Just Think

Well, the Senate will confirm Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court today and I have a few predictions on what that will mean for the United States.

In late 2000, somewhere around the time of October or November, my wife made some predictions about the election of George W. Bush as President. She said that if he were elected that the economy would go into the toilet, he would ruin the environment, that he would cut education spending, and that he would take us to war.

Sadly, the last of her predictions was joking yet within two years all of that had happened or was well in the works. We are now borrowing over 1 billion dollars per day that is not even put on the budget, no less any attempt to balance the budget. We now have the "Clear Skies Initiative" that allows more toxic mercury to be put into our atmosphere and hence end up in our drinking water. We now have the "Clean Water Act" that allows industries to put more sulphour dioxide into our water. And, we are at war.

Well, we never wrote her predictions down, so there is no way that I can prove that she said those things. This time around I will put some predictions down in writing.

I predict that within two years of this date that the following things will happen:

1. The Supreme Court will rule that the president is not bound by the laws passed by the congressional branch of the United States government.
2. The Supreme Court will rule that having varied methods of voting throughout the United States is "discriminitory" to the poorer areas of the U.S. The will insist that the Federal Election Commission establish one method of voting throughout the United States. The FEC will then make paperless, non-auditable voting machines the standard throughout the U.S. thus ensuring that we cannot trust the voting methodology for the foreseeable future. I get bonus points if the machines that the FEC decides upon are Diebold machines.
3. The Supreme Court will rule that soldiers may not sue the government in order to gain medical or disability benefits for service related injuries and ailments that the government refuses to acknowledge, such as Gulf War Syndrome.
4. The Supreme Court will rule for censorship of pornography on the Internet.
5. The Supreme Court will rule that police do not need to advise suspects of their rights prior to interrogation.
6. The Supreme Court will rule that handicapped persons cannot sue the state for not making courthouses wheelchair accessible.
7. The Supreme Court will overturn campaign finance law on the grounds that limiting donations from large donors (such as corporations) limits free speech.

Bonus points if the Supreme Court allows execution of minors. Major bonus points if they overturn the 22nd amendment. I believe that both of these will happen within 8 years if the Republican party maintains control of all three branches of government, but if they happen within two years I'm claiming bonus points.

If you are wondering where I came up with all of these, well...

The first one is because the Bush administration has been trying to expand presidential powers since they took office. This stacking of the Supreme Court will allow them to finally make some of the things they are doing legal, or at least avoid prosecution on them. Alito was the brain behind the presidential "signing statement"... you know, where he can sign an act of congress into law but with a little statement that it doesn't apply to him.

The second one is because this administration will not want to lose the power they have gained, and with a 38% approval rating they aren't going to maintain it if the voting is done legitimately.

The third one is because the government never wants to give benefits to its injured soldiers. Republican governments most especially. They may be the ones that cry "support our troops" the loudest, but they hate actually doing it because that is "entitlements". Entitlements are the anti-thesis of the neo-conservative movement.

The rest are from major rulings over the past two years that were split 5-4 in the court and are against the wishes of the Bush administration.

So, there ya go. I'll post them as the rulings come in.

I have told many people that I knew in October of 2002 that there were no WMDs in Iraq. The inevitable question is then raised "So why did congress approve war powers for Iraq?"

The answer is actually rather simple.

As I wrote back in September in the article "Concerning Politians", something that everyone should remember about politicians is that they only hear what their aides tell them.

Here is a link to what I knew in October 2002: Just Think - News Archive October 2002

After perusing that it is quite obvious that the CIA did not agree with the White House, so... So why did congress approve war powers for Iraq?

Well, for several reasons.

First, that was not front page stuff, so unless you had a lot of time to read then you wouldn't ever see it (I had a lot of time to read at that time, I wish I did now).

Second, that is not what they were given from the CIA, this is: http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm

Third, the environment of the time was one of "if you aren't for invasion of Iraq then you support terrorism" (it still is with some people) so politicians were scared of being labeled "anti-american" or "pro-terrorism".

Unfortunately the report that they were given by the CIA was cooked up by four Rumsfeld appointees as evidenced by this article.

So, congress trusted the general atmosphere of the country, the statements of the White House, and the false report that they were given (I call it false because it did not contain dissenting opinion at all) more than they trusted the few middle-of-the-paper articles that their aides were actually able to bring to their attention. There were many of these articles, but I know that the aides are busy too and didn't have nearly as much time as I did to locate them all and put all the pieces together.

In short, congress was misled.

I wrote this for a friend but thought others may find it interesting:

I saw an article today about Hugo Chavez and it took me back to our conversation where I told you I really didn't know much about him. Well, I've now done my homework and I still see nothing wrong with the guy. I've read the text of the new constitution that he helped pass in Argentina and see nothing wrong with it either. In fact it protects the people's right to overthrow their government if necessary far better than ours does. Anyway, here's the quick and dirty that I found:

(This is a copy/paste from Wikipedia)
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Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (born July 28, 1954) is the President of Venezuela. A former paratroop lieutenant-colonel who led an unsuccessful coup d'état in February 1992, he was elected president in 1998. His presidency has seen sweeping changes throughout the country, including a new constitution, many new social programs, and a new foreign policy distancing Venezuela from the United States.
Since his election in 1998 on promises of helping the poor, Chávez's influence over Venezuelan politics has grown. One year after a majority of Venezuelans voted to keep him in office, the popular leader consolidated his power, striking a harsh anti-USA tone. He is up for re-election in 2006, and recent polls suggest he has about 70 percent popularity.
Chávez and his administration have been opposed through confrontational methods by some established sectors in Venezuela, including the business federation Fedecámaras and labour union federation CTV, resulting in a coup d'état, general strike/lockout, and recall referendum, all of which failed to remove him from office. Although the opposition charged that there was widespread fraud in the recall vote, international observers said the official results matched their counts at polling sites. Subsequently Chávez and his allies have won consistent political victories, occupying the vast majority of elected municipal, state, and national posts, as well as majorities in the supreme court, national electoral council and national assembly.
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(This is copy/paste from an opinion piece in the NYTimes, of course it is just opinion with no validating references.)
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Since winning a presidential election in 1998, Castro's Venezuelan protégé, President Hugo Chavez, has pursued precisely what the Russian researchers in Santiago described: the methodical consolidation of absolute authority under the guise of "democracy." Along with paramilitaries and community snoopers, the Chavez power grab has entailed converting the congress into a unicameral body, rewriting the constitution to enhance his rule and purging potential opponents in the military.
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There is also this National Review article, though the National Review is a known propagandist magazine for the GOP and has been known to completely fabricate stories. The book "Blinded by the Right" is by one of their former authors who was one of the people fabricating those stories, which is what the book is all about. Anyway, here's the article link: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/mannes200412140820.asp

Anyway, those were the only two contradictory items that I could find in 10 pages worth of Google results. Everything else supported what Wikipedia has or was not relevant (like talking about Pat Robertson).

Something that everyone should remember about politicians is that they only hear what their aides tell them.

This applies to all politicians regardless of party.

Yes, most of them do read newspapers, but consider their schedules. On any given day they have a schedule that is mind-boggling; they must attend to their committee meetings, make it to voting sessions, meet with various constituents, do fund-raising (another subject all on its own), study various legislation that will soon be in committee or up for a vote, create statements to answer the inundation of email and phone calls that the talk show hosts and activists have asked everyone to send in, talk to the press, make time for their families, sleep at some point, etc. etc. etc.

These people live very hectic lives and therefore have very little time to be studying the news the way many of us (and I wish more of us) do. What that means is that the news they receive is colored very much by their aides. The politicians that are more knowledgeable on many issues obviously have chosen very good aides. The ones that seem not to know about a variety of issues have obviously chosen poorly.

Anyway, the point of me saying this is that we often point at politicians and say "he lied" or "she lied" when in reality it is quite possible they just don't know the facts. Most of America doesn't know the facts on most issues. Yes, we want our politicians to be well informed so that they can make good decisions but the fact of the matter is that due to the schedules they are forced to keep that is very difficult. They are also very insulated in their "bubble" of people around them, so the information they receive through whatever network they have set up is still highly filtered. Keep that in mind before you say a politician "lied".

I personally don't think G.W. Bush lied about Iraq, I just think he has poorly chosen the people that surround him. I don't think these people would give him the full information even if they knew it and he has admitted that he doesn't read the newspaper.

I wish folks would look at this issue pragmatically. Both sides come in full of emotion and with guns blazing and they tend to overlook the completely obvious.

Here is a pragmatists view of this issue:

The argument that it is a human life is valid, as is the argument that a woman has the right to make choices about her own body.

The libertarian party would argue that though the fetus has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the woman is the owner of her own body and therefore can evict an unwanted tenant... what happens to that tenant afterward is not her problem. I think that's a cop-out, but at least it is an attempt to reconcile the two valid arguments. Myself, I tend to take the approach of "what else weighs on this decision".

I'm sure we all agree that obviously the woman who has an abortion does not want the child at least at the time that she makes that decision. This is pretty obvious, but it is also a good place to start... common ground if you will.

Second, hopefully we can all agree that abortion is more costly than contraception. This is important when looking at this pragmatically because the idea of "abortion as contraception" becomes silly. Obviously an woman who knows that $2 is more than $1 understands that abortion is more costly than contraceptives. Hence we can conclude that it is an extremely rare case that abortion is used this way. It is likely that abortion is used when contraception fails, but obviously not as a contraceptive itself.

So where does this leave us?

Well, given that the children are unwanted and assuming that none of them are aborted at all that leaves us with over 1,000,000 unwanted children each year for which homes must be found (numbers from abortionfacts.com). Let's even assume that 50% (an outrageously generous number) of women who would have had an abortion actually decide after childbirth to keep the child, that's still over 500,000 unwanted children each year. Let's assume, for our purposes, no population growth at all for this number, we'll assume it remains the same.

In the 1990s, there are approximately 120,000 adoptions of children each year. This number has remained fairly constant in the 1990s, and is still relatively proportionate to population size in the U.S. (adoption.com quoting Flango and Flango). So, we must conclude that there are already at least 120,000 children per year available for adoption.

Would the addition of this 500,000 children per year increase adoption rates? That is debatable as we have no specific data to draw from. Let's assume a best case scenario that it increases adoption rates by 10%. This would mean that somewhere in the neighborhood of 132,000 children per year were adopted. Adjusted upward by another 10% (erring on the favorable side for the children here) for population growth that would put us at 145,200 children per year being adopted.

So, assuming a lot of growth in adoptions, no growth in unwanted pregnancies, and nobody circumventing the law and getting illegal abortions we would end up with around 354,000 children per year that we could not find homes for. You can play with that number and your guess on how many women would get abortions illegally if they could not get them legally, but you can already see that we cannot afford this.

Pragmatically, our nation cannot afford to subsidize a population of 354,000 unwanted children per year. Let's assume no change in that number for 18 years (the amount of time we'd have to subsidize each child)... that would be 6,372,000 children in the system in 18 years. Assuming a very modest support cost of only $1000 per month per child that would cost the country 6.3 billion dollars per month, 76 billion dollars per year.

I may believe that abortion is abhorrent, but I also believe that the government cannot make it illegal and then turn its back on the children who are born unwanted. I'm sure that my pragmatism will offend many, they'll say "how can you be so cold?" and "what is a human life worth?", my answer is this... "how much are you willing to pay?".

Are you willing to increase the size of government to create the bureaucracy needed to deal with these children? Are you willing to pay more for medical care due to the emergency room visits of women whose illegal abortions went badly? Are you willing to pay more in taxes to fund the bureaucracy you've created and to subsidize these children's lives? Are you willing to pay more for the policing of that bureaucracy to ensure these children are not abused and that they actually get the benefits the government is supposed to provide them?

Call me a cold bastard if you must, but I am not willing to pay for this and if the GOP truly wants less taxation and smaller government then neither are they.

That brings me to the final point. The GOP is just using the zealots who want abortion made illegal at any cost. They are just using them because the GOP has no plan to make abortion illegal, they just use it to push a hot-button at voting time. If you are making your voting decision on just this one issue then you are being boondoggled by the republican party. They need abortion to be legal so they can keep people like you voting for them. If abortion were outlawed then you may wake up and realize that there are other things going on which affect your life, and they don't want that to happen.

Speaking of affecting your life, and again being pragmatic here, how does the abortion of someone you don't know, have never met, and will never meet affect you? It doesn't, but if you make them have that baby it sure will, and it will affect me and everyone else as well.

Just my take on things.

I am growing more and more appalled at what is called "the news", especially on television.

I have digital cable television... over 200 channels of mostly worthless garbage. As I surf channels I will almost always stop on anything that is listed (in the channel guide) as "news".

Today I stopped on a local channel's nightly news program to see what was on it and they were interviewing an actress about the happenings on a sitcom (I presume a sitcom hosted by the same network). What in the world does that have to do with news?

This is just one example of a much larger, systemic issue. The "news" doesn't really exist anymore.

Here we have a day filled with things that are newsworthy. From around the world there are things such as China will no longer keep natural disaster death tolls secret, Israeli troops leave Gaza, and Iran says they are continuing their nuclear research and development. Here in the U.S. we have Michael Brown resigning from FEMA, Bush saying he'll accept responsibility for any problems with response to Hurricane Katrina, and the confirmation hearings for a new Supreme Court Justice starting. Locally there are things such as City council endorses proposal for casino, Outside Auditors to be brought into city schools, Residents plead with city to limit pain of planned budget cuts. Yet, through all this, the "news" wants to tell me about a sitcom.

This isn't limited to television either, but television seems to be the worst about it. You would think that with only a half-hour or an hour to cram in all the happenings in the world, country, state, and locality that the television news would avoid fluff, but just the opposite seems to be the case.

Radio follows a close second to television with being near useless as a news source. There are two things that help to redeem radio; 1. they have traffic and weather reports while you are actually out in it, and 2. they have talk radio which actually helps to bring some real important issues up (though you have to switch between the conservative and the liberal stations to get any kind of objectivity on a subject). Since most of us either don't want to switch stations constantly or don't want to be outraged further (the other drivers are usually outrage enough) this means we generally only get one very slanted view or we don't get anything of use other than traffic and weather from the radio.

Newspaper is still the best source for news but it still tends to go for fluff over substance. How many times have you seen the headline be something about a sports team when you know something larger than sports is happening in the world? How about headlines about celebrities? Bahh... it all irritates me to no end.

There are three trends in "the news" that really annoy me:

• Fluff - The "news" reporting on things that have absolutely no impact on my life such as the afformentioned sitcom. Also in this category would be things like celebrities, I don't care who got a DUI or who is in court... it doesn't impact my life. The piece about what barbeque grills are the hottest thing for this summer is useless to most of us, and those who do want to know can check out Consumer Reports magazine or website. The "news" is chalk full of useless fluff.

• Sensationalism - Sensationalism means that the audience will want to hear it even if it has no impact on their lives. Sensationalism also means making the story appear bigger than it really is. Some of the afformentioned fluff is done because it is sensational as does the reporting on themselves that I will mention next, but this is much bigger than just those. How has the hanta virus, west nile virus, or mad cow disease impacted your life? How has the touching story of the family that survived a tornado (the family you've never met, of course) impacted your life? For the vast majority of us, it hasn't. The "news", however, would have you believe that your life is in immenent danger from all manner of things, they sensationalize it. This tends to desensitize us to real danger warnings. The "news" reports the sensational because it sells, not because it is of any real use to you.

• Self Agrandizement - I don't want to hear one reporter interview another reporter about what a third reporter said (yes, I've actually seen this). You are the reporters, you are not the news! This is a growing trend in the "news industry" and it is, of all of these trends, perhaps the most damaging. The companies that put these "news" programs on the air don't want to fork over the money for any real investigation or reporting so reporting on themselves has become a cheap means of putting something that "sounds" newsworthy on the air without any real substance of "news". The reason this trend is so disturbing is that if it continues to grow at the rate that it has for the last few years soon we'll see nothing but opinion on the air. One reporting reporting (or debating) the opinion of another.

Humorously the right wing/conservatives/republicans continually say that the news media is biased toward the left while the left wing/liberals/democrats argue that the news media is biased toward the right. The truth of the matter is that the mainstream "news", with the exception of Fox News Channel (which is self-admittedly right-wing), neither is true. They are biased toward money. What makes them the most money is that which costs them nothing to research but will draw viewers and hence advertisers. That is what the media is biased to.

It seems the only place you get any actual "news" anymore is the internet. Funny how reporters criticize "internet research". Of course, even to get news there you have to use multiple sources and quite often still have to sift through a lot of garbage.

Myself, I have set up my homepage to show me RSS feeds of the top 5 most viewed stories from the websites of CNN, USA Today, BBC News, CBC News (Canada), ABC News (Australia), and, though the RSS feed doesn't work most of the time, even from Al Jazeerah.

Thank goodness for the internet, without it we'd be in the dark ages when it comes to knowing what is going on around us. I hope the "news media" wakes up and starts moving back toward real research and real stories.

I was researching this for a friend so thought I'd post it here

The Felons:

• John Poindexter - Convicted on several felony counts in Iran Contra. On Thursday, February 14, 2002, John Poindexter was appointed by President George W. Bush to lead the Information Assurance Office at the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Despite Mr. Poindexter's criminal record of lying to Congress, the President thinks he is "an outstanding American and an outstanding citizen who has done a very good job in what he has done for our country, serving in the military".

• Elliott Abrams - Pled guilty in Iran Contra. During George W. Bush's first term in office, he was appointed the post of Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs

• Robert Earl - Confessed to destroying national security documents in the 1980's Iran-Contra scandal, Earl was granted immunity from prosecution in return for testifying in the scandal. Now Chief of Staff to Defense Secretary Gordon England.

• Richard Perle - Very likely an Israeli government agent, Perle was expelled from Senator Henry Jackson's office in the 1970's after the National Security Agency (NSA) caught him passing Highly-Classified (National Security) documents to the Israeli Embassy. Bush made him Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.

• John Negroponte - Involved in covert funding of the Contras and covering up of human rights abuses in Honduras in the 1980s while he was Ambassador to Honduras. Bush appointed him as Ambassador to the UN, Ambassador to Iraq, and now Director of National Intelligence. If you've not seen this guy's record from Honduras you should investigate it, it is flat out scary having this guy in charge of all of our intelligence AND law enforcement at the national level.

• Otto Reich - The joint House-Senate select committee on Iran-Contra found that Reich’s unit of the State Department had engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda” on behalf of the Contras and violated restrictions on State Department appropriations. Bush appointed him to Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere.

The Shady Characters:

• Paul Wolfowitz - U.S. State Department Director of Policy Planning (part of NSA which coordinated the whole Iran Contra Affair). Bush appointed him first to Deputy Secretary of Defense and now to President of the World Bank.

• James G. Roche - Member of Wolfowitz Policy Planning team during Iran Contra. Bush appointed him to Secretary of the Air Force.

• L. Lewis Libby - Member of Wolfowitz Policy Planning team during Iran Contra. Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff.

• Fred F. Fielding - Deputy to John Dean (Nixon's counsel who was convicted of destroying documents) during Watergate. Appointed by George W. Bush to the 911 Commission.

• John G. Roberts, Jr. - White House Counsel during Iran Contra, now nominated for Supreme Court Justice. (edit: now this is upgraded to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court)