United Liberty

Despite President Barack Obama’s denials, he is as responsible for the deficit as his predecessor and is actually making it worse:

Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama’s last two years as Illinois senator. Obama supported the emergency bailout package in President George W. Bush’s final months - a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.

To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq war, a drain on federal coffers for six years before he became president. But with one major exception, he voted in support of Iraq war spending.

The economy has worsened under Obama, though from forces surely in play before he became president, and he can credibly claim to have inherited a grim situation.

Still, his response to the crisis goes well beyond “one-time charges.”

When purusing through the April 20 issue of Pat Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative, I found a depressing message:

As you may know, subscription revenues don’t cover the cost of producing a political magazine. Our losses are much smaller than our competitors, but we must still make up a deficit. Over the years, our financial backers have been heroic. But absent a major new infusion, TAC will print its final issue on May 7.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there was an article written by Gary Fields titled Shorter Sentences Sought for Crack. The gist of the article is that the Obama Administration has told Congress that they favor equal penalties for crack and powder cocaine. Right now if you have five hundred grams of crack cocaine on you, you will be given a minimum sentence of five years. The same minimum goes for those who have only five grams on them.

I applaud the Obama Administration in this step towards equality (and towards what I believe should be the ultimate goal, ending the failed war on drugs). Some teenager may have just got in with the wrong crowd and be caught with five or six grams of crack cocaine, yet would be given that five year minimum prison sentence. Does that really make sense?

I’m against prosecuting the agents who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects because I think they were working in the best interest of protecting America from future Islamist attack. I also differ with my colleague Luke Brady’s Nuremberg analogy, as following orders to get rough in order to prevent Islamist terrorism seems to me far different than following orders to commit widespread ethnic cleansing on one’s own population, as Nazi soldiers did.

Given that, I’m afraid my comments on that thread will make people think that I’m an apologist for Bush era interrogation policy and don’t think changes are needed. Far from it, I find that findings such as these reveal that much must be changed:

My last article, “Secession… an American Tradition,” elicited some good questions from readers. The whole issue of secession seems to beg the larger question of what constitutes a nation anyway.

To answer this requires a brief overview of modern nationalism.

Here are a couple of definitions to start:

Nation:

A large body of people, associated with a particular territory, that is sufficiently conscious of its unity to seek or to possess a government peculiarly its own: The president spoke to the nation about the new tax. (www.Dictionary.com)

Nation: