some dork

commentary on topical minutiae

A Civil Liberties Look At Obama’s First 100 Days

For the most part, I am with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on this one; the “first 100 days” is a Hallmark holiday hyped by the press and not of great import.  For the most part.

Theories of presidential power vary, but I see more than a degree of merit in theory that a president is most powerful the moment he is inaugurated.  Each day thereafter his power melts away and it becomes harder and harder to proceed with his initiatives.  Other pundits say the height of presidential power actually occurs near the end of the first year of the first term, once the president is comfortable with the levers of government.

Clearly these theories are susceptible to circumstance. One need look no further than George W. Bush, whose power was derived from 9/11, it being happenstance (ok, that’s debatable, but take the journey with me) that it occurred near the end of his first year.

I have become wise enough in my 35 odd years to understand that even if a concept is somewhat empty, if the masses are nattering about it, you ignore it at your own peril.  Thus I weigh in on my assessment of Obama’s first 100 days.

First, the obligatory disclaimer: to those of you who are not familiar with my political leanings, I like to get those up front and center before you read my screeds. I voted for Obama. I evaluated him as by far the most competent candidate this time around. Furthermore my vote was intended as a rebuke to the GOP, which blithely trod upon our civil rights as they ruined our country. Democrat I am most certainly not; I’m probably closest to the Libertarian party, but consider them a bit too extreme on too many issues to claim they can speak for me.

For the sake of brevity, I only intend to judge Obama’s record on civil liberties.  This is my most important issue; it heavily influences my voting behavior. In this category, I find Obama severely wanting. For me, Obama is running out of time to reverse the crimes against our Constitution our previous administration perpetrated. Sadly, I do not seem him doing so, in fact, he has gone so far as to expand upon them. If this trend continues, Obama may not receive my vote in 2012 (unless my only other viable choice is Palin, and it looks like she may actually pull it off).

In other areas (economic policy, foreign policy, the environment, et.al.) I am much happier with Obama and consider him to doing a fairly fine job. But the arena of civil liberties is my pet issue, so here goes:

Habeas Corpus

Things started off well.  The president issued an executive order to close the Guantanamo prison– our American gulag. Yet, so far this has been nothing more than a symbolic gesture. Guantanamo served as a bone for us civil libertarians to chew on to distraction while Obama did little else with our concerns.

To be fair, the second part of closing Gitmo is still in the works. Obama has ordered the Justice department to review the cases of all detainees and bring them to justice (or presumably release them). In effect, this represents an apparent return to habeas corpus, which his predecessor attempted to eradicate via Jose Padilla. Not only is Obama proceeding to charge and try American citizens, he is doing so for foreigners too. Isn’t it a relief to know that we have a government that no longer claims Americans can be imprisoned indefinately without trial? Right? Well, don’t start waving the Gadsen flag just yet…

Enter the case of yet another unlawful detainment, Ali Al-Marri. Like Padilla, was seized on U.S. soil.  He was detained for five years without being charged, let alone being brought to trial.  Now I agree that Al-Marri’s mullet is criminal, but I’m fairly certain the Constitution has an implied freedom of hairstyle (probably via the First Amendment).  Shortly after Obama took office, the government finally charged Al-Marri with a crime, thus ending the years of government abuse of power.

However, the Obama government charged Al-Marri in a deliberate attempt to sidestep a Supreme Court ruling on the lawfullness of Al-Marri’s detention. Basically the Obama legal team argued in front of the court that now they have charged Al-Marri with a crime that the court need to no longer consider the case of his unlawful detention because the charges rendered the case moot.  The court agreed.

So, thanks to the Obama administration, our right to a fair and speedy trial remains far less than what it was before the Bush administration took office. If we feel we are unlawfully detained, we have to wait for our appeals to reach the Supreme court, a process that takes years (5 in Al-Marri’s case, 3 and 1/2 in Padilla’s).  Is this the “right to a speedy and public trial” as guaranteed by our Constitution? I emphatically state that it is not.

Torture

Some may object to the torture topic being brought into a civil liberties discussion. After all, this issue centers around our interrogation techniques of suspected Al-Qaeda operatives. Well, tell that to Jose Padilla, who, when last I checked, is a citizen of the United States. Given that the Bush administration has asserted the right to declare anyone (including U.S. citizens) an enemy combatant, then yes, torture very much applies to domestic civil liberties.

As of late torture debate has devolved into an exercise in finger pointing. Sadly, this is starting to distract from a productive and crucial examination of the issue. Finger pointing is useless, as the real blame lies with all of us, the American voting public. As usual, Naomi Wolf states the case far better than I can. The torture techniques have been public knowledge for years, but not nearly enough of our citizenry gave a rat’s ass about it. We were happy to look the other way, and were guilty of the same willful ignorance we have blamed citizens of other countries for in the past. This is indeed a dark stain upon our freedom loving souls.

I applaud the Obama administration for releasing the legal memo and their attempts to justify the unjustifiable. With this act Obama essentially grabbed our heads and forced us to look into the mirror we has been so studiously avoiding for the past seven years.  Thank you sir for doing at least that. For that alone I am tempted to give you a pass on this entire issue. However, I cannot.

Digression: I laugh derisively at the GOP scolds who claim that releasing these memos is somehow a breach of national security because now the enemy can “train for them”. Karl Rove whined (8mins 15 seconds into video) that “..these techniques have now been ruined”. Sadly, thanks to the existence of such ilk as Fox News, this argument isn’t being laughed out of existence. These techniques were common knowledge, not just from released Gitmo prisoners, but even from reports from the International Red Cross, and from our own investigations of the Abu Graib scandal (which turned out to merely be the tip of the iceberg, not an isolated incident). Moreover, such an argument misses the point. It matters not that the techniques were exposed, what matters is that they were used in the first place.

Where Obama fails in his duty is his waffling stance on how far to follow the war crimes that have been committed. Make no mistake, the previous administration committed war crimes. The International Committee of the Red Cross (based in Geneva, Switzerland) has found our conduct to be torture; this is an international body we have cited to prosecute other nations for war crimes.  By our own standards (not Iran’s, not Venezuela’s, not Spain’s) war crimes have been committed.

Crimes require prosecution, no matter how painful and divisive it may be. Obama has shown little stomach for even an investigation into these crimes. This is an extremely dangerous position to take.

I understand that Obama has ended the practice of torture, and I fully trust that no one in his administration will allow this to happen under their watch.  However, by not prosecuting these crimes, there is no deterrent for another president to come along and resume the torture program.  Unless Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are thrown in jail, any future president may be happy to start torturing again.  If you find my argument fantastic, look no further than our previous administration.

In the wake of Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford pardoned him and others of any crimes committed surrounding the Watergate scandal. Nixon, another president who committed crimes, essentially got away with his crimes. This contributed to the brazen abuse of power for the Bush administration (remember Cheney served in the Nixon administration). The only precedent of consequence for law breaking was a presidential resignation– and Nixon was dumb enough to get caught.

Sadly, I’m guessing Obama is afraid the torture scandal will drown out the other major portions of his agenda. He may very well be right, but that is no excuse for refusing to enforce the laws of our great country. As others have urged, the wisest course of action would be to appoint a special prosecutor to work the case, and thus get it out of the headlines for awhile. He may be setting it up to do just that, as per his recent remarks that the justice department will handle this.

Warrantless Wiretapping

This issue is an outright betrayal of civil libertarians who took Obama at his word that he was against Bush’s criminal warrantless wiretapping program. Maybe I should have known better.

As a senator on the campaign trail, Obama voted to allow retroactive immunity from lawsuits for companies that cooperated with Bush in the lawbreaking and the spying on American citizens. This was a definite blow (see the deterrence argument above) against this thing happening in the future. However Obama joined other Democrats in stating that the government still could be sued for illegal wiretapping.

Taking them at their word, the EFF went ahead and sued the government.  In early April, Obama reneged on his promises about ending spying on American citizens.  Not only did the Obama justice department claim the exact same “state secrets” nonsense, it expanded the claim with a claim to “sovereign immunity”. Essentially they claim that a citizen can’t sue the Federal government unless the illegally eavesdropped conversations are used as evidence of a crime.

Keith Olbermann asked Georgetown Law Professor Jonathan Turley to comment on this issue. I urge you to watch this clip (at 8 mins, 40 seconds), as it bluntly lays out how Obama is destroying our privacy.

Conclusion

If I were to give Obama a letter grade on his first 100 days dealing with civil liberties it would be a D+. If I were to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, I would give him a 3. If I were to give him a letter grade based on a curve that included George Bush, he’d get a C (Bush would get an F).

There is no way other way to put it, Obama’s performance in this area is poor. I am encouraged by the closing of Gitmo and the releasing of the torture memos. However, these actions are more than offset by refusing to let the Supreme Court try Al-Marri’s unlawful detainment claims, and the continuation and expansion of the illegal wiretapping claims.

Civil liberties aside, overall you can count me as one who approves of Obama’s performance so far. This is, after all, the first 100 days. I’m holding out hope (yes, that campaign word) that his performance on civil liberties will improve over the next few years. However, if the present trend continues, Barak Obama will not be receiving my vote if he runs in 2012. I’d best state that conditionally. If it looks like it’s going to be a close election between him and say, Sarah Palin, I’ll vote for him as the lesser of two evils.

One of the reasons I voted for you Mr. President was the fact that you were a professor of Constitutional Law. I figured you were most knowledgeable of our sacred civil rights, and would champion them. So far you have not done so, and in one case gone further in the wrong direction. I ask that you reverse this troubling initial course and restore beyond a doubt our inherent liberties.

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AIG and the Case For Nationalization

What follows is a meandering thread of logic that led an advocate of the free market to conclude that AIG and firms like it ought to be nationalized by our government.  The journey is long and twisted, but I hope you can at least appreciate the ride:

So the wifey and I were taking a road trip back from Idaho to Montana and we started talking about our respective free market philosophies.  Yes, the wifey and I actually have discussions such as this.  Yes, we’re both dorks.

It is no secret that our present economic crisis has forced me to do more than a little soul searching with regard to my strong belief in the free market.  As much as the Sean Hannity types would love to blame the loose lending regulations (i.e. relaxing lending standards so poor people could get a home loan), this alone does not account for even 10% of the damage that has occurred.  The “poor people need a home loan” mentality is the equivalent of the match that touched off the gasoline-soaked house that is our global economic system.  Hannity can certainly blame the match, but I’m more inclined to blame those that poured the gasoline all over the place– such as AIG.

The subsequent derivative trading of bad mortgages is really what caused the damage.  Under loose regulation (and loose regulation is a mantra of many free market advocates) financial institutions were allowed to skirt rules that required them to keep a certain percentage of liquid assets on hand in order to protect themselves and defaults on said risky mortgages.  Since they no longer bothered with such protection they and everyone they traded these derivatives with were in a very, very bad way once the housing bubble popped.  AIG was a spindle in this exchange of toxic assets, and the government was forced to take an 80% stake in the company or sit and watch other financial giants topple with them.

As these events unfolded, my ardent support of a free market began to be called into question.  I have always been a proponent of as little government regulation as possible, in fact, I used to be a proponent of absolutely zero government interference (an anarchist-level stance that I’ve since reformed).  In the wake of the consequences of poor regulation, I was being forced to take stock in my beliefs.  This weekend, while driving, I think I have finally reconciled my beliefs against the current climate, and am happy to state that my free market principles are still very much intact.  What follows is a chronicling of my spiritual journey.

The first thing I found helpful was to understand why I so strongly believed in the free market.  For me there are two prevalent reasons.

First is the reinforcement of the proverbial American Dream.  I want this to be a country where a poor genius can turn his ingenuity and hard work into wealth.  Not just nominal wealth– I’m talking filthy rich, yacht owning, jet setting wealth.  In my mind, this dream is the birth right of every American citizen, it is merely up to him to seize it.

Second is the reinforcement of a maxim I borrowed from Robert A. Heinlein:

Never appeal to a man’s “better nature.” He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.

In my mind one of the main reasons our country has been the birthplace of so many inventions and innovations is the very fact that the inventors are motivated by their own self-interest, which is enabled by our free market system.  If there is no promise of fabulous wealth, then there is no drive to take a risk and start that company based on that fantastic idea.  If there is no way to get appreciably ahead of your fellow man, then why bother with all the stress and heartache of seeing your brain-child to fruition?

Such inability to excel reminds me of the unimaginative industry of soviet Russia.  Why would a worker bother to be innovative if his reward was to buy the same shoes at the same state-run store as the lazy dullard working next to him?

Intrinsic in this is the fact that there will be economic inequality.  There will always be those that are rich and those that are poor.  This is perfectly acceptable to me.  Our innovators and inventors will be driven to new heights by the desire to not be poor, or to pull themselves out of poverty.  Effectively poverty drives innovation.

After examining why I so strongly supported the free market, I turned next to why I believed in certain limitations upon a free market.  As alluded to, I used to be an advocate of no government intervention, absolute laissez-faire economics.  These were the days when I was more of an anarchist than a libertarian.  I felt that life was hard, the strong survived, and that was the way of it.  Tough luck if a corporation secured a monopoly on a product or an industry– that’s how life worked.  If you didn’t like it, you could sabotage said corporation through peaceful or non-peaceful means.  If said corporation didn’t like it, well, that was their tough luck for running a monopoly and pissing people off.  Maybe said monopolistic corporation should have thought about that before they got greedy and over-reached.  Regardless, I have long since backed off of such philosophies and tend to restrict myself these days within the bounds of more realistic thinking.

So my free market philosophy is tempered by a degree of practicality.  I firmly believe that the government needs to interfere when necessary.  Monopolies are an excellent example.  The Sherman Antitrust Act is a perfectly fine piece of legislation.  Although I was too young to really understand, I did live through the monopoly of the Bell Telephone Company.  In the 80’s the government stepped in and fractured Bell into many smaller, leaner companies.  This was very good for the free market.

The Bell monopoly was stifling innovation and competition in all facets of the telecommunications industry.  For example, if you wanted to purchase a handset (i.e. a normal land line telephone) you had the choice of a whopping two models, in a whopping four colors (including boring-ass beige and goat-vomit green).  Oh, by the way, said handset would cost you about $200 in today’s dollars.  One could probably construct a reasonable argument that the breakup of Bell accelerated the adoption of the Internet, but I’ll leave that for another blog article on another day.  Although the Bell example is a bit extreme, a similar, albiet lower level situation existed in the software industry in the 90’s.  Microsoft squashed and inhibited innovation at every turn by bundling a copy of any good idea into their Windows operating system.  Many an innovative idea was stillborn due to the realization that Microsoft would simply squash it like a bug before the innovator was able to get rich off their ingenuity.

It sounds a bit like “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” but government interference in the free market can actually preserve the free market.  Monopolies are only one such example.  The other one that immediately comes to mind is the concept of “too big to fail”.  This is more relevant to our current crisis, specifically, to AIG.

The reason the government took an 80% stake in AIG was exactly this– it was too big to fail.  If AIG collapsed, many other financial titans would follow in its wake.  The problem is, once a company becomes “too big to fail” it starts operating outside of our notion of the free market.  For a market to be free, there must be rewards for success and punishment for failure.  To put it simply, the strong and smart survive and make piles of cash, and the weak and idiotic die off and wallow and go broke.

If an institution such as AIG is no longer allowed to go broke because it will take our entire economy down with it, then we have a serious problem.  No longer is the free market’s fear of failure acting as an intuitive inhibitor for bad business practices.  AIG executives can now act without the fear of going bust, and rely upon Uncle Sam to come to the rescue and prevent their poor, stupid decisions from affecting them as they should.  AIG got so big it broke out of the bounds of the free market, and the rules simply no longer applied to it.

So, despite all the hand-wringing out there, the simple fact is this: AIG is NOT a part of the free market.  It ceased to be a part of the free market the moment it got to the point where its failure would collapse our financial system– something apparently none of our elected officials were willing to stand by and let happen.  This situation of AIG no longer being in the free market happened awhile ago, and we have only come to realize this in the past six months or so (although some prescient analysts were much ahead of the rest of us).  I think this point is important.  Once my fellow free market advocates realize that AIG is already out of bounds, and in fact has been for awhile now, they may stop the present gnashing of teeth and turn their energies into more productive outlets– such as figuring out how to never let this happen again and how to deal with our present conundrum.

This is why I laugh at politicians crying foul over AIG deciding this week to give $160 million in bonuses to the very executives that soaked our economy in gasoline.  If these politicians had acted true to free market principles (the principals espoused by my anarchist self, not my more recent, moderate vision) then AIG executives would not be getting these bonuses.  Instead of getting bailed out by the government last fall, AIG would be out of business and those executives responsible would be on the street panhandling for spare change– where they justly belong.  However, these politicians saw fit to give AIG a handout with no strings attached.  Since the very act of giving them a handout removed the risk of their poor policies, what did these politicians expect was going to happen?  AIG would suddenly decide to be smart without experiencing the negative consequences of their disasterous business model?  Please.  These very politicians (Democrats and Republicans are equally culpable here) are responsible for this just as much as AIG is.  They gave the money without condition, it is as natural as the sun rising tomorrow that AIG would misspend tax payer dollars.  Pretending anything else is ridiculous.

The outrage is because AIG has avoided feeling any pain for the incredible damage they have wreaked upon our economy.  In fact, the architects of the damage are apparently being rewarded for their failure.  The concept of the free marked reward / punishment model is being turned on its head.  The dumb are getting rich while the smart are paying for the consequences of their failure.  I have a potential remedy.

The remedy is nationalization.

This is a scary word for those of my ilk.  The concept of government run business runs counter-grain to free market principles.  The very word invokes the nightmares laid out by dictators, Ayn Rand, and communism.  I want to be perfectly clear that I am not in favor of nationalization as a general policy.  I am only in favor of it as a remedy for our current, present situation.  Once this mess is cleaned up, I’d be more than happy to have nationalization of any private business be declared illegal forever– provided there are regulations in place that will prevent any business from ever again becoming “too big to fail”.

What I want is the government to step in and flat out take over AIG.  Once the immediate crisis is stabalized AIG should be fractured into smaller companies and the pieces sold off.  Why do I advocate such an extreme position?  Because it brings back the free market’s punish / reward concept.  As stated above, AIG is clearly outside the concept of the free market.  Letting it fail did not appear to be an option.  However, forcing its nationalization is also an exteremely bad consequence.  AIG as it once existed will be over.  The net result is nearly the same, AIG failed and will go away (albiet in smaller, more managable chunks).  This whole nonsense of the stupid being rewarded is finally turned back around to where it belongs (well, at least the stupid bear some of the consequences of their stupidity).

Effectively, we’ve nationalized AIG anyway.  Without our 80% stake (i.e. the government’s financial backing injected last fall) AIG would be a dead company.  Nationalization means the government taking control and ownership of a private business.  We are halfway there by owning 80% of it, we just don’t have the control.  This is probably the worst of both worlds.  We’ve violated free market principals with the government taking an ownership stake in a private company, but we don’t get to have any say over how the company is run.  Thus we get idoitic things like rewarding the most stupid people at the company.

So let’s take the final step.  Pronounce AIG as fully nationalized.  Let that serve as a warning to other companies that would be so bold as to be so stupid in their business practices.  This sends a far better message than the one we’re sending now– mess up and the government will give you a hand out with which you can use to give your “brain trust” millions and millions of dollars.

As I’ve stated, once this AIG (and others) mess is mopped up, nationalization as a concept can go away.  Sure it can be put on ice just in case we ever get to the crisis point we are at today.  However, every effort should be made to avoid getting here again.  Strong regulation needs to be adopted to prevent a company from ever again becoming “too big to fail’.  If you’re “too big to fail” you’re in violation of the free market, and you are stifling invention, innovation, and the American dream.  I want my government to prevent just that, and no more.  That to me is in line with the spirit of the free market that I so dearly love.

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GOP Running Off The Cliff

As a follow up to my last post, I thought I’d expand a little bit on my thoughts concerning the state of the GOP.  Basically, I see the party idiotically self-destructing, at a time they need to be turning things around and getting creative.  Despite my seething anger at how this party really messed up my country, I’m going to offer them a bit of advice.  Yeah, it’s going to be snarky and biting, but that’s too bad.  If you don’t like the tone, then ignore me, at your own peril– in a way, I hope you do, I’m enjoying the train-wreck.

The Party of Limbaugh - This weekend on Face the Nation, Rahm Emmanuel painted Rush Limbaugh as “”voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”  Guys, if Rahm Emmanuel thinks that tarring you guys with the Limbaugh brush is a good idea, you really, really need to wake up.  He is toxic for you, and you need to clamor loudly and clearly that Rush is not your voice.  You need to publically and repeatedly repudiate him.

Eric Cantor got the ball rolling yesterday, stating in response to Limbaugh’s desire that Obama fails: “Absolutely not… And I don’t — I don’t think anyone wants anything to fail right now. We have such challenges. What we need to do is we need to put forth solutions to the problems that real families are facing today.”  More of this, from every major player in the party is needed.  Get away from Limbaugh.  He’s good for whipping up the base, but that’s it, he can’t be your spokesman, or you’re done.

Opposition to the Stimulus - Your united opposition to the stimulus package is a disasterous tactic.  I understand that you’re now suddenly standing on the principle of small, limited government, but it is really, truly a case of too little, too late.  No one, and I mean no one, believes that your stance is anything other than political posturing.  In case you missed the election in early November, the American public is fed up with this exact type of bullshit.  I snickered audibly when you congratulated yourselves on your united stand against the stimulus bill.

The only plausible explanation I’ve heard of your asinine strategy is that you are taking a gamble.  The gamble being that it the stimulus fails to work, that the public will turn to you guys for help.  I’m here to tell you now that this is not going to happen.  For the American public, this is your depression.  You caused, you own it, and it is forever going to be hung around your necks.  No amount of time is going to change that, not two years, not four years, not one hundred years.  If things aren’t fixed in two years time, then the public is going to conclude that you guys messed things up so bad that no one could fix it– not that they should have listened to you guys on how to fix it, nor that somehow, two years hence, that you now deserve a chance to have your say.

“The Government Is The Problem” - This is the core message you guys trotted out after Obama’s non-State of the Union State of the Union speech last week.  Bobby Jindal was your hapless spokesman, and do not mistake his flubbed delivery as the problem.  The message too stank.  It absolutely reeked.  You guys messed things up so bad that public opinion firmly believes what I believe, that massive government intervention is probably the only way we can pull ourselves out of this.  We don’t like it, but thanks to your party’s jackassery, it’s now the only way.

I understand that Obama is using the bully pulpit to tear down the legacy of your hero, Ronald Reagan.  Why Reagan is so revered by you guys is perplexing to me, he really was just a mediocre, albiet popular, president.  Thirty years ago Reagan delivered the message that government gets in the way.  Obama is stating the exact opposite, that government is going to help.  I’m guessing that Obama messing with your hero’s legacy is what prompted you to throw Jindal under the bus with his out of touch anecdotes about Katrina.  You gotta let it go.  Now isn’t the time to defend this line of thinking.  Did you ever pause to think that maybe the Obama campaign is playing your fervent defense of the Reagan legacy against you?

The reality is, Reagan did have a point.  But get some context, Reagan understood context, and apparently you don’t.  Reagan’s assertions were exactly what the public needed after the meddling post-Watergate and Carter years.  Now, Obama’s message is exactly what the public needs.  I do not particularily agree with either Reagan or Obama, I think the proper role of government is somewhere in between the two ideologies.  However, you guys trying to dig up the other extreme is poor timing and strategy on your part.

Even if you believe this from the bottom of your hearts, you’re going to have to bite your tongues on this for at least half a decade.  Even if you shout it from the rooftops, no one is going to listen to you as the messanger.  You have discredited your small government credentials too much to deserve to be heeded on this topic.  In fact, opening your fat mouths on this subject will probably drive the public away from the very thinking you want them to embrace.  Yes, your reputation on this subject is that bad.

That’s all I got for you for now.  If you don’t want to listen to me, that’s fine.  I’ll happily watch you guys self-destruct.  In a way, I’d rather you did that anyway.  You deserve to wither away to political irrelevance after what you’ve done to my great nation.

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The First Month of the Obama Presidency

With the his first month book-ended by two well received speeches, I feel compelled to lay out my thoughts thus far on how our new president is faring.

Last night’s non-State of the Union address offered a stark view of Obama’s first term agenda.  His three big issues: health care reform, an overhaul of our national energy policy, and education reform should not particularly surprise anyone, and as far as I can tell, they haven’t.  However, what did raise a few eyebrows was the fact that Obama is sticking to the gospel hard, even in the face of our woeful economic times.  Last night he unequivocally stated that although the plate is overflowing, he intends to finish his dinner.

My thoughts on the agenda?  Well, being slightly less optimistic than the average bear, I do not foresee Obama achieving a resounding success in all three areas.  I do not blame him for trying; you can’t win if you don’t play.  However, the country is in too dire of straights to allow such massive initiatives.

Beyond my doubts about the success of our president’s endeavors, I harbor some concern about their direction too.  My objections are simply knee-jerk libertarianism.  I am a proponent of small, limited government.  What I see on the table is a continued expansion of the government, and that just isn’t the direction I want us to go.

However, when I look at each of the initiatives individually, I understand and somewhat agree with our president that these issues must be addressed and tackled head on.  I can’t help but concede that all three are long overdue for some attention, and the state of their disrepair means that whatever must happen be done in a large, massive fashion.

So there’s the rub.  Here I am, a proponent of small, limited, and smart government.  Yet I see the issues the president has put before me, and I can’t help but agree that these are extremely important and pretty much only an entity such a our government is big enough to address them.  This is shaking the foundation of my ardent belief in small government.  Have I been wrong to advocate this?  Is the present mess we find ourselves in the result of my line of thinking?  Well fellow small-government advocates, the answer I have concluded is this: not really.

The problem is not that small, limited government has failed.  It is that the politicians we’ve had over the past two or three decades that have advanced this agenda have not been smart about it.  Ronald Reagan is a fine example.  A decent orator (though not even close to Obama’s league, don’t let the right-wing pundits tell you otherwise), Reagan firmly believed in and advocated for smaller, limited government.  Yet he managed to rack up ridiculous deficit levels, the most ridiculous until the worst president ever came along and topped even Reagan’s dismal deficits.  Reagan also bestowed upon us the great canard of “trickle down economics” which is a nonsense theory (labeled as such by none other than George Bush when he called it “voodoo economics”) that serves to justify giving tax breaks to the wealthy in lieu of the middle class.  Essentially Reagan was not the friend to champions of limited government.  Instead he serves as an example of how limited government doesn’t work– never mind that he was all talk and no action on this issue.

Though Reagan flubbed the limited government agenda, the GOP of the past decade has thoroughly decimated it.  This is a major part of why I presently harbor such animosity for the Republican party.  They claimed the mantle of the party of limited government and expanded and inflated the government beyond what anyone had ever done before them.  Unfortunately small government advocates are now saddled with their failed legacy.  Our collective political conscious rightly sees the GOP rule of the past decade a utter failure, and unfortunately the idea of limited government is lumped right in there, despite the fact the GOP did the exact opposite of limiting the size of the government.

So conservatives, it is time to take your lumps.  In his response to Obama’s speech, Bobby Jindal personified the disarray of the Republican party at this moment in time.  His claim that government couldn’t solve the problems of our nation came across at best as out of touch and at worst as absurd.  I give him full marks for admitting the GOP betrayed the trust of their voters, but I don’t see how they are going to easily win back that trust.  You guys had about a decade to deliver on your promises and you pretty much squandered all of it.  Republicans suddenly finding religeon on deficit spending and small government is a total joke.  You’re coming across as transparent hypocrites.

Republicans, it is time to come up with something new.   Sorry I don’t have any advice for you, but I would suggest maybe the best and brightest of you ditch your sorry party altogether and join the Libertarians.  That’s going to be rough though, and you’re going to have to endure a few more election cycles of being in the minority.  Furthermore you’re going to have to ditch the evangelical, values voters that are dragging you down hard.  America is getting more and more diverse by the minute, and no one wants to support a party that legistlates morality.  One man’s morale behavior is another man’s sin.  Our founders acknowledged as much in their support for seperation of church and state.

Perhaps a defection of the fiscally conservative small government Republicans to the Libertarian party could revive the notion of small government.  The message could be that small government is a good idea that was poorly implemented by the failed GOP party.  Libertarians can offer their fresh, intelligent perspective on the issue.

Despite all my pining for a party that smartly advocates limited government, I think I need to be clear about one thing.  I agree with our president’s agenda.  Now is not the time to limit the government’s responsibility.  The Republicans have left us with an unbelievable mess, and for now, government must rise up, expand, and clean it up.  I’m on board with this, as much as I’m going to hold my nose, it needs to be done.

If we had smartly and incrementally (and in a small government way) moved on Obama’s big three issues over the past thirty years, there may not be a need to go so large to address them today.  However, the bottom line is that we were not smart about it.  Politicians instead kicked the problem down the road, or worse, went about solving it in the wrong way.

Our dependence on foreign oil, a long acknowledged problem (anyone remember the 70’s?), was addressed in about the stupidest possible manner by the Bush administration.  Dick Cheney essentially doubled-down on our dependence.  I suppose that happens when you elect two oil men to lead our nation.

The dismal state of our education system was addressed in an orthogonal way by Bush and Ted Kennedy with the “No Child Left Behind” act.  This act served to put the focus on standardized testing instead of putting the focus on what actually matters, i.e. FUNDING!  If you pay teachers decent salaries and you put money into equipment and materials, our education system will become better.  Instead we got a “you must meet these testing standards or else” dictum from the government, with zero funding.

Finally health care reform was kicked down the road in order for the GOP to score points against the Clintons.  Instead of taking the best ideas from Hillary’s health care initiative in the early nineties and coming up with a compromise on reform that we could all live with, the GOP shut it down entirely and staged their silly 1994 revolution and the “Contract with America”.  So here we are today, holding the bag for a “revolution” that only furthered our problems.

Once we get this mess sorted out, I plan on continuing to advocate a smaller, more nimble government.  However, you Republican politicians out there, I am not on your side.  You’ve lost my trust, and I honestly don’t see how you’re ever going to recapture it.  This decade was a defining moment for you, and you failed utterly.  I actually hope you’ve created a power vaccum where proponents of my style of government can step in and gain some prominence.  I’m certainly not with the Democrats, but this president and his party offer our best short term hope going forward.

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an anecdote

Something happened yesterday which amused me.  It involves me, The Dork, being a dork, the first White House press briefing, and a pundit who appears regularily on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and Air America.  Hopefully you’ll find it as amusing as I, because that’s what you’re reading for this entry.

“If God dwells inside us like some people say, I sure hope He likes enchiladas, because that’s what He’s getting”

-Jack Handy

So as I kicked off an automatic test cycle of the project I am presently hacking away on, I turned to my twitter page.  I follow the tweets of a few people I find interesting.  One of them is Ana Marie Cox, political commentator and wise ass who appears on a few of the more liberal political shows.  She’s funny and active on twitter, so I figured why not.  Well, she had just tweeted about a live-blogging event covering the first White House press briefing, to be hosted on her blog site.  So, as often happens when I’m compiling my software projects, I got distracted and went down the rabbit hole.

I arrived on her blog site to be greeted with a widget inside the webpage.  I clicked in and sure enough, Ana Marie and some invited guests were posting updates, twitter-style.  One of the first posts I read was a link to the press conference live on video at the CSPAN website.  So I watched the video and the blog updates for awhile.  I’d never seen anything like it.  These folks were slightly obsessed with their wonkery.  Yet, the voyeur inside me found it irresitable.  Here were individuals immersed in their keen interest, taking advantage of bleeding edge technology in order to deliver the fix.

After awhile, I noticed a section at the bottom for me to enter my own comments.  Not being the reticent type, I typed something in, some observation about the press conference.  My comment failed to appear; I waited to account for latency.  A few minutes later, I entered another observation, this one carefully considered and worded.  It still did not appear.  That’s when I realized the comments from the “public” were being moderated.  Only Ana Marie and those she’d invited personally could say whatever was on their mind.

So, being bored, I decided I’d try and figure out how to get a comment published, as a few from the “public” had been allowed through.  I started reading the ones that had been accepted.  Most of them were humorous or some vague attempt.  Not only that, most of the entire live-blogging session had the feel of a bunch of friends sitting around watching a movie all of them had seen many times.  Got it.  I can do this.  One thing I can do is give a room of people like that a chuckle.

So after reading the entire transcript of the live-blogging event, I went for something topical and piped in with:

“Will the first dog be issued a blackberry?”

And disco:

I get moderated through. I even got Ana to post another funny in response to mine.

Satisfied, I get back to the code.

Later I kicked off a database regen and took a peek at twitter again.  On Ana Marie’s twitter feed was the following:

Which was a clever once sentence summary of the entire live-blogging event.  Part of my idea was there in that sentence.  Very cool.

So that’s it.  If you’ve read this far, congratulations.  It wasn’t really that good of a story, and maybe now you’ll know to steer away from anything I describe as an anecdote.  And Ana Maire Cox, if you ever read this, I’m not stalking you I promise.  I dig your comments on Maddow’s show and your twitter is semi-active; you and Rick Sanchez are media people I follow for that reason.  There are many media types that have a twitter feed, but never tweet.

To those of you that want to follow the Dork’s twitter, you can do so here.  Or just keep reading this page, I have the feed sent to the sidebar.

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Dawn of a New Era

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

-Barak Obama, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009

Admittedly, my prior post sort of pooped all over the “turn the page” feeling that bathed the national psyche yesterday.  The timing was poor, and my apologies to you dorkders out there that deserved something better.  I allowed my incredulous rage that someone dare suggest Bush had been treated unfairly get the better of me.  I shall take the quoted words of our new president to heart, though my grievances be neither petty nor my dogma be worn out.

Obama’s speech yesterday remained true to other addresses he has given in the past few years.  It contained moments of brilliance, and parts that tended to drag a bit when you watch it live.  However, just like others he has delivered, this speech comes into its own when read over a few times.  Welcome to a new style of president.  Fellow citizens, you may have to actually do some homework to parse and digest the full meaning of what our leader intends to convey.  There is nothing wrong with this.

What I approve of most about Obama’s inaugural address is that it contained a little something for everyone.  Even this dork, whose civil liberty concerns are far from the priorities of his fellow citizens found something in the speech with which he can take some hope for a better era:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers … our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

- Barak Obama, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009

Here the new president repudiates the compromise of our Bill of Rights that has occured under the tenure of the previous administration.  He states our ideas will not be compromised for any danger, especially from the actions of some terrorists, which are minor compared to the hardships our nation has seen in times past.  Our forbears did not compromise our liberties during tougher times, and neither shall we.  Good stuff, and I needed to hear that.  Well played Mr. President.

I firmly believe in the maxim “talk is cheap.”  Mr. President, you’ve eloquently stated my feelings on the erosion of our civil rights.  Now, show me by your actions that you’re serious about this.  Well, upon reading a news headling out of the BBC this morning, another cliché springs to mind–”Ask and ye shall receive.”:

Obama Plea Stops Guantanamo Trial

Just hours after taking the oath of office on the steps of the US Capitol, he moved to halt the controversial process of military tribunals.

These tribunals are nothing more than kangaroo courts set up to provide a fig leaf of cover to the blatant human rights abuses perpetrated upon these enemy combatants by our nation.  Obama has essentially called for a halt to the madness until his administration can do a full review of the situation and determine a better way to handle this conundrum.  So there is actual action behind his rhetoric.  Hopefully further good news will come down after the review is finished.  Again, well played Mr. President.

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I Do A Little Comment Trolling

I took a look at RealClearPolitics.com today, to check out the articles about the inauguration.  Knowing I shouldn’t, I clicked through on an article titled Bush and the Bush-Haters.

Needless to say, I didn’t agree with the article.  Angered, I registered with the site in order to post a response.  Before I posted I lapped up the comments that had become before me, both praising and damning the author and George Bush.  After building up enough furor, I crafted this response below:

And so the attempts to rewrite Bush’s legacy continue with this article.  This kind of thinking epitomizes the sickness that has gripped our nation for the past six years.  Thankfully today, we can finally begin to cleanse ourselves of this disease.

The treatment of Bush has been unfair?  Hardly.  The man is a war criminal.  Water-boarding is torture.  Torture violates the Geneva conventions.  Bush issued orders to water-board detainees.  The former president ought to be in jail, providing a stark warning to those who would commit crimes while serving under the public trust and demonstrating that our nation truly adheres to the principle that no one is above the law.  Instead all the criminal gets is rough treatment by the media in the last six months of his tenure.  Unfair?  Not nearly enough.

You apologists and yes-men approving this article disgust me.  You Republicans should have me on your side.  I am pro-small government, pro-free market, anti-bailout, pro-gun rights, a devout Christian, and in a heterosexual marriage.  Yet your refusal to admit that the leader of your party for these past eight years is a complete, worthless, law-breaking horse’s ass has pushed me firmly away.  May your view continue to live in political exile for many years to come.  Farewell George Bush, and thank God every day that you are not in prison for the crimes you have committed.

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Dork Update

If you’ve been checking this site all lately, you’ll notice I haven’t posting anything of substance in about a month.

Basically, I’ve been studiously ignoring the blog.  I have rejected my idea of a “read in less than 5 minutes” daily and am still flailing about for a focus.

The gist is I’m not sure I have it in me to go full bore on politics as I had done in the run up to the election. It was fantastic to have a purpose, but my purpose was really getting Obama elected in order to repudiate the outgoing Bush administration.  That being accomplished, the drive to blog ebbed, and I’ve been offline wracking by brain for a focus ever since.

I have decided to just let it drift a bit.  Maybe politics will continue to the the focus, as I still feel like I have something to say in that arena.  The crux of the problem is I’m an avowed generalist.  I abhor the specialist, and unfortunately for me, the best blogs are laser focused and ultra-specialized.

But whatever.

Assessment of Obama So Far

The psychology of the nation is in a remarkable state.  It seems as if we’re incapable of acknowledging that Obama isn’t president yet.  We know that he isn’t, but we continue to pronounce judgements on his work so far.  It is pervasive.  I’ve seen comments in the national media about how they are disappointed with Obama or are how they are satisfied with the job he’s done to date.  He hasn’t done anything yet.  He hasn’t even been sworn in.  Yet the critics are already filling the air with pontifications.

So I’m going to jump right up there on that ridiculous bandwagon.

My highest priority political issue is that of civil liberties.  The freedoms granted to our citizens by the Constitution in my mind is what sets this nation apart from all others.  However, under the scornful direction of Dick Cheney and George Bush, these freedoms have been dismantled.  If you think I am prone to hyperbole, consider this: under their watch an American citizen was jailed indefinately without a trial.  Moreover, this citizen was tortured.  Ironically, it is actions such as these that we supposedly invaded Iraq to free their citizenry from.  We have gone from being apportioned the most freedom in the world to somewhere firmly in the middle of the pack in the array of nations.

Much to my sadness most of my fellow citizenry do not cherish their freedoms as much as I do.  Polls conducted during this election cycle surveyed issues of concern amongst the potential voters.  Civil liberties never made any of the lists I saw.  Usually it was the economy, the Iraq war, terrorism, abortion, et. al.  I suspect that most citizens do not realize how much freedom they have lost in the past eight years, and frankly, I doubt they care.

I took heart in Naomi Wolf’s endorsement of Obama, as she based it off of the fact that she felt he was the candidate that was most apt to undo the damage that Bush has done to our liberties over the past eight years.  I certainly hope the Obama adminstration over-corrects.  I was not particularily happy with the state of our liberties before Bush came to power.

What I have seen so far is not encouraging.  So far, the only civil liberties issue to come to light has been the decriminalization of marijuana.  This issue only arose because the Obama transition team launched the Citizens Briefing Book which solicits input and concerns from the general public.  Amusingly enough, the decriminalization of marijuana got voted up on this site as an issue of concern from the site visitors.  It got high enough that the Obama team commented on it.  Their comment was brief, and essentially kneecapped the issue.  “Barak Obama has no interest in decriminalizing marijuana.”

Despite my view on this subject (I’m for decriminalization) this is hardly an important issue in the civil liberties arena.  When we have perpetually jailed and tortured an American citizen, I have care little about letting pot users get their fix without fear of the slammer.  The civil liberty house is on fire, and the Obama team pretty much isn’t saying anything about it.

I’m hoping that the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, et.al. are simply distracting everyone from the dreadful state of our civil liberties.  If the other massive problems are hogging the limelight, I’m okay with that, as long as our freedom is not ignored.  The sole encouraging sign I have seen is there is a clear intent to close our gulag in Guantomino Bay.

What about restoring habeas corpus?  What about prosecuting the crimes of our president by illegally wiretapping American citizens without a warrant?  What about ending the mission of a U.S. combat brigade whose duty is to police citizens inside our own borders– a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act?  What about removing the illegal checkpoints (by the ominously named Homeland Security Department) inside the U.S. border?  In these matters –matters of the ilk that drove our founding fathers into open rebellion against their government– silence is unacceptable.

Hopefully I’m getting in a tizzy over nothing.  Hopefully upon taking office Obama will restore many of our fundamental rights by a series of executive orders.  If not, you’ll be hearing about it here.

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My bad

Sorry to the readers of this blog.  I got all motivated to start writing daily articles, and fell flat on my face.  No excuses, just haven’t been motivated to write, whatever that means.  It’s a sorry excuse, and any professional writer will tell you that “waiting for inspiration” is the best way to NOT be a writer.  You have to make the commitment, and start banging out prose whether you feel like it or not.

I actually have a writing assignment, given to me by the wifey.  I’ll try and put it up by the end of the weekend.

Meanwhile, keep watching my twitter posts in the right sidebar.  I do at least maintain a thready pulse there.

A few quick hits:

 

movie review

Finally sat down and watched The Dark Knight.  I rate it a 9 (out of 10).  For a summer blockbluster (spelling error intentional), you’re not going to get better than this. All the talk I heard about Heath Ledger’s performance of The Joker lived up to the hype.  Yes, the “agent of chaos” motivation is about as weak as it comes, but somehow Ledger pulls it off.  I haven’t seen such a creepy arch-villain on the big screen since Hannibal Lector.  Oh, to brag just a bit, I highly recommend watching this on a large HD screen.  The Blueray version is breathtaking.  

 

hey left wing democrats, stop crying already

The is a mini-tizzy going on in the left wing concerning Obama’s selection of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.  

The gripe?  The left claims, with some merit, that Warren is simply hard right wing beliefs packaged up as a jolly, congenial fat guy.  The biggest beef (take the pun for what you will) is that he is a stringent anti-gay marriage proponent, going so far as to sponsor the now infamous Proposition 8.  Thus Obama is giving credence to the idea of denying civil rights to a minority group is acceptable.

For the record, I fully and whole-heartedly support a gay couple’s right to get married.  However, I prefer we’d go farther than that, and remove the word marriage from all statutes.  In my opinion, the government has no right to define or control marriage, it is a religious issue.  This is simple separation of church and state, and the government has overstepped its bounds here.  Leave it up to a church to decide if its gay members can be married or not.  I understand that most of the left wing (nor most of the country) do not share my opinion on this issue.  However, one thing I can say to the left–  your tizzy over the invocation is not helping your cause.

We’ve had eight (and to a lesser extent 28) years of marginalizing the opposition.  The result has been a downward spiral of polarization.  The opposing side is simply shut out of power, and their voice is cut off.  Obama is taking a new approach.  Get the opposition into the conversation.  Sit them down, and try to understand their point of view, instead of shutting them out to plot their triumphant return (and it will happen) upon which they can simple shut out your side.  Obama is breaking the vicious cycle.  Do I think it will work?  I have no idea, but why not give it a try?  The tactics the left wants to employ now (i.e. not allowing Warren to deliver the invocation) are a microcosm of what has clearly not succeeded, and has only served to divide our country more and more over the years.

I do have one example I can point to.  Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann (and I know you guys read this blog) please take note.  There is a fella on another network moving the political discourse of this country forward with an innovative approach, subsequently, he is putting both of you to shame.  That’s right.  Comedian John Stewart is doing a better job than the two of you, and this isn’t really even his main gig.  Take a look at his interview with Mike Huckabee on the topic of gay marriage:

Stewart makes reasonable, nuanced arguments. He does not shout nor attempt to claim any moral high ground. Huckabee, although I do not agree with him in the slightest, represents his side well, and shows us that his constituents are far from backwoods hillbillies. With more of this type of discussion, on air and in public, we may finally be able to move forward as a country on these important social issues.

Dork out.

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The Kick Off: Let’s See How Long This Lasts

somedork’s daily briefing

 

historical note:

93 years ago today, Ford announced the rollout of their 10 millionth Model T.  That year, the car cost $440 which is $9,300 in today’s dollars.  Henry Ford mythology states that he wanted to manufacture a car the workers on his assembly line could afford to buy.  That is sorta, kinda true today.  

The United Auto Worker’s Union has done a fine job of keeping up the wages for their membership.  Their website reports that the average assembler worker earns $27.81 per hour.  Assuming an employee did not work overtime, and took standard vacation days, this translates to an annual salary of about $54k.  Today’s version of the Model T, the Ford Taurus, costs $24k for it’s basic model.  If Henry Ford’s workers of today meet his desired wage criteria, it is probably not how he envisioned.

If the worker of 1915 did indeed earn enough to buy a Model T, then he would have been pulling down about $20k in today’s dollars.  In my mind, Henry Ford’s intent was to keep his cars cheap and affordable to the general public.  A salary of $20k a year is pretty low, that is below the poverty level for a family of four.  It seems that instead of cars being affordable for the poor, cars got more expensive, and auto worker’s salaries also climbed. 

I don’t know if this has any bearing on the predicament of the Big 3 today, but it does at least make me wonder.  The whole business model seems to be quite skewed from the golden age, and apparently not in a good way.

 

a dork’s life

The wifey sent me an instant message yesterday.  ”Want to foster a litter of kittens?” it read.  I answered: “Yes dammit, tell them yes quickly before I can change my mind.”  Thus six kittens, about 11 days old, have taken up residence in our basement.  Not exactly the tenants I had envisioned after our basement remodel.

A few years ago the wifey volunteered us to be a foster house for dogs or cats that need outside homes.  Kittens are typically what we get.  This is not our first foster litter.  In fact, our house cat, Kitty McGee, was a part of the first batch of cats we fostered.  I must say, there is a certain extra bit of joy I feel at the idea of spending Christmas in Montana and having six kittens pouncing around the house.

If any of you dorkders out there are thinking of adopting a shelter cat, I can attest that our experience has been stellar.  Kitty McGee is a pretty cool cat.  When we walk over to the high school practice field to throw the ball for the dogs, Kitty McGee goes with us.  

A police officer watched us going through the parking lot one day and hollered out his window at the wifey: “Is that your cat too?”  When she answered in the affirmative he said: “I don’t see that everyday.”

In warmer weather McGee sometimes joins us on the field by climbing the ten foot chain-link fence that separates the field from our back yard.  It is amazing to watch him place his paws in the links and climb on up as if it were no more difficult than a ladder.

 

guest column:

A reader of Somedork, a dorkder, wrote me an email a few days ago.  Little did he know, he has been drafted to be the first installment of the Daily Briefing’s guest column feature.  I do not think he’ll mind that I publish his email here, as he sent the same text to the editor of our daily newspaper– who published it.

Here it is in its entirety:

-

Dear Editor:

One good thing the Bush administration did for our country was to teach the American electorate how dangerous it is to vote based on ideology rather than ability to govern. Bush, a self-proclaimed proponent of small government, has presided over enormous increases in the size of the federal government and its debt. The Cato Institute noted that non-defense discretionary spending skyrocketed 28 percent in just the first three years of his presidency; they aptly labeled him the “Mother of All Big Spenders.” Such poor execution has done more harm than good to Mr. Bush’s conservative causes.

-

I have been mulling over doing a feature article on my assessment of the state of the GOP, especially the farther right wing of the party.  This letter touches upon one of the central themes of what I’ve been mulling.  

In a way, the right wing has been betrayed, or at the very least used, by the Bush administration.  There is no doubt the enthusiastic turnout efforts of the right wing served to get Bush elected in 2004.  Karl Rove threw chum into the water and the hard right frenzied Bush into a second term.  Yet other than two pro-life judge appointments, Bush has delivered on almost no promises to his base.  In fact, he is probably the most prominent reason they find themselves with the least amount of political power in about seventy years.  The full throated support of ideology over competence has utterly backfired.

Well stated guest columnist, well stated.

 

politics

The dominant story this week centers around Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich.  This morning federal officers arrested him on the charge of corruption.  Federal wiretaps have him on tape openly soliciting political favors in exchange for an appointment to Obama’s vacated Senate seat.

In my cynical mind, the real news here is the laughable brazenness of the governor.  I come from the view that this sort of negotiation happens all the time for things like a Senate appointment.  That he tried to get favors is not news, that he did so outrageously is.  

To you Democrats out there in the readership, let this serve as a shot across your bow.  You have made a lot of political hay about how corrupt and twisted the GOP politicians have been.  Your own house could use some tending to.  You’re on top at the moment because the Republicans stank worse that you did.  Well, stink is a relative concept.  When you’re on power, your scandals stink worse.  Shore up the ship, or join the GOP at the bottom of the ocean.

 

Thus concludes my first daily briefing.  Here’s to many more.

Dork out.

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