Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

State of the Union Address Tonight at 9pm

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President Barack Obama (D) is scheduled to give the annual State of the Union address tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST before a joint session of Congress. The address will be followed by a Republican Response to be delivered by Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI 1st).

As I do every year, I encourage all of my readers to watch both the State of the Union address and the opposition response. I recommend the unfettered and uninterrupted coverage from C-SPAN, but the addresses will also be available on most broadcast channels and cable news networks.

The Constitution requires that the president report to Congress annually on the state of the union, but does not specify the method or form of this report (Article II, Section 3). The in-person State of the Union address has been a tradition since 1913.

Transcripts of all 1945-2009 addresses before joint sessions of Congress, including each State of the Union, are available from C-SPAN.

“That Among These is Life . . . ”

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One might be forgiven for thinking that the ‘pro-life’ position on abortion is an exclusively religious position. It is true that the most vocal and consistent voices in opposition to pre-birth infanticide are those in the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, but to describe the anti-abortion position as one exclusively religious in nature doesn’t do it justice. If considered honestly and rationally, even cold, scientific logic requires us to be pro-life.

Consider, if you will, that the purpose of science (properly applied) is to increase knowledge and support the well-being of all humanity. Obviously, there have been ‘scientists’ who didn’t subscribe to this, but I think most of us can agree—whether religious or atheist—that science and medicine ought to be serving people, not killing them. If we accept this obvious argument, the question then becomes one of how we define humanity. Is an embryo in a woman’s womb a person, or is it a lump of tissue that is just a part of a woman’s body?

Contrary to the way it is often portrayed, science and religion are rarely (if ever) in true conflict with one another. The Catholic Church has, for example, claimed since antiquity that human life begins at the moment of conception. At the time, there was little direct scientific evidence to support this argument; it was an argument purely from faith. Science did not ever disprove, or even shake, this faith position. On the contrary, at every step the increase in scientific knowledge has bolstered the argument that life begins at conception.

Read more . . .

Best Democratic Party Strategy: Repeal and Replace

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It was only a decade ago that the Democratic Party styled itself as the party of unbridled democracy, attempting to throw out the rule of law and the unique legalistic nuance of our electoral system in an effort to make sure that the winner of the popular vote—then-Vice President Al Gore (D)—became president. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court had to weigh in, ruling that Florida’s election laws had to be followed as-written and couldn’t be changed on a whim because the outcome didn’t meet with everybody’s approval. As such, the state’s electors went (with the presidency) to then-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX).

Many Democrats were apoplectic, declaring that the will of the people had been usurped by a cadre of beltway elites in Washington. It may have looked that way on its face, but we simply don’t elect presidents by popular vote. You might not like the Electoral College system—heck, I’m not sure I like it either—but it’s the system we have, and its outcomes don’t always align with the popular vote. That’s reality, and we are free to amend that system at any time using one of the two methods of amendment provided-for by the Constitution itself.

Regardless, you would think that the party of unbridled democracy—that which treats the will of the people as the most sacrosanct of things, never to be ignored or usurped—would have refrained from passing a health care reform act opposed by a clear plurality of the voters (a majority in many polls) and likewise thought to be more harmful than helpful by just under two-thirds of doctors. The will of the people is quite clear: we want health care reform, but we don’t want the version of it that Congress passed last year. If there was any doubt about this, the last Congressional election should have made it painfully obvious. You would think that the Democratic Party would be the one to have noticed that the people were not at all happy with what they were doing.

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Stealthflation

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The biggest economic risk facing the United States (and much of the world) right now is something I’m calling ‘stealthflation.’

The elites in the White House and the U.S. Federal Reserve seem to think we are at risk of monetary deflation, where the value of the national currency actually rises. This causes many systemic problems when it occurs, not least of which being that people find their personal property suddenly worth less than what they owe on it. Deflation tends to harm loan recipients (people and companies) and benefit loan issuers (banks).

In an effort to keep the dollar stable, Presidents George W. Bush (R) and Barack Obama (D) have drastically increased our federal deficits by injecting massive buckets of federal tax dollars into the economy with ill-advised bailouts and ‘stimulus.’ Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve (under Bush-appointed and Obama-re-appointed Chairman Ben Bernanke) has created an additional 2 trillion dollars out of thin air and injected it into the economy through its so-called ‘quantitative easing’ programs. All-told, somewhere over 4 trillion dollars—that’s $4,000,000,000,000.00—have been artificially forced into circulation by the U.S. government.

Based on the official inflation rates and the consumer price index (CPI), our government keeps telling us that they need to put more and more and more money into the system to maintain its stability and prevent deflation. I’ve talked before about the very dangerous risk they are running, which is that their unprecedented dollar injections will result in serious inflation and potentially hyperinflation before they realize they’ve gone too far. One could argue that inflation is better than deflation, since it tends to benefit loan recipients (people and companies) at the expense of loan issuers (banks), but putting a bunch of our banks out of business isn’t really a good thing either. It’s just a different kind of bad.

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‘Gallery Shortcode Style to Head’ Version 2.1

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Plugin Settings Screen

I’ve just released an update to the ‘Gallery Shortcode Style to Head‘ plugin for WordPress, bringing the version to 2.1. This update is nothing earth-shattering, just a standard maintenance update.

Here’s what’s new:

  • Removed clearing <br> tags in galleries (replaced with clearing <div> tags).
  • Corrected bug that threw a cryptic error on the media page for some users.
  • Support for WordPress 3.1; now requires WordPress 2.9 or higher.

Like I said, nothing too major. As always, contact me if you find any bugs or issues!

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.