Politics

In only a few weeks Hoosiers will be able to vote on who should be their representative in Washington, and the Hoosiers of the fourth district still haven't witnessed a debate between Steve Buyer, our current representative, and Dr. David Sanders, the Democratic challenger. Dr. Sanders has invited Mr. Buyer to hold a debate between the two so that the voters of the fourth district can make an informed decision this election. But Steve Buyer has not accepted Dr. Sanders' invitation for an open and honest debate.

A voter has to ask why would Mr. Buyer not be willing to debate? There could be one reason why he has refused to debate Dr. Sanders: he's afraid to face the facts and take responsibility for what he's done as chair of the Veterans' Affairs Committee.

As I've helped Dr. Sanders' campaign, I keep learning more and more about how Mr. Buyer, as chair of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, has done more harm than good to the Veterans of our great nation. Mr. Buyer has done such harm that nearly every veteran, minus Mr. Buyer himself, hates the job he's doing.

I learned quite a bit about the horrible job Mr. Buyer is doing this past Monday, September 25th, when former Senator Max Cleland spoke in support of Dr. Sanders. From what Senator Cleland stated: Mr. Buyer has continually refused to allow veterans' organizations created by Congress to testify before Congress, has failed to equip the VA with proper funding for the veterans that are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and has continuously supported cuts to the benefits that we have promised our veterans.

Perhaps that's why Mr. Buyer has not accepted Dr. Sanders' invitation to a debate--he's afraid the truth will be known that he genuinely does not support our troops.

My, oh my. My education about government must be sorely lacking, because the FCC has just created a new tax for VoIP to PSTN providers. Who knows why they did that, but it defies my understanding of the US government. I thought the Constitution gave only the legislative branch the power to levy taxes?

That opens up another question too: do the broadcasters that get fined for obscenity by the FCC get their day in court before a judge?

If this stuff becomes more common, I'll need a new category on this blog called "Government Going Down the Crapper" or should that be "Government Is a Crapper...Throw Your Money In"?

One of my brother's passed along Joseph Sobran's The Commandments of Men. It's something that I agree with since I can't understand how liberty can be maintained after centuries of legislation. Mr. Sobran gets it right when he says:

...Keeping the Ten Commandments, or even all 613 commandments of the Torah (or Pentateuch), isn't enough to protect you from the wrath of the state, which is constantly adding thousands of new commandments of its own--"incessantly engaged in legislation", as C.S. Lewis once put it.

That's a lot of threats. At what point will we have enough of them? This question is seldom asked, since all parties agree that we need more threats (alias "laws") and the idea that we already have enough, or too many, and that some should be repealed, is inadmissible.

Though I disagree that the Commandments would make good laws, I do agree that having a single set of unchanging laws would be better at protecting liberty than any legislator. I only long for the day when the Rule of [Natural] Law prevails.

Note: This was published a while back in the Daily Journal. John Auld, Jr. is the president of the Partnership for a Healthier Johnson County and had previously wrote a letter to the editor citing examples of how the definition of freedom has supposedly changed throughout time. His argument went through those examples, and then he took the leap that smoking bans are a new evolution of freedom. This is my reply:

John Auld, Jr. and the Partnership for a Healthier Johnson County have a single goal: to destroy Freedom. That should be apparent from the letter of his that was published on March 22nd. He employed one of the tools that all destroyers of Freedom have always used: redefining the word.

That's one of the observations of F.A. Hayek in his Road to Serfdom. He described the “new freedom” that the socialists of the early 20th century in Europe called for and achieved. Their “new freedom” was another name for the equal distribution of wealth, and not the definition known to the great apostles of political freedom: “...the word [freedom] meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the invidividual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached.”

I'll leave it to the historians to describe the affects of the “new freedom” that swept Europe in the early 20th century. I will state that it gave the National Socialists and Fascists of Europe the tools and intellectual climate to commit the atrocities for which they are remembered.

Mr. Auld isn't calling for the “new freedom” of the socialists, but the consequences of his “new freedom” would end with the same result. Mr. Auld wants to be free from the responsibility of his choices, of his consciousness, of his free will, of his liberty. He and his fellow crusaders want to forfeit their liberty to other men in the name of safety and security. They have cloaked their hatred for liberty under the guise of the right to clean air.

They argue that they have a right to clean air, and that it's a violation of their life if they're “forced” to eat or work at a smokey restaurant. Nevermind that they chose to stay when they were asked for smoking or non-smoking. Nevermind that Mr. Auld's Partnership's web site links to a directory of smoke free restaurants. Nevermind that the coercive force of government was not standing on call to ensure that they did not leave. Nevermind that I would also have the right to eat a meal in a smoke filled restaurant.

Yes! If people have a right to breath clean air out in public then I also have a right to breath smokey, carcinogen, tar filled air out in public as well. I was not forced to breath one or the other, until now.
The fundamental right that gives me that choice is liberty, and I had the liberty to determine what kind of air I wanted to breath. Apparently that responsibility was to great for Mr. Auld and his fellow crusaders.

They obviously do not possess the integrity to choose between clean air or a mouth watering steak at the local pub so they went running to our governments. The same governments that pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisble, with liberty and justice for all.

CNet just ran an article about the cable companies' day in Washington. While I sympathize with statements like "I don't think the government should be coming and telling us how we can work that infrastructure, simple as that", the cable and phone companies' arguments still smell of bullshit.

That's because I'm over on one of their networks and Google is way over on some body else's. How exactly do the operators of my network extort money from a customer on someone else's network without pissing off the guy in the middle?

I can see it now:

Midnet

One of customer's is reporting that their site is being blocked on your network

AT&Time Warner

Yeah, they were using to much of our bandwidth because our users really really like them. We asked them to fork over some money before we restore service.

Midnet

Yeah, but you agreed that between us, whoever had the most data coming out of their network would be the ones paying that month.

AT&Time Warner

Umm...

Midnet

I just paid you for all that data my users sent. Now you go and block data coming out of my network, charge me for it, and extort my customer to pay you even more!

AT&Time Warner

Ain't this a happy little game? [Thinks: Thank god none of our users produce content.]

I'm reading about the IP Protection Act of 2006 on CNet. There's a paragraph that describes provision 1201 of the DMCA: "Section 1201 of the law generally prohibits distributing or trafficking in any software or hardware that can be used to bypass copy-protection devices."

The proposed law is supposed to beef that provision up, but I'm left wondering. Does that provision cover pencils, paints, guitars, cameras, and compilers? The very tools used for creation?

Another question is also nagging me. I program. I write. I also used to draw and paint. In other words I create. Why do things like the DMCA and the above bill leave a bad taste in my mouth?

This is an email I just sent to the TSA:

Hello,

I flew to Newark yesterday and got stuck there for 4 hours waiting for my flight back home. I smoke and Newark has zero lounges to smoke in after you go through the check point. That forced me to go through the checkpoint at least twice.

My boarding pass also got flagged for your special screening plus pat down. It was a little surprising at first, but completely unexpected the second time I went through seeing how they already did it.

There's two problems here: the lack of smoking areas behind checkpoints and when passengers are selected to get the special treatment. The first is fairly easy to fix, and it should be addressed since I had the same issue at Indianapolis before I went on my first flight.

The second one is a true security issue. I now know how my boarding pass gets marked for the special treatment, SSSS. Suppose that a friend and I were plotting to bring some explosives on board. One of us gets the SSSS on our boarding pass and so we swap bags.

The one with the SSSS would get the special treatment every single time he went through, but the other one w/o the SSSS would just walk through the metal detector and xray machine. His bags would never ever have the possibility of getting swabbed down for explosives.

The problem is that the random selection happened at check in, and not at the security check point. This issue could be corrected if the TSA agents had some random counter or something that told them to pull this bag and person over. This would result in a greater percentage of passengers getting the special treatment.

The above would have eliminated the duplicated effort expended on me while at the same time making the swab down and frisk more effective by not wasting it on smokers who are forced to go in and out.

Before Sen. Mike DeWine's (R-Ohio) law banning the disclosing of spy programs, I thought I should disclose every single spy program that has, does, and will exist. Here I go:

The government is listening to you when you talk on the phone; over the Internet; to anyone you know, domestically and internationally; and even inside your house. The government is reading your email, snail mail, blog, and even papers at your home when you're not there. If you wrote it, the government has read it. They're also reading everything you've read and listening to everything you've heard. They know who you know, what you buy, sold, make, and do on every minute of every day. They even have satellites that'll read your brain waves. They have enough information to become you!!

So don't think, they'll know!!

Last night I attended a Greenwood city council meeting in which a smoking ban was presented. It was one of those experiences where I saw first hand the problems with our nation. The problem isn't the myraid number of issues facing our governments, but the simple fact that principled people are hard to come by.

Only one member of the council, Ron Deer, took a principled stand against the ban. Practically everyone else in the room was in favor of the ban, in favor of using the government to coerce smokers. The mayor even suggested that tobacco should be made illegal, hinting to his lack of integrity.

I'm left wondering how people who do not hold rational princples can be persuaded with a principled argument? It also begs to ask why our schools fail to turn out principled people?

With the antics of Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and others getting attention in the mainstream media, there's been a call to reform Washington to remove the influence of special interests. Most of the proposed fixes have focused on preventing members of Congress from receiving any money from special interests. Such fixes are basically band-aids to patch up the loopholes in widespread use. Any proposed band-aid will fail to correct this problem permanently by not addressing the underlying causes.

Three reasons come to mind why someone would want to pay off a government official. The reasons are that they seek to preserve or increase our freedoms, to restrict our freedoms, or to get at a piece of someone else's pie.

People who are in Washington for the first reason are the only honorable lobbyists. These are groups that our trying to actually preserve our freedoms. Two prime examples from this group are the tobacco and gun lobbies. They may not be the most glittering examples, both are in Washington trying to counteract the push to make their respective products illegal or so restrictive they might as well be illegal.

The gun and tobacco lobbies are a direct result of the people who are in Washington for the second reason: people who want to restrict our freedoms. Just as there are people trying to preserve our freedoms, there are people in Washington trying to do the opposite by making it illegal or extremely inconvienent to do or own something. People in this group are either anti-something or another, assuming they're not double-speakers, or in a business in which they want to shut down or prevent competition.

The final reason could be the biggest: people seeking a piece of someone else's pie. These are the envious pull-peddlers that live according to Robin Hood ideals. Lobbyists for this group seek the right to take money from one group and possibly give it out to another. It's not just the poor seeking unearned money. This group extends the entire spectrum of Americans: rich, poor, elderly, middle class, farmers, employed, unemployed, incorporated, unionized, non-union, white, black, latino, etc. Any person who thinks they deserve a payout or break from the government that their neighbor or competitor does not.

The above reasons may not be exhaustive, but they explain why lobbyists have spilled out of the lobby and into entire blocks of Washington. If we want to remove them from Washington we'll have to do more than plugging up leaks as they appear. We have to fix the problem at the base by removing the reasons why they're in Washington in the first place. To do that our representatives must be prevented from passing laws that do not protect our natural rights or that cater to any one group. Only then will Washington become a smaller town.