Andre's Executive Order

So President Obama announced the end of the Iraq war, bringing the troops back by the end of the year. “Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a presidential hopeful, said in a campaign press release that Obama had shown "weakness" in making "a political decision and not a military one." The withdrawal, Bachmann argued, "represents the complete failure of President Obama...” Now to understand today's topic, you need to remember that at the last Republican debate just a few days ago Bachmann was besides herself with rage that Obama had pulled the United States into four wars, putting our troops in danger and overextending our international presence. President Obama also recently announced that a predator drone strike had knocked out Gaddafi's caravan allowing rebels to locate and kill them man. Now prior to this, Republicans had criticized Obama for not forming a no-fly zone over Libya and then criticized him for forming one a few days later. In this c...

Americans want something new. Whether they call themselves tea party, progressive, conservative or liberal, there is an underlying consensus that something fundamentally wrong has taken hold of our country and perhaps our world. This wrongness is causing uprisings and conflict within nations on an unprecedented level and shows no sign of fixing itself. Political parties seem unable to identify the issues involved and as the Occupy movement spreads, they struggle to grasp what they even can do. Make no mistake, regardless of the ideological framework from which the protesters come, there is a common theme present in both the baby boomers chasing Sarah Palin with tea bags hanging from their hats and the young people packing US cities today. That constant is the underlying feeling that something very deep in the tissue of our country's body is sick. Our knee jerk reaction is to blame it on Obama or wealth or liberals or government but the truth, as is usually the case, is more nuanc...

A democracy, by definition, is rule by the will of the people. It specifically requires that the dominant force in the political arena is the power of an equally distributed vote. The foundation of a democracy is not the fact that people have a vote, per se, but rather it is the goal achieved by giving each person a vote: the equal contribution of each citizen to the formation of the power that governs them. Now of course no political system is perfect. The US experiment with democracy prevented minorities and women from voting which runs counter to the pure principle, and the very fact that we use a representative democracy means our votes really only control who speaks for us: They are not an actual vote on actual policy. But neither of these deviations undermines the effort. No human enterprise is flawless and it is ridiculous to evaluate leadership or government based on the exceptions or individual failings just as it is would be to vindicate it by virtue of an individual succes...

An article about the Occupy movements was, I suppose inevitable. I'm going to do this a little differently than I have in the past. I'm not going to make a prolonged argument, but instead I'm going to make a series of points that everyone who watches the Occupy situation evolve should keep in mind. I think it does a disservice to the movement to over-analyze it at this point, so I'm just covering how to engage and think about the protests. The Biology of a Protest I hear a lot of complaining from outsiders about the lack of goals, focus, or consistency within the Occupy movement. Perhaps it's just been too long since the 60's for people to remember how this works or perhaps those who lived through the 60's have been infected with hindsight and can't clearly remember the reality of how a protest movement evolves. Real grass roots protests never start out as terribly organized. They never have metrics or specific goals or clearly identified leaders. ...

On the 28th of September, Kentucky senator Rand Paul blocked an oil and gas pipeline safety bill. The bill was supported by Republicans and Democrats as well as the Oil & Gas industry. It was designed to help remedy the exceptional number of explosions, spills, and deaths associated with our aging pipeline infrastructure. It would have called for automated cut off switches and certain new safety standards that the industry thought would be wise but wanted standardized across all providers to ensure the costs of the safety measures would be shared across the industry. The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee unanimously approved it's passage. Rand Paul's reason for single handedly using Senate rules to block it? Principle. Ideology. He is against government regulation. Let's talk about ideology. Ideology is the collection of principles, beliefs and ideas that we hold dear and use to steer our decisions. For many, our ideology is our religion whi...

So this is the part where I address offer some magic bullet answers to current conservative positions that to me are hard to defend even from a conservative point of view. I'm going to just very briefly make some suggestions about a broad spectrum of political issues and invite discussion here on facebook about them. This is my version of a top ten list for light consideration by moderate conservative and independent thinkers. Read to the end before you get mad. Immigration Everyone in complicit in this situation. Everyone caused illegal immigration. The government failed to secure the borders and ignored the issue too long. Private industry was quick to use illegal labor all across the US, increasing demand and opportunity for illegals while remaining actively resistant to laws that would toughen enforcement on them. Illegal immigrants were, well, immigrating illegally. And us, the consumers and citizens, enjoyed the fruit of cheap labor without protest until we started seeing ...

In the CNN/Tea Party Republican debate, Ron Paul was asked about a hypothetical involving a 30 year old man of middle class means with a job who decides not to get medical insurance. The man suffers a medical calamity and is in need of care to save his life. The question posed to Paul was: 'should society pick up the check.' Paul says: 'that would be the expectation of the welfare state but the man had made a choice and needed to live with the consequences of that choice.' “So should society let him die?” was the continuing pressure from CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer. Several people in the crowd yelled “Yes!” What does this mean? To American conservatives it is a code of orthodoxy. A statement of faith concerning the role of individual responsibility and self determination taken to an acknowledged extreme but asserted with vehemence. The point is not to cheer a man's death, but to make a firm statement and rail against government involvement in the lives of citizen...

Republican senator Paul Ryan from Wisconsin is charging people $15.00 to come to his 'town hall' meetings. While he avoids putting it that way, he does it because the protesters in Wisconsin will shout him down, yell, and express their outrage in a way that makes him almost unable to speak. The anger against Paul Ryan is a rage that comes from fear and resentment over his policies and a belief that Paul and others like him are hijacking the job they were voted in to do for another agenda. Democrat Anthony Weiner of New York had a strange and almost teenage pseudo-sexual exchange with women across the country involving photos sent over cell phones. The outrage over his odd behavior, not quite cheating but strangely morally disturbing, got so bad that he resigned his congressional seat under pressure from the minority leader and others. Republican Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota broadcast a response to the presidential State of the Union address speaking for nobody at all and ...

I wanted to write briefly about how hard it is to be married to a public school teacher. Particularly in recent months, with all the protests and bitter battles over benefits and state salaries, I thought I'd chime in and really let you see how much of a pain in the ass it is to have a teacher as a wife. It's hard to do my taxes at the end of the year and realize just how much of our income was spent on school supplies and specific tools for student needs that the district couldn't or wouldn't provide. It's equally hard to keep my mouth shut about it because I know she will defend those expenses to her last breath. It's hard to watch her leave every morning at 6:30am and know that if I'm lucky I'll see her at 7pm that night. Once in a while she's out by 4pm, but usually I don't see her until after dark, and there are times – frequently – that I get that call from school saying 'go ahead and eat, I won't be back until after 10.' ...

This is part two of a series of articles challenging the Republican establishment to defend their representation of Conservative interests and to challenge current Republican talking points with common sense. Today's topic: Taxation Every single Republican running for federal elected office is asked (rather heavy handedly) to sign Grover Norquist's pledge to never raise, or cause to be raised, any income tax for corporations or individuals or to reduce any deduction available that in effect raises those taxes. The effects of this pledge and the mentality behind it saturate the Republican political landscape these days and was plainly visible in the debt ceiling debate earlier this month. The suggestion of raising revenues caused Cantor to storm out of a critical meeting and was a hard line in the sand drawn by all Republican leadership in both the Senate and the House. The opposition to tax increases was so vehement that the Republican party passed up two trillion in addit...

I challenge the Republican establishment to explain themselves. This is not an attempt to attack conservative base values, it is instead a direct attack on the Republican political party and its priorities. It is my contention that neither conservatives nor libertarians are being served by that group in its current form. Today's topic: Education The Money Tree Every time the state runs into financial trouble under Republican watch, education seems to be one of the first things on the chopping block. Corporations, meanwhile, are one of the last to see an increase in taxation to make up the shortfall. This defies basic structural logic if public education has value, which I think every US citizen would agree it does. To understand the logical failing, we have to understand what we mean by value. Having an education gives a student the tools necessary to be able to realize their individual initiative and perform the jobs asked for them in the private sector. So in effect educ...