www.donaldmarino.com

Anyone who is silly enough to read this blog regularly or who knows me personally knows that I hold some pretty liberal positions. But, I also hold some positions that would traditionally be considered to the right. Gun rights are one area where I am found on the far right side of the spectrum. I believe that it is the Constitutional right of an American citizen to own handguns, rifles and shotguns. While I believe that many people should not own guns, we have to respect their right to do so. It turns out that although anti-gun politics have enjoyed strong judicial and political support throughout the last few decades, the Constitution is very specific in protecting the rights of the American people to own firearms. Let’s review the exact language in the 2nd Amendment:

“Amendment Two

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

For decades, the anti-gun contingent has zeroed in on the “well regulated Militia” part of this amendment, as if that means that only Militiamen’s right to keep and bear arms is protected. They do this because it’s all they’ve got to work with; “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is a very explicit piece of language. To attempt to spin this amendment’s language in any other way is downright laughable. It does not say “the rights of the people who are in a Milita”, it says “the right of the people“. I’m sorry, but that’s what it says and that’s what it plainly means.

We always get into trouble when we think that we’re smarter than the framers of the Constitution, because we are not. Those guys knew what the hell they were doing. Whenever folks want to change around the Constitution or twist it’s language to suit their fancy, they always do it for self-serving reasons. They never do it for the betterment of the common good. That’s why the Founders made it so difficult to change the Constitution; they knew that some yahoos would always try to change the Constitution to push their views on everyone. A good example would be the recent right-wing attempts to pass a new Constitutional Amendment outlawing gay marriage. Do you think they were doing this to protect the rights of all American citizens? Of course not, they were doing this to try to legitimize and codify their narrow-minded political views. It failed, as it should have - that kind of stuff has no place in the Constitution.

Recently the Supreme Court has ruled on gun rights for the first time since the 1970’s and to no surprise, they found that the second amendment protects the rights of the people to keep and bear arms. This is not a surprise because that’s exactly what the Constitution says the amendment does. I know that anti-gun fervor runs strong, bordering on the hysterical (”…but guns <gasp!> kill people” they cry), but the legality of gun ownership should not really be in question. What we need to remember is that the United States is a nation of widely varied backgrounds and viewpoints. The Constitution protects all of us, even those whose viewpoints we disagree with. Forget this, and woe to you when you find yourself in the minority sometime, and those who disagree with you pass laws against you. Overall the Constitution is an extremely fair document, and by and large is what makes this country so great. Don’t screw with it. It says what it says, and I guarantee that we are probably not smart enough to re-write it to any improvement.

I read this article in TIME magazine online, and I need to speak out against how wrong it is on almost every single count.

This article was written by a Miami-based TIME correspondent, so just keep that in mind as I debate his points.

First and foremost, I am tired of the incredible lack of accountability and the woe-is-me victim stance that has basically become the norm in American discourse these days. The whole point of this article is basically to lay the blame for Florida Democrats’ primary election predicament on the feet of Howard Dean, the Republicans, Barack Obama, or basically, anyone but Florida themselves. This is a complete fabrication. The reason the Florida Democrats were not able to have their primary count, is because they violated established party rules, that were quite clear - along with warnings from the Democratic Party specifically outlining the penalty for violating the rules. They chose to do so anyway. I certainly can’t see how anyone can blame anyone but the idiots running the Florida Democratic Party, but clearly they are trotting out the woe-is-me-we-are-victims rhetoric that has become the standard line when anyone is called into accountability for their actions anymore. Frankly, it sounds quite childish. Now that they have been given the punishment that they knew all along was coming, the Florida Democrats are crying foul. Well, I don’t really feel sorry for you all. You did this to yourselves in a vain attempt at a ridiculous me-first attempt to garner more influence in deciding the Democratic nominee. Boo-hoo. Take your punishment with some dignity and stop the crying. Your silly threat to just take your campaign donations and go home is one I’d gladly accept.

I am also tired of hearing about how the Florida Democrats feel they have been ‘disenfranchised’. As far as I can tell, Floridians are still allowed to vote in the General election this fall - you know, the one where we actually choose the next President of the United States. The Democratic primary is a party-run affair for the Democratic party. This isn’t actually real disenfranchisement. If the citizenry of Florida were prevented from having Electoral votes this fall, that would be a real injustice. The fact is, whether you like it or not, Florida doesn’t get to help choose the Democratic nominee this time. Big deal. Democrats in Florida will still be allowed to vote for a Democrat this fall if they so choose. Stop crying ‘disenfranchisement’.

Also, Floridians should stop asking for a re-vote. This is an incredible sore-loser ploy. The Florida Democratic Party leadership screwed this up for you. You don’t always get a second chance in life. You all sound like a 5 year old who lost a board game. “It’s not fair! We deserve another try!” they cry. No, you don’t. You broke the rules, take your medicine. “But New Hampshire did it too!” the article complains, failing to miss the entire point. The reason for having the relatively small states primary and caucus first is so that they have a fighting chance to be heard at all. If we let Florida (the 4th largest state as the article points out) go first, along with other bigger states, the nomination would be all but decided and the smaller states wouldn’t count at all. All your whining about ‘disenfranchisement’, but you’d gladly prevent so many other states from having a voice at all. Doesn’t jive with me. The ironic thing is that Florida’s crass attempt at exerting far more control over the nomination process backfired on two fronts: firstly they won’t have any delegates, secondly if they had held their primary as originally scheduled, they would have likely been able to tip the nomination one way or another, as the race was still quite competitive at that point.

Serves them right. TIME should know better than to publish this whiny article from Florida. This mess is clearly not Dean’s fault, nor Senator Obama’s. The blame lies with the Florida Democratic Party. It’s time they grew up, accepted their punishment with some grace, and accepted the blame for the position they put themselves in.

If you can, in good conscience, criticize Senator Obama’s speech today, you are probably either a hopeless racist, or a simpleton, or just hopelessly partisan.

What Barack said today was incredibly brave and needed saying.

Having grown up in Richmond, Virginia, amongst some blatant racism, I see Senator Obama’s speech as one of the truly great and honest assessments ever given on modern race relations.

This country needs him as President. We truly need this to happen.

I have obviously been watching the Democratic nomination race with some fascination lately. Over one year ago, in this post I came out in support of Senator Barack Obama. At the time, I thought it was incredibly unlikely that he would actually secure the nomination. Now it looks pretty much like a done deal. I have been saddened to watch the Hillary Clinton campaign implode over the last eight weeks, because I think she probably has some actual good ideas and some truly altruistic motives. I realized during last night’s Democratic Candidates’ debate that it was truly over when Sen. Clinton tried to introduce some doubt about whether Barack Obama was an amti-semite. An ugly charge under the best of circumstances, this was truly her worst moment, maybe of her entire public career (which is not, as she claims, 35 years long). In these circumstances it was truly pathetic. Senator Obama spent about two minutes denouncnig the anti-semitic ravings of Louis Farrakhan, after which Hillary Clinton tried to mince some words and insinuate that if Obama didn’t ‘reject’ rather than ‘denounce’ the controversial Nation of Islam leader, then maybe we should doubt whether he is or isn’t actually a jew-hater. What tripe. What an absolute embarrasment for her. I’d guess that she won’t understand why people like myself find that insinuation so offensive, but I think that she has demonstrated over the last 8-12 weeks that there’s a lot of things that she doesn’t get. That’s some pretty ugly hate-speech and I’m embarassed for her since she doesn’t have the decency to be embarassed for herself.

Please go away, Senator Clinton. We are tired of you. You need to understand that your role is to assist President Obama in getting his agenda through Congress. If you can’t do that, then please leave the public sphere, and the sooner the better.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Mike Huckabee.

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.” - Mike Huckabee

Um, we are really screwed. This jackass is widely considered the frontrunner for the Republican Presidential nomination. If he either gets elected or steals the election, I’m taking to the streets with torches and pitchforks. It’s a true tragedy that people take this POS seriously. I am now committed to seeing him defeated.

I just want to say that using Diebold (or anyone’s) electronic voting machines is wrong.

This is a system that is BEGGING to be abused and manipulated. As a professional software engineer, I have to say the chance that these machines are secure enough to use in an election is miniscule to non-existent. They are not secure.
Some folks like to point out that the machines print you a nice little reciept, showing you that your vote was what you cast. Please don’t be fooled. It’s not as if the machine can’t print out whatever someone wants it to, regardless of how it chose to cast your vote beforehand. I do not think it’s unlikely that there is an intentional back-door into these election machines, but at the very least that have been proven repeatedly in lab tests to be easy to break into. Like less than one minute easy to hack. We need reliable paper ballots that can physically be re-counted in a public and transparent way. Diebold likes to say the machines are secure. They have been proven to not be secure. Already there are allegations of misconduct. Apparently, in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, the paper ballots and the electronic ballots, when counted separately, revealed a far different result. In paper balloting, Barack Obama actually won the primary by a couple of points. In the electronic balloting, Hillary killed him. This is statistically impossible.

So, since we can actually look at and re-count the paper ones, one might reasonably reach the conclusion that the e-vote was either manipulated, or the machines simply can’t count.

In my voting district, you actually have a choice whether to use paper or e-vote. Always insist on a paper ballot.

DON’T E_VOTE!

Here is an illustrative graph of George Bush’s approval ratings. I’m sure the republican party is just thrilled. This should eliminate any doubt about which administration was the worst in history. Way to finish strong, there W.

We should be talking more about the Marshall Plan, don’t you think? There seems to be a lot of talk about reconstructing Iraq. But, back when World War II was over, we sent the troops home and began bombaring Europe with crucially needed aid that basically averted an enormous humanitarian crisis.

That is not the kind of plans that we hear about today. I think we could take a lot of the money we spend on the war and render it as aid. Also, we could increase Homeland Security in a legal and safe way to protect us better from terrorists, here at home - where they want to strike, regardless of where they train. We could support the troops by having them quit a battlefield that long ago stopped being a US military battlefield. We could do all these things and we would still be money ahead. Way ahead. And, our soldiers would stop being wounded and killed, just so we can say that we didn’t back down from terrorists (err, or was it the insurgents, or was it the Iraqi army, or that pesky Saddam Hussein…) in Iraq.

The Marshall Plan cost (in postwar dollars) $13 billion, an unheard of sum at the time. Even accounting for inflation, it’s a fraction of our to-date Iraq costs, and costs are “surging” every day right now. We need to be thinking about the Iraq policy in the same terms that we were thinking about destroyed Europe after WWII. I don’t see how you can call it defeatist, we haven’t won or lost in Iraq - we’re just hanging out. The Iraqi army stopped fighting against us a long time ago. Are we really at war with civilian militias in Iraq? How does that advance US foreign policy in any way? I just don’t know. Bring the boys back home, as they said back then. Why is that unpatriotic now?

You really want to make them stop hating us? Bombard them with real aid (and I’m not talking about unoading pallets of money from C-130’s either), and don’t stop doing it After a while, they might actually give a damn what you have to say about things. A lot of folks in our country think that constitutes ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. If we had been right to expect to be ‘greeted as liberators’, help is really what the folks should have expected, not the utter,ongoing destruction of their homeland. Maybe it’s time to stop occupying Iraq, which, let’s be honest, isn’t really in a position to harm us anymore. In fact, it’d be fair to say we have our boot upon its throat. Maybe it’s time to start helping Iraq. We need a new Marshall Plan.

I’ve been hearing a lot about whether the current field of Presidential candidates’ messages are ‘resonating’ with folks. We all know by now what the cliche means, but I suppose I haven’t experienced much of it yet personally. As a single, white male under age 40, basically none of those candidates are speaking to me. They are trying to win votes in minority blocs or they are talking to big business owners or unions or something. Seems like a regular guy like me who can mostly take care of myself and doesn’t really bristle at the prospect of paying a little more taxes is not of interest to the campaigns. It always seems like they’re talking about someone else with their message. You hear a lot about single mother in the inner city, the American farmer, the small-business owner. You don’t hear a lot about white males who are not wealthy, but getting along fine. I think, however, that Barack Obama is doing a really good job of ‘resonating’ with me for the first time. Every time I listen to guy, I can’t help but think that he’d be a million times better as a leader than anyone involved in the current administration. Now, I’m not an unabashed Barack-and-roller, but at this point he is obviously a better choice than anyone else. I like the fact that he is _clearly_ an extremely intelligent person. That alone is a good sign. Whether or not you think he is inexperienced, which really, I don’t think at all, he is _clearly_ smart enough to go to the White House and figure out what to do. There really shouldn’t be any debate about that.

I hope, unless Gore can be drafted, that he’ll beat Hillary Clinton. I really don’t like Hillary Clinton. All this talk about how inexperienced Barack Obama is, somehow you don’t hear the same about Hillary. So far as I can tell Hillary’s qualifications are as follows:

1- She passed the Bar at some point in Arkansas.
2- She was married to the President for 8 years.
3- She carpetbagged a Senate seat in New York.

OK, that really doesn’t seal the deal with me. Her message doesn’t ‘resonate’ with me. She always seems snarky and angry. Something about her bothers me. It’s certainly not her gender, it’s more of this vague feeling that it would probably be alright if had a President someday who _wasn’t_ named Bush or Clinton. I am certain we can find a leader elsewhere. Really. Senator Obama seems to me to be that guy.

So, I’m watching Obama. It’s early, but I like his message, and he is very easy to root for. Until Al Gore gets drafted (Please,please), I’m for Obama.