Response to A Classmate #2

I don’t know why other liberals hate guns. I do know why I will never own, touch, or keep one under my roof. A gun is a tool engineered to stop life. That is its entire purpose. Can I kill someone with a butter knife? Yes. All I need is the will and perhaps some knowledge of human anatomy. Were butter knifes created to kill enemies or hunt game? No. This is the central difference about guns in my mind.
Many studies have shown, time and again, that a gun in a civilian residence is more likely to shoot someone in that household inadvertently than it is likely to halt an unlawful intruder. I agree with you that child safety is the responsibility of the parent. However, there are many irresponsible parents in America today. I need only look at how many children on an elementary school playground are obese to reinforce this fact. Responsible parenting is a hot-button issue in this country. It is, frankly, pointless to tell poor, uneducated parents to “Be Responsible!” Either they grew up with this example and it is important to them, they intentionally endeavor to be responsible parents, or they couldn’t care less and want to do what’s easiest.
Where I grew up in the midwest (Indiana), the only people I knew who owned guns were police officers and farmers. It was shocking to find out that regular, ole Texans can take a one-day class and be licensed to carry a concealed weapon. I don’t know what possible good can come of this compared to everything that can go wrong. Just last week didn’t some famous football player shoot themself in the leg at a nightclub because their gun was tucked into the waistband of their sweatpants?? Of course, holstering your loaded gun in your sweatpants is stupid. That’s my point. PEOPLE ARE STUPID. When stupid people are allowed to own guns, they endanger everyone around them.
I prefer that the only people allowed to own guns are trained police officers, federal agents, professional hunters, and the military. Prescription drugs can harm or help people. That is why only people with significant schooling and training are given prescriptive authority. Guns can kill or protect. This power warrants more responsibility than being able to come up with the cash and attending a one-day gun safety course.

Pardon Me, Sir?

A few weeks ago, President George W. Bush granted another group of pardons. I started to wonder about pardons and what they mean for the person receiving a pardon. It turns out that presidents can do two things for citizens who have had a run in with the law:
1.) “A pardon means an executive order vacating a conviction”(Wikipedia). – Thus, making it like it had never happened. If you were a felon, you can now vote, own guns, and check that you have never been convicted of a felony on job applications. Both Presidents Bush pardoned people who had already completed their entire sentences.
2.) “A commutation means a mitigation of the sentence someone currently serving a sentence for a crime pursuant to a conviction, without vacating the conviction itself”(Wikipedia). – Although a person receiving a commuted sentence would still be a felon and still have to disclose information about it, they would no longer have to be in jail. This will probably happen for Ted Stevens, and has already saved I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby from spending 30 months in jail.
Former President Bill Clinton summarizes the numbers best in a New York Times article he wrote in February of 2001 to explain why the power of clemency is granted to the Executive Branch, as well as his reasons for granting some controversial pardons.

"On Jan. 20, 2001, I granted 140 pardons and issued 36 commutations. During my presidency, I issued a total of approximately 450 pardons and commutations, compared to 406 issued by President Reagan during his two terms. During his four years, President Carter issued 566 pardons and commutations, while in the same length of time President Bush granted 77. President Ford issued 409 during the slightly more than two years he was president." (Bill Clinton)

There will surely be last minute pardons before “W” leaves office in January 2009, but so far in his two terms 171 presidential pardons have been issued in his name. Let’s look at a direct comparison of the types of crimes pardoned by the Bush Presidents. I categorized each crime into one of eight categories.
1.) Any crime committed with a gun or related to a gun. (Ex: robbing a store at gun point or illegally selling firearms without a license)
2.) Drug crimes (This category got split in two when I realized the low percentage of pardons granted for marijuana possession/distribution when compared to crimes involving cocaine, hashish, LSD, and bootlegging or moonshining alcohol.)
3.) Fraud (Ex: lying on government forms, tax evasion, representing yourself as something you are not)
4.) Theft of money (Ex: bank embezzlement, misapplication of US Postal Service funds)
5.) Theft of property (Ex: possession of stolen mail, stealing a car, theft of government property)
6.) Environmental (Ex: importation into the country of wildlife taken in violation of conservation laws, illegal disposal of toxic waste)
7.) Military (Ex: AWOL from Coast Guard, insubordination, failure to report for duty)
8.) Other – The few crimes that could not fit into one of these categories (Ex: failure to appear in court, conspiracy to gamble regarding football)
At the top of the post, there is a graph showing the percentages of total pardons by both Presidents Bush, broken down by category. (Sorry, but it was a Herculean task to get the graph on the blog. Couldn't figure out how to get the graph in the middle of the story.)

What do the numbers on the graph mean? Basically, if you committed a crime dealing with guns, marijuana, or against the military, you pretty much have no shot at being pardoned. If, however, you’ve conspired to transport cocaine, lied on a government form or stolen money or property, you could be among many who have received pardons for similar actions. At the end of the day, no matter what crime you’ve committed, if the President is your friend (or brother, as when Roger Clinton, Jr. was pardoned after serving a year in federal prison for cocaine possession) you can pretty much get away with anything.

Response to A Classmate

(This post is a response to a classmate's post concerning his investigation into negative campaign ads during this year's Presidential Election.)
Although I appreciate the explanation of the system you devised to rate the ads and your genuine attempt at objectivity, I wonder where you obtained the 17 Obama ads and the 17 McCain ads? The reason I ask is because your results don’t jive with what the Science Daily, the Chicago Tribune, the Advertising Age magazine, or the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel concluded when they ran the numbers on the mounting negativity in the 2008 Presidential campaign ads.
Three of the above four sources found that McCain ran a higher percentage of negative ads than Obama. It seems that you were unintentionally subjected to some type of sampling bias, since by your tally Obama’s ads were 94% negative and, therefore, the most negative in our nation’s history. This cannot be correct. Even the single source that ranked Obama’s percentage of negative ads as higher than McCain’s totaled him at 68%. The numbers that I, personally, would like to see would be on a timeline. What percentage of which candidate’s ads was negative one year before Election Day? One month before Election Day? One week? I bet if these numbers were correlated with approval numbers in the polls, it would equate to blatant desperation. An example of this would be what The Wisconsin Advertising Project of the University of Wisconsin reported on Oct 8th, less than a month before Election Day – “The McCain campaign's decision to turn 100% of its advertising messages to negative attacks on Sen. Barack Obama last week -- combined with the 34% of Mr. Obama's messages attacking Sen. John McCain -- means that negative ads this time are outpacing those of four years ago in the race between President George W. Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.”
One thing that all studies agree on is that this was, cumulatively, the greatest use of negative campaigning in US presidential election history. I would like to believe these numbers are reflective of the sheer volume of money both candidates threw at advertising this year – more than $1 billion each. What I fear (and I'm about to tell you why I can't believe that phrase is coming out of my mouth) is that it may be reflective of a continuation of the Bush administration’s exceptionally effective tactic of public control – psychological warfare aimed at keeping Americans afraid. When any leadership can keep its constituency afraid of impending doom, no matter what this fabled doom is, they can effectively do anything they want. Once this type of warfare is in place, reason is trampled by rumor, conjecture, and (most recently) lies. If a citizen questions why the nation is invading a foreign land, the answer is, “You don’t want the terrorists to win, do you???” Dissenters are crucified on the cross of public scrutiny.
To be fair, this is not a new tactic and is not limited to the Bush administration. Orwell illustrated this concept very well in his [horror] story, 1984. Hitler used fear to rally Germans together and to him, against a common enemy – those supposedly different from themselves and continually working to bring about the downfall of Germany (the Jews). I don’t want to compare the Bush administration to the Nazis – it is the greatest extreme, the greatest evil to compare anything to. Do I believe that we, as Americans, have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people? Yes. Intentionally and unintentionally, we have devastated a population of poor people trying to eke out a meager living on the hard land they were born on. This is terrible, but not to the same degree as Hitler’s attempt at the focused annihilation of a race.
Somehow I’ve strayed far from where I started when I began writing this reply. The tangent I turned down does, however, relate to the recent election. I think that the reason Obama’s message resounded with so many Americans was its turn away from this fear. Hopefully, we’ll see a continuance of this message.

No, McCain, Don't!

On the right leaning blog, Free Republic, I found an article entitled, McCain On Nukes: Yes We Can. No author is attributed to the piece and the byline reads INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY. The article explains – and I use that term loosely – why nuclear energy is safe and how much efficient energy Americans are missing out on because of nearly thirty years of government leaders refusing to allow many of the procedures involved with the complicated process of nuclear fission. Although the anonymous author never presents their personal expertise in the fields of say, electrical engineering or nuclear chemistry, they are clearly appealing to those constituents who rightly suspect that something about nuclear reactors might be dangerous.
To support his claim of safe nuclear energy, the author quotes Senator John McCain and William Tucker, “author of the just-published book Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Long Energy Odyssey.” The last I heard, John McCain graduated from the bottom of his class at a military institute. This does not qualify him to know anything but what he’s told about nuclear energy. From the ridiculous lies I’ve heard him spout during the presidential debates, the advisors shaping his energy policy never studied any form of science, either.
One example is McCain’s claim that nuclear energy does not produce carbon dioxide emissions. This statement is intentionally misleading and grossly negligent.
In the simplest terms, nuclear power is a really complicated means of boiling water. While nuclear fission does not produce CO2 during the decomposition of notoriously unstable Uranium-238, McCain’s “no carbon footprint” statement conveniently disregards how the U-238 came to be above ground and at the luxurious swimming pool (a.k.a. nuclear reactor) constructed using huge government subsidies. In 2005 alone, the U.S. Congress allocated thirteen billion dollars in subsidies to revive a moribund nuclear power industry. (Those thirteen billion dollars were not funding the construction of new reactors, mind you. It was money to keep the current reactors afloat because nuclear energy is not financially competitive with oil, natural gas, coal, wind, solar, or geothermal energy production. The cost of maintaining safety at a nuclear reactor around the clock is too prohibitive for nuclear to be feasible, economically, without the aforementioned huge government subsidies.)
Helen Caldicott, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and antinuclear activist, contends in her book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, that “large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear power reactors, to construct the massive concrete reactor buildings, and to transport and store the toxic radioactive waste created by the nuclear process.”
Our mystery author then attempts to debunk Senator Barack Obama’s, former President Jimmy Carter’s, and Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s stances that nuclear energy should not be used “until it’s proved to be ‘safe and clean.’” Citing no other source but Tucker, and failing to give Tucker’s credentials qualifying him to expound on nuclear safety, the author implies that what scientists view as radioactive nuclear waste “means jobs, clean air, energy independence and keeping money here at home.” Caldicott and Dr. Carl H. Snyder argue that the environmental impact of nuclear energy is far reaching. Nuclear waste continues to be radioactive for over five hundred thousand years after it has ceased to be suitable for reactors. The only plan for containment of nuclear waste generated in the United States is burial at Yucca Mountain with the hope that the sealed metal containers will never rust or breach, unleashing the unbridled and insidious force that is Uranium – an element nature intended to live its long, unstable life deep within the crust of the earth and safely removed from living things with skin, DNA, or a digestive tract, just to name a few. (The 500,000 years statistic comes from Dr. Snyder, author of one of my favorite textbooks and available in the ACC Library, The Extraordinary Chemistry of Ordinary Things.)
The author criticizes Sen. Reid, by the way, for repeatedly refusing to store the waste we’ve already generated beneath a mountain in his home state of Nevada. A logical person might wonder why anyone would think to bury metal containers deep in the earth with the intention they would never corrode or leak. The answer is that when the American government uncorked the nuclear genie in the sixties, they assumed that by the time we accumulated enough waste to be of concern to Americans’ safety, science would have already figured out a way to magically de-radioactivate the leftovers a half million years ahead of schedule. We all know what happens when a person assumes. . .
Even though McCain On Nukes is a scant two pages, there is too much disinformation to be addressed in anything but a research paper. The EDUCATED bottom line, folks: When someone starts preaching about the safety of nuclear reactors, be afraid and be very afraid. The author's bottom line: "Let's split atoms and not hairs."

Bush Reminds Americans, "You Can't Trust Your Own Judgment!"

I was sent an email by Planned Parenthood recently that was extremely alarming to me, as a woman, and also as a nurse. Yet again, the Bush administration is meddling in morality. I wish this translated into taking a good, hard look into the depths of their souls and lamenting the lives lost to their ambitious, sadistic greed. That would be a storybook ending, now wouldn’t it?
No, I’m referring to the proposed Conscience rule currently in the 30 day period of discussion before being either put into law or discarded. According to an opinion piece in the New York Times by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cecile Richards, if this rule became law, any hospital or health care provider accepting federal funds would have to “certify in writing that none of its employees are required to assist in any way with medical services they find objectionable.”
Physicians have had the ability to refuse giving abortions since they became legal. Nurses, by law, must “provide, without discrimination, nursing services regardless of the age, disability, economic status, gender, national origin, race, religion, health problems, or sexual orientation of the client served” (Standards of Nursing Practice, Texas Administrative Code). But the Conscience rule doesn’t refer specifically to physicians and nurses, does it? It refers to all employees, possibly including – the receptionist that answers the phone, the tech manning an ultrasound, or the assistant that bills the insurance company.
While the rule directly targets abortion, sterilization, and contraceptive services, it indirectly goes further. “The rule would also allow providers to refuse to participate in unspecified ‘other medical procedures’ that contradict their religious beliefs or moral convictions,” write Clinton and Richards.
Let us now assume that you have never taken a risk, made a bad decision, or done something stupid. You have sex wearing a full body condom (since some STDs can be transmitted even while practicing safe sex), only with your spouse (it is impossible they would ever commit adultery), and everyone in your family and circle of friends adheres to the same procedures in their undoubtedly heterosexual relationships. When the receptionist refuses to schedule an appointment for AIDS testing, because her conscience doesn’t include the concept of communicable disease, you and your loved ones are unaffected. When a woman is raped and the hospital pharmacy technician refuses to ring up a prescription for the morning-after pill, she hopefully will be of no relation to you. When your daughter heads off to college and the physician’s assistant at the university health center has a moral objection to the birth control pill, I’m sure your daughter just won’t have sex. Sharp critical thinking skills are abundant in 18 year olds, don’t you agree?

Sexual orientation, reproductive rights, and premarital sex are all extremely personal choices. The decisions we make in these arenas have the ability to impact us on the longest of timelines. There is no black. There is no white. There are only the decisions we make for ourselves. Imagine these options being removed from you. The Bush administration, in an act of blatant condescension, has decided you’re not fit to make certain decisions about your life and your body. You may own it and operate it, but they know better.

Consolidation of Power?

John Dean’s article, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Incredible and Deadly Lie, is interesting and informative because it exposes the vulnerability of modern day separation of powers. The author suggests that checks and balances instilled by the creators of our republic can only function if elected representatives respect and nurture “the law of the land” that is our Constitution. After examining a possible breakdown in the way information was distributed between the branches before the war in Iraq, Dean gives a brief historical recount of why the Framers came to choose a republic over other forms of government. He then goes on to site the Harvard Law Journal’s article, “Separation of Parties, Not Powers,” that argues “Madison’s vision of separation of powers has, in fact, been trumped in America by political parties.” This article is a good read for lovers of the Constitution and/or haters of Cheney.