Random rants of a political nature...

First off I think that it's imperative to address the upcoming election. One cannot address the current election without discussing the candidates. As for Obama, I have had quite an opinion of him. I'm an admirer of his charisma, his personal charm, and his ability to rally people to politics like no one else has done in quite some time. However, when it comes down to being the candidate of "change," I think he gives it more lip service than actual substance. He has many "right" ideas, such as a progressive tax scale to balance the budget (hopefully) and giving the middle class the ability to have more spending power (which is the base of a good economy). He at least wants people to be able to have affordable health care, although it's still a far cry from a nationalized health care system that would provide free care (and by "free" I mean free when you walk in the door, but you pay for it through tax revenues) to everyone. His strategy for Iraq is decent, I suppose. Getting the soldiers back home is a good goal, albeit more difficult than anyone really knows. By adding Biden to the ticket, Obama makes up for an apparent lack of experience in "executive" and "foreign policy" arenas and gets a VP who can mentor him and be a representative of the United States abroad, which as oftentimes been the VP's delegated role when the President doesn't wish to go somewhere. If Obama were to meet some sort of an unfortunate end, Biden would be a fine choice to step into the presidency and serve out the remainder of Obama's term.

Then you move onto McCain. Me being a heavily biased liberal, I cannot objectively speak about McCain. His Republican tax platform is ludicrous (in the sense that it won't balance the budget), his desire to cut down government even more is a disaster (since government has problems doing what it is supposed to do at its current capacity), but I guess I admire his desire to end the useless riders that get attached to a bill that assign money to states like Alaska to buy off a Senator's or Representative's vote to pass the bill. I just used Alaska not because the senator is easily bribed, but because everyone should know by now that McCain's VP is from the state of Alaska. But his policy in Iraq is finally "catching up" to that of the Democrats and saying that a timetable is an okay thing, insofar as conditions on the ground are met (blah blah blah). McCain, not having a huge reputation for being a social conservative (despite him saying he does), picked a woman who has those credentials to be his running mate. Sarah Palin is a self-described hockey mom (although it should be grandmother), who is ardently religious (and carries the many beliefs associated with extreme religious beliefs), and apparently got up at 3:00 AM every day to go kill some moose when she was a kid. I recently read the viewpoint of a conservative friend of mine who said that Sarah Palin made her glad to be a conservative woman. I suppose she is the conservative woman's choice (at least a semi-progressive conservative woman's choice) but she is certainly a minority amongst Americans. Her hard-line conservative values are actually strongly outside the mainstream about just as much as the Republicans claim Obama is too liberal and outside the mainstream. I think the reality of the situation is that more people are becoming liberal and progressive while fewer people are clinging to their traditional beliefs. Sarah Palin's experience with 2 years of governorship, 3 terms as a mayor of 9,000 people, a member of the Oil and Natural Gas Board in Alaska (and her father just happens to be an oil driller), a member of her 9,000 population town's city council, and a former runner up/Miss Congeniality in the Alaskan beauty contest really highlight her (lack of) qualifications. The conservatives complain the Barack Obama simply has experience in being a community organizer... but his community had over 5,000,000 people in it (at least I think that's how much Chicago has...). Who would you say has more experience, the mayor of 9,000 and the governor of 600,000 or the organizer of millions? Maybe I just have fuzzy math going on...

Then there's the whole hooplah about Proposition 8. I've written extensively on this topic many times and in many places. The meat of the argument really just boils down to this: if we're a society that preaches equality, then we, as citizens, have an obligation to ensure that EVERY citizen is treated equally. For those who are not in California or familiar with California politics (or even American politics), Proposition 8 is a constitutional amendment to the State Constitution that legally defines marriage as a union between a single man and a single woman, excluding any homosexual couples from the process. The Supreme Court of California said that such exclusion is unconstitutional (which kind of makes it strange that an amendment is being ratified since it was deemed unconstitutional to begin with...). In my view, it's simply tyranny of the majority at work once again in the United States to terrorize and imprison a minority group who does not have the means to stand up for itself politically.