LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

I have long felt that liberals are concerned about groups (women, minorities, sexual orientation) whereas conservatives are more concerned about individuals (self made man, individual responsibility), but also local communities.*  Please note that ALL the 12 step programs emphasize individual responsibility.  Liberals,  I think, believe that you should be able to screw up to a certain degree (not kill people though), and it shouldn't make you pay for it the rest of your life (e.g. St. Paul, the great redemption story from persecutor of Christians to being the major advocate of Christianity.) whereas conservatives tend not to forgive screw ups, ever.

I think the liberals too admire the person in a group (e.g. poor) who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, but they feel the group has great impediments in breaking out.  I had a friend from the coal country of West Virginia who said that the main way people could break out of this community was through football.  Often those who have broken out feel, "I did it.  Why can't they?" a common conservative stand.

* I call the community aspect the" Kansas conservative" where, if your neighbor's barn burns down, everyone bans together and has a barn raising, not some outside group comes to raise the barn (e.g. the government).   It is sort of an expanded individualism.  Conservatives often point out that the government was not involved in restoration of San Francisco after the famous earthquake versus the liberals promoting government being heavily involved in recovery, e.g. from the New Orleans flood with accusations of not doing enough, fast enough.  On the other hand, there are conservatives who accused the president from not being involved enough in Mid-Western floods and tornadoes.  I recall one Kansas conservative who said, "We were doing all right before 'gimme politics'."

GLOBAL CONSERVATIVE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT

For some years now a global conservative religious movement has been going on.  It is most marked in Islam of Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, but a less deadly form, exists in Christianity, particularly in the U.S., where conservative Christians seem to have taken over the Republican Party.

Women are being sent to jail over abortion issues.  Consider the case of the woman who tried to procure "Morning After" pills for her daughter:*

In Pennsylvania, a woman has been sentenced to a year and a half behind bars for illegally procuring so-called “morning after” pills on the Internet for her 16-year-old daughter, who had an unwanted pregnancy. The mother had no health insurance, and there was no clinic nearby for the girl to obtain an abortion. (And if states like Texas end up getting their way, there will be lots of places where women’s health clinics will be shut down from over-regulation.) The mother is a single parent. One can only imagine how desperate both the mother and the daughter were.

But there was no acknowledgement of how awful it must have been for the mother to have to seek reproductive and abortion care for her daughter. Instead, the woman is suffering exactly the fate people said was just an hysterical conspiracy theory. She’s been named a criminal, convicted of performing an illegal abortion and is going to prison. The fact that the teenager will be without a mother for a year and a half doesn’t seem to trouble those who went after her, either.

Or consider the case of the Iowa woman who was only thinking about abortion"**
"Ms. Taylor became light-headed and fell down a flight of stairs in her home. Paramedics rushed to the scene and ultimately declared her healthy. However, since she was pregnant with her third child at the time, Taylor thought it would be best to be seen at the local ER to make sure her fetus was unharmed.

That's when things got really bad and really crazy. Alone, distraught, and frightened, Taylor confided in the nurse treating her that she hadn't always been sure she'd wanted this baby, now that she was single and unemployed. She'd considered both adoption and abortion before ultimately deciding to keep the child. The nurse then summoned a doctor, who questioned her further about her thoughts on ending the pregnancy. Next thing Taylor knew, she was being arrested for attempted feticide. Apparently the nurse and doctor thought that Taylor threw herself down the stairs on purpose."

And the trend is growing.  consider Colorado that recently had a vote on personhood (that failed this time):
This fall, the people of Colorado will have the opportunity to vote onAmendment 67. Though the measure’s proponents are marketing it as a way of bringing justice to a woman and the fetus she lost after a collision with a drunk driver, Amendment 67 is not a law designed to protect pregnant women. Rather, it is a total overhaul of Colorado’s criminal code that would give law enforcement officials grounds to potentially arrest, prosecute, convict, and imprison women and mothers. ***
 .............................................
This is not true. Well-documented research shows that hundreds of women in a number of states have been arrested, detained, or forced to undergo medical procedures based on the legal principle that Amendment 67 would establish if enacted. Moreover, the women targeted for these arrests have overwhelmingly been low-income mothers and mothers of color.***
............................................

Once the word “child” is redefined to include the unborn, no further legislation is necessary before criminal laws become applicable to pregnant women. For example, in South Carolina, a decision that the word “child” in the state’s criminal code included viable fetuses was enough toimmediately apply criminal laws to pregnant women, including those who used drugs or experienced stillbirths.

Similarly, the Alabama Supreme Court recently decided that the word “child” includes the unborn from the moment of fertilization in their state constitution. Using this new and expanded definition of the word “child,” research from National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found that more than 130 women have been arrested under the chemical endangerment of “children” law, passed in 2006 to penalize adults who take juveniles to dangerous places like methamphetamine labs. However, prosecutors have since used it to punish women who used marijuana or another controlled substance while pregnant, even when they gave birth to healthy babies—which has been in the majority of cases.***

...........................................

According to a Personhood USA press release, this Alabama decision—which makes it possible to sentence mothers to lengthy prison terms away from their children—is a “monumental victory.

The Christian religious right wants to define "personhood" as beginning with fertilization of the egg; however, pregnancy really only begins when the egg adheres to the womb wall and can take 10 or 12 days to do so.  Pills like the morning after pill interrupt this adhering process.

Women better watch out or they will lose control of their lives.  Will we eventually regress to the "good old days" when women couldn't vote or, even earlier, not own property?  My allegiances are to the born, i.e. a baby is out of the womb and has taken a breath on its own.

* http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/susan-milligan/2014/09/08/pennsylvania-women-sent-to-jail-over-abortion-and-morning-after-pills
** http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/14/956120/-Iowa-Woman-Jailed-for-Thinking-about-an-Abortion
*** http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/10/07/keep-mothers-jail-vote-colorados-personhood-measure/

DEPORTATIONS BY FISCAL YEAR

How have deportations been going?

Depoprtations by Obama administration:
Deportations in FY 2014: 315,943*
Deportations in FY 2013: 368,644*
Deportations in FY 2012: 419,384**
Deportations in FY 2011: 396,000***
Deportations in FY 2010: 400,000*** 
Deportations in FY 2009: 409,849*, ***
Deportations by Bush administrations:
Deportations in FY 2008: 358,000***
Deportations in FY 2007: 318,000***
Deportations in FY 2006: 280,000***
Deportations in FY 2005: 245,000***
Deportations in FY 2004: 240,000***
Deportations in FY 2003: 210,000***
Deportations in FY 2002: 165,000***
Deportations in FY 2001: 186,000***
Deportations by Clinton administration (last two years):
Deportations in FY 2000: 185,000***
Deportations in FY 1999: 175,000***

Still Obama has deported more illegals (2,309,830) than any other president, and counting.  President Bush (Bush-43) deported 2,002,000 during his eight years.

* http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-deportations-in-fiscal-2014-lowest-since-obama-took-office-1418100326?wpisrc=nl-wonkbk&wpmm=1
** http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/24/record-number-of-deportations-in-2012/
*** http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-u-s-deportations/

ROLLED HIM AGAIN

When President Obama came to office, he thought that he could get together with the opposition and work out deals.  He slowly found out that to get 20% of what he wanted, the Republicans had to get 80% of what they wanted.  Worse, then they would beat him over the head with his compromises, i.e. delaying the end of the tax cut for the wealthy.  Finally the President realized he was being rolled.

So he then adopted a confrontational approach with the result that little got done.  Perhaps the biggest thing was when he stood up to the House about their threat to shut down the government, which they did.  Something I found to be odd was how important people felt about the National Parks, Monuments, etc. being closed.  At any rate, the government reopened at a considerable cost to the government.  Nearly as important was the "sequester" that he thought were so draconian that surely congress would act to avoid them, but they didn't and the automatic cuts began.  Well, at least the DOD budget was cut a bit.

Now to fund the Federal government through next September, the President has agreed to incredible compromises.  One awful one lessens regulation of financial derivatives.**  Another allows political parties to  get an order of magnitude more money from individuals.**  Rolled him again.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_federal_budget
** http://news.yahoo.com/sound-smart-2015-appropriations-bill-161002683.html;_ylt=A0LEVvztpJFUSnYAODEPxQt;
http://crfb.org/blogs/budget-gimmicks-cromnibus-bill

TORTURE

In my classification, there are two types of torture: physical pain and mental pain.  The worst type is physical pain.  It seems hypocritical of us to try enemies for physical pain like waterboarding and then do it ourselves and say it legally is not torture.  Physical pain is torture.

Mental torture includes things like sleep deprivation which has been said to get the best results.  Our enemies have used it and we adopted it.  I'm not sure it is a crime.  I would tend to say it isn't.  I don't know what long term damage it does to the recipients.

People speculate on how more modern parts of warlike drones - will be viewed in 10 years, largely because of collateral damage.  It is naive to think that using group troops instead of drones would result in no collateral damage or even less collateral damage.  Plus how many of our troops are you willing to sacrifice to get the target?  I  support drones, but not indiscriminately.  If in 10 years it is decided that they should be illegal, then so be it.

It is incredible to think that war should be done in a surgical manner involving only military personnel.  War is messy and violent.  In WW-II, how would you classify the Dresden and Tokyo firebombings and the Hiroshima and especially Nagasaki* atomic bombs?  Such events were not made against military targets but in an attempt to break the will of civilians and their leaders.

* It seems like we dropped it because we had it.

YET MORE GOOD NEWS ON THE ECONOMY

Seems like every day we get more good news on the economy.  The latest is that the Thompson Reuters/University of  Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is at an 8 yr high at 93.8, (the highest since January of 2007).  The final November reading is 88.8, also good.  Consumer expectations came in at 86.1 (the highest since January 2007) from 79.9, and the gauge on economic conditions rose to 105.7 from 102.7 (the highest since February 2007). "Expected wage gains rose to their highest level since 2008, and consumers voiced the most favorable buying attitudes in several decades," survey director Richard Curtin said in a statement." (http://www.cnbc.co/id/102263893?trknav=homestack:topnews:8)

CONTINUED GOOD NEWS ON ECONOMY

...November’s wage growth marked the fourth time this year that wages have grown at least 0.3% in a month, and there hasn’t been a single month that recorded falling wages. That phenomenon hasn’t happened since at least 2008. Wages have remained stagnant for years for a variety of reasons. The financial crisis, and the ensuing spike in unemployment, forced many Americans to take a job–any job–to get back on their feet. Many took jobs they were overqualified for and agreed to take a pay cut just to get back into the workforce. The unemployment rate fell but wages hardly budged. But something might be changing, albeit slowly, that is causing the wage shift.*

The economy has seen a net gain of more than 6 million full-time jobs since the official end date of the 2007-09 recession, which was in June 2009. The economy has witnessed a net increase of just 311,000 part-time jobs over the same period, according to Labor Department figures**.

The increase in full-time jobs seems to be contrary to politicians saying that most new jobs are part-time.

The best places to live are in the Northeast and Midwest. The only "Southern" state to be in the top tire of the good list is Virginia if you still classify it as a Southern State.

Seven years after the credit bubble burst, just two of the 12 countries that went through systemic financial meltdowns in 2007 and 2008 have reclaimed enough ground to reach their previous peaks in per-capita GDP: the United States and Germany. And Germany isn’t looking so hot these days, given that it’s teetering on the edge of deflation.***

* http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/12/05/are-wages-finally-snapping-back/
** http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/12/05/november-jobs-report-how-many-new-jobs-are-actually-full-time/?mod=djemRTE_h
*** http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-how-the-us-economy-got-its-mojo-back/2014/12/01/6831e8e0-79a1-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html?wpisrc=nl-opt