I, geekrevThe closest you want to get to looking inside the mind of Shawn Coons.

When I decided to support Obama in the primary, I said I would continue to support him as the Democrat nominee as long as he doesn’t conduct himself like the typical nominee. I’m looking for a true liberal, not a Democrat lite who rushes to the middle to attract swing voters. And I’m looking for someone who will choose to stand by their convictions even when it may cost them votes.

Which brings me to this story. Obama has gone back on his promise to accept public funding for his campaign. I don’t care what his reasons are - he made a promise and now he is breaking it. When he made that promise he didn’t put conditions on it (EDIT: Ok, there was one condition and that was if the Republican nominee would accept public financing - which McCain has said he is going to). He simply made a promise.

I realize that he can run a more effective campaign and have a better chance of winning if he goes the private route. I realize that outside groups can run issue ads that are for all intents and purposes candidate ads. But Obama is a smart man and he knew about both these realities when he made his promise.

I will continue to support Obama for now, but I am one step closer to voting Green again.

UPDATE: I just finished watching Obama’s video where he explains his decision. He basically says that the public financing system is broken and so he will not participate in it. So did he just learn in the last several months that it was broken? Was it not broken when he made his promise?

The other argument he makes is that this puts his campaign truly in the hands of the American people. I got the impression that he wants me to think he is taking a big risk by forgoing public financing, as if there were a chance that he wouldn’t get enough money to run.

What happened to honest talk? The reason he is not participating in this broken system is because he can get more money by forgoing it. I am really disappointed. But this is what I have come to expect from our two party system.

Disclaimer: I’m supporting Obama.  Not because I think he would do that much different as President than any of the other Repblicrats.  But because he is raising conversations and questions that other politicians at his level are not.  Change is going to come from the bottom, not the top, and I think Obama can inspire change from the bottom more than Clinton.

So early in the primary season I subscribed to both Clinton’s and Obama’s blog and they are both pretty one-sided and spin-minded.  It’s been interesting, enjoyable and frustrating to get their perspectives on the same events.  But I’ve had it with one particular argument that the Clinton campaign is making and that is that she should be the nominee because she has won in key swing states.

Let’s be clear, Clinton isn’t winning general elections in swing states, she is winning Democrat elections in swing states.  She has talked about how she is the candidate of the “base” of the Democratic party.  Well, guess what?  The base is called the base for a reason, because they are going to vote for the Democratic candidate no matter what!  The question isn’t who wins the base of the party (although Obama can lay claim to the base as well), but rather who can draw more voters altogether - base, swing, Republican, Green, etc.

Clinton can’t shake her polarizing legacy and deep roots in established Democrat circles, while Obama is drawing in all sorts of people who wouldn’t otherwise vote Democrat (like me - Green Part ftw).

It’s a shame that we had these two candidates now, because if Clinton were running against Al Gore, John Kerry, or John Edwards I’d support her in a heartbeat.

Flying makes me mad.  I’ve ranted before about the security theatre that we are forced to go through if we fly.  The war on moisture, showing your papers, dress codes, and all that other stuff that doesn’t actually make us safer, but gets us use to operating out of fear, giving up our civil liberties, and authorizing the government to kill people “over there” so they don’t get us here.  How does that last one work anyway?  Don’t we have to perpetually kill them over there?  No matter when we stop as long as we leave one of the bad people alive they can come get us, right?

Anyway.  We currently live in Houston, TX which is a plane ride away from any family or conference we would go to, so we fly several times a year.  So our three year old son is familiar with airports, planes, and now - airport security.  We were waiting in line to run our carry-ons through the x-ray and as we got towards the front Ben looks up and asks, “Should I take my shoes off?”

This may be an overreaction, but I was heartbroken.  It upsets me greatly that Ben is going to grow up thinking it is normal and acceptable to partially disrobe just to travel from one area of our free land to another.  Thanks, George, for making living in fear seem acceptable to a new generation.

(yes, I plagiarized the title of this post from Friends)

As if to illustrate my point in my earlier post I came across the video below on the Spirited Chat blog. It’s from the Youtube Republican Presidential Nominee debate and the candidates are asked “What Would Jesus Do?” in regards to the death penalty. Huckabee refuses to answer the question while he extols his own record of sentencing people to death (to the applause of the crowd). I believe he refused to answer the question because he knew that Jesus answer was different than his own.

I just added this feed to my blog reader:

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/rss/recent/

So alongside posts like (Let’s Not) Focus on the Family, LotRo Quest Inspired by Apple II Text Adventure, and Big Ben Throws for 5 TDs, I am now reading the names of people like Specialist Marisol Heredia, Staff Sergeant Courtney Hollinsworth, and First Lieutenant Thomas M. Martin. These three people are just a few of the 3,827 American soldiers who have died as part of the war in Iraq. I’ve decided that I need daily reminders of the cost that some Americans are being asked to pay for an UnGodly war. I need these daily reminders, because I’ve come to a humbling realization.

I have not been opposed to the war in Iraq.

Sure, I’ve spoken against it in a number of personal conversations, and people at the churches I’ve served could guess that I thought it was a bad and wrong course of action.  But, as much as it pains me to admit it,  I have not truly been opposed to the war in Iraq. The definition of oppose is “to resist, withstand or combat.”  And I can’t think of anything that I’ve done that is strong enough to really count as opposing the war.  All my actions have probably been as pointless as throwing a magnetic “Support the Troops” ribbon on your car.

I’m ashamed that I haven’t opposed the war. I’m ashamed as an American citizen, I’m ashamed as a Christian, but I am most ashamed as a Minister.

I’ve bought into the rule that paralyzes many (most?) churches and ministers today. We tell ourselves that we can’t take a stand on controversial issues because there are people in our congregations who wouldn’t agree.  Well, guess what? We aren’t called to be popular, we are called to be faithful. In the 1960s, ministers were run out of churches because they supported civil rights, and churches lost members when they raised their voice to say that segregation was a sin.

Are ministers willing to be run out of churches today, to oppose the mass loss of American and Iraqi life that is happening in the Middle East? Some are.  I have a good friend who was forced out of a church in part because he committed “pulpitcide” by speaking out against the Iraq war. We certainly shouldn’t make it our goal to anger people and get kicked out of our churches, but we can’t live in terror of offending people or saying something that they disagree with.

I don’t know what I will do from here. But I’m not content to remain silent any longer. I’m not content to sit idly by and let more people die because someone sitting in a pew on Sunday morning doesn’t agree with me. I need to proclaim God’s Word as best as I can and as best as God has revealed it to me. And if someone feels they have a different Word from God, then they need to proclaim it loudly and as best they can as well.

Let us all speak boldly about what God wants for our world, because it is a matter of life and death.

I’ve supported Green candidates for the last two presidential elections. I say supported because I actually voted for Gore because my wife realized too late that she hadn’t registered to vote in Virginia, and so I “gave” her my vote. But I’ve been a firm Green party supporter because the Democrats and Republicans are both bought and paid for. Sure there are differences, but there are more similarities in their failures to truly address and make changes in any number of areas, especially economic injustice.

But I’ve decided to give Obama a chance. I’m going to support him in his attempt to become the Democratic nominee. If he gets the nomination it remains to be seen if I will support him as a presidential candidate. I won’t if he does the traditional “race to the middle” to try and be the perfect candidate for swing voters. But if he stays true to his words below, then he’ll have my vote.

“I don’t pretend to be a perfect man, and I will not be a perfect President. But I am in this race because I believe that if we want to break from the failures of the past and finally make progress as a country, we can’t keep telling different people what we think they want to hear - we have to tell every American what they need to know. We have to be honest about the challenges we face.

When I called for higher fuel standards so we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil, I didn’t say it to some environmental group in California - I said it in front of automakers in Detroit. When I called for corporate responsibility so that middle-class Americans could get a tax cut, I said it in front of CEOs on Wall Street.

When I’m your nominee, my opponent won’t be able to say that I was for the war in Iraq before I was against it; or that I supported an extension of the Iraq war into Iran; or that I support the Bush-Cheney diplomacy of not talking to leaders we don’t like. And he won’t be able to say that I flip-flopped on something as fundamental as whether our nation should use torture. Because we are not a nation that makes excuses for torture, we are a nation that rejects it. That’s the change we can offer in 2008.

When I am President, I will end this war in Iraq. I will bring our troops home within sixteen months. I’ll finish the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And I will lead the world against the common threats of the 21st century - nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That’s what Democrats must stand for, and that’s what America must stand for. And I’ll be a President who finally sends a message to the black, white, and brown faces beyond our shores; from the halls of power to the huts of Africa that says, “You matter to America. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.”"

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has become the first elected female president of Argentina. Way to go Argentina! You’ve joined a whole bunch of other countries in realizing that qualified leaders don’t have to have a penis. You’ve joined a politically and geopgraphically diverse group of countries, and you can see them all here, here and here.

What’s that, Argentina? Where is the United States? Hmm…good question.

What’s the problem with a two party system? Partisan junk like this book. If you only have two parties then it’s a lot easier to be against the other guys, rather than stand for your own ideals. This is why I vote Green, although I might vote for Hillary or Obama if they are the nominee. I don’t think either one is that different from the average bought and paid for politician (especially Hillary), but I think electing either of them is a positive step to fighting the racism and sexism still pervasive in our society today.