Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

State of the Union Address Tonight

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President Barack Obama (D) is scheduled to give the annual State of the Union address tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST before a joint session of Congress, followed by a Republican Response to be delivered by Governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA). This will be Obama’s first official State of the Union address.

As I do every year, I encourage all of my readers to watch both the State of the Union address and the opposition response. I recommend the unfettered and uninterrupted coverage from C-SPAN, but the addresses will also be available on most broadcast channels and cable news networks.

The Constitution requires that the president report to Congress annually on the state of the union, but does not specify the method or form of this report (Article II, Section 3). The in-person State of the Union address has been a tradition since 1913. Transcripts of all 1945-2009 addresses before joint sessions of Congress, including each State of the Union, are available from C-SPAN.

WHO Defends Handling of Swine Flu ‘Pandemic’

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The World Health Organization (WHO) is trying to defend its handling of last year’s H1N1 swine flu pandemic. As BBC News so aptly puts it:

When a pandemic was declared last June most European countries changed their health priorities to accommodate thousands of expected patients, including spending millions of euros on vaccines for H1N1. . . .But it has since become clear that although 14,000 people worldwide died from swine flu, and millions more were infected, it is a mild flu with a lower mortality than seasonal influenza.

Of course, any of us who were paying attention have known this from the beginning. The H1N1 hysteria never made any sense to a level-headed observer. Now, as the BBC reports, the Council of Europe has raised questions about whether the WHO’s irrational actions relating to H1N1 had something to do with their links to the drug companies that got massive contracts to produce vaccines. Fascinating.

Of course, if the WHO is corrupt, that still doesn’t explain why the governments of the world—including our own under President Barack Obama (D) and his administration—went along with the charade without any independent review. I like to think that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) don’t go nuts over every breathless decree from the WHO without double-checking first, but maybe I’m being naive.

I’m With CoCo

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I haven’t mentioned it before because there are much, much more important things going on in the world, but I am a big fan of Conan O’Brien. As such, I was quite unhappy to see what NBC did to him by effectively forcing him out of The Tonight Show to be replaced by former Tonight host Jay Leno. I had nothing against Leno and watched Tonight fairly regularly during his tenure, but O’Brien was definitely much more funny and entertaining. When I was younger I would sit through Leno pretty much just to watch O’Brien after, until I got too old to stay up that late ;-).

Obviously the villain in this whole fiasco was NBC and the executives there that made this idiotic decision. O’Brien might not have as many ‘fans’ as Leno, but they are much more vocal and passionate. Plus, Leno is now ‘damaged goods’ and will likely never regain much of the audience he had before (and he has to really retire sooner or later anyway). I really don’t understand what NBC’s end-game is here. And yes, Leno does deserve some of the blame for this mess. The honorable thing would have been to refuse to return to Tonight out of respect for his colleague.

It took Leno almost two years to win his time-slot on The Tonight Show after he took over (in another NBC debacle) from Johnny Carson. O’Brien deserved at least the same amount of faith and loyalty from NBC that Leno got. Personally, as a matter of principle, I don’t intend to watch Tonight when it returns with Leno, and I’ll follow O’Brien—’CoCo’—to whichever network he ends up on. Supposedly, Fox is already trying to pick him up.

Retail Decoration and Engrish Photos

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Over the last several days I’ve taken some photos of random, funny stuff at local retailers and restaurants. Included below is a scary cardboard bear from Michael’s, two mannequins from Dulles Town Center Mall, and some good Engrish from a local Chinese restaurant Melissa and I frequent. Enjoy!

Supreme Court Rules for First Amendment

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When I (somewhat reluctantly) endorsed Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for President in 2008, I spent almost 1/3 of the endorsement criticizing some of McCain’s policy stances and record. One of the items I criticized most harshly was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, colloquially known as ‘McCain-Feingold’ campaign finance reform. The law in question did many things I find objectionable and have long decried as violating the First Amendment.

When the authors of the Bill of Rights wrote “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” their intent was to prohibit government restriction of political speech. The fact that it also protects your right to stand on a street corner and scream at people about aliens (for example) is just an added bonus. The core purpose of the First Amendment was to protect political speech in all its forms. The U.S. Supreme Court has fairly-consistently ruled (until recently) that almost any government regulation of ‘political speech’ is invalid.

Donating money to political campaigns is, indeed, an exercise in free speech. If I choose to donate to Representative Whoosit’s reelection campaign, I have a right to do so. If I happen to have an extra $1,000,000 laying around and I feel like supporting Representative Whoosit with it, that’s my right. It’s my money, and (in this case) my spending is an exercise in political speech.

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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.