Obama: Both sides have him wrong.

Through various debates and research that I have done, I have slowly been forming a more and more bleak opinion on Obama.  And here is my central argument: both sides have him wrong.  I'm not going to write a big speech here; I'll just summarize how I feel.

On the left: many have been convinced that he is some kind of progressive savior, with the intent to advance social and international policies to bring the country back to stability, financially and with respect to foreign policy.
He may talk a big game, but it is not true.  He has only made token changes in favor of progressive policies while he (among other things) made a deal giving away a public option before the health care debate even started, he has increased already bloated and wasteful defense spending, increased domestic spying programs, and in many ways his administration is even more secretive than W's.

On the right: many have been convinced that he is some kind of socialist conspirator, with the intent to increase the size of government exponentially and force government control into every aspect of our lives.
This also couldn't be farther from the truth.  Most of his policies and the major legislation he has passed, from (among other things) health care to the so-called financial reform to his actions on the wars have ceded government control to private industry and private interests  Government has only grown in that it is paying more to private businesses to do its work.

In reality, by his actions, Obama is a corporatist through and through, only slightly to the left of W, doing everything he can to give handouts to big businesses through various government programs.  This, unfortunately, is a product of an election system that incentivizes this behavior and leaves those with the interests of the people at heart out in the cold.

If every specific proposal Obama makes in his speech tonight, no matter how good it sounds to the people, stands to shovel even more money to corporate powers, then we'll know that I'm right.


Trip to Space

Progress: 6.47%  Flight Time: 0:09:42

Solar Array

Progress: 6.47%  Power: 65W

We elected this guy for what?

Time to get all political in here.

After some consideration, I've decided that I'm appalled by Obama's recent Oval Office speech. He said they're trying to figure out what caused the spill, but didn't call for the requirement of safety measures that would have prevented this spill. He said they're trying clean up the spill, but didn't call for BP to stop using the dispersants that are super harmful and making cleanup much more difficult. He mentioned that the House passed legislation to encourage clean energy development, but didn't call for the Senate to consider it, which they have not.

He talked up a lot of great-sounding plans, but didn't call for any of the measures that would be necessary for those plans to become reality.

What did he call for? He called for us to pray. And that is all.

I can't help but to notice that prayer doesn't reduce corporate profits. Just saying.

Trip to Space

Progress: 6.47%  Flight Time: 0:09:42

Solar Array

Progress: 6.47%  Power: 65W

An Open Letter on Health Care

To all of the elected officials of the United States,

I am writing this open letter to discuss the condition of health care in this country. I have recently had a couple of personal experiences that has prompted this letter.

A few weeks ago, I came down with appendicitis. I had to have a CAT scan, surgery, and a brief stay at the hospital before missing a week of work while I was recovering. Within the past year, the company I work for has handed me two pay cuts and effectively reduced the level of my health care insurance coverage. Due to all of this, I'm expecting to pay nearly $2,500 after my insurance coverage for this relatively routine procedure, and due to the fact that my recent pay cuts have reduced my ability to save for emergencies, I'm either going to have to put that all in a credit card or dip into my long term savings to pay for it.

...and I'm one of the lucky ones.

My brother recently had to have a cyst removed from his tailbone that was causing him back problems. This has required two complex surgeries and an extended recovery period. My brother has a near-minimum-wage job with no health coverage. And because his job requires driving and he cannot sit until he is fully recovered, he is out of a job for the foreseeable future. He is now without a penny in the world, and my parents are having to pay for his rent and his and medical bills, which are likely well over $10,000. Even worse, because he is expected to continue to have back problems, he now has a pre-existing condition and getting insurance in the future will be nearly impossible. If nothing changes, he will likely spend his life praying nothing else goes wrong because if it does, he will once again be thrown into poverty.

I'm not asking for help with our personal situations. It's a hardship, but we can handle it. What I am asking... no, imploring you to do is to do anything you can to support a single-payer health system in this country. Cries that this would put a bureaucrat between us and our doctors are silly; we already have them in the form of health insurance companies, and those bureaucrats financially benefit from denying us the help we need. I can't imagine what all the people with cancer, or AIDS, or any number of horrible diseases in this country are going through on top of their physical suffering. Many are in financial ruin, having become effective slaves to the insurers. No, this situation cannot stand. We are better than that.

Please, please support a single-payer system, or at the very least a strong, affordable public option. Such an option would not solve the problem, but at least it would be a start.

(I have sent this letter to my senators, my representative, and President Obama. I would urge anyone reading this to send letters as well.)

Trip to Space

Progress: 7.03%  Flight Time: 0:07:33

Solar Array

Progress: 3.28%  Power: 49W

All About Labor Unions

It has been a while since I spoke up about politics. The politics part of my brain got kinda numb after the elections, and I haven't really felt like writing about it for some time. Time's up.

My good friend Geoff recently wrote a post on his website about labor unions, and I wrote him a response that is just awesome enough to repeat here. So here is what I think about unions:

On one hand, I'm generally in favor of unions. I would likely be in one if I could, but they don't really exist in my line of work, which is kind of sad considering how poorly we've been treated over the past six months or so. However, I don’t by any means see unions as bastions of awesomeness. On the contrary, many of them are led by bloodsucking crooks. However, I would rather have a bloodsucking crook on my side and a bloodsucking crook on the other side than just one on the other side.

On the flip side of the coin, part of what gives unions so much excessive political power is the fact that they have agreements with some employers requiring that low level workers be members of the union. This should be illegal. It can dissolve quickly to having two bloodsucking crooks against you. This happened to another friend of mine. One crook was keeping his wages low, and the other was demanding excessive membership dues and not really using it for any benefit to him. Just as I would be likely to join a union right now if I could, I would think twice about working anywhere that required me to be a member of a union.

What I’m getting at here is the legal framework surrounding unions needs to be changed. It should be easy for someone to join a union no matter where they work, but just as easy for someone to refuse union membership no matter where they work. If people could join or drop out on a whim, unions would have a lot more incentive to help members out and keep them paying dues. Also employers would have more incentive to treat people well and stave off their feeling of a need to organize. Maybe I'm being a bit simplistic here, but I think lot of this crap would change for the better on all sides, except maybe for the bloodsucking crooks, wherein lies the problem.

And yes, I'm totally allowed to profusely plagiarize myself.

Progress: 3.93%  Flight Time: 0:05:54

Domain Name and Stupid Votes

A couple of pieces of website news today:

The first bit of news is I finally forked over the $10 to buy http://www.joespacetourist.com/! joespacetourist.blogspot.com will remain valid, but joespacetourist.com will be the primary website from here on out.

The second is that I've started up a whole new website to rant about politics! Remember my list of things I would do if I were president? Item number 4 on that list went sometiung like this:

4. I would urge congresspeople to abstain on ridiculous frivolous votes like what to rename this federal building and should we have a National Orphaned Amputee Leper Day. Do you realize that this kind of crap makes up 3/4 of what congress does these days? Those who do abstain will get to have lunch with me frequently, because they're my kind of people.

Well, I've been following the issue of frivolous votes more and more since I wrote that, and it's horrendous how much nothing these people do! So I'm starting a website about it. http://www.stupidvotes.com/ will document as many of these stupid resolutions and hearings that I can find, and I'll be encouraging members of our government to abstain from such things. The website isn't quite up yet, but it will show itself any time now. I'm 80% sure that all I'll accomplish with the site is getting all this off my chest, but that's good enough for me. And who knows? Maybe someone will take notice.

That's it for now!

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

Voting Machines

Okay, so I work with computers, and have for most of my life. I know a lot about them. I know enough to know that I will never ever vote on one. I'm going to explain my reasoning, and you won't even need to a smidgen about computers to understand it.

When you vote on a voting machine, especially one that doesn't print out a record of your vote, your vote basically goes into this box where who-knows-what happens, and then the box spits out a number. That's the idea, right? Easier to vote by pushing a button, and less money wasted on counting paper ballots. Well, there's a problem with that theory. Several of them, actually. I'll go through them, one by one.

A) Inability to Monitor Voting Machine Behavior

When you vote on a voting machine, your vote goes into some hole where you can't see what's going on, and at the end of the day, the vote totals are spit out of the machine for an election official.

So lets say we've chosen someone to count votes for us by hand. We'll call him Geoff. Voting on a machine would be akin to handing Geoff the ballots, sending him alone into a locked room, and having him come out an hour later to read a piece of paper that has the vote totals. Would you trust him with your vote?

But wait, it gets worse.

B) Inability to inspect the voting machines

Many of the companies who make voting machines won't tell you, under any circumstances what happens inside those machines. They even go to court to keep you from knowing what happens to your vote.

So now our friend Geoff, after counting the votes and presenting you with the total, is asked how he counted the vote, how careful he was, whether he double-checked his work, etc. But he refuses to tell you. If you tell him you're sending someone in to watch him count, he tells you that you'll have to take him to court before he will allow that. But that's okay, your vote can be checked if there's any doubt about how Geoff handled it, right?

Not so fast.

C) No Individual Vote Records

Many voting machines do not print out any kind of record of your vote. So when your vote goes into this black hole, there is never any record of the way that you voted. All knowledge of individual votes is lost forever.

So our friend Geoff, after spending an hour counting the votes, emerges from his locked room with a box of shredded ballots along with his vote totals. If you ask him to show you the votes so you can make sure everything is in order, he hands you the shredded ballots and tells you to figure it out yourself. Nice guy, this Geoff.

Oh, but it gets better.

D) No True Vote Recounts

Because there is no record of these votes, recounting the vote from paperless voting machines is a problem. In particular, when asked to recount the votes, many of these machines simply repeat the totals they have already calculated. There is no record, so what are the machines supposed to do? Go back to the voters and ask them what buttons they pressed?

So when our friend Geoff, standing in front of you with his box of shredded ballots and his sheet of paper containing the vote totals, is asked to recount the votes, he simply looks at the piece of paper and repeats the same number he gave you before. Real helpful. It couldn't get much worse, could it?

Oh, but it could.

E) Error-Prone Voting Machines

Computers break all the time. Even computers designed for the most important applications are prone to errors and failures. Knowing their complexity myself, I'm constantly amazed that they work at all. So why wouldn't this be true of computerized voting machines? In fact, it has been demonstrated several times that voting machines in use in the upcoming election are error-prone.

So our friend Geoff who counted our votes in a locked room and then shredded the ballots? Well, his school records got leaked. So what sort of grades did he get in math? He failed basic arithmetic. Several times. Good thing he's the one counting our votes.

F) Visible Election-Time Voting Machine Errors

Yes, some of these voting machines seem to be so error-prone that the errors are occurring visibly as people vote! Several reports have emerged in the past few days of votes spontaneously and visibly flipping from Obama to McCain, or for choices just not registering at all when touched. If those are the errors that you can see, I wonder what could be going on that you can't see...

So not only is our good friend Geoff bad at math, but his vision is poor as well. Sometimes when he's looking at a vote marked for one candidate, he thinks it's marked for the other one. So he happily adds up his totals before shredding the ballots. Well, at least Geoff doesn't have his own political motivations, right?

Well, maybe...

G) Biased Voting Machine Manufacturers

It has been suggested on several occasions that some of the companies that make these voting machines are biased toward one party or another. The most damning example of this is in 2003 when Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold Election Systems (since renamed to Premiere Election Systems) said this in a letter to Republican Party officials: "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year." Greeeeat...

So not only is Geoff bad at math, shredding ballots, and refusing to let anyone know how he counted, but his boss is assuring people that he will do delivering votes to one of the candidates. Let's hope Geoff isn't excessively concerned about job security. Or angry mobs.

Oh, but believe it or not, it gets worse. In fact, this last point, in my opinion is the most disturbing of them all.

H) Easily-Hackable Voting Machines

Oh, yes. Believe-you-me, people know how to hack into these things. There have been many reports on the low security of these things, and people have come out on many, many occasions saying how easy they are to hack and even providing instructions and videos to prove it. They can be hacked either while the machines are being assembled, or while the hacker is standing in the voting booth. You can even buy used voting machines online to practice with! This is truly frightening. How are we to trust our votes to these machines when tampering with them is so easy?

So here's Geoff's full story:

Geoff has had vision problems all of his life. However, he has decided to make do without glasses or contacts, because he could see "good enough". He is also a bit slow, having failed basic arithmetic several times. Later in his life, he was hired by a big donor to one of the major candidates to be the person who counts our votes. He was given the box of votes and sent onto a locked room alone with no cameras. He sets the box down on the floor, grabs a handful of ballots, and then starts counting. While he is doing this, several people sneak into this room through the air vent and start rifling through the box of ballots (Geoff is a bit hard of hearing too). As Geoff squints hard to see whether a particular ballot is a vote for one candidate or another, the stealthy intruders replace a big chunk of the ballots in the box with some they brought with them, and sneak back out through the air vent. Some of the election officials outside hear the intruders banging around in the vents and become suspicious. When Geoff has finished counting (he's pretty sure he got it right), he writes the vote totals on a piece of paper and begins running the ballots through a shredder. When he finishes that, he emerges from the room with his sheet of vote totals and shredded ballots, which he reports to the waiting election officials. When the suspicious election officials ask to see the ballots to make sure they were the right ones, he hands them the box of ballot-shreds. When they ask him for a recount, he simply reads the totals off of the piece of paper again. When they ask him what went on inside the locked room, he says they'll have to take him to court to find out.

Would you trust your vote to Geoff?

Now I'm not saying that every voting machine have all of these problems, but they all have some of them. And not only the touch-screen voting machines that the media talks about. I'm talking about any computerized device responsible for totaling votes. Touch-screen machines, optical ballot counters, all of it. In my opinion, we really should be doing what Canada does and hand-counting paper ballots. Nearly every study shows that this results in the highest accuracy, and it probably wouldn't be much more expensive than spending thousands of dollars on a voting machine that you have to constantly upgrade and repair. And even if it is a lot more expensive, so be it. It's worth the expense.

So what can you do?

1. Always vote on a paper ballot if you can. Vote absentee if that's what it takes. Some areas (for example, New Jersey) are giving people the option of voting on paper ballots instead of machines. Take advantage of that. Even if your ballot is run through one of these questionable optical scanners, at least there's a paper record.

2. If you do have to vote on a voting machine, video tape it! If you have a phone with a video recorder, record the whole thing! That way, if something does go wrong, you'll have a record to prove it and you can do something about it.

3. Support groups like Black Box Voting who are dedicated to improving this situation. Unless the politicians get it through their thick skulls that these machines need to be abolished (and in my opinion, it should be a constitutional amendment) then these problems will always exist.

Oh, and Happy Birthday Geoff.

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

Bridge to Nowhere?

Okay, so since McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, she's been going around saying she's a reformer, and using the following words as evidence: "I said, 'thanks, but no thanks' to the bridge to nowhere." Well, when you look at the record, you find out that she was all for the bridge until it was determined that Alaska would have to pay for it. However, I'm not writing to discuss Palin's dishonesty. I'm writing to express a different bit of dissent:

I'm totally in favor of building the bridge.

And why should I express such an unpopular opinion? Well, it just wouldn't be as much fun to talk about it if everyone agreed with me.

McCain once described the project as "a bridge in Alaska to an island with fifty people on it." This is technically true, but at best, misses the point, and at worst, is intentionally deceptive. Not exactly uncommon with political rhetoric. The bridge in question would be called the Gravina Island Bridge, and would connect the city of Ketchikan, Alaska to the nearby Gravina Island, which is inhabited by fifty people. And an international airport.

Wait, what?

Yes, that's right. There is currently no way to reach this international airport by ground unless you take a ferry, which runs twice an hour, and four times during tourist season. Seriously. Look, here's a map.

View Larger Map

That's the city of Ketchikan, the fifth largest city in Alaska on the right, and its local international airport on the left. Notice the big blue gap between them. That's kind of hard to get around, especially considering the fact that boats and that airport are the only ways to access either island! That's right. To get to Alaska's fifth largest city, you have to either take a boat, or fly into its airport and then take a boat. But that's not the only reason for the bridge.

See, the city of Ketchikan sits at the base of some pretty difficult mountains. You'll see them if you hit the terrain button on the map above and zoom out. There isn't a lot of room left for easy expansion of the city. But notice, if you will, the nearby island of Gravina. That's right, the one with the international airport on it. It has plenty of nice flat land ready for development. It would be a whole lot easier to develop it if there were an easy way to get there!

The main argument against the bridge, of course, is the cost. But let's take a look at the cost. Most estimates reveal that the cost of the bridge would be about $400 million dollars. Now what else would 400 million buy that we could do without? Well, that will buy about four miles of four-lane freeway. Yep, four miles. Our freeways are pretty pricey. But guess what? Ketchikan doesn't get any freeways. So the least we could do is build them a freaking bridge to their freaking airport, right?

What else costs $400 million? Well, about three F-22 fighter jets. Yep. those things that litter the grounds of all those military airfields. Three of them would pay for that bridge.

Or dare I get more political? I dare! $400 million would pay for about a day of war in Iraq. Yep. One day. Say, how about we cut the war short by a few days and have a bridge and a massive nationwide party! Sounds like a better use of money to me.

Or how about this one? $400 million buys most of Bush's presidential library! Couldn't we forgo that and instead put up a booth with a cowboy hat, a barrel of oil, and a copy of My Pet Goat?

So let's just build these people their freaking bridge already. It would be rather neighborly of us. And then I could stop hearing about it. Over and over again. Ad-nauseam. Stop it already. Stop it. Stop.

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

Reactions to Protesters

Okay, I know I haven't written anything in two weeks or so. It isn't out of laziness this time; I just haven't had a lot to say. No new space tourism news has come out that I am aware of, and with the political conventions going on, I've sort of been in a politics overload and haven't really felt like writing about it. But that changed last night.

I watched (and actually, recorded) both of the dominant parties' presidential candidates' speeches. Last night, Code Pink protesters tried to interrupt McCain's speech several times. Did you notice the excessive amount of U-S-A U-S-A chants? It turns out that many of those were started by delegates trying to drown out protesters who were shouting and holding up signs with slogans such as "McCain Voted Against Vets" (true) and "You Can't Win An Occupation" (it's about time someone makes that point). One of the protesters finally succeeded enough to attract the news networks' cameras and cause a reaction by McCain himself, but she had to start stripping off her clothes to do it.

Code Pink is a group that was formed, mostly by women, to prevent Bush from starting a war with Iraq. These days, they are dedicated to ending it, and have also begun acting on several social issues (health care, for example). They specialize in getting behind the camera, both covertly (slowly standing up behind a speaking politician wearing a pink shirt with an anti-war slogan) and overtly (outright interrupting a speech such as the one last night).

The point I am bringing up here is not that there was a protester. There are protesters everywhere, dissenting against almost every conceivable opinion. What interested me was McCain's reaction: "My friends, don't be diverted by the ground noise and the static. Americans want us to stop yelling at each other, OK?" I found that more than a little patronizing. There are many ways he could have tactfully handled this, but he decided (granted, at the spur of the moment) to be disrespectful toward those with dissenting opinions.

The point I am trying to bring up here is that everything, everything about these political campaigns is scripted and rehearsed ad-nauseam. The only chance we have of potentially seeing these peoples' true personalities is at spur-of-the-moment reactions such as this. And there is a similar example of Obama's reaction when presented with a similar situation.

Early in August, Obama was giving a speech in Florida when a group of protesters used a rather Code-Pink-like tactic, raising a sign behind him and starting to shout while he was talking. The sign said, "What About the Black Community, Obama?" The crowd reacted with boos, and then chants of "Yes We Can" to try and drown them out. (Sound familiar?) At that point Obama turned around and saw the protesters, one of whom was still shouting. And what was his reaction? "Excuse me, young man, this is going to be a question-and-answer session, so you can ask a question later." and then "Sit down. You'll have a chance to ask your questions." This seems a bit patronizing as well, but at least Obama showed a willingness to listen, and later, he did allow the protester to ask a question. This, of course, wouldn't have been possible at McCain's speech last night, but at least McCain might have shown a little respect for dissenting opinions instead of dismissing them as 'static' and 'ground noise'. Dismissing dissenting opinions outright is what Bush does, and it's frankly troubling to me.

Oh, and if McCain wants to win, someone has got to tell him not to walk out to the podium like an old guy who has his pants hiked up to his nipples.

Just sayin'.

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

Presidential Candidates' Space Proposals Followup

So I mentioned a few days ago that Barack Obama had announced he was going to study ways to provide more funding for NASA (and therefore ways to conserve jobs in a stretch of Florida important to the campaigns). Well, he didn't waste any time, and on Saturday released a very detailed plan outlining his goals for NASA and how he plans to accomplish them. In short, he plans to provide options for additional shuttle missions after the currently planned 2010 retirement date, he plans to speed up the Constellation program to get the new CEV (crew exploration vehicle) up sooner, and he plans to cooperate with industry and other nations to facilitate this.

It looks like a good plan, but of course, it requires money. Obama's proposal is to provide NASA with an additional $2 billion. After reading much of the plan and skimming the rest, I saw nothing on where this money would come from. But that is NASA's everlasting quandary; how much money do you spend on exploration when there are homeless children to feed and terrorists to be fought? Still I hope it happens. As we saw in the 60s, a sense of exploration can be a great thing.

After that was released, McCain criticized Obama of "saying different things at different times to different people," and in doing so, changing his position on NASA (which, as I previously mentioned, he did). However, such a detailed position paper as the one Obama released when there had only been brief mention of NASA in the past seems like a pretty solid thing. We'll see if he actually has the interest to find the funding for his proposals. And on McCain's part, he claimed to be a longtime supporter of NASA with a proven track-record.

As for their track records, McCain just last year voted against $1 billion in additional funding for NASA, and was the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation when the US gap in manned space travel was created. Obama, to my knowledge, hasn't had the opportunity to vote on issues directly affecting NASA, so we have little way of knowing how serious his support really is. Take everything with a grain of salt.

But hey, here's Obama on the issue of Star Trek. There's always that.

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

Saturday's Poltical Forum Possibly Rigged?

Okay, so I'm kinda pissed.

There was a political forum Saturday where Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, asked the candidates identical questions on various topics, which were played live on CNN. Though I was more than a bit iffy about a political forum being held in a church, I was interested in the forum due to its format; identical questions asked individually of the two candidates.

Warren stated that Obama was randomly selected to be asked the questions first. The idea was (and it was explicitly stated) that McCain would be placed into a "cone of silence" (a soundproof room) while Obama was being asked his questions, so that McCain wouldn't have heard them beforehand.

Obama answered his questions fairly well, considering he was in a forum where people wouldn't necessarily be inclined to agree with a lot of his opinions. There were a lot of opinions concerning issues such as abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage: basically the right-wing wedge issues. There were very few concerning things like the Iraq war, the environment, and international diplomacy: Obama's strengths. But it was about what I expected from a forum being held in a church, and considering that locale, the questions weren't too one-sided.

Obama's answers were nuanced, and he was clearly attempting to be diplomatic; he was trying to find ways to reach out to voters who would disagree with him on a lot of these issues. I especially liked his answer to the abortion question, in which he tried to specify ways that people on both sides of the issue could work together to reduce the need for abortions in the first place. That's the sort of innovative compromise we need.

When McCain came out, I was a little bit bothered by his answers, and not only because I'm (admittedly) a little biased. Many times, he was extremely quick to respond to questions (sometimes when Warren wasn't even finished asking them) with very black-and-white answers and moral absolutes. There were a couple of questions to which he only gave one-word answers and didn't elaborate at all. While this frankly disturbs me (I don't believe in moral absolutes beyond the obvious ones like "killing people is bad", and I don't think there is any issue facing any national leader that isn't significantly complex), some people are interested in leaders who will make these kinds of absolute determinations and stick to them no matter what. After all, it worked out pretty well for Bush.

Still, I was a little taken aback by McCain's unusually quick answers, considering the fact that he usually pauses a moment or two before answering a question during his campaign. Apparently, I was not the only one, and some reporters actually did their jobs for once and investigated it. See, it turns out that McCain was not in a "cone of silence" after all. So where was he during Obama's interview?

He was in a car on the way to the event.

Yep. You heard me. Warren was either unaware of this, or he lied when he said McCain was "safely in a cone of silence." McCain himself misled the public when Warren asked him what it was like in the cone of silence, and McCain jokingly answered, "I was trying to hear through the wall."

So what do those involved have to say about it now?

Warren says that he flat-out asked the McCain campaign whether the candidate listened in on Obama's interview and that the campaign had "confirmed that McCain did not hear or see any of the broadcast." Yes, I'm sure we can trust a political campaign on that.

McCain spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace had this to say: "The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous." Gee, he's already been proven to lie, or at least mislead, on several occasions. I discussed one of them here (Ethics item one); cheating doesn't seem like that big a step.

To CNN's credit, they themselves have made some of this information public. However, I'm not sure I have done it yet, so I would like to warn anyone who reads this (yeah, all three of you) that the big news networks are a very unreliable source of news. They are motivated by money (and therefore ratings) and have proven time and again that they are not above manipulating a story to increase their ratings. They do this to such an extent that whenever they play a space-related news story of which I have some knowledge, I always notice get something wrong, or exaggerate some aspect of the story to increase its importance, or outright mislead.

A good example of this is a year ago when a few of the Space Station's computers failed, and some of these news networks were playing it up like the whole thing would have to be abandoned! In reality, the computers that failed controlled the station's orientation and oxygen systems. However, the backup orientation systems kicked in until the glitch was fixed, and the station had enough spare oxygen to last nearly three months. Few involved were even worried about the possibility of abandoning the station. You wouldn't know that, though, if you had read this USA Today article, which mentions abandonment in the first sentence, and comes complete with an out-of-context quote from a NASA official.

Great job, guys. Entertainment this is; news this is not.

And that's all I have to say about that.

EDIT: Okay, one more thing to say. I just found out about the website NewsTrust.net which provides news stories, and then allows people to rate the stories for qualities like accuracy and fairness. And interesting project; we'll see if it works.

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

Obama Proposes Increased NASA Budget

Okay, so I don't usually talk about stories purely about NASA, because NASA is uninterested in space tourism. However, I'm making an exception here because, of course, it's the point at which space tourism and politics meet.

Barack Obama has recently announced his plans for the future of NASA. Well, not so much announced them as talked about them off-handedly as part of a response to a completely unrelated question. Still, I'm saying that counts. Here are some of Obama's comments:

"Here's what I'm committing to: Continue Constellation. We're going to close the gap (between the end of shuttle flight and the next program, Constellation). We may have additional shuttle flights."

"My commitment is to seamless transition, where we're utilizing the space station in an intelligent way, and we're preparing for the next generation of space travel."

"I don't want to give clear figures yet. I want to have a thorough evaluation of a combination of manned and unmanned missions, what kind of exploration would be the most appropriate, and I want the budget to follow the plan. I'd want to see the proposal first."

That's one thing I like about Obama; his tendency to do actual research before making a firm commitment. In all fairness, this can be seen as a politician trying to appear to make a promise without actually promising anything, but I've seen enough anecdotal evidence to convince me that Obama is serious when he makes comments such as this; he wants to make sure he does things right before he actually does them. And it's personally exciting to me that he's interested in closing the five-year gap between the shuttle and the Orion vehicle during which NASA won't have manned spaceflight capabilities. Also, another comment that Obama made represents a reversal of his previously stated interest in slighting the NASA budget and moving some of the money to education programs.

And as if to prove his interest in actually doing the research, a couple of days ago, Ian Bassin, one of Obama's Florida campaign officials, met with about two dozen aerospace executives and NASA contractors. They discussed technicalities concerning Obama's goals, such as job losses when the shuttle is retired and the role of private industry in space exploration (and normally, I'm not in favor of privatizing government interests, but some of these companies are advancing research a lot faster than NASA).

And as if not to be outdone, McCain has quietly updated his website over the past week to include goals for the space program similar to those of Obama. However, it should be noted that McCain was the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation when the five-year gap was created.

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

All About McCain

So I've been pretty hard on Obama lately. And for good reason. I like the guy, but he's made some pretty crappy decisions as of late. I usually talk about those here, and then I usually end those articles with a caveat like "However, I'm still likely to vote for him, because my differences with McCain are far greater, and I'll write about those soon". Well, I'm finally getting around to it. Today, I'll lay out what exactly it is I don't like about McCain.

Now, for the record, I actually have liked the guy in the past. A lot. I was really rooting for him to win the 2000 Republican primaries. I've been following his career a lot longer than I've been following Obama's. So what's changed? Well, just about everything. But let me go over my differences with him point by point.


Policies:
Policies are, after all, the most important criteria for choosing a new leader of any sort.

1. Iraq
Seriously? You won't commit to taking us out of Iraq? Oh sure, you say you want the war to end, but you refuse to make any sort of firm commitment (saying, more or less, that we need to take it as it comes). You say you want "victory", but you won't define what "victory" means in Iraq. Guess what? This is exactly what Bush has been saying all along, and look where it has gotten us! If you really are committed to ending the war, at least set yourself apart from Bush a smidgen. Since you fail to do so, I can't trust you on this one bit.

2. Energy
Granted, for a Republican, McCain has had an excellent record in supporting sound energy policies. This is one of the reasons I have liked him in the past. He has heavily supported the development of alternative forms of energy. However, this all changed around 2006, when he started running for president. His energy policy now centers on three things: oil exploration in the US, clean coal technology, and nuclear power. He does mention alternative energy sources, but his website (for example) only has a small paragraph about them buried in a huge page devoted to his energy policies. Go see for yourself. So let me talk about his three main energy proposals.
Nuclear:
I actually do think Nuclear technology has a place in meeting our demand for energy, as long as it is done very carefully. However, what McCain (or anyone else, to be fair) fails to mention is the fact that this produces hazardous waste that remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years. Launching the waste into space is too risky. So to deal with it, someplace has to be contaminated almost permanently. The place I see for nuclear energy is a temporary measure to meet our needs while we develop alternative energy sources. This should not be a permanent measure, because we need to limit the amount of waste produced.
Clean Coal and Oil Exploration:
Yes, I put these into the same category because my issues with coal and oil are the same: we will run out of them! And very very soon! I don't actually mind the idea of drilling for more oil (as long as it is done carefully and safely, which it rarely is) or developing safe, clean ways to extract and process coal, so long that these are not the main focus of our energy policy! Putting too much money and energy into these solutions is akin to throwing it away, because it will all be gone before this century is over (and most in the scientific community believe it will happen much sooner than that)! We need to start now to focus our efforts on developing other sources of energy before the coal and oil run dry! Solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy are all excellent solutions to our problems; they just need to be developed! Oh hey, and in developing them, we might just be able to create a freaking ton more jobs and help fix the economy at the same time! How's that for a smart idea?

3. Diplomacy
I firmly agree with Obama when it comes to Diplomacy. Of course we should be talking with our enemies! That's how we get them to be, well, not our enemies anymore. Seems to have worked pretty well in North Korea. However, McCain seems dead-set against even taking a second glance at people who we should be negotiating with, whether it is with Cuba, Iran, the Palestinian government, or North Korea.
Wait, North Korea? Didn't I just say we negotiated with them and it worked?
Well, yes. But McCain had this to say prior to the breakthrough, in a joint statement with Senator Lieberman: "We must never squander the trust of our allies and the respect for our highest office by promising that the president will embark on an open-ended, unconditional personal negotiation with a dictator responsible for running an international criminal enterprise, a cover nuclear weapons program and a massive system of gulags." But wait, whoops, the talking worked.

4. Taxes
Do you know how much national debt we have? Nine trillion dollars. Specifically, in the early afternoon of of Tuesday, August 5, 2008 when I wrote this paragraph, we had nine-trillion, five-hundred-sixty-six-billion, seven-hundred-fifty-one million, three-hundred-twenty-three-thousand, eight-hundred-twenty-two dollars and fifty-three cents of national debt. For the record, that's $9,566,751,323,822.53. That almost sounds like a made-up number! A hundred-zillion-gajillion-bazillion! I'll rant more about that later, but my point here is that President Bush added more onto it than any other president in history. Do you know how he did that? He cut taxes during a time of war. And not only once, but three times! While we needed the money to fight an endless war in Iraq and a marginally effective one in Afghanistan simultaneously, we decided we needed to dig ourselves farther into a hole by cutting taxes. And why? It would "help the economy." Well, look where that has gotten us. I'm no economist, and I'm certainly no political expert, but even I could see how this was bad. And I was really ecstatic when McCain stood up and argued against Bush's tax cuts! He argued against them for all the right reasons; because we weren't curbing spending, because we were borrowing heavily from future generations, because they weren't necessarily good for the economy, and because we were at war. I was inspired that someone from the right would have the guts to stand up and say these things. But now? Now he's all for keeping the Bush tax cuts in tact and making them permanent. Hooray.

5. The "Patriot" Act
McCain voted for the "Patriot" Act. Need I say more? (Though, to be fair, Obama voted to reauthorize the darned thing. Oh why oh why did you do that?)

6. Habeus Corpus
Remember my rant a couple of months ago about granting Guantanamo prisoners the right of Habeus Corpus? Back in 2005, when I still liked McCain, he went on and on about how those prisoners should be granted that right. It was great! Here, I'll even give you a direct quote:
"Now, I know that some of these guys are terrible, terrible killers and the worst kind of scum of humanity. But, one, they deserve to have some adjudication of their cases. And there's a fear that if you release them that they'll go back and fight again against us. And that may have already happened. But balance that against what it's doing to our reputation throughout the world and whether it's enhancing recruiting for people to join al-Qaeda and other organizations and want to do bad things to the United States of America. I think, on balance, the argument has got to be--the weight of evidence has got to be that we've got to adjudicate these people's cases, and that means that if it means releasing some of them, you'll have to release them."
And what does he have to say now that the Supreme Court has given them those rights? He called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." No, Mr. McCain, it was one of the best. You're now totally wrong on this one.

7. Lobbying Transparency
If various groups are going to be allowed to make direct appeals to government officials (a.k.a. lobbying), then it's only fair that the people of the United States be allowed to know who is paying for the lobbying, right? Well, McCain used to be vocally for this sort of thing (yet another reason why I used to like him), but as the presidential campaign approached, he voted against legislation that would have done just that.

8. Gay Marriage.
He's against legal gay marriage. Specifically, he has said that he doesn't mind if people have "ceremonies", but that it shouldn't be legal. As I have expressed in the past, I believe this to be a critical human rights issue, and McCain is on the wrong side. Come on, let these people have a little happiness. It's not as if your own marriage is going to crumble and you and your wife will stop loving each other just because some gay people get married somewhere, right?


Ethics:
After all, isn't it rather important for a leader to be ethical while he or she is.. er.. leading?

1. Iraq
When the war in Iraq was approaching, McCain said several times that it would likely be an easy victory and that we wouldn't be there for long. That's fine, and he was certainly entitled to his opinion on that. However, he more recently made this remark: "The American People were led to believe that this would be some kind of day at the beach, which many of us fully understood from the very beginning would be a very difficult undertaking." Hmm, really? And who led them to believe that, Mr. McCain? And hey, I found a YouTube video that contained clips of all of this here.

2. Campaign Finance
This is the main reason I have liked John McCain in the past. He has been a great champion to the cause of limiting corporate influence in the government, which is my personal number one issue period. And while McCain appears to have backed off some of his previous stances during his current presidential campaign, that it not what I'm complaining about here. I'm going to describe a serious ethical lapse.
The campaign finance law works like this where it concerns presidential primaries: if someone opts in to public financing, they get over $5 million in government funding for their campaign, but they aren't allowed to spend more than $54 million before their party's nominating convention. Well, in mid 2007, McCain's campaign was looking pretty well done for. He was almost out of money and down to just a few staffers. So, he took out a couple of loans, stating that he would opt-in to the public financing system and use the government funds as collateral. This is perfectly fine for a candidate to do. However, when McCain had a huge comeback and looked like he had a chance to win the nomination early this year, he decided to arbitrarily opt our of the finance reform to be able to spend all the money he wanted, despite the fact that he had used the government funds as collateral for his loans. This was not only extremely unethical, but also illegal.
But isn't there someone to police this sort of improper behavior, you might ask? Well, there is, I might answer. It's called the Federal Election Commission, or FEC. Unfortunately, the FEC can't act on this. They can't act on anything right now since they don't have a quorum due to Republican stalling tactics. How convenient.
I should mention, in all fairness, that I have completely unrelated issues with Obama concerning campaign finance that you can read about here.

And, well, that's all I can think of right now. Maybe I'll post with more at another time. But did you notice how I never once went after McCain's age, or his personal life, or his temper, or his occasional gaffes? You shouldn't need to stoop to such levels to form an argument against someone. Let's have a clean contest here, guys.

But yeah. I don't think McCain would do us any good at all. If he had been elected in 2000, maybe. But not anymore.

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Another Barack Obama Complaint

Okay, I started writing this post just after the final congressional votes on the latest FISA bill, but I decided to hold off on finishing it, because I was just too pissed to think objectively about it.

Now it has been a couple of weeks, and I can say with certainty that I am objectively pissed.

And it's not only because Obama went back on his word that he wouldn't vote to give the telecom companies retroactive immunity (which, by the way, is constitutionally questionable), but because it was unquestionably the wrong thing to do.

For a bit of background: after 9/11, the Bush administration asked (without a warrant) for phone records from the major telecommunications companies. Only one company (Qwest) refused to do so. In fact, there were reports that the government was also recording much of the internet traffic that went through AT&T. My conclusion: when my cell phone contract with AT&T runs out, I'm looking into switching to Qwest.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance ACT (FISA) is what regulates this sort of government activity, and for the record, it is just about the least strict law that has ever existed. For example, you can wiretap a phone call, wait 72 hours, then request a warrant from the FISA court after the fact. This court consists of several presidentially-appointed judges whose identities are secret. They then approve or deny the warrants, but details about the warrants themselves are secret, and there is no oversight. The standard of approval of these warrants is fairly loose; if there is some hint that a sliver of information concerning national security might be gained by the wiretap, the warrant is approved. The only information about the FISA court that is made public is when a warrant is approved or denied (though again, not what the warrant was all about). Of the tens of thousands of warrants that have been requested since the court was created in the '70s, only three have been denied. Not exactly your model of strict standards. And (though I'm not sure how this is possible) the "Patriot" Act loosened these standards even more.

To clarify that last statement, I never mention the "Patriot" Act without using either air quotes or real quotes.

So the years pass, the information about the government's requests comes out, and no less than 25 lawsuits are filed against the telecommunications companies. So what does the Bush Administration do? They insist that a bill be passed granting those companies retroactive immunity for national security reasons. Why go through a super secret court with no oversight that denies less than 0.01% of its requests when you can cover it up and then go back later and provide immunity to get yourself off the hook?

And, well, what did the democratic Congress do? They gave it to him. Now I don't believe they would have done that unless at least some of Congress's democratic leaders had been in on it from the beginning, and are trying to save their own butts. However, Obama had no excuse. He claimed that it was part of a compromise with the Republicans, but their concessions were very limited and consisted of (in part) mandates to provide oversight that they were already legally obligated to provide and hadn't. The bill would have passed without his vote. Polls showed that the majority of the population was against the bill. The only possible reason I can think of that Obama would vote for this is as a signal to the telecom corporations (and perhaps others) that he is willing to give in to their demands when he is President, and they need not be afraid of his populist message. Whether or not that is the case, I don't like it. The bill was wrong, and it was unconstitutional.

What makes it unconstitutional?

Section Nine, Paragraph Three of the United States constitution states that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." This directly follows the passage mandating Habeus Corpus, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It seems Section Nine has been taking a beating as of late.

"Ex post facto" is latin for "after the fact". An ex post facto law is a law that changes the legal consequences of actions taken in the past, such as the legal consequences of the telecom companies providing records to the government. So there is hope. If one of those lawsuits I mentioned goes to the Supreme Court, there is a strong likelihood that they would overturn this part of the latest FISA bill. But I would rather that it had not been allowed to get that far.


Oh, and I shit you not: as I was in the middle of writing this post, I got a call from the Obama campaign requesting money. I had contributed small amounts to them twice last year. I don't make a habit of contributing to political campaigns, but I made an exception with Obama. I'm proud to say that today, I rejected them flat out and told them why. This is called voting with your wallet, and I am ecstatic that it worked out so well in this case.

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

Politics.... Bleh.

This is the kind of politics I despise. But then I got to looking at it, and started wondering what it was trying to say. Maybe, "If Republicans had been in power, this never would have happened." Wait a moment... whoops.



Okay, maybe that was a bit unfair. But then, so is the billboard. So there you have it.

Progress: 4.03%  Flight Time: 0:06:05

Slight Disappointment in Obama

Well, Barack Obama today announced that he is not going to accept public campaign funding, in favor of raising his own money and eliminating spending limits on the campaign. In response, I'm going to prove that I am by no means a 100% jump-off-a-cliff Obama fan by going on a long-winded rant about it.

One of the reasons I originally became interested in Barack Obama was his stated interest in eliminating (or at least lessening) the corporate influence on politics. This involved, perhaps primarily, reworking how campaigns are run.

Now, I'm not blind; I know that the corporate influence will never be eliminated. However, I'm certain that the influence can be lessened to encourage politicians to make more independent decisions.

The first step in all of this is, of course, publicly-financed campaigns. I've spoken about this before (see second section, number 7). The idea is that campaigns are run with money that the public provides so that campaigners aren't indebted to corporate sponsors when they make it into office.

We have a system right now that (in my view) serves as a first step toward that goal, but isn't effective to a significant extent. Presidential candidates can accept millions of dollars of public financing for their campaigns, but in return for that, they can only spend that money between their party's nominating convention and the presidential election, usually around 3 months' time. The financing is paid for by the little check box on your taxes asking if you want to give $3 toward presidential campaigns.

The system, as Barack Obama pointed out during today's announcement, is very broken. The law puts no limits on what candidates can earn before their party's convention, and there are many backdoors that corporations can use to funnel money to campaigns despite the law. However, it is better than nothing, and I had hoped that Obama would take the public financing on that basis alone. With that said, that's not the only reason that I'm disappointed in the fact that Barack Obama chose to be the first major candidate not to take public financing since the law passed 32 years ago.

When I was first beginning to pay attention to Barack Obama and his potential campaign, there was a little-known news story that came out which suggested that representatives of Obama and McCain had gotten together and agreed that if they became their parties' nominees, then both the candidates would accept public financing in the interests of reducing corporate influence. Later on, and on several occasions, Barack Obama provided statements that he was interested in taking public financing for those same reasons, as long as his opponent did the same thing. But when it came right down to it, well, I feel a little let down by all of this.

But as dissappointing as this is, my support for Obama remains. This doesn't really compare to the differences I have with McCain. But I'll yak about those later.

Progress: 3.73%  Flight Time: 0:05:35

The Rights of Terrorists?

Okay, lately, I have been listing to right-wing radio.

Now I really like listening to talk radio. I've always found it to be a great way to keep up with current events, and to alleviate the boredom of doing chores or commuting to work. There are a couple of talk radio stations in town, so usually, there is something that I'll enjoy listening to. However, this has changed recently.

I have always known (and accepted) that talk radio is dominated by ultra-conservative commentators. However, in the past, I have listened to some local talk show hosts that are a little more... balanced. And by balanced, I mean they still have right-wing tendencies, but they're willing to listen to and talk about both sides of an issue in a fair way.

Then a station started up in my town that played more left-wing content, including several shows by Air America. Now some of them I thought were as ridiculous as the right-wing shows. Randi Rhodes lowered herself to name-calling, baseless accusations, and one-sided propaganda just as much as most of the national right-wing talk show hosts, and I found it to be just as disgusting. Don't even get me started on the Ring of Fire; those two are flagrant propagandists. However, there were some shows that I loved, such as Stephanie Miller, Laura Ingram, and The Young Turks. Unfortunately, that station was recently run out of town, and it was bought out by public broadcasting, which now has two stations in the area that play the exact same thing. Yay.

So what did I do? I turned back to the other talk stations, with the hopes of finding those local hosts again who seemed pretty fair-minded. Only to find that they were gone. In fact, local talk seems to have disappeared from the area altogether during that time, and it's now nothing but national right-wing conservative broadcasts almost all the time. I went and looked those local guys up and found information on three; one had retired, and two had moved their shows to stations in larger cities. Yay.

I suppose what I mean to say is that I'm having ultra-conservative propaganda crammed into my head whenever I do chores or drive a car these days, and I'm therefore going to be complaining a lot more about it, starting with the following little tidbit.

A talk show host I was listening to last night was ranting and raving about the recent Supreme Court decision to allow prisoners at Guantanamo Bay access to civilian courts to challenge their imprisonment; basically granting them the right to Habeus Corpus which the Bush administration has denied them. Basically, this host was going on and on about the fact that "five activist judges decided to let terrorists into our courts! This is not what the founding fathers had in mind!" He was furious at this, slandering them left and right, claiming over and over that the judges had doomed the American people to endless terrorism, using all the cliches and scare tactics he could muster up.

Wait, what?

I'm not sure I can count on both of my hands the number of things wrong with the statement I quoted. So let's try.

1. Activist. Judges of the supreme court are nominated by the President and approved by congress. They have traditionally been nominated and appointed under criteria that included fair-mindedness, independent thought, and knowledge of the constitution, though recently, presidents have tended to take it upon themselves to nominate people that they considered to be sympathetic to their political beliefs.

For the record, of the nine current Supreme Court justices, seven were nominated by Republican presidents. If five of them voted to grant Guantanamo prisoners Habeus Corpus, then.. wait, let me do the math... at least three of those had to have been nominated by Republican presidents! Hey, Mr. Talk Show Host, if these justices were so "activist", then the Republican administrations that you laud so much must have been doing a pretty poor job at getting their buddies on the bench! Or.. in the event that they were actually looking for someone more independent, then, well, maybe the decision was well-thought-out?

Personally, I've almost always found Supreme Court rulings to be fair and reasonable. I think they do their jobs well. There are a few decisions I disagree with, but we'll get on that later.

2. Terrorists. Again and again, this talk show host called the prisoners terrorists. Never once during this whole rant did I hear him use any form of the word "suspect." These people aren't terrorists, they're suspected terrorists! Last time I checked, we were still innocent till proven guilty! This is the entire basis of our justice system. So call them what they are.

3. Letting them into our courts. I'm not sure what the specific procedure will be, but I have my doubts that the prisoners will actually be transported to the mainland and brought to standard civilian courts for their hearings. And even if they are, big freaking deal! This talk show host behaves as if the suspects will be taken to the courts via the graves of the founding fathers, after which they will will blow their noses with the flag while the courthouse explodes because, of course, these guys are terrorists, right? Holy crap! Killers, thieves, and yes, terrorists are safely trucked in and out of our courts every day. That's what courthouses are there for! And again, remember that these people are only suspected terrorists. Charges haven't even been brought against most of them yet.

4. Founding Fathers. The term "founding fathers" is way over-used. A lot of people, but especially conservative speakers and talk show hosts, invoke the term as if the founding fathers had stood up with one voice and, in a chorus, spoke the nation unequivocally and unambiguously into existence. No, no, no, no, NO! No. That's NOT what happened. The people who founded this country were just as argumentative and opinionated as our leaders today. It took years of painstaking negotiations to come up with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Some of those guys I really like and, for the most part, I agree with. Some of them were crazies. I'm descended from one of those. I'll give you a hint: he killed someone who is on money.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yeah. Don't put words in the mouths of the founding fathers, because most of them would likely have been offended by the attempt.

5. Not what they Had in Mind Okay, so I've established that you can't know with clear-cut certainty what the founding fathers wanted because they all had different opinions. Let's assume for the moment that you can glean some of what they wanted from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. I would propose that this is exactly what they had in mind! Article one, section nine of the United States Constitution says this:

"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it."

The Bush administration suspended Habeas Corpus for these people under the pretense that it was required for public safety. This was the issue before the Supreme Court, and they seem to have decided that it was not necessary. Frankly, I agree. I don't see any rebellion or invasion going on, do you? And anyway, denying these people the right to challenge their imprisonment does little for public safety. In fact, I would suggest that it reduces public safety by making people angrier at us! Oh, and to those of you who say they shouldn't get these rights because they're non-citizens, I would say that's a load of crap. This country was founded under the explicit principle "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." That's everyone. You, me, the French, Guantanamo prisoners, everyone. Why shouldn't our rights be extended to those we hold captive?

Okay, I know, that's only five things wrong with that statement, and I can count that on one hand. I've gotten this off my chest, and I'm tired of typing, so sue me.

Oh, and I'm not sure why I've been withholding the identity of that talk show host that started me off on all this. I don't really see any reason for it.

Rusty Humphreys is a prick.

Progress: 3.73%  Flight Time: 0:05:35

More on Hillary and Barack

Okay, so Barack Obama all but won the nomination last night.

And he gave a victory speech. And Hillary Clinton? She gave a speech.

And, well, I have a few things to say about that.

First, here are YouTube links to the actual speeches:
Clinton's Speech and Obama's Speech

Having become a bit of a political junkie during this primary season, I watched both of the speeches live. I only have a few things to say about Obama's speech. It was a great speech, but aside from its historic nature, it was rather unremarkable compared to his other speeches. One item of interest that I did find was that he made a point of saying explicitly and almost repetitively what change he wanted to see in this country. It was no doubt in part an attempt to dissuade people who say he talks a lot about change, but doesn't talk about that change he wants. I'll quote part of his speech:

"It’s time to refocus our efforts on Al Qaida’s leadership and Afghanistan, and rally the world against the common threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That’s what change is.
Change, Minnesota, is realizing that meeting today’s threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy: tough, direct diplomacy, where the president of the United States isn’t afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for.
We must once again have the courage and the conviction to lead the free world. That is the legacy of Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy. That’s what the American people demand. That’s what change is.
Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and the workers who created it. It’s understanding that the struggles facing working families can’t be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a middle-class tax break to those who need it, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation.
It’s understanding that fiscal responsibility and shared prosperity can go hand-in-hand, as they did when Bill Clinton was president."

Contrary to popular belief, he has elaborated on each of these points in detail; that's just not the part that the media ever plays. But now when people tell me he wants change and won't say what change he wants, I know what bit of text to point them to.

Now on to Hillary's speech. I have a can-opener in one hand and a can of worms in the other. Time to put them in a blender.

I had a feeling that she wouldn't concede last night, but I was rather amazed that she didn't even go so far as to acknowledge that Obama had a majority of the delegates. The closest she came was this:

"I want to start tonight by congratulating Senator Obama and his supporters on the extraordinary race that they have run."

That's it. That's as far as she'll go on the night that Obama makes history by becoming the Democratic nominee. Oh, but there's more. Not only did the speech not concede a smidgen to Obama, but she went on and on about her accomplishments and how she would make the best president. This wasn't a concession speech; this was another campaign speech! My favorite part is this:

"...In the millions of quiet moments, in thousands of places, you asked yourself a simple question: Who will be the strongest candidate and the strongest…
Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as commander-in-chief and lead our country to better tomorrows?
People in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the territories, all had a chance to make your voices heard. And on election day after election day, you came out in record numbers to cast your ballots. Nearly 18 million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history.
Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting. You’re the nurse on the second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner, the farmer, the teacher, the miner, the trucker, the soldier, the veteran, the student, the hard-working men and women who don’t always make the headlines, but have always written America’s story.
You have voted because you wanted to take back the White House. And because of you we won, together, the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes."

Holy cow, where do I even start? Okay, easiest item first. She once again claims that she won the popular vote. What she doesn't say is that she doesn't count three of the caucus states that Obama won and one that is disputed (those states don't release official vote totals, so the popular vote must be estimated, which Clinton conveniently doesn't). Also, she only counts votes for herself in Michigan, where the undisputed fact is that swarms of people intended to vote for Obama, and had to vote for Uncommitted because his name wasn't on the ballot. By intent, and by any estimation other than those of the Clinton campaign and her most staunch supporters, Obama won the popular vote.

It amazes me how Clinton gos on and on about counting every vote, then she herself goes out of the way to not count four whole states worth of votes. Yeah, that's really gracious of her.

Secondly, there is a key difference between the way that these two candidates speak to the American people that I have been meaning to talk about for a long time. Let me provide an example by means of two snippets of the candidates' speeches last night that basically say the same thing:

Clinton: "Well, I want what I have always fought for in this whole campaign. I want to end the war in Iraq."

Obama: "We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in, but we — but start leaving we must."

See the difference there? Okay, maybe that's not the most fair of comparisons; his stance on Iraq has always been one of Obama's strengths. Let me take another example, based on foreign policy, seen as one of his weaknesses:

Clinton: "And I want to restore America’s leadership in the world. I want us to be led once again by the power of our values, to have a foreign policy that is both strong and smart, to join with our allies and confront our shared challenges, from poverty and genocide to global terrorism and global warming."

Obama: "Change, Minnesota, is realizing that meeting today’s threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy: tough, direct diplomacy, where the president of the United States isn’t afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for."

You may have spotted what I'm getting at by now; I'm concerned about the tone that both of these candidates take toward the American people. With Clinton, it is always I want to do this and My positions will lead us forward and get out and vote for Me Obama's speeches take a much different tone; We can do these things and we can make Our country better and let us get together and do these things. Obama seems (and has always seemed) to base his positions on the fact that no one person can do it alone; we have to work together to make things better. The government is about the people, not about the leader; that's a central founding principle of this country. The candidates speeches last night were almost the same length. Clinton's was about 2200 words and Obama's about 2500. So I counted:

Word	Uses in Clinton's Speech	Uses in Obama's Speech
I	64	30
Me	18	2
My	18	4

Compare that to the more inclusive forms of these words:

Word	Uses in Clinton's Speech	Uses in Obama's Speech
We	26	39
Us	3	9
Our	27	39

As you can see, the difference is stark. Personally, I vastly prefer a candidate who would have inclusiveness so embedded in his message and his personality that it has significant influence on the pronouns that he uses. How about you?

My third point concerns Clinton's motives. Why is it that she would so harshly try to put the rest the notion that the race is over? Why risk prolonging this and potentially damaging Obama's chances in the fall? Why work her supporters into a disgruntled frenzy when the primary race is essentially over? I can think of a few reasons, and I don't like any of them very much.

Motive 1: She needs some space to breathe and a little time to make up her mind. I highly doubt this; she's clearly proven herself to be a strong and decisive woman. I have little doubt that she knows exactly where she is headed next. Besides, this wouldn't have precluded her from admitting that Obama has the delegates he needs.

Motive 2: She is trying to use her concession as leverage to get onto the ticket as Obama's vice-presidential candidate. This is the option I like the least. This means that she is willing to put Obama into a very, very difficult decision. Either he rejects her, and angers all of the disgruntled supporters that she has succeeded in working to a frenzy, or he picks her, and is seriously weakened due to the appearance that he was forced into his vice-presidential choice. Either way, it causes substantial damage to his fall campaign. If this is her true motive, she is far more deceitful than I would have imagined her to be. If she had graciously conceded last night, and then threw her name in as a potential vice-presidential pick, I would have been among the first to support that possibility, but not this. Not this.

Motive 3: She is trying to use her concession as leverage to get Obama to help her pay her significant campaign debts. I seriously hope this is the true motive. I would be just fine with that considering the alternatives. The way Obama campaigns, he can make the money back in nary a week.

Motive 4: She really does want to appeal the Rules and Bylaws Committee's decision and take the fight to August. She is very unlikely to win if this is the case, so she would be damaging Obama's campaign far more significantly than Motive 2. If she does this, well, she knows where she can stuff it.

And, well, that's about all I have to say, so I'll stop writing now. My wrists are tired.

Progress: 3.73%  Flight Time: 0:05:35

All the Little Things in Politics

I have just found myself with a renewed interest in the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. I have described my interest in him before, most notably in my second post. (Was that really three months ago?) Now, I don't take these things lightly. If I form an opinion, and more importantly, if I talk about it, I like to know that I've done my research. I like to make an informed choice.

There are a lot of people out there who seem to delight lately in going up to someone at an Obama rally with a video camera and ask why they like him, then proudly replaying the footage over and over when the hapless Obama fan don't have an answer. If they come up to me, they'll be both sorely disappointed and mildly annoyed as I talk their ears off.

It's not to say that I haven't considered Clinton or McCain; I have. However, I differ significantly with McCain on policy issues (this wasn't always the case; I was kind of rooting for him in 2000). I'll probably talk about that later when we get into the general election season. Today, I'd like to talk about Obama and Clinton.

I've always thought it would be great to have a woman president; in fact, I've believed that this is long, long, overdue. Also, I don't have many (a few, but not many) differences with her stated opinions when it comes to policy. The reasons I oppose her are a little more complex.

See, I've found a bit of a pattern having observed political campaigns over the past eight years or so. The manner in which someone runs their campaign seems to me to be highly reflective of the manner in which they hold office when they win. If someone runs a highly deceptive, immoral and divisive campaign, their activities in office are also likely to be highly deceptive, immoral, and divisive *cough*W*cough*.

So with very few policy differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I decided the best idea would be to sit back and observe how they run their campaigns and how they treat their opponents. Here are some of the things I've seen.

March 2, 2008: In an interview with 60 minutes, Clinton is asked directly whether she believes Obama is (as Stephen Colbert puts it) a secret Muslim. She replies with the following:

"Of course not. I mean, that, you know, there is no basis for that. I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that."

When pressed, she clarifies:

"No. No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know."

I take him on the basis of what he said? As far as I know? Not that it would matter to me, but seriously! Can't you give your opponent a fair shake? I know that in the realm of politics, this sort of thing is ho-hum everyday stuff, but have a little integrity. Sowing seeds of doubt on a sensitive topic like this is just repulsive.

March 10, 2008: After Clinton's win in the Ohio primary and narrow loss in Texas (yes, it was a narrow loss, the networks called it wrong), she made suggestions on TV several times that Obama would make a good vice-president. He was ahead in pledged delegates. He was ahead in states won. He was ahead in the popular vote. But she says oh, well, maybe he'll be a good vice president. That struck me as a more than a little condescending. This isn't the kind of politics I want to see going on in the White House.

March 18, 2008: So in March, the videos of Obama's former minister, the infamous Reverend Wright, came out and were looped on TV continuously for about two months (and those of you who insist the media is solidly pro-Obama must have had your TVs turned off for about... er... two months). Now Obama could likely have prevented those months of looping clips. Soon after they were released, he got up in front of the podium, and could have easily said, "I denounce this man and what he stands for, and I don't agree with any of these horrible comments. I stayed in his church for the sense of community I felt with the congregation and nothing more." Issue solved, right? Well, Wright was the man who officiated at Obama's wedding, who baptized his children, and with whom he had a long-standing relationship. Rejecting him like that would have been pretty heartless. So he got up in front of the TV cameras, and gave a speech in which he explained his relationship with his former minister, and in which he encouraged a discussion on race and the differences between his generation and Reverend Wright's generation. It wasn't the politically expedient thing to do, but it's difficult to deny that it was the honorable thing to do. Only a few months later when Mr. Wright got up in front of the cameras again and made (frankly) a complete ass of himself did he and Obama part ways.

March 21, 2008: Bill Richardson endorsed Obama, and in his endorsement speech, he told a story that really says a lot about Obama's character. Here's a piece of the transcript:

"And I also realized that here was a really good guy.
"And I'll tell you -- and I'll tell you why. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. You all watched those long, tedious Democratic debates, right? I could barely get recognized at any of them.
"The one time when I was recognized -- and I was sitting next to Senator Obama -- I said, "Finally I've been recognized." So I turned to him, and we started chatting a little bit. And then, all of a sudden, the moderator, instead of going after other candidates that hadn't been recognized, came back to me and asked me to answer the question. Well, needless to say, I wasn't listening.
"And I turned to Senator Obama in horror about to say, "Could you repeat the question?" And Senator Obama whispered, he said "Katrina, Katrina." And so I then gave my answer on Katrina."

Now that's the kind of politics, the kind of cooperative spirit that I want to see in the White House.

Various Dates: So the major political parties have some weird rules about the primaries and caucuses. They arbitrarily let some states go before a certain set date and punish others for trying to do the same thing. I don't agree with the system, but there you have it. I'll probably have a whole big rant about the primary system another time, but my point here is about political expediency. All of the candidates agreed to these rules, and when it became clear in December that Michigan and Florida were going to have their delegates revoked for holding their primaries too early, Clinton spoke on this:

"You know, it's clear the election they're having isn't going to count for anything. Obama's name did not even appear on the ballot in Michigan."

But we've all heard Clinton's calls in the past month, over and over and over, decrying the injustice that their delegates won't be seated, despite the fact that most of her opponents weren't on the ballot in Michigan (she won 55% of the votes against "Uncommitted"), and she herself stated that the elections shouldn't count. Personally, I've had enough of this sort of hypocrisy at the highest levels of our government.

And finally, May 14, 2008, the event that prompted me to write this post: Barack Obama, when asked a question by reporter Peggy Agar, responded, "Hold on one second, sweetie, we're going to do — we'll do a press avail." Then he never even answered her question. This "sweetie" caused a bit of outrage among various womens' groups, but then the reporter was surprised to find a voice mail on her phone the next morning, and it was then played on TV. The voice mail said this:

"Hi Peggy. This is Barack Obama. I'm calling to apologize on two fronts. One was you didn't get your question answered and I apologize. I thought that we had set up interviews with all the local stations. I guess we got it with your station but you weren't the reporter that got the interview. And so, I broke my word. I apologize for that and I will make up for it.
"Second apology is for using the word 'sweetie.' That's a bad habit of mine. I do it sometimes with all kinds of people. I mean no disrespect and so I am duly chastened on that front. Feel free to call me back. I expect that my press team will be happy to try to make it up to you whenever we are in Detroit next."

Dude! A politician apologized about something! And it wasn't even a half-assed apology made weeks after the event! How long I have waited to see this day! How long... how very very long...

Go Obama

Progress: 3.73%  Flight Time: 0:05:35

The Joe Space Tourist presidency?

So a friend and I were talking about politics just now, and he mentioned that I would make a much better president then George W. Bush. Modesty aside, I couldn't find a good argument to the contrary. So as I started thinking about it, I realized that it would be fun to hash out what I would do as President. The Joe Space Tourist administration would be way messed up, but I think messed up for the better. So without further ado, here is what my presidency would look like (and, as a result, why I will be the last man in the world to be President):

(Those easily offended by politics or social issues might want to skip this post)

EDIT: Hey, my friend Geoff is going to run against me! See his platform over at his blog, geoffandcarley.com

1. I will make sane nominations for political appointments. I will never, ever, ever make an Arabian horse expert head of FEMA, unless he also happens to be a tested emergency management expert. I will ask Al Gore to be the head of the EPA. I will ask Dick Cheney to be the head of the ATF. Sound fair to you? Because it does to me. Oh, and by the way, these people know something about what they would manage! Hooray for that.

2. I am not a member of either the Democratic or Republican parties. Neither would be my Vice-President. Give us people with different opinions and creative ideas a chance. I would probably choose Ralph Nader. I know a lot of people out there are mad at him for "ruining" our elections, but if any of you have ever listened to what he has to say, you'll know that most of what he says is exactly right! The man is way smarter than me, and that is definitely a requirement for my Vice-President.

3. My first executive order? To give up the extra powers that have been hogged for the presidency in recent years. The executive branch was made weakest for a reason; the founders of this nation didn't want another king! Read your history, people.

4. I would urge congresspeople to abstain on ridiculous frivolous votes like what to rename this federal building and should we have a National Orphaned Amputee Leper Day. Do you realize that this kind of crap makes up 3/4 of what congress does these days? Those who do abstain will get to have lunch with me frequently, because they're my kind of people.
Oh, and any congressperson who participates in a baseball hearing will be taken out back and... well... told politely to leave. I am not in favor of shooting congresspeople. But I'll be visualizing it in my head.

5. Jon Stewart gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Don't like it? Suck on it; I get to give it to whoever I want.

6. I would mess with Texas. At every available opportunity.

7. Oh, and holy hell, do we really need a freaking military presence in every country in the world? Really? Really? Yeah, I would put an end to that. Ron Paul is right. If we just talked to everybody instead of stood around in their backyards with guns all the time, maybe they'd like us a little better, hmm? And we could save all that money, and, um, I dunno, pay off the national debt?

And here are the kinds of laws I would urge Congress to pass:

1. Get civics taught in school again! Holy hell, people! Do you realize that the majority of our population believes that the President creates laws? The President doesn't create laws; he or she just approves them! And if that's a shock to you, you're not alone! That's super-basic. It's the civics equivalent of 1+1=2. This country might run a hell of a lot smoother if people actually knew how it ran!

2. No person paid by a business (corporate or otherwise) may be paid more than 100 times the equivalent full-time wage of its least-paid employee or independent contractor. I think that that is way, way more than fair.

3. The only days Congress gets off are federal holidays plus the minimum required vacation for employees in the US. Do you realize that citizens of the United States get far less vacation leave than almost any other industrialized nation? Any congressperson missing any additional days without a doctor's note gets fired, and their district or state has to hold a special election. Congress needs to get more done anyway.

4. More money for NASA. Where has our sense of exploration gone?

5. Get rid of all the silly obnoxious protect-people-for-their-own-good laws. Smoke pot? Great! So long as you do it in your own home and don't operate heavy machinery. Motorcycle without a helmet? Stupid! But why not? The only person you're killing is yourself. I'll make exceptions for taking truly addictive substances since people doing that often hurt others trying to get more of the stuff. But in general, if the only person you're hurting is yourself, you should have the freedom to do what you want. Remember freedom? I don't. I was born during the Regan administration.
(Okay, that was a bit harsh, but I had a clever burn on Regan in my head and couldn't resist.)

6. Um... enforce anti-trust laws?

7. Publicly funded presidential and congressional campaigns! I used to be against this myself, but I changed my mind when it was put to me this way: what amount of money would you be willing to pay to eliminate corporate influence on the government? I mean, this wouldn't fix the problem, but it would help a hell of a lot. Also, since we could limit the money that campaigns get, we would effectively limit the amount of obnoxious campaign ads! And really, who wouldn't be in favor of that?

8. Maintain a concise web-accessible searchable database of where our tax money goes. This should be a constitutional amendment.

9. Sign on to the Kyoto Protocol. I mean, practically half the country has done it already independently of the federal government; let's just make it official. That's right, Texas! You have to clean up your crap!

And... that's all I can think of for now. I'll probably add more onto it later.

Progress: 3.73%  Flight Time: 0:05:35