Recently I started reading The Forgotten Man and was struck with some of the similarities between the Hoover and Obama presidencies. I was also struck how both administrations have been stuck by unintended consequences. The Smoot”“Hawley Tariff Act was supposed to protect American jobs and farmers. The unintended consequence was that it reduced exports dramatically and generally blamed as one of the leading causes of the Great Depression. The Obama policies during the first two years seem to have generated similar unintended consequences. The stimulus package was supposed to create jobs and lead us out of the recession. The unintended effect is the near panic over the size of the deficit and the size of government spending. Although the Obama administration has talked the talk about jobs, the actions by the EPA and the Drilling Moratorium have been unintended job killers. The longer we go without a jobs recovery the more likely we are going to Hoover comparisons and posts like Mister, we’ve got a man just like Herbert Hoover again…

I woke up this morning thinking about Proposition 8 and jury duty. The people in California were asked to make a judgment on the definition of marriage and they did. Judge Walker has determined as his principle fact that “Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples”.

If there are so many people in California displaying this irrational behavior, how does Judge Walker plan to select a jury? It is without reason to assume that jurors’ will not involve their private moral views in their deliberations of serious crimes. Having served on juries in the past I can say that private moral views play important part in the decision making and the jury selection. In one jury selection process I was asked by the prosecutors if I had a “moral” problem with handing out a death sentence. In the Proposition 8 case Judge Walker has chosen to denigrate a vary large group people who exercised their civic duty in good faith. There is no middle ground on his disdain for this group of prospective jurors. It is truly ironic that shortly he will be calling on this group of irrational citizens to fill his juries. I suspect that these Californians are now wondering if they are incapable of making the “correct” decision on something as simple as the definition of marriage, how can anyone presume they can make a decision on the crimes of murder or theft?