Our mentally challenged government

I long ago came to the realization that I see the world a little differently than most people do.  But there are times when I feel so disconnected from what appears to be mainstream thinking that I wonder if I’m really some sort of alien dropped off on this planet by mistake, and somewhere in the universe there is a whole planet full of people who see the world that way that I do.

I’ve been feeling especially disconnected this week as I follow the two big news stories that are dominating the headlines: the looming “fiscal cliff” and the aftermath of the elementary school mass murder in Connecticut.

My first problem is that I don’t even understand how those stories can be receiving roughly equal coverage from the media.  When I read about the school shooting I was shocked and horrified, like any thinking/ feeling human being would be.  But when I read that the shooter had killed himself I really had no more interest in hearing any more about it.

For me, the story was over.  A seriously disturbed young man had done something horrible and then taken his own life.  What more was there to say?  What more did I need to know?  What good would it do anyone to endlessly rehash the awful details?

But I’m totally out of step with the rest of America, judging by the media coverage of the killings.  First we must grieve together, and then we must turn the story into a debate about reenacting an “assault weapon” ban that proved pointless and ineffective the last time we tried it.

Our president even flew to Connecticut in person to declare that “we can’t tolerate this anymore” and then returned to Washington to lead the debate on banning assault weapons and high-volume magazine clips. 

And all the while our country is rushing headlong towards financial disaster.  The President and Congress are burning up valuable time and energy consoling a grieving nation with promises of demonstrably ineffective legislative measures while the country’s economic system is about to implode, possibly never to recover.

Not that it matters a great deal, I guess.  The two parties spent months before the election and weeks afterwards talking over each other and grand-standing over a tax increase on the wealthy that would play only a tiny role in addressing our deficit problem at best.  It’s difficult to say if a few lost days or even a few lost years would really hurt the fiscal cliff negotiations.

I use the word “negotiation” very loosely here, of course.  It’s seems self-evident to my (possibly alien) mind that when you have a divided government compromise is necessary to get anything done.  And in any compromise there has to be give and take.  You cannot get everything you want, and in a good compromise no one walks away completely happy.

Yet the Democrats have drawn a line in the sand that tax rates most go up for people who have a certain income level and some Republicans refuse to approve a debt-reduction plan that includes any tax increase whatsoever.  The end result could well be that taxes will go up a lot, on everyone, next year. 

And if you’re a federal government employee like I am you could also get furloughed for part of the year in 2013, so for some of us it could be a very bad year indeed.

Oh, and since the sequestration thing doesn’t actually address the ballooning expenses of our entitlement programs it’s not really going to solve our deficit problem anyway.  In fact, if it results in a renewed recession as many economists believe it will, it may not end up helping the debt situation at all.

I hear the president wants that assault weapons legislation ready to roll when the new Congress is seated in January.  I’m not sure it’s going to be necessary.  Who’s going to be able to afford expensive guns next year anyway after the government gets through doing a number on our pocketbooks?

Too young to fall in love?

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a conversation with someone who is middle-aged or older and heard them say “I got married too young” or “I had kids too young.”  Usually “too young” in the context of that conversation is anywhere from the late teens to early 20s.  I’ve always wondered though, who’s to say what age is too young to make certain big decisions that affect the course of the rest of your life?

I’ve recently become aware of some scientific research that might suggest that at age 18 or 21 (ages we’ve traditionally considered a person to be a fully mature adult) we may indeed be a little young, in terms of our brain development, to be making be such big decisions.

Research suggest that the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and impulse control - the Prefrontal Cortex - does not fully mature until we are 25.  In fact that part of the brain is most unstable from the beginning of adolescence until we reach our mid-20s.

That helps explain why people in that age group tend to be prone to somewhat unpredictable (to put it mildly)  behavior and decision-making.  It might also help explain why people who get married younger are more likely to get divorced and why people who have children when they are very young often struggle with the heavy responsibility of parenting.

It seems to me that we’ve plucked 18 and 21 pretty much out of the air as ages when we expect people to become fully responsible for themselves.  The results of that can be disastrous.  I’m sure you can think of plenty of examples of what I’m talking about.

How many people who you know who married someone who was “totally wrong for them” and ended up getting divorced in a relatively short time got married before they were 25?  Probably a high proportion of them.

How many women who have children when they are very young end up needing a great deal of assistance figuring out how they are going to take care of their children?  And do very young fathers tend to be the most responsible ones?  You probably don’t know many couples in their 30s who had to live at home with their parents just to have a roof over their child’s head.

Now don’t get me wrong.  There are plenty of people who get married or become parents at a young age who do just fine.  But science and experience suggest that we are more likely to impulsively pick the wrong partner or have a child long before we are prepared to properly care for them if we dive into those very adult activities while our Prefrontal Cortexes are not quite fully ripened yet.

That’s all well and good, but what are we supposed to do with this information?  I doubt that we’re going to have laws changed that raise the age of consent or the legal age people can get married to 25.  Things like that become deeply ingrained in our culture and tend to not be greatly impacted by scientific research.

But if you are a parent, or just an adult who has any degree of influence in a young person’s life, you might need to get rid of the idea that you are off the clock trying to influence their lives when they graduate high school or even when they graduate college.  Until they have reached their mid-20s, they still need to be nagged, meddled with, and otherwise encouraged to slow down, take a breath, and wait for life to come to them.

Is the UN coming for your guns?

If you are reading this column, it means our civilization has probably not completely collapsed just yet.  But based on what I’ve been hearing from many of the people around me since the country reelected a certain liberal Democrat for another four years in the White House, such a collapse is surely imminent.

President Obama held back on his plot to turn us into a socialist collective during his first term, the thinking seems to go, but now that he doesn’t have to face reelection he is sure to unleash his full left-wing agenda on us.  Brace yourself!

I’m not sure exactly what all is supposed to be involved in this liberal re-making of America, but one frightening story making my email account light up lately involves an insidious plot to round up and collect all of our privately owned firearms.  And they are going to do it through the United Nations.  You know nothing good ever comes out of the UN.

It seems there’s this treaty that Hilary Clinton has been trying to get passed at the UN.  (Yes, Hilary Clinton AND the UN are involved in this, so you know it’s going to be very, very bad.)  It’s called the Arms Trade Treaty and according to the alarmist newswire service I am apparently subscribed to it will provide Obama with a “legal way around the 2nd Amendment” and will lead to a “complete ban and confiscation of all firearms.”

It’s one of the silliest things I’ve seen in my Inbox in a very long time, and let me tell you a lot of silly things show up in my Inbox.  (I know a lot of weird people.)  The goal of this treaty, which has not been completed or ratified by anyone as yet, is actually to generate an enforceable standard for importing and exporting conventional weapons between countries.  There is language within the treaty affirming the rights of individual nations to regulate the sale of conventional weapons within their own countries according to their own laws and constitutions.

But even if they were to change the wording to try and impinge on our gun-owning rights, the treaty (like any treaty we sign onto) would have to be passed by two-thirds of the US Senate before it could become legally binding, and I suspect that if it was designed to strip away our rights to own firearms there would at least be a bit of discussion about that before it passed the Senate.

And then there’s the fact that treaties with other countries don’t have the legal standing to override our Constitution, so if Obama wanted to round up every privately owned firearm in the US he’d have to wipe out or have the Supreme Court significantly reinterpret the Second Amendment, which makes the whole UN treaty approach seem like a huge waste of time.

Setting aside all of that, how realistic do you think it would be for the federal government to completely disarm the population?  We are saturated with guns of every size, weight, and caliber, and a well-maintained gun can just about last forever.  How on earth would they find them all?  How many people would it take to go out and get them?  How many federal agents would get killed in the process?  And how many federal agents would refuse to even carry out such an outlandish directive?

Please allow me to set your mind at ease about this.  We have a lot of things to worry about, and I’m not optimistic about four more years of Obama, but I promise you there is no secret UN treaty that is going to give the federal government the right to kick down your door and take away all your guns.  They don’t have the legal standing for it and frankly it’s not even logistically feasible.

So please don’t forward any more emails to me about this unless the UN formally assumes control over all the world’s governments, which according to some other emails I’ve received is going to happen any day now.

Passing the baton

I’m still feeling a little down about the election results from last week.  I didn’t realize it until after it was all over, but apparently I was one of the big losers this time around.

No, I wasn’t running for office myself.  As an employee of the federal government the law forbids me from competing in partisan elections.  I also think that a fairly large percentage of the human race are morons and feel compelled to point that out fairly often.  That attitude would surely cost me a lot of votes. 

But the news media made it clear when they waxed philosophic after President Obama’s convincing win that there has been a changing of the guard in America and that guys like me are on the wrong side of a major demographic trend.

You see I am white, male, over-40, and more often than not vote for Republicans over Democrats.  Apparently I have been part of an exclusive ruling class all my life and never even realized it until me and my cronies lost our grip on power this election.  All these years I thought people didn’t like me because of my looks and personality, but maybe everyone was just jealous because of all the power and influence I commanded.

I am glad, at least, that someone was happy on November 7.  If you are non-Caucasian, female, a child of illegal immigrants, someone who pays no taxes, a gay person who wants to get married, or a recreational marijuana user then I congratulate you on your success in 2012.  On behalf of all the conservative old white dudes, I officially concede the mantle of power to the new majority.

To be honest, the election results didn’t bother me all that much.  I gave Romney my tepid support because I thought he was more likely to address the one issue that for me dwarfs all others – the federal government’s completely out-of-control spending habits – than the man who had done nothing about it for the last four years. 

But did I trust Romney, or the Republicans in Congress, to decisively correct the course of our financial ship?  Not really.  After 8 years of watching George W. Bush and a Republican-dominated congress ratchet up our national debt to unheard-of levels I don’t have any faith left that either party has the backbone to make the hard, unpopular choices that need to be made to put us back on solid footing.

As I watched Democrats high-five each other in celebration on Wednesday and listened to Republicans sulk over the fact that the country has been taken over by deadbeats, it seemed like I was watching a football game where the people in the stands didn’t seem to realize that a hurricane was bearing down on the stadium about to wipe them all out.  A few of us have tried to point out that once we reach a point of no return we are all going to go down together, but most of America seems to be too caught up in the game to care.

And I’m tired of being a voice crying out in the wilderness.  Only the birds and squirrels can hear me, and they are getting annoyed.  This will be the last column I will write that addresses our national debt.  I think at this point it is a lost cause.

I believe we’ve passed the point of no return and we will eventually have to default on our debt.  And then things are going to get really interesting, and not in a good way.  We can only hope that the Chinese will be kind to us when we have to negotiate the terms of our financial surrender.

But for now, let’s not worry about it.  Let’s check in with the latest on the David Petraeus sex scandal, because that’s a lot more fun to talk about, isn’t it?

Race and politics part two

I would never have thought that I’d be writing two columns in a row about race and politics, but it seems like people are more race-conscious for this election than they were in 2008.  It would seem, for example, that if you are a black person and you do not support President Obama’s reelection you are subject to being called some pretty nasty names.

An actress named Stacey Dash found that out this week when she took to the Twitter-verse to proclaim her support for Mitt Romney.  Big mistake, Stacey!  After this young lady (who is of black and Mexican descent) failed to show support for Barak Obama (who is of black and Caucasian descent) some of her Twitter followers were outraged and thundered back in protest.

I won’t repeat the names Ms. Dash was called, but I will quote a young college student who scolded her by saying that “you got a lil’ money and you forget that you’re black and a woman, two things Romney hates.”  (Twitter is a great place to find enlightened discourse such as this, apparently.)

And that young college student isn’t the only one who thinks that race should be the deciding factor at the ballot box.  Actor Samuel L. Jackson will also be casting his vote for Obama because “that's why other folks vote for other people -- because they look like them.”  That’s so true!  And it’s why I never vote for blondes.

For the final word on the subject, let’s check in with rapper Snoop Dawg, who listed the following as his number one reason for voting for Obama on his social media account: “He’s black.”  To round out the argument, he also listed the primary reason he won’t be voting for Romney: “He’s white.”

To be fair, we should recognize that there are many Americans out there, of every race, who will vote for someone who “looks like them” if they have that option.  Far too many white people have the same attitude, they just can’t openly admit to it without risking public scorn.  Imagine the firestorm that would erupt if some white celebrity announced they were voting for Romney just because he is a white man.

In any case, I think it’s foolish and short-sighted for anyone to use race as the primary factor in determining their vote.  We are electing someone to do a specific job – to act as Chief Executive for our federal government.  There are no doubt people of every race who would do that job relatively well and plenty of others of each race who would make a complete mess of things.

Imagine if you had a chance to pick the pilot of a plane you were going to fly on and your choices were to pick a person of your own race who had a habit of crashing the planes he tried to fly or someone of a different race who had a spotless flight record.  Would you choose the one who was less likely to kill you or support the one who “looks like you”?

It probably wouldn’t matter if there weren’t many whatever-race-you-are pilots out there, you’d just want to get to where you were going in one piece.  That’s the same attitude we ought to have when choosing a president – supporting the candidate who is least likely to wreck the country.

Let me tell you something – if there was a black lesbian atheist running for president (we’ll call her Anita) and she respected the Constitution and had a detailed plan to get our country back on its feet financially, I’d be voting for Anita this year.  Maybe Anita and I wouldn’t have a lot in common, but I want to vote for someone who will be an effective president and not someone I want to be my best friend or my life partner. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a country where people were more interested in what a candidate wanted to do as president and less about what they look like and how “relatable” they are?

GOP running out of angry white males

If you believe the opinion polls, and in this case I think that I do, President Obama is looking more and more likely to be headed for a second term.  The worse news for Republicans is that their chances of retaking a majority in the Senate are not looking very good either, so we may well be looking at another four years of Democrats setting the agenda in Washington while the Republican-dominated House of Representatives either goes along for the ride or continues to drag their feet.

A look at the long term doesn’t provide the GOP with much room for optimism, either.  The party is not what you’d call racially diverse, but America is and is becoming more diverse every day. 

About 92% of registered Republicans are Caucasians.  In a few decades the majority of people in the US will something other than Caucasian.  You can do the math yourself.  If the party does not figure out a way to attract more non-white voters into its fold, it is going to become a minority itself.

In the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham, “we’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

Frankly I don’t think that quotes like that are helping the Republican cause very much.  And I don’t think Mitt Romney is doing much to change the party’s image as being a club for well-to-do white males either.  This is more than just an image problem though – it’s a threat to the GOP’s long-term survival.

So what should they do about it?  First they need to recognize the problem, and judging by Sen. Graham’s quote I think that we’ve probably reached that point.  The next step should obviously be to try and attract more minorities to join the party, but how can that be accomplished?

In general I’m not big on things like affirmative action, but in this case I think Republicans do need to make a genuine effort to reach out to non-white voters and make them feel welcome.  I’m not talking about pandering, and I’m certainly not talking about changing their values to become more acceptable to people who genuinely prefer the Democrats’ ideas about government.  I don’t think that’s necessary.

I know for a fact that there are plenty of Americans who are not Caucasian who believe in smaller, less intrusive government, low taxes, and fiscal responsibility.  Those are (or should be) the core values of the Republican Party, and I believe there are millions of ethnic minorities in this country who would be willing to consider getting involved with the party if they were made to feel welcome there.

So Republicans need to reach out to black, Hispanic, Asian, and other non-white voters and invite them to join the party, assume positions of leadership, and run for office.  The more people of color get used to seeing people of color holding important positions within the party and running as GOP candidates, the less likely they are to see the party as unconcerned about or even hostile towards them.

I know some Republicans wanted to see Condoleezza Rice as Mitt Romney’s running mate this year and if Romney loses I’m sure she’ll be encouraged by many within the party to run as the nominee in 2016.  I think that’s a good idea, but it’s not a silver bullet.  A much broader outreach effort is required.

At this year’s GOP convention they did make an effort to include black and Hispanic speakers, but those speakers looked out at an audience of delegates that was 98% white.  No one watching at home was fooled.  If the party wants to stay relevant, that cannot happen again in 4 years.

Sometimes you just can’t be friends

I read a book not long ago that gave advice on how to be comfortable talking to people in every situation.  One of the points the book made that stuck with me is that not everyone you meet is going to like you and that it’s best not to make universal likability one of your goals in life.  You just have to be yourself and associate with people who appreciate your personality (if there are any such people.)

That little piece of advice came back to me last week as I watched some of our foreign embassies get attacked and a group of our diplomats get murdered in cold blood.  All of this happened because one man in America made a very amateurish film that ridicules the Islamic religion and some people believed that justified destroying the people and facilities meant to promote good relations between our country and theirs.

These people simply don’t like us.  Specifically, they don’t like the fact that we allow our citizens to express themselves on any subject without fear of retribution from the government.  We have a very basic disagreement with such people, not just about government, but about a basic question of what is right and what is wrong.  I don’t believe there is a way to bridge that gap, and I don’t believe that we should even try to.

The way I see it, there is no shade of gray here.  The man who made the film that has some of the more excitable elements of the Islamic religion up in arms was exercising his right to self expression under the Constitution.  People have every right to be offended by his movie and to say so, but that’s their only recourse in our system of government.

Not everyone seems to agree though.  Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said that “the United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.”  I disagree, Madame Secretary.  The United States does not (or at least should not) “deplore” any particular view of any particular religious idea.  As individual citizens we can express any opinion we like on the subject, and our government ought to have our back on the matter regardless of what anyone else feels about the opinions we express.

The appropriate response from our government to the violent protests over this film should instead have run something along these lines:

“In the United States, every citizen has a legal right to express his or her own opinion on any religious matter without interference from the government.  The man who made the film that has offended so many Muslims around the world speaks for himself and not for the government or any other citizen of the United States.  He has broken no laws in our country and will not be arrested or otherwise harassed by our government.  Any acts of violence directed at American citizens or American interests around the world will be considered unjustified acts of aggression and will not be tolerated.”

And what should we do about people burning our embassies and attacking our diplomats?  Obviously we either need to commit the resources necessary to protect our people and facilities or withdraw completely from these countries until they reach a stage of civilization that has advanced beyond the “peasants with pitchforks” manner of dealing with those who don’t see the world the way that they do.

As far as giving financial aid to these countries, it should be an easy call to stop sending billions of dollars to places where our citizens are being murdered and our flag is being burned in the streets.  I’m not sure how a country that is drowning in debt like ours justifies doling out money to foreign governments in the first place, but surely we don’t want to throw our deficit-dollars at places where the people long to see our blood running in the streets, do we?

Hoping Mitt has something up his sleeve

When Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate, I have to admit that I allowed myself to get a little excited.  Ryan made a name for himself by authoring a budget in Congress that would have addressed our deficit situation in a meaningful way, one that actually specified where much-needed but unpopular cuts need to be made.  It never had a chance of passing the Democrat-controlled Senate of course, but the fact that Ryan had put his name on this plan and had then been selected as Romney's running mate gave me some hope that the Republican ticket would take on the issue of our financial insolvency in a direct and realistic manner.

And then they had their convention and I had to wake up from that silly dream.

Romney's acceptance speech was especially disappointing in that regard.  He had the country's undivided attention and this was his best chance to set the tone for the campaign.  And what did he do with the opportunity?

He told us that he loves his wife, his kids, his parents, and his country.  He told us that he believes in hard work and freedom and personal responsibility.  He told us that he doesn't think Barak Obama has done such a bang-up job in the last four years.  In other words, he shoveled out the same sweet-smelling, content-free BS that politicians from both parties like to feed us every election.  He gave us no specifics, just vague promises to do better than the other guy.  There was certainly no mention of what kind of budget cuts the Republicans would make to get us back in healthy financial shape.

The closest thing we got to actual policy discussion in Romney’s speech was his five point plan to create 12 million jobs.  (Yes, apparently Republicans now agree with Democrats that the federal government can "create" jobs.)  Buried in point 4 of his plan to put us all back to work is a promise to "cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget."

The one thing that he should have devoted most of his speech to - the looming financial disaster we face if we don't somehow get our federal spending reigned in - gets a scant dozen words jammed in with promises to dig for more coal and establish new trade agreements.  And this little snippet of policy discussion was of course dwarfed by the touchy-feely "please like me - I'm really a great guy" portions of his speech.

From what I understand that was the plan his handlers had in mind for his address – to “humanize” him and make people feel like they could relate to him.  That's because many voters supposedly choose a candidate based on how much they like them.  Those would be the voters who apparently are unaware that our government is flying our country into the side of a freaking mountain.

I don't care if Mitt Romney is a human, an alien, or a high-tech robot as long as he has the intelligence and backbone to tell us that we have to cut our spending to survive, and then tell us where he'd make those cuts.  But I'm sure his advisors are telling him that approach is not likely to deliver him the election.  And they are probably right.  The opposition would cut him to shreds if he started talking about cutting back on entitlement spending, which would have to be a part of any realistic plan to walk us back from a financial cliff.

I can only hope that Mitt does have a secret plan to reel in our out-of-control federal spending that he intends to implement if he wins this sad reality show that we call a presidential campaign.  We already know what the Obama plan consists of - tax increases and more government spending.

So I'll take whatever's behind door number 2, I guess, and hope for the best.

Facebook and election season: a bad combination

I’ve had a Facebook account for several years now.  If you’ve never been on Facebook, you aren’t missing much and you should probably just keep on doing whatever else you’ve been doing to occupy your time.  But if you are a Facebook person, you know that one of the delightful ways the people on your friends list there like to do to keep you entertained is to post things that let you know what their political views are.

More often than not they aren’t posting their own thoughts - they are just “sharing” articles, ads, and humorous cartoons that reflect their political leanings.  Now that the presidential election is drawing near, the sharing of these types of ads has reached a fever pitch. 

I’ve found that most of the people I’m linked with on Facebook are Republicans, but there are a smattering of very vocal Democrats mixed in there who are helping to keep things balanced for me.

But whether they support Romney or Obama, I’ve found that the political ads these people tend to post have a few things in common:

-  They almost never pertain to the candidate they support.  Nearly everything that they share is some kind of attack on the guy they want to lose.

-  These negative postings are usually very brief, extremely caustic, and way over the top.

-  If anyone replies to these postings with a counter-argument or even a “hey, isn’t this a little one-sided?” observation, the original poster pounces on that reply with an aggressive defense of the validity of the original attack.

All these years I’ve been complaining about how negative and silly politicians are with how they run their campaigns, and I thought they were the problem.  Well now, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, we all have the capability to orchestrate our own little campaigns for our favorite candidates and it turns out that we do the exact same things we supposedly hate about how politicians behave during elections.

I suppose elections are like sporting events to a lot of people.  It’s our team against their team, and nothing is more satisfying than making the other side look like idiots.  The whole thing seems rather pointless to me, though.

If you are already opposed to the candidate these ads attack you’ll think they’re hilarious and you’re bound to hit the “Like” button right away.  If the attack is against your guy you’re likely to feel your blood pressure go up and comb the Internet for ammunition to fire back with your own outlandish negative ads directed at the other side.

But how about the people who are on the fence?  You’d think such people would be the real target of these ads, but how many of them will decide to vote for Obama because of an ad that says Romney wants to raise your taxes so he can give the money to his rich pals at the country club?  And how many undecided voters many will throw their support to Romney when they are told that Obama is a closet Muslim and a socialist who hates America? 

Not very many of them will be swayed by the silly things they see on Facebook, I can assure you.  The most likely outcome is that they’ll get turned off by the whole experience and block any future posts from these wannabe campaign managers.

It would be nice, just once, to find that someone had posted something positive and fact-based about what the guy they support wants to do should he win office.  That’s what I care about.  I don’t want to see Obama’s birth certificate or his college transcripts and I don’t care about Romney’s tax returns or what companies Bain Capital bought out when he was in charge of it.  I’m less concerned with their pasts than I am about the country’s future.

A house divided

As I survey some of the big stories making the news these days – a typically rancorous presidential contest, angry and unbalanced individuals going on mass shooting rampages, and even the increasingly tiresome Chick-Fil-A controversy – I sense a pattern emerging.  I think that all of these things reflect a growing spirit of divisiveness, distrust, and intolerance in our country.  The United States seems to be less and less united with each passing day.

There is a lot of stress in this country right now.  We have been mired in an economic recession for more years than we care to count and no one seems to know how to get us out of it.  Prices keep rising and those of us who have jobs have seen our wages stagnate.  We are trying to wind down two separate wars but there is no sense of victory and no way of knowing what, if anything, our blood and treasure have bought us in the sands of the Middle East.  And speaking of deserts, it’s way too hot and way too dry in most of the country, and that is not doing anything to improve our economic situation or our mood.

People who are frustrated tend to get angry, and that anger needs something to focus on.  And since none of us like to think that we are the problem, we look for a cause outside of ourselves and our peer group. 

Most of the people I know tend to be conservative, so I hear a lot about how liberals are ruining the country.  It’s Obama, it’s the gay agenda, it’s the atheists who don’t want to let our kids pray in school that are destroying us from within.  If only we could stamp out their influence on our government and culture we would be a great nation once again.

There is no shortage of vitriol coming from the left, either.  They tell us that right-wingers are self-righteous, greedy, heartless people.  Most conservatives are white and well-off, the thinking goes, and they are desperately trying to cling to power in an increasingly diverse country.  They are the party of the privileged, and they could care less that the average American is struggling to get by.

Of course that kind of us-against-them thinking has always been around, but in the past there was a sizable moderate, middle-of-the-road portion of the population both in Congress and among the general public who could prod things towards resolution.  These days moderates are seen as traitors to the cause, as Republicans- or Democrats-in-name-only, and they have become unelectable.

So we are at war with each other.  Everything’s a battle and our side has to win.  What kind of future does a country in this state have?

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  Abraham Lincoln said that over 150 years ago and he was paraphrasing what Jesus said many centuries before that.  Some things remain true even as times and circumstances change.

We will always have differences with each other.  But when our differences are all that define us - when we live for the conflict and compromise is unacceptable under any circumstances - we don’t have much of a future.  Oftentimes a common enemy unites diverse people, but most of our “enemies” today (the budget deficit, misuse of our natural resources, failure to respect each other’s right to live and worship as we see fit) are results of our own selfishness and short-sightedness. 

Unless we can take a look in the mirror and realize that we are the problem (not Obama or Romney or Rush or the Chick-Fil-A cows) we will continue to fight about everything, all the time. 

I do think good leadership could help.  Sometimes one great leader really can redirect people’s attention and energy away from partisan squabbling towards something more productive.  I do not sense that kind of leadership potential in any major political figure in the public eye today, and I’m not sure how long we can wait for one to appear before we are too far gone and the house collapses.

Kermit takes on the Chick-Fil-A cows

My goodness, culture wars do break out in the strangest places, don’t they?  Now I can’t even go have a chicken sandwich for lunch without deciding where I stand on gay marriage.  I have Mike Huckabee on one side telling me I should definitely patronize Chick-Fil-A because they stand for all that is good and righteous and Kermit the Frog on the other side telling me that the secret ingredient in their chicken sandwiches is intolerance.  It’s really a lot more drama than I care to deal with when I’m hungry.

In case you don’t stay abreast (get it?) of the latest developments in the culture wars, allow me to catch you up on the Chick-Fil-A gay rights controversy.  Back in early 2011 it came to light that Chick-Fil-A’s parent company had donated millions of dollar to Christian organizations that actively oppose legalizing gay marriage.  A backlash has been slowly building against them ever since, with protests initially starting out on some college campuses and later picking up steam on Facebook and other social media.

Then last week Chick-Fil-A head honcho Dan Cathy (son of the franchise founder Truett Cathy) brought things to a boil when he was quoted in the Baptist Press as saying that his company was “guilty as charged” of being supportive of the “Biblical definition of the family unit.”  His words were widely (and correctly, I think) interpreted as saying that yes, as an organization Chick-Fil-A supports, both in word and deed, a traditional view of one man-one woman marriage and opposes the legalization of same sex marriage.

A few people took offense to that, needless to say.  Every prominent organization and individual that supports gay rights has sworn to never let a Chick-Fil-A sandwich touch their lips again.  The Jim Henson Company, which had recently signed a licensing deal with the company, has pledged to end their business relationship with them.  And the mayor of Boston has even declared his intention to keep them from opening any new stores in his city.

Of course conservative organizations have rallied to support the restaurant chain for upholding traditional Christian family values.  Former presidential candidate and current talk show host Mike Huckabee declared August 1 to be “Chick-Fil-A Day” and urged all right-thinking Americans to visit their local Chick-Fil-A and hang Kermit the Frog in effigy.  Okay, I made the Kermit part up, but conservatives are pretty riled up is what I’m saying.

Most of that is just fine with me.  This is America, and if a company wants to donate money to whatever (legal) advocacy groups they want to donate to, I say have at it.  And if anyone is offended by said company’s actions, they should certainly boycott, protest, and otherwise let that company know how full of beans they are for advocating whatever they are advocating.  Long live freedom of expression.

A few things I don’t like about the situation, though.  The mayor of Boston is a complete nincompoop for using his office to try and keep a business from coming to his city because that business advocates a cultural opinion he disagrees with.  That’s a gross misuse of his office and Chick-Fil-A should probably sue the pants off the city of Boston over his ridiculous abuse of power.

As for Chick-Fil-A, they certainly should feel free to strike a public stance on moral issues if they so desire, but they should be consistent about it.  Likely sensing a possible negative impact the controversy might have on their bottom line, they posted a statement on their Facebook page, stating that they intend to “leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena.”

I think it’s a little late for that.  The time to decide to stay out of the debate was before you donated corporate funds to conservative political action groups and proudly proclaimed you were “guilty as charged” in supporting a traditional view of marriage.  It’s too late to claim neutrality after you’ve already made Kermit cry.

Why keeping it off is the hard part

Okay readers, let’s pretend for a minute that we are all in the same room together.  If you have ever tried to lose weight, raise your hand.  Now if you’ve ever been successful in losing a significant amount of weight, keep your hand up.  Keep that hand in the air if, after losing the weight, you gained it all back and maybe put on even more than when you started.

If we were in a room together, and we were all being completely honest, a lot of the people who raised their hand at the beginning of that exercise would have kept them up the whole time.  Many of us have learned that losing weight is hard, but keeping it off long-term seems to be nearly impossible.  It turns out there is a good reason for that, and it’s not just a lack of willpower to blame.

According to a study recently published in “The New England Journal of Medicine,” when a person loses a great deal of weight their body goes into a state of shock, and the condition lasts for a very long time.  In the study a group of obese people were put on a strict, carefully monitored diet and exercise program and then received long-term follow-up counseling on maintaining a healthy weight after they reached their goal.

The story does not have a happy ending, I’m afraid.  A year after they lost weight, the dieters had regained an average of 11 pounds and reported feeling constantly hungry and preoccupied with thoughts of eating.  The scientists who conducted the study think they may have some idea why that was.

Even a year after the participants stopped dieting and they returned to a regular (healthy) diet, their bodies were behaving like they were starving.  Hormones that stimulate the appetite were noticeably elevated and those that suppress hunger were abnormally low.  A whole year after they’d lost a drastic amount of weight their bodies were doing everything they could to push these poor people to eat, eat, eat and gain back whatever weight they’d lost.

 So we shouldn’t be surprised that it is even harder to keep weight off once we lose it.  Our bodies simply refuse to accept the fact that we have reached a new “normal” weight, and it’s not something that seems to get better with time.

I realize this is not good news, but I’m not looking to make anyone depressed or suggest that trying to lose weight is a bad idea.  Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.  But there are a few points I want to make now that I’ve shared this admittedly downbeat information.

1.  We can’t consider dieting to be a temporary thing.  Fighting obesity is a life-long process, and people engaged in weight loss need long term care – lifetime care, really - to have a chance to be successful.

2.  It turns out that losing weight and keeping it off is much harder than staying at a healthy weight from the beginning.  So we need to be vigilant about keeping our children healthy.  Up to a certain age, parents control what their kids eat and (to some extent) how active they are.  This information underscores the fact that if we don’t get them started off right they will have a hard time ever recovering their good health.

3.  People who lose weight and gain it back are not weak.  They are human.  They are dealing with biological issues that those of us who have not had the same experience can’t begin to understand, and we need to cut them some slack and offer encouragement and not insults.

A closer look at school prayer and the Establishment Clause

In my last column, I issued a challenge to my readers to explain to me what the legal basis was for anyone to sue a public school system over that system having religious content as part of their graduation ceremony.  My point was that the First Amendment states that government should “make no law” that establishes religion and since there is no specific law covering what should or should not be said at a graduation ceremony, I didn’t see how a school system could be sued over the issue.

I did receive a few responses to that challenge, and they all boiled down to the same basic argument - that the Supreme Court has handed down a number of decisions over the years that judge organized prayer led or directed by school officials to be unconstitutional.  That such rulings have been made is of course irrefutable.  But unless we believe the Supreme Court is incapable of error, we have every right to examine those rulings and judge for ourselves whether they did or did not correctly adhere to what the Constitution has to say on the matter.  Let’s do that, shall we?

Perhaps the most important Supreme Court ruling on prayer in public schools was rendered in 1962 in the case of Engel vs. Vitale.  The New York State Board of Regents had in 1951 composed a short non-denominational school prayer and proposed it as an optional, start-of-the-day prayer for New York school children to recite if schools choose to do so.  One of the schools in the system that elected to have students recite the prayer aloud at the beginning of each day ended up getting sued, and at length the case made it to the highest court in the land.

The court ruled 6-1 that the school system’s encouragement of the recitation of a prayer to be “wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment.  Prayer and other overtly religious activities in public schools have been largely forbidden ever since.

So, case closed?  Well, let’s look closely at the specific wording of the Establishment Clause this judgment refers to:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Now, if you would, please read those first four words to yourself again.  “Congress,” it says, “shall make no law…”  As I interpret that, it is saying that the United States Congress, composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives, is prohibited from making a law that has the effect of establishing a religion.

What then, I must ask, does this amendment have to do with a school policy set by the New York Board of Regents?  To begin with, they didn’t actually pass a law.  And perhaps more importantly, the New York Board of Regents is not part of the US Congress, so (read those first four words of the First Amendment again if you need to) their actions had nothing whatsoever to do with the First Amendment.  And therefore the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to rule on this case.  In fact, they probably shouldn’t have even reviewed it.

Note that I did not say that I think the government-composed generic prayer idea was ever a good one.  I don’t.  It was a well-intentioned but completely misguided notion, in my opinion.  Prayer should never be something anyone should be “directed” to do by their government, with the words of said prayer composed by a government committee, no less.  There are so many things that are wrong with that idea I’d need a whole other column to list them all.  (I think Matthew 6:5-6 addresses it better than I ever could, anyway.)

But that is not the point.  State and local governments do a lot of things that I don’t think are wise, but the great majority of those things have nothing to do with the Constitution.  The school prayer thing is just one example among many that shows we are not really a Constitutional republic any longer, and haven’t been for a long time.

We need a Freedom From Litigation Foundation

One thing I never expected to see Warner Robins become is a flash point in the debate on the separation of church and state.  But over the last few weeks that’s what has seemed to have happened.

It started when someone from out of state who was attending one of our local high school graduations was unpleasantly surprised at the religious elements that were incorporated into the public school ceremony.  That individual has written letters to local media and the school superintendent objecting to the inclusion of prayer and religious-themed music and speeches in the graduation program and there is a possibility that litigation could follow.

Just a few days after that story broke, another church-state separation brouhaha surfaced in the International City when a letter that Mayor Chuck Shaheen had previously published in The Telegraph that included some strong religious references was protested by the activist group Freedom From Religion Foundation.  And once again there is the possibility that the situation could turn into a lawsuit for which you and I (and the other taxpayers in these parts) could end up footing the bill.

Frankly, I don’t see why these kinds of cases aren’t just summarily dismissed.  The Constitution states that the government shall “make no law” that either establishes a religion or prevents the free exercise thereof.  I do not believe that there is a law covering what the program for a high school graduation may contain, nor is there one to dictate what kind of letters a mayor can post in the local newspaper.  (Nor do I think that we have any need for such laws, by the way.)

Yet the basis of lawsuits like these is that these expressions of religion might be unconstitutional.  How can someone be in violation of laws that do not exist?  Maybe some of my readers who have a better grasp on the finer points of the law will be good enough to explain this to me.

Based on my limited research, our legal system seems to be a little confused about the whole thing as well.  The outcomes of such cases seem to be all over the map, and the same behavior that is forbidden in one state is given a judicial okay in another.  I guess it’s a good thing that our crime rate is nearly nonexistent, else these kinds of lawsuits might seem like a big waste of time and money.  (That was sarcasm, just in case that wasn’t obvious.)

Although I think such lawsuits are frivolous and ridiculous, I also believe that this man from North Carolina and the Freedom From Religion Foundation have every right to publicly protest the graduation ceremony and Mayor Shaheen’s letter.  I find it disturbing and disappointing that so much of the reaction to their complaints has taken the form of vicious personal attacks and invitations for these offended parties to “stay out of Georgia if they don’t like how we do things here.”  It is a shame that so many of us lack the ability to disagree without being disagreeable.

There’s a discussion to be had here and there are reasonable points to be made on either side.  A person should not have to leave his religious beliefs at the door when he is elected to a public office but he should be mindful of the fact that he represents a diverse group of citizens, many of whom do not share his views on religion.

As I’ve said before in this space, my opinion is that government officials ought to remain neutral on religious matters while they are executing their duties as public officials.  But that’s just my opinion about what’s right and what’s respectful to everyone concerned, and I wouldn’t try and sue anyone who disagreed with me.  If we have to settle this dispute in court the only real winners will be the lawyers and their fat bank accounts.

Read my lips: no more SPLOSTs

In the past, when I have commented on SPLOST votes, I’ve stated that since the “special purpose” sales taxes never seem to go away once they get approved our sales tax rate was likely to be at 7% forever.  I should have known better.

I was underestimating the burning desire to spend other people’s money that few politicians seem to be able to control.  In July we will get the opportunity to add another penny tax to every dollar we spend to fund a brand new regional SPLOST that would fund transportation projects in Houston, Bibb, and nine other mid-state counties.

That would raise our sales tax to 8%, but I’m not about to say I expect it will be 8% forever if voters approve the measure.  I wouldn’t be shocked if they find good reason to raise it to 9 or 10 cents on the dollar someday.  After all, what’s an extra dime on every dollar you spend, right?  You probably have a change jar at home that’s just chock full of dimes you aren’t using.

Prospects for the T-SPLOST passage may be a little cloudy though, especially where I live in Houston County.  We just renewed our county’s SPLOST that is targeted for capital improvements, and in this go-around there weren’t many road improvement projects included on the list of projects it covers because the previous SPLOST supposedly got us pretty well-positioned in that department.

And yet just a few months later we’re being asked to jack up our taxes for transportation improvements.  What gives?  Well, this is not just a Houston County tax, it is a “regional” tax, which means that taxpayers in Houston County would be paying for projects that would benefit surrounding areas.  As a matter of fact, it appears we’d be getting the short end of the T-SPLOST stick.

Of the over one billion dollars the T-SPLOST would be expected to generate over 10 years Bibb County would gobble up over $500 million of that, while Houston would reap less than $150 million.  The rest would go to 9 counties that many of us probably never set foot in.

But it might be worth it since all of this money would be dedicated specifically to improving transportation to encourage new business growth throughout the region, right?  Well, that’s only true if you think that building sidewalks and bike trails are going to attract new businesses to the area, because projects like that have been thrown into the mix of things this tax would fund.

Another point to consider is that many of us in Houston County (me included) are employed at Robins Air Force Base.  Federal government workers are currently under a pay freeze, and there has been talk of extending it beyond its supposed 2-year duration.  There have also been proposals floating around in Congress (coming from supposedly defense-friendly Republicans, no less) to do things like freeze our step increases, eliminate locality pay, and cut back the federal workforce by 10%.

And lest we forget, there are huge automatic cuts slated to be made to the defense budget in 2013 if Congress doesn’t find a way to avoid them.  No one knows what will happen if that “doomsday scenario” comes to pass, but it’s safe to say we might look on the last few years as the good times compared to what could be coming down the road very soon.

People who work on base or depend on the base for their income have been losing ground economically the past few years and that may get worse in the near future.  It does not seem to me like it’s a good time for us to absorb a major tax increase so that we can build sidewalks and buy buses for Bibb County.

I just wish there was a third option on the ballot, in addition to Approve or Disapprove.  I’d like an option that reads: “You have to be out of your ever-loving mind – NO MORE TAX INCREASES!”

President leads us into another pointless debate

It was certainly a relief when Rick Santorum’s quiet exit from the presidential campaign seemed to quiet the “debate” on contraception (one that very few of us were interested in having to begin with.)  Now, I thought, we can turn our attention away from hopelessly divisive and ultimately pointless discussions like that one and concentrate on more practical, down-to-earth issues that affect every American on a daily basis.  Issues like…gay marriage?  Oh boy, here we go again.

The President announced last week that his “evolving” opinion on gay marriage had finally evolved into something that could be put into the form of a declarative sentence:  he’s in favor of it.  I don’t think anyone was shocked to learn that an extremely left-leaning politician has that view on the issue.  The speculation mainly centers on why he chose to announce it now. 

Although Mr. Obama stated that this wasn’t a political move, you can bet that his bean counters ran the electoral math through their calculators and decided this wouldn’t cost him the election.  We’ll have to see how good their math was come November.

In the mean time, we get to enjoy more blather on both sides of an issue about which most people have already made their mind up and probably don’t care much about anyway.  Here’s my contribution to the blather.

The thing that makes this complicated is that even though marriage is a civil contract between two people that is recognized by the state, it is also an institution that has a great deal of religious significance for many of us.  Many Americans believe that marriage was instituted by God as a covenant between one man and one woman, and to mess with that is to trifle with one of the basic pillars of civilization. 

When pressed for proof of that belief you might be directed to check the Bible, where (surely) it plainly states that God only blesses a traditional one man/one woman sort of a marriage.  But if you actually crack open the Bible, you find that it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Polygamy, for example, is very common throughout the Old Testament and is never condemned as a sin.  Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon are just a few of the biblical luminaries who had more than one wife and were never chastised for it (although Solomon was led astray from the true faith thanks to the influence of his 700 wives and 300 concubines, proving that there is always a hazard in getting too much of a good thing.)  It seems like an argument could be made that a biblical view of marriage is that it should be between one man and as many women as that man can afford to keep up with.

Also, the Bible does not condone just any man and any woman getting married - Jews are very strictly prohibited from marrying gentiles.  That point is made very strongly in many places in scripture, yet Jewish people are legally allowed to marry non-Jews in every state of our union.

So I’m not sure we can claim that our marriage laws are strictly based on the Bible.  It might be accurate, though, to say that the law has been greatly influenced by modern Christian morality, and for a very long time most Christians have believed that God only blesses unions between one man and one woman.

I think it might also be fair to say that the influence that traditional Christian morality has on our secular laws has been waning for some time, and I think that that trend is likely to continue.  So I would not be at all surprised if I live to see gay marriage become legal throughout the land in my lifetime. 

But for now, please enjoy the blather.

Sugar, sugar

One of the many exciting things about getting older is that you never know which part of your body is going to stop working as well as it used to.  For instance, when I was younger I could eat whatever I wanted and I seldom gained an ounce or had an upset stomach.  I could exist on a steady diet of pizza, cheeseburgers, and ice cream and my body would take the abuse with nary a complaint.

Eventually (around the time I turned 40) my body decided it had had enough, though.  I haven’t had a problem with weight gain, but that’s only because my digestive system rebels when I indulge in eating too much fat, sugar, or dairy (basically anything that’s fun to eat.)  It’s all well and good to be thin, but when you are that way because eating a whole candy bar at one time makes you want to throw up it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best.

One of things I’ve been doing lately is paying closer attention to the things I eat, and what’s in them.  Let me warn you right now that you should never do this.  If you care at all about your health, examining what you are likely putting into your body (especially if you have a love of junk food like I do) is a sure way to make you very sad.

The thing I’ve specifically been focusing on lately is my sugar intake.  I have always had a sweet tooth and have always been pretty generous to myself about indulging it.  Based on my research, I’ve been too generous in indulging my sugar habit.  Way too generous.

The nutritional web sites I browsed recommended that an adult get no more than 40 grams (10 teaspoons) of added sugar in their diet each day.  Some recommended much less than that, so that would be the absolute upper limit.  Then I took a look at some of the food I like to eat, and how much sugar they contain.  I was in for an unpleasant surprise.

I normally start my day with a bowl of cereal or a couple of Pop-Tarts.  In doing so I am treating myself to pretty much all of the sugar I am supposed to have for a whole day (typically between 25 and 35 grams.)  Not a good start.

If I drink a 12-ounce can of Coke during the day I’ve consumed another 39 grams of sugar.  One of my “healthy” Nutri-Grain bars adds another 13 grams.  And even a low-fat “light” 6-ounce yogurt has 14 grams of sugar in it.

Of course I haven’t even mentioned real, honest-to-goodness desserts yet.  That candy bar I mentioned earlier has 30 grams of sugar in it.  A half cup of vanilla ice cream has 22 grams and a slice of apple pie has another 18, so you can do the math if you like your pie a-la-mode.

I could easily see that my average daily sugar intake could add up to more than 100 grams a day.  And I’m not alone.  The average American consumes between 125 and 200 grams of sugar each day.  Just in the last 20 years our average yearly sugar consumption has increased from 26 pounds a year to an astonishing 135 pounds a year.

The harmful effects on the body from that much sugar intake are too numerous to list in their entirety but include elevating your risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and even psychological disorders.  It is, in fact, an extremely harmful substance when consumed in mass quantities (as many of us do) but we don’t tend to look at it that way.

From the time we are children we learn that sugar is a wonderful, magical substance associated with parties and rewards for good behavior.  It’s only much later that we learn that it is also (like everything else) very bad for us if we overindulge in it.  What a drag it is growing old!

Winning is better than being right

It seems like when we are in a presidential election year, as we are now, there is more discussion and debate over what’s wrong with the country and what should be done about it than at any other time. You might think, then, that with all that discussion going on this would be a time when lots of good, useful ideas about how to solve those problems would be hashed out and agreed upon.

You might think that if you were from another planet and totally unfamiliar with how people on this planet interact with one another. But if you’re from Earth you know that when a politician engages in a discussion he’s not trying to solve a problem or seek the truth, he’s trying to either make you feel good or cast his opponent in a bad light.

But let’s not be too hard on politicians, as fun as that may be. You can hear the same kind of pointless “discussions” going on wherever you go, and I don’t just mean on talk radio. In offices and living rooms around the country you can hear people engage in their own one-sided, seemingly pointless debates where no one ever seems to change their mind or even thoughtfully consider a point of view that disagrees with their own.

So what’s wrong with us? Why do we always have to “win” every argument, when deep down we must realize that we are all fallible creatures who couldn’t possibly know everything?

One possible answer to that question (detailed in the April issue of “The Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science”) is the argumentative theory of reasoning. This theory asserts that humans didn’t evolve their ability to reason to seek the truth or to solve difficult problems but to establish their dominance over others by winning arguments.

The idea is that once we learned to communicate those who had the ability to persuade others to follow their ideas (regardless of how valid or true those ideas were) gained a survival advantage over those who were less persuasive. And hundreds of thousands of years of advantageous breeding of people who were persuasive but not necessarily correct has given us…Barak Obama? I guess I can see their point.

Actually their theory might explain a lot. It has long been known that people tend to exhibit something called confirmation bias. That is what happens when someone is confronted with apparently valid data that contradicts a deeply held belief. No matter how good that contradictory data is our brains will find a way to ignore it, discount it, or discredit the messenger. We don’t want to change our minds about the things that are really important to us.

That would seem like a strange and counter-productive use of our ability to reason if that ability was designed to seek out the truth in all cases. But if it was evolved to come up with arguments that would defeat our opponents and establish dominance in a peer group it would make a whole lot of sense.

If you pay attention to people when they engage in a disagreement, you might be surprised at how seldom logic and superior intelligence seems to determine the apparent “winner” of said disagreement. Instead it is usually persuasiveness, charisma, and appeal to emotion that sways the mob when a war of words is waged.

It’s fun to note this trait in others, but somewhat less fun to realize that it applies to me as well. It makes me wish that we had evolved the ability to forget things that we learn that force us to admit that we are a lot more irrational than we’d like to think that we are.

We are all profilers

The seemingly endless coverage of the Trayvon Martin case has brought an issue that seems to rear its head every few years to the surface once again. Many people seem convinced that one reason Mr. Martin was seen as a threat and “challenged” by a member of the local Neighborhood Watch was because he was black. Was he profiled by George Zimmerman that fateful day because of his race and the way he was dressed?

I don’t pretend to know (like so many seem to think they do) what exactly motivated Mr. Zimmerman to confront Mr. Martin that day, but the larger question of whether or not it’s ever acceptable to hold certain people under more suspicion than others based on their physical characteristics is an interesting one in any event.

On the one hand you have those who contend that we should all be judged as individuals and that no extra attention from the authorities is ever warranted based on our physical characteristics. Others point out that it’s just common sense to direct more security resources towards, say, a young Arab man than towards an elderly Asian female, because statistically some segments of the population commit more crimes than others do.

On a more personal level, I think that if we are honest with ourselves on the subject we’d have to admit that profiling is something we all do on a day-to-day basis. If you’re walking down a deserted street late at night and you see a stranger approaching, you are going to size him up as a potential threat based on how he looks and how he carries himself. That’s profiling.

After giving the matter a little thought, I came up with a summary of the profiling system I would use for the proverbial stranger on a deserted street scenario. I would ask myself the following questions to assess the potential for trouble.

- Is he male? I generally don’t regard females as potential threats, as I’ve never been threatened by a female. Well, let me clarify that – I’ve never been threatened by a female who I wasn’t in a relationship with, and we’re talking about strangers here.

- Is he between the ages of 12 and 50? Men are most likely to cause mayhem from the time they hit puberty until Father Time makes it difficult for them to flee the scene of a crime.

- Is he dressed like a gangster? The clothes make the man, and that’s especially true when you meet someone for the first time. If you are dressed like a thug, the safe assumption is you just might be a thug.

- Is he acting like an idiot? If you are talking way louder than necessary, cursing, and glaring menacingly at everyone you meet you either hate other people or you don’t care that you are making them uncomfortable. That sends a message that you are not to be trusted.

If the answer to all those questions is “yes” I’d likely cross the street to avoid that person.

Note that nowhere in the list did I mention race. I think I can say with plenty of conviction that if I had to share an elevator with either a well-dressed, polite black person or an obnoxious, swastika-covered white skinhead, race would not be a deciding factor.

Having said all that, however, let me add one more thing. The system I described influences how wary I would be of a stranger. I would not, however, use this system as any kind of justification to harass someone just because of their gender, age, or fashion sense.

Unless someone is trespassing on private property or otherwise behaving in a criminal or overtly threatening manner, they have the right to be left alone to go about their business. All of us should be able to walk down a public street without being followed, stalked or otherwise harassed. A healthy dose of mind-your-own-business would have prevented the Trayvon Martin tragedy from ever happening.

Searching for my inner liberal

One of the more interesting things about writing an opinion column is receiving feedback from readers. And one of the more interesting things about receiving that feedback is trying to figure out how people sometimes interpret things that I write in a completely different manner than I intended.

For example, I received some really interesting feedback on my last column, the topic of which was the Rush Limbaugh controversy. The main points I meant to convey with that piece were 1) people seemed to be going way overboard with their reaction to what Rush said, 2) he got into trouble not for what he said but because of whom he said it about, and 3) his behavior has proved to be a boon for his political and philosophical opponents.

But based on the feedback I got, that is not the message some people received. Not at all.

Mr. Chris Bowen of Jeffersonville was given a major chunk of real estate on the Viewpoints page a few days after my column ran and he apparently read and re-read my column until my true intent became apparent to him. He called me out as not only a “fairly liberal individual” but also a “chameleon, quite capable of numerous degrees of subtle camouflage” that “hides behind a façade of independence.”

Apparently I had a hidden agenda with that column that was hidden so well I was not even aware of it. But other feedback I got - privately in my email inbox - tended to be a little more direct and less kind than Mr. Bowen was to me.

I was called a dupe, a liberal hack, and a tool of left-wing extremists. It seems that some people are convinced that I have posters of Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton lining the walls of my bedroom. That’s ridiculous, of course. Neither of those ladies has out a decent poster since the 1970’s. (Kidding!)

Still, I think that if this many people see some kind of liberal undertone in what I write, even if I’m not aware of putting it there, maybe it is something I should think about. Even though I have always favored small, less intrusive government and voted a straight Republican ticket in 2010, it may be possible that my conscious beliefs and behavior really are just a façade. Perhaps somewhere between the lines of my writing the ghost of Ted Kennedy is peeking out at the world, saying things that I’m not even aware of.

Just for fun I decided to take one of those online political philosophy tests to see where I fall on the political spectrum. I endeavored to answer the questions as honestly as I could and let the chips fall where they may.

The results I got were far from shocking. The quiz I took, which consisted of a short series of questions about how I feel about the proper role of government in society, identified me very clearly as a libertarian. Please note that I said “libertarian” and not “liberal”. They are two very different philosophies.

A libertarian favors smaller, less intrusive government in all areas, which differentiates me from both the left wing (which sees government as a force for righting many of the wrongs in society, especially in economic matters) and the right (which tends to favor small government in economic matters but doesn’t mind using the state’s power to keep society’s moral compass pointed in the direction they think it ought to point in.)

So if I am a really a liberal, as some of my readers seem convinced, it is something that is buried so deeply in my psyche that my conscious self cannot seem to ferret it out. Hopefully alert readers of this publication continue to keep a close watch on what I write and let me know when my inner Jimmy Carter peeks out again and gives them a sly wink.

Have they shot Rush yet?

As I write this column, Rush Limbaugh is still a free man. It certainly seems possible, though, that he could be jailed, executed, or at least tarred and feathered by the time this is published. He seems to be the most reviled man in America right now, judging by the great lengths people seem to be going to condemn his bizarre and pointless attack on a 30 year-old woman who testified before Congress in support of contraception coverage for college age women.

His comments weren’t really out of character. The man is not known for his gentlemanly demeanor and - let’s face it - one doesn’t become a star on talk radio by being a nice person. I think this time he just chose a really bad target. It’s one thing to hurl invectives at a public figure like President Obama or even females like Hilary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi. It’s quite another to use language like he used in reference to this private citizen who was merely expressing her views at a public hearing.

He deserves to be condemned. He has been condemned. He probably deserves to lose some sponsors and some radio stations, and that has happened to. I wouldn’t be surprised if he loses some listeners too, though I have a feeling that his most ardent fans will forgive him for this outburst.

But does he deserve to be fired, or least put on suspension for some period of time? Obviously that decision is up to his employer, and I expect the decision will be mostly about money. As long as Limbaugh remains profitable, he will remain employed. People will still listen to him, and somebody somewhere will give him a microphone. Even if they do let him go, I expect he won’t be out of work long.

It is interesting to note that our society seems to punish “hateful speech” in widely different measures depending on who is doing the talking and who they are talking about. Conservative commentators have been quick to point out that the same media outlets who have had a conniption over Limbaugh’s misogyny have given a free pass to liberals like Bill Maher.

Maher has said things about Sarah Palin that are so vile and vulgar that I can’t even hint at the language he used in a family newspaper, but the media seems to respect his “free speech rights” without a hint of condemnation. Nor has President Obama returned the $1 million Maher gave to his super PAC despite his rather colorful descriptions of the former governor of Alaska.

The world is not a fair place and it is full of double standards. No one has ever lost their job in the entertainment industry using disparaging language about white males, Republicans, or evangelical Christians. That’s why a guy like Rick Santorum is has such a big target on him. The poor guy just has to take it too, because no one likes a bad sport.

The thing that makes me really sad is that we have become so distracted by an issue (contraception) that very few people even consider worth talking about. Aside from Rick Santorum, the Pope, and possibly Mel Gibson, there aren’t many who have a problem with the idea that medical insurance should cover contraceptive services for women.

It’s a losing issue for the Republican Party, and it is one that no one who wants to see President Obama limited to a single term should be running their mouths about. Rush is not doing the eventual Republican nominee or the conservative cause any favors by making a target out of a private citizen testifying in support of contraception coverage.

I don’t think he deserves to be yanked off the airwaves because of what he said, but I think if he really cared about his party doing well this year he’d take a voluntary leave of absence all on his own. Please Rush – take a long vacation and give us a chance to miss you.

Santorum thinks Kennedy had it all wrong

In 1960 a young man named John Fitzgerald Kennedy wanted to be the President of the United States. He had a lot going for him including good looks, a ton of charisma, and the backing of a very rich and powerful family.

But John had a problem. He was a Catholic, and back then some Americans were concerned that if a Catholic was elected President he just might take his marching orders from the Pope. To address those concerns, Kennedy gave a famous speech on what he thought the relationship should be between the church and the state. Here’s a quote from that speech:

“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish, where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

I think that’s just the right attitude for a man who wants to be President of a religiously diverse country like ours. A President should represent all American citizens without prejudice, not just the people who go to the same church he does.

But not everyone agrees. One person who does not agree with President Kennedy’s view on religion and government is Rick Santorum, another Catholic who is running for President this year and is currently doing quite well in the Republican primaries.

Santorum (who has directly disagreed with the sentiments expressed in Kennedy’s speech on more than one occasion) is very upfront about how his Catholic beliefs influence his legislative actions.

He opposes gay marriage of course, and supports the outlawing of abortion in all cases. That’s pretty standard stuff for Republicans these days. But he’s also spoken out against prenatal medical screening tests (which he believes may encourage women to have abortions) and has said that states should have the right to ban contraception.

Lately he’s even taken to directly criticizing President Obama’s theological viewpoints. Obama might be a Christian, Santorum speculates, but if so he’s using the wrong interpretation of the Bible to inform his public policy decisions. Apparently he thinks that Obama wasn’t reading Genesis correctly when he came up with his environmental policies, for example. (Please don’t ask me to explain this.)

Santorum’s strategy seems to be paying off for him, at least in the GOP primaries. But the primaries are heavily influenced by the most enthusiastic social conservatives, and some of the Republican power brokers are getting nervous about how Santorum’s antics would play in a general election where moderate and independent voters end up making the difference. I think they have good reason to be nervous.

Polls indicate that about 25% of Americans identify themselves as Catholics, 50% as Protestant Christians, 15% have no religious affiliation at all, and 5% are members of non-Christian religions. Santorum would obviously have a hard time winning over the 20% of Americans who aren’t Christians, but with his stance against contraception and prenatal screenings and his apparent need to justify public policy decisions based on his interpretation of the Bible I think he’s also bound going to lose a lot of Christians who don’t think theocracy is such a swell idea.

I do not see a path to victory in the general election for Rick Santorum, and sadly I’m having a hard time seeing a path to victory for the Republican Party in 2012. I believe people are ready for a change (I know I am), but the Republican primary looks like a beauty contest where no one can get through the talent portion of the competition without breaking their leg or setting their own hair on fire.

Could we please get a do-over?

Too much doctoring can make you sick

Once upon a time, further back than most of us can remember, people only went to the doctor when they were sick. Unless you were in a lot of pain or otherwise unable to go about your regular activities you left the doctor alone so he could look after the sick folks.

But things are different today. Thanks to advances in medical science we are now encouraged to go see the doctor for regular “checkups” even we feel fine, and we are often encouraged to undergo medical tests to “screen” for possible hidden problems.

Aren’t we lucky to be living in an age where doctors are actively looking for problems before they occur? Imagine how many lives have been extended and improved thanks to preventative medical screening!

No doubt there is some truth to that, but it is not quite so cut and dried. Lately we’ve been hearing some dissenting voices within the medical community concerning the wisdom of ordering diagnostic tests for apparently healthy patients. I am currently reading a book called “Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health” by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch that makes that very point, and I strongly encourage you to pick it up and read it for yourself.

The central theme of this book, which Dr. Welch drives home with numerous real world examples from his own practice, is that the medical community has used its increasingly advanced medical diagnostic capabilities to expand the number of patients it tests and treats for “abnormalities” that might well have caused patients no real problems if they’d been left alone. Even worse, there are a disturbing number of cases where this unneeded treatment is causing unnecessary harm.

One of the starkest examples of the “more harm than good” class of medical tests he cites is the PSA blood test that until recently all men were encouraged to take to screen for prostate cancer once they reached a certain age. The test is so sensitive that it detects extremely minute elevations of a chemical in the blood that can be a signal of cancerous activity within the prostate.

Dr. Welch estimates that over a million American men underwent treatment for prostate cancer based on the results of these tests that otherwise would have had no issues with their prostate during a normal lifespan. The treatments are expensive and can be painful and debilitating, and that doesn’t take into account the psychological toll that being a “cancer patient” takes on a person and their loved ones.

The PSA test now seems to be falling out of favor entirely with many doctors, but similar questions are being raised about other popular medical screening tests. Lately there’s a lot of discussion over whether women really benefit overall from having preventive mammography screenings, a debate that sounds an awful lot like the PSA blood test controversy with talk of numerous false positives leading to a lot of unnecessary treatment.

As health care consumers we need to be aware of certain factors that encourage doctors to run as many tests as possible and treat any possible issue these tests find in an aggressive manner. Medical tests are a significant source of income for doctors and hospitals and it is rare for a doctor to get sued for being overzealous in testing and treating possible illnesses, so they are likely to err on the side of overtreatment.

When it comes to your medical care, it’s up to you to look out for your own best interests. Unless you are experiencing a medical emergency that obviously requires immediate treatment, do your research and ask questions before you agree to expensive diagnostic tests and subsequent courses of treatment. Oftentimes there are trade-offs between the risk a potential problem represents and the cost and side effects of a course of treatment. Know what those trade-offs are and be an active participant in deciding what is done to your body.

It is, after all, your body, and your life. If your doctor is one that doesn’t believe in making his patient an active partner in his or her own medical care, you need to find another doctor.

Taxpayers get bit by gambling sting

I’ve been sleeping a little better at night this week, and I think the reason is that a scourge that has been quietly plaguing our community for who-knows-how-long has finally been met head-on by our local law enforcement. The Warner Robins Police Department made a bold series of arrests last Friday that has surely shaken the criminal element in the International City to its very core.

What dastardly deed did this dragnet sweep up and dump into the dustbin of law and order? Was it murder, rape, robbery, or assault? Nope. Was it was drunk-driving, child pornography, or drug dealing? Wrong again.

The nasty, vicious, community-threatening enterprise that the WRPD spent a significant amount of time and money setting up and executing a sting operating for last week was…wait for it…video gambling!

13 citizens were rounded up and arrested for operating businesses that provided illegal gambling services to their customers. These businesses were offering cash prizes to customers who got lucky on their video gaming machines. The machines themselves are not illegal, but paying out cash as a prize (as opposed to merchandise or store credit) is.

I want to state very clearly that I understand that the police don’t make laws - they only enforce them - and I have no beef with the WRPD for doing their jobs. But a couple of things bother me about this sting operation, and I’m going to tell you about them, because that’s what I do.

First of all it seems hypocritical to me, to an almost ridiculous degree, that the state of Georgia prosecutes private citizens for engaging in an activity that is perfectly legal when the state is the one profiting from said activity.

The usual logic (which I find questionable) for outlawing victimless crimes like gambling is because of the harm it does for people who become addicted and can’t control their behavior. But anyone who will be prevented from gambling away the family income on video poker thanks to these arrests can easily walk into a convenience store and blow said income on the state-run lottery.

This looks an awful lot more like a powerful state protecting its financial interests than a principled stand for the public morality.

But even if we ignore the arguably shaky moral ground that Georgia’s anti-gambling laws are built upon, I have another issue with this sting operation. I have to wonder what person, or group of people, made the decision to devote a great deal of money and manpower to addressing this particular crime?

Video gambling is illegal, certainly, but so is littering, jaywalking, and driving 1 mile an hour over the speed limit. With all the crimes that inevitably get committed on a daily basis in a city the size of Warner Robins, how did video gambling rise to a status that merited this kind of time and attention by our law enforcement community?

That is not a rhetorical question. It’s one I’d really like to have answered. If anyone connected with the police department, the city government, or any other agency that played a role in this sting operation can shed any light on my question, I’d love to see it explained right here on the pages of The Telegraph.

If we were to add up all the costs associated with an operation like this – the pay for the officers involved, the court costs and attorney’s fees associated with prosecuting those arrested, and the cost of jailing anyone convicted – I think we’d find it running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, at a minimum.

I think it’s fair to ask, at the end of the day, if it was all worth it. It’s fair to question whether these anti-gambling laws should even be on the books, and it is more than fair to question how much valuable police time and taxpayer money is getting gobbled up to combat an activity that, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Nomination without representation

With the start of the New Year the 2012 Republican presidential primary kicked itself into high gear. The Iowa caucuses are now just a memory and the votes in the New Hampshire primary are being counted as I write this. Soon the South Carolina primary will be held and at that point some pundits think the race could be all but decided.

But even if it isn’t, the field of challengers will be certainly be narrowed down by the time the people of the Palmetto state have their say. Michele Bachmann is already gone after her poor showing in Iowa and Rick Perry is hanging on by a thread. Those of us who vote later in the primaries (i.e. the vast majority of the American public) may have little or no say in who the Republicans draft to run against Barak Obama.

And that irritates me more than I can say. Is it any wonder that we feel disconnected from our government when the major parties nominate candidates for the highest office using a process that relies so disproportionately on the views of a tiny minority of eligible voters? It’s a silly process that generally produces silly candidates, and we’re lucky that people still bother to vote at all.

Still, I try to care. I recently took one of those online quizzes that asks you a series of questions and suggests which candidates most closely align to your views, theoretically helping you decide who to vote for. Unsurprisingly the libertarian-leaning Ron Paul came in first for me as an 80% match, followed by Mitt Romney at 63% and Newt Gingrich at 57%.

Scoring much lower as my potential political soul-mate was right wing flavor-of-the-week Rick Santorum. That too came as little surprise. The difference between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum comes down to a belief in limited government. Ron Paul believes in limited government, period. Rick Santorum believes in limited government too, except for when he doesn’t.

Let’s take abortion, for example, one of the two take-no-prisoners issues that social conservatives are willing to fall on their sword over (the other one being gay marriage, of course). Ron Paul is personally opposed to abortion on moral grounds, but he does not believe that the US Constitution gives the power on the federal government the authority to legislate the issue one way or the other. Rick Santorum reads the Constitution differently in this case, and believes that there should be a federal law outlawing abortion in all circumstances.

And when I say all circumstances, I mean all circumstances. He believes that victims of rape and incest should be legally required by the federal government to carry their babies to term. The same thing would apply if, say, a doctor told a prospective mother that her baby was seriously deformed and unlikely to survive after being born or that it might kill her if she did not terminate the pregnancy. She would see the pregnancy through or both she and her doctor would be subject to criminal prosecution.

That kind of thinking goes over well with one vocal segment of the Republican Party, but the majority of Americans would be put off by that level of interference by the government in a citizen’s personal life. Abortion is troubling to many of us on moral grounds and we’d likely support some legal restrictions on it, but circumstances matter. The rights of the unborn child have to be balanced against the right of a woman to make her own medical decisions without the interference of the federal government.

But I suppose I may be wasting my time contrasting the potential merits of a Ron Paul or Rick Santorum nomination. By the time I get a chance to vote, one or both of these men could be gone, or one of them could have the nomination sewn up. There’s no sense wasting my few functioning brains cells on a decision the good folks in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina may be good enough to make for me.