Showing Respect For
The New President

By Anthony Leone

Maybe it’s a generational thing. The previous generation was fighting two unpopular wars: A combat one in Vietnam and a Civil Rights battle on the home front.

More than 40 years ago, that young generation was split between showing respect for the establishment or spitting in its eye.

And as time went by, it seems as if each new generation grew bolder in showing disrespect and discontent with elected leaders to the point where it goes beyond petty remarks to downright nasty comments.

Sadly, it’s just not appalling remarks, but the attitude towards a president or any elected official. These new attitudes have become increasingly brazen and shameful in recent years.

Many Americans, sadly, were atrocious and downright mean to President Bush these last eight years, as a recent example. They’ve called him stupid, a murderer and a warmonger, with little regard to the fact that he is the President of the United States of America. Many of these same people have childishly said that he is not their president because they did not elect him.

And sadly, this childish demeanor has unjustly been aimed at President-Elect Barack Obama. Because certain people cannot see beyond either his skin color or simply his political beliefs, they have already said that he is not their president.

And this type of ignorance is being spread far and wide, from liberals to conservatives, to voters and politicians and vice versa. It's the increasing political bias of the people that is creating this near socially accepted disrespect for any elected official.

Believe it or not, there was once a time in this country when saying a discouraging word about any U.S. president would result in a bloody nose by anyone, despite his party affiliation.

But where is that respect now? We must respect whoever is in office, whether we have voted for that person or not. Yes, we can disagree with the president. We would not be called Americans if we refused our First Amendment rights if we kept silent about things we do not agree with. It was not what our Forefathers fought for.

However, there is a strong, bold line between disagreeing and being disrespectful. We must bring back that level of respect to our elected officials, especially the ones we disagree with most. It just furthers hateful feelings and severely slows the healing process this country desperately needs.

So I welcome, respect and honor Barack Obama as my new president. But I will also respectfully disagree with any of his policies, decisions and so forth.

Hopefully, all of my fellow Americans will do the same in welcoming Barack Obama into the White House as commander-in-chief. After all, it’s the respectful thing to do.

Teaching Children About 9/11

By Anthony Leone

One of the few devastating dates in American history that will forever be burned in our history books and in our hearts and minds is Sept. 11.

Today, many are reliving the nightmare of seven years ago and are sharing personal stories of where they were when they discovered that their nation was being attacked and what they were doing at that very moment.

But there are a group of Americans who do not know what happened on Sept. 11 because they were either too young to remember or comprehend the day’s events or were not even born.

That is why it’s important that we teach America’s children and youth about the importance of this day and what it truly means to be an American, with all of the glories, sorrows, duties and responsibilities that are attached to being a citizen of this great nation.

While young children may not fully understand the complexities of the horrific events that occurred or how it changed our lives or forced this country to go into war with the enemy, they still need to know the importance of what went on.

Explaining it in simple ways that children can understand will help them grasp the meaning of 9/11. While just labeling “terrorists” as “bad guys,” may seem like sugarcoating what they truly are, it will help a 6-year-old boy or girl to know what happened.

Some parents will feel that explaining to a young child that planes were used to destroy buildings or to kill thousands of innocent people is too harsh, then simply saying that the “bad guys” attacked this country might be enough to satisfy their curiosity until they are older to understand.

But children should also learn about the heroism that was displayed by the passengers and crew on Flight 93 and how their sacrifice saved countless lives. They are the embodiment of what it means to be an American and to be a hero.

Yes, the details of what happened in Shanksville, Pa., are not pleasant and it will be hard to explain it in children-friendly terms, but it simply needs to be taught to the children. It is a critical piece of education for them.

Just like it is important to explain to them how this country came together on 9/11 and how people, total strangers really but Americans nonetheless, from different states where going into New York City and Washington, D.C., to help with the rescue and relief operations.

Children need to learn about these modern-day heroes, because they are as legendary as the citizens who came together and fought against tyranny and for independence more than 200 years ago.

We must never forget what happened on this date and it is our duty that the next generation of this country does not forget either.

Palin Picked Because Of Sex?
By Anthony Leone

Who is Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin? She’s basically the counterpart of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Essentially, they’re the same: Very little political experience, both pretty young compared to their older partners and both are minorities, more or less.

Presumed Republican presidential candidate John McCain made a calculated risk that just might help him. He selected Palin just because she’s a woman and to attract the good number of Hillary supporters, especially women, who are still bitter that Obama got the Democratic nomination and not Hillary Clinton. Many have already joined McCain’s camp.

But what does Palin offer besides her female attributes? Actually, plenty. She has been elected to a city council, then a mayor and then onto the governor of Alaska. While not having much experience in the big political pond of Washington, D.C., she does have more experience than Obama when it comes to being a leader.

Obama has been in the Illinois Senate and a U.S. Senator, where he represented the people. Palin has held positions where she has led the people. That means that people voted for Palin to be their leader, which is a bigger responsibility than electing someone to represent you.

She has certainly worked very hard on the state level and even upset fellow Republicans when it was not in the best interest of the party. While appointed chairwoman of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, she investigated fellow commission chair and Republican Randy Ruedrich about breaking state ethics law. The result was that Ruedrich resigned and that he paid a $12,000 fine.

This and other incidences shows that Palin has what it takes to stand up to her own party in order to do what’s right. Certainly a very courageous talent that is desperately needed in Washington. This should make Republicans and Democrats shake in their boots, because Palin seems to be the type of leader that isn’t going to be intimidated by higher powers and she’ll easily adapt to the big changes that Washington has to offer.

Some have criticized McCain for choosing an inexperienced Palin to be his vice presidential running mate, because he has been attacking Obama on his inexperience. Certainly fair, however the difference is that it’s the experienced McCain who is running to be the president, not the inexperienced Palin. Certainly a big difference and it is an inexperienced Obama who is running for president.

But with her tough-as-nails leadership, even Palin must realize that there is only one reason why McCain picked her over veteran politicians who are more familiar with the goings on of Washington.

The question is: Is Palin OK that McCain is using her sex to help him win female voters and the election? That and many similar sex-base questions are certainly going to bombard the Republican duo and they should be asked. After all, Palin seems almost perfect to counteract a biracial Obama. He will certainly get a lot of the black vote, while Palin can help with getting the women vote.

It does seem to be blatantly obvious why McCain singled out Palin to be his vice presidential running mate and a slick political move. It's clearly a desperate attempt by McCain to unseat Obama's growing chances of winning the White House.

It is a shame that Palin is not solely chosen for her impressive, but limited political leadership. Only time will tell if this was a wise political move on McCain's part come November.

Washington Post Columnist Misfires Over Gun Safety

By Anthony Leone

In a column that appeared in last Sunday’s Washington Post, Arthur Kellermann blasts Justice Antonin Scalia’s assertion that keeping a handgun will protect the homeowner from burglars.

In the Justice’s opinion in the recent Supreme Court’s decision that the Washington, D.C., gun ban was unconstitutional, he wrote that a handgun can “… be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police.”

Kellermann, a professor of emergency medicine and public health at Emory University in Atlanta, offered the following in his column: That owning a gun is not a good deterrent to criminals, there are few cases that guns are used in self defense, that guns are used to commit suicide, and that Scalia’s scenario of holding a gun in one hand and using the other to call the police is “ludicrous.”

But let’s take these one at a time. Kellermann maintains that in a study that he conducted more than 20 years ago shows that more people actually shoot themselves or their loved ones than the actual criminal in the Seattle area. Thus, he maintains, “… that the risks of keeping a loaded gun in the home strongly outweigh the potential benefits.”

However, in the 1995 article, “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun,” by Gary Kleck, Ph.D., from the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University, showed that “about 1.5 to 1.9 million” cases of people defending themselves from criminals by using their handguns. That doesn’t sound like a few cases of self defense. In fact, that sounds like a lot of potential benefits.

While Kleck’s critics say that his numbers are too high compared to other studies, he maintains that some of those studies do not include people who used a gun as a deterrent and not firing it, among other things. Kleck also mentions in his article that other studies that show much fewer cases of people defending themselves with firearms are only low because of poor-questioning and fact-finding methods.

But Kleck is not the only one with criticisms in his studies. In a 1997 Reason Magazine article, it alleges that Kellermann is guilty of excluding critical information in his anti-gun studies, such as in one study, Kellermann, according to the article, left out incidents where guns actually deterred criminals. The article also claims that Kellermann is also guilty of misusing other people’s studies to support his biased views and that he refuses to give his full data to back up his studies. The magazine is not the only publication that question’s Kellermann’s objectiveness.

In an article in a 1995 issue of Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Daniel D. Polsby mirrored Reason Magazine’s allegations that Kellermann does not provide data of his studies for review. Polsby is the Dean and Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University in Arlington, Va.


And while Kellermann maintains that there are few cases of guns used in self defense, if one goes to the blogs Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog and Gun Watch, one will find nearly daily updated news stories of citizens using their guns to protect themselves and others. Obviously, these news articles and blogs are not peer-reviewed cases, but they are hard to ignore and certainly puts a sizable bullet hole in the notion that very few people use their firearms for protection.

Kellermann states that many people use guns to commit suicide. Sadly, the reality is if someone who is truly unhappy with his or her life, that person will find anyway to end it.
In Japan, where the country has a strict gun ban, many people are committing suicide by using the latest popular method of mixing common household cleaners and breathing in the fumes.

The sad truth is people will find any means to end their life. Going after the cause of a person’s suicide and treating it is far more productive than demonizing one particular method used to commit suicide.

Finally, we come to Kellermann’s attack on Justice Scalia’s scenario.

“Scalia’s ludicrous vision of a little old lady clutching a handgun in one hand while dialing 911 with the other (try it sometime) doesn’t fit the facts,” Kellermann wrote.

However, that’s exactly what happened to 80-year-old Phyllis Friesen, as reported by the Ravalli Republic.

One evening, Friesen, of Sula, Mont., woke up to a man ransacking her cabin, where she lives alone. When she asked the man what he was doing, he didn’t answer and continued with his destruction. That’s when Friesen went into her bedroom and pulled out her .357 pistol and dialed 911.

“It wasn’t as frightening as it would have been if I didn’t have the gun,” she told the Ravalli Republic.

The police came and took the intruder away. But according to Kellermann, even though this case clearly illustrates Scalia’s scenario, he would call this ludicrous.

Now the reality is people will misuse guns, either intentionally or unintentionally. Accidents will happen. And another truth is that criminals break laws. If they didn’t, we would not call them lawbreakers.

Yet Kellermann maintains that owning a gun is a public health risk. But for more than 30 years, Washington, D.C., had a gun ban which resulted in very high crimes and deaths by criminals who still got their hands on guns.

However, it’s not a public health risk for an honest citizen to own a gun to defend one’s self, but it is a public health risk to create laws that benefit the criminals more than the people. To think otherwise would be ludicrous.

Supreme Court Takes Second Amendment Out Of D.C.’s Crosshairs

By Anthony Leone

Many Second Amendment supporters are cheering as the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the nation’s capital had no right to restrict honest citizens from owning hand guns.

The controversial 32-year-old ban was held by gun control advocates as the ultimate, yet delusional, weapon to preventing crime and something that the rest of the nation should be doing.

However, the advocates always became silent when people mentioned how dangerous Washington, D.C. was because of the ban. This is because the ban did not stop criminals from obtaining guns from different areas and bringing them into the nation’s capital.

But this bit of common sense was lost to leading gun control advocate Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who said this about the ruling:

“I believe the people of this great country will be less safe because of it.”

And this is despite the fact that Washington, D.C., was once this nation’s murder capital. Apparently, Feinstein had her fingers in her ears on her way into the Senate during this time.

Many people are pleased with the ruling, because now honest citizens can start defending themselves against lawbreakers who do not follow the rules, hence their name, lawbreakers.

People like Feinstein do not have a clue as to what is really happening in places that have gun control. England has a strict gun ban and all it resulted are criminals still using guns or knifes to rob and murder their defenseless victims.

A dose of reality is needed for those who honestly believe that restricting decent Americans of their Second Amendment rights is a way to handle crime. And another dose is needed for those who believe that adding another law on top of similar ones will help matters.

Let’s enforce the laws that we have now and make sure that the criminals are punished and not honest folks.

Maybe if politicians like Feinstein did something about the crime in Washington, D.C., then law-abiding citizens would not have the need to purchase firearms to protect themselves.

Kucinich’s Impeachment Quest May Hurt Obama’s White House Bid

By Anthony Leone

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush. But his quest to remove the President from office may hurt presumed Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s own quest to win the 2008 election.

What was the reaction by his fellow Democrats? They pretty much opposed the former presidential candidate’s futile efforts. In fact, Democratic leaders are expected to table the resolution by referring it to the Judiciary Committee, where they hope it will be buried and forgotten.

The articles deals with such things as the Iraq war, global warming, allegedly holding American citizens and “foreign captives” (let’s call them terrorists) illegally, voting rights, and President Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, just to name a few. But let’s focus on the Iraq war.

Now, let’s forget a few things about why the impeachment will fail, such as how the U.N. never enforced its own resolutions against former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, so no one knew if he really had his weapons of mass destruction. Or that the U.N. voted in agreement to the resolution that Saddam still had WMD.

Or how former President Bill Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox to deal with Saddam’s weapons programs, after Iraq failed, again, to provide U.N. weapons inspectors with an honest account of them. Or how there were reports that Saddam shipped his WMD to Syria before the 2003 war.

But let’s remember that a great number of Democrats who said many times during the buildup of the war that Saddam was a danger to America and the world with his deadly weapons. Did they lie too? They saw the same information that the President saw. So, does that mean there will be an impeachment for Bush and the Democrats?

And more importantly, this will not only shatter Obama’s chances for the White House, but the Democrat’s as well. Why?

Obama was strongly against going into Iraq from the very start. And here is a speech he gave in October 2002 at an anti-war rally that will probably come back to haunt him:

“(Saddam) has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him,” the possible future president said nearly six years ago.

Now, if Kucinich’s goal is to get rid of President Bush from the White House, it could also rid the Democrats’ goal from getting into it.

This is why House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer and fellow Democrat and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have said that they would not pursue impeachment charges against the President. Because not only will it air the Democrat’s dirty laundry that a good number of them voted to give President Bush the power to go to war, but it will show how they are not unified if their presumed nominee was against going to war.

And more importantly, Obama’s speech is a huge weapon against him. He said that Saddam had WMD and knew that Saddam was a threat to the world and that U.N. resolutions were useless against the bloody dictator. But he didn’t think removing him was important enough for America’s safety.

Wow. What a thing to say. Because the Republicans can highlight this speech and point to Obama’s global inexperience and how he should not be the one to answer the phone about a national security threat at 3 a.m.

Granted, I believe the President should have handled the war better. He should have given the U.N. weapons inspectors a lot more time before considering military use. His administration should not have allowed retired generals and other former military leaders to sell the war to TV networks. But it still boils down to one thing: At the time, we found ourselves in a global terror war and we needed to know once and for all whether or not Saddam had those weapons. And because Kucinich opened up this can of worms, the Democrats are going to have a hard time putting the lid back on.

Kucinich is the little engine that shouldn’t. He either does not realize or care that he is sabotaging his party’s chances for the White House. And Kucinich is showing how ineffective Obama will be as a Commander-In-Chief.

Kucinich’s impeachment crusade is like Don Quixote’s battle with the windmill: There is nothing there that warrants these charges.

Solutions Needed To Help Troubled Youth

By Anthony Leone

Many around the world were shocked when they learned that a 25-year-old Japanese man allegedly used his truck to run down a group of people, jumped out of his vehicle and stabbed 18 people, killing seven in Tokyo.

In fact, knife attacks have become too familiar in Japan, once proud of its low crime rates. This past March, there was a random stabbing outside a train station in Tokyo and in January of this year, five people were hurt in another stabbing attack, reports Reuters.

Over in the United Kingdom, The Times did a feature article on teen-agers and how they deal with gangs and knife attacks, which are becoming too common. Just looking at someone the wrong way or telling another teen what town they are from can result in a “shanking” or stabbing.

The residents of the two countries believe they share a common link to the cause of crime: No one will listen to them.

The teen-agers in the United Kingdom claim that the police are accusatory towards them, especially towards black youths, and the Japanese believe that the family structure is deteriorating.

“Recently, peoples’ relationships have become strained,” 29-year-old Taishi Ikeda, of Japan, told Reuters in an interview. “There’s no-one to talk to when you’re troubled.”

Granted, there are many factors for the decline of society, such as economics, politics, trouble in the home, or just the individuals themselves. The list certainly goes on and on.

Trying to find a solution will not be easy for this problem. Knee-jerk reactions are not going to help, such as the one from Japan’s top government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura, who suggested tighter restrictions on obtaining survival knives, like the one allegedly used by the 25-year-old man.

Some people believed that tighter or even complete gun control in the United Kingdom and Japan would drastically reduced violent crime. However, it just made criminals seek out other weapons to harm or kill innocent citizens.

Either tougher new laws or enforcement of current laws can be productive in punishing criminals. However, more is needed to reach out to youths before they find their way into a dead end alley with a person holding a sharp instrument of death in his hand.

Politicians and police should make more of an effort to helping or improving social programs to keeping kids off the streets. They should also make sure that counselors are on hand to help discuss the problems that most young people, and even young adults, are facing.

But while we feel sorry for the terrible conditions that troubled youths and young adults find themselves in, it should not excuse any crimes that they commit. Wrong is wrong and it should be punished.

But there needs to be more recognition on the solutions to prevent these people from finding themselves in a hopeless situation.

Sure, there are many youths who do great good and go unnoticed. And it’s important to recognize the good deeds done by others to show us all that there is a lot of hope left in this world.

However, showing the negative is just as important, because it shows where we as a society and as a people are failing and how we need to address and fix these problems.