I used to tell people that I had a rule against watching any movie or TV show predicated on the concept of amnesia or an evil twin. In an ironic twist, a friend recently called to tell me he heard that very line in used in a TV show. That’s what I get for cavorting with L.A. writers… they’ll steal anything from anyone.

But the fact remains that these plot devices, despite being completely divorced from normal life experience, are so overused that they’ve become ridiculous clichés of modern entertainment. Here are a few other devices so overused and that they’re now silly:

The ticking clock. How many times have we seen a drama that conveniently introduces some artificial deadline, only to have the hero avert catastrophe at the last second? It was already old when 1960s spies were disarming bombs in the nick of time, and now it’s just tiresome and obvious.

The misunderstanding. This is the “Three’s Company” plot device, because nearly every episode of that sitcom was based on somebody mishearing, misinterpreting or misunderstanding something said by one of the other characters. A simple clarification between them would of course bring the whole house of cards tumbling down, which is why that never happens until the last scene. Although I do respect anyone who can write a whole story based entirely on a misheard fragment of a secondary conversation, I don’t respect it enough to sit through 22 minutes of it.

The car chase. The entertainment value of the car chase has been on the decline since the 1970s. You know at the outset that there are going to be a bunch of near misses, screeching tires, sparks flying, destruction, slow motion airborne shots, implausible explosions and vehicles launching themselves off unseen ramps. It’s all been done. Bo-ring. When I’m watching a movie at home, the beginning of the car chase is when I get up to grab something from the kitchen.

Don’t you knock? When writers can’t figure out a clever way to reveal something to a character, they just have him/her walk in at the precise moment necessary to catch others in a compromising position. The timing is uncanny, and it’s become such a common device that viewers can predict precisely when it’s going to happen. Apparently, nobody locks their doors in Hollywood. A variation is the discovery of a confessional document/letter/photo that just happens to be in the right place at the right time.

Bad guys can’t shoot. Entire movies are predicated on this concept. For some reason, “badness” induces a severe handicap to hand-eye coordination. Six bad guys with fully automatic weapons usually can’t hit the good guy even once from five yards away, while the good guy can pick them off at will with his six-shooter. Of course, the protagonist would be dead in the first scene if the bad guys had even 10 minutes of firearms training, so you’ve got to suspend some disbelief here. But while I can accept that they don’t teach marksmanship in bad guy school, it really irks me when there’s a guy we think is good, then later turns out to be bad and suddenly becomes a lousy shot. Stupid.

Environmentalism is simply being concerned with or advocating for the environment. But if each individual thinks of his environment instead of the environment, then the question of who is an environmentalist just becomes one of scope.

If I pull up in front of your house and start a big generator, the noise and exhaust will pollute your environment. If you object to that and take action to stop me, you’re an environmentalist.

If the local grocery store leaves all its trash piled up on the corner, stinking up the whole block and causing garbage to be blown down your street, you and your neighbors might band together to remedy that situation. You’d be environmentalists.

And if you joined an effort to prevent your neighborhood from becoming the site for a big factory that would spew pollutants into the air, you’d be an environmentalist then too.

The people who fight on a national scale for clean air, water and preservation of natural resources are just doing the same thing, but with a wider scope. The term “environmentalist” has been denigrated by political forces with specific agendas who want the public to think of “tree-huggers” or “hippies” when they hear the term. But the truth is, when you get past the labels and propaganda, we’re all environmentalists.

The Atlantic magazine this month tells the tragic story of the US government’s persecution (in lieu of prosecution) of Steven Hatfill. Everyone should read it.

Stories like this make me so sad to see what my country has come to in my lifetime. It’s just heartbreaking.

I take away three key lessons:

1. Always exercise your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.
2. Anyone who justifies curbing civil liberties with an argument akin to “if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you’ve got nothing to worry about” needs to read this story, plus the stories of Richard Jewell, the Duke University lacrosse team, and the hundreds of people exonerated by the Innocence Project just before their government was about to murder them.
3. With very few exceptions, everything you see on television “news” programs is first designed to entertain and sensationalize in the name of profit. The goal of truthfully informing the viewership is a distant second on the priority list.

For a long time now, I’ve been wanting to write about fear. Although I haven’t put my thoughts together enough to write it all out yet, this short piece gets at a lot of what I’m feeling.

I wrote most of this in response to a friend nearly two years ago, but I’ve been hearing some things lately that convinced me to share it more widely.

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The internet has become an incredibly easy publishing vehicle whereby anyone can mass-distribute his ideas. On the surface, that’s great. But as purveyors of this information, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff? How do we know what to believe?

These days, when I see or read something new, I start by asking two questions. First, “How does this make me feel?” Because if the answer to that is really anything other than “indifferent,” I know I’ve got a potential problem with my ability to accurately interpret the topic at hand. The second question is: “What are the countering positions?” Then I go about my research with as open a mind as possible, always keeping a critical eye on those two questions.

The human brain has been proven time and again to be a flawed processing engine when it comes to determining truth:

• Studies show that an overwhelming number of us will hold onto false beliefs, so long as they’re presented prior to even the most powerful contradictory evidence.
• The phenomenon of “confirmation bias” allows us to conveniently discard information which might contradict our preconceived notions, while we quite easily accept information that “feels” right.
• We are highly prone to believing things we perceive as potential threats to our safety.
• We naturally seek patterns and infer causes, even when there is insufficient evidence to identify patters or determine causes.
• We are wired be give more weight to anecdotal evidence, especially if based on our own experience, than any objective or comprehensive examination of the topic.
• Groupthink commonly prevents us from exploring alternatives to what many around us believe.
• We are highly susceptible to logical fallacies. (The one I see most often is: correlation equals causation.)
• Any information, no matter how implausible, becomes more believable the more it is repeated.

All combined, these innate flaws make a treacherous path for truth-seekers in the information age. But given the pace of life and change today, the need to focus our attention on real problems and solutions, rather than chasing wild geese, is greater than ever.

That means it’s imperative to improve the way we process the huge amount of information that now makes it to our brains, and then distill it into objective truth. It’s not an easy task. As usually happens in human history, our technological progress has outpaced our ability to adapt behaviors to suit. Critical thinking, based on a rigorous examination of the facts, is something that many of us were never taught how to do. But we risk our very future if we don’t force ourselves to quickly evolve our thinking.

I watched most of the health care summit that was held in Washington last week. A lot of it was just aggravating, with so much political grandstanding that I couldn’t imagine any of those gasbags actually solving real problems. But the discussion reignited some thinking that I had a couple years ago, so I thought I’d share it here.

A large part of the health care debate comes down to what each of us believes the role of government should be. Some say that health care is a privilege, and doesn’t fall within the government’s purview. Others believe that health care is a right, but as with other rights, the government’s responsibility is simply to not infringe upon it, leaving each person to attend to his own needs without interference. Still others believe that, as an individual right, health care is something that should be provided by the government. I understand all three of those viewpoints and I’d like to explore this idea a little further to reveal why I believe one of them is more in line with our national identity.

The United States of America was born out of a carefully constructed document called the Declaration of Independence. The famous preamble says that, among the “unalienable Rights” of all men are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that governments are “instituted among Men” in order “to secure these rights.”

That is, the role of government is, at the very least, to secure citizens’ natural rights, and one of those is the right to live. This is exemplified by the widely accepted view that government is responsible for things like law enforcement, sanitation, emergency response and national defense, all to prevent us from losing our lives to causes beyond our control.

On this point, I think it’s useful to focus on our military. We have armed forces to protect our government institutions, private property, the Constitution and our interests abroad. But the primary mission of our military is to protect American lives. When the nation has been attacked, we’re always talking about how many lives were lost, and we rightfully get angry at our government if we think they are failing to protect us. So, at least when it comes to foreign threats, protecting our lives is part of government’s role. To that end, our tax dollars are used to support a government-run institution that we call the Department of Defense.

The question then becomes: If it’s alright for the government to spend money protecting American citizens from foreign attackers, why is it not the government’s responsibility to protect Americans when the attacker is a virus, or a hereditary ailment, or cancer, or an accidental fall?

This issue comes even more sharply into focus when you look at the real threats to our lives. The following chart shows the biggest killers of Americans over an eight-year period.

The number of Americans killed by foreign powers during the same period, including by terrorism, is so miniscule that it’s difficult to show. The green box below symbolizes all American deaths for the timeframe, with the small white dot in the upper left corner representing the proportion of casualties from foreign aggression.

source: CDC

I’m not a big fan of government spending. In fact, I think the government over-taxes and wastes a huge amount of resources. But there are some big projects that benefit every citizen; projects that fall directly within the government’s mandate and which cannot be as equitably accomplished by the free market. Pooling tax dollars to protect all American lives is one of those endeavors, and there doesn’t seem to be a fundamental difference between doing that through the military and doing it through a national health care plan — other than the fact that health problems are a much greater threat to Americans than anything the military is protecting us from.

What our current policy says to people is: “If you happen to be attacked or threatened by a person, domestic or foreign, we will protect you. But if your attacker is a foreign body, such as a virus, bacterium, falling object, cancer, etc.; sorry, you’re on your own.” That makes no sense to me, and it makes no sense to the citizens of every other modern, industrialized nation.

Those nations have already had this debate, and they’ve come to the conclusion that some type of national health care system is the right way to go. Here’s a great Frontline episode examining five such systems. In every one of those countries, the citizens pay significantly less for health care (either through taxes or regulated insurance) than Americans do, and get better overall results. We deserve better.

Not that I think it does any good (beyond making me feel a little better), but I sent this email to the White House a few days ago:

The goal should be NON-partisan, not bipartisan.

I’m getting really tired of the White House touting all of their “bipartisan” efforts. Why should partisanship have anything to do with good policy? I understand that there are political realities in getting legislation passed, but if you’re appointing a commission to study an issue and offer solutions, it should be nonpartisan, not bipartisan.

The persistent idea that all policy issues come down to a conflict between two predetermined sides is akin to saying there are two kinds of music, country and western, and we’re going to appoint a commission whose members are fans of each to determine which style we’ll play in our nation. Just as there are dozens of popular music styles, there are many good policy ideas which don’t currently fall under the Republican or Democratic banners. Why limit ourselves to only the ones that do?

The Washington political cyclone seems to have blotted out the reality that roughly one third of voters do not identify themselves as either Republican or Democrat, so it’s no wonder they feel the government doesn’t represent them. Please open up the process.

There I go, tilting at windmills again.

On one of the blogs I read, a user named “The Professor” recently posted a comment titled “No one seems to remember the Enlightenment.”

It struck me as both funny and profoundly true. Far from remembering it, I wonder how many people even know what the Enlightenment was.

The Enlightenment, also sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a period in Western history where philosophers, predominantly in France but also in other countries, cast aside old notions of superstition and governance, and promoted instead concepts of reason, natural rights, democracy, freedom and equality. The ideas caught on and the result was a blooming of reason and scientific thought the likes of which the world had never experienced. It also gave birth to many new republics, the first of which was the United States of America, whose founders were greatly influenced by Enlightenment philosophy.

The topic is not something I was taught much about in school, so I imagine that many Americans, who owe their country to Enlightenment philosophies and ideals, don’t know much about it either. The way I was taught, the American Revolution was entirely homegrown, and other nations followed by the colonies’ example. But that’s not how it went. The discussions and writings in Europe at the time strongly influenced the founders. Prior to this period, the mere notion of a nation governed democratically, with the power vested in the people instead of the church or monarchy, was unimaginable.

It would do us some good to look back a few hundred years and remember where we came from.

The Federal trial began today on the constitutionality of California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, also known as Proposition 8.

Not being a legal scholar, I don’t have a specific position on the proposition’s constitutionality. It would seem to violate the equal protection clause, but I imagine there are clever defenses for every argument the claimants can put forward. My interest is more in the public policy aspects of this issue than the legal ones.

My view, simply stated, is that the government should not be in the marriage business.

Traditionally, marriage is a social contract; an interpersonal agreement that often has a cultural tradition and ceremony attached. No part of that formula warrants government involvement. Even among opposite sex couples, I don’t know why we accept that the government can tell us who we can and cannot marry, and even requires us to have a license to do so. This is a personal and private matter, much like any other agreement between individuals, and it has been throughout most of human history.

Legal marriage (sometimes called civil union) is another case entirely. Legal marriage confers certain rights upon the parties involved. The government has legitimate interests in regulating legal marriage; for instance, preventing people from entering a contract without proper consent, public health concerns, protection of minors, and guarding the rights of the infirmed or incapacitated.

Unfortunately, the two types of marriage have been conflated in our modern vocabulary, likely because most people undergo the processes simultaneously. Marriage ceremonies are often overseen by religious leaders, who are also empowered by the state to validate the legal contract. This has led to our current set of laws which cover both personal and the legal marriage, but they are not the same thing.

There’s nothing wrong with the government regulating a process that grants the parties a certain legal status and confers specific rights upon them. The problem is, the government goes much farther than that.

Everything from unemployment benefits to how much taxes we pay is affected by whether or not we’ve chosen to enter this particular kind of contract, and the people who have chosen not to do so are often discriminated against under the law. Furthermore, there is no good evidence that these benefits for married couples end up benefiting society as a whole. Despite the divorce rate being over 50 percent, the government continues to incentivize this particular behavior. It’s a kind of social engineering and it has no place in the land of liberty.

All that being said, the reality is that the government is almost certain to remain in the marriage business. Years of tradition are difficult to unwind and the people rarely regain rights once lost, no matter how illogical the resulting restrictions are. But if the government does continue to determine who can or cannot be married, it absolutely must grant that right equally to all persons. Anything less denies the ideals of liberty upon which the nation was founded.

Those ideals have not always been lived up to. There was a time when it was a crime in most states for a mixed-race couple to wed. The arguments that led to such restrictions were very similar to the ones being used to ban same-sex marriage today: it’s sacrilegious, it breaks tradition, it’s detrimental to any resulting children, it’s harmful to the fabric of society, it devalues the institution of marriage. All of those contentions turned out to be bogus, and some of them downright insulting. Nobody who wants to pursue a traditional marriage today is in any way prevented from doing so, or likely to find that path less fulfilling, just because some other people who don’t happen to look like the traditional couple are doing the same thing. More importantly, it’s not the government’s job to protect us from what we might feel if another citizen takes a certain action.

In the end, both sides in this legal battle will spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars trying to get the government to tell all of us which limitations on our personal life choices are acceptable, when in truth, the government really has no business making that determination in the first place. Our lives and choices belong to us. The essence of liberty is that we all get to make those choices, whether or not our neighbors like them, and we in turn grant our neighbors the same level of tolerance for their choices.

Once we start making decisions for everyone else, and using our government as the means to enforce those decisions, we’ve shifted from a society that protects individual rights to one that promotes the tyranny of the majority. Even if 99 percent of the people vote to deny rights to the other one percent, that doesn’t mean the 99 percent have a morally justifiable position. To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes, “democracy has to be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.”

This is a tribute to a true companion.

Bandi was my dog, but more than that, he was my companion through trying times and interesting adventures. He passed away on the afternoon of February 11th, 2009 at a veterinary clinic where we live in Panama City. He was 11 years old.

What happened?

Bandi got very sick in December of 2008, and an ultrasound revealed a large mass in his small intestine. The surgery to remove it actually went quite well, but the poor guy was already so weak that he stopped breathing shortly afterwards. Despite his age, tests results indicated that, had he survived the recovery, he probably would have had a good amount of time left.

I was with him for his final moments, and I think he knew that.

Where did Bandi come from?

Bandi was found in the street as a tiny, excitable, incontinent puppy by a man who worked for my grandmother. When he arrived at my grandmother’s house, long a home for wayward dogs, she named him Bandi because he had been “abandoned.”

A Jewish grandmother’s solution to everything is food, so Bandi grew a lot while living with her. Within a few short years, he tipped the scales at a chunky 96 pounds. He was also afraid to leave the house.

Why was Bandi so special?

Bandi was more than a dog. He was part of the family.

To understand the role he played in my life, you have to understand the history. And by that, I mean the history starting long before Bandi arrived on the scene.

My grandmother was a towering presence in my life that I still feel daily. When her health was failing, I  helped care for her, and before she passed away at 99 years old, she asked me if I would take care of her two dogs.

The older dog, Michael, passed away a couple years later, oddly of exactly the same heart condition that had taken my grandmother. Bandi and I became even more attached after that.

Little by little, the various people who helped care for my grandmother left the household too. Then my relationship with my girlfriend of four years ended and she also moved out. Eventually, only Bandi and I remained.

A few months later, we moved to a new house, and 10 months after that, we moved to Costa Rica. We shared three different houses with my friend Shaun there, and Bandi even made some dog friends on the beach (a rarity for him).

After a year, I decided to pick up and move farther south to Panama City, where I knew nobody. Once again, the only consistent element was Bandi.

On the rare occasions that I’d leave the house without him, people would ask “Where’s Bandi?” I think some people didn’t even recognize me without him. As of this writing, it’s been a month since he passed and people are still asking.

Over the years, there have been friends, relatives, girlfriends, housemates, traveling companions and neighbors. For one reason or another, as often happens in life, they have all come and gone. But Bandi was my constant companion and my last daily connection to my grandmother.

What was Bandi like?

Bandi was really more like a young child than a dog.

In fact, he wasn’t much of a dog at all. He couldn’t catch a ball to save his life, wouldn’t run up to greet you, knew very few tricks and despised almost all other dogs. His idea of playing fetch was to slowly make his way to the object in question, gently pick it, then saunter to a secure corner and quietly commune with it. He liked to be pet for a few minutes, after which he’d simply go sit somewhere else. He was afraid of the freezer and things that sizzled.

If I dropped the leash while walking him, he’d just stop in his tracks and wait for me to pick it up again before taking another step. He didn’t like when I took off his collar. Generally speaking, he wouldn’t take food from strangers.

Bandi was extremely mellow, except when confronted with a cat, an unknown dog of any size or gender, or a motorcycle. Faced with any of those stimuli, he would instantly turn into the scariest growling, snarling aggressive beast you can imagine. It would shock even people who knew him well.

He would bark at the doorbell, even if it came out of the TV and sounded nothing like the doorbell to our house.

Bandi was very sensitive. If you gently asked him to do something, he’d do it without hesitation. But if you raised your voice, he’d get scared and sulk, as if to say, “Please don’t yell at me.”

He loved to have his chest and belly scrubbed. His back too.

Strangers were scared of Bandi, especially in Panama, which is something I don’t think he ever understood. Lucy, my other dog, will run up to any person, tail wagging, with a big happy grin on her face, and get all kinds of love and attention. Seeing this, Bandi would sheepishly approach the same person to receive similar affection, but invariably, the person would retreat in fear, all the while continuing to pet Lucy. That always made me feel bad for him.

He loved turkey. There was no other food that could actually get Bandi to sit up and beg. While he was sick, I bought a whole turkey breast and roasted it up for him.

It is said that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but nobody told that to Bandi. He was entirely untrained at 5 years old, but after two weeks of work, which included three visits from the trainer, he was done: completely obedient, respectful and demonstrably proud of knowing what to do. Over the course of one week in Costa Rica, Shaun taught him to “fist bump” Tico-style.

I spoke to Bandi in complete sentences, just as I would to a person. He was an amazing listener. In fact, I sometimes even called him “Bandi the Listener”. That was just one of his many nicknames, given to him by various people. Here’s just a sampling:

Bandushka, Bandush, Dush, Bandu, Bandu-koo-koo, koo-koo, kooky, kooky-boy, the boy, the big boy, the big woof, big love, big guy, the big dog, the large canine, Bandalino, Bandalore, Bandikins, Bandido, el lobo, Loby, el oso celoso, Bob Barker and el matapasto (it’s funny in Panama).

But beyond all the history, nicknames and idiosyncrasies, Bandi was my best friend. The house feels empty without him.

The people who loved him

So many people affected Bandi’s life over the years that it’s hard to keep track of them. Shaun, Lyena and Dean all lived with and cared for Bandi at various times. Bob, Nicole, Karmen and Christina bonded with him when I traveled.

Being so removed from our traditional support system down here, there are some people who just must be thanked for helping Bandi through his last two months.

Because I was out of the country when he took ill over Christmas, Kira was Bandi’s lifeline. She went way beyond the call of duty, caring for Bandi as if he were her own and keeping me up to date all along the way. I have no doubt that she saved his life while I was gone.

Joyce was my angel. During the toughest times, whether I needed someone to watch over Lucy while I cared for Bandi, or just someone to talk through the tough decisions that come along with being responsible for another person’s life, Joyce was always there for me.

Adela cared for Bandi like a son from the moment she started working here, making sure he had everything he needed when I wasn’t around, cleaning up his occasional messes, and even feeding him by hand when necessary.

Lyena and I cried together over the tough decisions and rejoiced over the small victories. She and Dean also saved my skin with work when caring for Bandi was taking up all my time.

Rachel lent more than her expertise and advice. She showed infinite patience with my barrage of questions and disorganized record-keeping, never once losing her caring nature. I know that she felt a special connection with Bandi as more than just a veterinarian.

Dra. Carmen Solis, Dra. Sandra Rios and her father, and everyone at Cats & Dogs Care Center and Mundo Animal were absolutely wonderful and patient with Bandi, Lucy and me. They all far exceeded my expectations.

I share this loss with all of these people, and all of you who are reading this.

Comments

Some comments people sent me upon hearing the news of Bandi’s passing…

My sister Judy: “…it’s a sad end to a tie to our past. I will miss the connection and know that you will miss the companionship.”

Kira: “I loved Bandi and will miss him sincerely. He was a very special presence to be around.”

Cousin Jay: “He really was a unique animal. He was a dog who actually had an awareness of and appreciation for his life, and for the people around him.”

Marion: “Bandi was one of the most amazing dogs ever. Truly, truly.”

Cory: “He had SUCH a great life. First with your grandmother and then with you.”

Cousin Tom: “He was a sweet guy and Grandma loved him so.”

Shaun: “That breaks my heart.”

My dad: “…he was more of a good friend than just a pet.”

My brother Dan: “What a great dog. Companion to you and grandma, world traveler, nice guy. He had a great life, albeit too short.”

If you have any Bandi stories you’d like to share, please add a comment below.

It looks like the ability to comment on posts has been restored, though you have to be registered first. Give it a try.

Water flows uphill: a slippery analogy about how the government, despite the best of intentions, mismanages the economy.

Imagine that you have a plot of land with a long, gently sloping terrain. Someone has installed a water spigot right in the middle.

You decide that you want to put in a little garden, but the ideal spot is just a little above the spigot. “No problem,” you reason, “I’ll simply dig a trench to guide the water slightly uphill. There’s enough pressure coming out of the spigot that the water will flow up into my garden, so long as my trench doesn’t leak.” And it works. You dig the trench, open up the spigot, and the water eventually flows up to your garden.

Over time, you repeatedly expand the garden, each time extending the trench further up the hill. Though it becomes more and more difficult for the water to reach the right spot, it always manages to get there eventually. After a while, having become so accustomed to extending and maintaining these trenches, you just accept that water flows uphill. You forget that the only reason it does is because of the elaborate system which you yourself constructed and must continually maintain.

This is akin to what’s happening in our economy these days, especially as it relates to the housing sector. Decades of policies designed to “keep the economy growing” have convinced Americans that water flows uphill. What was once the earthen dike of regulation has become an elaborate system of market manipulation designed to keep prices flowing ever upward and plugging each leak as it develops.

The commonly held belief has become that, if home sales slow or prices fall, someone must intervene. If we experience a contraction of the market, people assume that the economy is being mismanaged. But the truth is, market corrections are a natural part of the economy, and are especially necessary when speculative bubbles cause prices to exceed the true value of an item.

Right now, home prices in the United States are too high. There are simply too many homes at prices too elevated for people to buy them on what they earn. That situation was brought about by the government repeatedly “stimulating” home buying, using tools like artificially low interest rates, the mortgage interest deduction, and lax regulatory oversight.

Yet even as many policy-makers now recognize these root causes, they’re prescribing the same medicine to solve the problem as created it. On December 1st, Treasury Secretary Paulson talked about the plans that his department has undertaken to address the financial crisis. Part of his statement included the promise that “…we continue to look for additional ways to make mortgage credit more affordable, which will stimulate purchases, help to stabilize prices and end this housing correction.”

If it’s really a “correction,” why do we want to end it? The housing market, now devoid of all the artificially cheap money, is doing what true markets do… correcting. The idea that we want to end that, and wind up with an incorrect, less correct, or manipulated market, doesn’t make any sense. It’s just going to put us back in this same place a few years down the line.

A correction, though painful, is exactly what is needed right now. At some point, water has to flow back downhill. It will eventually come to rest on level terrain.

President-elect Barack Obama gave a brief address to the Democratic Governors Association yesterday. Buried within it is one tiny statement which finally gives me hope about how his administration intends to address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems. In this era of monstrous bailouts and runaway deficits, barely one politician from either dominant party has broached the subject of fiscal discipline, until now:

“…we are not, as a nation, going to be able to just keep on printing money. So at some point, we’re also going to have to make some long-term decisions in terms of fiscal responsibility. And not all of those choices are going to be popular.”

Finally, someone who recognizes the problem and is not afraid to speak about it! The full transcript is here.

I was in a brand new office building today that has an ultra-modern ThyssenKrupp elevator system. It is a design disaster.

The first thing I noticed is that there are no standard call buttons. Instead, the wall space between the cars is occupied by numeric keypads. The rider is supposed to key in the destination floor, and then a display directs him to the correct elevator.

Although that’s non-standard operation, it’s not terribly intrusive. The problem arises when the manufacturer goes a step further by following through on the claim that, “there is no need for buttons inside the car.”

That’s right… no buttons inside the car. Think about that. If you happen to get into an elevator, and then change your mind about your destination, you’re out of luck. There’s no way to get off early or stay on past your selected destination.

And it gets even worse if you enter an elevator without first making your selection on the keypad. As often happens when people are in a rush, they see an open elevator with someone getting in and they simply follow. But if you haven’t made a floor selection before getting in, you have no way to get to your destination. No buttons inside the car… brilliant.

One might think an elevator car without buttons would have a minimalist feel. But no… there’s a TV in there, blasting advertising, or CNN, or whatever programming the building management decides to feed to a captive audience. There’s also a fancy display over the door which tells you the time, the temperature, and every floor that the elevator is scheduled to stop on. Unfortunately, there are no field labels, so what you see looks something like “11:32 31C 8 20 24″.

The one thing the display doesn’t indicate is what everyone expects to see when they look at numbers over an elevator door: the floor you’re on. In fact, the only way to know what floor you’re on is by the serene voice which accompanies the doors opening. The problem is, you can’t hear it over the television. And I guess deaf people (or those who don’t speak the language) have to take the stairs.

When it was time to go back down, I was faced with another challenge. Since the system uses a standard numeric keypad, it has no floor-specific buttons. It’s pretty much guesswork to figure out that: 0 = Lobby, 1 = Mezzanine, -2 = Parking, etc. I’m left to wonder if the term “usability testing” is even mentioned in engineering schools these days.

This whole design debacle is indicative of a larger trend that I’m seeing lately. The focus on incorporating the latest high-tech features eclipses any attention paid to the device’s ability to perform its primary function.

An elevator is supposed to get me to the appropriate floor quickly, comfortably, efficiently, safely, and with a minimum of effort on my part. Any design which detracts from that, or in any way makes the device less efficient than its predecessors, is movement in the wrong direction, no matter how “cool” it looks or what extra bells and whistles it provides.

The people who buy and install these systems want the “latest, greatest” technology, even if the old systems worked better. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the same building features an equally wacky high-tech parking system.

Interestingly, this seems to be something of a cultural phenomenon, as I see far more of it here than when I lived in the United States. For example, my apartment complex recently replaced the standard remote controls for the entry gate with a fancy RFID system. Now, instead of being able to remotely open the gate from 30 yards away, I have to pull the car up, stop, roll down my window (often when it’s raining), and place my card within inches of the special reader. It’s astoundingly less efficient than the 1960s technology we were using before, and it costs a lot more too. Arrrgh!

I read a comment from Rudy Giuliani the other day claiming that John McCain was the best candidate the Republicans could have fielded this year, and nobody could have done better in the current political climate. I beg to differ.

Here is what won the election for Barack Obama:

If you look at these points, you can see that the Republicans had only one primary candidate who could have matched or exceeded all of those advantages. That was Ron Paul, and his party threw him under the bus.

Dr. Paul may not have been the perfect choice. I think he still would have had a tough time in the general election. But he was the best option the Republicans had.

The fact that his party couldn’t see the fundamental shift that had taken place in the country, even after suffering a resounding defeat in the 2006 mid-term elections, speaks to a severe leadership deficiency. Fielding a selection of neo-cons who each tried to “out-Bush” the other while ridiculing the one guy who could have actually won the election was a serious mistake.

The country has changed. It’s well past time for the Republicans to take notice.

As often happens when a political party receives a thumping like the Republicans did last Tuesday, they strive to redefine themselves. Toward that end, the Republican National Commitee has started a new web site soliciting suggestions from the public. I posted a version of the comments below there.

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I am a political independent who voted Democratic this year. I have voted for Republican candidates in the past, but the Republican party as it stands right now is unrecognizable to me. The effort underway to redefine the party is a great thing… both for your members and the country. I can offer two suggestions which, if followed, would make an independent like me consider voting Republican again.

1. Relocate your true conservative principles. I vote for Republicans when I want fiscal conservatives who care about protecting my constitutional rights and defending our nation. That’s not what we’ve had lately.

The current administration has pursued a borrow-and-spend economic plan under the false premise that “deficits don’t matter.” As a voter, if I have a choice between a tax-and-spend Democrat and a borrow-and-spend Republican, I’m going to choose the Democrat. At least he’s got a way to pay for his profligacy.

The Bush administration seems to think the Constitution is not particularly relevant if you can get a group of smart lawyers to find enough loopholes. I’m accustomed to the liberals taking the “living document” viewpoint to push changes that fit their agenda, but I want Republicans to counter that with a stricter interpretation, so we don’t get too far from the founders’ vision.

Our current president ran promoting a platform of strong national defense rather than nation-building abroad. That’s the opposite of what we ended up with. You can say “9/11 changed everything” until the cows come home, but after seven years, it won’t fly any more. Nobody in the country has a taste for perpetual war. Furthermore, a lot of our citizens, including some in our military, believe that the nation’s security is better served by having our forces at home.

2. Disavow the hateful and intolerant commentary that permeates right-wing news outlets, especially talk radio.

Hannity and Limbaugh and Savage don’t have to go away. Protecting their freedom to speak is a sound conservative principle. But some of the outlandish comments made by these folks are doing serious damage to the Republican brand. If prominent conservative commentators make false or hateful statements about the opposing party (which the majority of Americans voted for), I will look to elected Republicans for assurances that those statements do not represent the views of the party.

The extreme partisans cannot be your base. They’re a shrinking demographic and they tarnish the party’s image. Commentary designed to polarize the people is no longer useful, nor will it be an effective election strategy. The culture wars, name-calling and fear-mongering are all beneath you. Conservatives have a proud intellectual tradition which needs to be revived as a replacement to these “lowest common denominator” tactics.

I look forward to a new, refocused Republican party that I can once again respect.

Last night, Senator Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. His acceptance speech was notable to me for its somber tone. The victory event included no pop songs, confetti, dancing, or balloon drop. The country has a lot of work to do, and you could see that President-elect Obama knows it.

But before we can do that work, we need to heal our divisions. I’m not talking about the divisions resulting from a hard-fought campaign, or those created under the Bush administration. I’m talking about the divisions that have polarized the country over the last 40 years. This polarization has left the major political factions in Washington so opposed to each other that they’d rather block a good idea from the other party than appear to “support the enemy.” I’m talking about the divisions in the country that cause citizens of one political stripe to say that they “hate” those of the other. We can’t get anything done if that fractiousness continues.

Barack Obama is a transformational figure for all the obvious reasons, and he has won a decisive victory. But another thing really struck me about the election results. Let’s look at the situation:

Obama’s opponent shared the party with one of the least popular sitting presidents in history. There is a severe economic crisis going on which most people are worried about it. We’re in the middle of an unpopular war which Obama has taken a stand against. He also drew huge crowds, inspired millions of young people to vote, enjoyed a huge funding advantage, and by all accounts, ran a brilliantly organized campaign.

In the history of US electoral politics, any one or two of those advantages would have translated to a landslide victory. Yesterday it did in the electoral college, but about 47% of the country still voted against him. That’s more than 50 million citizens. It is clear to me that we remain a nation divided. If we want to solve our problems, that must change.

In his acceptance speech, President-elect Obama acknowledged this:

“In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Let’s remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.

Those are values that we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, ‘We are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.’

And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.”

This sentiment is not new. Nearly every newly-elected president makes a similar pledge. I am hoping that this time it comes to fruition.

* Update 10-Nov: This site has an inspirational way of starting the process I’m describing.

Over the last couple years, I’ve learned a good deal about economics and public policy. But like many people, I still had a tough time figuring out the current financial crisis. What caused it? How are all the pieces connected? How does it affect me?

The following three programs, each running about an hour and geared towards the layperson, greatly increased my understanding of what’s going on. I hope they’ll help you too…

Back in May, the public radio show This American Life did a special episode titled “The Giant Pool of Money,” about the root causes of the subprime mortgage crisis. Since their usual audience is not largely composed of people with a financial background, the producers made a special effort to present the topic in an easily digestible format that the layperson can follow. You can download or listen to it here, or subscribe to the free podcast on iTunes.

This American Life won praise and awards for that episode. It was even featured in a New York Times article. They followed up their success with “Another Frightening Show About the Economy” on October 3rd. It goes deeper into how the crisis spread outside the subprime market.

Just a couple days before that, billionaire investor Warren Buffet sat down for a fascinating interview with Charlie Rose.

If you want a crash course in the financial crisis, bailouts, regulation and the wider economic consequences, dedicating three hours to the above will definitely get you somewhere.

When the idea of the financial rescue package was proposed two weeks ago, the case was made that Congress needed to act swiftly and decisively.

Why did the Whitehouse and the Treasury Secretary want to push the bill through Congress so fast? Was it because they wanted to avoid oversight, or because the nation was headed for financial doom if a bailout wasn’t passed immediately, or because we couldn’t afford to get bogged down in a partisan fight? Maybe. But there’s another theory that’s been bouncing around in my head lately…

Perhaps they tried to ram the bill through Congress so quickly to prevent it from getting loaded down with wasteful spending. Every bill that makes its way to the floor of the House or Senate is seen as a golden opportunity for the lobbyists who finance Congressional campaigns to add funding for their pet projects. That is, they want us, the taxpayers, to give them our money to help their businesses, even if we won’t directly benefit.

A big spending bill coming up for a vote is like a huge apple pie cooling in the window. Everyone who passes wants to load it up with ice cream and dig in. So perhaps the administration’s haste (giving them the benefit of the doubt) was an attempt to avoid burdening the bill with those additions. If so, it didn’t work.

Look at what eventually happened. The public revolted and the lawmakers used that as justification to vote down the $700 billion bill and delay until a revised version could be written. What did we end up with for all that posturing? The Congress passed a bigger bill… this one with not only the same $700 billion going to Wall Street, but also a $100 million tax break to benefit auto racetrack owners, $192 million in rebates on excise taxes for the Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum industry, a $33 million tax break to specific corporations on income earned in American Samoa, $148 million in tax relief for U.S. wool fabric producers, a $49 million tax benefit for fishermen and other plaintiffs who sued over the 1989 tanker Exxon Valdez spill, a $478 million tax break for film and TV companies, and my personal favorite, a $2 million tax benefit for makers of wooden arrows for children.

Just give the special interests enough time and opportunity, and sure enough, they’ll take your tax dollars if they can. It only costs them a relatively small amount in bribes… err, campaign contributions… to get our so-called representatives to divert our tax money to their coffers during one of the most difficult economic times the country has ever faced. Despicable.

A big part of our nation’s problems can be traced to our tremendous demand for energy and reliance on foreign oil. Imagine if we had a President who spoke directly and frankly to the American people in a serious attempt to address our energy problem, the threat it poses to our freedom, and the Washington partisanship which stands in the way of a meaningful resolution. Excerpts from such a speech might sound something like this:

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Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?… I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America… men and women like you.

I have a notebook full of comments and advice. I’ll read just a few.

“We can’t go on consuming 40 percent more energy than we produce. When we import oil we are also importing inflation plus unemployment.”

“We’ve got to use what we have. The Middle East has only five percent of the world’s energy, but the United States has 24 percent.”

And this is one of the most vivid statements: “Our neck is stretched over the fence and OPEC has a knife.”

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Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide…

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

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In little more than two decades we’ve gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people… This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation. The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation.

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I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States… From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed…

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To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel — from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun.

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We will protect our environment. But when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.

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I’m proposing a bold conservation program to involve every state, county, and city and every average American in our energy battle. This effort will permit you to build conservation into your homes and your lives at a cost you can afford.

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Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production. It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.

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We have the world’s highest level of technology. We have the most skilled work force, with innovative genius, and I firmly believe that we have the national will to win this war.”

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The above are excerpts from a much-derided address delivered by President Jimmy Carter on July 15, 1979. Nearly 30 years later, we’re still neck-deep in the same problems. The full text of the speech is here.

Every once in a long while, I run across somebody who really “gets it”… a person who sees the whole picture of what’s going on in the country and understands how the pieces all fit together. The last time was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a speech which I transcribed for a previous post. And now it’s, Andrew J. Bacevich, a self-described conservative who is a teacher, political expert, and former US Army Colonel. The interview runs nearly an hour, but it’s really worth watching.

And thank goodness for Bill Moyers, the former Washington insider who has found his place as the only television journalist to consistently host these kinds of thinkers. If you regularly watch any mainstream news, you owe it to yourself to occasionally balance out the hype-machine with an hour of The Journal.

In Washington D.C. this afternoon, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution died on the floor of the Senate. Cause of death was determined to be intense corporate lobbying brought on by chronic fear-mongering and an insidious infection of misinformation. By a vote of 69-28, the Amendment was pronounced dead at 2:47 pm local time with passage of the FISA bill. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to AccountabilityNow.

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

This week’s so-called “compromise” between the Whitehouse and Congress on the FISA bill is no compromise at all. It’s capitulation. The Democrats bowed to the will of the President and the telecom companies, selling out the citizens, civil liberties and the Fourth Amendment in the process.

Background

The FISA law was passed in the 1970s to regulate the government’s ability to monitor communications. It requires law enforcement agencies to get a warrant from a secret court before tapping the communications of any US citizen. The idea was for the government to be awarded this power only in specific cases without tipping off the subjects of the wiretaps, while also protecting the rest of the citizens from wholesale monitoring of their communications without probable cause.

In 2002, the Bush administration decided that FISA was no longer relevant and moved to bypass the law without informing Congress. The administration directed the National Security Agency (NSA) to install monitoring equipment at major telecommunications hubs across the country, but the NSA needed the permission of the telecom companies. AT&T and Verizon agreed, and in doing so, broke the law. Qwest refused.

Once installed, the equipment allowed the government to monitor the phone calls, emails and internet activity of almost everyone in the United States, without a warrant. This is precisely the scenario that the FISA law was designed to prevent.

The warrantless wiretapping program continued unhindered and unnoticed for years, compromising the privacy of untold numbers of Americans. It took a whistleblower from AT&T for the word to finally get out. After the New York Times broke the story in 2005, AT&T and Verizon’s customers, along with civil liberties groups, filed law suits claiming illegal invasion of privacy. The FISA law itself provides for criminal sanctions and civil damages for each instance where communications were unlawfully monitored.

In response to the law suits, the telecom companies claimed that they were only doing what they were instructed to by the Bush administration. However, a federal judge in the case ruled that the companies cannot reasonably claim to believe that their actions were legal, so the suits are still pending. That’s where the Whitehouse stepped in again and asked Congress to pass a bill revising FISA and giving retroactive immunity (aka amnesty) to the telecom companies for implementing the illegal program.

Congress did just that, but there was opposition from some Democrats. The Bush administration threatened to veto any legislation which did not grant amnesty to the telecom companies, so eventually, a so-called “compromise” was struck. However, it’s unclear how the proposal is really a compromise, because the amnesty is still in the bill, clear and unaltered. The House has already voted to pass it, and the Senate is expected to pass it soon.

If the bill becomes law, which looks likely, Congress, at the behest of the Bush administration, will have wiped out all accountability for the telecom companies, including cases where they clearly broke the law. Furthermore, the public will never know the extent of the spying, because the bill includes provisions to keep that information concealed.

How we got here

The FISA law was born out of a real need. Enemies can and will act from within US borders and it is reasonable that the government be able to monitor the communications of those it suspects of planning to do harm. The rights of the citizens to be secure in their persons and privacy also need to be upheld. FISA seeks to balance those two needs. Although the law may require some modernizing, the basic idea is sound.

The US legal system requires law enforcement agencies to put forth a minimal amount of evidence against a specific person to justify a search. In actual practice, presenting probable cause to obtain a search warrant is not a particularly high standard. Over a 15 year period ending in 2006, the FISA court granted 22,985 warrants, and only five were rejected, so any claim that the FISA system was overly burdensome or a hindrance to law enforcement is disingenuous. What it prevented was the massive data mining dragnet that has likely been installed by the NSA, and that’s what needs to be curtailed.

The telecom companies clearly and knowingly engaged in illegal actions at the request of the government. There needs to be a consequence for that, so that the government doesn’t feel that it can compel wholesale and illegal invasions of privacy from any company that serves the public, such as credit card companies, banks, hospitals, insurance companies, security firms, medical laboratories, satellite imaging companies, and more.

Giving the telecom companies amnesty sends the wrong message. It says that service providers can break the law and violate the rights of their customers without consequence because the federal government will protect them. That would have a wide ranging and devastating effect on the future of liberty in this country. It also clearly runs counter to the Fourth Amendment.

But it is also reasonable to understand that the telecoms were under great pressure to assist the administration in fighting terrorism. Some allowance for the mood of the country at the time, plus an acknowledgement that the FISA law had not been modernized for current communication technology, seems in order.

What should have been done

Here’s what a real “compromise” FISA bill should have done (besides bringing the act up to date for current technology):

1. Stop illegal monitoring. The system of FISA warrants is inherently workable. Though some adjustments may be necessary, there is no need to bypass it.

2. Within one year, require telecom companies to notify all customers whose communications were illegally tapped under the NSA program, except in cases where the government can get a “retroactive” warrant from the FISA court.

3. Issue an official apology from both the government and the telecom companies to those who have been illegally monitored.

4. Give notified customers the option to be included in a combined class of complaintants. All suits will be combined into one.

5. Cap the total damages which can be awarded to the entire class of those affected.

6. Encourage the telecom companies to settle the case and pay their customers compensation, rather than going all the way to trial.

7. Require the government to provide loan guarantees or some financial assistance to the telecom companies in order to spread out the expense for at least part of the payout.

8. Clarify the FISA bill to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

If the actions to revise FISA had included the points above, they would have balanced the interests of the three relevant parties: the telecom companies, the law enforcement agencies, and the citizens. Alas, what we ended up with gives very little consideration to the citizens and the lion’s share to the telecom companies.

Epilog: the Founding Fathers versus the legacy of Nixon

The United States was founded by a group of people seeking to restrict the power of government over its citizens. They were particularly wary of the Executive branch, because the King of England had ruled over them by decree. The Constitution is structured primarily to limit the power of the President over the people and their property.

Though put to the test at times, this concept of limited executive power endured for nearly 200 years, up until the Nixon administration. The Nixonian view of the Presidency was that anything the President does is inherently legal, because he is the President. It’s a strange kind of circular logic that sounds strikingly similar to that of the monarchies from which the American colonies fought to escape. The current Bush administration has been staffed by many of the same people who cut their political teeth in the Nixon administration, and their concept of executive power has remained intact. It is a treacherous view which goes against the very principles that the country was founded upon.

The only good thing to come out of Nixon’s perspective on executive power was that Congress gained a renewed sense of responsibility to “check and balance” the President. The Special Prosecutor law was designed as a way to investigate the President when he strays into illegal action, as had happened with the Watergate scandal. And the FISA law was a direct response to Nixon’s illegal wiretaps of US citizens.

The tragedy of the current episode of Nixonian resurgence is that this time, the Congress is not stepping up to reassert its Constitutional responsibility to balance out the President. Instead, our Congressional representatives just roll over to his every whim. It seems an appropriate time to ask why that is.

Why would so many representatives in the opposition party vote to support a bill backing an unpopular President and giving amnesty to companies who clearly broke the law, violating the rights of the very citizens who those Congressmen and Congresswomen claim to represent? The only way that makes sense is if those members of Congress feel more compelled by, or beholden to, interests other than their constituents. So much for a government of, by and for the people.

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NOTE: Glenn Greenwald has a great blog following this issue. Among the fantastic commentary is this clip from Keith Olbermann’s show:

UPDATE: Senators Dodd and Feingold issued a joint statement announcing their intention to block or modify the FISA bill, and urging their colleagues to do the same.

Now that we know who the candidates will be in November’s general election, I am looking forward to hearing them state their positions and make their cases to the American public. But the primaries demonstrated that the news media are falling far short of asking the important questions which voters can use to inform themselves. So, like many American voters, I got to thinking about what I would ask the candidates if I had the opportunity.

The first thing I know is what I wouldn’t ask. The candidates can be assured that I don’t care who their preachers are, were or will be. I don’t care if the candidates are elitist or folksy, athletic or clumsy, young or old, man or woman, or black or white. I don’t have the slightest doubt about their patriotism, so I won’t ask any questions suggesting that I do. In short, I don’t care about any of the things that the mainstream media outlets tell Americans is important in this campaign. I want to know where the candidates stand on the issues we face as a country and how they’re going to address them.

So, I’ve written out my own series of questions. If I could sit down with any of the candidates, or even receive a written response to a detailed letter, this is what I would ask. If you have your own questions, I encourage you to post them as comments. Who knows… if we can put together a good, refined list, maybe we can get some answers.

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1. Iraq. How do you define “success” in Iraq and how will we achieve it? Once that criteria is met, what will we do with our forces, our private contractors, and our diplomatic mission there?

2. Health care. A survey by the World Health Organization in the year 2000 ranked health care in 190 countries. Despite being the wealthiest nation in the world, dedicating the largest percentage of our GDP to health care, and spending twice as much per capita as many of the other nations, the US is ranked only 37th. Most of the top-ranked countries have a single-payer universal health care system. Your plan does not call for such a system. If that’s not the solution, then what can the country do to better care for the health of its own citizens?

3. Biofuels. Recent science indicates that biofuels do more harm to the environment than good, and their increased use is driving up the price of food worldwide. Proponents claim that the technology is getting more efficient. Do you believe that biofuels are a good use of America’s resources? Should the US taxpayers continue to subsidize biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol?

4. Signing Statements. As a Senator, you have passed legislation which President Bush has signed, but then qualified with signing statements outlining which parts of the law he was not intending to enforce. As President, do you intend to use signing statements, and if so, for what purpose?

5. Taxes and spending. In 1913, Congress passed the income tax law, with rates of 1 to 7 percent. Initially, over 99 percent of the population paid NO income tax. Today we have far more taxpayers, almost everyone pays, and the LOWEST rate is 10 percent. Federal tax revenue is over 10 times the share of GDP that it was when the income tax came into effect, yet amazingly, we STILL can’t balance the budget. Despite all that money coming from the citizens, Congress continues to spend more than it takes in.

Where is all our money going? How can any candidate talk about taxes or the deficit without addressing the huge amount of money that our government spends?

6. Enhanced interrogation. Imagine this scenario: a high-ranking US soldier, with knowledge of battle plans and tactics, is captured overseas by an enemy force. His captors release a video claiming that they will interrogate the officer using the exact same techniques that have been employed by the US Military in Guantanamo Bay, and by the CIA’s proxies in extraordinary renditions to third-party prisons. Does the US have any legal or moral ground from which to oppose such techniques, or have we effectively lowered the bar for the treatment of captured foes worldwide, including our own fine soldiers?

7. Anti-terrorism laws. It has come to light that many of the measures passed in the wake of 9/11 to make it easier for law enforcement officers to thwart terrorist attacks have been used for other purposes. By broadening the definition of “terrorist”, government agencies have been able to make arrests, obtain citizens’ personal records, seize documents, tap phones and internet connections, and even hold people without charge; all without the need to acquire a warrant or show probable cause.

Is this an appropriate or necessary use of counter-terrorism laws? If so, why? If not, what safeguards can be implemented so that average US citizens do not get swept up in the counter-terrorism dragnet?

8. Guantanamo Bay. What should we do with the facility and prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and when?

9. Undeclared Wars. The Constitution says that only Congress can declare war, but the War Powers Act allows the President to authorize a limited commitment of troops without such a declaration. The last seven presidents have used the Act to undertake extensive military operations around the globe, some of them lasting years and costing thousands of American lives.

Do you believe that the President has the right to authorize military action, other than the direct defense of an attack on US soil, without a formal declaration of war by the Congress? If so, in what cases would you authorize such action?

10. Point of entry searches. The Ninth Circuit’s recent ruling in United States v. Arnold allows Border Patrol agents to search and seize the laptop computers, cell phones and other digital devices of anyone entering the country, including US citizens who are not suspected of any crimes. The agents can review, copy and store the data without limitation.

Privacy groups argue that this is an unconstitutional infringement of people’s rights. Business groups worry that the policy could expose trade secrets. The issue has wide-ranging implications, because if a person anywhere in the world emails private information to someone who later enters the US, the person carrying the information may be held liable for exposing the data.

Do you agree with the ruling? If so, why? If not, what will you do to reverse it?

11. The Federal Reserve. The Fed has been in the news a lot recently. The organization has been battling the economic downturn by lowering interest rates, addressing the credit crisis, and bailing out a major financial institution. Some of these decisions have been controversial, yet the US Government is only peripherally involved. Whether or not you agree with the Fed’s recent moves, does the organization’s semi-autonomous nature give the US taxpayers too little oversight of its actions? Should an organization which holds so much power over the economy be allowed to operate largely outside the bounds of representative government?

12. The tax code. The US tax code is one of the most complicated in the world. Does it need to be, and if not, what can be done to simplify it?

13. The Free Market. Is a free market the same thing as an unregulated market? If not, how do you maintain a balance between appropriate regulation and a business-friendly environment?

14. Public works and infrastructure. The country has suffered some high profile failures of major infrastructure in the last decade. It’s widely agreed that we’re long overdue to address some of these issues, but with the country showing a record budget deficit, how do we afford it?

15. Poverty. We’re the richest nation in the world, yet we have over 32 million people living below the poverty line. What are the root causes of poverty in this country and what can be done to address them?

16. Security vs. Liberty. Can a truly free society also be the safest, or are they mutually exclusive? Is some level of insecurity simply the price of liberty?

17. Intelligence failures. The US intelligence services failed to foresee the end of the Cold War, failed to uncover decades-long foreign spying operations in the US, failed to prevent the transfer of US nuclear technology abroad, and largely got the story wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is not disputed that US intelligence agencies also had significant knowledge prior to 9/11 that Al Qaeda terrorists were in the country and determined to attack. Do you believe that enough has been done to address the intelligence failures that led to the attacks not being prevented? What would you do to address overall problems in the intelligence apparatus?

18. Politics of Fear. Nobody questions the need to address the threat of foreign terrorism, but statistically, Americans have a much greater chance of being struck by lightning, and about 1000 times greater chance of being killed driving a car, than falling victim to a terrorist attack.

Yet the country has completely changed it’s policies, redirected its resources, curbed civil liberties, and even sent our brave men and women off to die, all to avoid a threat that doesn’t even rank among the top 50 to American lives. If the goal of our enemies is truly to “terrorize”, then haven’t we handed them their victory by our own fearful reaction?

19. Attorney General. Of the last 15 Attorneys General of the United States, more than half have been involved in controversies over their roles relating to the Presidency. Whether it be ethical questions, charges of politically biased prosecutions, or inappropriate ties to the administration, the position of Attorney General seems to be a lightning rod for controversy in our system of governance.

As the person responsible for investigating potential wrong-doing in the Executive branch, should the Attorney General be a presidential appointee? Doesn’t that violate the principle of checks and balances amongst the branches? How can we ensure that the Justice Department remains a non-partisan instrument of justice rather than an instrument of executive policy?

20. Defense spending. The Cold War has been over for 20 years and the US is the world’s only remaining superpower. Yet the country continues to spend more on defense than ALL other countries in the world COMBINED. Is that necessary, and if so, why?

21. DNA Evidence. There have been a number of high-profile cases recently where citizens who were convicted of heinous crimes have later been exonerated by DNA evidence. Because the use of DNA evidence is a recent advancement, it is almost certain that Americans in the past were wrongly convicted and killed by their government. But the effort to exonerate convicts, some of whom are awaiting a death sentence, relies on independent organizations and private contributions. Do you favor government funded DNA testing to confirm the convictions of inmates on death row? How do we assure that American citizens are not wrongly arrested and convicted of heinous crimes?

22. World standing. By almost every measure, America’s standing on the world stage has fallen dramatically in the last five years. Do you think that matters, and if so, how would you reverse the trend?

23. Foreign aid requirements. A little more than one percent of every American’s tax dollars goes to aid foreign countries, yet some of those countries take actions that are not in keeping with our values or interests.

Should aid to foreign countries be conditional? For example, if a receiving nation fails to make progress towards peace or human rights, should we reduce our aid? If we catch an ally or supported nation spying on us, or stealing our state secrets, should US aid to that nation be cut off?

24. Pre-emptive war. Although Iraq did not attack the United States, the President and the Congress authorized the use of force against Iraq based largely on that nation’s past aggressiveness and the possibility that it had acquired weapons of mass destruction.

By that standard, can we not justify pre-emptive strikes against dozens of nations on the planet, or conversely, can’t any other nation use the same justification to attack the United States? In the big picture, how does the shift to a policy of pre-emptive war affect the security of US citizens and the world at large?

25. Foreign oil. As is clear from the effect of gas prices lately, our nation has a severe dependence on foreign oil. We are by far the world’s largest consumer of it. Besides the economic effects, oil has become a security issue, because we are forced to defend our supply. How would you address the nation’s dependence on foreign oil in a lasting, meaningful way?

26. Supporting dictators. The United States bills itself as a paragon of democracy, yet we have repeatedly supported dictators and oppressive regimes around the world. It usually comes back to bite us, and it breeds a great deal of resentment in the people who are forced to live under those regimes. A long list of bad characters, including Manuel Noriega, Sadaam Hussein, and even Osama bin Laden were all at one time supported by American tax dollars, ostensibly to further our own interests. When is it OK to support dictatorships or oppressive regimes abroad?

27. The drug war. Statistics from the drug war are not encouraging. In the decades since the battle began, the pervasiveness of use, potency, availability, number of drug-related crimes, and prison population have all gone up, while the average cost of drugs has generally declined. Critics of the current US drug policy argue that the lessons of alcohol prohibition were not learned and applied to national drug policy. At the same time, a number of states have decriminalized the use of some drugs.

Do you believe that our current federal drug policy is effective and in the best interest of US citizens? If not, what would you do to change it?

28. Afghanistan. By most accounts, the coalition forces are losing ground in Afghanistan. There is a Taliban resurgence, widespread corruption, rising opium production, greater difficulty getting our allies to commit troops, and still no sign of Osama bin Laden. What can we do to make sure that our efforts in Afghanistan are successful?

29. Deterrence. A large portion of the US defense strategy is based on the concept of deterrence. That is, other nations should consider the severe consequences for themselves and their people before attacking the United States. But the most dangerous foreign threat to US interests in the last decade has come from groups which do not depend on nation-states and whose attackers seem to care little for their own lives. Is the policy of deterrence an effective counter to ideologically-based terrorism? If not, how do we defend ourselves?

30. Border security. Our international airports have no-fly lists, bomb screeners, metal detectors, x-rays, cameras, a full complement of security personnel, and many other security measures to assure that not even one potential terrorist can enter the country undetected. Yet, by recent estimates, more than one thousand people each DAY enter the US illegally over our southern border. Setting aside the issue of immigration policy, isn’t the porous nature of our borders simply a security threat? What would you do to address that problem?

31. Campaign finance. The influence of lobbyists and powerful special interests has been a hot topic in Washington and on the campaign trail. Two states, and many municipalities, have tackled this problem by introducing a system of 100% publicly-financed campaigns. The results, though early, are quite promising. Is there any reason that we shouldn’t move to public campaign financing on the Federal level? If the people we elect are truly OUR representatives, then why are they allowed to take even one dime from special interests? Isn’t that just legalized bribery?

32. War reporting. The Iraq War has largely fallen off the radar of American media outlets. Part of this is due to the fact that the Pentagon places restrictions on what the media can cover. Some argue that the reason we don’t allow correspondents to report freely from the war zone, or film the homecoming of flag-draped caskets, is because we don’t want to risk eroding support for the war effort. But in a democracy, isn’t an informed electorate exactly what we want, so that if knowledgeable Americans decide that their sons and daughters should no longer be dying for a particular cause, their government will respond to that decision and withdraw the nation from the conflict? Put another way, when the military or political goals diverge from the interests of the populace, which takes precedence?

33. Climate change. Do you believe that combating climate change is a goal that the US government should undertake, and if so, how?

34. The Bush Administration. What policies, if any, implemented by the current President Bush do you admire and/or agree with?

35. Pardons. If you become President, and members of the former administration are indicted or convicted of crimes committed while they were in office, will you pardon them?

36. Warrantless wiretapping. The Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which monitors the communications of Americans without a court order, has been roundly criticized by civil liberties groups. The Congress is now poised to grant retroactive immunity to the companies who allowed the illegal monitoring to occur. Do you agree with that policy, and if so, why?

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That’s all I’ve got for now. Feel free to post a comment below to add your own.

Here’s the third installment of Steve’s Peeves.

Most refrigerators have a temperature control that’s labeled “Min” and “Max”. The trouble is, “Max” actually means minimum temperature, and vice versa.

Ideally, one side would simply be labeled “colder.” But if the gauge is going to say min/max, it should be called a “coldness” control, not a temperature control.