President Obama is off to a fast start...

First he orders the Guantanamo Bay prison closed, which raises an issue of where to place the hundreds of prisoners still there as well as the legal status of those imprisoned. Both are questions his administration needs to address rather quickly.

My feelings on this are mixed. My issue with President Bush's decision to imprison the Taliban and Al Queda fighters there is that they were not properly classified as Prisoners of War, which they surely are. Asymmetrical warfare is still warfare no matter how unconventional it is. Terrorism is definitely a method of achieving a political end by violent means.

What has irritated me about the whole controversy is the idea that this has somehow "tainted" the moral standing of the United States in the eyes of the world.

Um, what?

So I guess the Vietnam War, several interventions in other countries affairs, and general irresponsible international behavior over the past 50 years did not accomplish this, but torturing a few terrorists did.

Neither the US nor any other country in the world has "moral standing". There is no such thing as morality in a world that stands idly by while hundreds die each day as the result of murderous machete wielding mobs or as a people are "ethnically cleansed" from an area by a rival ethnic group.

His second act was to lift the so called "global gag rule" or "Mexico City Policy" as labeled by proponents of the law, which had disallowed funding to go to groups that advocated abortion as an option to poorer women around the globe.

While I believe that it is a woman's choice to abort a fetus, I cannot condone US taxpayers money going to fund either side of this debate. It isn't the United States job to be helping poor women in Bangladesh or some other third world nation, with birth control. If private organizations want to, so be it. But US taxpayers dollars should not be used for it. We have enough problems at home to deal with. The United States Government needs to trim alot of fat and this is one area that should definitely be cut.

These two initial acts of his Presidency were designed to sooth his left wing supporters who in the weeks leading up to his inauguration expressed concerns over his reaching out to conservatives. What remains to be seen is whether these actions are just the beginning of a permanent swing to the left or a pragmatic approach to governance that will address the concerns of both sides of the political divide.