Middletree

It is true that I am an evangelical Christian. However, that's not the reason I lean to the political right. At least, it's not the primary reason. I'm not driven by topics like abortion and gay marriage, despite the efforts of many on the right and the left to elevate those two issues to the top of the priority list. No, my reason for moving from a liberal in my younger years (my first presidential vote went to Dukakis in 1988; I also voted for Ann Richards for TX governor in 1990) to my current conservative status owes more to the fact that I took a few history and economics classes in college. The more I understand economics, the more I understand that less government is better, on two levels: a practical level and a deeper level. By practical, I mean that one can easily demonstrate with numbers how an economy will benefit when the government stays out of it. You give a dollar to the government, and it stays there. You give a dollar to a business, and that dollar gets sp...

I watched the Oscars last night. Sean Penn is a strong adherent to the value of double-standards. He admonished those who would, for religious reasons, vote their conscience, and specifically mentioned the word "shame". As in: they should be ashamed for voting the way they did. If I understand him correctly, he has no problem with practicing religious intolerance in his quest for tolerance of a non-traditional definition of marriage. The double-double (double-squared?) standard comes in when one takes note of the fact that Penn made friends last year with the dictator of Venezuela, a country which denies many basic human rights to its citizens, including homosexuals. If memory serves correctly, Penn also spent some time in Iran not too long ago. Sean, it's a lot more safe to be out of the closet in California than in Iran or Venezuela. I'm puzzled why you choose to spend time in two nations which offer much more oppression, and much less freedom, than we have here i...

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