Gay Marriage

Commentary on "Why just a man and a woman?!" by Miriam Yarber

It is very sad that here in America, here in the land of “freedom” not everyone has the same rights. Homosexual people still cannot get married in the majority of the states.
I don’t see why the government can’t grant this right to everyone, we all deserve to have the same rights, homosexual people also deserve to be happy and have a normal life.
They did not choose to have the sexual preference they have, neither heterosexual people nor bisexual people. The government should not uphold traditional values. Societies change, people change. It is not the government business to decide who gets married and who does not or what social values we should follow. We should have freedom to do whatever we want as long as we don’t hurt other people or ourselves. Marriage has to be a right for everyone. I just can’t believe that this is happening in the year 2008 in this country. I could have understood if this situation was happening 100 years ago or in other countries where people don’t even have the right to marry the person they want to marry.
But here in America? Year 2008? It is unbelievable. We all should wake up and realize how ridiculous it is that some people cannot get married and that discrimination still exists and not everybody has the same rights.
We have to understand that diversity exists, and we should tolerate each other in order to stand united as a society and to move forward.

An unconstitutional bill

The White House and leaders on Capitol Hill announced a suppose compromise on a domestic spying bill. According to President Bush and his allies, this bill will be an indispensable tool for protecting the nation’s security but “still” safeguards our civil liberties. Of course this is not possible; spying but at the same time safeguarding our civil liberties?

Some other members of Congress are opposed to this bill because they believe that many of its provisions are unnecessary, unclear and the bill will threat to the bill of rights.

After September 11, 2001 Mr. Bush bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize the interception of international calls and e-mail messages without a warrant.

The FISA is an act that requires the government to get a warrant to intercept between anyone in this country and everyone outside it. But now it doesn’t require a warrant for a limited time.

This bill has some problems. It gives the government too much freedom to acquire communications in the United States without individual warrants or even a showing of probable cause. It greatly reduces judicial review, and it would remain in force for six years, which is too long.

Congress should oppose to pass this bill. It violates the fourth amendment of the bill of rights because all of this is unreasonable search and seizure.

We have the right to have privacy. The government must not watch everything we do because that would be a threat to our liberty. Passing this bill would be unconstitutional.

Food Safety Planning

In the article, Now it’s tomatoes, the author writes about the last week’s tomato salmonella outbreak that have infected many people in the US. More than 160 people have been sickened, and at least 23 of them hospitalized from eating tomatoes since mid-April. The government has been tracking the strain of this problem but the source of this problem is still unknown.
The author argues that since last year’s problems with spinach, peanut butter and imported sea food, Congress and the Bush administration promised to a lot more to ensure the safety of food supply, but they haven’t done nearly enough.
Food-safety bills have been moving along far too slowly on Capitol Hill. This tells us that the government is not doing a good job protecting us. Most of the foods in the markets are imported and the government does not have an efficient “trace-back system”, we don’t know exactly where our food comes from. The tomato scare pushed the administration into asking for an additional $125 million for the Food and Drug Administration’s food-safety programs to hire more inspectors and to make a stronger “trace-back system” in order to identify the source of contamination quickly.
Hopefully with this additional money to the Food and Drug Administration we will be more protected because we need to improve our food-safety programs.
We need much better protection and the government should not wait until the next food scare before taking action in this issue.
Solving this problem is a priority. I believe our government must take serious action because if we don’t know exactly where all the food come from. Then we have a serious problem.

Politics and Hunger

(Commentary and Analysis of the editorial Politics and Hunger)

According with this editorial, the sky-high prices on food are a threat to 100 million more people who are falling into poverty. Over the past year, the prices of grains, vegetable oil have nearly doubled and rice has jumped by about half. The causes of this are the high energy costs, drought in big agricultural producers and big demand by the rising middle class in China and India.

But, the main point of the person who wrote this editorial is the “misguided mandates and subsidies in the United States and Europe to produce energy from crops. This is playing a very important role in the soaring prices of crops.

I believe that this is the main reason of the prices that we now have for corn and other crops. The International Monetary Fund estimated that biofuels (mainly corn ethanol) accounted for almost half the growth in the demand for major food crops last year, about a third of this country’s corn crop will go to ethanol this year. At a summit meeting held in Rome last week, the Bush administration said that the ethanol is playing a very small role in rising food prices. The U.S. was not the only country in denying that biofuels have something to do with the high prices of food. Of course the wealthy nations will not speak about this issue, and they are not going to tell the truth about what is really happening.

The world’s economy is in crisis, the good times of surpluses are gone, and the economy is suffering. We are running out of oil and we don’t have any idea of what is going to happen. Our government along with other wealthy nations such as the European countries and Brazil are looking for alternative fuels.

A good candidate is ethanol, but if the world uses ethanol in the future as fuel. The price of corn and other grains are going to go sky-high and this is going create more poverty in the world. The government should worry about the food prices and the poverty of the world that we are going to have in the future more than the fuels that we are going to use.

Democratic Primary Boosts U.S. Image Around the World

Even tough there is an anti-US sentiment in many nations and our nation's image abroad has been seriously damaged. People outside the U.S. still have been following the U.S. elections. Some people say that with Obama’s victory in the Democratic primaries, the image that the United States has is going to change for a good. I think this optimistic belief that people outside the U.S. and some in the U.S. have is only because if he wins the presidency he would be the first African-American president in the history of the United States. Race is an issue in this situation.
The world wants a big change. But I don’t see why race, religion or genders have to do with a positive change.
People must focus only on the candidates abilities.

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