What Conservative Purity Looks Like

 Posted by Mike  Business And Regulation, Healthcare, Homosexuality, Obama Administration, War in Iraq  2 Responses »
Nov 232009
 

The Republican Party is holding their national meeting this winter. This is standard fare for both parties, and these meetings are generally taken up by electing and appointing various people, tweaking the platform in small ways, and generally being an excuse for party leaders to get together and schmooze each other once in awhile.

A group of Republicans, however, just threw a bombshell into their own meeting. Here is a text of a resolution that just met the minimum requirement (signed by the chairperson from ten states) to be debated and voted on at this years convention:
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What A Pentagon Budget Ought To Look Like

 Posted by Mike  Fiscal Issues, Obama Administration, Terrorism, War in Iraq  No Responses »
Apr 092009
 

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just this past week announced the details of the Obama Administration’s Department of Defense budget. For once, it isn’t the size of the budget that has made a lot of waves, but instead the details of the budget. Gates and Obama want to radically restructure the military. And while I disagree with a few of the details, in general they are right-on. Here’s a breakdown of the winners and losers of the proposed budget.
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While The Cat’s Away…

 Posted by Mike  War in Iraq  1 Response »
Feb 272009
 

Imagine that you’re a sociologist studying childhood conflict, and you want to know what kinds of parenting techniques are most likely to calm fighting children down and get them to play nice. So you set up an experiment. You put pairs of siblings in different rooms, and then when they start to fight you have the parents enter the room and do whatever it was that you want them to do. Then you observe whether or not the parents effectively calmed the children down. But of course, simply the presence of the parent, in most cases, is enough to temporarily stop the fighting. So if you really want to know if the kids are calmed down and willing to play nice, you have to have the parent exit the room first. The presence of the parent changes the dynamic, but in a way that everyone there knows is temporary. The kids know that the parent will leave soon, and even a child who is intent on attacking his brother will usually be perfectly happy to play nice and wait for mom or dad to walk out of the room before resuming the fight.

In a nutshell, that is exactly what’s happening in Iraq right now. Continue reading »

Two Things I Wish Obama Would Stop Saying

 Posted by Mike  2008 Election, Abuse of Power, Foreign Policy, War in Iraq  2 Responses »
Oct 012008
 

I like Obama, don’t get me wrong. But there are two things in particular that just drive me nuts every time he utters them.
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Comparing the Candidates: The War on Terror

 Posted by Mike  2008 Election, Bill of Rights, Central and Southern Asia, Foreign Policy, Terrorism, War in Iraq  No Responses »
Sep 112008
 

Given the date, I thought it would be a good day to go over the differences between the two presidential candidates when it comes to The War on Terror. (If you were hoping that I’d discuss whether or not Senator Obama believes that Governor Palin is a barnyard animal, I’m sorry to disappoint.) The War on Terror covers a pretty broad range of issues, and I’ll try to address most of them; if I miss something, please let me know. Also, these issues are not presented in any particular order.
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