The Eversons - I’m a Conservative

[“New Zealand’s answer to Pavement.” Bandcamp.]

So I’m not usually one to hop on the small-government bandwagon. No, I believe in a positive role for government, a healthy regulatory state, and I’m not too keen on drowning anything in my bathtub.

But sometimes, the state just goes too far…

• Like banning toe-shoes from military training. Those stodgy old coots. ;-)
• Or the Fed unexpectedly doubling the cap on card swipe fees, meekly succumbing to the pressures of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. (A trite truism these days, it seems. But it does force you to reconsider those loony, conspiratorial Ron Paul Fed-heads…)
• How about the classic punching-bag of government overreach (and deservedly so), the TSA? At this point, it’s like beating a dead horse… Another day, another story. If it’s not an elderly woman being unnecessarily humiliated to ensure our sense of public safety, then it’s this Nigerian fellow flying unticketed from JFK to LAX. He somehow cleared security screening (I imagine they were too busy checking adult diapers to notice), and “it wasn’t until after the flight took off that attendants realized an extra passenger was on board… Crew members asked Noibi for his boarding pass and, after hesitating, he handed over a boarding pass from the day before… That boarding pass had another person’s name on it… The man whose name was on the boarding pass later told FBI officials that the document had disappeared from his back pocket when he arrived at JFK International Airport on June 23… On arrival in Los Angeles, Noibi left the airport without being detained… He was arrested after he returned to LAX on Wednesday and attempted to board a Delta flight bound for Atlanta, again using an expired boarding pass… A search of Noibi’s bags at LAX turned up more than 10 boarding passes with various individuals’ names, none of which were his own, FBI officials said.” Excellent. Well, it’s good to know that all those civil liberties we surrendered (to say nothing of the inconvenience, expense, and all-around ridiculousness of our national security-theater) have not all gone for naught. Good to know these invasive, intrusive security measures are effective, at very least, and that they won’t need to be heightened in light of this most recent event. :-/
• But here’s the kicker. Yet another in a long list of brilliantly contradictory positions highlighting the rift between the moralistic, Christian-conservative evangelical bloc of the Republican party and their libertarian, laissez-faire, free-market, corporatist backers. A new law that intends to heavily regulate women’s health clinics is threatening to put all such providers out of business in the state of Kansas. Currently, a single one remains open due to a legal injunction while it appeals the new rules, having previously been denied its license to operate.

The rules require changes to the size and number of rooms, compel clinics to have additional supplies on hand, and even mandate room temperatures for the facilities. Given that the rules were released less than two weeks before clinics were expected to be in compliance, many providers knew they wouldn’t be able to obtain a license to continue operating. The laws, often called “targeted regulation of abortion providers,” or TRAP laws, are an increasingly common legislative maneuver to limit access to abortion by redering it tough, if not impossible, for providers to comply.

Room temperatures? Really? And given only 10 days to comply? And here I thought Republicans didn’t approve of unduly burdening the market with regulation…