Category Archives: Politics

Broken Promises

Many of you are probably familiar with the White House petition site.  The basic idea is that anyone can start a petition and if that petition gets a certain amount of signatures, the White House promises to answer the question.  You’re not guaranteed to like the answer, but they will answer it nonetheless.

Well, here’s a website that tracks the petitions that the White House HASN’T answered.  Before we get to some of the interesting petitions that have yet to be answered, some interesting statistics.  The White House has answered 87% of the petitions that missed the threshold.  202 in total so far.  It takes the White House an average of 61 days to answer a petition once the threshold has been reached.  Given that this is the first time a White House has ever attempted something like this, the Obama administration deserves some kudos for having this portal to the people.

Some of the petitions that have not been answered are quite interesting.  Many are for supporters of bad science like anti-GMO people and pro-naturopaths and pro-acupuncturists.  A lot of others are for strange fringe international relations issues mostly having to do with the Far East like investigating organ harvesting of Falun Gong by the Chinese and getting rid of a statue recognizing Korean comfort women that the Japanese used in World War II, but the Japanese claim was more propaganda than truth.  There are even a few petitions for cigars and e-cigarettes that have mostly to do with regulation issues.  There is one recent one to allow Tesla Motors to sell their cars directly to consumers which I think is a great idea.  I’ve never understood why car dealerships are so protected at the state level.  One of the more serious ones is about getting the Armed Forces to stop proselytizing and various other tactics that are discriminatory towards atheists in particular and non-Christians in general.

Go check out the web site.  It’s worth reading in full.  It’s a strange mix of the ridiculous, the fringe, and the serious.

What This Country Needs Is A Benevolent Dictator

And who better than me to get the job?  Don’t answer that.

Seriously, though, we have so many “third rail” political issues that need to be fixed but never will be because so many politicians are more interested in keeping their jobs than tackling issues that need attention.  So here is what I would do during my benevolent dictatorship.

Corporate taxes would be zero.  No corporate payroll taxes, no hiding money offshore, no benefit write-offs, no armies of international tax accountants finding ways to flaunt the laws by taking advantage of loopholes.  Money can flow smoothly where ever corporations want it and individuals will be free from the corporate binds that often tie them to a specific job.

To balance that, we would scrap the minimum wage and replace it with a living wage law.  The living wage law would be tied to the poverty level originally and would change yearly based on inflation.

Individuals would be taxed on total income from all sources and all income would be treated equally.  There will no longer be any deductions for anything.  People that get paid with stock or other non-cash offerings would pay taxes on the full value of the offerings at the time of the offering.  Any income below the poverty level will have a 0% tax level and the brackets above will be similar to what they are now only with a few extra brackets at the top.  Payroll taxes will be paid on all income.

Copyrights would expire after 50 years. Patent laws would be changed to make patenting thing like software impossible.  Also, patent holders must show that they are putting forth some effort to make the patent into a salable product or mechanism to make a salable product or else the patent will become void.

Voting for Representatives and Senators would cease to exist.  Instead, the entirety of a district or state is eligible and the winner will be chosen by random drawing.  Representatives would have their term extended to three years and one-third of Representatives will be “elected” every year.

Immigration would require just one prerequisite; a company willing to hire you at the average compensation in the U.S. for your position for a term of five years.  The company must pay the whole five years regardless.  At the end of the five year term, the immigrant and his/her immediate family are sworn in as citizens.

As my last effort as Benevolent Dictator of the United States, I would take over Canada.  Because they’re just asking for it…

The First Rule Of Obamacare Is You Don’t Talk About Obamacare

I am sure that if I looked back in history, I would find a political party that did everything within their power to make a law they didn’t like fail miserably, but this is the first time in my memory that I have seen this.  Many Republican Congresscritters have decided to not answer even the most basic constituent questions about Obamacare.  Instead, they direct people to the White House or Health and Human Services.  It is a basic function of a Congressional office to answer constituent questions about laws, but some hate Obamacare so much they refuse to perform this service.  Even worse, states like Missouri have implemented a gag rule allowing State employees to be sued if they talk about Obamacare.  You would think that Tea Partiers in the state would be all over this gross infringement of First Amendment rights, but no.  Defeating Obamacare by any means necessary is more important than real unconstitutional activities.

Two Big Wins For Criminal Justice

It’s been a good week for minorities in particular and criminal justice in general so far.  Minorities are being attacked on so many sides these days, it’s good to get a few wins in.

First, a judge has put an end to the abhorrently racist Stop And Frisk laws that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has imposed on the city.  What purports to allow police to frisk anyone they stop unshockingly ended up being a reason to harass mostly law abiding black people.  I’m sure Bloomberg will appeal, but I’m guessing Stop And Frisk is gone for good.  Good riddance!

Second, Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that they will greatly restrict their pursuit of non-violent Mandatory Minimum drug cases.  This one’s a bit more mealy mouthed, but still important.  Basically, the way I understand it is they will still prosecute offenders (which is bad in many cases) but will not present evidence that would require judges to enact Mandatory Minimum sentences on those convicted.  As with Stop And Frisk, Mandatory Minimum laws are blatantly racist.  They impose harsher minimums for smaller quantities of drugs more likely to be used by minorities while allowing lighter minimums for larger quantities of drugs more likely to be used by non-minorities.  This is more a step in the right direction than a win.  Mandatory sentencing laws are ridiculous and will still be law.  What Holder is proposing is kind of a trap door work around than a solution.  I’ll take it, though.

Electoral College Machinations

So, it turns out that there has been this quiet state level push to effectively abolish the electoral college.  How they are doing it is an ingenious bit of political science.  States are passing bills that would guarantee that all of the electoral votes for the state will go to whomever receives the most popular votes from the entire country.  The kicker is that this will only happen once enough states representing half of the electoral votes pass a similar bill.  Rhode Island just signed on and that puts them half way to their goal.  Or, states representing one quarter of the total electoral votes have now signed on.  Once they reach their goal, bam, the President of the United States will forever be elected by the popular vote instead of the electoral college even though the electoral college will still exist.  Constitution followed, check.  Popular vote enabled, check.  Ingenious.

Of course, as the article states, the likelihood of getting enough states to sign on is pretty low since only Democratic states have been able to pass it and any individual state could always just change the law back to what it once was.  Which is a shame.  The only decent reason to keep the electoral college is to maintain minority representation and minority states already get massive over-representation from the Senate.  I don’t think they need the same at the Executive level.  Regardless, it’s still pretty cool political science jujitsu even if it will ultimately fail.

Teach For America Is Evil

Teach For America sounds like a good idea.  Train young people to teach and send them to places where they are most needed.  Places like rural areas or low income areas where nobody is willing to teach.  Places like Chicago.

Wait, what?  Chicago?  The place that recently laid off over one thousand teachers?  The place that closed a whole bunch of schools because of low attendance?  Yep.  Chicago signed a contract with TFA to add 325 new teachers this year while firing 1,000.  Where is the sense in that?

Union busting, plain and simple.  It’s brilliantly Machiavellian.  Get a bunch of mostly idealistic highly privileged youth and sign them up with promises of changing the world for our most underserved citizens while bringing them in to localities that have a strong union presence and don’t need new teachers.  This combination makes TFA almost immune to criticism.  You can almost smell the righteous indignation in the air.  “How dare you criticize me!  I’m doing it for the children!  We do a lot of good!  Look at how well the kids are doing!  Why do you hate the children?”

Look, this isn’t difficult.  You can be performing a very visible societal good while at the same time performing an invisible societal evil with equally dire consequences.  It’s easy to ignore the evil that you can’t see for the good that is right in front of your face day after day.  What’s happening in Chicago is the best example of that generally hidden evil.

Teaching is one of those few jobs where two (or even one) years of experience makes a huge difference.  No amount of schooling in the world can adequately prepare you for putting yourself in front of 30 kids for the first time.  What’s happening in Chicago is the removal of one thousand union teachers who have that couple of years’ experience and replacing them with a couple hundred non-union rookies who have none.  This is not in the best interests of the children.

One of the major counter-arguments you will hear is that TFA is building for the future.  Sure, these are new teachers, but they’re people who WANT to teach as opposed to teachers who are just doing it for a job.  These TFA teachers often stay on after their two year contracts.  That may be true, but they don’t want to stay in teaching in any greater frequency than their unionized counterparts.  Plus, who’s to say that Chicago will decide to keep you?  There’s already a precedence for firing experienced teachers and hiring TFA teachers.  Why should that change?

There are many things wrong with how we educate our teachers.  A teaching degree is filled with mindlessly wasteful courses only to be followed by a year of slave labor (aka, internships).  Those things need to be fixed, but TFA is not the solution to the problem.  The solution will likely look like this: Allow anyone with an advanced degree to be hired as a teacher at locally comparable cost of living wages and pair them with a rotation of experienced teachers to show them the ropes for a year.  At the end of the year, the teachers vote on if you have what it takes to teach.

TFA does nothing to solve the various crises our school systems are suffering from.  They only exacerbate the problem by allowing places like Chicago to bust unions and drive down already low teacher’s salaries.  I can only hope that TFA gets morphed into something like I describe above because there is a lot to be gained by broadening the pool of available teachers but TFA is only succeeding at replacing the pool.

Another Win For Obamacare

New York recently announced that individual plans under Obamacare will save it’s citizens 50%.  This is huge!  Obamacare will cut the premium costs of 6% of America in half!

The rest of us likely won’t be quite as fortunate.  Most states still don’t know how much, if anything, they will save.  New York had the highest premium costs for individual insurance in the country.  This is because of a law that requires insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions.  Without a mandate for its citizens to carry health insurance, as more people with preexisting conditions signed up, the costs of insurance for everyone went up.  This caused healthy people to drop their insurance which caused the costs for those with the preexisting conditions to go up. Obamacare both demands preexisting conditions be covered and that individuals carry insurance under penalty of law.  Thus the very large savings for New York which only had half the formula to save money.

The most important takeaway from this is that what’s happening in New York highlights exactly what Obamacare proponents have argued would happen.  A larger pool that can’t exclude anyone leads to drastically lower premiums for the individual.  In my analogy where Obamacare is a bag of poo left on the doorstep but what we had before was a flaming bag of poo, what’s happening in New York is what put out the fire.

Google: Do No Evil. We Have Senators For That.

We all know that Google’s “Do No Evil” motto is laughable.  It is worth while to point out every so often how laughable it is.

Case in point: Google is hosting a fundraiser for prototypical out of touch old white man Senator James Inhofe (R-OK).  Inhofe is the perfect mix of corporate shill and misinformed misanthrope.  Why would Google raise money for such a cretin?  To buy votes, duh!  Inhofe is a big enemy of an open Internet.  Google has the most to gain from an open Internet.  In the grandest tradition of corporate shills everywhere, Inhofe’s vote can be bought.  And buy it Google shall!

There is an argument to be made that buying votes to codify net neutrality will enable a much greater good.  Net neutrality is a huge step in making sure that the Internet remains equally available to all people.  Google, however, is committing some evil in order to reach this goal though.  Perhaps they should change their motto to “Do Some Evil As Long As It’s To Accomplish A Worthy Goal As Long As That Worthy Goal Mostly Benefits Us”?  I think that has a much better ring to it and it also happens to be much close to the truth than their current motto.

You’ve Just Been Schooled, Son!

Want to know what’s going on in Egypt?  Look no further.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeDm2PrNV1I&feature=youtube]

I couldn’t find any real confirmation if this is real besides comments from someone who claims to speak the language, but wow is it awesome.  The only thing that could have made it more awesome is if it were a girl saying it.

Personally, I don’t think Egypt has much of a chance of creating a country envisioned by this kid.  There are way too many external forces at play for any semblance of democracy to take hold.  The largest of which is our own U.S.  How can democracy take root in a country when the greatest superpower the world has ever known controls the purse strings of their army?  I’m fairly certain the answer to that question is it can’t.  Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Immigration, The Answer To All Of Our Problems!

Hyperbole!  But seriously, immigration reform is critically important to our continued status as a world power.  It is just as important as it always has been.

Unfortunately, one of our two political parties (Hint: It rhymes with Schmupublicans.) is dead set against any type of immigration reform bill that doesn’t make immigrants suffer.  Take Senator Jeff Session (R-AL) for example.  He is dead set against the reform that has been proffered by the most recent Gang Of Whatever.  So what does he do?  He gets the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to score the bill and see what the economic impact would be.  I’m sure Senator Sessions fully expected the CBO to come back and say that all of those Brown people would cost the Real Amurican Taxpayers billions.  But what does the CBO actually say?  Only that the immigration reform bill will save our country $197B over ten years.

Facts, the enemy of Republicans for well nigh eternity.  Hyperbole!  But seriously, elected Republicans do seem to have great aversion to facts these days.