Mr. Moderate

President Bush and his military leaders (presumably acting under Bush’s orders as Commander-in-Chief) are streaming out hopeful words about the prospects for the US troop surge making things better inside Iraq. However, the BBC reporters on the scene in Baghdad offer this gloomy assessment:

One measure of how bad things have become is that Western diplomats will no longer visit the Iraqi Defence ministry, even though it is inside the Green Zone.

In fact, militia infiltration is believed to be such that no-one walks anywhere in the Green Zone for fear of being snatched off the street.

So, if the coalition cannot even guarantee its own safety in the heart of its power base, what hope for the rest of Baghdad?

The so-called “Green Zone” is the heart of the US occupation, and is heavily walled, fortified, and guarded by American troops. So, if things are getting to be that bad in the “Green Zone,” then it really is legitimate to ask not only what hope there is for Baghdad as a whole, but what hope is there for the whole of Iraq?
Continue reading ‘Where The Surge Is’ »

One thing is already certain about the 2008 election results: there will be fewer moderates elected than either liberals or conservatives. The very nature of our two-party biarchy suppresses the middle and accentuates the extremes. Each extreme tolerates the other extreme as a place for incorrigibles who will never “see the light.” But any attempt at achieving power by moderate forces (such as Ross Perot in 1992) will be viciously attacked by both extremes, and this naturally serves to drive most people away from the political middle.

Accordingly, moderates are quite used to being forced to pick between “the lesser of two evils.” Moderates do not usually get to vote for a candidate or cause that they wholeheartedly support. Instead, moderates are usually forced to “hold their noses” and select the least-objectionable from two highly-objectionable extremes. Its no wonder that only about half the people of voting age will even bother to vote on Election Day even if the office of President of the United States is there for the choosing.

Is there any way to make moderates arise and gather in their destiny? I certainly wish there were, but after 15 years of hard work and moderate activism, I’m largely out of possible ideas. Largely, but not totally.
Continue reading ‘Moderates Arise!’ »

Let me say at the beginning that I favor Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), and my “vote for nobody” campaign should not be enacted unless IRV is also in force at the same time.

Given IRV, then among the list of candidates should always be included the option of voting for “None of the above.” In an IRV system, each voter marks N candidates in order, and with my “vote for nobody” option, “none of the above” would always be presumed as the N+1th option marked by the voter unless “None of the above” was previously marked by the voter. Valid but totally blank ballots would always be presumed as a vote for “none of the above” in the first position. In the event that “None of the above” should actually win (achieve a majority vote) under the IRV system, then all current candidates are barred from running again for a specified period of time and a re-run of the election is held with an entirely new list of candidates. The process may be repeated as many times as needed to achieve a majority victory by some candidate. In this way, the elected candidate will always be the choice of the majority. And if no candidate can obtain a majority vote, we are not left with the lesser evil, but instead get a new vote. Think about it: actual majority rule! And there would be no real advantage obtained by any candidate who could manage to generate “spoiled ballots” as those would be counted as votes for “none of the above” and would count against the leading candidate possibly obtaining a “50%+1 vote” majority.

The one thing which is most broken here in the United States is the health care system. I believe that the reason it is broken is rooted in the economics of health care. When it comes to individual doctors treating individual patients, I believe that the free market economy, as ruled by the law of supply and demand, ought to produce a good outcome for everybody. However, for almost a century now, there has not been a free market in health care.

If we look back a century and a half or more in America, all it took to become a doctor was enough learning from books to absorb the concepts of how the human body worked and what could be done (based upon what was known at the time) to repair whatever was deemed to be wrong. Many of my ancestral cousins in the old south were deemed to be “doctors” because they had enough learning from books to be able to treat slaves and assist mothers to give birth to babies. Of course, so little was known about “proper health care” in that day and age, that the concept of medical malpractice rarely entered the picture. Even today, it is difficult to find one “expert witness” doctor who will tell a jury that what another doctor did was absolutely wrong and caused injury to the plaintiff. In the distant past, juries were supposed to use common sense in deciding cases, and “expert witness” testimony was rarely used.

But my real point here is that the law of supply and demand is broken now when it comes to health care. All of the changes in how medicine is practiced have led to a situation where there isn’t any real free market in health care, and thus it is easy to understand why costs are out of control.
Continue reading ‘Economical Health’ »

The intense political debate in our nation over whether we are “winning” or “losing” the war in Iraq actually misses the point. The real fact is that we never intended to win in any real sense. President Bush went into Iraq with one goal in mind: to capture Saddam and see him executed by his enemies. Even that extremely limited goal proved very difficult to achieve, as Saddam avoided capture for many months, and the total destruction of the Iraqi governmental structure took years to rebuild to the point where Saddam’s political show trial could take place with at least some semblance of decorum. But the replacement of the chief judge in the middle of the show trial simply proved to the world at large it was no real trial, but a kangaroo court of the worst kind. The appeal process proved that when the appeal court insisted that one more defendant be sentenced to death when he had been spared after his original trial. It isn’t recorded in the public news media what punishment the judges received for failing to follow the script set down by the Bush administration.

But to get back to the war, it was never stated as an objective that the United States would somehow annex Iraq as a political dependency, such as it had done in the past with Cuba and the Philippine Islands. It is true that, in the earliest days, there was talk of using Iraq’s oil money to pay back the United States for giving Iraq its freedom from Saddam. But that idea foundered when it was pointed out that the Iraqi government was not likely to keep up payments to the United States after the US military leaves Iraq, and the US military was spending $100 billion per year in Iraq to protect an oil output worth only $30 billion per year. Besides, the main idea of repayment was to pay back construction loans, but again, the US is still destroying more each year than it builds overall. So, even in that limited case no legitimate argument exists for expecting the Iraqi government to make any payments to the United States.

The real issue, which nobody points out, is that even if Bush’s war plan is the greatest success any general could conceive of from here on out, the United States still loses the war by any rational measurement. No matter what happens, the US military will eventually leave Iraq. And no matter what happens, Iraq will still be next door to Iran. And no matter what happens, Shiites with a natural friendship towards Iran will be in the majority within the body politic inside of Iraq. So, no matter what happens, eventually Iran will have far more influence within Iraq than the United States will. With a victory like that, who needs a loss?
Continue reading ‘Iraq: Winning Is Losing’ »

After roughly two months of experimentation and occasional blogging, I’ve decided to give this a shot at creating an actual conversation. So, I’ve enabled the ability to register to post comments on the site. I will eventually even entertain the idea of adding additional posters so that this can become a multi-party dialog.

Mind you, I’m afraid of the spammers, so I will be moderating comments. I don’t want this to become known as a place to post advertisments for the enhancement of male or female body parts or bettering their interaction with one another in some way, shape or form. And, if the spam gets to be too tough to handle with Wordpress, I may be forced to go back to not allowing random passers-by to register at this site.

I would really like to have an intellgent conversation with you folks out there in the blogosphere. I am horribly upset at the divide in American politics and I despise the policy offerings of the extreme left and extreme right who feel that they have the only possible options to offer to the voting public. Instead, I firmly believe in the power of the middle ground. So, somewhere between the “lock ‘em up” attitude of the far right and the “anything goes” attitude of the far left lies the middle ground where we need to try to lock up the really bad people and not waste our time and money persecuting the rest of us folks.

So, welcome to my world, where I’m still “stuck in the middle with you!”

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist by his own petard
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4

The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 25, 1979. The final troop withdrawal began on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989. Due to the high cost and ultimate futility of this conflict for this Cold War superpower, the Soviet war in Afghanistan has often been referred to as the equivalent of the United States’ Vietnam War.
Wikipedia article on the Soviet War In Afghanistan.

As hundreds of Muslim “enemy combatants” remain held in the Gulag at Guantanamo, lost in all of the moral outrage mounted by the Republicans is the fact that during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States funded and provided arms to those very same Muslim “enemy combatants” (really, “terrorists”) for the purpose of defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Continue reading ‘USA Terrorism’ »

To hear the right-wing talk show hosts rant and rave, one of the two worst enemies of America is socialism (the other is “Islamo-Fascists”). But socialism is so deeply embedded into our American system these days that we would not be the great nation we are without socialism. Let me enumerate a few socialist government programs that at least 80% of the people (on average) would vote to support if the question were put to them:

• Anti-Trust Laws
• Social Security
• Unemployment Insurance
• Medicare (health care program for older people)
• Pell grants
• Student Loans
• Consumer Product Safety Commission
• Food and Drug Administration
• Building roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, and other infrastructure.

Socialism has its roots in the progressive movement of a century ago, and Republican President Teddy Roosevelt was a leader of that movement, closely associated with the passing of anti-trust laws to prevent the robber barons of commerce from creating vast business monopolies for the purpose of sucking as much profit out of the public as they could manage. His cousin, Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt, gave us numerous social programs, and the most popular is probably the Social Security System.
Continue reading ‘Successful Socialism’ »

Today I watched a C-Span show where Al Gore talked about his latest book, The Assault on Reason. Gore clearly recognizes the problem: reason is getting shoved out of public dialog. But he also clearly misperceives why that is happening. The advocates of God have realized that they are in a battle against rational thought and that they have been loosing since at least the Enlightenment. What we are witnessing in the arena of public discourse is just the most obvious examples of them fighting back. And, unfortunately for those who associate rational thought with civilized behavior, God is winning, and reason is on its way out.
Continue reading ‘God vs. Reason’ »

Unable to find a decent “permanent” job, I took a one-year contract position with a major contract labor company. This at least allowed me to have access to a decent health care plan, even if I was required to pay the entire group rate premium out of my gross earnings. However, I’m approaching the end of my one-year contract term, and that means I’m approaching the end of my ability to (barely) afford health care. Now, its true that I will have the option of continuing my coverage under the COBRA law. But it is also true that my maximum monthly unemployment benefit will just about equal my health insurance premium under COBRA, so how am I supposed to afford food, shelter, and other basic needs?

Unfortunately, my family and I have chronic health care problems. As long as we are covered by health care insurance, our chronic problems are manageable. But if we ever become uncovered, we descend into medical Hell, and getting covered again becomes increasingly problematic as our chronic conditions are all “pre-existing conditions” for any new plan. This means that I do not dare allow my plan to lapse, as exclusions for “pre-existing conditions” are waived if you are simply moved from one plan to another. That being the case, though, how do I afford food, shelter, etc. while paying for health care?
Continue reading ‘Health Care Horrors’ »