Independence Day Grab-Bag

I hope you all had a safe and enjoyable Fourth of July.  In honor of Independence Day I’ve prepared a special triple-feature for you: a grab-bag of news items representing the three biggest threats to your individual liberties and well-being as an American: Big Business, Big Religion, and Big Government.  These categories, while not perfect, adequately cover most groups, individuals, political movements, and ideologies at work in the world right now which threaten your freedoms: freedom of speech, economic freedom, scientific freedom, artistic freedom, and property rights, including the environment-oceans, atmosphere, groundwater, climate-which is our mutual property.

The categories aren’t mutually-exclusive, there are internal divisions within the groups, and some individuals or factions might actually pursue the agenda of another group, even if it may be to the detriment of themselves or their own class.  For example, a wealth corporate executive, a man who most would assume would pursue the interests of Big Business, might actually give money and political support to the advancement to the cause of either Big Religion or Big Government, even if such might harm his business interests in the long-term.  Also, it should be noted that both Big Business and Big Religion seek to harness the power of Big Government-the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful of the trio-to pursue their own agendas.  Big Government helps the other two grow, but as it is also the most directly accountable to the people and the most powerful of the three, it can be used to crush down the other two to manageable levels before cutting itself down to size.  Government must be the means the people have to defend their rights, and thus it must occasionally intervene in personal matters, including matters of commerce and religion, but just as there is not always martial law, the government ought to be, in its day-to-day state, small and unobtrusive.

First, let’s start off with Big Government:

Venezuela Oil Rigs

In Ayn Rand’s famous and much-maligned novel (and, let’s be honest, enormously long author tract) Atlas Shrugged a railroad line belonging to Taggart Transcontinental is seized and nationalized by Mexican government.  Protagonist Dagny Taggart, having foreseen such a move by the Mexican government, had fortunately taken action to cut the company’s losses by cutting staff, leaving only one outdated wood-burning locomotive operating the line, and moving every piece of company property possible out of Mexico.  Dagny never liked the idea of opening a railway line in Mexico to begin with-what could her company profit, she asked, from opening a line in an impoverished nation whose government didn’t respect property rights?  Her brother, the bleeding-heart James, had said that it was their humanitarian duty to invest in Mexico, to help raise the Mexican people up to the level of the United States.  Now fifty-three years after its publication, life has imitated art: the Venezuelan government, ruled by the self-proclaimed Socialist Hugo Chavez, has nationalized 11 oil rigs owned by an American company, Helmerich and Payne. (more…)

The Gulf Oil Spill and the Future of Energy

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
But from what I’ve tasted of desire,
We’ll perish by oil, not ice or fire.

(Apologies to Mr. Frost)

We have now passed day 65 of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and things keep getting more and more ludicrous.  Obama’s moratorium on deepwater drilling-one of the few sensible things he’s done in response to this crisis-was overturned by a judge who, surprise of the century, turns out to own stock in BP.  Secretary of the Interior Salazar has failed to purge Mineral Management Servive of oil industry shills, a BP robot crashed into the containment dome, forcing the company to remove the containment vessel and once more unleash the full volume of oil spewing from the damaged piping and blowout capacitor, and a device made by Kevin Costner, of all people, is working wonders at separating out the oil!  It’d be hilarious if it was fiction, but alas, this is reality.  When the Coast Guard is allowed to prevent the Louisianans from setting up a blockade of barges to block the spread of the slick because some of the vessels might not have up-to-date fire extinguishers, it becomes rather obvious that this entire response is botched to hell and back, and the crisis is not over yet.

Last week our brave president-the one who has to take golf breaks for the good of the country-delivered a national address from the Oval Office concerning the tremendous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and how he and his administration, fifty days in to the worst environmental disaster in recent history, were working to rectify the situation.  His speech was equal parts empty rhetoric, blame-shifting, and use of the tragedy to advance his own agenda.  All the words in the world cannot compensate for his administration’s failure to prevent this catastrophe, their initial inaction, and continued foot-dragging, inaction, and ineptitude of the federal government.  When the Coast Guard is allowed to prevent the Louisianans from setting up a blockade of barges to block the spread of the slick because some of the vessels might not have up-to-date fire extinguishers, it becomes rather obvious that this entire response is botched to hell and back.  Political analyst David Gergen said on Anderson Cooper’s program on CNN that this speech was Obama’s last chance to make up for prior inaction and to win over the American people, and that, in his opinion, he failed to do so.

Around the same time last week the major news networks began reporting about another deepwater BP oil platform named Atlantis. It is deeper and pumps more oil than the Deepwater Horizon, and 90% of its safety documentation is missing.  This wouldn’t be as frightening were it not for BP’s over 700 past egregious and willful safety violations. (more…)

Holding Media Accountable: How the Huffington Post Spins Data

2010 Multi‐state Survey on Race & Politics

Tea Party Poll

Tea Party, June 1

Another day, and yet another meaningless poll which is completely misconstrued by the media, this time courtesy of University of Washington and the Huffingtonpost.com.    With the headline “More Than Half Of Tea Party Supporters Say Gays And Lesbians Have Too Much Political Power (POLL)”, The Huff Post is spinning this small poll in Washington state as yet further proof that the Tea Partiers are all horrible, ignorant, racist, homophobic, and “downright mean”; I wish they could have told that to the short-haired, boot-clad, “Marriage Equality California” t-shirt wearing woman I saw visiting the display booths at the local Tea Party rally I attended, or all the non-white Tea Party protestors.  Clearly those poor people were not aware that they were part of some covertly racist and homophobic terrorist organization run by lunatics.

One should never trust a news story about a poll, or even the charts or conclusions the pollsters have formulated.  Instead one must look at the actual polling data and methodology to judge the validity of its conclusions, and luckily the article had the link to all that right in the first sentence.  While those who the study classifies as “true” Tea Partiers diverge from what the people conducting the study classify as the “mainstream” opinion (if we’re defining the mainstream American opinion by the 2000 people in Washington surveyed in this study) on many issues, on some issues the Tea Party people in Washington are just exaggerated expression of what the majority (again, according to the data set they’re going on) believes.  For example, a majority of both the people surveyed AND those classified by the pollsters disapprove of the job being done by the current U.S. congress, by 60% and 80%, respectively. Majorities of both support the AZ immigration law, by 88 and 52 percent. While their stances on LGBT issues my seem unpalatable to many of us Californians, this is a poll of people in one state (and, again, according to the people formulating the data, they’re categorizing the opinions of only 335 people within that group as the “Tea Party position”), which the Huffing Glue Post is trying to use as an accurate description of a nationwide movement. Their purpose, of course, is to continue hyping the “Tea Partiers are all ignorant, fat, racist, homophobic rednecks” meme which the media has been promoting since last summer’s town hall meetings.

So yeah, no, nice try though HP. (more…)

No on 14 and 16

2010 Multi‐state Survey on Race & Politics

Well, the June primaries are less than a week away, and like any California election this month’s ballot is loaded with propositions.  I don’t have the sufficient level of obsessiveness to go through the pros and cons of all the initiatives, so for this entry I’ve targeted what I feel are the two worst props.  These Propositions are especially deceptive, and I feel the need to inform the voters of their

Prop 14 is being billed as an “open primary” proposition.  It is more akin to an “incumbent protection” bill.  The “Top-two” system described by the bill has been used in Louisiana, where it neither advanced moderate politicians nor increased the viability of third party candidates, as advocates of Prop 14 claim it will do for California.  The “Top Two” system will in fact crush third parties, but it gets worse.  Under a top-two system in an overwhelmingly Republican district the top two could both be Republicans, thus denying the Democrats the chance to even have a candidate, and the reverse in overwhelmingly Democrat districts.  Needless to say, such a system would also mean death to the smaller parties, denying their voters even so much as a chance to vote for their parties’ candidates in the general elections.  It’s no surprise then that virtually every political party in the state, from the big two to the smaller parties such as the Greens and Libertarians, are opposed to Prop 14.

The proposition also allows candidates to choose not to list their party affiliation, allowing politicians to deceive and mislead unwary voters of their true political affiliations.

Proposition 14 is a horribly deceitful ballot initiative, one that seeks to subvert the electorate’s genuine dissatisfaction with the current partisan gridlock in Sacramento and use it to solidify that very crooked system.  It’s little wonder that Governor Schwarzenegger and his “dream team” are behind it.  Sadly, the polls show that most Californian voters are as well, so it is imperative that as many of us work to spread the truth about this deceptive initiative.

Just as disingenuous is Proposition 16, the egregiously named “Taxpayers Right to Vote Act”.  According to Ballotpedia (a site I know nothing about, so I cannot attest to it’s bias or lack thereof):

“ If Proposition 16 is approved by voters, it will take a two-thirds vote of the electorate before a public agency could enter the retail power business. This will make it more difficult than it is currently for local entities to form either municipal utilities, or community wide clean electricity districts called Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs). Forming a local municipal utility or a CCA, if this measure is enacted, will require the approval, through election, of 2/3rds of the voters who live in the area of the would-be local municipal utility or CCA.[1]

Pacific Gas & Electric is the primary financial sponsor of the initiative, having contributed $46.1 million through May 25, 2010. That makes PG&E the Goliath in a David-v-Goliath battle, since Prop 16′s opponents have raised less than $50,000 through mid-May.[2],[3]”

http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_16_%28June_2010%29

Like the proponent of Proposition 14, the proponents for 16 are trying to tap into current voter discontent, running ads that mention government takeovers of local electric providers and using your tax dollars to do so.  The reality is that this PG&E-financed ballot initiative is merely an attempt to solidify the company’s strangling monopoly on utilities in California.  Honestly, is there another electric company to which Californians can switch to, one with lower rates and better service?  Yeah, I thought not.   Contrary to it’s naming, the proposition would limit the power of voters; while all state propositions only require a simple majority to pass, this amendment would change the state constitution so that a super-majority of two-thirds of all voters are required to approve before a local government could go into the utilities business.  Luckily, despite the round-the-clock advertising and millions of dollars spent, the polls show that approval for the proposition has been steadily declining for months. I’m hopeful that by next Tuesday the California voters will be well-enough informed to see through the lies and vote against Props 14 and 16.

Best of UCSB 2010: Polls Closed

The polls for this year’s Best of UCSB have closed. Look for the Daily Nexus‘ “Best Of” issue on February 16th!

Thank you to everyone who voted! Look for the Daily Nexus‘ “Best Of” issue on February 16th!

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