Andre's Executive Order

For progressives, open carry activism is disgusting; It's everything we don't like about gun ownership. This movement takes the right to bear arms and walks around shoving it people's faces, scaring them half to death, and setting police nerves on edge as regular citizens brandish everything from pistols to semi-automatic rifles in combat styles. With thirty states allowing open carry without a license, these activists often garner very little confidence in the judgment or control that supporters of gun rights insist is the standard among legal gun owners and seem to be nothing short of a powder keg just waiting for the right match to go off. Maybe these guys are well disciplined and full trained with their firearms able to discern friend from foe quickly in the advent of a violent altercation and respond with necessary, accurate force to end the situation quickly and decisively saving lives. ...or maybe they think guns are really cool, play a lot of Call of Duty, lo...

Ferguson, MO Generally speaking, we don't like to think of the police as the bad guy. These are the people who keep the peace. They patrol our neighborhoods, and come from our communities. We have friends or relatives on the force and the tradition is a proud one in America as being part of the great enterprise that is our democracy. Lurking behind these ideals is another more practical reason; These are the people responsible for our safety from crime, anarchy, and the loss of our property and even our lives. If we can't trust them, the world becomes a very scary place. But to presume them to be infallible executors of our safety is to become willfully blind to the corruption, poor judgment, and willful abuse that tend to lurk like a misty smoke around the accumulation of power over other people. The police have a lot of that power, and because of that they are a group from which we should be willing to demand a much higher level of accountability and be much more wi...

Americans hate shades of grey. On August 9th, Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri was shot and killed by police outside a convenience store. By now, if you're the kind of person who reads blogs like mine, you already know this and know what happened afterwards: we have riots. We have looting. We have protests. We have an ongoing and growing police presence involving everything from snipers to tanks to tear gas. We have a community enraged and law enforcement put in a horrible place of being asked to use violence to contain their neighbors. The American public has done what it does best; jumped to conclusions. The tweets and posts about it have been jarring to read. Some folks jump to the defense of the police depending on what isn't or can't be known as the buffer between the facts and the response. Others rush to Michael's defense without the slightest knowledge of what may have transpired. They are ready to see the police officers terminated or b...

In the late 1970's, the Republican party got some bad news. That news was that they were outgunned. The sheer number of people who identified as “Democrat” significantly outnumbered the voters who identified as “Republican”. With the ethnic diversification and urbanization of the United States ever increasing, the strongholds of what might be Democratic power seemed to growing as the primarily rural and white mainstays of the Republican party were shrinking. Now put down your value judgments on any of this and step slowly away. Just understand the environment. Just before the 1980's, the Republican core America was, in fact, shrinking. The Democratic core America was, in fact, growing. It was a reality of the time that has shifted with many Latinos later joining the Republican party which at the time was unexpected by Democrats and with certain Urban areas remaining conservative despite conditions normally friendly to Democrats, something unexpected by Republicans. But we...

If you've been paying any attention to political news, which if you're reading this you do, you're probably pretty saturated with the continuous commentary on Rush Limbaugh and his attack on Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke. But before we let the topic completely go, there's one more piece worth examining. Despite reading countless articles about this, I found most analysis of HOW the scandal came about to be lacking. They focused on trying to make the arguments about the underlying issue, birth control, and did a poor job of examining the actual nature of the interchange between Rush, the public, his sponsors, and our collective psyche as the American people. But few if anyone examined the confluence of events that led to the scandal, even though that analysis answers a lot of questions about everything from Bill Maher to the question of partisanship and how this issue really transcends it. So what happened to Rush? We know what he said, but what did ...

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...