January 2004 Archives

The Medicare plan passed last month is going to to cost nearly $150 billion more than the the White House and Congress claimed.

Read the Washington Post’s report.

The New York Times is reporting a Bush Administration push to increase the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Wait a minute did the President forget which party he belongs to? Certainly as conservative a Republican as the President is (or at least acts like) would not dream of giving more money to such a foul and contemptible agency as the NEA. I mean after all they fund art! And some times it is a little risque. Art is so uncontrollable, people can take away all kinds of indeterminable ideas. How dangerous.

But seriously I applaud the President’s initiative. The NEA has suffered for years at the hands of Congress, it’s budget continually cut while Senators and Representatives complain about the art they don’t like or think is inappropriate for public money. But art is important and public funding for the arts, just as for the sciences, is a something that government (at all levels) should provide.

PS Add this initiative to the list of those the President will take in order to win over certain electorates in the next 9 months. Also on the list: the new space program, pseudo-amnesty for illegal immigrants, and Medicare ‘reform’.

Fast food is bad for you, duh! Now we can watch a movie about just how bad for you it is. The film Super Size Me: A Film of Epic Proportions at The Sundance Film Festival chronicles the director’s month-long McDonald’s binge. He ate at Mickey D’s three times a day, everyday for one month to see what effects the food would have on him. An article in the New Zealand Herald describes how Morgan Spurlock’s health deteriorated within days of the beginning of the experiment.

That’s why you should always choose Wendy’s when looking for a quality fast food dining experience.

For those of you familiar with New York City politics you might have heard Mayor Bloomberg called Nanny Bloomberg or some other variation on the nitpicking nanny theme. Lately New Yorkers have seen a big rise in citations for small infractions like smoking in indoor public places, sitting on milk crates on the sidewalk, not curbing animals, etc. And the city’s columnists have been up in arms about the whole thing. Most people understand the Mayor’s motivation to be revenue-based; supposedly he can cover part of the city’s huge deficit by enforcing petty laws. Who knows.

I mention Nanny Bloomberg because today while I was reading Time magazine I ran across an interesting article titled The Nanny in Chief. The piece argues that President Bush has developed an affliction similar to Bloomberg’s. Although his motivations are very different, the president sees the government as a tool to ‘improve’ the moral lives and the character of Americans. Programs like mandatory drug testing in high schools, the ‘healthy marriages’ initiative, and a general moralist thrust in political rhetoric are his way of telling Americans how he thinks they should be living their lives.

I’ve always argued that this president has overstepped his bounds as a leader by promoting certain social programs that go beyond not only the scope of the Federal Government and the Presidency but also beyond the school of the government in general. Where are the real Republican ideals of limited government, personal privacy, state’s rights? They’re history because the president and congressional leaders aren’t Republicans at all, they’re moralist conservatives and politicians (in the bad way).

P.S. This isn’t to say that most Democrats are any better at avoiding moralizing. I don’t think they are. Politics right now are dictating the behavior of our representatives, and for the worse not the better. In their zeal to secure their “bases” politicians pander (President Bush’s State of the Union appeal for a narrow definition of marriage is a prime example) to special interests because they think they can’t get elected without their money and their votes. And they’re probably right.

Have you heard about John Ashcroft’s creative solution to keeping political protestors away from the president? They’re called ‘free speech zones’ and the secret service sets them up wherever the president is traveling, as well as along the travel route. They are usually outside of eyesight and are sometimes within fenced-in areas. One of the most interesting and problematic things about these free speech zones is that they only apply to those people who disagree with the president; supporters of the president are allowed to stand almost anywhere they want. Am I the only person who sees the huge contradiction here? It’s so blatant that I think people don’t recognize it at all.

Now of course the Secret Service says that these zones are used to protect the president and they are necessary to keep him safe. But this is a very weak argument. The definitions of protestor and dangerous person have been merged. Anyone with a sign arguing with Bush Administration policies becomes the enemy. On the other hand any supporter becomes a friend. It’s not that supporters have been screened in any way; they have not. It’s not that protesters have been screened in any way or been found to be carrying weapons or something dangerous; they have not. No one in either of these groups has been checked physically or historically, but they have been screened politically. One group has been deemed politically friendly and the other politically dangerous.

Sadly, this kind of thing doesn’t surprise me from a president that admits he doesn’t read the newspapers and who probably doesn’t even know how actual people feel about him or his policies. He is insulated from the outside by his advisors; his information is filtered and molded to fit a certain idea of him as a populist leader.

Not only do free speech zones prevent the president from hearing what different groups of real Americans think, it is also scandalously unconstitutional. It flies in the face of free speech and the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

As it was so eloquently put by a commentator on CNN, “the whole country is a free speech zone.”

My favorite line from this year’s State of the Union address was, “… the United States of America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins.” This is true, because if you read the rest of President Bush’s speech we don’t need to worry about other people intimidating us, our own president is taking care of that just fine. I was surprised not to find the half of the speech that didn’t deal directly with war and terror and fighting sprinkled with “Danger! Danger! We’re at war!!” and “War! Be afraid!” Although evidently we have to be frightened of unmarried women and gay people now, so that’s something. It appears that these people are threatening radical religious groups identities, in fact I hear they are trying to get people to stop marrying altogether and some to turn gay?! Oh my, what are we to do?

During a Vice Presidential debate in 2000, Dick Cheney was asked about gay marriage. He responded by saying:

The fact of the matter is, we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody, and I think that means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It’s really no one else’s business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard.

What a sensible attitude, made all the more sympathetic because he is the parent of a gay daughter. In a free society we are free to enter into relationships of whatever type we choose providing those relationship does not infringe on the rights of others or pose an unreasonable personal danger.

Like a good Republican and a sensible person Cheney realized that marriage is an issue that should be decided by the states. He eschewed federal intervention in favor of states rights.

The next step, then … is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some kind of official sanction, if you will, of the relationship. That matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area.

It appears that Vice President Cheney recently realized that not only had he strayed from the moralist, Republican party line by not denouncing then and there homosexuality as an abomination and a crime, but he was in conflict with President Bush’s stated policy of constitutionalizing discrimination. In order to get on the same page with the party and the President Cheney said that “everybody is concerned by recent court cases, in Massachusetts for example” and probably Texas as well that are expanding legal protections to gays and lesbians. What they are really concerned is that the courts will strike down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional. Congress passed a bad law that is based on a subset of the public’s moral convictions and discriminates against men and woman who would choose to legalize their relationship. Now the courts will correct the mistake, which is their constitutional function.

Rather than have the courts fix the mistake President Bush and Republican lawmakers in Congress may try to make an end run around the law by amending the Constitution. It is clearly within their rights to try that, but it smacks of government intervention into personal morality and the limitation of State’s rights. The former is a sacrosanct conservative ideal and the latter is anathema to the same.

The Denver Post reports.

Michael Crichton gave a talk at a leadership conference in April 2002 on the trend in media to report speculation as fact. He makes a very string case for the pointlessness of such “news”.

At the end of each year Google publishes a summary of interesting information it is able to cull from it’s search engine records. The compilation includes the most popular search terms for the year (number one: Britney Spears), graphs of search term frequency, and other random bits.

The term zeitgeist is German and means “spirit of the times.”

Check out the Google Year-End Zeitgeist.

On 1 January new laws will go into effect across the nation. A few highlights from this new year’s legislative changes:

• Illinois has made it illegal to drive in the left lane of the interstate for more than half a mile.
• New Mexican’s now have to go to the dentist to have their tongues split. Before tatoo parlors could perform the procedure.
• Remarkably old people (those over 80) in Florida now have to pass a vision exam each year to get their license renewed.

The New York Times reports.