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. ...