Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Senator Byrd Dead at 92

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Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), the longest serving member of Congress, has died at the age of 92. He had suffered numerous age-related health problems over the last two years.

Byrd served West Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1953 to 1959 before moving to the Senate for an astounding nine terms. During his half-century in the Senate, Byrd has served in various leadership positions including President Pro Tempore, Majority Leader, Minority Leader, Majority Whip, and Chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

His legacy, however, has been tarnished by his racist positions earlier in life. In his twenties, Byrd was a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan and he famously filibustered the Civil Rights Act. He has since repudiated and apologized for these positions, and in later years became a reliable supporter of minority civil rights issues.

Under West Virginia law, Byrd will be replaced by a gubernatorial appointment.

How to Quantify My Politics

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I’ve been giving some thought lately to how I can quantify and/or explain my political views in a short, pithy, simple way. I keep coming up short. What’s most annoying is that I’ve been trying to do this with only limited success since I first started paying real attention to politics, some time around 1997 or 1998. Originally I called myself a ‘moderate Republican.’ This gave way to something like ‘libertarian Republican’ [note the small-L].

In 2000, I first began to really identify myself as an independent since I found that I was in disagreement with a lot of ‘Republican’ policy stances and calling myself a Republican wasn’t really accurate. I didn’t really have any good qualifiers so I just said I was independent. When prodded, I would give an explanation like, “I disagree with Democrats 80 percent of the time and Republicans 60 percent of the time, so I generally vote Republican.” This was both an oversimplification and an exaggeration, but it got the point across. It’s still somewhat accurate.

At some point, in desperation for a 1- or 2-word statement on my politics, I began calling myself a ‘conservative independent’ and this stuck. This is what showed on the ‘about’ page of this web site for many, many years . . . but it never felt totally right. It wasn’t that it was wrong, it just seemed like it lacked clarity. It says I’m somewhere center-right, which is true, but doesn’t really explain what I’m center on, what I’m right on, or, for that matter, what I might be left on! At some point ‘conservative independent’ gave way to the equally obtuse ‘independent conservative,’ reflecting a slightly more pronounced rightward slant (though certainly no sea-change).

Read more . . .

House Passes ‘DISCLOSE’ Act

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The United States House of Representatives narrowly passed the controversial ‘DISCLOSE’ Act last night. The Act would impose a number of new, unconstitutional requirements on organizations that engage in First Amendment protected political speech. More on the Act here.

If you value your civil liberties and your own free speech, free assembly, and privacy rights, you might want to contact your Senators and demand that they vote against this bill when it comes to their chamber.

If your Congressman voted for this (and the many other unconstitutional bills they’ve been passing over the last several years), you might want to contact them too and let your opinions be known. Of course, the best way is to vote with your . . . votes ;-).

Don’t forget, all of our elected officials swear to protect and defend the Constitution; this usually precludes trampling it. It might be worth letting your representatives know that you expect them to do what they swore to do.

Gen. McChrystal Had to Go

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General Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of Afghanistan Forces, was subject of an in-depth article in Rolling Stone magazine in which he and his staff members shared their low opinions of President Barack Obama (D) and other high-ranking civilian government officials. After the article went public, McChrystal promptly met with Obama and tendered his resignation earlier today. He will be replaced by General David Petraeus.

McChrystal—and his staff members—are all entitled to their opinions. Heck, their opinions might even be right! Even so, McChrystal should be smart enough (and experienced enough) to understand the chain of command. You make your opinions known to your superiors privately, and then accept their judgment and follow their orders. You don’t insult them, especially not in a public forum, and you always treat them with honor and respect.

Our military forces answer to the civilian government and, whatever McChrystal might personally think of that government, its officials outrank him. Elected and appointed civilian leaders are entitled to appropriate respect and deference from our military officials, whatever they might think of their policies and personalities. I cannot understand why an experienced, professional military leader like McChrystal would allow himself to land in this position but, at least, he handled it honorably after the fact by apologizing for his poor judgment and resigning.

Insubordination is not accepted in the ranks of our armed forces; had McChrystal insulted his military superiors in this way he quite possibly would have faced court-martial for it. If McChrystal had not resigned, then Obama would have had to fire him. He had to go.

Website 21.2 In Development

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I’ve started some preliminary work on a minor update to the site which, when done, will bring the version to 21.2. Believe it or not, it’s been six months since the last minor update and over a year since the last top-to-bottom redesign. I’m still pretty happy with it, but—as happens every-so-often with me—I’m starting to feel like I ought to update it just for the sake of updating it. I also want to try out some cool new jQuery and WordPress tricks I’ve been learning.

So far, my experimental development version has . . . nothing all that great, at least from the reader’s perspective. I’ve added support for the new menu system in WordPress 3.0, which will make it easier for me to make changes to the menus when I need to (and make sure the Site Map and menu are always in sync). I’ve also hacked around on WP-Super-Cache so I can enable WordPress caching on my theme without screwing up the desktop vs. mobile versions, which will speed things up a bit for everybody when it goes live.

Other than that, I don’t really have much planned yet . . . so if you have any requests, now is the time. What do you love about the site? What do you hate about it? Let me know.

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.