Obama beseiged

So the darling of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, has recently been catching flak for working out a neighborly relationship with Antoin Rezko, who has been indicted for plotting kickback schemes and swindling investors. Apparently Rezko owns a vacant lot adjacent to Obama’s house. Barack bought a chunk of it to extend his lot, and then Rezko built a $14,000 fence for him.

The only sin here is that of association between a legislator and an indicted fundraiser. Of course that association already existed: they’ve known each other since 1990 and Rezko has raised $60,000 in funds for Obama over a period of years. It’s a shame to see an apparently good guy like Obama get smeared with this sort of innuendo, but that’s politics. And sometimes there’s a fire beneath that smoke, so it’ll be interesting to see if anything more incriminating is revealed as reporters continue to dig.

For Barack, however, may be a kind of blessing. He gets this controversy out of the way 2 years before his possible Presidential run, and he gets a taste of the nastier side of politics, rather than the free ride he’s enjoyed for the past 2 years. That allows him to change his mind about his candidacy before he gets too far down the path.

One last thought on Obama: it’s a sad measure of today’s politics when the DNC had to reach that deep into the ranks to find a bright light for their party. …and that the RNC hasn’t yet found one at all.

Tomorrow’s thugs identified by kindergarten

I have mixed feelings about this article from the UK Independent: Tomorrow’s criminals can be identified by age of five. The article tells us that:

Children as young as five can be identified as tomorrow’s future criminals, depressives and drop-outs, says research produced for the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit.

Key factors in a child’s life – for example, whether they grow up in an overcrowded home, with parents who smoke or are unemployed – have a dramatic effect on their future prospects.
…
Children who were truants at age 10, who wet the bed, or who had fathers who showed a “dismissive attitude”, had a far higher chance of having problems later in life. Those with poor communication skills as children had worse prospects than keen talkers.

This seems to support the conservative view that strong families in a healthy economy are less likely to produce problem children than broken families in a welfare economy.

This part of the article, however, creeps me out:

The report underpins the Government’s decision to intervene to help children as soon as they are born.

I believe that a government should work to create and preserve an environment that nurtures strong families. But direct government intevention at birth? That’s the reductio ad absurdum of the nanny state.

UPDATE:

Junkyardblog has a somewhat related post on a call for euthanasia for disabled babies in the UK. How long after the government assumed responsibility for family structures would it be before they assumed responsibilities for decisions like this, as well?

On the legalization of marijuana

I generally support the legalization of marijuana, though I haven’t used it and don’t ever intend to start. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the subject, supporting my belief that making marijuana illegal has done more harm than good. But I won’t be voting for Colorado Proposition 44, which would legalize possession of 1 oz of marijuana for adults 21 and older.

Why not? Well, this sort of malarkey: Colorado pro-pot ads target Bush and Cheney.

They’ve now turned it into a partisan issue, rather than just a moral/legal issue, and I don’t much feel like enabling that.

UPDATE:

I notice that SobekPundit is facing a similar initiative in Nevada.