Iraq, Afghanistan, War and Money: A Look at Two Presidencies:

But, once again, not all moral principles are examples of oppression. To the contrary, human life is only possible within the context of enduring moral laws and principles that liberate all human beings to their true humanity. This is where those who support same-sex marriage and those who oppose it face each other across a huge gulf of understanding. One side sees a moral mandate to liberate marriage from its heterosexual limitation. The other side sees natural marriage as a liberating, God-given institution for human flourishing. There is precious little shared ground in this debate.

–Albert Mohler, Blog Post

While I don’t know what he means by being “liberat[ed] to” our “true humanity,” I don’t have much to argue with in his description of the situation as two side staring at each other across a gulf where they both claim that their ground is the moral one. But, when you combine his analysis in this piece with his article from last week about Obama dropping his support of the Defense of Marriage Act you get the sense that the moral aspect of this marriage debate is all he sees:

Attorney General Eric Holder informed Congress yesterday that President Obama had ordered the Department of Justice to cease all efforts to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in the courts.

In the second place, this announcement means that President Obama and his advisers now believe that the full legalization of same-sex marriage is both inevitable and without major political risk to the President and his plans for re-election. That, in itself, represents a moral earthquake. The President clearly believes that a sufficient number of Americans will either support or accept same-sex marriage — and this comes just a few years after a majority of the states passed constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage, and most by huge margins.

The President has made his decision. The Attorney General has now made his announcement. Mark your calendars for yesterday. That day now represents a tragic milestone in the betrayal of marriage.

–Albert Mohler, Blog Post

Moralism has completely blinded our church leaders to the fact that the enemy is not the immorality of homosexual marriage, but the State’s confiscation of the means of marriage. If the state had not appropriated to itself control over the institution of marriage, this whole debate would not exist. There would be no “moral earthquake.” There would not be two sides staring at each other across a chasm, because there would not be two sides. This whole moral swamp has been artificially manufactured by the simple fact that the State, through the steady passage of more marriage laws and marriage licenses, has constantly sought to make itself the decider of who can marry whom. And that fact alone has damaged the institution of marriage and allowed this debate to be born. It was inevitable.

Throughout American history, marriage licenses were used to arbitrarily restrict racial intermarriage. And while mixed race and same-sex marriage are two completely different things(one being morally inocuous and the other being morally engendered), the comparison is just too ripe not to be picked. Indeed the comparison between restricting interracial marriage and restricting same-sex marriage has “restriction” as it’s primary idea. And there’s only one institution that can grant itself the power to restrict a natural right. The State.

The percentage of the population that is homosexual and wants to be “married” is miniscule. In a free market of social interaction where nobody controls marriage from a central authority, society as a whole would just absorb this issue in the same way it handles something like alcoholism. Alcoholism is morally detrimental to the family structure. But we, as Christians, don’t see alcoholics as a moral enemy to be armed against. No, we try to reach them for Christ and convince them of their need of Him. But because the State claims control over the marriage process, society has been removed from this debate. Instead we’re left helplessly on the sidelines to watch with baited breath as the next supreme court ruling comes down. What nonsense.

So, what am I saying? Am I saying that homosexuality is moral? No. Am I saying that same-sex marriage is moral? No. I’m not saying anything about the morality of the issue at all. Instead I’m talking about the morality of the state stealing the right of society to decide for itself, without interference, what is and is not morally acceptable. I’m saying that if the State got out of the marriage business altogether, and put marital authority back into the hands of the social market where it belongs, these issues of morality could be properly addressed without resorting to the use of force. The issue would vanish.

The enemy is not same-sex marriage. The enemy is any earthly institution that tries to set itself up with monopoly power over marriage. Marriage belongs to society(for Christians, the Church. For non-christians, the family or community), not an all powerful State.

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

– The Hill

Fast forward to February, 2010:

Behind closed doors and with no cameras present, President Obama signed into law Friday afternoon the bill raising the public debt limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.

–Jake Tapper, ABC

Guess what Barack. America still has a “debt problem and a failure of leadership.”

“I appreciated his openness and his willingness to spend time with us and to really listen to what our concerns were and to address our concerns,” Haley told McClatchy.

In the most dramatic moment, Haley asked Obama to repeal the landmark health insurance bill he signed into law

When Obama ruled out repeal, Haley tried a different tack.

“I asked him if the state of South Carolina gave solutions, so we’re not just saying no, would he allow us to opt out or allow any other state to opt out should they choose,” Haley said. “He said that he would consider an opt-out provision if it contained three clauses.”

Haley’s exchange with Obama on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump was less complicated.

“I asked him if he would consider honoring the federal commitment and allow waste to go to Yucca Mountain. His answer was no.

–James Rosen, TheSunNews.com [em. mine]

I really could care less about the specific issues being addressed here. What’s so disturbing is the fact that you have a governor of a state literally begging the president to let her do what she wants to do in her own state. Folks, the Executive branch has literally swallowed up the rest of the government. That’s never been more evident than it is right now. Name me one thing that goes on in D.C. that doesn’t have to go through the Executive branch. You seriously can’t find one anymore.

A full Executive branch takeover has been coming for decades, but Bush literally put it into overdrive. He set everything up for Obama to take the wheel and stomp on the gas. He even hung an air freshener from the mirror.

“The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. And the way to make government accountable is make it transparent so that the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made, how they’re being made, and whether their interests are being well served.

…For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city…That era is now over. Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known.”

–Obama Press Conf (1/21/2009)

Obama from 2 days ago (11/29/2010):

Striking back, the Obama administration branded the WikiLeaks release of more than a quarter-million sensitive files an attack on the United States Monday and raised the prospect of criminal prosecutions in connection with the exposure. The Pentagon detailed new security safeguards, including restraints on small computer flash drives, to make it harder for any one person to copy and reveal so many secrets.

–Anne Gearan, AP

Who knew that when he said “change” he meant himself? All you main street liberals out there, please remember that those Democrat leaders you think are on your side aren’t. They will always side with the state. You don’t have “a guy” in office that represents you. Nobody does.

[H.T. David Kramer at LRC]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IVZw18lH7k

Well, that explains a lot. I guess by “we” he means his fellow elitists. And yes, those would be the same elitists he chastises Obama for being a member of in the very same video.

In order to make them accept him as president and to prevent endless legal roadblocks to his placement in the White House, and to diffuse the probability of another war, Rutherford B Hayes promised the Democrats he would withdraw the Federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction.

But – even in his nomination speech, Hayes said that the government would “protect all classes of citizens in their political rights”: a veiled threat often stated by Ulysses S. Grant, Oliver Otis Howard and the Republican governors, implying that Washington would continue to generate fraudulent stories of race war to justify a continued military presence.

In addition, “Hayes, had promised to withdraw troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. But this would mean the collapse of Republican governors Packard and Chamberlain… Deposing Packard and Chamberlain would split the Republican Party. Twelve Republican Congressmen announced they would vote with Northern Democrats if this was done. Then Hayes would be unable to get any legislation approved by Congress.”

…

Hayes made this comment in his diary for May 11, 1879, nearly two years after he said he would pull Federal troops out of the South: The Democrats “have passed on an affirmative new measure which repeals for the day of elections many valuable laws. They call them war measures, and seem to think that as the war is over [yes, fifteen years before!], these laws should be mustered out. We are ready to muster out the soldiers but… we don’t muster in again the evils that caused the war. Besides, it is for the victors to say who shall remain, not the vanquished.”

Twenty years later the threat of military intervention was still a reality for the South. And Curry, possibly coming to his senses at last, described the truth: “A studied effort is being made to induce the South to believe that under McKinley as President there will be no danger of another attempt to re-enact the Force Bill to oppress us with sectional legislation. These spurious representations may guile those who wish to be deceived; but they are too ‘thin’ to impose on any who have recollections of the past.”

–Chodes, Destroying the Republic

I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: we in the South have been occupied by foreign aggressors before. We’ve been objectified as “rebels” and “backwards” before to justify keeping us under military supervision. Yet, for some reason Southerners are, today, robust advocates for the military and war. We should know better. We should understand well how presidents and politicians lie us into war for their own benefit and then lie their way through occupation in order to keep us in fear.

We should know better than to believe that Iraqi’s are backwards terrorists that want to kill us because they hate our freedom. No. They are God’s precious creations just like us. And just like us, they don’t want to be ruled by some foreign army. They want to live in peace. They weep for their war-dead children just like an ante-bellum Carolinian woman would have done – holding her tender child in her arms after having to see them killed by a stray bullet or cannon shot. All because some far off government felt it was “necessary to preserve the union” or the more modern version: “to preserve freedom.”

It wasn’t the war that preserved “the union”, it was the brutality of the post-war occupation, misleadingly called Reconstruction. It took nearly 30 years of military occupation before the South had finally been sufficiently beaten into submission enough to just give up and let their wills die in their own chests. And along with the death of that unique Southern spirit died it’s culture. That was the plan all along, and that’s the plan in the middle-east as well: to break their will and destroy their culture in the name of democracy and freedom. Not because that’s somehow a good idea, but because it expands and preserves power and money for the political class. There’s always some noble political cause to be commandeered to justify the satiation of a politician’s lust for bloodshed and war profits. The money might be made during war, but the empire is built through occupation.

As I always say: think about who benefits. Firstly, Obama gets tons of campaign money from the oil industry:

In a new ad, Obama says, “I don’t take money from oil companies.”

Technically, that’s true, since a law that has been on the books for more than a century prohibits corporations from giving money directly to any federal candidate. But that doesn’t distinguish Obama from his rivals in the race.

We find the statement misleading:

• Obama has accepted more than $213,000 from individuals who work for companies in the oil and gas industry and their spouses.
• Two of Obama’s bundlers are top executives at oil companies and are listed on his Web site as raising between $50,000 and $100,000 for the presidential hopeful.

–Factcheck.org

and from BP specifically, nobody was given more than Obama during the 2008 election cycle:

During the 2008 campaign cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, individuals and political action committees (PACs) associated with oil-giant BP contributed about $500,000 to federal candidates. About 40 percent went to Democrats.

The top recipient overall? President Obama, who got $71,000 from the company tied to the environmental disaster in the Gulf, according to the group.

–Brian Montopoli, CBS

So, armed with those facts, how are you going to convince yourself that Obama is going to shut down off-shore drilling? He’s not. What he will do is make multiple head-fakes to appease his green base. That’s a given. He did one of them yesterday:

President Obama ordered a halt Thursday to drilling operations at all 33 exploratory deep-water rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for as long as six months, one of several steps he announced at a news conference where he sought to defend his administration’s handling of the spill.

Most of the measures, including a six-month moratorium on new wells, concern future operations. But in perhaps the most dramatic shift, Obama ordered nearly three dozen existing rigs or others preparing to drill to stop operation pending the findings of a presidential commission. Production rigs in deep water may continue to operate, and exploratory drilling in shallow water will continue, White House officials said.

–Shear and Wilson, Washington Post

This is a classic political head-fake. Obama announces that he is halting drilling until his commission concludes it’s research. We get a clearer picture on exactly what’s going on by looking at another article:

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama will announce a six month extension on a deepwater oil drilling moratorium on Thursday while a special commission studies the reasons for the Gulf of Mexico spill, a White House aide said.

–Hans Deryk, Reuters

So, when he says that he’s “halting drilling”, what he means is that he’s simply extending an existing moratorium on off-shore drilling that has been in place since 1990. This is the same moratorium that he vowed to “relax” as recently as March:

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

–John Broder, NY Times (March 31, 2010)

So, he isn’t “banning” or “halting” anything in any meaningful way. He’s just extending an already in-place moratorium on drilling off of the East coast. Guess who first put that moratorium in place. Yep, George Bush Sr.:

Navigating a middle course between environmental advocates and oil companies, President Clinton announced today a 10-year extension of the moratorium on oil drilling off virtually all United States ocean coastlines.

Mr. Clinton also placed several marine sanctuaries off-limits to oil exploration, setting no expiration date. The areas include the Channel Islands and Monterey Bay sanctuaries in California, the Florida Keys, Gray’s Reef in Georgia and the Olympic Coast sanctuary off Washington State.

The moratorium does not, however, affect areas off the Texas and Louisiana coasts, where extensive drilling has been going on for years, nor does it protect any areas, including the coastline of the southeastern United States, not already covered by the drilling ban first imposed by President George Bush in 1990.

–John Broder, NY Times(1998)

And a little more digging in the NY Times archive turns up further clarification of exactly what the moratorium entails:

New Coastal Drilling Would Be Barred by Gore

Vice President Al Gore said that as President he would ban any new offshore drilling for oil and gas along the California and Florida coasts. The proposal by Mr. Gore, who is battling his Presidential rival Bill Bradley for the support of environmental groups, would go beyond a current moratorium on drilling and apply to companies that had already bought billions of dollars’ worth of leases but not drilled yet. Mr. Gore cast his proposal as part of a bold environmental agenda that he pledged would be central to his campaign.

–News Summary, NY Times(1999)

So, essentially, the moratorium itself was a classic corporate protection bill to begin with. It applied only to companies that had not “already bought billions of dollars’ worth of leases.” It essentially kept competition out of the oil exploration market, thus protecting the big boys. All that Obama has done is just find a politically expedient way to extend this big oil protection mechanism for even longer, while cashing it out as a green friendly move to mollify his base. And it’s working like a charm:

Finally: Obama halts new offshore leases and stumps for climate bill

Now we’re getting somewhere on the offshore drilling problem. Some progress from the top:

Mr. Obama ordered a further six-month moratorium on new permits for new deepwater oil and gas wells; suspended the planned exploration in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the coast of Alaska; canceled a planned August lease sale in the western Gulf of Mexico; and canceled a proposed lease sale off the coast of Virginia. Environmentalists who had opposed the Alaska and Virginia projects hailed the decisions.

Mr. Obama said further moves will be made to strengthen oversight of the drilling industry and enhance safety as a commission he is appointing opens its own six-month inquiry.

–Jonathan Hiskes, Grist.org

So the green army(ever naive), have fallen for the bait hook, line and sinker. [sigh] I guess they will never learn. Politics is always smoke and mirrors. If you just read a headline and take it as fact, you will never, ever be properly informed. It takes tracing the flow of influence, money and motivation in order to find out the truth.

US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.

“Despite earlier reports we have determined that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Nato spokesman. The coalition continued to deny that there had been a cover-up and said that its legal investigation, which is ongoing, had found no evidence of inappropriate conduct.

–Jerome Starkey, Times Online

This is the “new tone” that Obama brought to the world stage. This is how he restores “respect to America’s image in the world.” Just a few more children that will grow up without parents thanks to the whims of an American president. God help us. Christians love to rail against abortion, yet they actively worship at the feet of a military that just killed two pregnant women. And, yes, I said worship and meant it. Have you been to the Lifeway book store lately and seen their military section with paintings of soldiers kneeling at the cross? It’s sickening.