A New Season in Ideologically Driven Politics? | Capital Commentary

A New Season in Ideologically Driven Politics? | Capital Commentary by Timothy Sherratt.  MGB: It looks like the sequester is now built into the newest budget agreement.  Now the question will be whether it will have an effect on services to citizens, or will instead lead to buyouts of senior employees and a cut to the training and travel budgets.  I have noticed there is a sharp decline in government job announcements, so I think it may be absorbed.

As for the question of an identifiably Christian movement, I am entirely open to such discussions and have been having them with others.  If we insisted on proportional representation, we might even win a few seats in the majority coalition.  Without such a change, we would have to find some compromise between people who want to stop abortion with criminal law and others who would use economic incentives.  Perhaps we can come up with a marrying of both.  As long as the two parties have a duopoly, however, it is hard to see anything happening until the Republicans talk themselves out of existence on immigration and gender issues.

The Complexity and Urgency of the Problem of Gun Violence | Capital Commentary

The Complexity and Urgency of the Problem of Gun Violence | Capital Commentary by Ted Williams III.  MGB: As long as we treat gun violence as a crime, including possession, we leave it in the old and outdated Anglo-Saxon legal system.  Guns should be treated as a public health issue.  Quite simply, if an area is prone to gun violence, a state of emergency should be declared and every house searched for all firearms, legal or not. They should then be confiscated as a public health measure rather than a criminal one.  If a store consistently supplies the area, ATF agents should come in every week and buy out their entire stock, or just buy out the store and put in a monument to all the Chicago dead - something with their names.  Likewise, the mental health system needs to catch alcoholics, addicts and the mentally ill before they get to the point of criminality or suicide - although this should be done with better hospitals than Geraldo Rivera went after in the 70s.  I suggest contracting it out to Catholic Charities.  There will be plenty of money to do this once we transfer current prisoners whose main problem was mental or literacy.

Drone Strikes, ‘Imminence’ and the Need for Judgment, Part II | Capital Commentary

Drone Strikes, ‘Imminence’ and the Need for Judgment, Part II | Capital Commentary by Brad Littlejohn.  MGB:  I did not see anything in the text about internationality until the last paragraph, although I agree that a more unified allied government to bear the burden of dealing with terrorism would be helpful.  Be that as it may, there is no need for judgment in the face of continuing attacks or attempts at such things.  While in the US there seem to be a variety of people who were supposedly minding their own business or simply sharing their views who got caught in operations entirely made up in the Hoover Building, an American in an enemy camp which is the source of those attacks is committing treason.  If such a person returns and two witnesses can testify, he can be convicted.  If not, however, he or she mainly presents a danger to the United States and its citizens and should be treated like any other enemy combatant.  Thomas More argued that assassination is much more logical than full scale war.  He had a point.

The Reality of Our Debt Crisis: By the Numbers | Capital Commentary

The Reality of Our Debt Crisis: By the Numbers | Capital Commentary by Michael Gerson.  MGB: The reality is that the CBO report shows that the major driver in debt accumulation is letting net interest ride to meet the needs of the world's currencies and speculators.  Medicare and Medicaid as a percentage of the economy don't grow that much.  Indeed, as health care reform is implemented, it will require fixes that will also fix Medicare and Medicaid.  Getting Pentagon spending under control is vital, if only to remove all those obstacles to quick decisions on weapons that will help soldiers in the battlefield.  Sending the service department civilians to the Office of the Secretary of Defense while sending everyone in uniform back to the product commands, or better yet into active deployment or training will save money and end the war more quickly.

An important fact to note is that if net interest is not rolled over into borrowing, but instead paid down (especially the Social Security Trust Fund - which cannot be redeemed by cutting benefits already earned by those of my age), those doing the paying won't be the children and grandchildren of most citizens.  Truly, it is only the wealthier families who could be taxed enough to pay back debt without slowing the economy.  Indeed, removing these people from their money may actually result in growth for the economy, since the government will spend it or pay promised benefits.  If we ignore the problem, however, the people who are holding our debt and benefiting from our Pax Americana will start wanting a piece of the action in decision making.  The real argument, then, is not economic collapse but eventual political absorption.

The Troubled State of the Union | Capital Commentary

The Troubled State of the Union | Capital Commentary by Amy Black.  MGB: The White House actually has some concrete proposals that both add up and provide money for job creation.  They are mostly based on Simpson-Bowles and could be enacted in time (with the sequester delayed) if Boehner is willing to to take yes for an answer.  http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/deficit_reduction_table_bucketed_r8.pdf  

Drone Strikes, ‘Imminence’ and the Need for Judgment, Part I | Capital Commentary

Drone Strikes, ‘Imminence’ and the Need for Judgment, Part I | Capital Commentary by Ben Littlejohn.  MGB: It is much more complicated in philosophical terms to justify a drone attack than to identify camps as being affiliated with some branch of al Queda and by nature dangerous to the United States.  If an American citizen is part of such a camp, he is committing treason against the Untied States and if he cannot be prosecuted, he can be killed as an enemy combatant.  On the more philosophical argument, such preventative action is the world, including the corporatocracy defending itself from revolution.

Deciphering the Administration’s New Proposed Rules on the Contraceptive Mandate | Capital Commentary

Deciphering the Administration’s New Proposed Rules on the Contraceptive Mandate | Capital Commentary by Stanley Carlson-Thies.  MGB: Religious employers who are not churches are, in effect, agents of the government seeking to regulate the right to use contraception freely.  That would be equivalent of trying to ban it, which would violate the whole privacy chain put in place by Grisswold v. Connecticut.  I doubt that this will happen.  This situation will be ended quietly, as the entire issue was meant to activate women for Obama for the 2012 election.  Now that the election is over, accommodations will be made.  Note also that contraceptive coverage has been mandatory on preventative policies purchased outside since December 2000. The only questions now are mandates and copays.  As for whether these procedures cause abortion, they don't.  Life does not begin until gastrulation, when the genes of both parents control development.  When only maternal genes control, the maternal soul is controlling as well - if you define the soul as the energy in the life force that keeps it from achieving entropy.  At gastrulation, a new energy takes over for a unique individual.  In other words, the Movement could win the issue by conceding this point.