American Revival in Salt Lake

Glenn Beck is holding one of his all day American Revival Events on July 17th 2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah.  I would love to go to this and it is close enough to go to without to much difficulty.

More info at: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/39727/

Race In America

I have just recently finished learning about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr. in American History.  I have also been thinking about some of the current issues dealing with race such as the accusations of racism against the Tea Party.

As I have been learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and what he did, I thought it was really good the way he went about his protests in a peaceful manner and with patience.  We as Americans, in a time when the Government is not doing what we want it to do can learn from Dr. King's leadership of peaceful, persistent protest.

One thing I did have a question about was one about all of the sit-ins that were held to protest segregation.  Seregation would probably not have ended if it wasn't for these sit-ins, but I wonder if it was slightly against the principles of the country to not move.  The reason I say this is because those places where sit-ins were held were usually privatly owned.  The only thing I would say about the sit-ins would be that I think legally if the owners of the property would have had the right to get the protesters off. However, Jim Crow Laws in the South would not have been changed as fast as they were with sit-ins.

A thought I had on the president at the time of the Civil Rights Movement was that he was a really progressive president.  It is unfortunate for people's viewpoint on Conservatives that Lyndon B. Johnson was the president who really pushed the civil rights acts and voting rights acts in the sixties.  When the average U.S. citizen learns about history of the civil rights movement, the fact that a liberal president was leading the country makes liberals and democrates out to be the good party rather than the racist one.

In this country over the past few months the media has been targeting the Tea Party Movement as being a race based movement as well. Some members of the Tea Party Movement could very well be racists, but the movement itself has nothing to do with racism.  The movement is just for reducing government size and power; because of that, the Tea Party Movement has been targeted by the media with a smear campaign of racism.  The Tea Party Movement does not have many African-Americans involved, but the ones who are come to the conclusion that it is not a racist movement. Here is an article about black conservatives in the tea party:   http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9ETR1380&show_article=1   

Today we have a African-American president, but the question of weather he was elected because of his race is one I have asked myself many times.  In America today are we showing racial bias towards others, as in this instance, by giving them more power than others just because of their race or do we vote or give respect towards those of any race, gender, or religion who are good people that have strong values?

Glenn Beck's New Book

This book will be out at the beggining of June, but I don't really know what the title implies.  However, from what I have read on wikipedia it is a " 'window' in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue."  I think it has to do with the diagram found in the Five Thousand Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen about political ideas (liberal and conservative).  I beleive the overton window is a window of which accepted political ideals are found.  The window has definatly moved in the last couple years to include more far liberal ideas and less conservative ideas.  I am looking forward to see what Glenn Beck's new book is about.  The other books he has written are really good. 

You can pre-order the book here: The Overton Window   

President of the United States Bows to Communist

Who will President Obama bow down to next? Ahmadinejad. Chavez. Fidel. Osama. 

This is absolutly discraceful that our president would do something like this again as he has already done many times to other leaders of lesser countries.  Bowing to another leader shows that you are below them and that they are better than you are.  The United States is still the most powerful country in the world (even if we are becoming weak) and our President should not be bowing to leaders of other countries, especially Communist China.

E-mail in Defense of Glenn Beck

A column on Mormon Times was written about Glenn Beck by a  Mr. Coppins, which speaks of Glenn Beck as a hateful and uncivil Mormon who many young Mormons "seem to be rejecting".  Since I am a young Mormon who opposes that oppinion of Glenn Beck I wrote this e-mail to Mr. Coppins to share my viewpoint and defend Brother Beck.  You can read Mr. Coppin's column here:  http://www.mormontimes.com/mormon_voices/mckay_coppins/?id=14298

 Mr. Coppins,

I am a "young Mormon" who would differ from your opinion of Brother Beck. While you may see Brother Beck as someone who is a hate-monger, conspiracy theorist, radical fringe, or a fear-monger I, at seventeen years old see him differently. I am a teen who loves this country and the Constitution of the United States. From watching and listening to Glenn Beck I don't see his so called "uncivil" and hateful rhetoric at all. What I see is a man who loves the United States and the Constitution. In almost all of his shows he talks about the importance of the Constitution and its founders as well as living by truth in our lives. He speaks of today's politics often with the history of past mistakes and shows the similarities. I would contend that the fact "that younger Mormons seem to be rejecting him is encouraging" is not an encouraging thing at all. If Brother Beck is speaking the truth on how we as a nation should be returning to the principles of our Constitution (which he is), I would say that those "young Mormons" who are rejecting him are also rejecting the Constitution of this great country. Maybe those "young Mormons" have not listened or watched Brother Beck as I have and they get their opposition to him from the extremely liberal media that is in our country today. I would ask that you and other "young Mormons" would truly watch or listen to Brother Beck and then make your assumptions about his so called "uncivil" rhetoric.

Respectfully

Capital Punishment Mock Court Case

The past month in sociology class we have been learning about crime and punishments.  I recently was involved in a mock Supreme Court case that we did for our final project.  My teacher choose two of the class-members to be lead attorney's, with three judges, and the rest of the class was splite on either side of the issue.  The issue was capital punishment with one side having to argue for it and the other against it.  I was choosen as one of the lead attorney's and a girl in my class who is extremely vocal with her liberal views was the other.  My teacher knew my oppinion on the death penalty, that I was for it, and the other girl was against it, so he had me be in charge of the side against it and her on the side for it. 

At first I was not happy about his decision, but I am know glad he did that.  I lost the court case in the end, but I learned a lot about how both sides of an issue can have ligitimate arguments even if one is truly better than the other.  My teacher is really good at teaching in a way that doesn't reflect his personal oppinion (which happens to be mostly opposite of mine) and he knows I am interested in history and politics, so he pushes my brain.

Here is the paper I wrote up against the death penalty.  It was hard because it was not my point of view.

“Whatever else might be said for the use of death as punishment, one lesson is clear from experience; this is a power that we cannot exercise fairly and without discrimination.”

-Justice William O. Douglas, Furman v. Georgia (408 US 238)

For these reasons and those that follow we stand firmly against the resolution that capital punishment is Constitutional and should be used in the United States.

Contention 1: Capital Punishment is dispersed unequally and in a discriminating manner making it a violation of the Constitution of the United States.

Constitutional processes and elementary justice both require that sentencing should be conducted in fairness regarding race and gender. Many times courts have sentenced some individuals to prisons while others have been sentenced to death based off of bias and racism. Between the years of 1930 and 1996, 4,200 prisoners were executed in the United States with “more than half (53%) [being] black.” Over the past century, before capital punishment was declared only for 1st degree murder, 455 men were executed for rape with 405 of those executed being black. Also, the fact that from 1977 and 1995, out of 313 individuals 36 had been convicted of killing a black person while 249 had killed white person proves that the death penalty is applied unequally.  (http://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/case-against-death-penalty) These statistics show that those who kill whites are more likely to be given the death penalty compared to those who kill racial minorities.

Race is not the only factor in which the death penalty is applied unequally. The execution numbers of women compared to the numbers of 1st degree murder shows that women are less likely to be executed than men. While women are arrested for murder 10% of the time they are only executed for murder 1% of the time.  (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/women-and-death-penalty#facts ) Compared to their crimes women are much less likely to be executed for their crimes than men making the death penalty unequal in that respect.

Unequal punishment dealing with the death penalty is made even more unequal because of the fact that many of the people accused of capital crime are poor and can not pay for a substantial lawyer. The 90% of individuals accused of capital crime are then given a public defendant who has no real reason to continue appeals because of the cost to the taxpayers he works for. In the end the accused does not receive competent council in defending his right to life.

Contention 2: The simple fact that capital punishment is more expensive than life imprisonment is enough to discontinue the use of the death penalty in the United States.

Murder trials take much longer and expel more funds when the death penalty is the issue rather than life imprisonment. In Maryland between 1979 and 1984 a death penalty case cost “approximately 42 percent more than a case resulting in a non-death sentence.” Similarly, in Florida, a state with one of the biggest death rows in the United States, the cost of one execution is $3.2 million or in other words six times the cost of a life-imprisonment sentence. (http://users.rcn.com/mwood/deathpen.html) The fact that defendants can file numberless appeals also adds to the cost of the death penalty. Death penalty defendants cost taxpayers billions because they are usually defended by a lawyer who is paid for by the state. A death penalty case in California has been going on since 1989 when a 24 year old serial killer, Richard Ramirez, began his appeals. Experts suspect that he is “only about halfway through the appeals process” ending with his execution. If that process continues Ramirez “won’t be put to death until he is 71 years old-if he lives that long.”  (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/22/california-killers-sit-symbolic-death-row-decades-costing-billions/) The amount of taxpayer dollars spent on executions and the legal expenses leading up to them far exceeds the amount of money required for an individual to be placed in life-imprisonment.

Contention 3: Capital punishment has all but disappeared in the civilized world and is Unconstitutional in the United States.

Throughout the civilized world the death penalty has been rid of as a way to punish murderers. The United States is one of the few “civilized” countries to still use capital punishment. Under Amendment VIII, attached to the Constitution, no “cruel and unusual punishments” should be inflicted. The killing of an individual is cruel and the fact that capital punishment is not used in most civilized nations makes it unusual in our United States. This amendment helps define capital punishment or the killing of another human being as Unconstitutional.

In the end “[t]he death penalty brings neither peace nor healing to the uninjured parties and the resulting upheaval and re-victimization at all levels of its implementation have far greater consequences than are ever brought to light. As a society, we have to decide; do we perpetuate a system of punishment that is of questionable social value and can never be perfected, or do we remove its traumatizing impact from our criminal justice system altogether? The answer will in large measure define who we are as a people.” –Bill Jenkins, Father of Murdered Victim

So with these arguments we stand firmly against the resolution that Capital Punishment is moral, legal, and most of all that it should be used for justice in the United States.

Conservative Huh?

Here is an interesting part of an article my dad showed me from the Jackson Hole Daily.

It's the conservative in me that wishes we had an old-fashioned government jobs program, such as FDR's Works Progress Administration, which hired unemployed people to work to build roads, libraries, public toilets, hiking trails, tens of thousands of small useful projects.
-Garrison Keillor (Wednesday April 7, 2010,  Jackson Hole Daily)

Here's a question for you Mr. Keillor; what does a Government jobs program have to do with anything Conservative?  The government stepping in to make jobs is completely Liberal and even Progressive in nature.  Also, how do you say FDR and Conservative in the same sentance?  They are complete opposites, with FDR and his type desiring huge government being in control of the economy and Conservatives pushing for small government with private sector initiatives.  The conservative in you?  I beg to differ.

The Miracle of Liberalism

I found this intresting paper along with some of Grandpa Alf's journals.  I think it is very relavent to our day and what Liberals generally beleive even though it was probably written at least twenty years ago.  I had a good laugh after reading it. Enjoy. (You may have to click on the picture in order to read it.)