Would Obama vs Huntsman be a win/win?

The one guy on the GOP bench who could rightly be called a STATESMAN is Jon Huntsman, and few on either side have his international experience. He is living demonstration of what is right about Mormon social values, and yet is open-minded and tolerant, and not on a religious mission. The rest are politicians, flacks, and tent-show evangelists whose talent is playing the election TV reality show game, and who are chosen for their "electability" by voters who are sold candidates like brands of pizza, with slogans and single-issue mantras, not for their qualifications for actually holding the job. And the GOPs election strategy has long been to focus not on their own candidates beyond iconification, but upon the horrors they allege to Obama and why to not vote for him... and instead for the default Notobama. By me, that is low-class politics, however effective, and I am unfavorably impressed with candidates who employ it.

Though I think not a "leftist" I believe we have unfortunately lost our sense of America being a mutually-supporting community which creates what I call "collective wealth" ... which I think government has the potential to be the best way to obtain. Our new-deal dams and highways are a good example (and our schools should be). It is not in the direct interest of any individual or private company to create such things, yet all of both greatly profit by their existence. I believe a state medical system could be run like that most effectively and at a very small fraction of the current cost... a subject on which I've got several articles and videos.

Those most vocal these days about being "real Americans" seem mostly about defending a select group of "us" behind gated walls with rifles to keep the hordes of "them" out. The very idea that government should provide something to everyone without regard for their having done something to individually "deserve" it has itself become demonized as "socialism," the current horror word that explains and justifies everything.

Without getting into the issues, I have great admiration for President Obama. I have no trouble discerning the difference between what I hear him say, and what the rightnik pudnits tell me he is saying, and between what I see him do and what they say is wrong about it. His credentials are impeccable, unless you would discount the State of Hawaii, INS, State Dept, FBI, Electoral Commission, Electoral College, Supreme Court, etc etc, and reluctantly even both houses of Congress... and also impugn the integrity of the Board Of Regents of what is arguably the most prestigious school of law in the world. Though his detractors openly flaunt and even applaud their willingness to employ whatever dirty tactics they can to destroy him, he has behaved with grace and forbearance.

So, I find things I agree and disagree with on both the Left and the Right, and whatever might be said about the party machines or ideology they represent, I'd say Huntsman vs. Obama would be a win/win race for the people. Those are American good guys.

Whose Unborn Baby Is It?

I recently received this in correspondence on the subject with a friend, and I appreciate the chance to address it.

, eric writes:
.....a woman's right to abortion is legal. That is not my problem with it. My first problem is that taxpayers should not have to pay for abortions. My second problem is that I believe the law does a disservice to women. If women have a right to choose, what are they choosing?

If it is a disservice to give someone a choice to do something you think they should not, then you do them best service by taking such choices away from them, and ensuring they only choose what you know is right, right? If she has a right to a root canal, why should any health care program refuse to cover it? What makes the abortion procedure different, if not the moral judgment prohibitionists would presume the power to enforce? I think government should not pay for cosmetic procedures, nor for the pharmacopoeia of Dr.Feelgood drugs, but if abortion is called a medical right (and it is hundreds of times less expensive than the alternative, providing pre-natal, birth, and adoption services), then who should say it should be excluded from the services covered, particularly on moralist grounds?

Your question demonstrates the apriori presumption of authority to define what is so immoral as to warrant prohibition. "What are they choosing?" you ask. The answer implied is, "something too bad to permit." Whose business is it to judge her choices so as to take them from her by law? In a sense, she is choosing to call abortion a justifiable homicide, as homicide it unquestionably is. Those who admit an "incest rape" exclusion to permit the victim mother a merciful abortion are doing exactly that, claiming the right to declare that particular homicide to be justifiable, the right they will not give to her. Their issue is thus shown not to be the life of the unborn, but the moral circumstances of its conception, and their power to declare one homicide mercy, and another murder in accordance with their standards, and to employ the might of law enforcement to obtain conformance to their judgment.

However you define its physical, spiritual, or legal personhood, until you could take it from her and sustain its life yourself as in parturition, you have no rightful claim upon it at all, neither to protect, speak for, nor to vaccinate, assign an identity number, nor place into an institution of protective maternal custody for the unborn. Whoever you are, no matter how much you believe in your righteousness, no matter how devoted to God by any name, no matter how many of you vote, or if you use the guns and judges, that fetus is not yours to protect. It does not belong to you. It does not and certainly should not belong to the state as though a protected ward, and even its soul does not belong to the church.

Whatever I might personally feel about any woman's choice to submit herself to carrying a pregnancy or not, or whatever I think God thinks about it, I would consider it a self-righteous usurpation of her God-given right to the ownership of her own body for me to subject her to my decision and bend her to my control by using the power of law enforcement in God's name. As for morally judging her choice, that part is between her and God, and none of us has a right to intervene, least of all by force in God's name. Though it break our hearts, we ought bide.

Mexicans Paying their Dues?

"Mexicans who come here contribute nothing...," I hear the Rightniks cry. That is not true, especially not true just because they aren't paying income taxes. I believe the working-man's term for it is "sweat equity" which they pay into our economy by working very hard for less than a citizen must be paid, which enables the employer to sell his produce at a profit without making it too expensive for the working American to buy. Those are some very hard dues those people are paying, harder than most Americans would rather have to pay than their taxes. We should open the border fully and marry Mexico, not keep her on her knees at gunpoint at the fence.

You think that is naïve? You are so right, of course. The real American way would be to clear away a DMZ (De-Mexicanized-Zone), build a Tortilla Curtain, guard it with State and Federal guns and robot military camera airplanes, and start shooting those invading criminal drug terrorists, and their family members they are so cowardly hiding behind. As we did with Japanese in WWII, we could then round up anyone suspected of likely being loyal to the Mexican insurgents, and put them in a chain of residence and evaluation camps. Call it "Sheriff Joe's Gulag," in honor of that law enforcement hero whose head was found on a bullfighter’s pike. Halliburton and Blackwater could be paid on a DOD contract to operate it all, which would provide jobsjobsjobs for thousands of good Christian boys in uniform, khaki, green, black, and blue.

Most Mexican immigrants, legal or not, work harder in a week for what little they get than the megabux desk-jockey works in six months of trading in other people's money. You make it illegal for them to work, then call them lowlife when they go into crime. They risk their lives to work as dirt-grubbers to feed their children and then you cram them ten deep into prison cells where they are forged into criminal cadres of extreme anti-American homicidal fanatics, seriously dangerous people, and rightly so. As "a free-country movement of charitable Christians" the high-horse knuckle-whackers of the Bible-Right, well-intentioned or not, are hypocrites, assholes, and fools.

Why Not Vote Social Conservative?

“Social Conservatives” are good and sincere people, but they are the puritan crusaders, prohibitionists, finger-waggers, torch and pitchfork witch-hunters, censors of obscenity and of heresy, intolerant of perverts and false doctrines, each a self-justified moralist judge and ready executioner of the deserving sinner, likely motivated by a narrow but extreme religious viewpoint. Whatever you think personal liberty means, these are people who likely will religiously strive to prevent you from exercising yours, likely as not in the name of protecting your morality from self-abuse by license to sin, and protecting your children from the trauma of seeing you do it.

A century and a half ago, Lysander Spooner wrote eloquently about the folly of dealing with vice through enforced prohibition. In the 1930’s we recognized the folly of creating a huge and profitable criminal class by the prohibition of alcohol, and that was repealed. Later the pragmatic on both sides of the law recognized the profitability of maintaining prohibition of many other such highly desired substances and elements of various vices. The consumer suffers from the actions of both sides in the wars on sin, but the street money for it and the budget money against it both flows.

Therein lies the unforseen horror. The fact prohibition is profitable for both the suppliers of the desired commodity and those who enforce the laws against them does not change the folly of what is being done, but multiplies it. Both sides soon create in the other the thing they fear, and everyone suffers the terrible destructive effects of each trying to resist and destroy the other. The damage done far outweighs whatever could have been caused by the prohibited substance or practice.

If dancing is outlawed as something sinful, a vice, because it leads to fucking, soon only outlaws will be dancing, and the lawful who succumb to their sinful nature will kill to fuck. Even one such killing will be taken as proof the sins of dancing and fucking should be even more rigorously outlawed. The dance halls move underground and become more expensive, and more and more terpsichorian fornicators are hunted down, tried and appealed, imprisoned in huge new facilities, and hanged. The monster feeds upon itself, and grows.

Whatever you think of Barack Obama, the political ideology of the Republican Party, or the petty arguments of Congress over which of them gets all the money, it would be damaging to all of our personal and civil liberties to vote for any candidate who advertises himself or herself as a “Social Conservative.”