Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Corruption on the Run?

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People aren’t happy with our government right now. President Barack Obama’s (D) approval rating, starting at an impressive sixty-three percent on the first day of his presidency, has nose-dived into the low-forty percent range. Our split-party Congress has fared much, much worse with an approval rating hovering around twelve percent—probably the lowest in history. Almost three-quarters of Americans think our country is on the wrong track.

But there are some tentative signs that things might be changing. Political corruption, rampant in both our dominating political parties and one of the strongest drivers of this popular dissatisfaction, appears to be on the run.

The two popular protest movements of the last three years—the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street—are polar opposites by some measures, but they share a strong aversion to political corruption and cronyism. At the Tea Party’s height, it defeated ‘insider’ candidates for Republican nominations across the country (with mixed results in the general elections). OWS is likely to have a similar impact on the Democratic Party’s 2012 Congressional nominations.

Additionally, corrupt politicians caught in scandals are not getting away with it the way they used to. Former Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL), who attempted to sell an appointment to Obama’s Senate seat after he was elected president, was convicted earlier this week and sentenced to 14 years in prison. It is no wonder that some cronies are seeing the writing on the wall and choosing not to stand for reelection in 2012 at all. In one telling example, Representative Barney Frank (D-MA 4th) announced last month that he will be retiring—perhaps cognizant of the fact that his constant efforts to protect sub-prime lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from outside scrutiny helped lead to our current economic crisis.

Read more . . .

Announcing Website 23

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I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new major revision to Off on a Tangent, bringing the site to version 23.0. As always with major revisions, there have been a lot of obvious and not-obvious changes. Here’s a review of the most important updates:

  • New Look: My major revisions always come with a new look, and this one is no different. I’ve added a chunkier banner and other visual refinements to the header, and darkened the overall palette quite a bit. The site is also tightened up width-wise. I’ve also added a ‘bio’ to the bottom of each page, so users coming in from search engines can get an idea of who I am. In addition I have tweaked the advertising placements in an effort to minimize their intrusiveness (without undercutting their effectiveness). Overall, Website 23.0 is intended to be a simple, straightforward, classy site that works well on traditional desktops and laptops, as well as on tablets and smartphones.
  • Home Page ‘Features’ Area: At the top of the home page, you’ll find a new ‘feature’ areas. At launch time, this area has three ‘focus areas’: politics, faith, and liberty. Each focus area has links to the five most recent Off on a Tangent posts on that subject. This area will be changed now-and-then to reflect the site’s areas of focus as they shift, and will occasionally be replaced entirely (especially around elections) with a dedicated special-coverage area.

    Read more . . .

Will the Euro Last?

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Yesterday, the Federal Reserve and several of its foreign counterparts announced a plan to increase ‘liquidity’ and ease the ‘global credit crunch.’ This is in response to European banks’ increasing difficulty in raising money for their day-to-day operations. So what’s going on is a kind of foreign-relations equivalent of the Fed’s ‘quantitative easing’ domestic money-printing programs and, like ‘quantitative easing,’ it doesn’t actually address the underlying problems. It treats a symptom, not the cause.

The U.S. stock markets surged in response to the announcement, in part because the plan alleviates a little bit of the immediate-term uncertainty being wrought by the European sovereign debt crisis. But that’s not all. You see, when the stock market goes ‘up’ it can do so for two reasons: either the total average value of our publicly-traded businesses has gone up, or the value of the dollar relative to stocks has gone down. Perhaps some investors were reacting to the increased short-term stability; perhaps others were reacting to the associated decline in the value of the dollar. Indeed, the only reason the stock market looks as high as it does even in the midst of a recession is because it has mirrored the inflation rate which, by honest measures, has been hovering around ten percent per year.

So will these moves save the Eurozone currency union, or solve the European sovereign debt crisis, or prevent our own looming debt crisis? No. They, like most previous moves by our dysfunctional Fed, might buy us a little bit of time . . . but only at the cost of the later implosion being incrementally worse than it might otherwise have been. As to the Eurozone, well, there are rumblings among some economists that it might not last (at least not in its current form) for more than another two weeks. The grand experiment, unique in world history, of multiple sovereign states sharing a single currency may well be coming to an inglorious end.

Students Have Rights Too

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On November 21, eighteen-year-old Emma Sullivan was on a Kansas Youth in Government field trip to the Kansas capitol. While there, she used her phone to post a message to Twitter about Governor Sam Brownback (R-KS): “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.”

Needless to say, Sullivan’s ‘tweet’ doesn’t exactly rise to the kind of political discourse I would like to see in our country. First off, it’s a lie—Sullivan did not actually speak to Governor Brownback at the event. Second off, expressing disagreement with a politician by saying he ‘sucks’ and ‘blows a lot’ is not much of a contribution to civil debate. But whatever I might think of Sullivan’s ‘tweet,’ there is no doubt that she has a fundamental First Amendment right to post it.

Well, Brownback’s office didn’t like it and notified Sullivan’s principal, and then Sullivan’s principal demanded that Sullivan apologize in-writing to the governor. Sound at all familiar? Since then, both Brownback’s office and Sullivan’s school district have distanced themselves from the situation. Brownback blames an over-zealous staffer for contacting the school, and the Shawnee Mission School District now says that Sullivan is not required to write an apology. Good.

Should Sullivan apologize? Probably. But her school has no authority to require it, and Brownback has no right to request it. The whole point of the First Amendment’s free speech clause is to protect political speech, no matter how offensive or absurd it might be. Sullivan posted the ‘tweet’ from her own phone to her own privately-obtained Twitter account, and as-such it’s none of her school’s darn business. If it were posted on school equipment or in a school publication, that would be different. Or if she were a minor, then the school would have some limited authority as her acting legal guardian. But Sullivan is eighteen, and made her own statement from her own equipment. Her school has no authority in this matter whatsoever.

Time and time again (and again, and again, and again, and again, and again) I find myself having to remind our public educators that they are government employees, and are thus bound by the constitutional limitations on government. Even if this weren’t the case (as in private schools), there is educational value in permitting students the broadest possible civil liberties in their schools. You cannot teach students about how to operate in a free society from an academic environment that more closely resembles totalitarianism—telling students what to say, what to think, what medicines to take, when to take them, when to urinate, when to inquire, and when accept blindly. One cannot learn about how to responsibly exercise freedom in an environment where they have none.

An Act of War . . . Against Pakistan

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Back in May, United States military forces killed Osama bin Laden at his hideout near Islamabad, Pakistan. Although U.S. officials initially reported that the Pakistani intelligence services were instrumental in finding bin Laden, there are many open questions still remaining about Pakistan’s complicity in protecting bin Laden during the years he was hiding in their country. Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan have been strained, with a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations going back and forth between the two countries.

But today, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces—led by the U.S.—attacked two Pakistani military outposts on the Afghan border and killed at least 28 Pakistani troops. In retaliation, Pakistan has closed its Afghan border, cutting off supply routes that bring one-third of coalition supplies into Afghanistan.

Our raid against the bin Laden compound was clearly justified, as bin Laden and al-Qaeda have been making war against the United States. Pakistan wasn’t the target; al-Qaeda was. This is another example of what makes the Global War on Terror so unique among wars. The belligerent is not properly a state, but a non-state entity that operates within other states. Pakistan, of course, could have interpreted this as an act of war against them . . . that was a risk we had to take.

But in this case, there is no such nuance. We attacked Pakistani military outposts manned by Pakistani troops within Pakistani territory. We have committed a clear, undeniable act of war against Pakistan, and they are within their rights to retaliate. Given that Pakistan likely did protect bin Laden and other al-Qaeda elements for many years, I’m the first to question whether they are the ‘ally’ they claim to be . . . but we can’t label them an ally while we blow up their border outposts. If we’re going to be at war with Pakistan, let’s admit it. If we’re going to be allies with Pakistan, let’s not wage war against them.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.