Disturbing My Peace

I am thankful and happy to celebrate another birthday.

I'm thankful for my mother, her strength and her love. She is both the rock of the family and it's gentle heart at the same time. Last Wednesday I gave the eulogy at my paternal grandfather's funeral, the last of my grandparents. As my sisters & I broke down crying at the private family ceremony for him the next day, my mother was our rock. Our guiding light, the calm in the center of the storm.

I am thankful for the time I was able to spend with my grandfather and all the life lessons that he taught me over the years.

I consider myself to be a conservative liberal, which basically means there are some issues that I have a conservative view point on and then there are issues that I'm move liberal about.

For example I'm for the death penalty and believe that it should be expanded to include serial rapists & serial pedophiles. Yet I do understand that in the United States there have been and currently are people who were falsely convicted of capital crimes facing the death penalty. And the courts should & must take this fact into consideration when & before denying someone's last appeal or accepting new evidence.

I am personally disturbed by partial birth abortions and think that the procedure should be limited to extreme cases. Yet I am firmly pro-choice and believe in a woman's right to choose. That decision is between her, her partner & her doctor as to if she is going to proceed with the pregnancy. It is beyond my right or conscious to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term and deliver a child while leaving her other children without a mother. While forcing a rape victim to relive her attack everyday by having to carry & giving birth to her attacker's child is beyond me. There are woman who do that of their own choice and my heart goes out to them and I applaud their strength in doing it. 

 Reasons why I can't in good conscious or use of commonsense vote for Romney

 1. The math just doesn't add up as to how he is going to cut everyone's tax rate by 20% and not add to the deficit. Even if he closes every loophole & removes every tax deduction & exemption it still isn't possible much less cutting the deficit.

 2. He wants to increase military spending by two trillion dollars on top of current levels. We are currently spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so is he planning another war we don't yet know about.

 2 (a). With all this talk of increase military spending there is no mention of providing more services to the vets we already have.

 3. No real plan to bring manufacturing back to the US or much less keep the little that we currently have. His plan was to force Detroit into bankruptcy and let private investment bring it back. Ask the average American how easy it is to get a new mortgage or even a modification on their current loans.

 4. His plan is to gut education funding in the US and continue our slide downwards in education while every other developed & developing nation continue to either out pace or rapidly gain on us.

 5. He would move to overturn Roe v. Wade and remove a woman's right to choose. His running mate supports "personhood" amendment that would grant state constitutional protections to human embryos starting at conception. This would make it illegal for a woman who is raped to have an abortion so rape victims could be in a prison just down the road from her rapist for not wanting to give birth to his child. In vitro fertilization (IVF) would also be outlawed under such an amendment. So modern medicine can't help you get pregnant but you have to carry your rapist’s child. And these guys actually have more than a snowballs chance in hell of being elected to any public office in the US much less the Presidency.  

 6. His plan to replace Medicare with vouchers make little to no sense at all. What kind of health care plan is a 70 year old with pre-existing conditions going to get on the open market? I've personally seen a senior rack up a $23,000.00 hospital bill after spending 1 week in a hospital after a minor heart attack without undergoing major surgery. Medicare & Medicaid needs serious overhauling but vouchers are not the way to go, especially when pre-existing conditions will be a factor.

During the Obama '08 campaign I was surprised by their ability to raise so much money for the campaign by way of small donations directly from average citizens and not depending on unions, corporations and PAC's to fund the elections. I saw that as being a truly positive thing especially for the first African American that honestly had a real chance of being elected. Yet I was a bit concerned about the amount of money that had to be raised by both parties to fund the campaign.

Yes, some of the money was actually needed to fund media buys to correct some of the nasty, factually wrong and at things racist information that was being spread in opposition to the Obama/Binden campaign. But one must ask is it really necessary that close to a $100 million dollars be spent on just the Presidential campaign?

In the first election since the Citizens United decision by SCOTUS allowing an unlimited funding of PAC's by corporations & unions, how can anyone not honestly question whether or not the US Presidential election is up for sale. At the current rate of fund raising by both candidates it appears that well over $500 million dollars is going to be raised between them. Combined with private PAC's this could be the United States first Billion Dollar Presidential election.

Totally forgot that I was meeting up with some class mates today so I'm rushing out the house and there is where the problems start.

1. Walked all the way to the subway in 20° weather only to realize I had forgotten my wallet at home.

2. Had to walk all the way back home to get my wallet in 20° weather & then back to the train station.

3. With wallet in hand and ready to swipe my metro card...No card so I have to go back home for it. Fuck that it is too bloody cold out. I'll buy one.

4. Now that I'm on the train finally heading to destination late, I realize no text book.

5. F******CK!!!

Earlier this year a radical Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen along with several of his associates by a military air strike as he was leaving a residence in the Jawf province in Yemen. This operation was carried out knowingly and with the authorization of the US Government due to Mr. al-Awlaki leadership position in al-Qaeda. The issue that separated this operation from any other is the fact that the target was a US citizen and was therefore entitled to certain protections under US law. So the question arises, did the government have the right, legal or otherwise to target one of their own citizens to be killed?

Mr. Al-Awlaki was born in the US state of New Mexico and lived there until the age of seven before moving to Yemen with his parents. He later returned to the US where he received degrees from Colorado & San Diego State Universities before serving as an imam at different mosque in Colorado, California and Virginia. He openly advocated violent attacks against US targets both civilian & military and in furtherance of that he not only activity recruited individuals to carry out such attacks but helped in the planning of such actions. He clearly presented a real and ever present danger to the US public. 

I firmly believe that United States as do any country has a legitimate right to target and bring military force to bear on any organizations or individuals that represents a clear, present and real danger to their citizenry. Of course I do not advocate the use of such force as a first resort or it’s indiscriminately use where a target is surrounded by a civilian population. But in cases where an individual or group of individuals are beyond the reach of conventional judicial process then the option of such action must be used.

The fact that Mr. Al-Awlaki was a US citizen raised the question that if the government had the right to targeting him to be killed overseas, what is to stop them from killing other US citizen elsewhere in the world or from doing the same to someone here in this country. The bill of rights says that he had the right to a fair and public trial so the government should have made every effort to capture him alive and bring him to trial. And that his death was in fact a prime example of an extrajudicial killing, something the United States has always been against, at least publicly. Although there are those who would advocate that the US government has long history of extrajudicial killings against US citizens such as in the cases of Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian ranch.  

Just heard a rather foolish argument against abortion from an individual I considered an intelligent woman. I am personally against partial birth abortion because I consider the process to be unsettling to say the least but the option/choice must be and should remain available in extreme cases. We are not talking about some mandatory law requiring women to have an abortion as all states requires drivers to have insurance. We are talking about a woman/couple being informed by their doctor that if this pregnancy is continued to term it would lead to the death of both mother and child. They are not told that they have to end to pregnancy on the spot but informed of all the risks involved in either choice.    

No doctor would perform such a surgery without the informed consent of the mother or her husband should the mother be incapacitated at the time of the emergency. My issue with her assertion that because a colleague’s daughter who was force to give birth three months early and the child after spending  months in the hospital was thankfully home and doing fine. That the child as she put it proof that abortion is wrong and anyone who is pro-choice needs to just look at a picture of this baby to know just how wrong they are.

To say that the process she used to get to that assertion has more holes in it than a chain link fence would be kind to say the least. First of all no one at the hospital told our colleague’s daughter that she had to have an abortion nor was it even an option at the time the doctor informed her that she had to deliver now to save the baby so how did this woman get to point whereby this child was a tool to be used in her anti-abortion rhetoric.

During the late 1980’s and  90’s the nation of  Iraq still firmly in the grip of the dictator Saddam Hussein was put under heavy international sanctions by the United Nations severely limiting what the country could trade resulting in even more hardships for the average Iraqi citizen including famine. To help elevate the suffering of the people the UN allowed the Iraqi dictator to trade oil for food under their supervision. Saddam quickly turned the program to his advantage receiving large cash payments in the form of kickbacks which served to keep him and his murderous regime in power for another decade and a half.

On December 17th president signed a new funding bill worth close to a trillion dollars to prevent the shut-down of the federal government that also included the a two month extension of a payroll tax cut that would affect close to 160 million Americans making less than $75,000 a year. This funding bill was only passed at the last minute after months of delays by the Republicans in Congress. A tax cut of $1500.00 may not seem like a lot of money but it is a lot to someone worried about making this month’s mortgage payment. The GOP is the self-proclaimed champion for tax cuts yet they have been blocking this bill for months and only finally agreed to temporarily extend the tax cut for two months as long as the president agrees to made a decision by then on the building of a new proposed oil pipeline would run from western Canada through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to refineries in Texas known as the Keystone XL pipeline.

With the increasingly large number of protest taking place in and round lower Manhattan the activities and actions of the New City Police Department has come in to question more and more. The main issue is that their actions of recent having crossed the line from being good policing into intimidation of those exercising their constitutional rights of freedom of  speech and freedom to assemble.

Some sort of police presence at rallies or protests as they happen is understandable to ensure that those with an intention to cause damage to property such as anarchist do not get the opportunity to carry out their plans. Due to the fact that New York City continues to be a high value target by terrorist and public rallies are an easy target so just as a form of deterrent a small presence is needed.

When a peaceful protest is taking place such as one in which parents and teachers legally protesting what they see as the privatization of public schools by the mayor across the street from his official residence. And the NYPD has officers in uniform and armed standing on the roof of a private school across from the protest and taking photos of the protesters crosses the line into intimidation. Having a police officer taking pictures of you conveys the message that you are doing something wrong. STOP IT!!

The honorable Governor from the state of Texas earlier this year at a campaign appearance for his bid to become the GOP Presidential nominee stated that he would be willing to send US troops into Mexico to combat the drug cartels currently running amok. His exact quote was “It may require our military in Mexico working in concert with them to kill these drug cartels and keep them off our border.”

The more cynical among us would say that this is just him using the blood shed as an in to get back at Mexico for the Alamo, being from Texas. After all this is the same individual who was just last year toying with the idea of seceding from the union. But with all seriousness here is someone wanting to gut the government over wasteful spending yet wanting to start a third war this time right on the nation’s border. There is no bigger expenditure for a government than to go to war but then again furthering the neo-con agenda is well worth any expense.

The truly troubling issue with this is the fact that he would be willing to place our troops in harms way to fight the cartels yet would not consider strengthen the gun laws in the southern states from which most of the military-style hardware that the cartel are using originate from. Of the little over twenty-nine thousand firearms recovered in Mexico between 2009 and 2010 that was sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing, twenty thousand, five hundred and four came from the US. That means that if we were to ever send troops into Mexico they would be looking down the barrels of US guns because we are the ones supplying the enemy. And exactly what kind of a message is that to send to our troops that not only are we sending you into harm way, we are also supplying the other side but good luck just the same.

On Saturday 20th of September at 12:01am the middle of the night for most people, Navy Lt. Gary Ross while in his full dress uniform married his partner of eleven years in front of family and friend who had traveled all the way from Tucson to Vermont just to bear witness to this ground breaking event. They did it at such a late hour not because they were ashamed but as that was when the military policy of Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell officially ended and if done five minutes earlier it would have put Lt. Ross on the fast track to a dishonorable discharge from the Navy. 

It is a well-known fact that there have been gays & lesbians serving in the military probably since its inception although none of them could admit to it or be found out not if they wanted to continue serving their nation. This dirty little secret had caused the armed forces to lose many a good solider and put some of them at risk for being blackmail which strangely was one of the reasons the military used for kicking them out of the army. I personally think that anyone willing to stand a post, putting their selves in harm’s way serving their nation honorably should be allowed to do so as long as they meet the physical & mental requirements of the duty. The same way there are no atheist in a fox hole no one cares who the solider next to them writes home to during a fire fight, just that they do their job.

One of the arguments against allowing gays to serve openly in the military is the fear that they would begin to add flair to the uniform which is more than just a little ridiculous. There is nothing about the uniform of any of the armed forces that isn’t exactly scripted with precise measurements laid out in their code of conduct hand books. It’s not like a Marine is going to start wearing pink gloves with his dress uniforms especially if he doesn’t want his commanding officer’s boot planted firmly up his hind parts for being out of uniform or spend the rest of his career cleaning the toilets with a toothbrush.

Yet when asked at the last Republican presidential debate what the candidates would do if elected about DADT. Many of them agreed that they would re-instate the policy going forward ignoring those that had revealed their sexual orientation in the interim. The problem with such a policy is that it will result in a group of virtual second class soldiers who must again hide their status for fear of being coming under investigation and ejected from the military. Even association with those who have declared their sexual orientation could put them at risk. And then what happens in a few years when those soldiers that enlisted while Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell is repelled, the thousand that were discharged because of it re-enlist or Lt. Ross himself when they have to update their next of kin & spousal benefits forms? It would mean acknowledging their homosexuality which is against D.A.D.T so does that mean that they still get a pass or does it mean that they need to start looking for a new career outside of the military.