How much does it cost to buy a vote in the national legislature that could potentially save your business billions of dollars in legal liability for you willfull, illegal actions over a period of several years? Well, it varies depending on the legislator, but for Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T to get retroactive immunity for their role in placing what amounts to millions of unwarranted wiretaps on United States citizens it averaged $9,659 each.

That was how much, on average, a Democrat that voted against the March 14th immunity but turned around to support the June 20th immunity received from political action committees run by these telcos. To be fair, the 129 U.S. representatives that voted against immunity averaged $4,180 in contributions each since the beginning of the year, but that five grand apparently represents the value of your privacy, citizen.

Take a look for yourself. How much did you rep cost? Nancy Pelosi costs about $24,000 to win over. John Murtha of Pennsylvania (former contender for the majority leader position) came in cheap at a mere $5,000. Wonder how that is.

Please note that these numbers are just the campaign contributions, and does not reflect other money spent on lobbyists. There’s a slim chance that the Senate won’t just turn around and show their ass on this. Again. Where do your representative and senators stand?

Well, they finally did it. The pervasive homosexual conspiracy has finally driven a stake through the heart of all that holds western civilization together. Gays have gotten married. Legally. In California. As was widely predicted by folks like the Family Research Council, John Hagee, and the 700 Club, the underpinnings of our culture have been visciously attacked, undermined by sinful hedonists.

This morning I sat on my front porch, shotgun at my side, cradling my terrified son in my arms as Californians everywhere lost all sense of public decency, respect for law and order, and even the value of human life. Roving gangs of disillusioned youths set fire to houses, bad-mouthed their parents, spoke openly of having any random number of daddies or mommies (but seldom both), and are having wanton butt-sex on the streets. Oh, the horror. To think that all of this came from an irrational desire by committed same-sex couples to have visitation rights at hospitals, inheritance rights, health care, and tax protection equal to their God-fearing, honest, righteous, serial-divorcing, wife-beating, child-neglecting heterosexual neighbors. So selfish.

Where were you when we needed you most, Westboro Baptist Church? Off protesting a dead soldier when there was real work to be done?

I leave you with a prediction from H.P. Lovecraft regarding this terrible turn of political events:

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

Oh wait, that was the return of the Mighty Cthulhu. Never mind.

Gotta hand it to Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. The man’s got no quit in him. Yesterday he spent over four hours on the floor of the US House of Representatives calling for the impeachment and removal from office of George W. Bush.

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the
following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

Articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in
the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its
impeachment against President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors.

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power.

Summary of all 35 counts follows (link to PDF of full resolution with details)
Continue reading →

In this video, posted by the John McCain 2008 campaign account on Youtube, campaign manager Rick Davis lays out the roadmap to a McCain presidency, using currently-available polling data to crunch the numbers on the electoral prospects. This is the same Rick Davis that will be serving as the poster-child for how the McCain campaign is largely run by lobbyists, something that may not reflect well upon the candidate come November, but that’s beside the point.

Some of the numbers are cooked (for example they site the burn rate on the Obama and McCain campaigns for April of 2008, when McCain was essentially unopposed and Obama was still working on beating Clinton), but the electoral map is quite interesting. The list of expected battleground states has expanded from Ohio, Florida, and Missouri back in 2000 and 2008 to include a number of areas we used to think of as fairly safe bets. Now, I’m not actually expecting Michigan to go for McCain, or for Obama to win Arkansas, but we can reasonably expect to see both of these candidates working hard to make a showing in places that haven’t seen a presidential candidate outside of the primary season in fifty years.

Rick Davis’s take on things aside (it’s his job to paint a rosy picture; note that he didn’t put Georgia in play), it’s currently Obama’s race to lose. McCain’s hitching his wagon to an unpopular horse on too many issues, whether people identify themselves as moderate or not.

Earlier today I read something by the normally-insightful KC Meesha that has been gnawing at me for a little while now. He lined up a number of position statements attributable to a major-party presidential candidate and then commented on each one in a way that at first was somewhat comforting (thank God this man doesn’t vote), but then started itching at me (too many people think like this and vote). Gotta scratch that itch.

Let’s line a couple of points up and take a closer look, shall we?

[…]I support many ideas in theory but I am not doing anything about it. Where is a plan?

Specifically on the subject of abortion rights, at the federal level there’s basically nothing to be done other than put Supreme Court justices on the bench that will strike down Roe v. Wade or pass a constitutional amendment clarifying the constitutional place of patient-doctor confidence. Neither major-party candidate is looking to put anti Roe v. Wade justices on the bench, and the president of the United States has no constitutional role in the passage of constitutional amendments. This is a non-issue in 2008, just a cultural wedge people are using to drive people to or away from their polling places.

This immigration plan is ridiculous and unworkable and the fence idea is beyond stupid. Over 5,000 people got through much shorter and much better guarded Berlin Wall, so how can anyone expect a 700-mile fence to do the job. I am all for illegal immigrants (make them legal) as long as they 1)Pay taxes, except for Social Security since they cannot collect it; 2)Do not receive any taxpayer-provided assistance no exceptions;3)Obey the law. If they still want to come here and work I don’t have a problem. On the other hand if I were Obama I’d try do make everyone forget I voted for that joke of a plan and come up with something short, loophole-proof, frugal and usable. He can use my plan above for free. Not much change here.

Both major party candidates substantially supported the immigration plan in question here. Regarding Meesha’s proposed fix, most illegal immigrants pay taxes (they submit bogus identification to their employers who withhold payroll taxes and such that the employee will never see direct benefit from). It is nearly impossible to live in an industrialized society without drawing some benefit from taxpayer funds. We have socialized sewage treatment, water supplies, state-protected power monopolies, socialized roads, postal systems, et cetera. The second condition is ludicrous on its face. Perhaps if softened to a “no direct subsidies or special programs to specifically benefit illegal immigrants” we’d be back in the realm of the reasonable. As for the third point, illegal immigrants by definition have violated a law. Remove the illegality of the original entry (or overstaying of some visa or other) and they are roughly as likely to commit actual crimes as anybody else.

[…]I am not so sure straight troop withdrawal is such a good idea[…]

This is a widely-spread misrepresentation of Barack Obama’s Iraq policy. His stated goal is to “be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.” Whether you believe that or not is certainly up to you, but the only people that were arguing for a precipitous withdrawal were Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul (“We just marched on in, we can just march on out”). Attributing a straight cut-and-run disordered rout to Obama’s policy goals is ever bit as intellectually dishonest as the claims that John McCain wants to have a boiling insurgent conflict over there until the 22nd century. It just isn’t true and doesn’t match the candidates’ statements in any reasonable interpretation of their original contexts.

[…]I just don’t want it turned into something similar to the last days of Vietnam War. Someone smarter than me should devise a working plan to get out without putting American lives and property in danger.

Yes, that’s what generals are for. Tell them “Get our boys out safely, you have 18 months” and if they’re worth their stars, they get it done. If we cannot trust them to manage a withdrawal, we should not trust them to manage an occupation.

What kind of non-position is that? I don’t care about gay marriage as it is a non-issue for me.

Yes, it’s a non-position on a non-issue. So what? I don’t care whether a presidential candidate agrees with me or not on issues I don’t care about. I similarly don’t care if a candidate doesn’t care about issues I don’t care about. I’d much rather they held positions on important matters that are in their job description.

Workers of my age have been all but officially informed that were are not getting Social Security. Why not let me manage a tiny amount of my own money, mismanagement of the funds is one of the reasons Social Security is going down.

First, Social Security will still be there so long as the payroll tax is being paid by people that are still in the workforce. It will almost certainly not be able to pay out at the levels it is supposed to according to the current cost-of-living adjustment schedule. This is primarily due to the fact that the workforce is aging. The funds were only mismanaged in that the Social Security Administration has been purchasing extremely safe securities from the federal government (floating our deficits) instead of creating the incredibly touchy proposition of a government agency purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of private securities on the open market.

Second, you can manage your own money. There are entire industries dedicated to people managing their money. Stocks, CDs, bonds, real estate, baseball cards, fast food franchises. Invest your money however you like. What Meesha probably meant here is that he doesn’t like paying taxes. Yeah. People don’t like paying taxes, but we also don’t like potholes and homeless elderly people all over the place.

Raising taxes again. Not very smart but sure to please a lot of people. No change here, same old “tax the rich” song and dance.

Wait, doesn’t want to leave Iraq. Doesn’t want to pay Social Security taxes. Doesn’t want to raise any of the other taxes. So how do we pay the soldiers over in Iraq? With yellow ribbon car-magnets? How to we pay the people who are holding government-issued bonds? Print more money? That worked great for 1920’s Germany. It is politically infeasible to cut back our defense, Medicare, and Social Security budgets (the lion’s share of federal revenue goes to those three things) enough to cover our expenses without raising taxes. It is politically infeasible to raise taxes enough to support all the programs everybody wants. It is increasingly difficult to continue putting everything onto the national credit card. This is why we have professional bickering little sluts (legislators) duking it out all the time for us in Washington.

Cut defense spending and people will howl that we’re being irresponsible. Reduce Medicare and the health care infrastructure takes a huge hit as even more treatable conditions fall back to the emergency rooms. Touch Social Security at all and the AARP mafia will break your kneecaps (not literally, but old people vote, so politicians are afraid of ticking them off).

Raise capital gains taxes and homeowners looking to sell will cry bloody murder, investors will scream that new factories and shopping malls cannot possibly be built, no new jobs will be created, mobs of unemployed young people will rove the streets slaughtering the innocent, the gutters will run red with the blood of the innocent, chaos! Raise tariffs and prices at Wal-mart and Home Depot will skyrocket, sorely-pinched working people will be denied the affordable luxuries that keep them docile. Raise income taxes and highly-paid professionals will all decide to stay home instead of going to their quarter-million-dollar-salary jobs, and somebody will howl that a family consisting of a Firefighter and a School Teacher (capitalized because these are politically-sacred professions) will magically be in the top income-earning bracket despite their chronic representation as underpaid and under-appreciated public servants.

Taxes are touchy. The only thing you can say when running for office that is politically safe when this subject comes up is “my opponent is going to mishandle taxes terribly.” Democrats like to lean towards a policy of “we’re going to try to get the money out of the people that can best afford to pay it and have benefited the most from this country’s opportunities.” Republicans like to lean towards a policy of “we do not want to discourage the best and brightest from excelling, so everybody should pay the same.”

June 3rd, the proper primary day for California, is upon us again. There’s basically nothing to talk about on the US Representative side of things. Barring an act of God, Lynn Woolsey is getting re-elected. Heck, nobody’s even running against her in her own party. The state Senate and Assembly positions are also uncontested at the primary level. The Presidential contest has already been weighed in on back in February. Heck, we only have two ballot measures to think over, both on the same issue:

Prop 98 Grrr! Eminent Domain bad! Kill with fire! Rarr!
Also includes lots of fun little provisions that get rid of rent control and make it practically impossible for the government to ever impose new regulations on anybody that could possibly be construed as damaging their property value somehow. Probably a bad idea.

Prop 99 Grrr! Eminent Domain bad! Kill with fire! Rarr!
Basically like Prop 98 but with less gotchas built in. Basically a populist backlash against something the Supreme Court did a while back. I’m unaware of any actual cases of the State of California seizing property from homeowners that didn’t want to sell, then turning around and selling it to private developers. The pro-98 campaign is basically just an anti-99 effort operating on the assumption that nobody wants the government to take their land. Well, so far as we can tell, the government doesn’t actually want your land, so I’m disinclined to give this one the thumbs-up either.

So it’s looking like a “no” on both of the live propositions.

Board of Supervisors
If you live in District 3 for the County of Sonoma (like me) you’ve got a bevy of supervisory candidates available. Wright, Zane, and Smith all look like the most likely picks here, with Sharon Wright having won the notoriously lousy endorsement of the Press Democrat, our local newspaper. The endorsement was posed as a close call between her and Tim Smith. Tim Smith has the great virtue of having the exact same name (down to the middle name, identical) as the former incumbent, and further benefits from having an atrocious website. Veronica Jacobi is another Santa Rosa City Councilwoman looking to make the jump to the county level, but her curriculum vitae reads like exactly the kind of political actor better suited to represent the West end of our county, not the 3rd district. Shirlee Zane looks credible, and seems to be hitting all the right buttons to appeal to the local body politic, but suffers from an apparent endorsement from the sci-lon empire, her election signs having appeared on their local HQ’s front lawn. Not a great association there, from my perspective. Wright also suffers by association with Herb Williams, local power broker that has helped shoehorn a number of local figures into positions of power that they haven’t done a lot of good in.

I probably should have done a series of posts on these folks, but I know that most of the people who comment on this blog don’t actually live in the 3rd district. Of course, I also figured I’d decide who I was voting for earlier than this, and I’m still fence-sitting. Bad burrowowl, you should be a better voter!

There has been a lot of talk recently about possible vice-presidential picks for the likely Democratic nominee for the office of the president of the United States. At some point, Barack Obama has to make his choice. Much of the talk has been focused on notables such as senator Hillary Clinton as a form of bridge-building reconciliation between the two warring tribes that the Democratic party has fractured into during the nominating process. Others have proposed senator John Edwards as a possible pick, citing working-class appeal, a southern appeal, and a general reinforcement and amplification of senator Obama’s core message of change. Other names like Biden and Dodd have been raised as possible bulwarks against accusations of naïvité on foreign policy issues. This is just among the other contenders for the nomination. Kathleen Sebelius is another name I keep hearing, as is Jim Webb. Each have certain regional or topical strengths.

But people don’t vote for the vice president when they show up to the polls in November. The name will be on the ballot, but it’s the top of the ticket that draws the greatest scrutiny and consideration. As an opportunity to help secure the election, the choice of a running-mate has more to do with the news cycle during which it is announced, a minimal bump or hit in the polls after any vice presidential debates, and fundraising. As for the actual duties of the office, the vice president is to inquire daily as to the health of the president, and be available for tiebreaker votes in the Senate.

I just don’t know who would be truly useful for fundraising. Presumably Clinton would be strong in this area, as she has already raised and spent a stupendous amount in pursuing the nomination herself. For amplifying a message of change and a new direction unifying the country and setting aside the divisive politics of the past twenty years, though, I humbly suggest an alternative that may be mentioned frequently as a possibility for John McCain: governor Mike Huckabee.

That’s right, the Arkansas Baptist minister turned cultural-conservative second-place contender for the Republican nomination. Let us consider the upside:

• He has executive office experience as governor. This could help offset potential claims that the ticket lacks leadership experience.
• His public service experience includes working together with a Democratic-controlled state legislature. We know he can function when surrounded by crazy left-wingers.
• His conservative credentials are centered almost entirely around cultural wedge issues. These are the major symptoms of the cancer that Barack Obama claims to be seeking a cure for before it kills our body politic. Inviting him onto the ticket is a major gesture towards spanning a multi-decade political divide.
• His record on the actual operation of government is quite moderate, having implemented government programs and tax policies in a pragmatic manner that makes led many fiscal conservatives to turn their back on him. This man can work with Democrats on their key issues of trade, education, infrastructure, and health care.
• He’s got a band. They’re not that great, really, but they do a passable cover of “Freebird,” and could save the campaign a few shekels on campaign-stop entertainment expenses.
• Dude is seriously charming. Actually listen to him for more than six seconds and you may have diametrically-opposed policy views with him but probably won’t dislike him. Not a lot of people can do that any more.

These are all positives. I also suspect that inviting this specific man to be a running-mate would result in roughly three quarters of the Washington media punditocracy to crap their drawers and run screaming into the woods. Experts that once forecast a Clinton vs. Giuliani main event would likely spend no less than a month huddled up in a fetal position, rocking themselves an sobbing into empty Jack Daniels bottles. Multiple fire and brimstone preachers and vociferous atheists would wander the streets in a muddled daze. Very little could happen for several days that could knock this off the forefront of the political news cycle short of a foreign invasion.

The negatives are all too obvious:

• He is a Republican. This means he is likely to no accept the position, and many Democratic party insiders would get their panties in a bunch over this gesture.
• He has endorsed John McCain. This almost certainly means he would not accept the position at first blush. Senator Obama is a persuasive man. Get the two in a room together and let some magic happen.
• He is strongly against abortion. He does not want Roe vs. Wade overturned, he wants a constitutional amendment. This isn’t really an issue, as it isn’t the purview of the vice president to revise the constitution.
• He joked about somebody pointing a gun at senator Obama. Considering that being his veep would put him a bullet away from the presidency, this would be especially tasteless and probably require him to commit seppuku should something of the sort actually happen.

I don’t think that the negatives outweigh the benefits here. Every right-wing claim that Obama is some kind of radical Islamic Secularist Leftist (if such a worldview is even possible) would ring hollow to even the most credulous audience. An Obama-Huckabee ticket would win in New York and California, in Illinois and Arkansas, in Iowa, Virginia, and the Carolinas. It would beat McCain in most of the South, and force him to fight hard to keep even Utah and Texas on board.

TL;DR: we should let the funny southern guy back into the political limelight.

But I will send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem. Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes; That pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and turn aside the way of the meek: and a man and his father will go in unto the same maid, to profane my holy name: And they lay themselves down upon clothes laid to pledge by every altar, and they drink the wine of the condemned in the house of their god. — Amos 2:5-8

I’ve said before that I have no horse in the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination process, but I’m certainly disappointed in Barack Obama today. Yesterday I watched his long-time pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, speak before the national press club regarding the brouhaha that has been made of a sermon he gave shortly after September 11, 2001. The press has been bending itself backwards trying to keep Rev. Wright’s comments firmly out of their original context and put them in the frame that best serves their interest in selling newspapers and drawing the eyes of television audiences. Yesterday Rev. Wright fielded questions regarding his religious views, the prophetic liberation theology of the so-called black church, and the political fallout that has been dogging his former parishioner, Senator Barack Obama.

I watched the Bill Moyers interview with Rev. Wright, with the expanded-but-still-incomplete clip of the now-famous “God damn America” sermon. I watched the reverend speak to the national press club. As I watched, I grew firmer in my belief that the more of this man people actually heard the less radical he would sound to them. Naturally, people like Dan Abrams and Tucker Carlson on MSNBC couldn’t stand such a thought, and simplified the reverend’s comments into a fabricated pissing match between the pastor and the senator. This was unfair to the reverend, unfair to the senator, and unfair to the voting public.

It was also totally expected. The press reaction to Rev. Wright was, I thought, the primary reason that Sen. Obama had gently distanced himself from the reverend’s misrepresented comments. Today that changed. Senator Obama in a press conference today has now cut his own pastor (former pastor, whatever) loose having seen the reverend’s full remarks. Regardless of what the political pundits had been saying, Wright had not done anything deserving such. The proper reaction for Senator Obama to have given, upon having seen the video, heard the audio, or read the transcripts, would be something along the lines of “I feel that Reverend Jeremiah Wright has been badly misrepresented by my opponents and by the press in this matter, and while I understand that many in the public — who have not been exposed to these remarks in their original context — are offended, he is a good man, he has nothing to be ashamed of, and I am proud to have been a part of his congregation for all those years.”

TL;DR – Barack Obama showed reprehensible political cowardice today. He may yet make an excellent president, but rolling over on a good man like this is just not right.

• Book of Amos (from a little-read religious document called the “Old Testament”)
• Rev. Jeremiah Wright full sermon (September 16, 2001 audio)
• Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club (April 28, 2008 parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Sen. Barack Obama regarding Rev. Wright (April 29, 2008)