A place for Liam to post essays, comments, diatribes and rants on life in general.
Those fond of Liam's humor essays, they have been moved here.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Plan to Build One America
I've mentioned my support for John Edwards recently on this blog, and I have (at least in comments) made reference to an innovative (or at least rare) approach he's had in his campaigning, the 80 page booklet he's giving out to anyone who wants one detailing is plans as President.
All of the candidates will, of course, tell you what they want to do, but we've all seen examples of some politician or other getting caught telling one thing to auto workers in Detroit and then something contradictory to the financial and management types on Wall Street.
John Edwards wrote his positions down, along with some specifics as to what (and how) he wants to accomplish during his Presidency if elected. He says he did it so that we can hold him accountable, and know he's telling us all the same things.
Regardless, if you are at all interested in reading over the document, one of my commenters here did the leg-work and found out that you can get an electronic copy of the file here. (It's in PDF, so you'll need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer, but these days it's hard to find a computer without it).
Oh, and I should say, I'm sure other politicians have done something like this before, I don't necessarily mean to say that this alone is a reason to vote for Mr. Edwards. But so far this election cycle, in having seen Edwards, Obama and Bill Clinton (on behalf of his wife) on the Democratic side and Giuliani, McCain, Romney and Paul on the Republican side, Edwards is the only one giving out more than a one-page position flyer with almost no tangible information on it.
Liam.
P.S. Thanks to regular reader Linda for finding the on-line version of the file!
There's an interesting article in the Boston Globe (link here).
It details the results when a survey was sent to all of the major candidates for the office of President regarding Presidential powers.
To me, the interesting part is not the commentary, but the link on the left side a short way down on "Candidates' Answers by Question". You can see each of the 12 questions on the survey and how each of the candidates (those who were willing to respond, which was most of the Democrats and three of the Republicans) answered.
Although Mitt Romney has come across as personable and well spoke the two times I've gone to see him speak, I consider this to be one of the most important issues currently facing our country, and his answers here, more than anyone else's, rule him out completely as someone I can support.
[UPDATE: After a lot of research, here's what I've been able to find out: Ron Paul claims that the 1992 article was written by and inserted into the newsletter by a staffer who was promptly fired. Unfortunately, the newsletter had a very narrow distribution and very few copies seem to exist in the public domain... and Dr. Paul has apparently refused to provide copies to the press. So it is essentially his word against others' as to whether this staffer was fired or whether (as has not actually been asserted anywhere that I've found) any retraction was ever printed.
Which leaves me about where I was before: On the one hand, we all have experiences in our lives and in our past which may be completely innocent but which would be hard to explain and/or would cast us in a poor light if they surfaced. On the other hand, the article WAS published, under his name, and there's no real documentation or paper trail proving his version of the events that followed... and if there was an actual retraction posted in his newsletter, you'd think he would at least have provided a copy of that particular issue to the press as evidence. And if he as vehemently disagrees with the sentiment of the article as he now claims, and that article had been posted under his name, one would think he'd have hurried to distance himself from it in the very earliest future edition he possibly could have.
(By the way, one of the bits of information I found was an interview he did with radio host Stephanie Miller on 12/6 of this year. It is unquestionably her and him (I recognize both voices) and he admits to the article existing in the newsletter, so that part, at least, is no longer in question to my mind.)
--Liam]
Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.
Those who have spoken to me about politics recently, or have read this blog, know that I have been flirting with the idea of voting in the Republican primary for Ron Paul. (As I've mentioned, in NH I can, as a registered independent, vote in either of the primaries, just not both of them).
I was going to do this because although I think a lot of his policies go too far (some WAY too far), nevertheless some of his stances on returning to the Constitutional origins of this country are very attractive. I thought that voting for him might help send a message that there is a contingent of voters who honestly believe in returning the balance of power between the Federal government and the States to what it was intended to be (small Federal government, most of the power with the States, Federal government primarily involved in foreign policy, etc). And even if he won, perhaps four years of extreme push back in that direction would set the country back to a better course, and then after four years I'd vote for someone else, before he could get to some of his more extreme, dangerous and (in my view) wrong policies.
But today I saw this article, which asserts (among other things) that in 1992 Ron Paul wrote in his self-published newsletter that 95% of black men in Washington DC were criminal or semi-criminal. And there are other, similarly racist statements he has supposedly made.
Now, my problem... The documentation I can find for these statements is sketchy. Most of it comes from blogs which, like this post you're reading now, may have all gotten the news from the same source. So there is some possibility that the whole thing is made up. I'm going to ask if factcheck.org can find any information on it.
The article goes on to assert that Dr. Paul has responded to this by saying that the article in question was ghost-written, but to me that doesn't excuse it. If you self-publish a newsletter, especially one under your by line, and the best excuse you can come up with is that you didn't bother to read what you were publishing as your own words, even that excuse doesn't say much for your thoroughness or diligence.
And of course even that response might have been part of a made-up smear campaign.
So I'm doing some frantic digging to find out. I don't want to vote for a racist, but I also don't want a political dirty trick, a false smear campaign to work and tarnish what might be a good name with entirely bogus allegations.
[NOTE: I forgot to mention this, but this video was taped on December 26th in Laconia, NH. The occasion on which I spoke to Mitt Romney was on Sunday December 23rd at a small Italian restaurant the name of which (and the town of which) escapes me at the moment, but they serve wonderful Canolis! --Liam]
This week, I finally got a chance to ask my favorite question of two different candidates for President. John Edwards hit the ball out of the park and reaffirmed my opinion that he's the best man for the job.
My question varies depending on the day, because it's actually too large a question for even the longer answers of a question-and-answer campaign event, so there are slight differences to how I asked it.
Of Mitt Romney, I asked "Over the course of my lifetime, we've seen the balance of power in this nation shift, both in terms of tilting more towards the executive from the legislative and judicial branches, and also more towards the Federal government over the states. What is your opinion of this?" (Paraphrased, but that's the general gist)
Mr. Romney did a great job with the Federal vs State power, talking about how he agreed that far too many powers which should not be Federal powers have been usurped by the Federal government, and that we need to move to re-balance power along constitutional lines, returning power to the states when it clearly belongs there. He even quoted one of my favorite (and least well known) of the Bill of Rights, that powers not expressly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution belong with the states or with the people.
Where he did not do nearly as well, in my opinion, was on the Executive vs Legislative and Judicial question. He began his answer by saying that we've recently seen the Legislative and Judicial branches taking power AWAY from the Executive, and that this needs to stop, that we need the Executive to be strong.
Ladies and Gentlemen of my reading audience, I submit to you that at no time in my life time have we had a stronger Executive branch and a greater push to marginalize the co-equal branches of Congress and the Judiciary than we have had in the last seven years. So Mr. gets an A for his answer on Federal vs States, and an F on the three co-equal branches of the Federal government, for an overall C average.
Of Mr. Edwards, I asked the question somewhat differently, assuming that I already know what his opinion on the matter would be. It was something like "I'm not terribly much younger than you are, and over the course of my lifetime, we've seen the balance of power between the federal branches tilt further and further in the direction of the Executive Branch, against what the Constitution says if you actually read it. Do you think this is a bad thing, and if so, what kinds of specific things would you do as President to solve the problem?"
In my opinion, he hit the nail on the head. We videotaped the answer (on a digital camera, not a video camera, so the time was limited. I apologize if the video cuts out before the answer is done).
Here's the answer:
By the way, like Barack Obama, he stressed that he wants his advisers (cabinet and such) to be people who will challenge him, the best and brightest from both parties, because he feels a President works best when he is confronted with all sides of the issues, not just one. It is the strategy which worked so well for both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and which has been largely abandoned (in my opinion to horrible effect) by the George W. Bush administration. (I don't remember if that was part of the answer in the video or part of another answer.)
Someone e-mailed me this YouTube video and I wanted to share it. (I've also wanted to play with embedding video objects, so this makes a good chance to try it).
I sat down to write something about the current FISA law situation after completing my praise for Chris Dodd, and I had a moment of cognitive dissonance.
It suddenly occurred to me that not only had we come to the point in this country where some were actually seriously arguing against maintaining the judicial oversight of the behavior of our elected officials, but that we'd actually reached a moment where the civil libertarian argument is de facto arguing in favor of a secret court, a court whose workings and composition are hidden and whose rulings are secret, and thus not really subject to appeal.
In my childhood, secret courts were among the bogeymen we were warned about with regard to the Soviet Union. They were The Enemy, because they didn't believe in Freedom. People visiting the Soviet Union, we were told, had a tendency to disappear if they were in any way negative towards the Kremlin, shipped off to secret prisons in Siberia by secret courts accountable to no one except the politburo.
And here I am looking at our country and making the extreme moral compromise of arguing in favor of a secret court here, because our leaders want us to believe that even that court is too much of a hindrance on them.
I think I have a new front runner in the race for my primary vote, on the Democratic side.
(Of course, I've still not decided whether I'm voting in the Democratic or the Republican side of the ticket, as I've mentioned, in NH I have that choice since I'm a registered Independent).
Up until this point, I've been going back and forth between Barack Obama and John Edwards. Edwards has been my favorite in general, but I'd prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton, so if it looks like Edwards has no shot, I was going to support Obama.
But now, I may just have to vault Chris Dodd to the top of my list.
Why? Because ultimately, it's about leadership and the ability to do what you believe in even if it costs you personally. Senator Dodd did that, when none of his opponents for the Democratic nomination did.
I've been wondering for days why it looked like the Democratically controlled Congress was going to roll over and grant immunity from prosecution to the telecom companies, without even having been briefed on what it was they supposedly had done and without any real limits or strictures on what that immunity applied to. It seems to me to be wrong. We have laws in this country, we're supposed to have personal responsibility.
But anyway, yesterday Senator Dodd began a filibuster of that immunity bill. Those among his Democratic Presidential Primary rivals who are also Senators (Sens Biden, Obama and Clinton) all expressed support for his filibuster and opposition to the immunity... but not one of the bothered to come back to Washington even to vote against it, to say nothing of supporting Senator Dodd.
Dodd, who is trailing quite badly in the polls and clearly needs every last remaining bit of campaigning time to try to make up some numbers gave up some precious time to head back to Washington to oppose a bill he felt was wrong.
That's leadership. And it ought to be rewarded.
By the way, for reference, John Edwards is not currently a Senator, so it is neither fair to blame him for not taking time off in support of this cause nor to assume that he would have had he still BEEN a Senator. But my logic runs as follows:
I preferred Edwards over Obama.
But I was willing to support Obama over Edwards in order to defeat Clinton.
That must mean that my preference for Edwards over Obama must be a fairly small thing.
After yesterday, I am much more in favor of Dodd than Obama
Therefore, if my distinction between Dodd and Obama seems stronger than my distinction between Edwards and Obama, then it stands to reason Dodd must be ahead of Edwards, even though Edwards didn't do anything (was not in a position to do anything) in the current case.
If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be glad to hear them.
