Jefferson's democracy

Attorney General

2007-03-16T19:57:00.000-04:00

What pisses me off about this news where the Department of Justice fired a bunch of US prosecutors is the lack of accountability. I don't know about the firings, politics, whether they were good prosecutors or what. What I do know is that they were fired by the Department of Justice, but the Attorney General-- the appointed head of the Department of Justice-- says he had nothing to do with it, he didn't know why they were fired, he wasn't involved.

What the heck??? Why are they paying him a salary if he claims he has nothing to do with running the Department?

What in the world is wrong with these guys? Everybody says that they don't know nothing about what's going on in their department, it's all underlings, they were out playing golf the whole time.

Republicans call for Gonzales Resignation
Murky on Firings

Fire the bunch of them.

Busy

2007-03-03T10:12:00.000-05:00

Well, my business had gotten busy the last few months, and I haven't had much time to sit and look at the news. In any case, I'm somewhat at sevens and nines to know what to think about the new congress; I'm not thrilled about Democrats in general, but I'm like the checks and balances that come from the fact that Congress is from a different party than the president. So I'll be waiting with some amount of interest to see if the inherent liberalness of the Democrats will win out, or whether the end result will be a nice balance. Speaking of balance, I'm baffled to see that, after six years of humongous deficit spending, the President has suddenly come out in favor of balancing the budget. Wow. You hypocrite, you had six years with your own party in control, why wasn't it ever an issue then? But it is nice to see that, now that he has some opposition that will keep hand out of the candy jar, he's all of a sudden waking up to core Republican principles that he had forgotten.

Of course, his idea is to put together a plan to balance the budget... not now, but in the future... like, just as soon as somebody else is in office in 2012 (or look here)

On Marxism and Libertarianism

2006-12-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

A thoughtfull blog-entry "On Marxism and Libertarianism" here:
www.celticbear.com/weblog/2006/12/13/on-marxism-and-libertarianism/

I like the idea of a libertarian taking a good, unbiased look at Marxism, although I think he misses a little in not really noticing some of the absolutely loony conclusions that Marxism ends up at. In general, all of the worst excesses of the 20th century-- genocides, agressive wars, mass starvation, ethnic cleansing -- seem to stem from governments, not from corporations. Indeed, of almost any century! To the extent that evils are perpetrated by corporations, it tends to be when corporations are given a state-supported monopoly, or are given state protection or state exemption from laws.

But I think it's a good thing to think about. What do we want, and why, and what is the best way to actually defend our individual liberties?

(For what it's worth, I am not a libertarian of the libertarian-anarchist variety, who thinks that the best outcome would be no govenment at all-- it is not at all clear to me that a true anarchy does not devolve into a society of thugs, warlords, and thieves, where the closest thing to law is protection rackets-- as, say, has happened in Somalia. It seems to me that some government is needed to support the legal system that allows commerce to function. However, this government needs to be strictly and vigorously kept small and to the point; it's the government's job to maintain our liberty, not to take it away, or to tell us what to do.)

Why I love a divided government!

2006-12-17T11:44:00.000-05:00

Ah, this is why I love a divided government!

For six years President Bush has been signing budgets without a single comment (much less ever vetoing a budget) about the fact that the Republican Congress has been stuffing into the budget as much pork-barrel spending as they could grab. With the undivided government, the Republican party turned into the spend-spend-spend party, and budget deficits have taken gargantuan proportions.

But now, the instant that a Democrat congress is about to take office, Bush comes out with a major statement condemning pork-barrel budgets!

I love it! Yes!

Bush is actually turning into a Republican!

www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-16-bush-address_x.htm

Cut down pet projects in budgets, Bush says
Posted 12/16/2006 10:07 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush said Saturday that his administration will outline a series of changes that would clamp down on the common Capitol Hill practice of slipping pet projects into spending bills.

[Sure. And in the six years of Republican Congress, how is it he never hinted at any desire to clamp down on pork barrel spending?]

These projects, called earmarks, are spending provisions that often are put into bills at the last minute, so they never get debated or discussed, Bush said in his weekly radio address.

"It is not surprising that this often leads to unnecessary federal spending, such as a swimming pool or a teapot museum tucked into a big spending bill," he said.

The president said his administration's proposal would make earmarks more transparent, make lawmakers more accountable for the earmarks they propose, and help reduce the overall number of earmarks.

Many lawmakers claim they are better suited than others in government to know what their states need. Bush said the use of earmarks has exploded, and pointed to a Congressional Research Service report that the number of earmarks has increased from about 3,000 in 1996 [i.e., under Democrats] to 13,000 this year [under Republicans].

"I respect Congress' authority over the public purse, but the time has come to reform the earmark process and dramatically reduce the number of earmarks," Bush said.

Democrats, who will take control of Congress on Jan. 4, already announced their plan to wipe out billions of dollars in lawmakers' home-state projects in unfinished spending bills. On Monday, the incoming Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations committees announced that they would eliminate earmarks from the nine unfinished spending bills for the budget year that began Oct. 1.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said they would restore earmarking in the upcoming 2008 budget cycle, but only after implementing changes. Obey said he was pleased that the president supports their plan.

"But it should be noted that all of the earmarks combined don't begin to match the increase in the deficit caused by the president wasting $50 billion in supersized tax cuts for those making more than $1 million a year while other Americans sleep on the streets," Obey said.

This summer, Republicans announced changes to require spending bills to carry lists of earmarks and their sponsors.
[The author neglected to note here that this "change" enacted did not apply to this year's spending, only to next year]
That's a good start, Bush said, but more needs to be done by both parties.

"Republicans and Democrats alike have an opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to spending restraint and good government by making earmark reform a top priority for the next Congress," Bush said. "When it comes to spending your money, you expect us to rise above party labels."

Byrd said any effort to change the way business gets done in Washington cannot begin and end with the appropriations process.

"We also must address earmarks in the tax codes which have resulted in huge loopholes for corporate America while middle-class America is left holding the bag," Byrd said.

=====================
THREE CHEERS FOR A DIVIDED GOVERNMENT!

Do-nothing congress

2006-12-03T16:02:00.000-05:00

www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1203congress1203.html

"...Congress will convene Tuesday for what some fear will be the lamest of lame-duck sessions, and GOP leaders have decided to take a minimalist approach before turning over the reins of power to the Democrats. Rather than a final surge of activity, Congress will probably wrap up things after a single, short week of work. They have even decided to punt decisions on annual government spending measures to the Democrats next year.

"Before the midterm elections, GOP leaders had dismissed the Democrats'"do nothing" label for the 109th Congress as political posturing, promising that a robust post-election session would put the accusation to rest. Instead, Republican lawmakers will have met for one week in November, devoted almost exclusively to leadership elections, and one week in December, largely to pick committee assignments, move offices and pass a measure to keep the government operating through February.

"That will mean this Congress will have spent the least time in session of any in at least half a century, according to Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, congressional historians and the authors of The Broken Branch, a critical look at recent Congresses. In the time they did meet, lawmakers will have failed to approve a budget resolution or pass at least eight of the 11 annual spending bills.

"Other significant pieces of legislation will be hard to find. Bush's push for a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws produced a partially funded measure to build a border fence. "

--of course, there are those of us who think that doing nothing is the best thing that any Congress can do.

Transparency in government... not

2006-11-13T11:37:00.000-05:00

Here's a great one, from USA Today.

The Republican Congress passed a new rule in 2006 that would identify which congressman added each "pork" spending earmark to a budget bill.

... the rule exempts the 2007 spending bill (the bill being worked on when the rule was passed)

...and the rule expires at the end of the year!

So the Republicans made a rule that is in effect only for the 2007 budget, which exempts the 2007 budget from the bill... they made a rule that did NOTHING WHATSOEVER!!

Isn't that the epitome of politics? They wrote a bill that would allow them to crow about how it increased transparency of government, which actually doesn't do anything at all. You gotta admire that.

www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-12-dems-pork-sponsors_x.htm

In our name

2006-11-10T10:08:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago I posted a note here expressing my distaste for a government that argued that a political prisoner shouldn't be able to talk to a lawyer because he might tell the lawyer what techniques were used to question him.

Much to my amazement, I've heard from some people who seem to think that this is ok. We shouldn't worry if the government says that some people who have been picked up by the CIA and questioned for three years in secret should be prevented from ever talking to a lawyer, since they might "disclose the techniques used to question them."

(the previous post had links to the original story, among them this one: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/03/AR2006110301793.html

The prisoner under discussion, Khan, was picked up in Pakistan along with his brother, wife, and one-year-old son. The others were released without being charged, and for the last three years, they have been told that he would be released "soon" as long as they didn't complain:

www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C11%5C06%5Cstory_6-11-2006_pg7_40:

"Periodically, he [the brother] said, people who identified themselves as Pakistani officials contacted Mohammad Khan and assured him that his brother would soon be released and that they should not contact a lawyer or speak to the media. "We had no way of knowing who had him or where he was," his brother said from his home outside Baltimore, Maryland. He said they complied with the requests because they believed anything else could delay his brother's release."

Right here I'm already not happy. So the CIA claimed to be Pakistani officials, and told this guy that his brother might be killed if he contacted a lawyer or contacted the media. I don't like intimidation and extortion anyway, and a "free press" isn't quite exactly free if people are threatened by the CIA if they talk to the press.

Once the government has affirmed the right to take prisoners secretly, keep them for years without charges, and deny them the right to talk to a lawyer, or anybody else (they don't even get the traditional one phone call), why do you think that this power will be used only on guilty people, exactly, and never used, say, to cover up the fact that they abducted and tortured the wrong guy?

I don't trust the government to take people to secret jails and question them for three years. I don't want to give the government secret powers with no accountability.

We should live by the principles of freedom, justice, democracy, free speech, and the rule of law; we should serve as an example to the world, and I mean a good example here, not an example of the things we tell the rest of the world they shouldn't do. We believe in fair trials, not in putting people in prison for years with no trial and no charges. We should not let our fears scare us into giving away our liberties. We should not be sure that that if we give secret branches of the government unrestricted power, that this power will never be used on political opposition or innocent civilians.

I don't agree that a prisoner should be held incommunicado, with no right to ever talk to a lawyer, simply because he might disclose the methods used to question him. Actually, I think we ought to know the methods used to question prisoners. These methods are being used in our name, and I want to know what is being done in my name.

This is really an absolute; you can't be a libertarian of any kind ("neo" or other) and still accept secret prisons, people being taken away and held without being charged, and "questioning" of prisoners by techniques that cannot be disclosed and with no accountability. Libertarians use words like "Soviet" and "Fascist" to describe these kinds of actions, and the words are not less appropriate when the secret police are using Fascist techniques "for our own protection." Actually, that's just what the Fascists said.

I subscribe to the principles of the United States of America, that means freedom, decency, and we don't torture people and we don't have secret police or secret prisons or political prisoners who are held without trial. I do not want people violating every single one of my principles and then tell me that they're doing it for my own good because "they're useful to us as prisoners."

I don't want secret prisons, secret police, or suspension of civil liberty as the price of "using oil."

The word "liberty" is at the root of the word "libertarian"

For the argument "Jihadis don't have civil liberties, and don't want civil liberties."

We're not them; we don't want to be them; we don't want to be like them; and most particularly, we don't want to become like them, in the name of defeating them.

We're Americans. We believe in liberty and justice. This is what America is about.

What is it that they don't want us to find out?

2006-11-06T18:54:00.000-05:00

Houston Chronicle: "U.S. Fights Detainee Access to Attorney"

(also Forbes,
www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/4310060.html)

I have to say that this one gives me a very sick feeling.

They haven't charged this guy with a crime... now they're saying he
can't even talk to an attorney, because he might tell the attorney the
techniques to questioned him.

It's not merely that I am rather queasy at the fact that they are
trying to keep us from finding out what they did (although I am). What
I find even worse is the fact that, before any kind of trial, they are
saying that they intend to never let him free, since they claim that
they can't allow him to talk to anybody ever.

What are they trying to hide? What is it that they are afraid we might
find out about about how he was questioned for the last three years?
How did it happen that United States government has secret prisons and
a secret police, and the USA turned into a country that says people
don't have a right to an attorney, or a trial, or even a right to be
charged with a crime before being imprisoned?

Is this what we wanted, when we call America the land of the free?

WASHINGTON Nov 4, 2006 (AP)- A suspected terrorist who spent years in
a secret CIA prison should not be allowed to speak to a civilian
attorney, the Bush administration argues, because he could reveal the
agency's closely guarded interrogation techniques.

Human rights groups have questioned the CIA's methods for questioning
suspects, especially following the passage of a bill last month that
authorized the use of harsh but undefined interrogation tactics.

In recently filed court documents, the Justice Department said those
methods, along with the locations of the CIA's network of prisons, are
among the nation's most sensitive secrets. Prisoners who spent time in
those prisons should not be allowed to disclose that information, even
to a lawyer, the government said.

"Improper disclosure of other operational details, such as
interrogation methods, could also enable terrorist organizations and
operatives to adapt their training to counter such methods, thereby
obstructing the CIA's ability to obtain vital intelligence that could
disrupt future planned terrorist attacks," the Justice Department
wrote.

The documents, which were first reported by The Washington Post, were
filed in opposition to a request that terror suspect Majid Khan should
be given access to an attorney. Khan, 26, immigrated from Pakistan and
graduated high school in Maryland.

According to documents filed on his behalf by the Center for
Constitutional Rights, Khan was arrested in Pakistan in 2003. During
more than three years in CIA custody, Khan was subjected to
interrogation techniques that defense attorneys suggest amounted to
torture.

President Bush acknowledged the existence of the CIA system in
September and transferred Khan and 13 other prisoners designated as
"terrorist leaders" to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Under a law passed last month, they are to be tried before special
military commissions and may not have access to civilian courts.

(also reported at ABC News,
abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2628673&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312
and Voice of America:
www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-04-voa15.cfm)

Words from the American Conservative magazine

2006-11-05T23:14:00.000-05:00

www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_11_20/feature.html

GOP Must Go

Next week Americans will vote for candidates who have spent much of their campaigns addressing state and local issues. But no future historian will linger over the ideas put forth for improving schools or directing funds to highway projects.

The meaning of this election will be interpreted in one of two ways: the American people endorsed the Bush presidency or they did what they could to repudiate it. Such an interpretation will be simplistic, even unfairly so. Nevertheless, the fact that will matter is the raw number of Republicans and Democrats elected to the House and Senate.

It should surprise few readers that we think a vote that is seen—in America and the world at large—as a decisive “No” vote on the Bush presidency is the best outcome. We need not dwell on George W. Bush’s failed effort to jam a poorly disguised amnesty for illegal aliens through Congress or the assaults on the Constitution carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism or his administration’s endorsement of torture. Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why—thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer.

As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves. Bush’s decision to seize Iraq will almost surely leave behind a broken state divided into warring ethnic enclaves, with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed and thousands more thirsting for revenge against the country that crossed the ocean to attack them. The invasion failed at every level: if securing Israel was part of the administration’s calculation—as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides—the result is also clear: the strengthening of Iran’s hand in the Persian Gulf, with a reach up to Israel’s northern border, and the elimination of the most powerful Arab state that might stem Iranian regional hegemony.

The war will continue as long as Bush is in office, for no other reason than the feckless president can’t face the embarrassment of admitting defeat. The chain of events is not complete: Bush, having learned little from his mistakes, may yet seek to embroil America in new wars against Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, America’s image in the world, its capacity to persuade others that its interests are common interests, is lower than it has been in memory. All over the world people look at Bush and yearn for this country—which once symbolized hope and justice—to be humbled. The professionals in the Bush administration (and there are some) realize the damage his presidency has done to American prestige and diplomacy. But there is not much they can do.

There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen—in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur—as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq.

We have no illusions that a Democratic majority would be able to reverse Bush’s policies, even if they had a plan to. We are aware that on a host of issues the Democrats are further from TAC’s positions than the Republicans are. The House members who blocked the Bush amnesty initiative are overwhelmingly Republican. But immigration has not played out in an entirely partisan manner this electoral season: in many races the Democrat has been more conservative than the open-borders, Big Business Republican. A Democratic House and Senate is, in our view, a risk immigration reformers should be willing to take. We can’t conceive of a newly elected Democrat in a swing district who would immediately alienate his constituency by voting for amnesty. We simply don’t believe a Democratic majority would give the Republicans such an easy route to return to power. Indeed, we anticipate that Democratic office holders will follow the polls on immigration just as Republicans have, and all the popular momentum is towards greater border enforcement.

On Nov. 7, the world will be watching as we go to the polls, seeking to ascertain whether the American people have the wisdom to try to correct a disastrous course. Posterity will note too if their collective decision is one that captured the attention of historians—that of a people voting, again and again, to endorse a leader taking a country in a catastrophic direction. The choice is in our hands.

November 20, 2006 Issue

Where the GOP right went wrong

2006-11-05T10:34:00.000-05:00

From the Houston Chronicle, Dick Armey (who was the Republican leader, back in in the "Republican Revolution" days) asks "How did GOP right get it so wrong?":

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4310979.html

His answer, in essence, is that when the Republican politicians got in power, they stopped being conservative, and became the party of big-spending, big government, and debt to special interest groups.

He says:

Now spending is out of control. Rather than rolling back government, we have a new $1.2 trillion Medicare prescription drug benefit, and non-defense discretionary spending is growing twice as fast as it had in the Clinton administration. Meanwhile, Social Security is collapsing while rogue nations are going nuclear and the Middle East is more combustible than ever. Yet Republican lawmakers have taken up such issues as flag burning, Terri Schiavo and same-sex marriage.

They're fooling only themselves.

Getting power changes people, and not for the better. The best thing that could happen for conservatism would be for the current batch of politicians to leave office, so candidates who actually have a clue about what "conservative" means might be able to run in 2008.

The mainstream gathers to where I already was

2006-10-30T16:48:00.000-05:00

from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,29449-2426622,00.html

In many ways the Bush administration and Republican Congress have abandoned principled conservatism and deserve to be punished by conservatives more than liberals. When they took over in 2000, the long-term fiscal liability of the federal government was $20 trillion. It now stands at $43 trillion. They have increased government spending at a faster rate than any Democratic Congress since the 1930s. They have generated deficits after four years of strong growth.

This kind of spending has made sleaze and de facto bribery inevitable. The number of lobbyists in Washington has doubled in five years. As for pork barrel spending, a simple comparison tells the tale. In 1985, Ronald Reagan vetoed a motorway-construction bill because lawmakers had stuffed into it 150 pet projects for their constituencies. Reagan thought that was unconservative. Last year George W Bush eagerly signed a similar bill with 6,000 such projects. In plain English, they are bribing the voters with the public purse.

For years, it seemed like I was the only conservative in America who though George Bush was harming America. It feels very very odd to hear a chorus of conservative voices now saying the the Bush administration and Republican Congress have abandoned conservatism. Yes, I agree-- I'd said that long ago.

Why I hate Democrats, too

2006-10-28T12:42:00.000-04:00

An interesting essay at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20061027/cm_ucgg/withelectiondayloomingamericansarecomingaround

"...perhaps explaining the strange absence of any real response to the Iraq war and its unbelievable mistakes and losses, a study by Ohio State University found that many voters were becoming timid and apprehensive about participating publicly because of the polarization of politics.

"Politics has become the arena for screamers," Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs says of the trend. "It's understandable that people withdraw when 50 activist groups are yelling about their single pet issue. Ordinary people don't want to get caught in partisan crossfire."

Another element that comes soberly into play in elections, as well as everyday life, is the effect of out-of-control "diversity," pushed avidly by the Democratic Party in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Harvard's influential political scientist Robert Putnam's recent research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone.

"They don't trust the local mayor," Putnam said recently, "they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people, and they don't trust institutions. The only thing there's more of is protest marches and TV watching."

So, what is one to make of all of this? One could easily take the negative position that nothing will change after Nov. 7, because, as military analyst William Lind says cynically, "In reality, both parties are one party, the party of successful career politicians."

One could worry, as I do, that America has lost faith in, or even knowledge of, the central core principles, unifying ideas and noble virtues of citizenship that inspired our formation -- and that today there is little to hold us together except the coarseness of popular culture and our imperial wars."

I can agree with a lot of that. Why has America become a nation of screamers, and of divisiveness?

This is why, in essence, I hate Democrats as much as the current batch of Republicans. Dump them all!

Another Conservative Voice

2006-10-27T16:03:00.000-04:00

Here's Christopher Buckley-- you know, the son of William F. Buckley; former speechwriter for George H. W. Bush.

Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research? A more accurate term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.buckley.html

Holding my nose and voting

2006-10-27T10:12:00.000-04:00

Interesting article, Holding my nose and voting Republican, by Linda Chavez

http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20061025/cm_uc_crlchx/linda_chavez20061025

Linda Chavez writes
I'm angry at Republicans for abandoning their principles. This Republican president, aided and abetted by Congress, has increased federal spending at a reckless rate, even when the costs of the war in Iraq are taken out of the equation. I'm embarrassed by the scandals that have plagued some Republicans and by the abject failure of the leadership to do anything meaningful on lobbying reform.

I'm sickened by the cronyism that protected former Congressman Mark Foley and put children at risk. I'm disappointed that after years of claiming to be the party of colorblind equal opportunity, Republicans have actually expanded racial preferences in federal programs. I'm disheartened by the demagoguery on immigration and the refusal to do the one thing guaranteed to stop illegal immigration, namely, enact a broad guest worker program.

I have to admit agreeing to many of the points, but doing exactly the opposite: I'm holding my nose and voting Democrat. I don't actually like most of the platform of the Democrat party (and for most of the same reasons), but at the moment they look like the least-worst choice.

I do, however, disagree with this sentence of hers:
Democratic control of Congress also worries me when it comes to the economy.

Republican control of Congress has turned out to be far worse a disaster, since the Republicans are spending taxpayer money like drunken millionaries on an expense account and racking up trillion-dollar debts. This is simply because the Republican president won't rein in Republican spending bills. The country desperately needs to get out of this situation we're in where the presidency, house of representatives, and senate are all from the same party, which has eliminated all semblanace of checks and balance, and all restraint on spending.

Voting machines need paper trail

2006-10-26T17:06:00.000-04:00

Not just a paper trail, but also software that is verifiable-- the software that counts the votes and reports the results should not be secret.

This shouldn't be a partisan issue-- both sides should be concerned that elections need to be open, and verifiable. Once the election is over, there should be no grounds for one party to claim that the results were fraud; it is in everybody's best interest to make sure that this does not happen, by making sure that the vote counting-- and the vote counting software-- is completely open and above-board.

from http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2006/09/27/69135

Voting machines need paper trail
September's primary illustrates the problems with new voting technology.

fter two consecutive presidential elections ended in contention - most dramatically the 2000 election, because of ballot irregularities - many states and cities have switched to new voting technology to help ensure "hanging chads" never again enter American political discourse. But, in doing so, many have rushed ill-prepared into a system without fail-safes to guarantee that every vote is counted properly.

The primaries in Ohio, Arkansas, Illinois and Maryland reported serious malfunctions in the new machines. Some rebooted for no apparent reason, others recorded votes for a candidate different than they were cast.

A study by Princeton University discovered that AccuVote, a product of Diebold Election Systems - on which as many as 5 percent of Americans will vote this fall - was easily broken into and contaminated with a virus that would manipulate vote totals.

Representatives of Diebold have tried to silence these reports with legal action and have refused to submit their products to additional testing, but by now it is clear their products are deplorably inadequate and don't come close to the security guarantee that is necessary to justify their use.

About 40 percent of registered voters will use some kind of electronic voting system this fall. Some states, Minnesota included, require voting machines to create a paper trail, to provide assurance against fraud or failure. There is no good reason not to institute such a policy nationwide. Physical records of votes would be invaluable in a contested election.

Updating voting technology to reduce irregularities is necessary, as proved by the 2000 and 2004 elections. Indeed, electronic voting can generate results faster and more accurately than previous systems. But this paperless electronic system isn't good enough, especially considering the fundamental flaws of some machines that have been exposed in this year's primaries. We shouldn't substitute one bad system for another.

Some attribute this quote to Josef Stalin: "He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything." Let's be sure we count correctly.

see also http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/Technology/story?id=2596705&page=1

"Electronic Voting Machines Could Skew Elections."
By JAKE TAPPER, REBECCA ABRAHAMS and EDUARDO SUNOL

Oct. 22, 2006 — Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland Democratic legislator, was shocked when she opened her mail Wednesday morning.

Inside, she discovered three computer discs. With them was an anonymous letter saying the discs contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland's new electronic voting machines.

"My understanding is that with these disks a malicious person could skew the outcome of an election," Kagan said.

Diebold, the company that makes the voting machines, told ABC News, "These discs do not alter the security of the Diebold touch-screen system in any way," because election workers can set their own passwords.

But ABC News has obtained an independent report commissioned by the state of Maryland and conducted by Science Applications International Corporation revealing that the original Diebold factory passwords are still being used on many voting machines.

The SAIC study also shows myriad other security flaws, including administrative over-ride passwords that cannot be changed by local officials but can be used by hackers or those who have seen the discs.

The report further states that one of the high risks to the system comes if operating code discs are lost, stolen or seen by unauthorized parties — precisely what seems to have occurred with the discs sent to Kagan, who worries that the incident indicates the secret source code is not that difficult to obtain.

"Certainly, just tweaking a few votes in a couple of states could radically change the outcome of our policies for the coming year," she said.

Worry That Elections Could Be Hacked

Computer experts and government officials have voiced serious concerns that if these machines malfunction, no paper record will exist for a recount. Even worse is the fear that an election could be hacked.

Princeton University researchers using an Accuvote TS — a touch screen version of the Diebold machine — showed how easy it would be to deploy a virus that would, in seconds, flip the vote of any election.

"We're taking the vote-counting process and we're handing it over to these companies — and we don't know what happens inside these machines," said Edward Felten, a professor and a researcher at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, which ran the study.

Diebold called the Princeton study "unrealistic and inaccurate."

But many computer scientists, including cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore, disagree, pointing out that the Accuvote TS was used in the 2004 presidential election and is still used in at least four states — including all machines in Georgia and Maryland. Spoonamore said the hack attacked the operating system layer of software and would affect any touch screen machine built by Diebold.

Diebold argues that the software from the 2004 elections has been updated to fix any possible security problems. But Spoonamore is not convinced, saying Diebold's "system is utterly unsecured. The entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and secure our nation's voting."

There is also the matter of computer glitches. In primary elections and test runs this year, there were glitches with electronic voting machines from Diebold and other companies.

Machines malfunctioned in Texas, where 100,000 votes were added.

In California, directions for voters with vision problems came out in Vietnamese.

And in Maryland, screens froze and memory cards went missing.

Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican running for reelection, advised residents to vote by absentee ballot because he had no confidence in the machines.

"I don't care if we paid half a billion dollars or $1 billion," Ehrlich said. "If it's going to put the election at risk, there's no price tag for a phony election or a fraudulent election."

Many are concerned about how the confusing technical issues will be handled by poll workers, who tend to be senior citizens and who are not necessarily tech-savvy.

Electronic voting machines were supposed to be the solution to the paper ballot problems from the 2000 presidential election. But to many critics, America's voting system has gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.

National Debt clock

2006-10-24T21:28:00.000-04:00

Right now:

(from http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock)

$28,500 per person, at the moment.

The Conservative Soul

2006-10-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6253752

" In his new book, The Conservative Soul, Andrew Sullivan examines how the Republican Party has changed and the tensions between two forms of conservatism: historical conservatism and what he calls fundamentalism.

"Sullivan argues for getting back to the basics of conservatism: limited government, balanced budgets, individual liberty, rule of law. He says today's Republican-controlled U.S. government has strayed from these fundamental tenets.

"'I am asking for a conservatism … that gets back to understanding that we have to restrain government, not empower it, and that faith and politics need to be kept apart for the sake not only of politics, but also of religion, which is being poisoned by partisan politics,' he says."

Not too much I can add to this-- it's exactly my point. Conservatism has lost its focus with the existing "conservative" politicians, who seem to use conservative jabber as a tool for grabbing power, but seem to have no real interest in actual conservative ideas or beliefs.

Bryan Burrough states
(www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/19/AR2006101901116.html )
"The party I grew up in, which stood for fiscal discipline and strong defense and avoided the sloppiness and stained dresses of so many good-hearted Democratic administrations, seems to have been conquered by people who think stem-cell research is murder, who want to ban unpopular sex acts and who have proven incapable of managing such basic government tasks as disaster relief and a war."

I will argue once again (am I getting tedious here?) that the whole problem is power-- with Republicans in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, they have no checks on power, and unlimited power has fundamentally damaged them.

Interesting essay on "Common Conservatism"

2006-10-16T10:59:00.000-04:00

Interesting essay on "Common Conservatism" www.commonconservative.com/fiore/fiore101606.shtml

A lot I agree with, but I have to object to:
"Though the economy is the best that it’s been since the late 90s, it still remains the most underreported story of the last five years."

...well, to be brutally specific, the economy is the best it's been since the end of Clinton's term. That when the budget was running a surplus, and George Bush said he would take that surplus and "put it in a lock box."

"...Budget deficit lower than expected ($111 billion less)?"

I don't see how this is anything to crow about. "We're spending the country into trillions of dollars of debt, but we're not spending it quite as fast as we expected last year, so we will call that a gain!" I mean, even if you ignore the debt accounting that's so fuzzy that it's basically a con game, it's hard to see how "our budget deficit is 'only' a quarter of a trillion dollars" is "fiscal conservatism".

I have to say, thought, that I'm no longer even sure that “vote GOP, because the alternative is even worse than we are" even works for me any more. I've lost track of why the Repubicans call themselves conservatives-- they seem to have abandoned all the principles that I would call the core of conservatism, and have turned into the party that spends tax money like a kid in a candy store.

I'm still chewing on the fact that a Democrat president can balance the budget and even make a surplus, but a Republican president, with a Republican congress, can't. Who are these people, and what did they do with the actual Republicans?

(to be fair, though, I have to admit being more of a libertarian than a conservative. For while, during the Reagan revolution, there wasn't much difference, but that's no longer true; the younger Bush doesn't seem to have any interest in libertarian principles-- or liberty, for that matter.)

The End of the Republican Revolution

2006-10-12T21:53:00.000-04:00

Interesting link forwarded from Jafo on Usenet, on the end of the Republican revolution. I was a fan of the Republican revolution-- at least I was back when it really did look like some good ideas coming into Washington, and not the same old shit.

"...after controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of Bush's six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals. The exquisite political machinery that aces the elections has begun to betray the platform. To win votes back home, lawmakers have been spending taxpayer money like sailors on leave, producing the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history. And the party's approach to national security has taken the country into a war that most Americans now believe was a mistake and that the government's own intelligence experts say has shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

"One of the problems is that after the Republicans got into power, the system began to change them, not just the other way around. Among the first promises the G.O.P. majority broke was the setting of term limits...."

--
Frank Luntz, one of the strategists of the G.O.P. takeover, wrote:
"The Republican Party of 2006 is a tired, cranky shell of the aggressive, reformist movement that was swept into office in 1994 on a wave of positive change. I worked for them. They were friends of mine. These Republicans are not those Republicans."

No, these are "big government" Republicans. I want the old Republicans back!

Eight trillion dollars in debt

2006-10-11T13:40:00.000-04:00

NEWSWEEK, Sept. 18, 2006 issue

D.C.'s Deficit Math Doesn't Add Up

By Allan Sloan
Newsweek

Next month the White House and its congressional allies will be taking victory laps when the deficit for fiscal 2006 is announced.

The stated deficit for the year, which ends Sept. 30, will be $260 billion or so.

[a quarter of a trillion dollars new debt, and they're talking victory laps? They should be talking sepuku!]

That will be down $58 billion from 2005 and a whopping $77 billion below what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted in January.

The White House says this is happening largely because tax revenues have surged--which they have.

It sure sounds great.

But let me share a dirty little secret with you:

the real federal deficit isn't $260 billion.

It's more than double that.

And when you calculate what I consider the real deficit--hold on to your hats, it's $558 billion--you come out with slightly more than last year's real deficit, which I put at $551 billion.

Revenue surge, shmevenue surge.

Things are getting worse, not better.

To be sure, that $558 billion is better than the $635 billion implied by January's CBO numbers.

But it's nothing to crow about, considering that not long from now, baby boomers will begin to retire en masse and put huge pressure on the budget.

We know that numbers in Washington tend to be big and sometimes murky.

But how can the official deficit be only $260 billion while mine is $558 billion?

Am I taking strange pills?

Drinking funny water?

Nope.

It's the difference between Washington Math--the unique way that the federal government accounts for itself--and real-world math.

Here's the deal.

The stated deficit is the difference between the cash that the government takes in and the cash it spends.

That's $260 billion--the number most analysts use to measure the deficit.

But Uncle Sam will also borrow almost $300 billion from federal trust funds:

$177 billion from Social Security, and an additional $121 billion from "other government accounts" such as federal-employee pension funds.

Some $78 billion of this total comes from the Treasury's taking Social Security's cash surplus this year and spending it.

Most of the rest comes from the government's paying what it owes the trust funds--primarily for interest on their $3.6 trillion of Treasury securities--with I.O.U.s, not cash.

(All my numbers, by the way, are based on public budget documents.)

If a company tried to keep books this way, its accountants would scream faster than you can say Sarbanes-Oxley.

But we're playing by the rules of Washington Math.

I readily concede that if you want to measure the deficit's effect on financial markets, using $260 billion makes sense.

After all, that's how much the government is borrowing from "public investors" such as banks, foreign governments and you and me.

But if you want to see how much deeper the fiscal hole is getting for taxpayers present and future--which is how I think we should measure the deficit--you have to include the almost $300 billion of trust-fund I.O.U.s.

Unless, of course, you expect Uncle Sam to default on his promises.

I've written about the differences between Washington Math and real-world math since the Clinton administration.

The budget situation was improving then and got to be pretty good--though not as good as the Clintonist as wanted us to believe--thanks to fiscal responsibility, a surge in revenues and partisan gridlock that reined in spending.

Now things are heading the wrong way.

Not enough people seem to care that we're hocking ourselves to the eyeballs and borrowing heavily from foreign lenders--such as Asian central banks--whose future national interests may differ from ours.

"There's a disconnect from reality," says Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad, a longtime deficit hawk who is one of the few people who calculates the budget shortfall the way I do.

"It's utterly reckless," Conrad told me.

"The debt load and our growing obligations to foreign creditors are weakening us. We're running risks we shouldn't run."

I agree.

So when the budget victory song is sung in Washington next month, I'll curb my enthusiasm.

If you're worried about our country's financial future, you'll curb yours, too.

Pirates of the Mediterranean

2006-09-30T22:47:00.000-04:00

Roman history, from the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/opinion/30harris.html
(subscription needed), or from the Amherst Times, here:
http://www.amhersttimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2926&Itemid=27

Pirates of the Mediterranean

By Robert Harris - Kintbury, England

In the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”

Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”

Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11.

The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.

Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”
--
Franklin

Diebold voting machines shown to be insecure

2006-09-18T22:25:00.000-04:00

Haven't been blogging-- life has gotten in the way-- I guess blogs should be limited to people who promise to make time, somehow...

This was in the news lately, though, and I thought it worth posting.

This is not a partisan thing, and it's not about the last election, it's about democracy, period. The most important thing about a democracy is that an election needs to be verifiable. At the end of the election, we want to be able to say, this election was fair, and nobody cheated, and be able to have confidence that this is true. It is a goal for everybody, libertarian and conservative, Republican and Democrat, to be sure that election results are true. It is a bad thing to have an election where the results are questioned, and there's no way to verify whether the election was stolen or not, and we should do everything possible to make sure it does not happen.

There's been a lot of controversies lately about electronic voting machines (some of which I've posted here) including a great uproar about the fact that you have to trust the machines, and if the result has been tampered with, how would you know, other than to trust the company's assurances saying "you can't tamper with the result."

A recent resulting shows, yes, you can tamper with them:

Princeton University Scholars hack Diebold electronic voting machines.

The details are here

The abstract is:
Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine
Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten

Abstract This paper presents a fully independent security study of a
Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities - a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

The full paper is online.

In their frequently-asked questions portion of the site, they say: Have the vote-stealing methods you discuss ever been used in real elections?

Probably not, but we don't know for sure. We haven't seen evidence that these attacks have been used, but one lesson of our report is that the design of these voting technologies makes attacks relatively easy to cover up.

and
Isn't this all just partisan politics? Aren't you just unhappy with how recent elections have gone?

Our goal is to make elections more accurate. That shouldn't be a partisan issue, and when others try to make it partisan we do our best to ignore them.

The purpose of an election is to accurately measure the intent of the voters. The challenge is to convince the losing candidate and his supporters that he truly lost the election. Sufficient evidence can only come from a combination of properly-engineered technology and robust procedures for handling it. We can all benefit from a system that can supply that
evidence.

--for what it's worth, I agree with this last statement. My personal belief is that no voting machine should ever be qualified to be used in an election unless its source code is available for inspection by any registered voter.

And paper trails are a good thing, too.

Voting rights renewal

2006-06-22T13:27:00.000-04:00

Here's some rather biased coverage:
"Southern lawmakers delay voting rights bill"
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-06-21T201959Z_01_N21242448_RTRUKOC_0_US-CONGRESS-RIGHTS.xml&archived=False
or
GOP Halts Extension of Voting Rights Act
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-voting22jun22,0,1505421.story?coll=la-story-footer

The headlines make it sound like those ol' racist southern congressmen are trying to kill the 1965 Voting rights act... read the details, though, and you see that they are objecting to the requirement for Spanish language ballots, and the federally-mandated oversight of some voting districts that used to be discriminating, before 1965. Nobody is objecting to the voting rights act itself, which says that Americans should be allowed to vote regardless of race, creed, or color. This is a manufactured issue.

The objections are perfectly reasonable. If the law says that districts that discriminated fifty years ago still need "temporary" federally-mandated oversight, it's pretty clear that the answer to the question "how long is 'temporary'?" is "forever."

And the multi-lingual ballot part wasn't even part of the 1965 act-- it was added later. It is completely ridiculous that the Federal government should mandate Spanish as the second language for elections. What about immigrants from Haiti, shouldn't they have ballots in French? How about Vietnamese immigrants? Ukranians? What about ballots in Swahili? How about Esperanto, or Klingon?

People who want to vote should know at least enough English to complete a ballot.

The difference between conservative and libertarian

2006-05-28T10:44:00.000-04:00

Conservatism vs. Libertarianism (Jacob G. Hornberger)

I hate 'em all

2006-05-28T09:59:00.000-04:00

The newest congressional corruption scandal doesn't surprise me-- Democrats take bribes too? No surprise. It's kind of karmic retribution; after all, what with (Republican) Randy Cunningham now in prison for taking bribes, and influence-peddler Abrahmson pleading guilty. I'm pissed off, but have to admit also being a bit happy to see the Democrat's smug holier-than-thou attitude get a little bit punctured.

But what I don't get is the instant Republican response. Jefferson was videotaped by the FBI taking bribes. One of his aides had pleaded guilty to bribing him. They got a search warrant, they searched his office-- sounds routine.

Congress is not above the law, dudes. He's just as fair game for a search warrant as a drug dealer or fence or any other criminal. Why the outrage over the search? This is the same congress that, when Bush says that search warrents aren't needed if you say the magic words "war on terror", says "well, that's reasonable."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0605280273may28,1,2834107.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hastert28may28,1,7962390.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&track=crosspromo

The burning question I have is, why is Hastert so afraid? What does he have to hide?

LIberty and Security, Continued

2006-05-25T12:01:00.000-04:00

So, WIRED mentions Orwell...

WIRED online has now posted some documents with technical details about the cooperation of AT&T with the no-warrent wiretapping of phone lines.

What I found most interesting is the end of the article, where WIRED asks what the data from the wiretapping was actually going to be used for. Apparently the point of the wiretapping was to do massive amounts of data collection, that could then be sifted to test the "Total Information Awareness" (later renamed "Terrorist Information Awareness") initiative to do data-mining on large amounts of data

At the very end of their post, they quote a 2003 DOD Inspector General's report about who is involved here:

For testing TIA capabilities, Darpa and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) created an operational research and development environment that uses real-time feedback.... Among the agencies participating or planning to participate in the INSCOM "testing" are the "National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the DOD Counterintelligence Field Activity, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Special Operations Command, the Joint Forces Command and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center." There are also "discussions" going on to bring in "non-DOD federal agencies" such as the FBI.>/i>

Yow-- eight government agencies are going to be sifting through our conversations, plus "discussions" about more.

WIRED concludes, "This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state."

Yep. That's the problem. And most especially, it's an infrastructure that they have already said is not subject to warrents, or legal oversight of any kind; in fact, it's infrastructute that they have now told us we weren't even supposed to know about. Once they set up the infrastructure, why are we supposed to trust that nobody, ever, is going to decide to use it?

Once again, back to the quote from Eppers:
"Dangerous laws created by well intentioned people today can be used by dangerous people with evil intentions tomorrow."

Conservative Criticisms

2006-05-25T10:21:00.000-04:00
Conservative Forum on Bush (linked from Roman's Weblog).

"...The first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, Bartlett called the administration "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept." ...speaker No. 2, conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Author of the forthcoming The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back, called Bush "reckless" and "a socialist," and accused him of betraying "almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for.""

"Nor was moderator [Cato Institute vice president David] Boaz a voice of moderation. He blamed Bush for "a 48 percent increase in spending in just six years," a "federalization of public schools" and "the biggest entitlement since LBJ."

"True, the small-government libertarians represented by Cato have always been the odd men out of the Bush coalition. But the standing-room-only forum yesterday, where just a single questioner offered even a tepid defense of the president, underscored some deep disillusionment among conservatives over Bush's big-spending answer to Medicare and Hurricane Katrina, his vast claims of executive power, and his handling of postwar Iraq."

No real surprise that conservatives are "disillusioned" with Bush; it's been quite clear for a while that GEORGE BUSH IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE. I'm baffled that people have failed to notice this.

And he absolutely, completely, totally isn't a "small-government conservative libertarian." Isn't, never was, never will be a "small-government" anything.

"Betraying almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for." Yep, that's about it.

Security and Democracy

2006-05-18T12:07:00.000-04:00
The Chicago Tribune
The article quotes Congressman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) as saying that this issue is this: "You have no civil liberties if you are dead."

Patriot Patrick Henry once expressed the opposite view. He said "Give me liberty, or give me death!"

Or, to quite Benjamin Franklin, "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

It seems that the government is asking us to give them our liberty and our privacy, and saying that we should just trust them not to misuse it. But, if we give away our liberty and our privacy for a never-ending war, will we ever get them back? It's not just a question of trusting this administration, but trusting every administration in the future never to misuse the powers we are giving them. Because they will continue to use the same arguments, of course. This is always the argument for taking away liberty, that they're doing it for our own good.

And it gets worse exponentially. The politicians that don't use the power we give them to spy on political opponents in secret and increase their own power, well, those ones don't stay in power as long as the ones who are more ruthless (and secret) about using their power to stay in power.

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
--Lord Acton, 1887

We may need some limit on the absolute power.

Search and Seizure: does the government's power have limits?

2006-04-13T11:40:00.000-04:00
This was posted by "Pete Guither and Hypatia" to the blog "Unclaimed Territory," and I think it's worth repeating.

Anybody see a problem here? I mean, the government has given themselves the right to break into your house with guns specifically in order to take your stuff. (And "stuff" here includes money-- if they find any money in your house, they keep it.) And, here's the nice thing about it (nice for the government, I mean-- not nice for you.) They don't need to go through the legal system if they want to keep your stuff, or sell it. If you want your stuff back, you have to go to court and prove that you're not using it in a criminal enterprise. Isn't that nice? It's a civil seizure, you see-- there's none of that inconvenient stuff like "civil rights" or "guilty until proven innocent."

I mean, doesn't anybody have a problem here other than the inconvenient fact that this is specifically and blatantly against the constitution?

From glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/04/using-drug-war-to-expand-government.html
by Pete Guither and Hypatia
"[The Patriot Act] allowed the Department of Justice to use the same tools from the criminal process on terrorists that we use to combat mobsters or drug dealers."
- John Ashcroft

"The law allows our intelligence and law enforcement officials to continue to share information. It allows them to continue to use tools against terrorists that they used against -- that they use against drug dealers and other criminals. ... And the bill gives law enforcement new tools to combat threats to our citizens from international terrorists to local drug dealers."
- George W. Bush, March 9, 2006

Whether it's terrorism or drugs, declaring war is an opportunity for the state to demand more tools, more weapons, more power. All the Department of Justice needs to do is utter the words "terror" or "drugs," and Congress starts writing blank checks. These days they utter both, and the sky's the legislative limit.

We discussed what is arguably the most vicious drug war weapon – prison – at this site in our guest post Prison & the War on Drugs: Just Say No. But the drug warriors have long employed many other dangerous and/or inhuman additional weapons, and these are now growing more numerous. Most recently that is thanks to The Patriot Act (“TPA”), sold as an essential tool in fighting terrorists, but one that it also being used with increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism, especially the investigation of suspected drug traffickers. (And, as will be seen, no one understands and objects to this state of affairs more strongly than Senator Russ Feingold.)

About 110 million Americans age 12 or older (46% of the population) have reported using illegal drugs at some time in their lives. Further, many if not most users also qualify as “dealers” in the eyes of the law. With close to half of our country constituting "the enemy,” the government must have a heavy and varied armory, if it is to effectively wage battles on this massive domestic horde of drug belligerents. Let us consider what, then, in addition to prison, comprises the drug warriors' arsenal that it trains on nearly half of us.

Drug War Weapon: Asset Forfeiture

Forfeiture -- the seizure of the personal property of traitors or certain felons -- has its roots in English common law and was used to a limited degree in the American colonies. Our Founders, however, despised it, and in 1790 the very first Congress abolished forfeiture. That repeal held for 180 years, until 1970 and Richard Nixon's drug war push.

The new federal asset forfeiture law is civil, not criminal, and unlike the English common law, which required conviction prior to seizure, American forfeiture dispenses with the need for proving the property owner guilty of anything. All that is necessary is for the state to claim a connection between the thing seized and drugs, whereupon the government may confiscate the property. It is then up to the owner to prove (at their own expense, hiring a lawyer & etc.) that the property is "innocent." Critically, the proceeds from the seizures go into the budget of the state or federal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors offices, creating a horrible incentive for officers to go after seizures solely for the purpose of enriching their units with a swell new fleet of fully loaded police cruisers, or lovely new desks for the DAs.

Forfeiture Endangers American Rights documents some of the myriad, rampant abuses of civil asset forfeiture:

Willie Jones, the black owner of a Nashville nursery business. Jones aroused the suspicions of a ticketing agent by purchasing an airline ticket with cash. He was traveling to Houston to buy nursery inventory with cash. Jones was not arrested or charged with a crime, but the $9,600 so essential to his family business was seized. Law enforcement assumes that anyone carrying that much cash, especially to a city where drug trafficking occurs, must be a drug dealer. While there was no evidence to charge Jones, lack of evidence wasn't necessary to charge his cash (the concept, again being, that since objects aren't people, they aren't entitled to the presumption of innocence.)

Donald P. Scott was a reclusive millionaire in California with a 200 acre ranch in Malibu. His home was raided by 30 law enforcement officers hoping to find marijuana plants, with a plan to seize the property. In the course of the raid, Scott was shot to death by two sheriffs deputies. No drugs were found. According to District Attorney Michael Bradbury:"It is the District Attorney's opinion that the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to seize and forfeit the ranch for the government... Based in part upon the possibility of forfeiture, Spencer obtained a search warrant that was not supported by probable cause. This search warrant became Donald Scott's death warrant."

Last fall, 56-year-old Cynthia Warren of Boulder City, Colorado pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of growing 6 marijuana plants in her home and was fined $500. But that wasn't the end of it. City Attorney Dave Olsen attempted to seize her $400,000 home.

And yes, this is all constitutional; thus has held our Supreme Court. The state may seize your “guilty property” even if you are an “innocent owner,” unaware of or uninvolved in any illicit activity. Further, asset forfeiture having been brought back to us for the drug war,it may now apply to other vice crimes, according to our Highest Court; even if you are an innocent wife who co-owns a vehicle with your husband, and in that car the cad avails himself of the services of an, um, “sex worker.” You lose your "guilty" vehicle to the state.

The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (pdf) made some minor corrections to the federal law, but the program is still a major law enforcement agency budget enhancer, and is rife with corruption. Abuse of state asset forfeiture laws is rampant. Since 1997, less than half of the law enforcement agencies in Ohio have filed reports listing money and property seized, despite a state law that mandates reporting. Utah tried to reform the laws by requiring seized assets to go to education rather than law enforcement, but were stymied by their own law enforcement agencies who refused to comply as well as the federal government. Getting around state law often merely requires involving a federal agent in the bust. That renders it a federal case, and the feds automatically kick back a percentage to local law enforcement. Federal seized assets totalled $500 million in 2005-- not a bad little petty cash fund.

Drug War Weapon: Criminal and Paid Informants

The informant is an essential tool in the war on drugs, most commonly sent out to buy drugs and then law enforcement arrests the sellers. Informants did not used to be heavily employed by the police, but they are “necessary” in vice crimes, and especially so in the drug war. That is because unlike in the instance of, say, rape or robbery, there is no complaining witness; drug transactions do not normally involve an aggrieved party -- "Officer, that man sold me some weed, help me!"And since drug dealers are also generally unwilling to conveniently conduct transactions in front of law enforcement officers, the drug warriors simply “must” make extensive use of informants. These are either paid (sometimes by the bust or according to the amount of drugs involved), or s/he is working for a reduced sentence. Either way, the incentive is to deliver the arrest and conviction of other citizens, any way they can.
The results are predictable:

In 1999, a drug sting operation in the small town of Tulia, Texas resulted in the arrest of 46 people, 40 of whom were black. The remaining six individuals were either Latinos or whites dating blacks. This drug bust resulted in the incarceration of almost 15% of the black population of Tulia. All were charged based on the word of Tom Coleman, a paid operative who worked alone, did not wear a wire, and did not record the locations of any of the supposed drug transactions. Despite a paucity of evidence other than Coleman's claims, several of the accused were convicted (including one who received a 99 year sentence). But then things began to fall apart. Some of the suspects had proof they were elsewhere at the time of the supposed drug buys. Information surfaced that Coleman had a criminal past and a history of lying. Eventually the case got some visibility and public pressure. A special prosecutor dropped the charges for those being held, and the Governor signed a bill in 2003 freeing those who had already been sent to prison.

In 2001, narcotics informants on the Dallas police payroll planted packages of billiards chalk on dozens off innocent Mexican immigrants, who were then arrested and imprisoned for cocaine trafficking. The bigger the "buy," the more the police would pay their informants. This travesty came to light when several Dallas police officers were prosecuted for corruption.

Drug War Weapon: No-knock Searches

The most dangerous tool used in the War on Drugs is the no-knock drug raid. It's 4 a.m. and dozens of officers dressed in black prepare to storm a house. They come with battering rams to smash down the door, flash grenades are employed, and before the residents can fully wake up and figure out what's going on, armed men are swarming through the house and into the bedrooms. Anything can happen. And it does.

Federal constitutional law generally requires "knock and announce" before entering a residence with a search warrant. However, there is an "exigent circumstances exception" -- generally held to include situations threatening physical safety, or the imminent destruction of evidence. And we cannot have drug dealers flushing evidence down the toilet, so officers crash into homes without first knocking and announcing themselves.

Prior to the drug war, no-knock searches and SWAT teams were generally reserved for hostage situations and extremely rare cases where lives were in danger. And for good reason -- storming into a house is incredibly dangerous for both officers and residents. These are military tactics and should only be used on civilians as a last resort. But, of course, this is a “war,” hence the commando raids. (See this excellent post at QandO about a case currently being reviewed in the Supreme Court pertaining to the constitutionality of no-knock searches.)

Indeed, with the advent of the war on plants, pills and powders, there has been an explosion in SWAT teams and no- knock drug raids around the country (why does Mount Orab, Ohio -- population 2,701 -- need its own 12-man SWAT team?). In the 1980s, there were about 3,000 annual SWAT team deployments each. Today, courtesy of the drug war, there are at least 40,000 a year.

These raids entail high risk of two serious dangers: officers understandably on edge ready to fire at the slightest provocation, and confused residents who may think their home is being invaded (some of whom may be legally or illegally armed). With the increase in the use of these tactics, therefore, comes an increase in the frequency of these kinds of stories:

8-year-old Xavier Bennett was accidentally shot to death by officers in a pre-dawn drug raid during a gunfight with one of Xavier's relatives.

11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda was killed by a shotgun blast to the back while following police orders and lying face down on the floor during a SWAT raid.

84-year-old, bed-ridden Annie Rae Dixon was in her room at the time of a drug raid. An officer kicked open her bedroom door and accidentally shot and killed her.
56 year-old Alberta Spruill died of a heart attack during a wrong- address drug raid. The same thing happened to the elderely, Reverend Accelyne Williams in a separate wrong-address raid.

23-year-old Anthon Diotaiuto was working two jobs to pay for the house he lived in with his mother. He died after he was shot 10 times during a raid on his house that yielded 2 ounces of marijuana.

46-year-old Willie Heard thought his home was being invaded and he grabbed his unloaded rifle to protect his wife and daughter. He was shot to death in front of them. The police had gone to the wrong address.

During a drug raid, smoke grenades started the house on fire. 21- year-old John Hirko was shot to death in the back trying to escape the burning building. (The city of Bethlehem, PA is paying an $8 million settlement to his family.)

20 year-old Jose Colon made the mistake of visiting a house targeted for a raid. He was standing outside when SWAT shot him in the head.

45 year-old Ismael Mena was killed in his home by police. They were at the wrong address.

65 year-old Mario Paz died when he was shot twice in the back in his bedroom during a drug raid.

Well, but we are war. During war, collateral damage and friendly fire are to be expected in harsh battle zones. But is this the America we want? A country where we engage in military-style invasions of citizens’ homes to prevent dried weeds and powders from being flushed?
Do we want more drug war weaponry, and escalation of the tactical offensives, sanctioned in the name of the war on terror via TPA? No, thinks the estimable Russ Feingold, who has been much maligned for his vote against it, but who approves of most of TPA. Among his objections, however, is opposition to enhancing the use of an un-American weapon in the drug warriors' armory, namely expanded use of “sneak and peek” searches (our emphasis):

Notice of [a] search is part of the standard Fourth Amendment protection. It’s what gives meaning, or maybe we should say “teeth,” to the Constitution’s requirement of a warrant and a particular description of the place to be searched and the persons or items to be seized. Over the years, the courts have had to deal with government claims that the circumstances of a particular investigation require a search without notifying the target prior to carrying out the search. In some cases, giving notice would compromise the success of the search by leading to the flight of the suspect or the destruction of evidence. The two leading cases on so-called surreptitious entry, or what have come to be known as “sneak and peek” searches, came to very similar conclusions….

Let me make one final point about sneak and peek warrants. Don’t be fooled for a minute into believing that this power is needed to investigate terrorism or espionage. It’s not. Section 213 is a criminal provision that could apply in whatever kind of criminal investigation the government has undertaken. In fact, most sneak and peek warrants are issued for drug investigations. So why do I say that they aren’t needed in terrorism investigations? Because FISA also can apply to those investigations. And FISA search warrants are always executed in secret, and never require notice. If you really don’t want to give notice of a search in a terrorism investigation, you can get a FISA warrant. So any argument that limiting the sneak and peek power as we have proposed will interfere with sensitive terrorism investigations is a red herring.

The drug war and its odious arsenal are a danger to our society. They result in lost lives, police corruption, and a severe erosions of citizens' rights -- and familes destroyed by loved ones going to prison. Even if the drug war were considered a success (a truly absurd belief), it is surpassingly clear that the tools of prohibition are worse than the drugs prohibited. The Bush Administration’s expansion of the types and occasions for use of these weapons, while invoking and piggy-backing on terrorism as an excuse, is wholly unjustified; it is right for Feingold, and all of us, to just say no.

The case for gridlock

2006-04-11T16:53:00.000-04:00
This is from 2004, but still seems to be valid for the coming elections. Brian Doherty made the case that gridlock would be the best thing for the government:
Adapted from www.lewrockwell.com/ocregister/kerry-doherty.html: "In praise of gridlock"

In the past, growth of federal spending has slowed only when the national government was divided

[adapted from an original essay by Brian Doherty]

Can you imagine Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist proudly standing beside President John Kerry in a Rose Garden signing ceremony as he signs a bill that they handed him - a bill that will increase government spending over the next decade by more than half a trillion? Especially if that bill would give Democrat Kerry the loyalty of a politically powerful
constituency?

Of course, the GOP's congressional leadership did help President George W. Bush - their own party's man - pass his Medicare bill, whose projected costs keep rising above that budget-busting level. In fact, Bush, with the exception of his tax cuts, has been a shockingly big-government conservative.

Having the President and congress from opposite parties is the most likely hope for curbing excessive government growth in the next four years. Why? The party stereotypes don't always hold up, and a Republican president and a Congress led by Democrats creates a kind of institutional impasse that actually slows the momentum of government.

Ever since the Goldwater vs. LBJ contest of 1964, the two major parties have staked out rough philosophical positions along these lines: the Republicans are, at least rhetorically, for a lean and limited government; the Democrats are unreconstructed advocates of state power, state spending and state solutions to every problem.

But the facts - the performance of the parties when they have the power - have never borne that out. We got such regulatory state measures as the Clean Air Act and wage and price controls under Nixon, and the Americans with Disabilities Act under the first George Bush. And it was under Democrat Bill Clinton that we got meaningful welfare reform that has knocked nearly 3 million families off the federal dole so far, even as child poverty rates shrink.

But the most vivid example that Republicans can't be relied on as consistent defenders of smaller government is our current Republican president. Bush has increased domestic discretionary spending 25 percent in less than four years, compared to an increase under Clinton over his entire two terms of only 10 percent.

Bush's administration is spending over $20,000 per American household, the highest level, adjusted for inflation, since World War II. He can't blame it on war and post-9/11 security measures alone, either. Even with those taken out of the equation, according to an analysis by the usually GOP-leaning Heritage Foundation, discretionary spending under Bush has increased 16 percent, from $340 billion to $395 billion.

And then there's his Medicare expansion. Clinton had an opposition Congress to curb his health-care expansion enthusiasms; Bush, alas, had a GOP Congress mostly compliant to his wishes.

Bush has betrayed the humble, restrained small-government vision of the Republican Party in other ways as well, for example, by engaging in a spectacularly expensive nation-building project in Iraq, despite talking intelligently against that sort of big-government hubris while campaigning in 2000. He's shown no firm dedication to free-trade principles, hiking tariffs on steel and shrimp. He's supported restrictions on free political speech by signing the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill.

...Nothing is certain when contemplating the political future. But we do know some things about the recent political past that should help guide a strategic voter who wants smaller government: In the past, divided government has shown great power to curb federal spending. As William Niskanen, a former chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, has noted, the only two post-World War II periods of genuine restraint in federal spending growth (with annual increases of less than 1 percent) came during the Eisenhower and Clinton administrations. Both presidents mostly lacked Congresses controlled by their parties.

It couldn't be clearer that the combination of Bush in the White House and a GOP-dominated Congress has been a disaster when it comes to curbing the growth of government spending and programs. It might just be that partisan spite can make a Democrat-controlled Congress do the right thing where a principled dedication to reining in government seems MIA. Since Democratic lawmakers don't have the political reputation of their party's standard-bearer to protect, they are more likely to stiffen their spines and help obstruct much of the damage.

And if George Bush doesn't receive some electoral punishment for his profligate ways, the Republican Party's value as a vehicle for limiting government will plunge lower than a 10-year-old Ford Escort. Bush might earn some short-term electoral advantage through expensive schemes like his Medicare reform. But such schemes are sure to bankrupt the republic in the long run. His own party's Congress don't seen about to stop him. A Democratic congress might.

As paradoxical as it seems, for those who believe in the Republican Party that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan promised, the Democrats may be their greatest realistic chance to express their support for preserving that tradition.

Republican view of Republicans

2006-04-08T22:30:00.000-04:00
Here's an article from the Washington Post that has me saying yes, yes.
" A new AP poll shows 60 percent of Republicans now disapprove of the Republican Congress." Add my name to the list; I'm disgusted with the Republicans, and I am one.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040801031.html

GOP Sees Disturbing Reflection in The Mirror
Democrats Fell in '94 After Abuses of Power
By Jim VandeHei and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 9, 2006; Page A03

The Tom DeLay era is ending much as it began. An entrenched majority, battered by ethical scandals involving its top leaders, is running what many see as a politically polarized and profligate House of Representatives.

What is most remarkable, according to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers and aides, is that it took a little more than a decade for DeLay and House Republicans to succumb to many practices they railed against in the 1990s. From stifling congressional dissent to the raw use of power, they say, Republicans have become like the Democratic barons they ousted in 1994.

Former House majority leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) said that former majority leader DeLay (R-Tex.) was largely to blame for leading Republicans away from their core values. "DeLay, as much as anybody, was responsible for putting the party on the wrong track," Armey said last week. "He always wanted his place in the sun."

Yet many others said the problem was much bigger -- and more complicated -- than the excesses of DeLay. They said it was a general sense of hubris and self-preservation that prompted GOP leaders to gradually abandon the tenets of the 1994 revolution: smaller government, accountability, and a new and cleaner way of doing business in Washington.

"It is a little like a reformed alcoholic taking little drinks -- pretty soon, you have a real problem on your hands," said John S. Czwartacki, who served as a key communications strategist for House Republicans in the 1990s. Czwartacki was talking about the Republicans' embrace of big government spending in particular, but others said the idea applies to the undoing of the entire revolution.

DeLay's career tracks the rise and fall of the Republican Revolution. He was a little-known conservative backbencher in the early 1990s agitating for change. And he was part of a broader movement led by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who sought to take down not only the Democratic Party but also the more moderate and compromise-minded leadership led by Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.).

The parallels between the Democrats that DeLay and Gingrich abhorred 12 years ago and the Republicans of today are striking. In 1994, Democrats who had been the majority for more than four decades were heavily favored to remain so. But the public was discontent with their performance. Polls then showed that about one in three Americans approved of the Democratic-controlled Congress; polls today show that about one in three respondents approve of the Republican-control Congress.

Democrats were increasingly perceived by the public as corrupt and unethical. Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.) had become the first man in that office to resign because of ethics charges, while then-Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), who pioneered many of the money-for-access techniques DeLay would later adopt, had stepped aside after his financial dealings came under scrutiny. Then the House Bank scandal erupted, and reports that members had routinely kited checks served as a symbol of Democratic abuse.

DeLay, Gingrich and other conservatives mounted a national campaign based on a promise to end corruption and enact a new "Contract With America," which promised institutional restructuring, tax cuts and a reduction in government red tape.

After the Republicans toppled the Democrats that fall by picking up 52 seats in the House, they promised big changes -- and often delivered. With Gingrich as speaker, Armey as majority leader and DeLay as whip, the Republicans instituted a series of reforms aimed at curbing some of the Democrats' worst excesses. They applied federal workplace laws to Congress, so lawmakers had to comply with the same rules as other federal employers, and eliminated proxy voting so members had to actually show up and vote when committees were in session.

GOP leaders abolished bastions of patronage, such as the House mailroom, and eliminated perks including daily ice delivery to House offices. These changes, along with decisions to eliminate 621 committee staff jobs, saved taxpayers $50 million in 1995, according to the House Oversight Committee. The Republicans cut taxes, eliminated many regulatory restrictions on business and took aim -- unsuccessfully -- at eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce.

But as the Republicans became more entrenched and accustomed to their position of power, leaders shifted their emphasis from reforming government to consolidating their power and self-preservation. "I do think for both parties -- and it has happened for Republicans now -- there is a risk of majority fatigue where you run out of new ideas," said Ari Fleischer, who worked in Congress in the 1990s before becoming White House spokesman. "The other risk is people's zest for reform yields to their desire to maintain power."

Gingrich said the party became too preoccupied with creating and maintaining safe GOP districts as part of an effort to cement a lasting majority. Gingrich, who originally championed the idea, said he now thinks the tactic has had the effect of undermining democracy and distancing House members from their roots.

Democrats "get to rip off the public in the states where they control and protect their incumbents, and we get to rip off the public in the states we control and protect our incumbents, so the public gets ripped off in both circumstances," Gingrich said. "In the long run, there's a downward spiral of isolation."

During their decades in the minority, Republicans lambasted Democrats for excluding them from decision-making in drafting major legislation and denying them the opportunity to amend bills on the floor using arcane House rules.

After having vowed to eliminate the "closed rules" Democrats used to quash GOP ideas, Republicans used the same tactics to stifle debate. During the past Congress -- the 108th -- only 22 percent of legislation was considered with an open rule allowing the minority to offer amendments from the floor, compared with 30 percent under the Democrats' 103rd Congress. When Democrats offered 29 amendments to a medical malpractice bill last Congress, GOP leaders blocked all of them from coming to a vote.

"Here we are fighting for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have more and more closed rules here," Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.) said. "We don't want democracy to flourish on the floor of the House of Representatives."

DeLay and others also grew increasingly focused on campaign fundraising, especially how much others were raising for the party and fellow members. They abolished the seniority system that controlled chairmanships and committee assignments, and replaced it with ideological and financial litmus tests. Those who raised the most money for the party often had the best chance of snaring a top committee assignment.

DeLay "had a tremendous influence making [money] a consideration, and once you have adopted those criteria, other members take note and say 'Gosh, I better do whatever it takes to get the nod for the job,' " Michel said.

The Republicans built a powerful legislative machine that rarely faltered. House Republicans were highly effective at passing legislation, especially tax cuts and measures benefiting businesses. The GOP leaders rarely lost floor votes, and since President Bush took office in 2001, they have shaped and pushed the Republican agenda. But along the way, the core conservative principle of shrinking the size of government was jettisoned, according to some Republican members. During the past six years alone, government spending has increased by more than 25 percent under their watch.

Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.) said the party has compromised away its commitment to smaller government. "The moderates went along with us on policy as long as we gave them more money at the end of the year," Souder said. "We got addicted to spending." Souder, who first won office in 1994, said that it is no longer clear what the party stands for.

"This is a campaign where we're each fighting on our own, hoping we can survive with a bare majority," Souder said. "Even if we had a unified vision, I don't know exactly what our vision would be."

Of all of the examples of backsliding, it is the ethical ones that Republicans fear could hurt them most in the fall election. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) recently resigned after pleading guilty to taking bribes. Last week, DeLay announced he will resign from Congress this spring, just as the investigation of his former top aides in money-for-favors scandals is heating up. Many members said they expect at least one more GOP member to be indicted this year. A new AP poll shows 60 percent of Republicans now disapprove of the Republican Congress.

"If it's about your power, you lose," Armey said, quoting one of his own favorite axioms. "If it's about you, you lose."

In Favor of Freedom

2006-04-06T15:19:00.000-04:00
Today, many politicians are telling us that to preserve "freedom," we have to be prepared to give away our liberty

In the blog Unclaimed Territory
"Hume's Ghost" recently posted quotes from the Founding Fathers about liberty. (I won't repeat the whole list of quotes-- find them here: glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/03/what-would-founders-say.html). Many of the quotes warn in the strongest way against giving excessive power to the government, and to the chief executive.

I can think of no more eloquent defenses of liberty.

James Madison in Federalist #47:
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

George Washington, in his Farewell Address (1796):
"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.
"...let there be no change by usurpation; for although this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield."

Thomas Paine in Dissertation on the First Prinicples of Government (1795) said:
"An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

Thomas Jefferson, in "Bill for a More General Diffusion of Knowledge" (1778) :
"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."

Jefferson expands on this in the "Kentucky Resolutions" (1798):
"... In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

John Adams, in Notes for an Oration at Baintree (1772):
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

James Madison wrote in 1798 to Thomas Jefferson:
"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."

In the Federalist #8 Alexander Hamilton recognized that external threats can erode liberty:
"Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free."

All of these quotes are doing little more than amplifying on what was attributed to Benjamin Franklin in 1759, and often misquoted:
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

"Humes Ghost" ends with an appeal from Patrick Henry, telling us that it is not worth sacrificing our freedom in the name of security:

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

US Citizen Held Without Trial

2006-04-04T21:29:00.000-04:00
OK. The guy's an American citizen, born in America-- if he gets arrested, he has the right to a trial, a lawyer, all that. This is what America means by freedom. We don't hold people in secret jails, in solitary confinement, without the right to talk to their family or a lawyer, without charges, indefinitely. That's what dictatorships do.

There it is, right in the bill of rights... still there, yep--- due process of law, amendment V.

from the LA Times (quoted by The Moderate Voice:
The court's action leaves unresolved the question of whether the president as commander in chief has the power to arrest and hold without trial Americans whom he believes are working for the enemy.

President Bush and his lawyers have claimed this power as part of his wartime authority. However, both the Constitution and U.S. law say that American citizens cannot be arrested and held without due process of law. That usually involves, at minimum, a hearing before a judge in which the detained person can challenge the government's basis for holding him.

The Bush administration has accused Padilla of being part of a terrorist conspiracy. It has steadfastly refused to give him a hearing to challenge those chargess. Rather than charge him as a criminal, the White House said the president had decided to hold Padilla in military custody. He was not permitted to speak with his family or with a lawyer, and no charges were filed against him.

This is not just a little while here-- we're talking about a guy being held for four years without being charged. Let me check, yep, it's still there in the constitution: a right to a speedy trial, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation, and to be confronted with the witnesses, right there in the U.S. Constitution, Amendment VI. Nothing about "unless the president says otherwise."

The Republican summarizes it:
www.masslive.com/editorials/republican/index.ssf?/base/news-0/11441369207010.xml&coll=1
Padilla was born in Chicago. He is a U.S. citizen. He was apprehended on U.S. soil. But he was not afforded the rights of a native-born citizen captured inside our borders. Why? Because, the administration says, we are at war. But Padilla was not detained as a prisoner of war. Why? Presumably, the administration would argue, because this is a different kind of war with its own set of rules.

That is not the logic of our constitutional form of government, our system of checks and balances. The high court stepped aside when it should have stepped forward.

Voting Machines

2006-04-03T20:59:00.000-04:00
I've recently been looking at some articles on electronic voting machines, and I find them frightening. It looks like these things are an open invitation to hackers, and nobody seems to care.

From cyber.law.harvard.edu/briefings/dvb:
Computer scientists have been grumbling about the transition to electronic voting for years. They have claimed that electronic systems are too unreliable to entrust with the most sacred exercise in a democratic society. But it was Diebold's systems in particular that generated interest and outrage in July 2003 when a team of computer scientists published a scholarly review of the machines' software.
The report cataloged hundreds of flaws, which ranged from lack of password protection on central databases to a glitch that would allow holders of a certain "smart card" to vote as many times as they liked. As Avi Rubin, the principal researcher, explained, "We found some stunning, stunning flaws."
These flaws had not attracted widespread attention prior to Rubin, few people knew how to access Diebold's source code. As Joe Richardson, a spokesperson for Diebold explained, "We don't feel it's necessary to turn [the source code] over to everyone who asks to see it because it is proprietary."
This lack of access was one of the main objections computer scientists raised about electronic voting. They argued that electronic voting is inherently undemocratic because, when a company's software cannot be viewed by the public, voters have no way to ensure that it works properly-the public must simply accept the company's assurance that touching a button on a computer screen registers as a vote for the correct candidate. As critics have explained, the systems are also highly vulnerable to tampering, malfunctions, and problems with voter-privacy because results are aggregated in centralized databases - databases that can easily be altered.

Some more links: www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1636
www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1593
blackboxvoting.com/

I'd be more willing to trust the computerized machines more if the source code were open to inspection. The computer industry has time and time again proven that "security by obscurity" doesn't exist; flaws exist in the security of every computer system, and if you don't bring them out in the open, then they will be exploited in the dark.
In fact, testing software without having any knowledge of what's going on inside is not likely to reveal any security flaws at all.

From Wired: www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00.html
"Last January the electronic voting machine maker faced public embarrassment when voting activists revealed the company's insecure FTP server was making its software source code available for everyone to see.
"Then researchers and auditors who examined code for the company's touch-screen voting system released two separate reports stating that the software was full of serious security flaws."

Notice the trend here? The voting machine software was, in fact, insecure, but the fact that it was insecure wasn't revealed until researchers EXAMINED THE SOURCE CODE.
Second, the computer voting machines have been pushed into place with little or no testing, and the voting machine companies have been frantic to *avoid* independent testing.
Here's a story from NBC www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5762054/
"Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and electronic voting expert, told lawmakers in Washington, D.C. the system for 'testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent.'
"Virtually no oversight" "Although up to 50 million Americans are expected to vote on touchscreen machines on Nov. 2, federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology. The certification process, in part because the voting machine companies pay for it, is described as obsolete by those charged with overseeing it.
"The testing firms - CIBER and Wyle Laboratories in Huntsville and SysTest Labs in Denver - are also inadequately equipped, some critics contend.
"Federal regulations specify that every voting system used must be validated by a tester. Yet it has taken more than a year to gain approval for some election software and hardware, leading some states to either do their own testing or order uncertified equipment."
Third, when independent testing has been done, all too often the machines have failed.
www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/5921.html
www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1636
www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1529
www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.

Our voting system should be absent flaws, period. I would like to *stop* the process of challenging and recounting; I'd like a system where it is possible to count votes and know the total, without manifest doubt about the validity of the system.
I desire the kind of security that comes when hundreds or thousands of independent eyes examine the program and look for flaws. This does rely on an assumption, which is that the number and cleverness of people trying to expose the flaws to the world exceeds the number and cleverness of the people trying to exploit the flaws. I believe that this is true of America, and that openness is a good thing.
I think Democrats are sleazy and untrustworthy. I think exactly the same about Republicans. The "consequences" I want is for all source code for computerized voting machines to be available for inspection. That sounds simple and straightforward enough to me. I don't see what you think is gained by not allowing us to see the details of the software that counts our vote, and the more you argue that we shouldn't be allowed to see it, the more I really start to worry about exactly what it is that you think we shouldn't see.

Some more disturbing links:
news.mywebpal.com/partners/680/public/news674236.html

wishtv.com/Global/category.asp?C=49590&nav=0Ra7JXq2

www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

Just a couple of snippets showing a few more recent problems with electronic voting machines. San Angeleno Times: www.sanangelostandardtimes.com/sast/news_local/article/0,1897,SAST_4956_4559073,00.html

"...About 1:30 p.m. today, county Republican Chairman Dennis McKerley stopped the recount after workers found discrepancies of as much as 20 percent between what was counted Monday and what was reported Election Night. "We're having some trouble with the electronic equipment," McKerley said."

Chicago Tribune
www.chicagotribune.com/news/custom/newsroom/chi-060321voterproblems,1,1831943.story?coll=chi-news-hed
"... At one point, a dozen repair technicians showed up to test the faulty equipment. It turned out someone had forgotten to flip an internal switch in another device that authorizes each voter and transmits the results.
"At Chute Middle School in Evanston, voters only cast paper ballots when the electronic touch screen didn't work. "The little memory card is kaput," said election judge Jerry Smith.
"Among the paper ballots cast by 1 p.m., Smith said five or six out of 57 had been spoiled because voters had accidentally filled in more than one candidate for several judgeships.
"The error wouldn't have occurred if the voters had been able to use the electronic touch screen to vote, Smith said.
"Across town at Evanston's Grace Lutheran Church, election judge Carol Straus lamented low turnout and three machines that failed to work: The electronic touch screen, the election counter, and the scanner that counted the manual votes...."

The Morning call online:
www.mcall.com/news/opinion/anotherview/all-brau3-23mar23,0,3808305.story?coll=all-newsopinionanotherview-hed summarizes my worries. "If easy-to-manipulate, computerized voting machines ever become the standard for elections across the country, we would lose forever the ability of a citizen to have his or her vote cast and counted accurately. Simply put, the United States of America would no longer be a democracy."

Hypocrites in the house

2006-04-03T12:25:00.000-04:00
In one day, the House budget committee finalized the 2.8 trillion dollar U.S. budget, with almost no debate. But representative Dennis Moore made an interesting suggestion: fiscal responsibility:

from the Olympian online: 159.54.227.3/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060402/OPINION/60402019/1005

... Moore and other Democrats were trying to reimpose the budget rule known as “pay-go.” That requirement simply says any spending increase or tax cut be offset by a comparable saving in order to avoid increasing the deficit, unless a supermajority of 60 percent of the lawmakers voted to make an exception.

[note that this doesn't forbit deficit spending-- it just means that the legislators who vote for it need to go on record as approving it. What we call "accountability."]

The rule was in effect from 1991 to 2002 and contributed directly to whittling away the deficits and moving the budget into surplus. But when Bush became president, Congress discarded the rule — an action that Alan Greenspan and many other fiscal conservatives deplored.

In the Senate on March 14, Democrats tried to revive the rule, and failed on a 50-50 tie vote. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, led the effort to defeat it, arguing that it would inevitably force a tax increase. Gregg was not the least embarrassed when Sen. Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat who offered the amendment to bring back “pay-go,” quoted Gregg’s own words from a 2002 debate.

Four years ago, Gregg said: “If we do not do this, if we do not put back in place caps and pay-go mechanisms, we will have no budget discipline in this Congress, and, as a result, we will dramatically aggravate the deficit, which, of course, affects a lot of important issues,
but especially impacts Social Security.”

When Conrad quoted those words, Gregg replied: “I was right then [to support fiscal responsibility] and I am right now [to oppose it]. Times change, and the dynamics of what is happening around here change substantively.”

[The only "substantive" change is that now the Republicans control the checkbook, they want to borrow borrow borrow spend spend spend without accountability.]

That argument was replayed in the House Budget Committee, with Republicans unanimously opposing the reimposition of the pay-go rule, while Democrats supported it.

Back in 1991, in his first year in Congress, Nussle was a budget hawk, even proposing that lawmakers’ salaries be cut 5 percent every year they tolerated a deficit of any size.

This year, in his final year as Budget Committee chairman, he sent the House a fiscal plan that — by his staff’s optimistic forecast — would add $3 trillion dollars to the national debt in the next five years and boost the annual interest payments by 35 percent during that period.

Jim Nussle and Judd Gregg are not alone. The budget policies that conservatives and Republicans are swallowing these days are policies you would think would cause them to gag.

No wonder they’d rather be home campaigning.

Conservatism means fiscal conservatism

2006-04-02T13:02:00.000-04:00
The Baltimore Sun
www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.debt02apr02,0,4092151.story

Rising debt is very scary

By Diane Lim Rogers and Andrew L. Yarrow

Anyone who has visited Disney World's Haunted Mansion remembers the ride's signature beginning: Visitors enter a room, the doors close and the ceiling appears to keep rising and rising as a spooky voice intones that there is "no way out."

There are frightening similarities to America's national debt.

Congress recently raised the national debt ceiling by $781 billion to $9 trillion.

It marked the fourth increase in the last five years, making for an aggregate increase of more than $3 trillion since George W. Bush became president.

Like the Haunted Mansion, the ceiling keeps rising and rising, and whether there is "no way out" is a matter of economic and policy debate and political will.

Either way, the prospect of runaway deficits and debt are a good bit scarier for the American people and their nation's future than Disney's animatronic wizardry.

As Mr. Bush said shortly after he took office in 2001, when the debt was a third lower:
"Future generations shouldn't be forced to pay back money that we have borrowed."

Nice sentiment.

But on our current course, if you add in deficits that will skyrocket after baby boomers retire and the long-term unfunded commitments to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, every man, woman and child is saddled with $156,000 in debt.

That is roughly three times the average American household's net worth.

One can rail against the fiscal irresponsibility of an administration and Congress that have let federal spending grow by 5 percent a year in real terms, the fastest in 40 years, while slashing taxes and reducing revenues to levels that haven't been seen since cars had tail fins.

One can also rail about the hypocrisy of policymakers agonizing over budget cuts that amount to three-tenths of 1 percent of federal spending while approving tax cuts and new supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina that dwarf the Lilliputian budget cuts.

But, you may say, it's all mind-numbing numbers.

Or you may think that we've worked our way out of deficits before, as we did as recently as the Clinton administration.

Or, if you're really cynical, you may think - and not care - that the Chinese, Japanese and Saudis will bail us out by lending us ever more money, as they have been doing at unprecedented rates in the last few years.

[yeah, sure, these are all governments that love America so much that they will give us a billion dollars a day, forever]

However, deficits have a way of hitting home in much more personal terms.

If they continue to rise, they will crowd out investment, slow economic growth and reduce the average family's annual income by $1,800 in just eight years.

Government debt is also likely to drive up interest rates, making the typical $250,000 mortgage, plus the interest that Americans pay on other purchases, cost about $3,000 more a year.

Moreover, if we keep our current promises to the elderly, without reforming entitlements, the average family would have to pay $7,000 a year more in taxes by 2030.

And, like the Haunted Mansion, deficits ultimately might spook the paying customers so much that they go running to the exits:

Those foreign investors who have been so willing to finance our debt could decide to pull out, throwing the financial markets and the economy into turmoil.

Deficits are such a large and growing problem that we need to come up with additional tax revenues and well-targeted cuts in spending.

And the big entitlement programs need to be fundamentally reformed so that ever-rising health care costs, in particular, can be contained.

Developing such policies that produce meaningful reductions in the deficit requires political will and bipartisan compromise.

But the public should demand such noble bravery from their government.

Unlike the Haunted Mansion, our country cannot just "get off" the scary ride; instead, our children and grandchildren will face the horrors wrought by deficits every day.

Diane Lim Rogers is research director for the Brookings Institution's Budgeting for National Priorities project. Andrew L. Yarrow is outreach director for special projects for Brookings' Economic Studies program.

It's been clear for years now; but it's hard to get the message: Bush borrows conservative rhetotic to get elected, but he is not himself a conservative, and once in office he has basically trampled on the concept of conservative fiscal responsibility to go for big-government spend spend spend policies.

He's not a conservative. He's not even close.

--
Franklin Jefferson

Reading the White Man's Burden

2006-04-02T12:30:00.000-04:00
Current reading
THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
By William Easterly

Review from Business Week
www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_14/b3978114.htm

Throwing Money -- And Missing

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
By William Easterly

The Good: A brilliant diagnosis of the failings of Western aid to underdeveloped lands.
The Bad: Easterly himself is disappointingly skimpy on solutions.
The Bottom Line: His indictment may be overbroad, but aid agencies deserve criticism.

The international development community is still reeling from William Easterly's 2001 book, The Elusive Quest for Growth. In it, the former top World Bank economist demonstrated how the panaceas concocted by the West to save the Third World, such as huge injections of aid, conditional loans, population control, infrastructure spending, and debt forgiveness, have all failed to stimulate sustainable growth and cut poverty.

Easterly is at it again. In The White Man's Burden, he marshals a wealth of fresh studies, original statistical analyses, his own anecdotal reporting, and historical precedents to buttress his argument that today's foreign-aid system doesn't work. He shreds practically every new strategy by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, U.N. agencies, and other donors aimed at lifting the world's poor out of misery. This book is disappointingly skimpy on solutions, but it is brilliant at diagnosing the failings of Western intervention in the Third World.

The real tragedy, says Easterly, isn't Western indifference toward the human crises in Africa and elsewhere, as many advocates of huge aid hikes claim. The problem is the development community's miserable record of treating the most basic needs of the poor. The West "spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the past five decades and still has not managed to get 12 cents medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths." Throwing greater sums at the problem under the existing system will actually be detrimental because "the current wave of enthusiasm for addressing world poverty will repeat the cycle of its predecessors: idealism, high expectations, disappointing results, cynical backlash." So before digging further into their wallets, rich donors should demand hard results and hold international aid agencies accountable.

Easterly's 16 years as a World Bank economist and his broad experience in developing nations make the critiques hard to dismiss. He is as harsh on U.S. conservatives as on free-spending liberals. He blasts the Bush Administration's antipoverty programs as naive and poorly conceived. He rips into the President's much-ballyhooed African AIDS initiative because it focuses mainly on expensive drugs while discouraging the use of condoms, whose widespread application could save many more millions of lives. He also ridicules neoconservatives who believe the U.S. can make poor failed states better places by forcibly removing dictators and imposing democracy and free-market economics.

Yet the author admits he has no big answers of his own. In fact, he says he's allergic to anything smacking of ambitious planning. The fatal flaw of big aid initiatives, he writes, is that they derive from rich Westerners' utopian agendas rather than input from the needy. Another problem with broad, collective goals is that no one agency bears responsibility for achieving anything concrete.

Instead, Easterly advocates "piecemeal interventions." For instance, donors should fund well-focused projects created by "seekers," highly motivated individuals who find creative ways to solve real-world problems. He profiles many grass-roots success stories that deserve help, from a private college in Ghana to an Indian outfit that cut HIV incidence by working with prostitutes. Aid agencies should focus on specific tasks, such as building roads and clinics or providing textbooks. Independent auditors should scrutinize sample projects in the field to see if they are delivering results. Poor villagers ought to decide for themselves what they need, receive cash vouchers supplied by donors, and use these to hire the most effective agencies to provide what's wanted.

These are great ideas. But would hundreds of thousands of independent microprojects really make a bigger impact -- or be more cost-effective and freer of abuse -- than if such efforts were coordinated through existing channels? More to the point, well-off, conscientious Westerners are unlikely to sit by and watch millions of Africans die of preventable causes as they wait for verifiably waste-free aid projects to materialize.

Easterly's book also has some glaring omissions. What to make, for example, of the immense foundations guided by tycoons such as Bill Gates that aim to bring the focused, results-based methods Easterly advocates into the war on AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases? Nobody would label Gates a central planner, but he does believe in international coordination, high goals, and big expenditures. Surprisingly, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation isn't mentioned in this book.

Easterly's thesis may be overstretched. Still, he is right that we should be tough on aid agencies that don't deliver. The White Man's Burden is disturbing but essential reading for would-be Samaritans -- and a powerful call for reform.

--
Franklin Jefferson

Liberty and economics

2006-03-23T10:31:00.000-05:00
Here is some of my input, from a recent discussion on alt.politics.economics; where I'm trying to define some of the basics of the libertarian argument. Since a lot of people don't understand the libertarian argument, I think it's worth going through it. The discussion here was initially a response to a comment that "the libertarian ideology of a small government is wrong."

There is a difference between "less government" and "no government". Right now, I'd like a little less. Going to the extreme of no government at all is an opinion some libertarians have, but not all. The government rightly has the functions of preserving the people's rights, including life and liberty, and that part shouldn't be diminished.

[replying to "If you take away to much power from government that power it is going to be hijacked by other entities.... power is like gravity. The biggest object attracts the smaller one and becomes bigger...]:

Repression by any other name is still repression.
This is a strong argument for keeping power diffuse, and trying to make sure nobody gains too much of it. That is, giving liberty to everybody, instead of concentrating it.

Or, to quote Acton, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men"

The heart of libertarian ideology is not greed; it's liberty. The theory is that people are the best judges of what they want, and what's good for them, and they should be given freedom to pursue it. The astonishing observation of Adam Smith was that, when you give people liberty, what they tend to do is create wealth; not just for themselves, but for everybody around them.

Moral codes are good. An important point, though, is that people don't become more moral when they act in large collective groups; in fact, I think that there could be a fair argument that large groups become less moral.

If you argue that libertarianism-- which is to say, giving people choice-- will destroy overall wealth due to selfishness, I argue that the loaded word "selfishness" shows the bias of your argument. The hidden assumption here is that when people are given freedom, they will use their freedom to be selfish. I don't necessarily agree with this assumption. People want different things; people will do different things.

Even if you take the position that people will be selfish, again, I will argue that they don't become any less selfish in large groups. If you give people the collective power to take money away from somebody and give it to themselves, they will tend to do it and think of it as being utterly right and fair-- even when, on their own, they'd never think about robbing their neighbor. And then other interest groups go in and say, hey, if these people are getting free money, we deserve free money too! Then, of course, you have to add the fact that, since you're assuming that people in general act selfishly, the people elected to government themselves will be acting selfishly.

So I will argue that you may in fact see less selfish behavior if you give people freedom, and that giving governments more power increases, not decreases, the overall selfish behavior. If people act "selfishly," and that's bad, why in the world would you advocate giving these people a coercive government that they can use as a tool to enhance their "selfish" wealth?

(Even so, the word "selfish" is a loaded term. Does "selfish" mean "I have the knowledge and power to make decisions for myself; I can decide what I want myself, and I'm not qualified to make decisions for other people?" If so, why is this bad?)

You may argue that too little regulation by government allows corporation to go wild, but here we more often have the opposite problem; government regulation is used by corporations to cheat and steal in ways that, if people were free, they wouldn't accept. We have the situation where corporations use the power of governments to create and enforce monopolies, to keep competitors out of business, to vote subsidies to keep them in business despite selling shoddy goods at too-high prices, and to put up trade barriers with the dual effect of raising prices in one place, and keeping people in another place from raising themselves out of poverty.

Adam Smith wrote a lot of things; he was not a one-note demagogue. The main question he asked was, why are some nations wealthy and others poor, and his main answer was, when people are allowed to profit from their labor, and decide what to do and what not to do, this creates wealth. His primary goal was what we could call a liberal one: how do we reduce poverty?

I suppose that the solution of government regulation may, on rare occasions, actually work to the benefit of consumers, but far more often it works the opposite way. Governments don't have an invisible tap to goodness and truth. Letting the consumers have free choice and pick what they think benefits them is a much better solution in the long run. The government "solution" can be far worse than the problem.

A claim was made that "in most cases" people don't use choice wisely. This is the kind of thinking that gives me chills. You're saying other people don't use their freedom wisely, so it's better to take it away from them and have somebody wiser (who? You?) decide things for them.

The argument was made that we've become a nation with lots of "antisocial" people. Some are, some aren't. I'd rather give freedom to all the people, paying the price of also giving freedom to the "antisocial" people, rather than take freedom away from everybody in the foolish belief that if people are antisocial that somehow it's better if their decisions are made collectively.

In extreme emergencies-- lifeboats, wars, natural disasters-- people often accept being organized into authoritarian power structures to deal with the emergency. I don't accept that this is the best paradigm for non-emergency situations, and I am very wary of the fact that politicians always somehow find or create an emergency as an excuse to take away people's freedom.

Current reading

2006-03-22T20:24:00.000-05:00
Current reading:
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama
www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300113994/.

Fukuyama is one of the architects of the neoconservative movement; this is his analysis and critique of the Iraq war (an expansion of his article of the same title in the conservative journal National Interest.

The view from abroad: a German interview with Fukuyama (odd that there don't seem to be American interviews on the web...): service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,407315,00.html

Nowhere to go

2006-03-21T20:07:00.000-05:00
At this point, if anybody's reading this, I expect people are saying, ok, another garden variety Bush-basher; why doesn't he join the Democratic party?

The problem is that disliking Mr. Bush hasn't meant that I like the liberal policies any better, and Ted Kennedy is still a stupid, bloated buffoon. My opinions and beliefs really haven't changed; it is the Republicans that seem to be repudiating everything that conservatism really means. The movement of the Republicans away from libertarian principles and toward "big government conservatism" (which is an oxymoron if I've ever heard one) has really left me with nowhere to go, and I resent it. I resent the fact that conservatism has been hijacked, and that politicians talk about defending liberty while taking our freedom away and putting the machinery of dictatorship in place.

I'm not about to turn into a liberal. I want my country back.

Improving Education

2006-03-21T14:04:00.000-05:00
I neglected to mention education.

Is the federal government really the right place to reform our schools? Education needs to be done at the local level-- right at the level of homes and families-- and not by big-government mandate. The "no child left behind" laws, stripped of rhetoric, consist of nothing except new government-mandated standardized tests-- another unfunded mandate from Washington that our states and cities have to pay for. Teaching children how to do well on standardized tests-- is what we want to teach our children? When did conservatism start believing that the government in Washington is the right place to run our schools?

Franklin, Jefferson, and many of the Founding Fathers understood the importance of education as a cornerstone of democracy.

I agree with them. The part I disagree with is that education should be run by Washington, and that making federal-government testing mandatory (but not giving states any money to pay for it) helps education.

If you want to improve education, improve the American family. Education starts with the family.

Mr. Bush claims his "no child left behind" action helps education-- I can't see that it does a single thing to help education, but it removes money from schools (it costs more than the tax money allocated to pay for it), makes children take time away from actually getting educated to take the new mandated tests (didn't they already have enough standardized tests?), and adds even *more* layers of federal paperwork to the educational system. Mr. Bush has harmed the education system in the US, and then brags about how he's reformed education. When the federal paperwork requirement reaches the level of eight hours of time spent doing paperwork per teacher per day, I expect people may begin to think that federal government shouldn't be running schools.

George W. Bush is not a Conservative

2006-03-20T21:57:00.000-05:00
It is a very simple fact, but nobody seems to have noticed it. George W. Bush is not a conservative.

When you ignore his talk, and looking at what he has actually done, you see that over and over again, George W. Bush has betrayed every ideal that the conservative movement has.

The heart and soul of the conservative thinking is fiscal conservatism: the government should be responsible for how it spends money. The conservative economic view has always been very simple: balance the budget, and quit deficit spending. That idea somehow went out the window when George W. Bush was elected (in fact, suddenly we are even hearing how deficit spending is somehow good for the nation.) What happened to the "lock box," where George Bush said he would put the budget surplus to save it for social security? The instant he got elected, he seems to have forgotten his promise.

The fact is, George W. Bush has run up a record budget deficit-- the largest deficit in history. And, before you say that terrorism and the response to the 9/11 atrocity is the source of the unexpected budget deficit-- look at the data. Only a small portion of the Bush deficit can be tagged to the 9/11 terrorists. Bragging about "cutting" taxes while actually increasing government spending at the same time isn't really a tax cut; it's just increasing the tax next year. America is about our children, and leaving our children and grandchildren in debt is not what we mean by "family values."

The heart of America is our business. Americans aren't afraid to work... but where are the jobs? A conservative president should be a pro-business president, but in fact rather than helping business, American businesses are going out of business; and the ones that are staying in business are shipping jobs oversees. No matter what Mr. Bush's advisors may think, ramping up the deficit is not helping the economy.

Mr. Bush says that education is his priority. This is excellent, but is the federal government really the right place to reform our schools? Education needs to be done at the local level-- right at the level of homes and families-- and not by big-government mandate. The "no child left behind" laws, stripped of rhetoric, consist of nothing except new government-mandated standardized tests-- another unfunded mandate from Washington that our states and cities have to pay for. Teaching children how to do well on standardized tests-- is what we want to teach our children? When did conservatism start believing that the government in Washington is the right place to run our schools?

The conservative world view is that the era of Big Government is over. Ronald Reagan knew that, and for that matter, so did President George H. W. Bush. But the younger Bush just hasn't gotten the message.

Iraq. It goes without saying that America needs to be strong, and that we should use every means of defending ourselves against those who detest our freedom and despise our way of life. Destroying the Taliban, the stronghold of the Al Qaida terrorists, was necessary and unavoidable; it was required for the defense of America. But invading Iraq? Long ago, John Quincy Adams wrote, "Wherever the standard of freedom shall be unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." It doesn't matter how loathsome a dictator Saddam Hussein was; America should go to war only with great reluctance, and as a matter of last resort. America isn't in the business of nation building.

Once, even George W. Bush understood that. During a debate with then-Vice-President Al Gore in 2000, Mr. Bush said: "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building . . .. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have a kind of nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not." Apparently to Mr. Bush, it depends on what the meaning of "absolutely not" is.

And fear of terrorism is no reason to erode our liberty.

Conservative leader Pat Buchanan said, "It is remarkable how complacent Americans seem to be, as our freedoms are gradually restricted, and more and more power and wealth flow to Big Government to protect us from terrorists." Do we really need the 342-page Patriot Act, to protect us from terrorism by giving the government more rights? Has we finally become a place where American citizens can be picked up and held without lawyer and without charges, indefinitely? It is worth quoting Benjamin Franklin: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. " When did we decide that we prefer our security to our liberty?

Mr. Bush is that, quite frankly, he is not merely destroying the credibility of the Republican party, he is damaging the credibility of conservativm, period. Is Bush really the person who we want the world to view as the public image of conservatism? For the last twenty years, Ronald Reagan has been the image of conservatism in American. Do we want George W. Bush to be the intellect who will shape conservatism for the next twenty years? Conservatism could have survived a term of Mr. Kerry as president-- it may even have made us stronger and more focussed. But will conservatism survive another term of Mr. Bush?

Bush, a wolf in sheep's clothing, is eroding our economy, our liberty, and the very standing of our nation in the world. His words say that he is a conservative. His actions, on the other hand, say exactly the opposite.

Recommended reading:
Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, by Pat Buchanan
War without end: www.theamericancause.org/patthecheney.htm
The Case against Empire: www.theamericancause.org/caseagainst.htm
The war party www.theamericancause.org/patthewarpartys.htm

Confessions of an ex-

2006-03-20T20:32:00.000-05:00
A while back, I would have described myself as being a conservative and a libertarian, but over the last few years, I've become more than a bit disillusioned. I'm still in favor of freedom, but I'm at the point where when I hear a politician say the words "liberty" or "freedom," I hold on to my wallet, and wonder about what part of my freedom they're planning on taking away next.

I thought I'd start a blog, to log some of my opinions. I'll start by re-publishing some of my old usenet posts, some of which date back to 2004.