question is who did this statement help more? Is McCain trying to instill fear of Obama’s inadequacy in voters? Or is Obama surreptitiously playing the race card to his own advantage? McCain questions Obama’s celebrity status while Obama questions McCain’s housing situation.

McCain isn’t a racist. And Obama is not simply a celebrity. However they keep bringing up the same old arguments. What of the issues and their solutions? What about McCain’s energy plan and Obama’s exit strategy for Iraq? The public is hearing more of shortcomings and less of accomplishments. Obama’s broken promise of a clean campaign is disheartening. And McCain’s line of negative ads does not exemplify him as the better candidate either. Questions of dollar bills and housing are becoming more prevalent than solutions for America’s future.

Slowly, Americans begin to mouth the phrase, “I hate _____, but I hate _____ more.” The platforms of the candidates are being replaced with the distorted caricatures of their opponent’s deficiencies and flaws. It’s a conundrum because legitimacy is lost when tactics such as these are implemented. The question turns into who is the lesser evil? The race for dirt gets both players equally dirty. And we see not intelligent debate, but unabashed mudslinging. Politics should be practiced with passion, not drama.

While the weather begins to heat up around here, these tyrannical leaders have found their own ways to avoid the political heat. From using the hear-no-evil see-no-evil tactic to covertly funding foreign terrorists to ruthlessly crushing all internal opposition, these three leaders have defined what it means to be a tyrant and in the process have given credence to the old maxim, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So without further ado, here is the summary of what three men from around the world have been doing to help make the world a worse place.

Than Shwe – Burma: The leader of Burma’s ruthless ruling military junta announced three years ago that the national capital (Rangoon) would be replaced by the new city of Naypyidaw. Rangoon, a teaming city of millions near the coast is the nation’s economic powerhouse and the historic capital. However, fears of – I am not kidding – a US marine invasion prompted the move the to brand new city in the middle of the jungle. The paranoid Than Shwe felt that isolation was the best route to take and this opinion is vividly on display as the Junta continues to balk when offered foreign aid for the millions of homeless and malnutrition survivor of the recent cyclone.

Hugo Chavez – Venezuela: The man who has waged a war of words against the US and, indeed, the entire ‘West’ at the expense of his impoverished people, had been implicated in an attempt to destabilize his neighbors in Colombia. A couple months ago Venezuela almost went to war with Colombia after that nation aggressively target a home-grown terrorist group and drug cartel called FARC, violating Ecuador’s borders in the process. Rumors which had been circulating for years that Chavez has funded FARC to overthrow the government of the Colombia (a US ally) received confirmation from an Interpol investigation into FARC computer files showing Chavez gave them weapons, money, and training. Chavez’s response? He called Interpol a “puppet” and disparaged its chief as an “idiot.”

Robert Mugabe – Zimbabwe: Weeks after loosing the general election to the major opposition party, Mugabe and his party have declared the election instead “too close to call” and requiring a run-off. The run-off election however, which the opposition was forced to reluctantly agree to, may not be scheduled for another year or longer. In the meantime Mugabe and his party, which regularly bankrolls guerilla-type thugs that roam the nation, has set about killing, forcing into exile, or completely intimidating all who voted against him. Don’t be surprised if the run-off turns out to be a resounding victory for Mugabe and an utter disaster for democracy in Africa.

I was deeply offended by Obama’s remarks concerning people from small towns. For the record, his comment was, “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them, and they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”Aside from the fact that I spent a large portion of my childhood in a small town in Connecticut and I know that to make such a generalization about people from small towns is ridiculous and uneducated, I am offended for other reasons.

Much was made of his remark in the press, saying that small town people would resent being called bitter. I must say, that as much as I found that offensive, the press is missing the mark in saying that this was what was so offensive in his remark. What was really offensive was to suggest that people cling to guns and religion as a reaction to the economic and political situations they face. They are interesting as well, coming from a man who claims to be of faith. I doubt the faith of anyone who would say that someone else’s faith is merely an expression of their anger about their situations.

Religious faith doesn’t come from anger or fury. It stems from love. If you know there is a god, you know it whether you love or hate the current president, and you know it regardless of the size of your wallet. What Obama has done is imply that only ignorant people, or people without college degrees, who don’t understand things that the Washington elitists and wealthy Californians clearly must (of course) have religious faith. We all know that small towns have a reputation for being largely blue collar places, usually inhabited by a lower number than average of college graduates. He assumes that the wealthy audience of most likely well-educated people he was speaking to wasn’t religious. Obama was even giving this speech to explain regular, working class America to rich people who are sadly out of touch with it. So what does that tell you?

I won’t even go into the ignorance of his remark about turning to antipathy for immigrants as a way to vent some sort of frustration or hostility. That would take me a whole other blog. The immigrants are a problem, but that is something that elitists in gated communities wouldn’t know anything about, being that their only contact with the immigrants and the issues involved are when border hoppers come to cut their grass.

A relic of some forgotten past, whom most would rather see fade away into that past, Robert Mugabe isn’t giving up. He’s a cautionary tale - what would happen if George Washington had decided to cling onto power for nearly three decades.

Mugabe, like Washington in America, is widely recognized in Zimbabwe as that country’s modern founder; the man who fought most of his young life against the racist white minority government of then Southern Rhodesia. When they won and the old government was toppled, Mugabe was president by default with almost unanimous support. After three decades however, the power has gotten to his head and he has plunged this once prosperous country into economic decline where inflation tops 14,000%, millions are underfed, a quarter of the population has fled overseas, and unemployment hovers just under 80%.

Zimbabwe, has held regular elections but they have recognized as little more than a sham for sometime, with opposition leaders who have dared to challenge him being beaten into submission before the election results return with a surprise: President Mugabe won a vast majority of support, again! The people of Zimbabwe must simply love not working, not being paid, and not eating far more than we anticipated.

Recently however, the situation has proven simply too much for Mugabe to control and independent tallies show that the opposition has won an overwhelming majority. Without releasing the actual vote numbers, however, the official election board has claimed that the vote was too close to call and a run-off is necessary. We all see where this is going don’t we? This time though, the opposition will no longer put up with their founding father and his kleptocracy of mismanagement.

Prepare for yet another story of civil strife in an impoverished African country. But this one’s different, if only slightly. For those of us who look at Africa, longing for a success amidst all of the failures, Zimbabwe is particularly saddening. It’s a nation which had it al and seemed poised on the verge of greatness only to be self-cannibalized by its once prodigal leader in Mobutu-esqe fashion

I have now seen the highly controversial YouTube video of Oklahoma’s Sally Kern discussing homosexuals. A good friend sent me the link. She is the total opposite of me on the political spectrum and so her reaction was quite different than mine. She passionately believes that what Kern said was hate speech.

All issues aside about whether you agree or disagree with Kern, what she said isn’t hate speech. It concerns me that nowadays it seems like any time you disagree with someone, dislike them, or believe they have a degenerate effect on society or anything else, you are considered hateful. She doesn’t have to like or agree with homosexuality. If she thinks that homosexuality has a negative impact on society, there is nothing wrong with that. She didn’t threaten anyone or attack individuals. I praise her for coming out and saying what she thinks, even if it is completely politically incorrect. If what she said is hate speech, then by that reckoning all of us have to like and agree with everyone else all the time.

Personally, I do think that schools indoctrinate young kids to all kinds of ideologies beyond the issue of homosexuality. I also know that homosexuality is a sin. Additionally, I think it is one more sign that society is degenerating. People can argue all day about how not everyone believes in the Bible and that you can’t shove morality down other people’s throats. This is true. However, the fact remains that the Bible does say it is a sin and Christians and other groups of people have a right to say so. I don’t want to shove biblical morality down anyone’s throat, but at the same time I won’t allow this politically correct society to shove liberalism down my throat.

-Lisa Minner