So it comes down to this: this is the week that the Supreme Court is hearing the oral arguments about the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature health care reform law. The Justices are specifically focusing on the question of that pesky individual mandate, which as the name might indicate will eventually require that each and every one of us has health insurance, and whether, in fact, it is legal.

On an organizational side note, this post marks the return of the short-lived “Brief Thoughts” series, which I am debating whether to rename to something snappier. Hopefully this will let me be even more wonderfully consistent in posting; with a format that lets me get out a quick post in between classes or on the bus or whatever, I can possibly save the major long posts for special cases. If you have an idea for a new name for this section, feel free to suggest it in the feedback box!

If you believe CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the once-certain question of the constitutionality of the mandate is now up in the air based almost solely on how terrible the government’s lawyer was at the arguments today. This view is being repeated all around the blogosphere, showing that once again we bloggers can be quite an echo chamber at times for better or worse.

Though I may not have the qualifications of Mr. Toobin, allow me to take a different view of the arguments today. Given the nature of the Court today, not to mention the overall political polarization, as well as the law in question, I’m not particularly certain that anything but a 5-4 ruling either way could have been expected of the Court. Given the ideological balance of the Court, with what is essentially an even split between conservatives and liberals and with Justice Kennedy typically in the middle, the only real question was which way he might go. Today’s arguments, according to the above article, seem to show that he might be considered in opposition; however, some of the typically conservative Justices sounded open to ruling it constitutional.

This makes it particularly interesting, to say the least; the idea of Chief Justice Roberts ruling in favor of it is something that I doubt anyone would have expected until now. And that’s just it. Nobody, and I mean nobody saw this same Court coming up with the Citizens United ruling that went as far as it did in opening up the floodgates of campaign financing as free speech. The Roberts Court has set a precedent of unpredictability for itself with that case, and I have a feeling that despite what pundits are calling a disaster for the law’s backers today, anything could happen in this one. Even in the best of times, figuring out what the Justices are thinking during Oral Arguments is something akin to divination; with a Supreme Court that has shown itself willing to go even beyond what professional Court-watchers expected, all the prediction at this stage is mere speculation at best. And yes, I recognize the irony in saying that in a post speculating about how the Court will go regarding the Affordable Care Act.

A decision is not expected until perhaps as late as June, if not even later; it should be interesting to see which way they do ultimately go in this case and what impact a precedent they establish with it could have.

I know I said on Fridays I would post, but I was literally singing one song too much to calm down and write.  (What song, you ask?  Well…let’s just say if I linked it here you guys would be too busy singing along for the rest of the day to read the rest of this post!  Or do anything else, for that matter…)  Anyway, I’m writing this at 2:15 am on a Saturday because it’s that important, even though I feel like a bit of a zombie right now.  Speaking of zombies, apparently SOPA is risen from the dead in the US.  We all knew they would try again, but to have the audacity to not even take a break from the bill and slip it into what feels like Congress’ very next order of business?  Kind of ridiculous, when you think of it.  I mean, didn’t our outrage count for anything?

That’s a topic for another post, however; we have something far more ominous to discuss.  As it turns out, the government might not even need the Stop Online Piracy Act to achieve the chilling effects on free speech on the internet that the legislation would have had.  Earlier this week, a popular web utility known as JotForm was effectively shut down by Washington, its domain having been seized by the Secret Service.  Wait just a minute here…this is no small-scale or obscure piracy site streaming live sporting events for free; this is a business that has more than 700,000 users, according to TheNextWeb.  Service has since been restored, but the seizure effectively caused JotForm to go out of business for a couple of days, causing a loss of revenue that’s not yet known.

With Bureaucrats Like These, Who Needs Congress?

This isn’t even the first time that a government agency has shut down a legitimate internet business because of being trigger-happy and overzealous in its pursuit of cyber-criminals.  I can’t be the only one that’s more than a little disturbed by the trend that’s getting established here.  We have a process for this, and it’s called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; I wrote about the DMCA in my earlier posts on SOPA and censorship, but in short the government needs to actually follow the due process outlined in existing legislation before it starts trying to create new stuff that’s even worse.

Imagine, for a second, that you’re a small-business owner, say a dry cleaners.  One day, completely out of nowhere, the Federal Government decides to shut down your business because there were suspicions that one of your clients was using your business, completely unbeknownst to you, to pass notes to a Russian spy or some other illegal activity; the only connection either party has to your business is that they are both clients.  Again, you have no knowledge whatsoever of it, and would have gladly talked to the authorities yourself as a business owner if you had, and you try to tell the agent in charge of your case this.   However, the agent is busy and doesn’t sound too interested in following up or even acknowledging the harm being done to your business, and so you remain closed down.

To draw a further parallel, your business is across the street from the city’s convention center, where a major trade show is happening this week.  You have another location across town, but it’s not nearly as well-known as your main place; faced with the shutdown, you begin moving clients’ laundry over to your other site and informing them of the move.  Unfortunately, this is hugely inconvenient to many of your clients, and in addition to this extra hassle, some of them begin to lose confidence in your ability to serve them; this is the people you’re even able to reach out to, as many of them may not even see your notices or receive the messages you leave for them.  A week later, the government decides to let you re-open.  Ultimately this shutdown only affects the clients who tried to use your business in the last week, however the damage has been done due to losing all the potential revenue from that trade show, never mind the damage your reputation took in the confusion.

In a very real way, this is exactly what happened to JotForm.  Except, web businesses are not solely 9-5 entities; rather they are open 24/7 and to a global customer base.  JotForm’s main domain was shut down, so they began to shift customers over to a new one; this only inconveniences legitimate users, as we’ve seen time and again previously disabled  sources of copyrighted work pop up less than 24 hours later at some new address, potentially even in a different country.

Web startups are, according to TechDirt, responsible for much of the real job growth in the US economy for the last few years; it is trivial for a startup owner to move all its assets to another country with a much friendlier business climate than the one that US regulators seem to be creating; moving him or herself there would be a bit of a logistical hassle, but I can imagine that a country like France or Germany would be willing to welcome these “job creators” with open arms.

In fact, if I were thinking of making a web startup (I am, in fact, though not for a few years at least…have to finish learning to code first!), I would strongly consider moving to another country that has made a strong statement against the sort of legislation that the US Congress is attempting to pass through every chance it gets.  Make no mistake: I am a content creator, and I recognize that copyright protection legislation is necessary, but the chilling effect that actions like the JotForm case and the attempts to pass the  Stop Online Piracy Act in all its various incarnations are having will prove to be harmful to the US economy and potentially endanger our economic recovery, never mind the various free-speech issues I have already explored in previous posts.

I urge all of you, yes, you, to consider writing your Senators and Representatives to get these agencies to stop harming job growth in the United States by potentially scaring away such a vibrant engine of economic growth.  The anti-SOPA protests proved that we can be effective en mass, with one voice, to make a change.  Let’s continue the fight to have sensible legislation that promotes these startups and free expression while continuing to protect the rights of content creators nationwide.

Well, it’s been a while, to be sure.  Now that I’m settled in to the new semester of college, I can finally get back to writing these posts that y’all love reading.  As the late, great, Billy Mays would say, “but wait, there’s MORE!”.  That’s right folks, I’m actually going to attempt to stick to a posting schedule this spring!  Unlike the last 4 times I’ve said that, I actually have a schedule that will definitely let me do just that.  Every Friday afternoon, I’ll be working on putting out a post just like this one, but with less meta-news at the top; I may do another post during the week if something extraordinary happens, but Friday afternoons will be post day for the foreseeable future.  I’ll let you get over your shock and surprise for a moment…

Okay, all better?  Onto today’s topic; after all, I’m not missing an internet spaceship battle of quite epic proportions late on a Friday just to write meta-news announcements and do site upgrades, after all.  I may have taken a break from blogging, but the Republican Party’s series of primaries to decide who will be their candidate to go up against President Obama continues.  Largely, Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, has held all the momentum in the race aside from a few setbacks here and there.  This past week, though, were the Missouri Primary, and the Minnesota and Colorado Caucuses.  Former Senator Rick Santorum (R- Pennsylvania) swept the lot of them on Tuesday night.  Considering momentum is key in the primary, this should be a big deal for the frontrunner, right?  Well, not exactly…

A Pointless Primary?

What has made me- and many of my friends -facepalm this week was the Missouri Primary itself.  In essence, Missouri wasted $8-9 million taxpayer dollars to hold a primary that doesn’t even count.  No, really.  In case you don’t want to open the link, in essence the GOP would have penalized the amount of delegates Missouri would have gotten if they had left the primary at the date it happened.  In short, they were going to be changing the date to be within party rules, which is supposed to be a simple matter for the state legislature.

Welp, they screwed it up so not only did we have the primary which is non-binding, but we’re going to have the for-real caucus next month.  Everyone in the state is scratching their heads about how the legislature screwed it up that badly.  As a result, despite his win on Tuesday, Santorum gets absolutely nothing out of the state yet.  Delegates, in the end, are what matters in this race up to the GOP Convention sometime in the summer, as whoever has the most will walk out as the Republican Presidential nominee.  Currently, Romney has 112 to Santorum’s 72; this could certainly change with the way the primaries will be playing out up until then.  Romney is most likely going to be the nominee at this rate, but there’s still a chance that Santorum will make up ground.

Momentum, after all, can be just as crucial as the actual results, as I explored around the Iowa Caucuses.  Though the Missouri Primary doesn’t count officially, it can be an important PR boost for the Pennsylvania Republican; Americans, after all, like a winner, and by winning three contests in the nation’s heartland in the same night can potentially make a statement about his electability in the rest of the country.  After all, if Santorum can keep up said momentum into races that, you know, actually matter, he can make a solid case for staying in the race as the conservative alternative potentially as late as the convention.

If it goes that far, this could be very fun to watch.  Honestly, I’ve gotten tired of how boring the primary season has been.  A nice, rousing floor fight at the GOP convention would be just the thing to liven it up.  Plus, you have to admit the Democrats would absolutely love for the GOP nomination fight to last all the way to summer.  Just think about that for a second:  if the GOP spend another 6 months fighting each other instead of President Obama, that’s a head start on messaging that you can’t ignore.

Either way, this’ll be good.

Happy new year, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s finally 2012, and among other things we have an election to look forward to.  Several of them, in fact, as the Republican Party decides on who to nominate as their candidate to face off against President Obama this fall.  In fact, that process began yesterday, as I’m sure many of you know by now.  The Iowa Caucuses are one of the more interesting parts of the nominating process in my opinion, both because they happen so close to the beginning of the new year and because of how different they are from just about every other contest in American democracy.  While the normal procedure used on election day in November as well as in the majority of the primaries is your typical “spend five minutes in the voting booth” affair, the Iowa Caucuses are a whole different animal.  In short, folks who attend the Caucuses go and listen to speeches by representatives from each campaign before casting their votes.

Does Iowa Matter?

Virtually everyone in the media and online was asking this question leading up to the caucuses, and there is no definitive answer.  On the face of it, it’s not all that important because the caucuses don’t even determine who gets the state’s convention delegates; all it does is give the nation an idea of who has momentum in the race for the nomination and whose campaign can resonate with voters enough to finish in the top 3 (at least for this cycle, sometimes all that matters is who comes out on top).

Therefore, most of Iowa’s significance in the larger picture is the illusion of momentum it can give a campaign.  Momentum in campaigns, particularly this early in the campaign and unlike in physics, is largely a psychological effect.  But why Iowa?  Much fuss has been made of its outsized influence on the nominating contest, seeing as it is demographically more homogenous than the country as a whole.

One quick aside: in political science, support of a candidate is thought of on the most basic level in terms of something called the Median-Voter Theorem.  Think of all registered voters as being lined up on the political spectrum of liberal to conservative.  In the general election (the one in November), the candidate who can win over the median voter, that is, the person who is ideologically right in the middle of the spectrum, will be the one that wins the election.  In practice, this is the reason independents play a huge role in our elections.

However, in the primaries (and caucuses) the story is different.  Rather than having to appeal to the overall median voter, a candidate must appeal to enough of his or her party’s base to secure the nomination.  This is where Iowa is important; a figure quoted by various articles in the past few weeks showed that Iowa has a large number of evangelical Christians, a key demographic for the GOP.  The Iowa Caucuses, then, are largely a test of how well a campaign can appeal to social conservatives, and a good measure of the candidate’s appeal to a large part of the Republican base.  Enough political theory for now, though…

The Winners

• Old-fashioned campaigning.  A few weeks ago Rick Santorum was largely an afterthought in the race.  However, he managed to overcome the huge funding advantage Mitt Romney had in Iowa by getting out there and shaking hands, kissing babies, and doing all the things that were once considered the hallmarks of running a campaign.  Despite having a very significant disadvantage in fundraising, Santorum managed to very nearly win the Iowa Caucus, only losing to Mr. Romney by 8 votes.  Not 8%, mind you, eight votes.  This is purportedly the closest result in the history of the Iowa Caucus, and impressive given all that we traditionally assume about fundraising being the key to victory.
• Ron Paul.  He managed to get a close third behind Romney and Santorum, and remaining relevant as a result.  Further, by not winning, the Internet didn’t explode with posts from Paul’s sometimes-obnoxious fan base.  A win-win for everyone!
• Rick Perry.  Despite a poor performance in Iowa, he’s decided to stay in the race.  Of course, as a Texan I would like that he’d at least spend a bit more time focusing on our state, but you have to give him credit for persistence.

The Losers

• Michele Bachmann.  She won the Ames Straw Poll back in August, and didn’t stop sliding since.  Today, she decided to drop out of the race after the fact that she didn’t even win a single county in last night’s Iowa Caucus.  She was the only woman in the race, and an early conservative star.  Bachmann’s exit makes the race just a bit more ideologically sane, but the decision to drop out was a smart one.  Momentum, folks; she clearly didn’t have any.
• The people of Iowa.  This year’s Iowa Caucuses were also known for a heavy amount of negative campaign ads.  I can’t say I’m at all surprised by this, as negative campaign ads are unfortunately the hallmark of a modern campaign.  That said, the prevalence of negative ads are nonetheless a striking contrast to the community-centered focus of the Iowa Caucuses.  The caucuses are very much ultimately a community-building event, where neighbors try to convince each other to vote for his or her favored candidate, and the amount of negative advertising can only be harmful to the spirit of the event, if not the substance of it.

The Toss-Up

• Mitt Romney.  He won the Iowa Caucuses, and a win is a win, but aside from that fact I’d almost put him in the losers category.  He outspent just about everybody and still barely matched his performance from four years ago.  Further, he didn’t win all that convincingly in Iowa, so you have to wonder just how much momentum he actually has.  Fortunately, New Hampshire should be a relatively easy primary for the Massachusetts Republican; it’s basically his home turf and there is something to be said for a home-field advantage in politics.  We’ll be watching next week’s New Hampshire Primary to find out if he can do better, or if Santorum can keep up his momentum.  Who knows, Ron Paul might even do better in this libertarian-leaning state.

Quick, what do the People’s Republic of China, Soviet Russia (along with the rest of the Warsaw Pact states), Iran, and Britain in Orwell’s 1984 all have in common?  They all censor ideas that they don’t want their citizens to hear about.  Soon, if the US Congress gets its way, the United States could join this list.  Quite frankly, I have no idea what is running through the minds of Senators and Representatives this season; Congress can come up with some strange stuff, but the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (SOPA’s Senate counterpart) are genuinely Bad Ideas.  In fact, if these bills become law, it’s easy to see how we could have censorship of American media just as it was censored in those cases.

Continuing on the theme of taking away our Due Process rights, SOPA/PIPA open a new, perhaps even more chilling, front in the Congressional assault on our civil liberties.  As stated at the beginning of the previous post, I am not intending, by writing these words, to become “just another loud voice” yelling in the blogosphere.  As always, I back up what I write with references to what is being said elsewhere, all while presenting my take on the issue at hand.  Make no mistake: our right to say whatever we want, to be free to find alternative sources of information and form our own opinions on the events of our time, in essence, to do what you are doing now by reading this and I am doing by writing it, this is all being threatened.  As a blogger, freedom of speech is my lifeblood; without it, this blog would not exist.  Because of that fact, this post will probably be one of the most passionate posts I have ever written; consider yourselves warned, and read on if you dare…

How it Works Now

The Stop Online Piracy Act and its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, sound harmless in theory, even something you might want to support.  As someone who, in an ideal world, would make a living based on writing, I am in favor of protecting Intellectual Property; after all, I spend perhaps too much time on these posts when I am inspired to write one; where would the motivation to write, much less eventually make a living from writing, be if there were no protections against someone taking a script they wrote to copy my post and pass it off as their own?  It is with this in mind that the authors of SOPA and PIPA have brought these bills into debate.  As the saying goes, however, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions; these bills, or should I say abominations, are no exception.

A brief digression, however, is in order; seeing as much of Congress doesn’t seem to know how the Internet works, I should clarify a few things.  First, the “social web”, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and so on, all those buttons on just about every webpage today, are built on sharing.  Such sharing does not violate the law; it could be said that President Obama could not have gotten as much support as he did in the campaign without those little buttons.  Hell, Viacom, Universal, et al, the major music labels and movie studios all to some extent rely on this sharing to promote their artists’ latest works.  Behind all this sharing is, ultimately, a link to content somewhere else on the internet.  Where we start to have problems with it is content that may be infringing someone’s copyright.  Keep the uncertain may in mind for a bit; it is quite important as far as this debate goes.

A Trojan Horse Attacking Our Civil Liberties

SOPA and PIPA are, first and foremost, intended to strengthen existing copyright law, in particular the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known commonly as the DMCA; though very few people if anyone would argue that the DMCA is perfect, SOPA and PIPA are the wrong way to go about it.  Quite simply, they are too broad and too much of an attack on our right to freedom of speech.  I had a long writeup about a potential case that could happen to any of us under SOPA or Protect IP, but this video from AmericanCensorship.org explains it much more concisely (and uses neat graphics!  Who doesn’t love those?)

A potentially infringing site could theoretically continue to exist, but as mentioned in the video, payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard would be able to block any payments to the site owners, Google and other search engines may be forced to “de-list” the site, making smaller sites basically invisible, and all ad revenues would vanish as well.  Oh, and the counter-notice period under the DMCA is shortened from 10 days to 5, and oh by the way, the payment networks and so on would not be required to reverse their actions.  As we saw with Wikileaks, without a legal order to lift such restrictions, they won’t be lifted.

In essence, SOPA and PIPA would require sites to be extremely proactive in monitoring content, so that they could avoid Wikileaks’ fate.  It is this fact that has caused almost everyone in Silicon Valley and the United States tech startup scene to speak out against it, saying in effect that sites like YouTube and Reddit could not have been created under SOPA/PIPA.  Do we really want to be enacting legislation that could constrain economic growth at a time like this?  More importantly, and a factor that has not been addressed nearly enough, is how this legislation could be used to censor the Web itself.

Imagine, for instance, a blogger receives proof of corruption in the government or proof of something that is in the public interest to get out, but the government doesn’t want it to.  How easy do you think it would be to get the site blocked in the United States?  It wouldn’t be very difficult at all; as we’ve already discussed, someone could allege that their rights were infringed and that said site is hosting illegal content.  Just like that, no more damaging information.  There are penalties under the DMCA for filing false notices, but they don’t seem to stop anyone who is determined.  For instance, take the developing case of Megaupload  v. UMG.  In this case, a bunch of high-profile artists made a video promoting MegaUpload; legally everything was squared away, MegaUpload got the rights to the song and everyone was happy.

Everyone, that is, except Universal Music Group, who filed a bogus claim with YouTube that the song infringed their intellectual property.  It didn’t, and MegaUpload filed a counter-notice with YouTube which put the video back up as the DMCA requires.  UMG then re-filed and took the video down again; the matter is now headed to the courts and should be interesting to watch, but this paints a disturbing picture about how easily the law can be abused without much consequence.  Mind you, this is under the relatively generous DMCA; under SOPA/PIPA MegaUpload and/or YouTube could’ve been cut off after the repeat notice.

If SOPA/PIPA are allowed to become law, it will have a chilling effect on anyone who creates any sort of content, from your little sister singing along to Taylor Swift and posting on YouTube, to whistleblowers, to bloggers and anyone providing an alternative perspective on the events of the day.  Make no mistake: CNN, The New York Times, and other mainstream media all have the legal and financial pockets to be able to continue as they are in a post-SOPA/PIPA world.  But do we really want an America where a pro-corporate, pro-government media with the resources to effectively counter any claims against them is the only one permitted to exist, or do we want an America with as many viewpoints able to be heard as possible, one that encourages innovation and bold, new, different ideas rather than squashes them under the weight of a corporate legal department?

My vote is with the latter.  If you agree with me, write/e-mail/call your Senators and Representatives and let them know how you feel about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.  Perhaps most importantly, tell your friends to do the same, and together we can beat this and prevent censorship from coming to the United States.

Forget about Occupy Wall Street for a moment.  Forget Protect IP and SOPA for a moment as well.  There is, lurking in the halls of Congress at this very moment an all-too-serious threat to our rights as Americans.  Watch the first minute or so of the above video, and pay special attention to Senator Rand Paul’s question to Sen. McCain and his response around 25 seconds in; is this seriously what we need in America?  This excerpt is from the debate on S. 1867, the annual Defense spending bill, and hidden away deep in the bill are three sections that should give anyone who values our civil liberties, particularly those of due process and the right to a speedy trial and habeas corpus itself, pause.  I don’t intend to sound alarmist, but the alarm must be sounded about these parts of this legislation.

There is indeed a lot of very passionate rhetoric about this bill flying around the internet this week; as usual, I will attempt to be as calm as usual in the analysis, but if these provisions become law, life in America as we know it may well change for the worse.  When I heard about Sections 1031-1035 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, I thought that its passage by even the Senate would be almost unthinkable.  Sadly, and scarily, that is not the case.

A World of War

The core issue with this bill is that it essentially extends the defined battlefield in the War on Terror to include the United States.  Yes, if this passes we are all effectively part of the war, and as such the military has the option to detain us just as it would an insurgent in Afghanistan or, until the recent pullout, Iraq, and send us to Guantanamo Bay.  In fact, two retired Generals, Charles Krulak and Joseph Hoar, said in a recent New York Times editorial that “due process would be a thing of the past.”  Is this really what we need in our country?  It’s not like we’re overrun by terrorist incidents like in 24; if we were, then the passage of something that implicitly targets American citizens, living in the United States of America, might be somewhat useful.  Make no mistake, it would be no less atrocious than it is now, but since our reality is not that of 24, I really have to wonder what sort of ulterior motive our Congress has in inserting these provisions.

What’s worse is the sneaky way the legislators went about doing this part of the NDAA.  In fact, I held this post back for a few days while I tried to figure out whether American Citizens were included or not.  See, the bill implies that we are in one section, and in another says that we are exempt.  Which is it?  Obviously we cannot have it both ways; either we’re able to be detained indefinitely or we’re not.  You can’t just be “oh, I’m kinda detained forever…” You either are or you’re not.  After much reading on the matter in my study breaks this finals period, I agree with the interpretation of Representative Justin Amash (R- Michigan), among others: Section 1032 of the NDAA does not actually exempt us as American citizens from the possibility of indefinite detention by the military; it merely gives the President the option rather than the requirement to do so.

To be honest, for the sake of clarity in knowing what we’re dealing with, I would’ve rather that the section was explicit; that way, we could have had more time to mobilize against this bill, to stop it in its tracks as it deserved to be.  Indefinite Detention at the whims of a President is not something I would’ve ever thought to read about in the United States.  Argentina under the military junta during the 1970s-early 1980s, yes, but here?

Given that President Obama has now signaled that he will not veto the bill, a fact that is greatly disappointing to me who once supported hin (and is still flooded with emails about his 2012 campaign), we have to hope the third branch of our government still has its head on straight.  In fact, I would expect that the first lawsuit that results from these provisions will go to the Supreme Court; I am not very religious, but when that happens, I’d pray that at least 5 of the Justices see the light and rule it unconstitutional, because that is what it is at the very basic definition of the term.  In fact, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld was a Supreme Court case in 2004 that dealt with this precise issue, or at least one very close to it; are we, in fact, entitled to representation and due process while under military detention?  The Court ruled that this is, in fact, the case; unfortunately, its ruling essentially gave Senator Carl Levin (D- Michigan) the legal basis for this legislation.  It will be interesting to watch it play out to be sure, but given that this Supreme Court gave us Corporate Personhood in the Citizens United ruling, we shouldn’t have our hope too high.

Congressman (and perennial Presidential candidate) Ron Paul (R- Texas) has called this bill “arrogant and bold and dangerous”.  I may not agree with him on many issues, but this is one that I think any rational American can see is, sadly, quite a reasonable assessment of the bill.

Perhaps you’ve already heard about the growing movement known as Occupy Wall Street.  This broad social movement has protested against a variety of social problems in the heart of New York City’s Financial District since mid-September, and it has since spread to a variety of other cities in the US and around the world.  I’m going to call it now: 2011 is the Year of the Protest; the OWS groups claim to draw inspiration from the Arab Spring earlier this year, which toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.  Though the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements are the most visible to most of us here in the USA, Greece, Spain, and other countries have all seen some protests so far this year.

The “Occupy” groups have up to this point, predictably I might add, not been taken very seriously by the mainstream media establishment.  By viewing them dismissively as those “dirty hippies”, the media is hoping that it’ll just fade into the background until the protestors give up.  It’s having the opposite effect, and ever so slowly the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spinoffs in other locations are starting to be acknowledged by the media as they grow.  Despite the valid criticisms against the movement, it’s the best hope our generation has had in a while.

Rise of the 99%

One of the biggest criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that there is no single demand that could fit on a bumper sticker, and therefore the movement is too unfocused to be effective.  I disagree.  While that could have been true at the beginning of the movement last month, it has since started to focus on the issues of income inequality/Wall Street’s greed and ending the financial sector’s influence in politics.

“The 99%” as they refer to themselves, in reference to the fact that 1% of the country owns the majority of the wealth, attribute the lack of a single concise, snappy message to the fact that there are just too many problems to solve.  In addition to the two mentioned above as what seems to be receiving the most focus, the movement could be broadened to be against everything from the War on Terror to the fact that whoever ultimately wins the Presidency next year will have raised upward of $1 billion in order to be (re)elected, with a large part of that money coming from corporate lobbies.

This past weekend, I found this image while following the developments of the movement as I have since it became clear it wasn’t going to be going away for a while:

A listing of many of the top concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement

Though I do not agree completely with some of the points on this list (“Wars for Profit” and the “emergence of a police state”, really?), I do agree with many of them, and this list is probably as close to the concise messaging that traditional protest-watchers try to look for.  It’s clear to me that our generation is standing astride a turning point in the history of our country.  For those about to graduate from college this coming year, who were told that surely the economy will have recovered in four years, reality is a cold shock indeed.  Hell, I’ve got another year and a half left before I have to worry about going to graduate school or entering the workforce and with the unemployment rate for college graduates under 25 still around 10%, there is genuine cause for concern (especially since liberal arts majors like yours truly generally have it worse off than those with a more practical course of study.)

To people like us, this movement is the best hope in years.  The status quo cannot stay as such; change is needed in this country even more than it was back in 2008, when President Obama campaigned on a promise to bring us just that.  If I could go to New York City and join the Occupy Wall Street movement, I would.  Hell, if I had the time to go downtown and join Occupy St. Louis, I would, but the fact of being a college student means I’ve had almost no time to update this blog in the last month, never mind go out and protest!

This problem is perhaps the main limiting factor in the movement’s growth at this point; there are surely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people near an Occupy protest somewhere who would love to join but cannot due to a lack of time or money to make the trip and play a meaningful part of the movement beyond the sidelines, those who want to do more than just send a couple of dollars toward the movement and then zone out.  As much as we would love to go and take more direct action to support OWS and its sister movements in other cities around America and the world, the real world prevents us from doing just that.  We will just have to come up with different ways to feel like we are supporting the movement in a real way.

Anyone can click a donate link online; my challenge to you is to do something more.  This does not mean just change your Facebook picture or your Twitter avatar to an OWS image; slacktivism such as this is easy, but it accomplishes almost nothing.  Send some supplies to your local protest (google “occupy [city name]” and you should find a link to their website along with some suggestions on what to send as well as where), write well thought-out letters to your Senators/Congressmen demanding reform on your favorite issue in the image, or even go and join your local protest if you have more time than I do.  As for me, I’ll be making a series of posts based on the points in that image and doing exactly what you come here to read: explaining the issue and why it matters to us.  Though this semester has proven, once again, that I cannot commit to a set-in-stone schedule, I will be putting them out as soon as I have some spare time, which will be much sooner than next month!

In short, I’m mad as hell about the direction our country is going, and I’m going to do something about it.  Are you?

Image via Wikipedia

So, apparently there was a hurricane last week that hit just about the entire east coast.  Hopefully it didn’t affect any of you all that much, but if it did or if you know someone who was affected, I hope everything’s alright and that you’ve recovered from Irene’s effects with few problems.  Because if Virginia Representative Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, has his way, you won’t be getting any help from the Federal government.

Normally, it’s the government’s job to step in with disaster relief when something like this happens; usually it’s even as much of a no-brainer as anything in government can be.  One little problem: Irene struck on the heels of that bruising debt-ceiling debate, and both parties have come to embrace the ideals of deficit reduction above all else.  Apparently, that includes federal disaster relief.

Being second only to Speaker John Boehner (R- Ohio) in the House of Representatives, Eric Cantor has a great deal of power and influence over what the House of Representatives does on a day-to-day basis.  Being from Virginia, one of the states directly affected by the hurricane that caused about $7 billion in damage, Representative Cantor should, in theory, be one of the loudest voices calling for disaster relief funds to be disbursed.

After all, that’s what our Congressional Representatives and Senators are, at the core, supposed to do: fight for our interests within government, and the pressure on the Congressional delegations from the affected states is extremely high, as it should be.  The average Joe on the east coast might not care all that much about the debt ceiling, healthcare reform, or other national issues, but when his business or home is destroyed by a hurricane, you better believe he’ll notice that the federal assistance that he is expecting to help him get back on his feet isn’t coming.  Now, who exactly is responsible for that?

Ideological, or Just Plain Evil?

Deficit reduction is all fine and good of course, but not when it comes at the expense of the real job of our Representatives (that is to, you know, represent us).  In fact, noted economist Paul Krugman points out that disaster relief has historically been considered to be economically similar to a war in that “it is a temporary condition“.  According to Krugman, the answer to a natural disaster, at least in terms of national economic priorities, is that

“[the government] should balance its budget in present discounted value terms, not year by year…it should be met largely through higher taxes and lower spending in the future rather than right away, which is another way of saying that it should be paid for in large part by a temporary increase in the deficit.”

-Paul Krugman in The New York Times, August 30, 2011

In essence, just the opposite of what Rep. Cantor is demanding.  Not only is this idea highly unorthodox economically, even members of his own party are rebuking the Majority Leader, showing just how politically unviable Cantor’s stance is.  Not only that, but he’s also a typical Republican hypocrite!  Yep, 5 years ago he did exactly what he’s blocking now, which in a way is not surprising at all.

His dedication to his newly found ideals is admirable, but is this really what Representative Cantor’s constituents want in their Representative?  Ideology is one thing, but when a natural disaster strikes, I don’t know about you, but I’d want my Representative to stand up for me.  After all, disasters such as this transcend ideologies, and the response to one can make or break an official’s career.  In any case, Rep. Cantor needs to take a good hard look at why he wants to represent the people of Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, because refusing to help out the people who gave him the seat in Congress based purely on ideology is not the way a Member of Congress should act.  Leave the lofty debates to issues that aren’t tied to an emergency; after all, real people’s livelihoods depend on that aid coming through.

Texas Governor Rick Perry entered the 2012 Republican Party field of Presidential candidates a couple of weeks ago with a splash; so much so, in fact, that the winner of the Ames Straw Poll, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, was upstaged; ordinarily, she would have had the media spotlight all to herself for the weekend.  With Rick Perry’s entry, however, Bachmann not only had to share the media’s limited political attention, but she also gained an ideologically similar competitor.  Bachmann has her own issues, which deserve a post of their own, but she and Rick Perry will be going after the same voters in the Republican primaries early next year; both candidates are considered rising stars on the conservative, Tea Party end of the political spectrum.  Therefore, any post about one of them necessarily must at least mention the other.

For the sake of full disclosure, I was an intern for Rick Perry’s opponent in the gubernatorial race last year; that said, it’s difficult if not impossible to live in Texas and not have a strong opinion of Rick Perry either way.  As always, the opinions on this blog are mine and mine alone.  Though I have not lived in Texas for very long, it has been long enough to realize that Governor Perry is not the right person to lead this country.  And that’s putting it lightly.

Rick Perry: A Hypocritical Cowboy

Two decades can change a lot in a person, to be sure.  However, Governor Rick Perry first appears to be a classic opportunist.  Back when it was cool to be a Democrat in Texas, Gov. Perry was one; now, he styles himself as one of the more-conservative Republicans at a higher level of government.  Never mind that he was just short of explicitly calling for Texas to secede from the United States just a couple of short years ago.  Do we really want our country to be led by someone who thinks his own state may one day be better served by not being a part of it?

States’ Rights versus a strong Federal government is the debate in American politics, but these statements go just a bit too far.  It’s one thing to decline Federal stimulus dollars or to fight  against President Obama’s health care law, but it’s quite another thing to effectively threaten to pick up your ball and go home if the country’s situation doesn’t get better.  If Governor Perry loves this country enough to want to lead it, why does he at the same time suggest his state may want to leave it?

In addition, as Governor he has advocated for several projects and initiatives that don’t quite fit with the conservative idea of smaller government.  For instance, the Trans-Texas Corridor would’ve required a historically massive use of eminent domain powers to complete, had it not been stopped in the planning stages due to public outcry.  Eminent domain, the idea that a government can simply take land for public use from a private citizen or corporation, is something that conservatives love to rail against.  And who can blame them?  Eminent domain is one of those things that seems just barely legal under the Constitution; after all, we’re supposed to be protected against seizure of property under the Fifth Amendment’s “Takings Clause”.  The owners must be compensated (at a minimum) at fair market value of the property to be taken, but eminent domain is still a very controversial issue that a conservative Governor should (in theory) not be advocating.

What is also interesting about Governor Perry is how he attempts to cast himself as an outsider candidate.  While it is true that he has not held Federal office in his career, he is the definition of a career politician.  Just think about it for a minute: Rick Perry has held some sort of state-level political office for longer than I’ve been alive; more than 25 years, in fact.  If that isn’t a career politician, I don’t know what is.  In addition, he is the longest-serving Governor in Texas history; if there’s anyone in Texas that is even more of a part of the system, I don’t have a clue who it would be.

I could go on and on and on with reasons why Governor Perry should not be elected President, or even given the GOP nomination, but there is plenty of time between now and when all the posturing among the candidates begins to really matter.  At this point, however, I’m not sure whether I would want Governor Perry to lose in 2012 for the sake of the country, or for him to win for the sake of Texas.

Well, that hiatus took a bit longer than I originally planned; in fact, it was so long that I thought I would wait until I was able to establish a (mostly) regular schedule in about a week, but this post couldn’t wait for then.  We’re just about a week past the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, which isn’t really all that important in the grand scheme of the 2012 elections aside from perhaps being a (very early) measure of a campaign’s organizational strength (and ability to entertain people), and it’s safe to say that the political horserace is in full swing.  Unfortunately for the majority of the country that doesn’t care about (or dislikes) the Tea Party, at the rate things are going, there may not be a moderate candidate by the time the actual Iowa Caucus, New Hampshire Primary, or even the general election contest about a year from now gets underway.

Will the Real Conservative Please Stand Up?

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was the first to end his candidacy following the Straw Poll, and aside from giving some real, concrete, meaning to the Straw Poll, it’s a shame he’s out.  Aside from Pawlenty, the other prominent (somewhat) moderate Republicans in the field at this point are former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney; of this group, really only Romney is in the spotlight as having a good shot at the nomination.  It is only August of 2011, and anything can happen in the next year, however, the conservatives are largely overshadowing the moderates, which doesn’t bode well.

Though Romney is considered one of the frontrunners, all of the spotlight is focused on Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and new entrant Texas Gov. Rick Perry.  Oh, where do I begin?  As a Texan, I could say enough about Rick Perry to make another post as to why he shouldn’t be elected President, and Bachmann is just as crazy, if not worse.  For instance, she calls herself a doctor, even though she does not hold a PhD.  She does have a JD, but as the linked article explores, there’s a bit of controversy whether that allows the use of the “Doctor” title.  In addition, she still thinks the Soviet Union is around and menacing America, not to mention confusing Elvis’ birthday with the day he died and other speaking fails.  That all is before we even get to her stance on the issues, which are as deserving of another post as Rick Perry’s positions are.  There’s also Sarah Palin, who never seems to be quite in the race, but then again, showing up in Iowa on the same day that the real candidates are out meeting voters doesn’t exactly signal that she’s entirely out of the race either.

…And then there’s Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who despite coming in a close second in the Straw Poll seems to be continuously ignored by the media, and that may not be such a bad thing.  After all, even though the Internet culture seems to love him, his positions are just as crazy as Bachmann’s or Rick Perry’s ideas.  Congressman Paul, after all, wants to not only end the IRS, but he also wants to bring every soldier stationed overseas home.  As much as that second point sounds logical in theory, bringing everyone home, not just ending the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, is highly impractical.  It would vastly degrade our perception as the world’s lone superpower and add a considerable strain to the national economy (read: unemployment figures).

Despite the media’s decision to ignore Ron Paul, he is perhaps the candidate that Team Obama needs to fear the most.  As I stated earlier, Congressman Paul seems to have the support of a good portion of the Internet culture; this reason alone should give the President’s campaign cause for concern.  If you remember back to 2008, a key part of President Obama’s strategy was online outreach, especially to the younger voters.  These same demographics (young and connected) now express support for Ron Paul; though they have in the past as well, a theoretical nomination for Ron Paul changes the game completely.  In a Obama – Paul matchup in the general election, we may see the campaign decided by who can have the better social media presence.  Ron Paul may be a nobody to the mainstream media, but his Internet appeal combined with the support of the Tea Party would be a troublesome mixture for President Obama’s reelection bid.