A Complicated Electoral Decision

I am not a fan of the current Republican Party, but this doesn't make me a fan of the Democrats.

Republicans should be for small government, but they champion many causes that limit liberty. Democrats never pretend to be about small government, but their support of big government goes too far for me.

Ideally, I think I would rather have one party in control of the executive branch and a different party in control of the legislative. Specifically, I'd rather have a democratic President with a Republican Congress (as was probably a big part of Clinton's winning Presidential recipe), but that doesn't seem possible this time, so I am torn.

Obama is smart and eloquent and seems able to make things happen. Defeating the Clinton machine was very impressive and it speaks volumes about his political abilities. On the other hand, he has little experience and a Democratic President with a Democratic Congress is a scary thought.

McCain doesn't toe anybody's party line. He's willing to work across party lines and has many positions that make sense. As far as I'm concerned, McCain's biggest problem is that he's a Republican. I'm afraid of his party. As a party, the Republicans have done a crappy job with the Executive branch for the past eight years. They have lied, and broken rules, and diminished our civil liberties.

Neither VP candidate is perfect. Biden is a hot head, while Palin is socially ultra-conservative and spectacularly under-qualified. Obama certainly gets the edge here, but Biden isn't great.

I honestly don't know who I am going to vote for, but whichever way I decide, I won't be particularly happy about it.

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

I have always liked the libertarians, so I checked out the Libertarian Party platform. Here are some annotated highlights of the three major sections of the platform.

1.0 Personal Liberty: Individuals should be free to make choices for themselves and to accept responsibility for the consequences of the choices they make. No individual, group, or government may initiate force against any other individual, group, or government. Our support of an individual's right to make choices in life does not mean that we necessarily approve or disapprove of those choices.

Basically: Live and let live. This works for me. Details in this first section spell out a platform that is for freedom of religion and against government regulating interpersonal relationships or individual decisions that do not affect others. They lose me a bit with the gun stuff, but just as it pertains to defending assault weapons.

2.0 Economic Liberty: A free and competitive market allocates resources in the most efficient manner. Each person has the right to offer goods and services to others on the free market. The only proper role of government in the economic realm is to protect property rights, adjudicate disputes, and provide a legal framework in which voluntary trade is protected. All efforts by government to redistribute wealth, or to control or manage trade, are improper in a free society.

This section spells out opposition to taxes and support for a balanced budget amendment. Some of this section is a bit much for me. For instance, I am not a fan of their position on education. On the other hand, I like their view on end-of-life decisions. Overall, they have a bit too much faith that the free market system can take care of everything, while I am a bit too cynical for that.

3.0 Securing Liberty: The protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of government. Government is constitutionally limited so as to prevent the infringement of individual rights by the government itself. The principle of non-initiation of force should guide the relationships between governments.

In this final section, they condemn bigotry and intelligence gathering that infringes on personal liberties, and other infringements on personal liberty.

Libertarians have a few positions that are ridiculous. At times, they remind me of a fraternity brother of mine who consistently used ludicrous extremes to make every point. I liked him and often agreed with him, but some of the extremes he went to for his arguments made it hard to be solidly on his side.

Overall, I think the Libertarian platform is a really readable document. I agree with close to 2/3 of the platform, which is certainly a higher percentage than for either the Republican or the Democratic platforms. The extremes of the Libertarians are as nutty as extremes of any party, but there is lots to like in what the party as a whole stands for.

The Log Cabin Problem

I heard an interview on C-SPAN with the President of the Log Cabin Republicans. After some discussion between the Log Cabin guy and the host, two people called in. The first was a Republican and the second was a Democrat, but they both agreed that because the Log Cabin Republicans are gay, they should really be Democrats.

It's interesting to me that this view of the Republican/Democrat divide is so pervasive that many in both parties really have bought it. The religious right has dominated the Republican party for so long that many people have lost sight of the fact that the Republicans once stood for limited federal government, while Democrats stood for a more powerful role for the federal government.

Nowadays, Republicans are the party of:

• prayer in school
• big military build-up
  
• limiting rights of gay people
• limiting rights of women who are confronted with certain intensely personal decisions
  
• the death penalty

I don't know how the Republicans got to this point, but I do think that their party is an unholy alliance between the religious right and the small government folks. The small government parts of the GOP should be ashamed of the pro school prayer, pro military, pro death penalty, big spending, anti gay GOP (for references to all of these statements about the Republicans, check out the Republican Party Platform.)

I wish the Log Cabin Republicans luck. Changing the culture of the GOP is an ambitious goal, but they are optimistic enough to see a small government Republican Party that is a world away from the current GOP.

Web Stuff Friday: Ubiquity, Office War, 24h a NYC

Ubiquity is Mozilla's natural language internet project. What does that mean? It means that they are trying to come up with a way of making the Web work with sentences as we think of them. I think of this as similar to a high-end universal remote for a home theater system for which you hit a single button to watch a DVD and the remote turns on the right devices and sets each to the proper settings to you can do what you want. Similarly, Ubiquity should let you type a command like "Send this to Mom" and the browser would do the copy and pasting and emailing for you. It's an interesting way of rethinking how the technology can work.

The Great Office War is funny.


Here is a movie by a man who took a short business trip to New York City. He took the photos with his iPhone and narrates the resulting sequence of images in French with English subtitles. It's really a nice piece.

[A 24 Hour Trip to New York] from M. Ward on Vimeo.

Some Republican Convention Thoughts

In the interest of balance, here are some thoughts about the Republicans during their national convention.

McCain is not a particularly good speaker. He stumbled at times during his speech. His smiles were really painful (his speechwriter didn't get the job done.) His delivery was stilted. It was often a painful speech to watch. I feel like McCain is Nixon in 1960 to Obama's Kennedy. It isn't really that stark a contrast, but at times it feels that way. Speeches aren't his strength.

I like that his story is one of devotion to America, but his reliance on his military background seems a bit much. On the other hand, I do like that he seems like the kind of person who really believes that he is fighting a good fight as he serves in the government. When he asked everyone to fight with him, he was at his most sincere and powerful, but that moment was brief.

Now the real fight begins.

T. Boone Pickens: The Man With an Energy Plan

T. Boone Pickens has made a ton of money on oil, but he now has an energy plan. PickensPlan is ambitious, but the goal seems like a good one: reduce our dependence on petroleum.

For some of my thoughts and some data about energy, look back at Energy Independence. We need to change how we power our transportation needs. Right now, we are dependent on oil and that's bad for several reasons.

Pickens is pushing natural gas and wind power. Here is his website's summary of the crux of his plan:

The Pickens Plan is a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives, and buy us time to develop even greater new technologies.

Check it out and learn more about the reality of our dependence on petroleum. We can't drill our way out of this. Pickens has lots to gain from natural gas becoming more important, so he's hardly impartial. Still, his assessment of our energy problems seems pretty accurate. His precise solution might not be the absolute best, but it's certainly better than trying to drill our way out of it.

Wind might not be the answer, but it could be part of the solution.

Note: Diane Rehm had a show about electric cars. Two guests represented companies I have blogged about: A123 and Tesla Motors. Check it out: Real Media or Windows Media. It was an interesting discussion about recent advances in technology for electric cars.

Comparing First Spouses

There are many things to consider when deciding on a president, but there is one criterion that many people seem to gloss over: The first spouse.

#4: Michelle Obama: A protestant lawyer. Another freakin' lawyer in the White House is just what we need.

#3: Jill Biden: A Catholic English teacher. Better than a lawyer, but still not much fun.

#2: Todd Palin: Alaska's "First Dude" is part Eskimo and has won a 2000-mile snowmobile race four times. He'd be the coolest first spouse ever.

#1: Cindy McCain: A baptist business woman and former beauty queen. She is currently chair of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributor in Arizona and is a former druggie who has spent time in rehab. She's not as cool as First Dude, but if she gets to the White House, I think she'd be fun. A pill-popper/former beauty queen/beer maven. That's pretty good. I bet she knows how to have fun at a party.

I know he's off the table, but I like to dream big, so honorable mention goes to:

Bill Clinton. I know he's another lawyer, but let's face it: Bill would be fun. He'd be sneaking women in and out of the back door of the East Wing of the White House. He'd party without holding back since he wouldn't have to be coherent at every event. He'd crack jokes behind Hillary's back. Bill would be the greatest first spouse of all time.

So there you go. I'm not sure how this will impact my vote in November, but I'll be following the spouses carefully.