Republican US Senator, and Winston-Salem home boy, Richard Burr has a blog. He started it on New Years Eve and he's posted consistently since then. Since things are just getting started for the year in Washington he hasn't really had anything exciting to post about, but once the inauguration is over next Tuesday I think things will heat up and I hope that Sen. Burr gives us some of his viewpoints without the filter of the press or a ghost/staff writer.
Virgil Goode, the five term US Congressman from Virginia's 5th district who gained some notoriety when he made a stink about an incoming Congressman taking the oath of office using the Quran (apparently he didn't care that the incoming Congressman was Muslim, thus making it much more sensible to use the Koran than the Bible), has probably lost his reelection bid. The margin is so slim that he's going to demand a recount, but if the count holds up then it will give Virginia more Democrats in Congress than Republicans, a stunning turn of events considering Goode had a 30 point edge in the polls as recently as August and the Republicans entered the election with an 8-3 edge in Congressional seats.
I'm not sure exactly why Goode lost, but I'm sure the economy had more than a little to do with it, especially when Goode continued running ads based on a fear-based campaign strategy straight out of Lee Atwater's playbook. Well, whatever the reason I'm sure some of the media are going to miss some of the gems that came out of Goode's mouth or pen. I'll share a couple below.
First, from a letter to constituents about that Muslim Congressman taking the oath on the Quran, who by the way was born and raised in the U.S.:
From a letter to USA Today defending his letter to constituents:
Immigration is arguably the most important
issue facing the country today. At least 12 million immigrants are here
illegally. And diversity visas, a program initiated in 1990 to grant
visas to people from countries that had low U.S. immigration at that
time, are bringing in 50,000 a year from various parts of the world,
including the Middle East.
Let us remember that we were not
attacked by a nation on 9/11; we were attacked by extremists who acted
in the name of the Islamic religion. I believe that if we do not stop
illegal immigration totally, reduce legal immigration and end diversity
visas, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who
want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather
than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a
beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world.
I wonder if anyone ever pointed out that a lot of illegal immigrants are Christian? Is a legal Christian immigrant preferable to an illegal Muslim immigrant? Oh, and as for our Judeo-Christian principles being a beacon I'd like to point out to the good ex-Congressman that many people, including the people we celebrate every Thanksgiving, came to America to escape religious persecution and to practice the religion of their choice without fear. There's nothing exclusive to Judeo-Christian tradition about it.
What truly kills me about people like Goode is that they seem to not realize that by imposing their religious values on the entire populace they open the door for someone else with other religious values to do the same at a later date. They also don't seem to see the hypocrisy of our country celebrating non-secular governments in the Middle East, and taking position that Islamic regimes like Iran's are bad and simultaneously calling for government policies at home to be based on Judeo-Christian values. In other words non-secular is good for the rest of the world, but not for the United States.
Of course the cynic in me thinks that this was a policy of convenience for Goode, a red-meat issue that he figured he could use to fire up his conservative base. Unfortunately for him I think his opponent did a good job of painting him as a political opportunist who's vote was for sale and by implication who's policies were for show only. I'll end this with the ad that his opponent ran that some observers think put the stake in the Goode campaign's heart:
According to this news story a Catholic priest in Greenville, SC sent a letter to his parishioners saying that those who voted for Barack Obama should seek penance for their vote before taking Communion. This is just another in a list of reasons that I've become disillusioned with the church. For some background, here's my life journey with religion:
I'm very comfortable being Moravian. I've found it to be much more inclusive than Catholicism and quite honestly the church's general outlook seems to fit my world view much better. I'm not going to sit here and condemn Catholicism because I do feel there's a lot right about it, but in the end I think religion is a very personal journey and it's very important to find what's right for you. I just couldn't come to grips with the Catholic church's handling of the priest sex scandal and its outlook on women among other things. In the end the negatives outweighed the positives.
Oh, and as far as I'm concerned the parish in Greenville should have it's non-profit status yanked. Denying parishioners the sacrament unless they repent for freely exercising their right to vote is tantamount to actively stumping for a candidate or party, and my understanding is that the IRS sees that as a verboten activity.
Below is a video I created to show how many robocalls and direct mailers we've gotten from various politicians over the last few weeks. The vast majority of calls came from or on behalf of Elizabeth Dole, and they're all negative. I have no idea what she's like as a person, but after the last two weeks I can tell you that I hate her guts as a politician. What's interesting to me is that we haven't received one robocall from a Democrat, but a lot of the mail came from Democrats. Anyway, enjoy:
I just read one of those articles that makes me want to pummel the author. The offending article is titled "Show Biz Demeans Politics" appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer and the headline alone should give you an indication of how dimwitted the article is itself. After all the politicians haven't needed any help demeaning themselves, and entertainers are merely picking the low hanging fruit that the politicians have handed them.
As for the article itself just take a quick read of this excerpt and see if you can keep from groaning:
A survey by the Pew Center for the People and the Press in 2004
found that 61 percent of people under the age of 30 got some of their
political "news" from late-night comedy shows.
So what is wrong
with this? Plenty, says Russell Peterson, a former stand-up comic and
political cartoonist turned political scientist at the University of
Iowa.
The effect of endless jokes lampooning our political
leaders is "implicitly anti-democratic," Peterson says. It plays to the
deeply ingrained American belief that our political leaders are jokes
and that the democratic system is "an irredeemable sham."
"Election
after election, night after night, joke after joke, they have
reinforced the notion that political participation is pointless,
parties and candidates are interchangeable, and democracy is futile,"
Peterson writes in his new book "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night
Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke" (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
So exercising free speech in the form of humor is implicitly anti-democratic? Cynicism is suddenly anti-American? What the authors of the study and the article seem to be blindly ignorant of is that they are the ones engaging in anti-democratic thinking and elitism. Somehow they can't seem to grasp that the folks who are watching the Daily Show can only find it funny if they happen to be paying attention to the issues. Political jokes aren't funny if you don't know the politicians, don't know the issues and thus can't put the joke in context. Did it not occur to the authors that people can think for themselves, that being cynical is not inherently bad, or that people under 30 do have the capacity for critical thinking?
I hate to tell the esteemed authors but these days the parties and candidates ARE largely interchangeable and we the voters aren't to be blamed for perceiving them that way. Both parties have raided the treasury for their own purposes and pointed the finger at the other for "pork barrel spending". Both parties were implicit in running up a staggering deficit, building a monolithic bureaucracy and manufacturing an atmosphere of disdain for the other party. Late night comedians didn't do it, the parties did. That's great business for the comedians and a tragedy for the country.
Well it’s almost over. In a couple of weeks we’ll have survived what will surely be remembered as one of the crazier election years in memory. However the election turns out the winners will be dealing with deeper systemic problems than any incoming administration/Congress has had to deal with in at least a generation if not two. It seems to me that they will be confronted with some hard questions that have not really been addressed in a long time. Those include:
Unfortunately we’ve spent decades with people screaming at each other about the role of government, yet in reality we as a society haven’t had an honest conversation about it. We hear talking heads spouting catch phrases like "government is the problem, free markets are the solution" but never discuss how a free market can exist without government or at least within the governed society.
Ironically if you start to get down and dirty in a debate with folks from either side of the ideological aisle they almost immediately begin to moderate themselves. For people who want to trim government to the bone just find the government program that they value and offer to cut it and all of the sudden they’re advocating for "smart government." For people who want the government to provide for every need simply say that it’s no problem but they will have to use the services as the government dictates and all of the sudden they start arguing for limited government.
The reality is that we need to have a long, painful discussion about what America’s priorities are. To have a civil society we must have government. I’d say with the exception of our friendly neighborhood anarchists we can all agree with that. The differences come in what we ask the government to do. We need to remember that much of what we take for granted in terms of government hasn’t always existed. We didn’t start paying income taxes until WWI (well we paid them during the Civil War but then stopped in 1872). On the other hand we didn’t have Social Security until the 1930s or Medicare until the 1960s.
My point is that there is no reason for us to limit our conversation to making incremental changes to government programs. Right now we have a unique opportunity to make radical changes because we all know that the system we have now is royally effed up although we can argue all day about the reasons why they are. So what to do? Personally I think we should put those four basic questions I listed above to the populace and find out what this country really wants for the future.
So what role should our government play? My personal preference is that the government limit itself as much as possible to the role of referee. While certain jobs should always be fulfilled directly by the government (i.e. defense), for most the government should provide a safe environment for private enterprise to fulfill those roles. A difficult part of this discussion will be deciding which programs fit the bill for government delivery. Energy? Transportation? Health care? Education? Parks?
For arguments sake who says that public schools are the best answer? With today’s technology isn’t it possible that distributed education regulated by government might be better and more cost effective? Isn’t it possible that it would be more effective to take public school funding and have private enterprises compete for the dollars? I can almost guarantee that if you had a bunch of companies competing for students in Washington, DC the kids would be getting a better product than what they’re getting now. On the flip side look at the craziness we’ve begot with Medicare. That’s a program paid for with government dollars and administered by private enterprise and it’s looking like an absolute boondoggle.
Once we decide on the programs we’re going to keep under the government’s control we’ll have to decide how much to spend on them. In other words we’ll need to decide how big the military should be, how much money should be provided to state and local law enforcement agencies, how much to spend on building and maintaining roads or if more money should be spent on mass transit, what kind of energy generation projects should we pay for (solar, nuclear, coal, etc.) and the list goes on.
For those industries we decide to regulate we’ll need to determine how far regulations should go. We’ve seen in the financial sector that too much regulation can stifle growth, but not enough regulation can lead to meltdown. Most likely we’ll only determine the appropriate levels of regulation through trial and error, but it’s crucial that we allow private enterprise to provide as many services as possible in a competitive environment so that we keep the cost of delivery down.
Finally we need to figure out how to fund the government. Is an income tax really the best way to go? Other industrial countries seem to be having success with VATs, so might it be a better way for us to go? Also, and not insignificantly, we need to remind ourselves that as members of this society it is in our interest to pay taxes. Those taxes pay for our security and welfare, so the issue isn’t whether or not to pay taxes but determining how much is fair to pay and what those taxes should fund.
These are huge and important issues but we have not been asked to confront them. Our leaders pay them lip service, but in reality the vested interests debate these issues among themselves and we the people rarely get asked for our take on it. I’m sure the powers that be think that the average citizen isn’t interested in the details and will only sit still for sound bites, but I think that if we were provided with the information in plain English and allowed to see for ourselves exactly how things have been working lo these many years, they might be fairly well surprised at the response they’d get. Let’s put it this way: we the people seemed to have pretty good instincts when the Bush administration tried to cram that bailout package down our throats.
Hopefully whoever wins this election, Presidential and Congressional, will engage our country in this kind of fundamental conversation. If not I truly worry about the country I’ll be living in during my old age, and I don’t even want to think about what my kids and grandkids will be facing.
This came in from my Mom. It’s one of those videos that allows you to embed a person’s name so that it appears in the video. In this case it looks like I’m running against Obama and McCain and the thrust of the video is that you, the voter, is the one who can change America. It’s a nice get out the vote effort from the geezer association. Oh, and I say that in only the nicest way because I’m soon be of age for membership.
I think the McCain/Palin folks have settled on a tactic for their last push of this election: trot out hard core Republican attack dogs who happen to be brunette women and have them spout crazy accusations with the flimsiest thread of logic to try and damn Obama by association. First you have Palin accusing Obama of consorting with terrorists and now you have a Congresswoman from Minnesota who frankly comes off looking bat-shit crazy in this interview on MSNBC (also pasted below). Pay close attention to the robo-call the McCain campaign is running and is played during the interview. These folks are turning rabid:
This woman makes my Congresswoman, the right honorable Virginia Foxx, look mild by comparison. The Republicans do seem to love their crazy white women.
Hat tip to Ed Cone for the lead.
We’re in the midst of early voting here in North Carolina and since this is a hotly contested race in the presidential election we’ve actually had both candidates in the state quite a bit over the last of months (Obama) or couple of weeks (McCain). Anyway, Senator Obama appeared in Fayetteville yesterday and urged people to vote early. Below is some video shot outside one of the polling places that features a boisterous crowd of McCain/Palin supporters across the street from the polls. About halfway through you’ll see one man interviewed who takes issue with the fact that extra local polling places were opened on a Sunday in order to handle an expected crush of voters from the rally. It also seems that he’s taking issue with the Cumberland County board of elections opening up on Sunday in general, which he says was a special accommodation for the Obama folks. I’ve only read that they opened up extra polling places, not that they opened up on Sunday expressly for the rally. Still, the GOP is upset that it appears to give unfair advantage to the Democrats, and in fairness if the election board had done the same thing for McCain the Democrats would be up in arms too. Anyhoo, I think this is going to be a VERY interesting election year although I can’t imagine a group of protesters outside my polling place which also happens to be my church. BTW, I still think that’s weird.
Last night I made sure I didn’t watch the last presidential debate of 2008. Ostensibly I had other, better things to do but the reality is that even if I’d had to choose between watching the debate and cleaning the lint out of my navel the navel would have won. That leaves me with just one question: Who the hell is Joe the Plumber, and why on Earth were they talking about him?
Just. Shoot. Me.
Befuddled 