We need a monarch.

I hate to sound like a Tea-Party nutbag, but I really love the United States' Constitution. As I've mentioned before, I'm a free-speech fanatic. I love the Constitution's sharp focus on individual liberties, its emphasis on the rights of the accused, and that grade-school-civics favorite, the checks and balances of power. I despair when these ideals meet real-life sacrifices, especially glaring ones like, oh, the utter lack of Congressional declarations of war since WWII. I also don't like to sully the document's purity with excessive amendments, interpretations and adaptations. No Defense of Marriage Amendment, please, but while you're at it, no marriage at all (it violates the establishment clause, you see). But don't call me a Scalia-esque strict constructionist. If I could, I would copy-edit the otherwise brilliant Constitution and correct a centuries-old omission with no qualms: I would give the United States a monarch. It probably seems unamerican, undemocratic and all-around anti-freedom-y to propose that we foist an unquestioned figure to the crown of government. It probably sounds old-fashioned, all uppity and needlessly symbolic and European. I know it does. It's exactly my point.

Continue ReadingWe need a monarch.

Google, China, and hypocrisy

You've probably heard the stories in the news. A superpower has been shamed, a totalitarian state has been outed. A tyrannical government has been spying on the private communications of its citizens, including that of activists and journalists. What they plan to do with the fruits of their techno-espionage is not well understood, but given their history they can hardly be up to any good. What is clear is that this government is fanatical about crushing any challenge to their perceived supremacy, whether those challenges are internal or external. They even demand that private companies aid them in censoring unfavorable news (with a stunning degree of success), and these private companies (mostly based in the United States) may even have helped them spy on their citizenry. You could be forgiven for thinking that this was just another blog posting about Google and China. It's actually a post about hypocrisy. First, if you haven't heard, Google is re-evaluating their decision to do business in China, ostensibly as a result of some cyber-attacks directed at the Gmail accounts of some human-rights activists. The U.S. State Department is planning to lodge a formal protest on the alleged attacks. Plenty of others have already analyzed this story. As usual, the real story is behind the headlines. The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week:

The Google-China flap has already reignited the debate over global censorship, reinvigorating human rights groups drawing attention to abuses in the country and prompting U.S. politicians to take a hard look at trade relations. The Obama administration issued statements of support for Google, and members of Congress are pushing to revive a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens.
To prevent United States businesses from cooperating with repressive governments in transforming the Internet into a tool of censorship and surveillance, to fulfill the responsibility of the United States Government to promote freedom of expression on the Internet, to restore public confidence in the integrity of United States businesses...
So far, so good. Restoring public confidence in the integrity of U.S. businesses might be a tall order for any bill, but whatever. The rest are all noble goals: preventing repressive governments from using the internet as a tool of censorship and surveillance, promoting freedom of expression, and so on. Just one problem: none of these provisions apply to the U.S. Government. You see, the U.S. Government is the tyrannical superpower from the first paragraph of this blog post. You might have asked yourself why it is that the Chinese people put up with having their private communications read by their government. The real question is this: Why do you put up with it? [More . . . ]

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Right wing calls for military coup

Occasionally, items in the news make me sit up and take notice of how far from a constitutional republic we really have come. Like this:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.
That's the opening salvo from John Perry, a regular columnist with the right-wing website Newsmax, in an article entitled "Obama risks a Domestic Military 'Intervention'". I would like nothing more than to provide you with a link to the whole article, but it has apparently disappeared down the memory hole. Perhaps the editors at Newsmax realized it would be inconvenient to have an article speculating on the potential for a military coup at the same time they are trumpeting the peacefulness of the tea-party protestors and wondering why anyone would accuse them of encouraging dangerous, violent extremism. The quote I harvested above came from Mediamatters.org, which detailed this story yesterday. Unfortunately, the did not reproduce the full column. I managed to grab a screenshot of the Newsmax website search function, which proves that the article really did exist, although the hyperlink for the article now returns visitors to the main Newsmax page.

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Proposed Amendment

I've been mulling an idea for an amendment to the U.S. constitution that probably won't have as much a chance as the failed Equal Rights Amendment, in which persons of the female persuasion would have been defined explicitly as full fledged people with the same rights as the white male landholders for which the constitution was originally penned. How's this?

"Government shall pass no law abridging the right of any person to decide whether an organism living within his or her own body is a harmful parasite or a welcome guest, and to respond accordingly."

A lawyer could probably tighten up the wording, but I think the gist is there. This amendment might save oodles of money on government health care in ways such as:
  • It would limit the ways in which lawyers determine what medical procedures are prohibited or required, and the associated overhead in managing those decisions.
  • It would remove the bureaucracy necessary to separate funding for procedures that everyone accepts under government insurance from those protested by a vocal minority.
Discussion?

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Time to Change Congress – – again.

Change Congress? Didn’t we just change control of Congress? Well, we did change the party that controls Congress, but we haven’t yet changed the money that controls the politicians who control Congress. Barack Obama will have an uphill claim, guaranteed, because politicians are not going to judge his proposals based on their merits. There is always the money, which feeds their cravings for reelection. What if all federal politicians learned that potential donors took this pledge: “I'm pledging not to donate to any federal candidate unless they support legislation making congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded.” This link will take you to a speech by Lawrence Lessig, who explains the urgent need to “Change Congress.” As long as members of Congress keep themselves in a position where they can be influenced by large contributions of money, we shouldn’t trust them.

Continue ReadingTime to Change Congress – – again.