True Intentions Revealed

"The Pro Choice Movement: The radical idea that a woman owns her own body"


As everyone knows this past election was a huge shift towards more conservative candidates. Many, myself included liked seeing politicians who had been in many terms finally taken out of office (regardless of party). My true excitement in the previous elections came from the election of Tea Party Candidates. Yes, they indeed ran under the Republican banner, but they were not full fledged Republicans, to me these were the more moderate candidates and the ones with the best potential. The problem when people shift from one party to the other is they do it blindly. In many areas this blind push for more conservative candidates has lead to a full pendulum swing (extreme left to extreme right). The problem with this is although many candidates are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, the majority of the population is somewhere in the middle.
What we see now is many of these conservative candidates who ran on the campaign of smaller budget less spending are already moving on to other agendas. Agendas they barely if at all campaigned on. What I am talking about is the new Pro Life push. The problem in recent years has been huge government deficits. So the past legislature passing a stimulus and a healthcare bill is insane and will only destroy our economy more. But brining in new people that said they would fix the problem and then go off and address the abortion issue does not help at all!!
This new movement has been mostly one occurring on a state level. There are now 29 governors considered to be solidly anti-abortion, compared with 21 last year. Some now pro life state examples are: Florida and Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, as well as Georgia and Oklahoma. Maine and Pennsylvania are now strongly anti-abortion as well.
In a time when the budget should be our biggest consideration both at the state and federal level we do not need this huge conservative advantage to run off on social issues. This will only lead to a backlash and we will go back to liberal governors and representatives on the next election cycle. These governors should be working on what they campaigned on. This huge conservative push was not because people wanted anti-abortion laws passed, the majority of American's are pro choice. This anti-liberal push was to fix our economy.

Polarization of Politics

To really understand how and why politics is polarized you have to go to the root of each of the mentalities, or the extreme of each, if you will. I am sure many will not agree with me on this, but it is how I see it.

The people who really consider themselves moderates these days are the ones who do not care much about politics and do not want to pick a side. This means you have to be careful because if you voice your opinions too strongly or too often you become and "extremist" or "crazy" and then people will just blow you off and not listen to you. If you never voice your opinions then what good is it having any? So there is a fine line you have to walk.

The people who are really into politics are usually clumped into one of two groups (later I will argue why there should be at least three groups). Commonly these groups are known as Republicans and Democrats. Now many people differ from the candidates of those parties in opinions so it is often hard to decide which to call yourself. I have found that the easiest is to take them to the extremes and see which extreme you like the best.

Democrats is the easiest, because many of them are open about it. The extreme liberal is a socialist or in the absolute extreme a communist. Now Republicans are a little harder but to me it would be a Theocracy (government run by the church). I believe this because their social policies (gay rights, abortion, etc...) resulted from a religious origin for the most part. Not to mention many want Christianity to be the US religion and want the 10 commandments taught in school.

So which of those do you like better? For a country comparison, would you rather live in USSR/China or Iran? To most of us neither sound good and indeed there are other factors, but you have to start somewhere.

Now I would argue there are other extremes, one I just want to touch on is a dictatorship or totalitarianism. This is usually an offshoot of one of the others, so I personally would lump it in with one of them most of the time, but I would not argue too much if others wanted to make it its own category.

So then I started lumping different movements into different categories and there was one movement that did not fit any of those 2/3. That is the smaller government, Libertarian movement. Now once again very few people want any of the extremes, but what would be the extreme to this movement? The final extreme that I think needs to be considered based on this one is anarchy. We have been raised to fear this word, just as religious people fear polytheism or atheism. But it is something to consider. Is no government really worse than a fully controlling government? Personally I don't think true anarchy would work or if it did, I don't think it would last, but it is an extreme none the less.

So I leave it to you, which extreme would you prefer if you had to pick and there were no other choices?
Totalitarianism, anarchy, theocracy, or socialism (communism)?

Previous Three

The last three posts were ones I wrote on the College Republican Blog, which I am a writer for. I wanted to get them in here too so I had them on a non-joint blog. They obviously all lean more conservative, but I will try and be more balanced henceforth.

A Time of Sorrow

As most people know there was a terrible shooting a week ago, on the morning of Saturday the 8th. A 22-year old man, named Jared Laughner opened fire at Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' outdoor meeting. She was his target and suffered a gun shot wound to the head. Miraculously at this point it appears she will survive the injury. A total of thirteen people were injured and sadly six were killed, including a federal judge, a congressional aide and a nine-year old girl.

Laughner is in custody and faces the death penalty. He is remaining silent, having plead the fifth and will likely go for an insanity plea. There are many reports along with many of his online posts that show he is indeed very mentally unstable.

Everyone is pointing the blame at someone else. Liberals saying conservatives such as Sarah Palin had targeted that district in "cross hairs" on a map of the U.S. and have been using a great deal of gun related language. With conservatives responding to this criticism that those were simply districts to target in elections, and it was never meant to lead to anything like this. Although Laughner targeted a Democrat he appeared to be very mixed along political lines, liking the book by Hitler, Mein Kampf (Giffords was indeed Jewish) and a book by the Chinese communist leader Mao, which would usually be linked more towards the left of the political spectrum.

In all of this political turmoil, there are likely many to blame. But sadly a new far more daunting finger of blame has arisen, as we knew it would. With many Democrats backed by the Brady campaign saying that it was not Loughner to blame or all of the political partisanship, but are now attacking guns........ As always they are using the crisis to get their agenda's passed when they hope there will be less opposition. Fortunately groups such as the NRA have vowed to fight any laws that threaten the second amendment rights of the citizens of Arizona.

It is so sad to see that so many people come away from such a tragedy with conclusions as insane as we see from some of those in the liberal media and politicians. I mean, let me get this straight. A truly mentally ill man goes on a crazy shooting spree in an attempt to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the lesson learned is that guns should be taken away from law abiding citizens? Where is this connection between a mentally ill lunatic and responsible, perfectly sane people coming from? It would be the same as a drunk driver killing an entire family in a car and the state or federal government trying to ban alcohol or even cars to everyone. Absurd right? And yet, that indeed was the response.

There are countless reasons to not ban guns to law abiding citizens, they can not all possibly be named here, but one reason would be that limiting access to guns will not stop criminals from obtaining guns!! Drugs are banned in this country, yet they are found everywhere. If guns were to be banned it would not stop a single criminal from obtaining it on the black market, it would only prevent law abiding citizens from defending themselves. Leaving them to the mercy of thieves, home invaders, murders, rapists and madmen.

As Americans we have a Constitution. It gives law-abiding citizens the right to bear arms. Allowing us to protect ourselves, our families and our homes. It is a huge part of how America has remained so free. God Bless America!

“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes...Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
--Thomas Jefferson

The Problem with Funding Scientific Research

First some background, to anyone who knows something about basic economics this is a review, to everyone else, there is the problem in economics of a "public good" (the best example being a fireworks display) where it is non-rival and non-excludable. Aka its hard to limit who sees them and who does not and one person watching them does not take away from another person watching them. The problem with this is who provides it? You have a problem with "free riders" where people do not pay for it, but still get to enjoy it. The first conclusion everyone leaps to then is government should pay for it.

In recent years there has been a huge push that scientific research is a public good and therefore should be provided funds by the government. The problem is as soon as it's government funding people tend to be much more wasteful of money and lets face it the federal government nor our state government can afford much of anything these days. So the big question is...... is there a way to still do research and not have the government adding to their deficit to do it?

This video does a great job of giving an alternative, one that is literally right under our nose.

With other Debates Done START to Begin

The easiest side to see for many of these issues being debated in the senate now is the liberal side of the argument. You really have to stop and think to understand why there is opposition to a treaty that on face value seems to provide only good intentions. The START Treaty (for STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty) when first looked at is about reducing arms between the US and Russia and starting up inspections between the two countries again. So what',s wrong with that? Well the problems start as you begin to look at the actual wording in the treaty as Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona did with his proposed amendment that was voted down (59-37). The specific wording in the bill that comes into question is:

“Recognizing the existence of the interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms, that this interrelationship will become more important as strategic nuclear arms are reduced, and that current strategic defensive arms do not undermine the viability and effectiveness of the strategic offensive arms of the Parties.”

This wording is very ambiguous to say the least. This raises some very important questions. Such as who is getting more out of this treaty? What is this interrelationship that will become more important? And how will this link between our offensive arms and defensive arms impact the defensive ones?

Defensive arms can incorporate many things, the most obvious would be weapons we have in our country to defend ourselves against different possible attacks. But what the treaty is more likely going after, which could potentially be even scarier, is shutting down and dismantling our Missile Defense Systems in Eastern Europe. For those that don't know, this system was set up so that if Russia were to attack, the system would counter-attack target key areas in Russia, terminating their Second Strike capability. This ensures that they can not continue to attack us if their surprise first strike takes out all of our defenses within our country. All this is likely because our capabilities greatly reduces Russia's world prestige and makes them feel bad. The most recent NATO summit agreed with our placement of these defenses, meaning this is just another way Obama, the Democrat led senate, and even some GOP senators are trying to lead us down the road to submission, which as Regan said so well is not a choice between peace and war, but a choice between freedom or slavery.

We can all agree (or I hope we can) that the world would be a better place if nuclear weapon stockpiles could be reduced or even better eliminated. But is there a possible way to do this? Are we fooling ourselves thinking that by us making all these concessions it will make other countries see how we are stepping up to reduce our nuclear stockpiles, so they should reduce theirs? It might be just me, but I don't think North Korea and Iran are going to do that, they are going to laugh and continue to increase their ever expanding arsenal.

Many say the GOP are just trying to delay for the sake of delaying and kill the treaty. But the truth is, something with such huge ramifications needs more than just a glancing over before it is passed. We know very well that Obama will not be one to go through and make sure everything is satisfactory. At this point he just wants a couple of things checked off in his very large "to do" list, with very few checks so far.

In reality the most important question of them all is why are we taking the time to go through this? Our economy is in shambles, we in the middle of massive government take overs with rising unemployment. Why are we worrying about Russia? Russia is not important anymore!!! Out of all the foreign threats to our country I believe we can all agree Russia would not even be put in the top three. We have Iran and North Korea developing Nuclear programs, we have China buying/developing who knows what. And Mexico taking over more and more of our country. Why is Russia such a top priority?

A History of My Political Views

I thought my first post should be a back-story on how I reached the political views I have today. This is too much to put in the about me section, hence a full post.

In high school I cared absolutely nothing for politics, seeing it as a topic that was always argued at family get-togethers, but not anything I had a desire to learn about. As I was going into college I saw more and more people that talked politics who were my age. Most I knew were quite liberal and hearing a lot of what they had to say I became very liberal. One of the first papers I wrote in college was why gun control was necessary and why our founding fathers would have supported it.

Second semester freshman year had a professor, a very liberal professor, who taught literature philosophy. No matter the discussion he always told us there were two sides to every argument, and he would always play devils advocate. At the time I really did not have any opinions so I would only argue when there were facts to input, but he really got me thinking. I started to look at the other point of view on all the liberal ideas I had just taken for granted.

Some of the views I kept, including many of the social ones such as gay rights and abortion and religion as part of the state. I looked into the conservative point of view, but would never be able to agree with it. Other topics though, I started to change. I looked into fiscal policy and slowly began to see how blind I had been agreeing with liberal politicians. My biggest change of all came on the topic of gun control. By the time I took a speech class my sophomore year I gave a speech on how important gun rights were and in no case could I find gun control causing more good than it did harm.

Junior year I did very little with politics, mostly learning about the different sides to the climate change debate. In the end I took neither side completely making more of a hybrid of opinions. The summer between Junior and senior year I wrote an essay for one of the people on Youtube I subscribe to, who works at Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). I got accepted and went down to Washington D.C. with a group of like minded people and got my full awakening to the Libertarian point of view. Which is now what I would consider myself closest to. It was an amazing experience.

Senior year I finally started being politically active on campus. Joining both the College Democrats and the College Republicans. Since I like more of a balance in politics and Rhode Island is almost entirely a blue state most of my work was with the college Republicans, not to mention it is a much more active group than the college Dems. I enjoy hearing peoples opinions in both groups and love being involved so much in politics.

In the end I have become for the most part fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but I am constantly learning and adjusting my opinions on different topics. What I learned the most from all of this is how much I still have to learn.