Coming Back to Earth

I almost take a sort of sick, grim satisfaction at seeing the reactions of Obama’s strongest supporters to Obama basically doing what many of us thought he would do.

While I voted for Obama in my primary, it was sort of a “I felt like it today, but I might have felt like voting for Clinton yesterday or tomorrow” sort of thing.  Part of it is that I never really bought his “change” and “hope” talk.  Part of it is because, regardless of what Democrat we got elected, we were going to see major changes and improvement, so it seemed silly for Obama to rally around change like none of the other candidates wouldn’t bring it either.  Many Obama supporters argued against this by saying that Obama would change how Washington works, though how he would be able to reform a political system that very few people have successfully been able to reform, they never really could answer.

I and others have long pointed out as well that, on a matter of policy, Hillary was actually the more liberal candidate, and Obama was more of a centrist in the mold of, ironically, Bill Clinton (whom many of Obama’s supporters suddenly decided was the worst president in history).  However, we were told not to fear! Obama would bring change and hope and all would be right with the world.

So now that the general election has started and Obama has actually started showing more of his true policy positions instead of appeasing the base (which I’m not saying is bad, since all politicians do it in the primaries), Obama’s supporters are now becoming all horrified.  I almost want to see their heads explode if Obama votes for the final FISA bill (which he said he would, even with immunity) but Clinton doesn’t (I don’t know how she plans to vote).

Surprise, surprise, Obama is a politician, and I and many others have said all along.  Most of his supporters will almost certainly still vote for him, since the alternative is still much, much, much worse.  However, much of Obama’s “enthusiasm gap” has been due to this “hope! change!” thing, and I’m wondering if we’ll see that gap start to lessen, as well as Obama’s fund raising from small donors start to shrink as he tacks more towards his general election stances.

I’ll vote for Obama, but I’ve never really been one who has been all that crazy about him.  Now everyone else is starting to see why as they start to see some of what I’ve either seen or suspected pretty much all along.

Supreme Court strikes down death penalty for child rapists

I think overall, this is probably a sound decision:

Barring the death penalty for any crime that does not take the life of an individual victim, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that it is unconstitutional to impose the death penalty for the crime of raping a child. If the victim does not die or death was not intended, capital punishment for that crime violates the Eighth Amendment, the Court ruled in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

The primary difficulty with a case such as this one is that it is obviously extremely emotionally charged.  However, the point of law and punishment is to deal out proportional punishment in a rational fashion and not to implement a punishment based on raw emotion.

The gut emotional response to someone like a child rapist (or any rapist for many) will probably be somewhere along the lines of “that person doesn’t deserve to live.”  However, the problem with this line of thought, other than being based in emotion, is that the law isn’t necessarily meant to determine what a person deserves per se, put to implement a sentence proportional to the crime committed.

That is basically the tac the Supreme Court took today, saying that, in crimes committed against individuals, the death sentence can only be considered a proportional punishment for a crime where either death results or death is intended.  Basically the old “an eye for an eye” punishment.  Death is for death, and nothing else (though they do exempt “crimes against the state” from their ruling).

The court is saying that, while rape, and particular child rape, is a horrible crime and can have very traumatic consequences on the victim for the rest of their life, such an event doesn’t necessarily mean that the person cannot eventually live a normal life for the most part.  Given this, is it “cruel and unusual” to sentence someone to death for a crime in which the result or the intent isn’t to end another person’s life?

There is another asepct to this ruling as well: those in support of the death penalty for child rapists basically argue that the extreme psychological trauma caused justifies the death penalty.  However, this begs the question: what if someone inflicts extreme psychological trauma on someone via another means?  By this logic, such a crime should be punishable by death as well, even if no physical harm is done at all.

For example, if a child is subject to intense and cruel verbal abuse by, say, their parents for their entire childhood (but no physical abuse) which causes a child to be extremely psychologically scared, should that be punished by the death penalty?  If cruality towards children and long term psychological effects are to be the standards by which the dealth penalty can be allowed, then the answer would seem to be yes.  I think allowing the death penalty for crimes against a person in which doesn’t result and isn’t intended to result in death just opens a slippery slope that we don’t want to go down.

If death is OK for child rape, then why not for adult rape? Or for child abuse?  If it’s OK for those, why not for plain old sexual assault?  Or spousal abuse? Or any sort of physical assault for that matter?  You see where this can go.  By setting the wall at “death is meant for death,” the Supreme Court has set up a solid, non-arbitrary wall as to where the death penalty can and cannot apply.  The court starts getting into an area of ambiguity and risks setting an arbitrary bar if you start getting into defintions such as “if it’s sufficiently cruel” or things of that nature, since the definition of sufficiently cruel can be different for different people.  Death for death and only death is clear and simple.

Obama: Charge Oil companies for land they’re not using

This is an intriguing idea by Obama:

He also proposed to charge oil companies an undefined fee for every acre that they lease but fail to drill on. Oil companies now lease but are not drilling on about 68 million acres, according to the Obama campaign.

“If that compels them to drill, we’ll get more oil,” Mr. Obama said. “If it doesn’t, the fees will go toward more investment in renewable sources of energy.”

The goal, Mr. Obama said, would be to catch and replicate the success of the world leaders in this field.

Now, the initial reaction by a random diarist on dk was that it would “encourage oil companies to drill, even if there was no oil.”  However, someone quickly pointed out that the fee would probably be far less than the cost to maintain a pump.

The point of such a proposal would probably be three fold:

1. If there is oil there, then drill for it. You already have the land.
2. If there is no oil there, and you want to keep it, then you have to pay a fee
3. If you don’t want to pay the fee and there is no oil, or if drilling for oil there is cost prohibitive (though I’m not sure how with how high the cost of oil is) then give the land back to the government.  Hell, you may even get paid for it (I’m not sure if they own the land or lease the land or exactly what the deal is).

This looks like a win/win/win for the government:

If they drill for more oil, then that will hopefully put a dent, however small, in oil prices without opening up any new land for exploration.

If they sell the land to the government, then we have more land which can either be protected or used for other more productive purposes.

If they pay a fee…a mere $14.71 fee per acre per year could bring in $1 billion a year for the government.

Hell, even $1 per acre per year would bring in $68 million a year which, by the way, could pay for the DOE’s money request for research solar energy almost 7 times over.

Thoroughly Evangelical

You can’t make this shit up:

Without question, Dr. Dobson is speaking for millions of evangelicals because his understanding of the Bible is thoroughly evangelical.

That is an actual quote from Focus on the Family senior vice president Tom Minnery in response to Obama saying that Dobson is “making stuff up” which is itself in response to Dobson saying that Obama is “distorting the Bible.”

Perhaps the most ironic thing about all of this is that one of the biggest results of Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther was the distribution of the Bible to the populance at large instead of what had been the Church’s tradition up until that time that basically only the priesthood could understand and know what the Bible meant, and so they were the only ones who really had access (and thus could read and interpret) it.

And now, here is Dobson and his group, ground around talking like they are the final arbiters on what the Bible means.  Well then, I guess no one else needs their own Bible then if Dobson can just tell them what it means (and obviously, any other interpretation is wrong)

Hillary hold-outs….start throwing Hillary under the bus

I knew it had to happen sooner or later (from you know where):

It’s all over the press that beginning Friday, Hillary Clinton will be fundraising with the presumptive nominee, Barack Obama. For many of us, I’d say at least a few million, this is a nauseating thought. While we respect Hillary for her loyalty, we will not be joining her efforts. In fact, for me at least, Hillary’s choice to support Obama reminds me of the battered wife returning home to her batterer.

I’m trying to decide if this is sexist or not (it certainly has a slight smell of it), but now we have the start of the Hillary hold-outs basically saying that Hillary is that women beaten by her husband who runs away for a night or two, only to be lured back by her spouse to claims that he’ll never do it again, and proceeds to beat her even more than what he did before, or something like that.

Of course, it’s a bogus analogy to begin with, but that’s not stopping them from using it. (Hell, at the absolute least, even if it were true that Obama beat Hillary up like a battered wife, supporting the political party of that candidate and going back to your husband are hardly comparable things, if for no other reason than one is grounded in reasoning and pragmatism and the other is generally grounded in raw emotions.  Wait, does that mean they’re saying Hillary is emotional? I thought that was sexist?).

I still have to roll my eyes at the whole “we respect Hillary and all, but we’re not going to abide by her will.”  Well, then you don’t friggen respect her then.

If you’re going to piss on your party’s nominee, then fine, but don’t say you’re going to do it for Hillary or somehow in the name of Hillary or anything about Hillary and talk about how great she is and how you respect her, and then totally ignore her when she asks you to support the party’s nominee.

I also love how when Democratic leaders like Dean, et. al. come out and support Obama when he became the presumptive nominee, they were all drinking the kool-aid, but when Clinton does it…well, it’s just her being a good democrat.