Some Stuff I'm Currently Disagreeing With Obama On (with varying levels of outrage)

[phamos]

FISA: Give me a friggin' break, Barack. If this is meant to be a political pander, it's a dumb one, like when liberals waffle on abortion rights even when the majority of Americans believe abortion should be safe and legal with few caveats. The independents you're trying to pick off in the general either don't know enough about the FISA situation to give a shit, or they're libertarians who are rightly horrified by expanded Executive branch power in the abstract and spying in particular. And then you manage to piss off your base. Trying to paint this bill as some kind of "compromise" is ludicrous, even beyond your token opposition to the retroactive immunity part. The few tiny impediments to rampant invasion of privacy stuck in there are so easily overcomes as to be practically made of, like, filo dough or balsa wood or fucking feathers. Basically, what your endorsement of the bill is basically saying is, "Well, if I'm president, you'll be able to trust me not to abuse this power." Which I PERSONALLY do trust you to stick to, but the principle you're running on here is deeply offensive to a country that's been watching our president run our liberty into the ground. Trust your judgment over the principles of the constitution? Pass. I expected much more from a damn Con Law professor. OK, I'm done yelling now. Let's move on to the Supreme Court.

2nd Amendment Decision: I actually don't see his stance here as much of a flip flop, because he hasn't subscribed to the originalist/"militia" stance in the past like many lefties (including myself, to a certain degree) do. And Scalia did end up having to grudgingly acknowledge that gun control programs are not themselves inherently unconstitutional, just that the DC ban in particular is. So, I'm OK with Obama's approval here, even if I personally come down more on the John Paul Stevens (god bless that man)/bobbies with night sticks side.

Child Rapist Death Penalty: Obama siding with the minority on this one doesn't surprise me, even from someone who has been so passionate in Illinois about protesting the inequities of our death penalty system. Again, like with gun control, Obama has consistently taken a more pragmatic stance, saying that the way the death penalty is currently implemented is egregiously unfair but not actually coming out against the act itself. And I understand where he, and others, are coming from. Dammit, if I were going to give the death penalty to any one group of people, it would certainly be child rapists above and beyond probably all others. (I mean, have you heard the particulars of this case? Oh my lord, it is so heinous. I may have been more horrified reading about that rape than reading the story of the Czech kid who was ritually cannibalized.) But I am 100% against the death penalty, legally and morally. The government has zero right and should have zero power to make decisions of life and death, even beyond the structural inequalities and inefficiencies of the policy itself as currently implemented. But Obama is consistent here, and I certainly emotionally get where he's coming from.

Oh, and Barack, stop stomping on all of Scarlett Johansson's hopes and dreams, or we may have to send you over to Jezebel's "Crap Email from a Dude" territory.

Comments

[muridae.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, why did I google that Czech cannibalism case? That may be the most horrible, depraved, revolting thing I've ever heard in my life. If the Kennedy case is worse than that, I don't think I want to know.

=(

[phamos818.livejournal.com]

Well, I just have an extremely emotional reaction to rape. Never having been, you know, eaten piece by piece by my brainwashed mom. I suppose that, empirically, ritual cannibalism is worse than a 300 pound man raping his stepdaughter so violently that her internal organs rupture, then asking a friend how to get blood out of a carpet because his daughter "became a woman" -- but I guess I can identify with the latter in a way I can't with the former. Thus it hits me harder.

All in all, YUCK.

[muridae.livejournal.com]

They're both pretty outrageously horrifying. I think the cannibalism is more OMG are you fucking kidding me that's unbelievable, while the rape case makes me feel sorrow and rage all the way to my bones because it's so completely believable in its routine-atrocity happens-every-day sort of way.

Either way, YUCK is right.

Those poor children.

[thatabbygrrl.livejournal.com]

my own comments on these issues probably going up tonight. i share your FISA rage, am ignoring the 2nd amendment stuff, and have some more serious problems with the death penalty stuff.

and you didn't even mention the exxon settlement! :)

[notcotuit.livejournal.com]

And aside from the more debt thing, can you explain again why you aren't going to law school since you have a clearer explanation of all of the court's decisions than anything I have read to date?

[phamos818.livejournal.com]

To go along with the theme here of pragmatism, I'm well aware that the way law school works would stifle my ability to game the system the way I have with pretty much the last 15 years of my schooling. I've always been very good at figuring out exactly how much work I have to do to get a 3.5 GPA and sorta coasted. I am able to do this because I am a perfect combination of very intelligent and somewhat lazy. I'm guessing that I probably would have gotten the same grades I got at Chicago if I'd gone to a much crappier school, because I would have been way less motivated and worked less and learned less.

Law school, unfortunately, is all about ranking. If you're not going to be in the top echelon of your class (straight As, law review, internships, whatever), it's not worth going. I'm assuming what would happen is I would get into a very good law school (I kicked a ridiculous amount of ass on all the LSAT practice tests I took) and then proceed to waste all my money by getting exactly the same grades I would get at a second or third tier law school because of my particular habits. It's really a shame, but I fear I might be too old to be taught new tricks like, you know, discipline and sticktoitiveness.

You're going to say I'm not giving myself enough credit here, but I think I am. I could have gotten straight As in high school, college, grad school. There were particular semesters where I DID, because I happened to be oddly motivated at that time. The motivation never seemed to last. So I doubt I'd do any better at law school. There would be a lot of classes I would have to take that would bore the crap out of me, and I probably just wouldn't try any harder than I needed to to get a B+. That would tank my class ranking and basically make the whole enterprise a waste of time. Sadly, I know my own faults well enough to know that I would make a good lawyer but a piss poor law student.

[rationalpassion.livejournal.com]

I think Obama's new position on FISA is actually politically smart. Here's a guy at MyDD--a lefty site if you're not familiar--suggesting just that. Most people in this country don't give a damn about civil liberties until and unless it affects them personally. But listening in on the phone calls of foreigners who might be terrorists? Very popular.