Wrong Decision, Wrong Solution

I preface this entry by noting that I'm no "law expert", but I did take Communications Law TWICE (once in undergrad and once for my Masters, no not because I flunked once), and was a TA for such a class for two more semesters. I'm qualified enough to teach the class myself... and I'd rather not get into why I'm currently not. Anyway, suffice to say I know the First Amendment pretty well.

So can anyone tell me where in the First Amendment it says ANYTHING about MONEY? Or corporations for that matter?

By now, most people who follow the news know about the Supreme Court of the United States (and yes, that's how you write it) decision last week that not only threw out much of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, but also decades of election law along with it. The Court pretty much ruled that money equals speech, and to deny anyone the opportunity to use their money to support a candidate in any way is to deny them their right to free speech. And apparently this extends to corporations as well as people (more on that later). The sad thing about it is this case really became a campaign-finance issue through the back door... it was about movie attacking Hillary Clinton that came out during the 2008 Democratic primary process. Apparently a watchdog group thought it was a "campaign ad" and therefore illegal according to McCain-Feingold. That's kinda silly... I mean by that rationale, we could have prevented "Fahrenheit 9-11" from coming out right before the 2004 election. The issue at hand was what exactly constituted a "campaign ad", and clearly a movie does not qualify. Instead, the Supreme Court went completely 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

Anyway, right-wingers are overjoyed. So are unions, who also can spend whatever they like now. So is George Soros, I'm sure. He probably wants the Court to next throw out the individual limits on donating money directly to candidates so he can personally bankroll President Obama's 2012 re-election effort... instead of just funneling it through the MoveOns and Media Matters of the world.

Since I have read Glenn Beck's books, I do tend to think, "What would the Founding Fathers say" about certain things. I'm pretty sure they didn't intend free speech to be connected to money and for that right to be extended to corporations for the purpose of electing career politicians. They would probably look at corporations and 527s and unions and PACs and tell them, "You already have freedom of speech... it's called PUBLIC RELATIONS. You can print anything you want as an organization. That's it. Money is NOT speech." The biggest problem with this, as I have said before, is that if money does indeed equal speech, then that means that freedom of speech is not equal for all Americans. The amount of freedom of speech you have depends on the amount of money you're willing to pay to express it. The rich can spend at will and drown out everyone else. Ever feel like you have no voice in politics because you're just a regular Joe Six-Pack? Yeah, a lot of us do. Well, the Supreme Court just made it law.

In last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist/radio talk show host Michael Smerconish, who really seems to come off as a centrist on a lot of issues (he's even had the president on his show) staunchly defended the SCOTUS ruling and supported the overturning of rulings limiting personal contributions. He thinks it is unfair that people can spend millions to attack a candidate and the person cannot defend himself with his own money. EXCUSE ME? He CAN... through his party's campaign committees, the national committees, and any number of organizations and PACs... it's just that these groups don't defend him as much as they retaliate against the original attacker.

He says that these organizations that bankroll attack ads (they're ALWAYS attack ads) are simply the little people banding together to make their voices heard. If only. Again, MoveOn gets a lot of its money from billionaire Soros, and unions and corporations bankroll a lot of these advocacy groups. The American Petroleum Institute that is always running ads saying we should drill for oil? Yeah, that's the oil companies. How many concerned citizens can actually pool together enough money to buy campaign time? Well, if you're wealthy citizens, then sure you can do that. Which goes back to my original point about free speech now being tilted to the rich. And unions run ads that many of their rank and file members disagree with, same with corporations and their employees. Yeah, the Syracuse Peace Council can get face time and column inches every time they march against something, but what are the odds you'll ever see a TV ad from them around election time?

As bad as this SCOTUS decision was, the immediate response from the left was even worse… they now want “corporate personhood” revoked. By that, I mean the fact that corporations are treated like people in regard to how you legally deal with such entities. It is a common-law tradition that dates back to England. The claims that such status comes from some legal clerk in a 19th-century SCOTUS decision are nothing more than urban legend. But now the left-wingers behind this hope that they can ride the wave of anger at Wall Street to get this accomplished. Why? Because they consider corporate influence on government to be “fascism”. One Inquirer letter-writer even said "you can look it up in the dictionary." Well, clearly that person does not read this blog... because I DID. Just a couple of entries ago... but for his purposes I will actually print the Random House dictionary definition of fascism:

Fascism –noun
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
2. (sometimes initial capital letter) the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.
3. (initial capital letter) a fascist movement, esp. the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922–43.

Anyone see “corporations” in there? Me neither. Another definition states that the only difference between fascism and socialism is that fascism does not mandate that government control the economy or that everyone be economically equal. As such, it's easy for those on the left to marry fascism to capitalism and infer the role of corporations... but it's just not there. But I digress...

Suppose this movement against "corporate personhood" were to succeed. If we no longer consider corporations to have the same rights as people, then they should not have the same responsibilities either. If “corporate personhood” is abolished, you can kiss corporate taxes goodbye. If a corporation fouls the air or dirties the waters, don’t expect to be able to sue them anymore. All those banking regulations you liberals want so badly? Can’t do them… can’t prosecute a “non-person”. Sure you can go after the bigwig who ordered the fouling of the air or the unscrupulous behavior, but isn’t it so much easier to fine the ying-yang out of the offending company?

The problem is when knee-jerk liberals make knee-jerk reactions to bad events, they fail to consider WHAT ELSE could happen if they got their way. I'll bet liberals would probably try to repeal the Law of Unintended Consequences if they could... that is, if it were an actual law.

The correct solution is one actually being advanced by Democrats… force shareholders to vote on corporate ad buys… but this needs to be extended to unions as well. Democrat leaders marched before the cameras and decried how Big Oil and Wal-Mart and Evil Insurance could wield influence over elections but not one of them mentioned the influence of UAW or SEIU or other large unions. It needs to go both ways. That is a sensible solution, one that will no doubt enrage right-wingers... but they're wrong. Plain and simple. Take it from someone who's studied this stuff a time or two...

Iron Chef? More Like Tin Chef

Let me start by stating something obvious: I am not a very good cook. My parents love to cook, my relatives enjoy making culinary delights, I even have friends who blog about their love of food preparation. I'm not as enthusiastic. In true Irish fashion, my philosophy is "if you can boil it, I can make it", and that's pretty much it. I rock at macaroni and cheese or various derivatives thereof, I can use the oven to cook chicken or make french fries. As a young single guy, that's pretty handy, because it gives me more time to do guy things... or to do nothing. Whatev.

However, as time has passed, it has become abundantly clear to me that nothing snaps a guy into action like boredom. Being bored with the same things for dinner again and again, or just deciding, "Hey, I've got nothing going on, let me see if I can throw something together in the oven." Granted, as a graduate student, these moments of boredom don't happen very often (and likely won't happen at all once this semester really gets going), so one must take advantage. And considering I'm the son of a food service manager and a Masters degree-holder in home economics, it's about damn time I started using the talents I got from heredity.

So recently, I took a few turns at cooking for myself. I started with my mom's tuna noodle casserole recipe; after all, it's winter time and that means comfort food.

A lot of cooking has to do with timing. This is a skill that I, as the King of Bad Timing, am notably deficient at. My first attempt to make tuna noodle casserole suffered from the fact that some recipes are best prepared when you are multi-tasking. If you follow a recipe to the letter and do things one piece at a time, it will take twice as long. This is not good, because I'm a guy, and I want to get back to doing something else or doing nothing. So I made up the concoction that the noodles would go into... then had to do the noodles. This led to a very exasperated 30 minutes of waiting for the water to boil and then cooking the noodles, while I periodically had to go back and stir up this goop AGAIN. End result? Eh. Noodles could've been better but it served its purpose.

Having accomplished this, it was now time to get even more adventurous. Over time, I have been given "cookbooks for guys" by various members of my family. I figured it's about time I start using them. Also, I need to eat more meat to help with my workout strategies. So I decided I should make chicken in a way that doesn't involve throwing some name-brand chicken strips on a plate and sticking them in the microwave. This would, of course, require a more focused trip to the grocery store than I'm used to. I shop for groceries the same way I shop for anything, the "guy" way: I know what I want (usually the same things every time), I go in, I get them, and get out, as quickly as possible... so I can get back to doing other things or doing nothing. Last weekend, I happened to be out in the suburbs getting a haircut and doing some banking, so I decided to make a stop in lovely Media, PA and go to that trend-setter of 21st century grocery stores, Trader Joe's.

First of all, I should describe Media. It's a very nice-looking small town, a beautiful Main Street, looks exactly like a small town should. However, it's the 21st-century blue-state version of Main Street USA, which means that Main Street is dotted with coffeehouses, art shops, and boutiques, in a town that prides itself on being "the first fair-trade community", next to a major interstate artery that the locals blocked for over 20 years (and you thought Average Syracusan was bad). As such, I discovered quickly when I entered Trader Joe's that this was a place that BELONGED in Media, and I DID NOT. I get the notion of selling only your own products (after all, why pay an evil corporation to carry their products), and people have shown they will pay more for organic/free-range/chemical-free food, but I quickly realized that this is just not my scene. However, I did manage to find a package of hormone-free chicken legs for 2 bucks, so I grabbed that, some all-natural turkey bologna, and a jug of "certified organic" mango lemonade, went through the checkout... and promptly went to Acme and bought Corn Flakes. Kellogg's Corn Flakes. THAT'S America, baby!

Anyway, I bring my chicken home, chicken that says "keep refrigerated"... and I promptly put it in the freezer. Oops. Not the first time I've done something like this.

After having to take an extra day to thaw it out by putting it in the fridge where it was SUPPOSED to go, I was finally ready to give it a go. I get the cookbook out, look for a nice oven-fried chicken recipe, and I find a recipe for a sort-of poor man's Shake & Bake. The recipe suggests that I make a nice crunchy coating for the chicken which requires, among other things, CORN FLAKES. Even the King of Bad Timing can pull off a miracle once in a while. And I had all the other spices and such, because my mom gave me those once upon a time... ya know, in the unlikely event that I may actually use them someday. The end result? Eh. It was okay but when you make fried chicken and the skin falls off when you bite into it, that kinda ruins the point of putting a coating on it. Also the "putting your mix in a paper bag and shaking it" routine is a little clunky. The first chicken leg came out of the bag looking pretty good, the second was alright, and the third was... hardly covered at all. When I went back and used the recipe again, I just took the crushed corn flakes and spices and sprinkled it on the chicken directly. Cut out the middle man. After all, as I say so often, necessity is the mother of invention, but laziness is the father. It pretty much came out the same.

So now that I have successfully broadened my cooking horizons and expanded my repertoire, what's next for me? Beef bourguignon? Duck a l'orange? Shrimp scampi? Uh, no. The semester is ramping up and I am sure that soon I will have no time or interest in anything beyond English muffin pizzas. Besides, I haven't had a total cooking abortion yet, so maybe it's best to quit while I'm ahead?

The Beauty of Gray

During my semester break, I read Glenn Beck's Arguing with Idiots, and found large parts of it to be very enlightening. This column draws inspiration from both Beck and one of my grad school professors... who I'm sure is VERY flattered to be mentioned in the same sentence as Glenn Beck...

A common theme running through this particular professor's class was that when things are set up as a binary, one side vs. another, it's never a good thing. Up/down, black/white, right/wrong, Leno/Conan, "you're with us or you're with the terrorists", and ESPECIALLY conservative/liberal or right/left. Binary dualism means there is no middle ground. It's one thing or the other, and in today's politics, it is too easy to be classified into one of the two boxes with no room to maneuver or for escape. There are only two ways to see something, and if you're not on our side then we will attack you with everything we've got. Just give us an opening and we'll let you have it.

Even when the response is deserved, it still makes you scratch your head and wonder why we do these things. Take for example the recent stupid remarks made by the leader of the Republican Party about Haiti. Everything is politicized now, and for both sides, it's all about scoring political points (or accusing the other side of trying to score political points... so you can score political points). Like I've said before, with regard to tactics, the Right and Left are exactly THE SAME. More proof lies in the Republican Party's strategy for 2010. I told you the Democrats' strategy (tie opponents to Bush... again), but the crux of that strategy back in 2006 was that they were nationalizing all the local races, which goes against everything politics should be. As offensive as it was to political philosophers of all stripes, it worked, which is why the Republicans have admitted their strategy for 2010... is to nationalize every race. And they have said their strategy will be 80% trashing Obama and 20% saying what they would do. When you're only doing that 20% of the time, you may as well not be doing it at all, which is precisely what Democrats will say. But then again, this "80/20" strategy is pretty much what the Dems did 4 years ago.

On ABC's "This Week", uber-leftie Katrina Vanden Heuvel from The Nation said we were in a time of unprecedented "rhetorical savagery", which was pretty funny considering that half of what she had said during the segment was a perfect example of rhetorical savagery. Which only underscores my point. She decries what Republicans are doing while trotting out that homosexual slur used to describe Tea Party activists several times and then stating that the main reason to pass health care is to repudiate all the evil that George W. Bush did to the middle class. In fact, I wonder if Ms. Vanden Heuvel would consider this missive from MSNBC's Ed Schultz to be rhetorical savagery.

The only difference between the two sides are the ideological positions into which they have entrenched themselves. And what does that have to do with you? Well, you're supposed to take a side, which means you have to march in lockstep with one side or the other and agree with them on anything. If you don't, you automatically become identified with the other side, the "enemy". If you're conservative on 90% of issues but differ on abortion or gay rights, you're a liberal. If you're liberal on 90% of issues but you disagree with single-payer health care, you're a right-winger. These two sides have become so much entwined with the two major political parties that conservative and Republican automatically go together, as do liberal and Democrat. And the party in power must get its way; bipartisanship, compromise, and pragmatism are out the window.

We'd like to think that we can have a viable third party in American politics, but the truth is they've never lasted for very long. American politics, love them or hate them, are a two-party world, and always have been, ever since the rest of the Founders disregarded George Washington's warnings not to get involved in a partisan system. At first, you had the Federalists (the party of Alexander Hamilton) and you had the Jeffersonian Democrats. The Federalists evolved into the Whigs, who evolved into today's Republican Party. The Jeffersonians evolved into Jacksonians and eventually evolved into today's Democratic Party. The Populists, Bull Moosers, Dixiecrats, and Reform Party types all had their 15 minutes and then their ideas got absorbed/co-opted by one of the two major parties. And so it would be if the Tea Party types split. If moderates formed a centrist party (which has never really happened), that might be the exception to the rule.

But it almost feels like those who have tossed aside party affiliation for being independents (most of whom are moderates) follow the teachings of Marx... not Karl, Groucho: "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." For most of these people, being stuck in a black vs. white situation is completely untenable. As Live sang, "This is not a black and white world." Most people see give-and-take as part of life, not something to be avoided at all costs. They see the world as having not just black, white, and gray areas, but having MANY different shades of gray.

I see myself less and less as a Republican and more of a libertarian. Which is where Beck comes in... he too seems to identify with being libertarian. In his book, he decried "nanny state" regulations of all stripes, including those put in by the supposed champions of small government, the Republicans, because the heavy influence of the Christian Right causes them to believe that government SHOULD tell you what to do when it comes to morality. For any Republican to say they are for less-intrusive government and then say that there should be government-enforced definitions of "marriage" and sin taxes and a War on Drugs is, quite simply, a HYPOCRITE.

If there is a binary to deal with in American politics today, it is between the libertarians and those who are only out for power. I can't really put a label on them. Some would call them "socialists", but that doesn't describe people on the political Right who lust for power; some would call them "fascists" but they're not really for authoritarian dictatorship, which is the dictionary definition of fascism (NOT mere alliance between corporations and government). So let's just say it's between libertarianism and lust for power. Yeah, it's not the easiest way to describe our political climate. Let's face it, when you were in Political Science 101 and your professor (if he was like mine) drew that line on the chalkboard to represent the political spectrum, and he/she said the left side is the liberal and the right side is the conservative, it was a pretty simple way to understand things. So left/right or liberal/conservative is pretty effective, but not completely accurate. Libertarians value personal freedom, liberty, freedom from government having power over them. Lust for power is pretty self-explanatory.

The problem is it rearranges the battlefield big time. This binary puts gay-rights activists and pro-choicers in the same camp as fiscal conservatives, it puts bible-thumpers on the same side as advocates of single-payer health care. Talk about politics making for strange bedfellows. But hey, that's just the way I see things, and if you think about it, you might see it that way too. And if you don't, that's cool too. That's all part of being a libertarian, live and let live.

Snow Blows

We got 1.2 inches of snow today here in Philadelphia. Even after the 23-inch blizzard they got a few weeks back, the TV weather people were acting like drivers should prepare for utter madness during their morning commute. But I guess that's the way things are in this town. The snow stopped falling by 9am; by Noon, it had already melted off the cars in my parking lot.

I just got back to Philly the other day after 3 weeks in Syracuse over the holidays. As we all know, they get much more snow up there. A good two feet or more fell the last week I was in town, and unlike the one-shot deal they got here in Philly, this was the kind of snow that just piles up endlessly. It keeps coming... and coming... and it doesn't seem to stop. Ever. Think Chinese water-torture in the form of lake effect snowfall. It was even worse 45 minutes the north in Fulton, which made the national news for... the only reason for which Oswego County EVER makes national news. Fulton got 55 inches of snow.

But we who hail from upstate New York are hearty souls. We don't get fazed by a good heavy continuous snowfall (though we do get really frustrated and sore from all the shoveling). Hell, in the midst of this two feet-plus that fell, I went out to the bar at least twice... as long as the roads are well enough plowed or salted for me to get home, I'ma get my drink on! That's how we are in Central New York. However, this feeling of invincibility also has the tendency to make us REALLY BAD DRIVERS when it snows. Usually this only occurs the first few times it snows, as it has been at least 4 or 5 months since the last time we had to put up with driving in snow (okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration... in fact they just had a record 9-month snowless streak in Syracuse before all this recent madness started). But people usually fall into a routine, at least until the weather warms up in February (usually around the week that Winterfest happens... it's like clockwork), and then when we get snow again in March or even April, it's like the first day of winter all over again.

Lately however, bad winter driving seems to be the case all the time. I blame SUVs. I'm certainly no environmentalist who wants to get rid of all the gas-guzzlers, but the mentality that SUV drivers have when it snows is foolish. "I have 4-wheel drive, I can drive at my normal speed in this weather!" Uh, no, you can't. But there they go, whizzing by you at top speed and making you fear for your life because, well, they're bigger than you and they are going quite fast.

There seem to be three kinds of drivers in this type of weather: 1) the aforementioned psychos driving their SUVs 55-65 miles per hour on the highway even when there is a good inch or so of snow pack on the roads; 2) the uber-cautious drivers who see snow and immediately come to a crawl on the roads (even the highways), people who do not just exist in places like Philadelphia or DC or Atlanta where it doesn't snow often but also in snow havens like the 'Cuse; and 3) you. See, you're a smart driver who knows his/her way around a good snowstorm and has been out in this mess countless times before... sometimes you may slip into the behavior of the uber-cautious but for the most part you know your limitations and you stick to them. Which means that you drive your car while being super-afraid of EVERYONE ELSE. Think about it, when you talk about the way people drive in winter weather, what do you always say? "It's not me, it's EVERYONE ELSE who drives psychotically on the roads!" Admit it, you do... and if you don't, then you're probably in category #1.

Regardless, snow is not an excuse for stupid. Snow does not mean that red lights become optional. If you whiz right through a light well after it turns red and your excuse is you couldn't stop because you would skid... that's what the YELLOW LIGHT is for! It means slow down! That gives you plenty of time to avoid skidding into a red light. Stop signs are similarly not optional. But the most fun comes any time you get to your destination and you go in search of a parking space. Drivers (at least the ones in upstate New York) seem to operate by a series of self-imposed "winter parking rules" when it snows. What this means is if you can't see the lines in the parking lot, PARK ANYWHERE! This includes taking up two spaces at once (or even three... yes I've seen it happen), parking out of the space so you're actually in the road going between two rows of parking spaces, and other similarly stupid maneuvers. The net effect of such winter parking rules is that you end up with fewer parking spaces and more people circling around the parking lot... and oh isn't that a lot of fun?

This warning against stupidity also applies to people who choose to get around in snowy weather by walking. We've had a lot of incidents in the winter time where people have been hit by cars because they were walking in the streets. The excuse we hear is the sidewalks aren't shoveled, so municipalities pass laws requiring residents to shovel the sidewalks in front of their homes so that people don't walk in the streets. Guess what, folks... IT DOESN'T MAKE A DIFFERENCE! The last couple days I was in Syracuse, I noticed not one or two but SEVERAL people STILL walking in the street even when all the sidewalks on that block were shoveled! You can't change these people's habits, apparently. One more argument against nanny-state regulations, I guess.

Unfortunately these walkers (and anyone who is out trying to dig out or brush off their cars) have to deal with not just the crazy SUV driver flying up the street. If you live in the Syracuse neighborhood I was staying in the last few weeks, you've also had to deal with CRAZY SNOWPLOW DRIVERS! Snowplow drivers are not supposed to go any faster than 35 miles per hour... on the HIGHWAY. This is because these are big hulking vehicles and they are not built to fly down the road, certainly not any better than SUVs are. But I swear this snowplow operator was doing 40 in a residential area! I literally dove out of the way of the guy at least twice because I was convinced he was not going to be able to go around me without flipping the thing.

So after dealing with all of this madness, you can imagine how relieved I was to escape the Lake Ontario Snow Machine and make my way back to Pennsylvania. As I crossed into the state on I-81, I saw electronic signs warning of "Snow Squalls Ahead." All I saw the whole way down were occasional flurries... maybe that's what people in PA consider to be "snow squalls"? I can't even imagine how my friends here dealt with two feet of snow at one time. Apparently, they ordered a lot of pizza. The few pizza joints that could operate in the storm did so by delivering pizzas on snowmobiles, proving they were nothing if not resourceful. All I know is I have no fear of anything that could possibly happen down here the rest of this winter, because I've seen it all living in Syracuse...