One Term President

Funny thing, I can believe McCain when he says intends to be a one-term president.

“I didn’t decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism,” he wrote in his post 2000-election book, Worth the Fighting For. “In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president.”

Here he is back. He’s figured out what he did wrong in 2000. He needs four years in office to get the retirement and the big library.

He’ll only be 76. Still a young man in AARP years.

Do you believe in … ?

If one were a mite cynical, and old enough to remember the Iranian Hostage Crisis … when a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter was unable to retrieve a some 70 American hostages from their Iranian captors for 444 days — and five minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of presidential office, the hostages boarded an airplane and came home.

Now the Russians have invaded Georgia, the way Hitler invaded Czekoslovakia, and a Quinnipiac University poll released today says 55 percent of the voters think McCain is more qualified to handle the Russians; only 27 percent think Obama can handle them.

Coincidence?

I doubt it.

©2008 by T. Samuel Emery

Fourth Amendment repealed

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was repealed this month, and no one seemed to notice. By an aggregate vote of 363 yea, 156 nay, and 16 no vote, Congress passed HR6304, “A bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to establish a procedure for authorizing certain acquisitions of foreign intelligence, and for other purposes,” and sent it to President Bush, who signed it into law July 10.
When the Constitution was set before the people of the new United States, and the states asked to ratify it, they were collectively disappointed that it did not provide sufficient protection against possible excesses of the federal government. Having recently thrown off the yoke of a King, they were understandably suspicious of too much power vested in a central government.
On Dec. 15, 1791, the first 10 amendments finally were ratified, guaranteeing:
1. The rights of free speech and free press and of the people to gather and petition their government for change;
2. The right to maintain a militia and bear arms; to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure and
3. Protection against the government forcing a homeowner to quarter soldiers during peacetime;
4. Protection against search and seizure without a warrant specifying the place to be searched and the person or things being sought;
5. Protection against being tried twice for the same crime, against being required to testify against one’s self, and against government taking of private property without just compensation;
6. The right to a speedy and public trial, by jury, to know the crimes being charged and the who is making the accusation, and to have an attorney to help defend against the accusations;
7. The right of trial by jury in civil suits where the money being sought exceeds 20 dollars;
8. Protection against excessive bail;
9. That other rights could not be denied simply because they were not specifically mentioned in the Constitution; and
10. Rights not specifically granted by the constitution to the federal government would remain with the individual states.
To amend the constitution requires approval of Congress, and then approval of two-thirds of the states. But there is another way, and Congress has found it. They passed a law making it illegal to prosecute anyone who violates the constitution.
By prohibiting prosecution of the telecommunication companies for helping the government illegally perform warrantless searches, Congress repealed of the Fourth Amendment. Oh, it’s still on the books, but it’s meaningless.
Among the bill’s supporters were Senators Arlen Specter, Robert Casey, and Barack Obama and John McCain. McCain didn’t actually vote, but if you don’t vote, you’ve helped the winning side of the question.
Citizen outcry has been, well, lacking.
There are those who will claim the warrantless searches do not apply to much of what we normally deem private. After all, telephone companies do not carry our mail.
But increasing percentages of out our communication is by text message, email and instant messaging. In recent years, government prosecutors have obtained information from internet service providers that users thought was private.
Those early, post Revolutionary, lawmakers wanted to protect because they were familiar with their citizens being imprisoned with no trial, not charges, no attorney. The Framers just hadn’t learned to spell Guantanamo.
Every piece of email is stored somewhere, and just because we delete it doesn’t mean it’s gone: Hotmail, Gmail and MySpace users take note.
If you happen to mention “Mahmoud” and “wedding” in the same email, the next sound you hear could be the boys in the Black Suburbans knocking on your door.

©2008 by T. Samuel Emery

Changing face of the information control

Here’s an interesting thought: Apple has come out with a device that plays music, videos, and radio and TV shows, and makes telephone calls. It also will run a plethora of software. We know that because Apple says it’s true. The company says an upgrade to the operating system will allow all those hinted-at applications to run.

But Apple gets to decide what software will run, and when it will run, by mandating that all software must be obtained from the iTunes store and installed from the iTunes application. Presumedly, Apple could, if it later decided, turn off any software that once worked simply because, oh, say it allowed users to buy music, videos, or podcasts from Not-Apple.

One might point to hackers who already have figured out ways to run software on an iPhone, but how long will it be until Apple decides to shut down iPhones that do not operate approved software through the approved iTunes interface. It’s in the agreement with AT&T that Apple maintains control — AT&T merely sells the units and provides over-the-air service

With that much control, Steve Jobs can decide what information will be allowed to appear on the iPhone. Maybe it will come from only Google, or only Yahoo, or only some as yet unknown AppleSearch that will decide not do display certain search results. (Don’t laugh; companies already pay to be at the top of the list; eliminating “objectionable” content altogether would be easy.)

To use the device at all, the buyer already has to activate a two-year contract, at an exhorbitant price that includes charges for “features” many users may not ever use, often do not want, and at any rate may not have available where they hang out. One may not purchase an iPhone and opt out of the Wi-Fi or email, for instance, by not subscribing to the mandatory $30-a-month data package.

And yet people seem focused on complaining about the price as they stand in line to acquire the latest state-of-the art gadget, while the once dying Apple computer brand moves toward total control of what it hopes will be the new Microsoft-model of control by becoming the de facto standard.

But Microsoft has controlled only the tools by which we manipulate information. Apple is well on its way to controlling access to the information.

And that is, or should be, more worrisome than the size of the monthly bill.

She is woman; they hear her roar

Hillary Clinton’s run for the American White House began in 1776, when Abigail Adams wrote to her husband: “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

In their statement of independence, John Adams and his compatriots declared “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

But some “men” were more equal than others. Blacks were only three-fifths of a man, a precept accepted in print, if not in unanimous principle. Women were not allowed to vote until 1920.

Nearly two and-a-half centuries after the national declaration of equality.

More than a century and-a-half after a bloody war to abolish the enslavement of Americans of African descent.

In 2008, women finally have an opportunity to finish the job Mrs. Adams began as her husband made his way to Philadelphia to help create a new nation upon the globe.

“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

They are fomenting a rebellion, those women who have been kept “in their place” these many years. They understand being told, by societal acquiescence if not by statute, their job is to care for children so their husbands can go off to slay a beast for dinner.

Hillary Clinton has grown up through the ‘70s when women burned their bras and began taking hammers to glass ceilings.

When women decided they did not need men for any reason other than to make — not raise — babies.

When she cried in New Hampshire, thousands of New England women understood.

I had a friend in college whose husband was a dairy farmer. When she graduated and wanted to put her degree to use, he objected.

He had allowed her to go to college; now she should return to help on the farm.

Hillary Clinton knows about those women. Thirty-five years of campaigning have taught her how to touch them.

She won last week in Pennsylvania by touching the same women. Women wished they could do things, not necessarily instead of, but in addition to, raising children.

There is an acceptance in this nation, in spite of a vast reservoir of empirical evidence, that men of color could, if they wished, be as successful as any white man.

But women, including women of color, know in their bones that is not true for them. They have stood in the bars with their hard-working men and drank shots and beers. They did not necessarily approve, but they did it. They have cried because they have been denied opportunities given by right to their men.

They are proud of their husbands and sons, but now it is their turn, and Hillary is their standard bearer. For a large number of them, large enough number to keep her in the contest, and maybe enough to help her win it, nothing else matters.

If Hillary Clinton beats Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, it will be because she knows how to touch those women, and he does not.

He never will. He is a man.

One of the guys?

The Pennsylvania voting results were a bit amazing.

We regularly hear politicians and Mothers Against Drunk Driving rail against underage drinking. It’s unsafe, they say. It kills kids, they wail. It is a poor example tailgate partying adults provide their offspring, getting drunk to have a good time.

And then those same mothers give the go-ahead to a would-be national role model who downs boilermakers in an Indiana tavern on national TV, for no other purpose than to show she’s one of the guys.

“Every time I get around you we always start drinking!” CBS News’ Fernando Suarez quoted Hammond, Ind., Mayor Tom Hammond.

“That’s true,” Clinton said. “It is Saturday night, though.”

That’s an excuse?

But whether the event was staged (which is likely) or real (which it also could have been), the question is, or should be, raised: Is reducing the legal drinking age simply a politically advantageous way to get 18-t0-21-year-olds or their parents to pay a couple of bucks to the tavern for a beer, and a couple hundred in “voluntary tax” to the local municipality?

Obama’s presidential-aspiration hurdle

Ask any politician and the answer will be the same: Whether his purpose is to serve the people or line his own pockets, the thing that counts is the number of votes on election day. Sure, there’s the occasional John McCain out there, saying he’d rather lose the election than lie, but deep down he knows a little obfuscation may be necessary if he’s to get the job that will let him do what he thinks needs doing.

That’s why we’re in Iraq. After 9-1-1, we were — the majority of us, anyway — ready to kill a bunch of Muslim Extremists. And they were all Muslim Extremists.

Saudi Arabia may have been friendly, but those 19 murdering suicide skyjackers were mostly Saudis. And Saddam Hussein was a flat out bad guy who’d gas his own people to quell insurrection. Kill ‘em all.

And we set off to do that. A lot of us thought maybe moving on Iraq was a bad idea, but we were not the politicians who had to give President Bush the go-ahead, and we were not the majority of voters who were pressuring the politicians to give President Bush the go-ahead.

The vast majority of us were buying newspapers and watching television that went along with the attack-Iraq argument; the news media stays in business by reflecting, by its choice and treatment of stories, what its consumers want, and we wanted blood.

Obama was right. When we’ve been lied to enough times by our government, we reduce our litmus from broad concepts to narrow concrete choices: for or against gun control, pro-life or pro-choice, Christian or Islamic.

It’s not that we didn’t have those beliefs all along, but in a sound-bite world, those issues become symbolic of our world view. Is the Constitution meaningful, especially in a nation whose government is whittling away at personal rights? Is life, especially that of babies and other helpless among us, sacred? Are we to defend ourselves, even preemptively, against foreign attackers.

When times are really tough, and our lives are not under our control, we look for someone to blame, or at least someone who promises to save us. Ask Hitler about blaming the Jews for the economic hard times in Germany. Ask any preacher about how the population in the pews and money in the collection basket relates to the local economy.

Ask Ronald Reagan. We laughed at Bonzo the chimp, but we quickly turned out a southern military leader whose rescue helicopters crashed in the desert in favor of a cowboy in a white hat and Winchester who promised to give those Eye-ranians their due.

And when his administration did things that were not exactly legal, we turned away and joked about he must have been asleep and didn’t know what was going on.

Barack Obama, and others like him, have to learn to walk the very fine line between “condescending” and “patronizing.” They don’t have to down shots in redneck bars, and they don’t have to bowl a 200-plus game, but they do have to find that middle point between “I know stuff” and “you don’t.”

Most people respect education — as long as they don’t feel forced to admit they don’t have it.

In the end, it’s not whether you’re right or wrong; it’s how many votes you tally on election night.

No second-place winners

Pundits like to ask why Hill would go so strongly negative when it is hurting her so much.

The answer is simple. Her claimed 35 years experience, which necessarily includes her eight years as co-president to her husband Bill, has repeatedly taught her that there are no second place winners.

What matters, come Nov. 5, is who survives Nov. 4.

Either Clinton or Obama will face McCain in November. Clinton may bloody herself. Her hope is she bloodies Obama sufficiently to at least keep herself in the race, if not knock Obama out of it.

If she doesn’t do something to cut into Obama, or at least keep him from cutting into her, in the April 22 Pa. Primary, she doesn’t have a chance of competing in the Nov. Republican-Democrat run-off.

He mis-spoke — not!

Bill and Hillary Clinton are playing the eventime talking heads like fine guitars.

Bill says Hill’s getting old. Hill says, Shut up Bill; I’ll handle this. He tells the press she put him in his place.

Then he accuses the press of a double standard in going after his wife and not Barack Obama, even though it wasn’t Obama wh made up a story about being in a shooting scene that didn’t happen

Hill’s the one been talking the past several weeks about double standard. About being asked why she won’t drop out when she’s behind. about being given the first question in the debates.

The talking heads spend all night, and maybe more nights thereafter, wondering whether Bill’s losing it by suggesting Hill’s losing it.

And the same older, hard working, tired, but unforgetfull women on whom Hill counted to count her tears in New Hampshire, and who have been starting of late to leave her camp for that other guy, say, “You go, girl!” and rally to her in Pennsylvania.

Cynical? Maybe.

Bill and Hill don’t do stuff by accident. She may really cry, but it won’t be in front of cameras unless she wants it to be in front of cameras. And he won’t call her old unless it gives her a chance to cry out, “No I’m not!”

Of course, maybe they don’t really talk about everything, the way she said they do. Maybe Bill didn’t know his wife told that Bosnia story three times during the day, and not once during the night. Maybe he didn’t know she had pretty much gotten away with blowing it off.

Yuh!

And maybe she’s planning to drop out of the race on Chris Matthews’ show Sunday morning.

Don’t count on either scenario.

President reduces Iraq tour length

Pres. Dubya announced this morning soldiers’ tours in Iraq will be reduced from 15 months to 12 months.

What he forgot to tell reporters is the new tour lengths will apply the way new interest rates apply to credit cards — to new recruits only. Those already in Iraq will stay there indefinitely.