New School Politics

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The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 is among the greatest laws ever passed by the legislature of the United States. Passed on October 24, 2001 by the House of Representatives, and the next day by the Senate, it was signed into law by President George W. Bush (fittingly, one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States) on October 26. Though typically said to be passed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 that same year, the PATRIOT Act was something the government of the United States has needed for a long time. For too many years, the citizens of the United States had been running the government, rather than the other (proper) way around. The citizens and their ACLU lackeys, always bandying about liberal toy phrases like “Congressional inquiry”, “transparency in government”, “human rights”, and worst of all “judicial review”, were collectively running train all over the powers of the executive branch and its agencies. This situation was entirely unacceptable. When citizens control the government, all sorts of bad things can happen - particularly change.

The main problem plaguing the executive branch for the first 200 years or so of its existence was a particularly inconvenient piece of legislation, passed very early in the government’s existence, commonly referred to as the Constitution. This piece of blatantly partisan legislation supposedly enumerates what the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the federal government of the United States are and are not allowed to do. There is an obvious fundamental problem with legislation such as this. Why is there something the government (especially the executive branch, which is the only part that matters) shouldn’t be allowed to do? Government is supposed to make law, not follow it. If government is supposed to follow law, then why doesn’t it pay taxes? Moreover, whenever the government is not allowed to do something, our enemies, especially our terrorist enemies, can exploit that restriction as a weakness. It would give the terrorists nothing less than pure joy to know that our own citizens are stopping the U.S. government from extracting necessary information from them. Vice-President Dick Cheney wisely notes that a “vital requirement in the war on terror is that we use whatever means are appropriate to try to find out the intentions of the enemy.” Every time we refuse to ‘torture’ an unlawful enemy combatant sitting in Guantanamo Bay, planning the next 9/11, a terrorist celebrates. If we insist on preserving their human rights, their human dignity, and the Geneva Convention which we signed, then they will win. If we do any less than condescend to precisely the measures they use against us, they will win. After all, when they can’t tell the difference between them and us, they won’t be able to attack us. It’s impeccable strategy. The PATRIOT Act gives the government these necessary tools to descend to the level of terrorists and dictators.

As mentioned before, the USA PATRIOT Act was introduced and passed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, the bill was introduced to the House of Representatives as a whole by F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. on October 23, passed the House the next day, the Senate the day after that, and signed into law by the 26th. The marvelous advantage to the fact that this bill was passed almost immediately after its proximate cause and quite immediately after its introduction is that there was neither the need nor the time for anyone actually to read it. As the misguided individuals who oppose Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism suggest, it is completely unreasonable to expect members of Congress to have staff read 342 pages of legal text overnight, so that they might form a reasonable, well-considered decision for voting the next day. What these critics also realize is that if the representatives actually read the bill, they might be tempted to object, instead of accumulating political brownie points. If they objected, they would be performing their Constitutionally-given duty to exercise due diligence - and as has been mentioned before, the Constitution is not something to which attention should be paid.

Always remember that satire > satyr, and that this work is licensed GFDL.

Popularity: 67% [?]

I chuckled to myself when I heard Senator Sam Brownback say that a goal of his presidency would be to cure cancer in 10 years. Statements like that are enough to drive a thinking man crazy. Sam Brownback will not cure cancer, he has no knowlege of to even begin exploring remedies nor do any politicians in their occupational capacity. But what he will try and do is use taxpayer money to fund the medical researchers who he likes the most; that is what he meant by “anti-cancer.”

Governement funding of science is an awful idea for two reasons: (a) it creates bad incentives–in a free market, capacity for innovation will draw investment; in a government influenced market, political pull will draw funding. The two are adverse and only the one where free exchange is present and productiveness is the lone borometer of success will scientific breakthrough actually occur. 

(b) Second, it creates waste. Because government has bad incentives it tends to loose perspective on special interest issues. Meaning pols will hype the importance of individual issues so much that they will invest more money into it than it deserves (i.e. agriculture) in order to pander for more votes. The fact that these politicians constantly ignore is that everything has a proper price tag and because there is always a limited amount of resources in an economy, you must prioritize spending. The free market always prioritizes best, becuase it has the best incentives.

Popularity: 21% [?]

I’m not sure if others caught it, but in comparing the War on Terror to the Cold War in tonights GOP presidential debate, Governor Mike Huckabee said “Today’s Ronald Reagan’s birthday.”

But today is June 5th. Any true Reagan junkie (i.e. myself) could tell you at any moment in time that Ronal Reagan was born on February 6th, 1911.

 Any true Reagan junkie could also tell you that Ronald Reagan Died on June 5th, 2004.

 Good try, but very poor execution, Mr. Huckabee.

Popularity: 29% [?]

As a first generation immigrant, I see America as a land of double standards. Here are a few of the more prominent problems that I see in today’s society.

Females are allowed to discriminate against males and even advocate their total destruction as a gender, but males aren’t allowed to, vice versa.

We provide free tuition to illiterate, illegal immigrants, while in the meantime middle-class educate legal immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa are having enormous amounts of trouble trying to fill out all the paperwork, plus they have to pay large fees that may be for naught.

Calling someone a racist is now as offensive as some racist words.

We keep mentioning about a jury of our peers, yet doctors keep getting screwed over by malpractice suits because their “peers” are actually those of their victim.

We keep trying to ban guns because people use them to commit crimes. I bet that if everybody in a store/plane/school had a gun, there would be a lot less killing sprees.

We keep crying out about seperating church and state, and yet we forbid stem-cell research and the teaching of evolution.

We advocate how the family should be the most important unit in a society, and yet we keep regulating not only how the family can be created, but we do a parent’s job for them.

We try to help people in other nations with financial aid, while we also have the world’s largest national debt and an incredibly poor healthcare insurance system, as well as Social Security.

We pride ourselves on being a democracy, and yet we give a lot of power to appointed officials that did not win a single vote, but pulled the right strings.

We prosecute foreign scientists regularly, even if they’re not guilty, and yet we let all sorts of drug dealers slip under our noses.

Finally, here’s a personal anecdote, about how minorities are elevating themselves above the majority, whether they know it or not.

I was talking with one of my cousins, who was a vice president in a biotech firm. He mentioned how the company was forced to hire janitors from different underrepresented minorities. So they hired one, and this janitor, being illiterate, managed to walk through THREE LINES OF DECONTAMINATION with alarms going off and all sorts of warning signs, and failed to pay attention. He then proceeded to enter the lab, and contaminated and destroyed $50,000 worth of property. The kicker? The company wasn’t allowed to fire him because he was a minority.

This is just one of the reasons why serious change needs to be implemented in our country.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Then I heard what must have been another joke. Dennis Kucinich actually suggested that we decrease the size of our military. In proportion to GDP and federal spending, we currently spend less on our military today by percentage than at any point in US history. Two thirds of all of our federal spending goes to pointless and over bloated programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the utter disaster that is the Department of Education. Christopher Dodd actually had the nerve to suggest cutting military programs such as the F-22 fighter jet. With the increase in Chinese military spending and now with Russia aiming its nuclear arsenal at Europe why would we even consider cutting programs that ensure US military dominance. It is imparative as a preventive measure to ensure that the US military has a technological advantage of thirty years over the other major powers (as we currently have). It is clear that we do not have enough soldiers as we need. In the first gulf war over five hundred and fifty thousand soldiers were placed on the ground as part of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Senator Obama has proposed an increase of one hundred thousand US soldiers; we should take it further than that and double the size of the US military.

We need to significantly increase the number of ground forces in the armed services, but the military also needs to add thousands of Special Forces units, Arabic translators, and cultural specialists. Our military needs to be bigger, not smaller, but it also needs to be smarter. One reason why the early operations in Afghanistan were so successful was because of the use of the “network” strategy. Less than one dozen four to eight man “A teams” which included a mix of CIA operatives and soldiers from different branches of the military coordinated the ground and air war against the Taliban. This network strategy enables commanders on the ground to make important decisions in real time without having to deal with heavy bureaucracy. One of the massive failures of Vietnam was the consolidation of Special Forces into SOCOM, which was a bureaucratic disaster that cost lives and money. It has been suggested that the Pentagon continue its strategy of decentralization. CENTCOM is the US military base of operations for the Middle East and its existence enables all Middle Eastern operational decisions to be made in real time, in the same time zone (CENTCOM is located in Qatar) and by military and civilian experts who specialize in the region they operate in. This is a huge step forward as it has enabled much faster and more well informed decision making than if day to day operations were run by the Pentagon thousands of miles away in Washington D.C. We should expand this strategy by sectionalizing the globe into other command centers that have access to their own air, sea, and ground assets, which would be capable of responding to situations in any part of the globe at unprecedented speed. I would recommend such networking with the State Department and the CIA and increase inter-corporation between all three on regional levels as suppose to agents, diplomats, and soldiers on the ground having to speak through professional bureaucrats in Washington D.C.

The last thing America needs is the weaker military Democrats like Dennis Kucinich are proposing.

Popularity: 30% [?]

There were multiple times that I almost died with laughter during tonight’s Democrat debate on CNN.
Of the more hilarious responses were those dealing with the gas “price gouging.” Some candidates (including John Edwards) called for a justice department investigation into “price gouging” by the big bad oil companies. Guess what morons, only twenty percent of all of the oil in the world is controlled by multinationals. As Mike Gravel observed, there should be no investigations into “price gouging” and nothing should be done to lower gasoline prices. Prices for crude oil are controlled by the global cartel known as OPEC which sets prices for the eighty percent of the worlds oil that is produced by nationalist corporations such as those in Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, ect. Democrats in congress have refused to allow any new oil to gas refineries be built in the United States for more than two decades. Most people do not understand that the oil in the ground is different than the gas in your car. It has to be refined from what is known as “crude oil” to usable gasoline. If we allow the “evil” companies like ExonMobile and others to build more refineries than the price of gasoline in the United States will decrease.
Eftychis

Popularity: 30% [?]