satyadasa

Crossposted from Facebook: Take A Stand

2008 Presidential Candidates: Obama. He's the only candidate in my lifetime whose election has the potential to facilitate a change in the culture of the Democratic Party towards left libertarianism - the principle that the coercive powers of both government and corporations need to be limited by a strong emphasis on the Constitution. He is also the only candidate who qualifies as a member of the religious left - someone who acknowledges and embodies that principles of faith have positive transformational potential in the fight against injustice - without privileging one religion or enshrining false interpretations of religion in our social law.

Party: Reluctantly Democratic. If the party transforms how I want it to under the leadership of Barack Obama, then I will be less reluctantly Democratic. I am a transnationalist left libertarian and there is no transnationalist left libertarian party.

( See my transnationlist religious secularist left libertarian answers below )

Somehow missed in the debate about whether or not Senator Barack Obama is African American (those who say he is not argue that, not having ancestors who were enslaved on the American continent in the 17th through 19th centuries, Obama does not share genealogically in the legacy of slavery)₁:

His wife of fifteen years and his two daughters certainly do.

family ≠ ancestors only
kinship ≠ genetics
identity ≠ identity_ancestor1 + identity_ancestor2 + ...

According to a study by the Institute for Competitive Government, the 2005-2006 New York state budget included $2.6 billion of funding allocated to state legislators' projects through Memoranda of Understanding, agreed to and signed by the Governor, Senate Majority Leader, and Assembly Speaker, without public input or legislative approval.

Unsurprisingly, like all other state funding, it is unevenly distributed across the state, with New York City getting comparatively much less.

"City residents get an average of $29 in extra capital spending per person, while those in Albany and Dutchess counties netted about $1,000 per capita. Bronx residents received $28 per person in the analysis, which examined appropriations by individual state lawmakers from 1997 to 2005" (Norwood News, April 6-19, 2006).