Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

U.S. Politics: What’s Happening Here?

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The political ‘lay-of-the-land’ in the United States has transformed incredibly in the last three or four years. The pundits and politicos are working themselves into a froth trying to figure out, define, and—yes—control what is happening in this country. All of the old rules seem to be breaking down, with long-time Republican Party insiders finding themselves ousted in the primaries by supposedly ‘radical’ firebrands and seats that have been held by Democrats for decades suddenly in-play and under Republican threat. How did we get here? How did everything change so much and so fast?

There are two main elements at play here, both of which have served to aid the Republican Party in this election cycle though it remains to be seen whether it will continue to do so. The first element is an internal struggle within the Republican Party which has gone on for many years, but has only recently risen to prominence among the outside punditry. The second element is a sea-change, entirely in the last two years, in how the great middle perceives each of our two major political parties.

Republican Party Internal Reform

Despite all the blather over his eight-year presidency, George W. Bush (R) was not the radical right-wing ideologue that his opponents made him out to be. Stinging from Bush’s razor-thin victory over Vice President Al Gore (D) in 2000—a historic election rife with controversy—the political opposition very quickly embarked on an effort to cast the Bush administration as a cabal of hyperactive right-wing psychopaths. The facts simply do not back up this characterization. For example, before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush’s main policy accomplishment was the No Child Left Behind law—a law he crafted with ‘liberal lion’ Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) that went on to pass both houses of Congress with broad bipartisan support. Yeah, you’ve got to watch out for those radical right-wing extremists and their bipartisan education bills!

Read more . . .

Taking Control from the Carriers

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In the United States (and in other places too), our wireless phone carriers have too much control. As an example, I have a Palm Pre Plus that is currently running Palm WebOS 1.4.1. Palm updated the operating system to version 1.4.5 on July 15, which brought a number of new features and capabilities, including support for newer and more-advanced games and applications.

Verizon Wireless, however, has withheld this update from its users. This isn’t unique to Palm users, or Verizon customers. With pretty much every phone other than the iPhone, updated software from phone manufacturers are not released to users until the carriers release them—usually many months late, if they are ever released at all. My old AT&T 8525 (made by HTC) running Windows Mobile was capable of running Windows Mobile 6.5, but AT&T never updated it beyond 6.1. AT&T eventually updated my BlackBerry Bold’s software to BlackBerry OS 5.0, but finally did so many, many months after it became available from RIM (and after I had abandoned AT&T for Verizon anyway).

It’s time to put the control in the hands of the manufacturer of the phone, not the carrier. The company that made my phone has created updated software for it, so let me install it. Verizon has no right to withhold an available software update from me.

Sometimes you can work around these limitations. With BlackBerrys, it’s fairly easy (with the right know-how) to install available software updates on the ‘wrong’ carrier’s phones (during the year+ I had the BlackBerry, I spent most of my time running ‘unofficial’ OS’s that were newer and better than the ‘official’ ones from AT&T). With the old Palm OS phones you could usually hack the ‘unlocked’ versions of the Palm OS onto carrier models. With many Windows and Android phones, vibrant enthusiast communities produce unofficial ‘ROMs’ with updated systems. Sadly there’s no known way (yet) to do this stuff with WebOS because of the uniquely efficient way that Palm packages and distributes its OS updates.

But it’s very simple: we should not have to hack around to run the newest operating systems available for our phones anyway. They are our phones, not Verizon’s or AT&T’s. We should be able to get an updater from the company that made the phone and install it, if we want to, and the carriers should put no roadblocks in our way. Sure, they have the right not to support an unofficial OS version, but they have no right to use technical means to prevent us from installing them if we want to. I’ll say it again: they’re our phones!

Remembering 9/11/2001

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I watched the Pentagon burn. First, on the evening of September 11, 2001, I saw the column of smoke rising in the distance as I drove west on Braddock Rd. to visit Melissa in Burke. Then, on September 12, I skipped my classes at George Mason University (which should have been canceled anyway) to drive down to Arlington. I stood, with a fairly large crowd, maybe 350 yards from the collapsed and burning hulk of the building’s western face. I just felt like I had to see it for real, not just as one of the many horrific images on my television.

I drive by the Pentagon now and then, usually on Washington Blvd. which passes right in front of the face that was hit by hijacked American Airlines flight 77. The plane passed so low over the highway that it knocked over some of its overhead street lights. Every time I pass through, I remember standing there and watching the building burn more than 24 hours after the attack. Every time, I think about everything that happened on September 11, 2001. I probably always will.

I’ve talked to people who watched the plane crash into the Pentagon from their offices in Crystal City. Thousands of people saw it from those offices, though from most of them the view of the actual final impact would have been obscured. Many in the Navy barracks and Sheraton Hotel on a hill just west of the Pentagon had a clear view all the way to impact. People driving on Washington Blvd., Interstate 395, and other nearby roads had a clear view as well. They all saw the silver-colored airliner in the standard American Airlines livery slam into the world’s largest office building, killing all 64 passengers and crew (including 5 hijackers) and 125 people in the Pentagon. No conspiracy theories about it being a missile or something, please.

Obviously, the scale of our local tragedy pales in comparison to the carnage in New York, New York, on that same day. The 184 innocent victims in Arlington compare to 2,753 in New York. Another 40 innocent victims died in the crash of United Airlines flight 93 in Shanksville, PA. But the attack on the Pentagon is the one that I saw first hand, albeit a day after. I feel, in some very, very tiny way, that’s ‘my’ part of September 11, 2001.

Another thing that sticks with me is how empty the sky looked over the D.C. metro area in the days that followed. This region has three major airports—Washington Dulles Intl. Airport, Reagan National Airport, and Baltimore-Washington Intl. Airport. There are always planes in the sky. Lots of them. With the national airspace shut down, all the planes were gone. As a long-time resident of this area, and a constant observer of the planes in its busy airspace, it was eerie. You don’t really realize how many of them are there until they’re gone.

There’s a lot more I can say about that day. The absolute, shell-shocked horror on everybody’s faces. The fact that I was supposed to be working downtown in a federal building, but found out about the tragedies unfolding before I left campus. The frustration of dealing with phones that couldn’t make a connection on the overloaded networks when I knew people were worried about me (there had been erroneous reports of car bombs going off in D.C., and my friends and family knew I worked downtown). My parents were supposed to be flying that day (national airspace had been shut down before their flight left). I had woken up late and rushed to a class without checking the morning news, so I missed the early reports about the first plane hitting the Twin Towers in New York.

The more I think about it, the more little details come flowing back almost like it was yesterday.

We have to keep our memories fresh, because the radical Islamic ideologies that led to the September 11, 2001, attacks are still out there and still have their adherents. What happened that day is what happens when these ideologies are brought to their natural conclusions—death and destruction. We have to remember, and we have to constantly dedicate ourselves to fighting radical Islam because, if we don’t, there’s no reason that September 11, 2001, can’t happen again.

God bless you, and God bless America.

Election 2010: Things to Consider

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Much has happened in the two years since the last Congressional election. In the lead-up to the 2008 polls, outgoing President George W. Bush (R) was just kicking-off an unprecedented ‘investment’ of billions of your tax dollars to bail out Wall St. executives and failed banking and automotive firms. Voter anger quickly rose to a crescendo, and the people rightly rebuked the Republican party for its mad, wasteful spending and record-breaking federal deficits. President Barack Obama (D) roared into power with strong Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. It was, we were promised, the dawn of a new era in Washington.

Well, it turns out that the new era looked a lot like the last one. The new administration promptly quadrupled Bush’s deficit record, increased the mad bailout spending, embarked on a misguided health care ‘reform’ bid, and alienated much of the angry electorate that rocketed them into power. This is the background against which we must consider our votes on November 2. All 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are in contention this year, as are 37 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, 37 of 50 state governorships, and many other state and local offices. We have an opportunity to either lend our endorsement to the policies of the last two years, or demand a new course.

At the risk of sounding overly melodramatic, this is possibly the most important election you will ever vote in. The economic policies initiated by Bush and accelerated by Obama will, if pursued much longer, catastrophically collapse the American economy and quite possibly take our system of government down with it. Never in the history of the world has a government successfully spent its way out of a recession and, on the contrary, excessive deficits and ‘injections’ of money into a faltering economy invariably serve to prolong and deepen recessions. The longer it goes on, the greater the risk of massive inflation, hyperinflation, and collapse. Governments that follow this path rarely survive intact.

Read more . . .

U.S. House of Representatives, Virginia’s 10th District, 2010

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In the race to represent Virginia’s 10th District in the U.S. House of Representatives, incumbent Representative Frank Wolf (R) faces off against challengers Jeff Barnett (D) and William Redpath (L). The 10th District encompasses Clarke County, Frederick County, Loudoun County, Warren County, Manassas, Winchester, and parts of Frederick, Fairfax, and Prince William counties. Wolf has represented the district since 1980 and is seeking his sixteenth two-year term.

In 2008, I heartily endorsed the reelection of Representative Wolf when I posted the Off on a Tangent endorsements. Then, when President George W. Bush (R) embarked on a mad binge of socialist bailouts and bank takeovers, I was forced to rescind most of my endorsements—including Wolf’s—for reconsideration because most of my endorsees had voted in the face of vehement, consistent, and vocal public opposition for the ill-advised and ineffective TARP bailout. I ended up endorsing Wolf anyway, reluctantly, with some new caveats. Most importantly, I said that “Wolf must oppose any further moves toward socialist interventionism by our government and must defend the free market economy.”

This caveat has become even more important in the last two years, as President Barack Obama (D) and his strong Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate have expanded and accelerated the mad and misguided federal spending that started under Bush. In 2009, the first annual federal deficit under Obama was nearly four-times bigger than Bush’s record-setting 2008 deficit, and the Democratic Party—roaring into power on promises of fiscal responsibility—shows no sign of stopping the madness.

Read more . . .

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.