Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Barack Obama Inaugurated as 44th President

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Barack H. Obama (D) has been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. Per Constitutional provision, the peaceful transfer of executive power from outgoing President George W. Bush (R) to Obama occurred at noon today. The transition was recognized with the new president taking of the oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building.

Obama’s ascension to the presidency is an historic event in-and-of itself, made even more poignant by his being the first non-white person to hold the highest elected office in the United States. Obama is the biracial son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, though he is erroneously identified in many media outlets as simply ‘African-American’. Obama was sworn in as president less than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended discrimination on the basis of race. When Obama was born, his parents’ relationship would have been illegal in many states (including my home state of Virginia) under anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriage.

The inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC, brought record crowds into the city. Preliminary estimates indicate that the gathered crowd numbered in the millions, possibly setting new records.

Despite my many political differences with President Obama, I sincerely wish him a safe and successful presidency.

Remembering the ‘New Deal’ Accurately

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The ‘New Deal’ is something we all learn about in school but, like so many things we Americans learn in school, they don’t teach it very well. The story we get told in our history classes is oversimplified and only half-true—the stock market crashed in 1929 and the country spiraled into an economic depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) was elected to the Presidency in 1932, he then created broad new government programs labeled the ‘New Deal’ and single-handedly saved America just in time for World War II.

Of course there is a whole other side to this story. Many conservatives at the far right of the political spectrum paint FDR as a socialist boogeyman who undermined the American economy, prolonged the depression, set dangerous precedents of government interventionism and expansionism, and spent all his time trying to destroy America. As is so often the case, reality lies somewhere in-between.

FDR was well-intentioned. He was not out to destroy America. I believe that FDR truly believed that his polices were best for the country but, despite what your middle school history teachers told you, he was wrong. Well-intentioned or not, FDR’s efforts to end the Great Depression prolonged it. His policies did set many dangerous precedents and made toilet paper of the Constitutional limits on government.

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Securing the Southern Border

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The U.S. Joint Forces Command recently issued its annual report on worldwide security risks, and one element of the report deserves careful attention: Mexico, our southern neighbor, is among the few countries in the world in danger of “rapid and sudden collapse“. Like Pakistan, also listed as being in imminent danger, Mexico is at risk because it has been unable to quell instability brought by criminal gangs. In Pakistan, it is tribal groups with Al-Qaeda sympathies. In Mexico, it is the drug cartels.

There is plenty of room to discus what the United States can do to bring about stability in Mexico, but it is clear that we must do something. A collapse of the Mexican government would be a direct threat to our country. It is also clear that we can’t continue to permit illegal immigration from Mexico through our porous southern border. Illegal immigration has already saddled our local and state governments with crime and other social ills, flooding some communities with people who have little or no respect for our laws or our citizens. The porous border also lets drugs into our country, as well as the same drug-lords and their lackeys that have destabilized Mexico.

The integrity of our southern border must be a priority for the incoming Obama administration. We can permit documented guest workers from Mexico and a reasonable liberalization of our immigration policies (so long as we do not grant amnesty to the criminals who have entered illegally before). It is true that we need a certain number of unskilled migrant workers, and our immigration policies must accommodate this. But we must make every effort to secure our borders against the stream of undocumented criminals and drug smugglers entering our country, and we must do so with renewed urgency as the prospect of an anarchistic Mexico run by drug-lords starts looking like a distinct possibility.

Flight 1549 Crash-Landing Videos

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I wrote just a couple days ago about the expert flying exhibited by U.S. Airways pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, who successfully guided his crippled Airbus A320 (U.S. Airways flight 1549) to an nearly-unprecedented safe water landing in New York’s Hudson River.

Now we are beginning to see the first raw video of the event (included here via LiveLeak.com). First, the grainy videos of the crash itself:

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The Wiretap Vindication

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I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, since I’ve covered it before. Like it or not, in a time of war the president has fairly broad powers to protect the people of the United States using means (like warrentless wiretaps) that might be illicit in peacetime. Every president who has led us in times of war has used these powers—Republican or Democrat—and was completely within their rights to do so.

The liberal left—who don’t seem to mind that one of their heroes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (D), authorized the war-time internment of certain Japanese, German, and Italian persons right here in the U.S. under Executive Order 9066—seem to go into fits of spasms over President George W. Bush’s (R) approval of very limited wiretapping of potentially terrorism-related phone calls. Recording some suspicious phone calls seems to be quite a bit less intrusive than the complete suspension of Japanese-Americans’ civil liberties, but such is our partisan world. Either might be morally wrong; neither is illegal in war time.

The Wall Street Journal printed an editorial today bringing to light a story that most other media outlets have ignored. Most critics of these wiretaps have claimed that Bush was required to get permission to perform these wiretaps from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (‘FISA Court’) established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The court itself just released a (highly-redacted) ruling disagreeing and re-affirming the President’s war-power authority to gather foreign intelligence without any judicial involvement, even when one end of the call is in the United States.

Hopefully we can put this tired, baseless issue to rest now.

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.