Chasing the Wind

Executive Kill Orders

Obama’s first executive orders are about to gives us a hint what the next four years will be like.

Presidents long have used executive orders to impose policy and set priorities. One of Bush’s first acts was to reinstate full abortion restrictions on U.S. overseas aid. The restrictions were first ordered by President Reagan and the first President Bush followed suit. President Clinton lifted them soon after he occupied the Oval Office and it wouldn’t be surprising if Obama did the same.

Because obviously the biggest failure of the United States over the last four years is neglecting our responsibility in eliminating the lives of unborn minorities in impovershed nations. Kill them all.

Is that our new message of “Hope” and “Change” to the World? God help us.

One Less Bad Candidate to Vote For

I think I keep hoping for some unknown conservative candidate to suddenly appear and give me somebody to vote for. Like the ghost of Ronald Reagan, perhaps.

What I want is a candidate that is socially and fiscally conservative. Socially conservative because, like it or not, the President sets an example for the morals of this country. Bill Clinton taught millions of middle schoolers that oral sex isn’t really sex, and an outbreak of oral sexual diseases broke out. He taught us that it’s ok to stretch the truth, it’s ok to lie by omission. I think a generation of dishonest youngsters are on the way. George Bush didn’t do that, but I feel misled; I thought “compassionate conservatism” was still conservatism. Under his leadership, Republicans spent money like drunken sailors. Whee!

When the Republican National Committe send their fundraising letters, I trash them. If they were conservative, I’d support them.

Duncan Hunter was my early favorite, but his campaign never got traction, and he’s dropped out. That left me choosing between Huckabee and Romney.

Huckabee is socially conservative. But is he fiscally conservative? His record as Arkansas governor doesn’t appear so. He’s all for mandating health goals. I don’t want the government involved to that level in my life. I also don’t think he has enough international experience. But I like him socially. I just can’t figure out why the second choice of Huckabee supporters is McCain.

And Romney is socially conservative. But fiscally, he too spends more than I’d like. But now he’s dropped out.

That leaves McCain, an unstable “maverick” that has done significant harm to conservatives. He dislikes evangelicals, he’s soft on border control, he co-sponsored that McCain-Feingold usurping of the First Amendment, he voted against tax cuts, and he was part of that group that unblocked the stalemate on judicial nominees. I *wanted* the stalemate; I disliked the fact the judicial committee could derail a nomimation and keep the full Senate from voting. McCain is a pain.

Look, a campaign slogan. McCain is a pain.

As of now, I don’t think Huckabee can make a comeback, and I’m not sure I’m sold out for him anyway. That leaves McCain.

Will I support him? McCain’s strongest suit is he is very strong on defense. To me, he’s weak on everything else. But compared to the socialist, defeatest Democrats, McCain looks comparitively good. Comparitively.

So when Romney dropped out earlier this week, there’s one less bad candidate to vote for. Now I only have to choose between three bad candidates: McCain, Clinton, Obama. With that poor selection, I’ll go with McCain.

I’m going to have to hold my nose and remember the alternatives are worse.

Censorship

Heh. And the left wing accuses the right wing of censorship. The Democratic party issues a veiled threat to ABC/Disney to cancel Sunday night’s 9/11 miniseries:

We therefore urge you to cancel this broadcast to cease Disney’s plans to use it as a teaching tool in schools across America through Scholastic. Presenting such deeply flawed and factually inaccurate misinformation to the American public and to children would be a gross miscarriage of your corporate and civic responsibility to the law, to your shareholders, and to the nation.

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.

Remember last October when CBS pulled the miniseries at the last moment due to conservative outrage? At the time, the left complained loudly that truth was being supressed and even if the miniseries wasn’t factual, it was still covered under some artisitic license.

The big difference this time is that Bill Clinton is defending himself, something the Alzheimer-suffering Reagan wasn’t able to do.

Update: Ah, here’s the story I was looking for. When CBS pulled the trash-tabloid story about Reagan without showing it, Tom Daschle called it “appalling.”

Senate Minority leader Tom Daschle later called the decision to pull the show “appalling.” CBS “totally collapsed,” he told National Public Radio.

State of Cindy’s Delusion

You probably know Cindy Sheehan was arrested and removed before the President’s State of the Union address last night. That wasn’t really a surprise – the surprise to me was that a U.S. Representative, Lynn Woolsey, gave her a ticket. Sometimes the Left is really… Left, you know? Cindy was removed by Capital Police because, well, because it wasn’t a State of Cindy speech last night.

Cindy’s posted about her experience on Michael Moore’s website. I’m going to nitpick only a couple of pieces in it:

[...]
At that time, I was wearing the shirt that said: 2,245 Dead. How many more?
[...]
I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled, “Protester.”
[...]
I wore the shirt to make a statement. The press knew I was going to be there and I thought every once in awhile they would show me and I would have the shirt on.

These snippets show she still doesn’t understand why she was escorted out. The show wasn’t about her. The wife of Republican Representative C.W. Bill Young was also escorted out for wearing a t-shirt supporting the troops. I remember a man being escorted out during one of Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speeches. The President is required by the US Constitution to tell Congress about the State of the Union every year. It’s all about the President on that night.

I have lost my First Amendment rights.
[...]
I have some lawyers looking into filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the government for what happened tonight.
[...]
I don’t want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government.

I think a lawyer would have a hard time proving that her First Amendment rights are being violated, especially when she’s posted everything she wanted to say the very next day. The fact that she can’t say it there and that particular time and be disruptive at a Presidential event is supported by a Supreme Court ruling placing a “reasonable time, place or manner” restriction on speech.

Read some of her ranting. Does she sound oppressed to you?

Oh Christmas Tree

Some time in the 1990s, the annual spruce placed on the Washington Capitol grounds started being called the “Holiday Tree” instead of “Christmas Tree.” Nobody seems to know why it was changed, but it was at about the same time Bill Clinton was in the same city and struggling to keep his pants up. Coincidence? I think not.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert is going to have it renamed back to “Christmas Tree.” Huzzah!

If it’s a spruce tree adorned with 10,000 lights and 5,000 ornaments displayed on the Capitol grounds in December, it’s a Christmas tree and that’s what it should be called, says House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Hastert, R-Ill., in a letter to the Architect of the Capitol, recommended that the annual Capitol Holiday Tree, as it has been called the past several years, be renamed the Capitol Christmas Tree.

“I strongly urge that we return to this tradition and join the White House, countless other public institutions and millions of American families in celebrating the holiday season with a Christmas tree,” Hastert wrote to Architect Alan Hantman.

His office said the tree began to be referred to as the Holiday Tree in the 1990s. Spokesman Ron Bonjean said the reasons were unclear.

On Dec. 8 Hastert will flip the switch to light the tree, a 65-foot Engelmann Spruce from the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico. On Tuesday workmen were erecting the tree on the West Front of the Capitol.