Alabama Tracks

Here are the latest……

I was officially 36 weeks on Saturday, March 15th.  Here is the status picture from that day - I’M HUGE!  I actually measure 38 weeks.

Here is Ruthie just being cute eating her beloved Goldfish.  She can’t get enough of them lately and most days wold prefer to eat them over anything else.

My in laws have been coming up to stay with Ruthie so that I can go to my OB appts. alone.  In addition, they spend the night so they can be a little more acquainted with her routine.  Tubbie time is a biggie.

We found some goggles in a box (like 5 pair) and Ruthie absolutely LOVES to play with them.  Mommy wears goggles and so does Ruthie.  For days now I have tried to get her to allow me to put them on her.  I finally succeeded today.

You have to admire the man. He’s not JFK (JFK wasn’t quite the spinmeister Obama is and he articulated goals, not just rhetoric) but he’s definitely the most spectacular politician I’ve seen in a very long time. But he likes to talk a lot about change without qualification of said change. I don’t expect any winner of the 2008 election to be a continuation of George Bush (a double edged sword no matter your political bent) but what exactly IS he going to change? Why is it that some people are going nuts over a man who talks very well but says very little? So I’m going to highlight what President Obama will bring. This isn’t as speculative as you might think, either.

The Supreme Court

This one’s going to hurt. A lot. Bush, for all of his shortcomings, has installed two very stalwart anchors in SCOTUS. Not conservative activists in the same way Clinton installed liberal activists, but people who believe in strict constructionism (a belief that the court should interpret law, not write it). A President Obama will let Stevens and Souter retire, knowing full well that Democrats will seek to replace them with, at best, people like O’Connor or, at worst, people like Ginsburg.

So what does this mean for you? Well, it’s the lack of strict constructionists that lead to bad decisions like Kelo (the gov’t can seize your property if someone will pay more tax), Engel (separation of church and state) and, most infamously, Roe (abortion). Perhaps the best example would the SCOTUS inconsistancy in the separation of church and state. Things have been so muddied that many government agencies feel they have to ban anything religious or face the wrath of the ACLU. A court that is a bit more towards the center might give us just such a standard (and perhaps even rule that you have to show harm before filing a lawsuit over the matter). But the worst problem is the fact that liberal justices tend to lean more on international law. How’d you like to find out you can’t home school anymore because an Obama justice voted it unconstitutional because Germany disallows it?

Taxes

Obama has opposed making the Bush tax cuts permanent. He’s a tried and true Democrat on the tax front. His colleagues are just as foolhardy. Despite claims that Bush cut taxes for only the rich, other data contradicts that.

Taxes under Clinton 1999 Taxes under Bush 2008
Single making 30K - tax $8,400 Single making 30K - tax $4,500
Single making 50K - tax $14,000 Single making 50K - tax $12,500
Single making 75K - tax $23,250 Single making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 60K - tax $16,800 Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K - tax $21,000 Married making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 125K - tax $38,750 Married making 125K - tax $31,250

$30,000 a year is rich? Obama is going to let the tax cuts expire so it’s not far fetched that you may be paying twice the taxes come 2010. And if his colleagues pass tax hikes I have little doubt he’ll sign them. Taxing the big, rich oil companies sounds good but exactly who do you think will foot that bill? Take a look in the mirror to see who that would be. I hope you consider yourself monetarily wealthy because Bill Gates is worth only some $40 billion and our entire Federal budget is well over $1 trillion dollars. To quote Bill Cosby, “The government comes for the regular people first”.

Abortion

NARAL gives Obama a 100%. Here’s why, from Obama’s own lips

Whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the Equal Protection Clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a . . . a child — a nine-month-old child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place.

I’ve felt my wife’s adbomen move. According to Obama, I was confused and that’s not really my son in there after all. It’s just a fetus. For those of you who think Bush is a complete disaster, I invite you to compare the previous quote to this one

We aspire to build a society where each one of us is welcomed in life and protected in law. We haven’t arrived, but we are making progress.

Iraq

The real hotbutton issue of 2008. More than all of the above, it seems. I could go on to other issues for hours but I will close with this one. The Democrats want retreat. They want to leave Iraq and they want to leave yesterday. As long as Iraq was spiraling out of control it sounded better all the time. The rampant bombings, the IEDs wounding or killing our guys daily. It makes you want to stop it all.

Laying aside the reasons we went to war (in the scope of this discussion it’s moot), Bush put together a strategy called the Surge. And it worked. Vast reductions in bombings, sectarian violence. People actually returning to Iraq. Sunni and Shia working together. Stability has returned. Al Quaeda, once gaining ground, has lost almost all it once dominated. Iran has lost their Shia brethren. Things are, for a change, looking up.

Obama will, undoubtedly, yank the troops out of Iraq, regardless of the status over there. He’s already promised to do so. What I fear is that we will watch in horror as Iraq implodes like South Vietnam did in 1975. Effectively speaking. the US pulled out of Vietnam and, when the North violated the treaty, all we did was extract our people and leave the populous to a horrible fate (Democrats refused to fund any futher action in Vietnam). If you think Iraq was bad before, this could eclipse it all. Iran will pour resources into insurgents, bombings will resume en masse and the fragile government will fold like a lawn chair. What will rise, instead, is a Shia dominated puppet government, locked in step with Syria and Iran. Stability will return, but only in the hands of Ahmadinejad. President Obama, trying his best to lay the catastrophe at the feet of Bush, will turn to diplomacy. I don’t know if he really believes the rhetoric that Bush is the reason it’s so bad over there but his positions on foreign policy are naive at best (some are already comparing him to Jimmy Carter). Diplomacy sounds good but diplomacy only works with enforcement. Neville Chamberlain learned this the hard way. Hitler talked a good talk up until he started knocking down Europe like dominos, unhindered by anyone. Talk is cheap, action costs lives but may save others.

I may not be a fan of John McCain but I think that he’s going to be the (much) lesser of two evils at this point.