Just had all four of my wisdom teeth removed. Ouch.

There will be no more wisdom henceforth.

If you live in Indiana, you have the honor of voting for the great Mike Kole of the Libertarian Party to be your secretary of state. Trust me, if you love freedom in practice and not just in rhetoric, Mr. Kole is definitely worthy of your vote. You can read his campaign website here, and his blog here. When he lived in Cleveland he used to do a college radio show called Laissez Faire, which absolutely excellent.

And while I'm endorsing a big "L" Libertarian candidate, I might as well bring up something that's been bothering me lately. Why is it people who calim they want things to be "more fair" always say we need to be more bi-partisan, or that we need to give "equal time to the other side" on talk radio and what have you. This is America, land of individualism and diversity, shouldn't we be promoting polypartisanship?

Ohio finally has someone half-decent running for high political office (Ken Blackwell) for the first time I can remember, and it looks like he's going to lose. I can't believe that Bob Taft got his own ass re-elected as governor (though Tim Hagan was certainly not as formidable and opponent as Ted Strickland), and now his own dumb-assedness is costing Ohio a Blackwell victory. Also, while I've never gotten excited about our senators over here, the prospect of Sherrod Brown being my new senator just doesn't sit well with me at all.

As for the bigger picture, aren't the months leading up to the war the time to express your apprehensions? I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to criticize a war effort in progress, but if you can support, or at least not mind, the prospect of war, then threaten that we should pull out troops from a half-finished effort when it suddenly dawns on you that bad things can happen during a war. I'm not addressing this to anyone specifically, but there has to be millions of morons like this in our country if this is what is supposed to swing the election to the Democrats. Now, I would have been perfectly happy if our country had decided not to invade Iraq in the first place. While, I have held since before the war that I think the removal of a murderous/torturous dictatorship is a just premise for war, I also realize that that is an enormous endeavor that is not necessarilly a practical possibility. Of course, once we've committed the lives of troops to a war effort, we damn well better take it seriously. You can't run a profitable business from a voting booth, and you damn sure can't command a war in that way. I swear to God, the people here who really piss me off are the fickle "moderates" who don't take a damn shred of responsibility when making a moral decision regarding a war! These are the people who make the final decision on who runs the country, and they can't even take that seriously. Our biggest moral failure in Vietnam was pulling out and leaving millions to be slaughtered by the Vietcong. War should certainly be debated, but it should be debated by grown-ups who actually recognize both the horrors involved in going to war, as well as the horrors involved in remaining passive in certain situations (which often has far more horrific results than war, as was the case with allowing the Rwanda genocide to take place). When we first went into Iraq I drove myself near-insane with internal moral confliction. I have never felt 100% certain that I was right, even for a second, but from the moment an American soldier first set a boot on Iraqi soil, I've felt whole-heartedly that this thing needs to be seen through. I really don't care if it's seen through under a Republican or a Democrat, but I care a great deal about the fact that the war effort has been cast into a partisan political frame (thanks predominantly to all the political whores who voted "for the war" before they voted against it), and made propagandizing the public's perception of the war imperative for anyone in national politics who hopes to be successful. It really makes me sick that people feel that they have business voting if they can't think through a moral issue that is going to cost human lives either way they vote. That overwhelmingly beautiful sight of Iraqis with purple-dyed finger tips voting for the first time in their lives, I'm guessing that such a beautiful icon of freedom will not be seen again in my lifetime. I could be wrong, the Berlin Wall fell during my lifetime, but I sincerely doubt it. The strongest lingering memory of the entire Cold War in this country was not the collapse of that wall, but the American defeat in Vietnam. Now, I think we had the technical capacity to defeat the insurgency in Iraq and prevent civil war, but I think that our political environment completely ties the hands of our military. I hope I'm wrong about that, for the sake of Iraqis like Omar and Mohammed, who have a deep appreciation for the freedoms so many Americans take for granted (and most Americans don't even seem to understand).

Anyway, I sat down to just type a few lines for this post and that all came out. I guess it's about time I posted something new anyway.

Has it occurred to anyone that the so-called "War on Terror" is just a ploy to divert our attention from more pressing matters like the shortage of gay / bi- / curious / transgendered characters on Star Trek shows?

Michael Moore not answering your phone calls? Is Ward Churchill ignoring your emails? Cindy Sheehan won't even come to the door when you knock? Is Noam Chomsky pretending you don't exist?

Don't despair if your reliable sources of anti-American boilerplate are drying up on you! Why not try Hot Communist Talk?

It's funny.

Tales of woe here. Some of this stuff may be made up. "For some reason, they smell like clams" has a certain lack of credibility.

[I finally tweaked this to where it's publishable. Not great, but it'll do for now]

Let me begin with a summary: This was a Bad Thing.
Senator McCain's bill is the worst thing since bits of Lego on the floor at night. It dismantles and destroys the fundamental purpose of the first ammendment, though it does leave the superficial side affects untouched. It provides an even higher barrier to entry in politics. Finally, it does nothing to actually purify politics in any way. The excuse for this excreble morass is reformation of the current state of campaign finance, which is an issue comprised of nightmares. that is to say it is entirely without form or substance On the plus side, it does ban foreign donations and I'm pretty sure that this bill doesn't actually molest children.

Let's break this sucker down backwards. On the positive side, I have these two things:

One: Foreign donations. I have somewhat mixed feelings about these. On the one hand, seeing canidates get huge sums of money from places that don't necesarily have out best interests at heart leaves me feeling a little uneasy. On the other hand, accepting those large sums of money looks so bad, I wonder if it's even worth banning. It seems kind of like mandating that canidates not accept money for kicking puppies; you might make a huge profit, but you also commit political suicide.
Or not, come to think of it. I think Clinton may have taken Chinese cash, and it certainly didn't hurt him much. I'm less certain, but didn't Bush also take Saudi Money with a similar lack of penalty? So this section is actually probably a very good thing.

Two: I've checked, (here) and this bill is not a registered sex offender, so I feel confident now in saying that it doesn't molest children.

That is all the good things I can say about it. On the bad side though, I have four main issues, which I will continue discussing in reverse order:

Fourthly, that this is an issue comprised entirely of whimsy and flights of fancy. There is an excellent book that I recomend entitled Freakonomics. In this book, the author actually applies statistics to various things. For example, he looks at win ratios of sumo matches with specific characteristics to determine if match-fixing occurs (ans: extremely likely, for slightly convoluted but solid reasons) or at the patterns on standardized tests to check for teachers cheating (which has different patterns than students cheating). He also attempts to determine the effect that campaign spending actually has. The conclusion? Minimal. Canidates are historically unsuccesful at buying votes with advertising dollars. For a real-life example of this, consider Hearst (the one that Citizen Kane is based on). He controlled a huge slice of the media (like Rupert Murdoch, only much, much more so), was fabulously and opulantly wealthy, and ran for president.
He was a dismal failure.
At the same time, consider the actual amount spent on elections: it is less than the amount spent on chewing gum.

Thirdly, on the actual efficacy of this legislation: it has none. I would like to make this longer, but I don't really know how. Nominally, this should somehow clean up politics, by making politicians less indebted to their contributors, especially the large ones. Sure, there are slightly different hoops to jump through to get money, but they're just that: hoops, not barriers. Someone, please prove me wrong here.

Secondly, that it provides an even higher barrier to entry in politics. In reality, this is a series of barriers, like the Berlin Wall. First, you have a convoluted set of regulations, making compliance more difficult and time consuming, especially to a newcomer. Now, I personally enjoy complex rulesets in games, because mastering them gives me an advantage over most people. I'm cheap like that. Politics is the same way; with an already complex and increasingly more so body of legislation about what exactly canidates must do, the advantage goes to whoever has already mastered the rules. This perfectly describes almost all incumbents.
Now, if we assume, arguendo, that money is actually important, we again have a bifurcating barrier. First, because of the huge expenditures required and the new difficulty in gaining those funds, politics becomes exclusively a rich man's game (or woman's, lets not forget Teresa Heinz Kerry). Within that, who is more likely to have a big warchest lying around, an incumbant who ran four years ago (or six, or two) or a new challenger? This legislation has cemented the authority of those already in power to an unwholesome degree. Additionally, this means that an incumbant actually has a strong incentive to collect hard (and fabricate contentious issues to do so) during non-contentious elections. In his fashion he can build his war chest during the times when oversight is more lax and practice sanctimoniously strict compliance when next in the spotlight of a contentious election. Finally, within 60 days of an election is the prime time to critisize incumbants, and banning that just makes them that much harder to remove. This brings me to my final point though.

Primarily, I am deeply dismayed that this legislation was able to pass when it runs directly and clearly counter to the letter and spirit of the first ammendment. Is there anything simpler than that ammendment? We hold it so sacred that we have "discovered" a right to privacy in it, we have extended it and applied it to all forms of government, we allow anything that might concievably be speech, and we do this because always, there was the terrible spectre of actual and real cesorship looming in the background. Well, while everyone was busy shadowboxing, the real thing snuck up and sucker-punched us.
You know what? I'm done. Either you can fill in all the reasons why banning free speech and political discourse is bad, or you really don't have much business here anyway. If there's some third group, feel free to contact me and I'll fill you in, but really? This is the fundamental basis of democracy here.