An open letter to Rep. Austin Scott

Dear Rep. Scott,

First of all, I want to apologize for not writing sooner.  I have received several letters from you in the past informing me how you were working hard to uphold my conservative values in Washington, and I really should have written back to you a long time ago. 

I’ve just been busy with work, family, the fall TV season – you know how it is.  But you’ve been on my mind a good bit lately with all the mess that’s going on with our federal government lately and I thought it was time that I gave you some feedback.

Unfortunately I don’t have good news for you.  You see, Austin, I’ve decided that I’m going to have to let you go.  No matter what you do between now and the next election I’ve already decided that I’ll be voting for someone else.

Please don’t take this personally.  You seem like a good guy and I know you and the rest of the House Republicans who have taken the country on this government shutdown/debt default thrill ride mean well and you think you’re doing the right thing. 

I also want to make it clear that I don’t hold the Republicans solely responsible for the waking nightmare that our government has become.  There is plenty of blame to go around, and the Democrats and President Obama share equally in the responsibility for failing to make our divided government function.

It is indeed a group failure, but I can’t hold anyone else responsible the way I can hold you responsible.  You’re my guy.  You’re the one I get a chance to pass judgment on every other year.  You have to to bear my most immediate, direct response to my disappointment over the embarrassment that our federal government has become.

I’m trying to imagine someone in any other line of work getting away with the kind of job performance you guys are delivering to us and not getting fired, and I’m having a hard time doing so. 

Imagine you were part of a team that was tasked with designing a new product, for example, and the team split into two opposing factions with differing opinions on what the design should be.  If at the end of the development process each team presented a different design to management and declared that it was the other side’s fault that the task didn’t get accomplished, what do you think management’s response would be, Austin? 

Maybe you’ve been out of the business world for a while, so let me tell you what would happen – you’d all get fired.  And you’d deserve it.  Your job was to get the task done, not to somehow beat the people you were tasked to work with in a contest of ideas.

Perhaps the most important task of any government is to collect taxes and decide on how that money should be spent, to come up with a workable budget that can pass the legislature and be signed by the chief executive.  It can be a difficult process, especially with a divided government, but governments get it done all the time.

You guys should have gotten it done, and I think you should all be held accountable for failing at this most basic of tasks.  It’s time that you all be let go, and I mean what I say – I will be voting for someone else next year.  I hope there is someone who lives in my district who is just as fed up as I am who and will decide to run against you. 

In fact it would be great if more than one of my fellow citizens ran against you so we’d really have more choices in the next election, and it would be fine with me if those people didn’t belong to either of the two major parties. 

Count me among the 60% of Americans who now agree that we need an option besides the Republicans and Democrats on the ballot on Election Day.  We need more choices, because what we have right now sure isn’t working for us.

Shutdown was inevitable

In retrospect, we should have seen this coming.  We live in a country where the population and its government seem to grow more polarized with each passing day.  We don’t know how to talk to each other without shouting and we aren’t willing to listen to anyone who is not parroting our own beliefs back to us.  Maybe it was inevitable that all of that discord would eventually cause our government to grind to a halt. 

As I write this column, the government is (partially) shut down and the two parties aren’t even meeting to talk about a resolution.  They are just taking turns mouthing off to the media, each side claiming they are the reasonable ones and pointing the finger of blame at the other party.

Who’s really to blame for this mess?  Is it the Democrats or the Republicans?  Or is it a case of our President failing to show effective leadership?  Maybe responsibility should be laid at the feet of voters who keep reelecting the same morons and then complaining about how sorry they all are.  Personally I think the answer is all of the above.

Opinion polls seem to indicate that the Republicans are getting most of the blame for the shutdown, even though those same polls indicate that a majority of us agree with them about Obamacare not being the greatest thing ever. 

I think the reason the GOP is getting hammered over this is that is that they had 3 years to derail Obamacare and they couldn’t get it done either through the normal legislative process or at the ballot box.  Shutting down the government after they failed to get voters to throw Obama out of office or retake a majority in the Senate after campaigning against Obamacare looks like a desperate move by a party that seems to be in an increasing state of disarray.

Of course the Republicans are pleasing their conservative base by taking on the signature legislation of that left-wing Great Satan Obama.  I’ve been following the posts of Rep. Austin Scott, the congressman who represents my voting district, and he racks up numerous “likes” and positive comments any time he posts about his anti-Obamacare votes.

I am sure that Rep. Scott will cake-walk to reelection in his carefully drawn GOP-friendly district, just like most of the Republicans in the House will do no matter how long the government is shut down.  They know how to play to their base. 

But as people much smarter than me have observed, they could be doing major damage to their prospects for retaking a majority in the Senate next year or winning the White House in 2016 with their actions right now.  So the nonsense going on right now may be what we get for the next decade or so unless something happens to change the game in a significant way.

What kind of change would shake things up?  Defaulting on our debt might do it.  There are varying opinions on what a default would mean to the average American, and they range from very serious to horrifying.  Imagine what happened to Greece, for example, but with no one to bail us out.

In such a scenario a whole new reality could set in and no one can predict what would happen.  Based on what we know about human nature, it certainly seems possible that all the hateful speech that is flying back and forth between the left and right could devolve into violence.  Desperate people do desperate things.

I hope that doesn’t happen and I don’t think we’ve gone over the brink just yet.  But I think it would help if we stopped rewarding bad behavior by patting our representatives on the back for “standing up for their principles no matter what” instead of recognizing the reality of our divided government and put a higher premium on being pragmatic and working towards compromise.

Maybe I’ll post that thought on Facebook and see how many “likes” I get.

Time to call for a new constitutional convention

Based on the approval ratings I’ve seen and conversations I’ve heard recently, I’d say we are feeling as badly about our federal government as we ever have in this country’s history.  And I think it may be just about to get a lot worse.

The government will have to shut down at the beginning of October if a budget or continuing resolution is not passed by then.  By November we will default on our debt if Congress doesn’t approve an increase to our self-imposed debt ceiling.  With a large number of Republicans insisting that Obamacare be defunded as part of any resolution to our financial situation and Obama insisting that he will not even consider doing that, either or both of these once-unthinkable situations could come to pass.

If the worst case scenarios do occur we will be in uncharted waters.  The stock market could collapse.  Your cash and investments could become virtually worthless overnight.  Government benefits like Social Security and Medicaid might be dramatically scaled back or not paid at all.  We could become one of those countries people mention when they list famous “failed states.”

I think it’s fair to say that our government is fundamentally broken at this point, and I don’t see it getting any better unless we somehow shake things up and change the status quo.  But how could we do that?

I think we should turn for inspiration to the year 1789.  That’s when the 13 states that then made up the Union decided that the government that was set up in the Articles of Confederation after the revolution was not working out and needed major revisions.  So they convened a constitutional convention and our federal government as we know it was the result.

I believe that in a similar manner we are finding that our government as it currently exists simply isn’t working anymore, and we need to make the same sort of radical change.  It’s time for the states that make up this union to call for another constitutional convention.

I would not suggest throwing out our current Constitution as I think it is a worthy foundation to build a government on.  But I think we have found that it leaves some loopholes that our government has exploited much to the nation’s detriment, and those loopholes need to be closed.  Some amendments I’d suggest are:

1.  One that requires the budget to be balanced every year, with the only exception being time of war or natural catastrophe.  Even then there should be limits on how big a deficit can be and how long it can be on the books before it is paid off.

2.  One that makes election to Congress more of a public service position and less like winning the lottery.  Enact term limits for all congressional offices.  Set salaries to correspond to the government General Schedule instead of letting then set their own, and give congressmen the same heath care options other federal employees have.  Eliminate retirement benefits and make it illegal for congressmen to become lobbyists when they leave office.

3.  One that makes it very clear that it is Congress’ responsibility to declare war and that we can only legally go to war when our national security is under threat or one of our allies has been attacked.  No more “nation building” or “peace keeping” exercises at a President’s discretion.

I think amending our Constitution this way would address some of the more egregious issues we’re having with our federal government.  But don’t expect the impetus for change to come from Washington – they will not give up the power they’ve accumulated over the years willingly. 

We would need two-thirds of our states to petition Congress in order to convene another constitutional convention.  It may seem far-fetched now, but I’m guessing we may be willing to consider such a radical step as the insanity in Washington continues the rest of this year.

A point of light for Georgia Democrats

To say that the Democratic Party in Georgia has hit on hard times would be quite an understatement.  All of the major positions of power at the state level are held by Republicans and they have a solid majority in the state house and senate.  Both of our senators in Washington are Republicans as well.  Democrats have been relegated to holding a relatively small number of state and federal congressional seats from districts that were designed by majority Republicans to group their likely voters together.

But there may be one small, bright light on the horizon for Georgia Democrats.  Her name is Michelle Nunn.

Michelle is the daughter of legendary Senator Sam Nunn, who was a well-known and widely respected Democratic Senator from Georgia back when Democrats still ruled the South.  Obviously she’s getting most of her publicity, at least initially, because of her last name.  She even looks a lot like her Dad.

Having a famous father is not going to get her elected, but it gives her a certain amount of credibility by osmosis.  Polls being conducted against her potential Republican opponents show her doing very well against any of them.  But realistically those polls don’t mean a whole lot at this point and she’s facing an uphill battle in this very red state.

Ms. Nunn is still largely an unknown quantity to the public as this is her first run for public office.  Up to now she’s been working in charity organizations and is currently the CEO of the George HW Bush-inspired Points of Light Foundation.  I had no idea that whole “thousand points of light” stuff was still around, but apparently Bush was more inspirational than I realized.

She has pledged to be the same kind of politician her father was – one who puts the country first and works with representatives of both parties to get things done.  She has said that all parties in Washington, including the President, are responsible for the gridlock that has kept our government from attending to its most basic functions.  Of course it’s all just campaign rhetoric at this point but it’s a sentiment I strongly agree with and I’m sure it’s a message that will resonate with a lot of independent voters in the state.

In the end, though, her chances of winning will have a lot to do with who the Republicans nominate to run against her.  If one of their more far-right candidates like Paul Broun (who labels scientific theories on evolution and the Big Bang as”lies straight from the pit of hell”) or Phil Gingrey (who sort of agreed with the deposed congressman who said rape victims are unlikely to get pregnant) she is likely to compete strongly for more moderate voters and it could turn into a real horse race.

Leaders in the state Republican Party seem genuinely concerned, and they are considering moving up the primary election date next year from its usual time in the “dog days” of summer to late spring to increase voter turnout.  The thinking seems to be that holding a primary when more people are likely to vote will somehow favor the more moderate candidates.

In any event, barring some gross misstep or unforeseen scandal on her part Michelle Nunn has given us a shot at something none of us would have expected a few months ago – a real competitive race for an Senate seat in Georgia.

I will admit that it has been a long time since I voted for a Democrat, but I’m an independent voter and I will be watching this race closely to see how it plays out.  I’m glad Nunn has chosen to run.  Voters deserve options and elections should not be won by default.  One-candidate elections are not a sign of a healthy democracy.

A well-earned break?

I’ll be taking my summer vacation next week.  It won’t be a long one – just 4 days at the beach – but even that was something I agonized over before deciding to spend the money on it.  Like many other Department of Defense workers I’m in the middle of being furloughed one day a week right now, and based on the things our Secretary of Defense has been saying about the next fiscal year I’m afraid my job could soon disappear entirely.

Some people are more fortunate than I am though, and they don’t have to stress over taking a few days away from work.  Take the US Congress.  (Please.)

Our representatives in Washington are currently enjoying their traditional 5-week August vacation.  They get 5 weeks off with pay every year at this time, and this year they will collectively pocket nearly $9 million of your tax dollars as they enjoy a respite from all of their hard work.

There was some talk in Washington earlier this month about Congress working through the traditional August recess, given the perilous state or our financial situation.  Nancy Pelosi was ready to roll up her sleeves and work through the month, saying that taking a vacation right now “shows shocking disregard for the American people and our economy.”

I’d be tempted to agree with her if this Congress actually accomplished anything while they were in session.  All they seem to be able to do right now is pass legislation in one branch that they know has no chance of passing in the other one. 

As one of their last acts before they dashed out of town, for instance, Republicans in the House passed their 40th bill to repeal, delay, or defund Obamacare.  Would it really help the country if they stayed in town and raised that number to 45 or 50? 

They know they are wasting time passing bills that will never become law, but they seem to think that we will be impressed that they “took a principled stand” as opposed to working on legislation that might actually have a chance of passing.

When they do return from their vacation, Congress will have only nine days before the current fiscal year ends.  If they don’t pass a budget before then we’ll be facing another government shutdown.  We are also on the verge of another “fiscal cliff” where they will either have to raise the debt limit or face defaulting on the country’s debt.

Some Republicans want to use that dreaded scenario as a bargaining chip to get the Democrats to roll back Obamacare.  Others in the GOP think that’s a very poor strategy, one that has been tried before with disastrous results for the party’s standing with most voters. 

There seems to be increasing division within the Republican Party over a number of issues (immigration reform is another good example), and one wonders if we are drifting towards a one-party government.  Imagine Hilary Clinton in the White House one day presiding over a Congress where Democrats control both the House and Senate.  It could happen.

For now though expect a lot of hot air to be expended by both parties while they pretend to listen to our concerns at their town hall meetings this month and later as they play chicken with each other on the Fiscal Cliff Highway.  They will tell their constituents how hard they are fighting for them when all they are really doing is trying their best to make the other side look bad.

Because they have shown us that they really don’t care about us, the state of their country, or our future generations.  It’s all a game to them, and winning means making the other side look bad so they can jockey for position in 2014 and beyond.

Whether they’re in Washington or not, politicians these days do not govern.  They are forever stuck in campaign mode.

Stand Your Ground here to stay

In most cases if you get tried for committing a crime and are found not guilty you are then free to go back to living the life you were living before being charged with a crime.  If your name is George Zimmerman, however, your troubles are far from over after a jury exonerates you. 

He was already tried and found guilty by the media and people of a certain political persuasion long before his trial took place, and nothing short of a guilty verdict would have kept them from continuing their pursuit of what they have decided is justice.  His detractors seem to have two main demands now that he’s been cleared of second degree murder: that he be charged by the federal government with violating Trayvon Martin’s civil rights and that the Stand Your Ground law in Florida be repealed.

I have heard nothing beyond pure conjecture to suggest that racism played a role in Martin’s death, so any federal civil rights charges would have to be based purely on political pandering.  So of course it’s entirely possible that it will happen, especially given the level of “integrity” that has been exhibited by our current scandal-plagued Attorney General Eric Holder.

As far as the Stand Your Ground law goes, I’m not the first to point out that many other states (including Georgia) have similar laws, but the protests and threatened boycotts (the state has already lost the opportunity to see Stevie Wonder play live for the foreseeable future) seem to be aimed solely at Florida.  That’s because people who are prone to big public displays of outrage are motivated by what they read in the news and not by logic or good, solid information.

I put the odds of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law being rolled back at less than 10%.  The fact is those laws are quite popular in conservative states like Florida and are strongly supported by Second Amendment proponents.

Frankly the whole “duty to retreat” idea that these laws replaced in states like Florida and Georgia is a little confusing to me anyway.  I’m trying to picture myself in a public place, wearing a sidearm and having some menacing individual approach me with the intent to do me harm.  Imagine that the law says I have to try and escape before I can shoot this threatening individual. 

Do I have to run until I hit a wall?  What if I trip and fall and they are able to overtake me before I can get my gun out?  I’m not very coordinated, so that’s a real concern.  If you’re armed and convinced that your life is in danger it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to try and beat the aggressor in a footrace.  You’re much more likely to show him your gun and let him decide if he wants to meet his maker or be on his way.

Just in case the law doesn’t get changed, I have some helpful advice for anyone who is concerned about someone shooting them and using Stand Your Ground to get out of being punished for it.  Note that the law only allows someone to shoot you if they fear that you present an imminent physical threat to them. 

So here’s my advice: don’t attack or threaten to attack people in public places.

Let’s say, for example, you’re walking down the street minding your own business when someone starts following you and proceeds to question you about your identity and destination.  I’d advise you to answer them with words, not your fists.  Do not - let me repeat this - do not respond by climbing on top of them and pounding their head into the ground.  That’s risky behavior and could end up getting you shot.

Always keep in mind that there are a lot of idiots in the world of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and some of them have guns.  I assume every obnoxious stranger I run into might be armed, so I try to avoid getting into fistfights (even when they are acting like fools) unless they start swinging first.  I believe that if Mr. Martin had lived by the same philosophy he’d still be alive today.

A coup by any other name

Like the other 650,000 Department of Defense workers who are affected by the sequestration-driven furloughs, I’ll be staying home from work today without pay.  Unless Congress decides to show us some mercy our pay will be reduced by 20% for the rest of the fiscal year.

And if we continue on the path we’re on now, things will be much worse for federal employees next year.  Even if they furloughed all of us for the maximum 22 days the law allows the DOD would still be way over its projected budget for next year. 

Instead of furloughs, next year there could be layoffs.  Massive layoffs.  I’ve seen estimates that say 100,000 active duty, civilian, and contract workers could lose their jobs because of the projected budget cuts.

As of now though there doesn’t seem to be much sign that anyone in Congress is motivated to do anything about the sequestration cuts despite the fact that military officials have made it clear that they have dangerously impeded their ability to carry out their mission and protect our nation.  Congress apparently has more important business to attend to right now.

For example, they are currently embroiled in a fight over whether or not we should carry out a scheduled $1.5 billion payout in aid to Egypt in light of the fact that the military has seized control of the government.  Apparently there is a law that would prevent us from giving them the aid if what has happened over there could be classified as a military coup of a legitimately elected government, so those who support giving them the money are finding creative ways to frame the situation so that it’s classified as, well, something else.

Yes my fellow Americans, that’s right – your government can’t be bothered to address its funding shortfall to keep its own military in good working order but quite a few of your congressional representatives are hard at work ensuring that we send $1.5 taxpayer dollars to a foreign government that is in complete disarray. 

Interestingly enough, about three-fourths of the Egyptian aid would go towards the purchase of military hardware.  I wonder who they buy those arms from.  Could it be American defense contractors who make generous donations towards certain congressional representatives?  Please forgive me if my cynicism is showing.

One of my favorite quotes in support of continuing American taxpayer support to the Egyptian military came from Speaker John Boehner, who praised the Egyptian military for doing “what they had to do in terms of replacing the elected president.”

Okay, Mr. Speaker, one question for you – what exactly does a democratically elected president have to do before that country’s military should replace him?  I just wonder what the guidelines are for something like that.  Is the speaker setting us up for something to happen down the road in our own country?

You think I’m kidding, and for the most part I am, but I think it’s worth noting that Republicans for some time have been making noise about President Obama’s tendency to engage in “extra-legal” activities in order to make end-runs around the contentious, do-nothing Congress he’s saddled with.

The military ousted that guy in Egypt largely because he was consolidating power for his radical Islamic group and bending the law as necessary to force the country along the path he and his cronies wanted it to be on.  So the military “did what they had to do.”  Could something like that ever happen here?

I don’t think so.  Apparently the military is sort of an independent force in Egypt that is obviously not under civilian control, but here the military is an integrated part of our gigantic government infrastructure.  We don’t see a dime in funding unless Congress gives its blessing, and lately we are seeing a lot less dimes.

Our military is not going to rescue us from our inept government.  We’ll have to do that ourselves by electing better people and demanding that they do a better job for us.

Compromise is not a dirty word

According to Gallup polls released this month, American’s approval of the US Congress has dropped to a historic low of 10%.  It’s hard to believe a nation would allow themselves to be ruled by a body that it disapproves of so strongly, but as yet there have been no street protests or riots as we have seen in other countries that have so dramatically lost faith in their governments.

Perhaps we put up with them because our dislike of Congress is only intense when we consider it in its impersonal, corporate form, and not as a group of men and women that we elect, and often continue to reelect.

Check the approval rating for an individual US Representative or Senator on their home ground and I guarantee you the number will almost always be well above 10%.  Congress is inept, we seem to think, but our guy is one of the good ones.  Maybe that’s because “our guy” knows what’s important to the people he represents, and is good at giving the appearance that those things are important to him too.

Would you like to represent Houston County in Washington?  Make sure you’re a Republican, are against abortion, and support gun rights and the military.  It’s also good idea to let everyone know how much you love Jesus.  If you were running for Congress in, say, the San Francisco area, you’d probably want to have a whole other set of principles if you want to have a chance of winning there.

So what we end up with is a big group of men and women who come in with very different ideas about what the government should be doing.  Yet somehow enough of them have to come together and agree on legislation if anything is ever going to get done.  If they can’t do that, well, we end up with a Congress that is unable to do very basic things a legislative body must do, like pass a budget that doesn’t bankrupt the country.

Which is, of course, exactly where we are today, and that explains why most of us have a very dim view of that particular branch of government.  It seems to be broken beyond repair.

Let’s talk about traitors

There’s been a good deal of debate this week in the news media over whether this Edward Snowden character, who leaked classified information on government surveillance programs to several major newspapers, is a hero or a traitor to his country. 

I can’t help but jump into this debate because it’s the kind of thing I find engaging.  And if you have read many of my columns you might guess that my answer is going to be a nuanced (and likely long-winded) one.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front - we should be able to agree that the man is a criminal.  He signed a document that said he would keep any classified information he had access to private and he broke that agreement, knowing full well that what he was doing was illegal and knowing what the consequences would be when his actions came to light.

The government has no choice but to press charges against him and I can’t think of a good legal argument to say that he shouldn’t be convicted and imprisoned for what he has admitted to doing.

But the question of whether or not what he did was morally wrong and whether or not the man betrayed his country is a very different and much more complex matter.  (Here comes the long-windedness you were warned about earlier.)

Whatever else you might say about Edward Snowden, you have to admit that he was in a difficult position.  He was privy to information about government programs which had the approval of all three branches of government and were therefore perfectly legal.  Yet these programs were also being kept secret from the American people and upon learning about them many of us agree with Snowden’s opinion that they are unconstitutional and counter to the principles on which this nation was founded.

What should he have done in that situation?  It seems to me his options were very limited.  I can think of no legal and effective way that he could have protested this.  His choices were to either keep his mouth shut or to do what he did, break the law, and (most likely) ruin his life.

What would you have done in his shoes?  I think the great majority of us would have kept our mouths shut.  Not many of us would throw away our lives and our personal freedom by taking on the US government.

The fact that he has thrown his life and his future into turmoil does not, of course, make Snowden a hero.  But labeling him a traitor, as some of our congressional representatives (but not our image-conscious President, interestingly enough) have done, is a hard sell.

I think it’s fair to say that Snowden did betray his government, but I don’t believe he betrayed his country.  And I certainly don’t think he betrayed our Constitution.

The Fourth Amendment says that our government does not have the right to invade our personal space unless we are suspected of criminal wrongdoing and that “searches and seizures” have to be pre-approved by a judicial official, based on evidence of that wrongdoing. 

I believe that means that they have no constitutional authority to collect detailed information on every single American’s phone and Internet activity so they’d have convenient access to it in the event that they want to browse through it on some future date looking for evidence of terrorist activity.  But that’s exactly what they have been doing, for years.  And they’ve been doing it in secret, until now.

How you feel about this case probably comes down to how you feel about the government.  I’ll come clean and admit that I am a confirmed libertarian and I believe our government has too much power, and this is just another example of how it has assumed more authority than the Constitution says it is allowed to have. 

If you are looking for traitors to the principles our country was founded on, don’t look in Hong Kong or wherever Snowden has fled to now.  Look in Washington D.C.  They’re everywhere.

Georgia offends another atheist

It seems as if Georgia has become something of a flashpoint in the debate over separation of church and state lately.  Last year at this time there was a big brouhaha over prayers being offered and hymns being sung at high school graduations right here in Houston County, which eventually led to our superintendent banning such things from being part of the official program at future graduations.  Now the state is making national news over the practice of Gideons International being allowed to place Bibles in government-operated cabins at state parks.

An atheist named Ed Buckner was disturbed to find a Gideon Bible next to his bed in his cabin at Amicola State Park last month and when he complained to management they temporarily removed all Bibles from their cabins.  The state attorney general soon ruled that the state was not running afoul of the law by allowing the Gideons to Bible-up state park cabins since the books were provided for free and Governor Nathan Deal ordered the Bibles to be returned.

Predictably enough, atheist organizations are now requesting that they be allowed to place their own literature in state park cabins and the state has little choice but to allow them to do so unless they want to be sued.  The governor has said (presumably with a straight face) that of course atheists can place their own literature in state park cabins next to the Bible but he “can’t guarantee its safety.”

I suppose that might be the end of the story, if the world were made up of only Christians and atheists.  But as it turns out there are lots of religions in the world, and lots of them have their own version of Holy Scripture.  The Catholics will want their version of the Bible placed next to the protestant version the Gideons distribute, the Jews will want the Torah and the Talmud in the same drawer, and the Muslims will certainly feel left out if they don’t have a copy of the Koran tucked in there are well.

Let’s not forget the Book of Mormon, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and of course we’ll need to throw in a copy of Dianetics for the Scientologists.  We will also need to save a lot of room for Buddhist and Hindu scriptures because there are quite a few sacred texts associated with those religions.

The real fun will start when the pagans want to bless each cabin nightstand with a book on witchcraft.  I know religious folks who won’t let their kids read Harry Potter books for fear they will develop a curiosity for the dark arts.  Just imagine what will happen when Mom tells little Johnny to look for a phone book in one of our state cabin nightstands and he pulls out a copy of the “Book of Shadows.”  Hilarity will, no doubt, ensue.

Being a libertarian, I’m fine with all of it.  Let everyone have their say.  The truth has nothing to fear from honest inquiry, and your faith doesn’t have much value if it can’t stand up to contrary viewpoints.

The only problem I see is that the bedside drawers in our state cabins are not going to be big enough to hold the holy books of all the world’s religions.  Maybe everyone who wants to place a book in a cabin can contribute a nominal fee, say a dollar per cabin, to generate a bookshelf-building fund.  Our state cabins could become known as a Mecca for the study of world religions, where people come to ponder the faiths of the world against a backdrop of Georgia’s finest natural wonders.

It will all be great until someone defaces a copy of the Koran in one of our cabins and someone snaps a picture of it and puts it on the Internet.  How exciting it will be to be governor of Georgia when that day comes.

Let’s get rid of the IRS

So, how was your week?  Chances are you had a better one than our president did.  No fewer than three major scandals engulfed the White House this week before lunch time on Tuesday.  Not since Bill Clinton’s second term have I heard the term “culture of corruption” get bandied about so freely.

Of all the things that have gone wrong for Mr. Obama this week, I think the targeted auditing by the IRS of conservative political groups may be the most damaging and long-lasting scar on his credibility and popularity.  That’s a bit ironic since to date there is no evidence he had any knowledge or complicity in that situation, but when you’re the man in charge you are held liable for everything that happens on your watch.

As it turns out, political misuse of the IRS to attack the opponents of the sitting president is far from a new thing.  There are plenty of well-documented instances of the IRS being used as an attack dog for whoever occupied the White House from FDR all the way to (of course) Bill Clinton.

But no one used the IRS to his political advantage more than John F. Kennedy did.  The abuses during the Kennedy years didn’t just involve “rogue IRS officials” either – audits were conducted at the direct request of powerful politicians.  Kennedy directed the IRS to aggressively audit political groups on both the left and right, and once even ordered an audit to be done on some folks who were noisily interrupting his vacation time.

The problem here is not, in my opinion, that Obama or Kennedy or Clinton was corrupt.  Of course they were corrupt – they were successful politicians.  The problem is really the fact that the IRS exists at all, at least in its current far-too-powerful form.

A really nice silver lining to this latest example of IRS abuse of power would be if the movement to get rid of the institution altogether would gain some momentum.

The federal government is too big, too powerful, and too intrusive in our lives, and the IRS is the tool that it uses to keep us under its thumb.  Congressmen and presidents pass out tax break to whoever they choose and tax and/or audit those they don’t favor. 

Imagine if we took that power away from them with a flat tax or a national sales tax.  No more burdensome paperwork to have to complete (or more likely to pay someone else to complete for you) by April 15 every year.  No more audits.  No more worrying about how the government will penalize you for investment decisions that you make.

It’s a pleasant thought.  But it won’t be an easy sell, especially with the man we currently have in office.  The “progressives” say that we need a progressive income tax system to make sure that the rich “pay their share” and that the burden of financing the government doesn’t fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class.

Come on.  Does anyone really think our current tax system is fair to anyone?  Those of us who pay in pay way too much and there are far too many people who pay no taxes but are feeding at the government trough.  We can do better.  I’m certainly ready to try another way.

Either finance the government with a consumption tax, or let us all pay a flat rate and get rid of all the tax breaks and penalties that necessitate having a huge collection agency that is quite obviously ripe for abuse.

There are already proposals out there to implement one of these plans, that but they haven’t been able to gain much traction because it would mean a less-powerful federal government and few of those in power want to give any of that power up.  Change will only come if we demand it and refuse to take “no” for an answer.

Learning to cope

I’ve written about health issues that I’ve had in the past several times, and I always seem to get a lot of feedback on those columns.  Often that’s because people have either had the same or a similar problem to the one I describe or they know someone who has.  People just tend to bond over shared misery, I guess.

Now I have another chance to bond with the afflicted, and this time my nemesis is insomnia.  It isn’t really a new problem.  I first started having trouble staying asleep for more than a few hours at a time when I developed a thyroid problem in my late 20s.  My doctor prescribed me something at the time that helped a lot and I’ve continued to take it ever since.

It has worked pretty well all these years, but over the last six months or so I noticed my sleep cycle was getting shorter again.  I can’t seem to sleep for more than four hours or so without waking up, and I don’t get up feeling very refreshed in the morning.

I took the issue to my family doctor, and I got to play the always-entertaining role of lab rat once again.  That’s what I call it when a doctor has you “try out” medications that might either make you better, do nothing for you, or make you worse.  The fun part is that medications affect everyone differently, so there’s no way of knowing for sure if a particular drug will help you unless you try it out. 

It’s like when the lead actor on the medical drama “House” would tell a patient that a treatment they were going to try on them would either make them better or kill them, and at least then they’d have the correct diagnosis.  Fortunately in real life these “diagnostic treatments” don’t usually kill you.  Usually.

In this case I tried out three different sleep aids.  They either didn’t work at all or only made me sleep just a bit longer, and they all had the side effect of making me very drowsy the next day.  Ultimately I was no better off.

So I decided to go see a sleep medicine specialist.  I was hopeful that a doctor who specialized in the science of sleep could get this problem nailed down and put me on the road to an effective treatment.

After listening to my history, Dr. Sleep Expert said we needed to do a sleep study to rule out things like sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome, but his initial diagnosis was that (and hopefully this won’t sound too technical) I am just one of those people who doesn’t sleep very well. 

He said I am probably what is known as hyper-aroused.  (No, that’s not as exciting as it sounds.)  People who are hyper-aroused are constantly in a low-level version of the “fight or flight” psychological state.  They have higher than normal stress hormones acting on them at all times and that does not lend itself to falling and staying asleep.

He also told me that I am getting older, and people normally have trouble sleeping as long as they used to as they age.  So the combination of hyper-arousal and advancing age means I probably just need to get used to spending less time asleep.

That’s not the answer I was hoping for, but I appreciated the honesty.  I’d rather get a straight answer in this situation, even if it’s not what I want to hear.

As Shimon Peres once said, “If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact - not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.”  I think as I get older I see that there are a lot of things that initially seem like problems that need to be solved but are really just facts that I need to learn to cope with.

False flaggers appear once again

When something like this week’s terror-bombing in Boston happens it can cause you to seriously question any faith you might have had in the basic goodness of humanity.  Then the comments that some people make in the aftermath of such a tragedy can make you wonder why you ever gave us the benefit of a doubt in the first place.

Yes, the “false flaggers” are out in force once again.  These are the people who see every terrorist act as a secret government plot to sway public opinion to support whatever their agenda happens to be. 

False flag is a term that originated in naval warfare when a ship would fly the flag of its enemy to confuse them into thinking they were friendly, thus supplying them with a tactical advantage.  It has over the years come to mean any military act perpetrated by those in power disguised to look like an act by an enemy force, usually for the purpose of fooling the public into supporting some political agenda.

We heard from the false flaggers on 9/11 when left-wingers like Cynthia McKinney suggested that the Bush administration knew the attacks were coming but gave them tacit approval so they would have an excuse to wage war in the Middle East.  More recently some on the right claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was orchestrated by Obama operatives as a pretext for swaying the public to support his gun control initiatives.

And now the lunatic fringe is suggesting that Obama is up to his old tricks, terror-bombing his own citizens so that he can – what?  I don’t think even the conspiracy theorists have come up with a semi-coherent explanation about what blowing up runners and spectators at the Boston Marathon is supposed to have accomplished for our “Dr. Evil” President.  But I’m sure they’ll let us know once they piece it together.

I see this as an extreme example of a trap many of us fall into.  We want life to be simple and straightforward.  We want the world to be made up of good guys and bad guys, with the good guys being made up of ourselves and the people who look, act, and think like us.  The bad guys are made up of everyone else, and they are constantly working on tearing down all that is good and righteous in the world.

Some people approach politics that way, and we are more polarized than ever.  There is a troublingly large group of people on both the left and right who see the other side as not just wrong in their beliefs about the best kind of government, but as bad people who do nothing but bad things, all the time.

If you are seeing things through that filter, then it’s going to seem like the most obvious thing in the world that Bush allowed the Twin Towers to be destroyed or that Obama somehow was behind Sandy Hook and the Boston bombing.  And you won’t require a great deal of proof to be offered to convince you that the smug so-and-so in the White House is at it again.

As it turns out though, the world is not that simple.  The human race is made up of left-wingers, right-wingers, moderates, libertarians, fascists, socialists, anarchists, and even a large group of people who don’t care a lot about politics and are motivated by completely different things altogether.

The President of the United States is a powerful man, but he’s just one guy.  Everyone who has ever sat in that office has had his good points and bad points, and I don’t think any of them have been the embodiment of evil or had “destroy America” as the top item on his agenda. 

Their opponents should stop conferring these near-omnipotent powers of evil on them.  It’s both silly and counter-productive to their cause.

A very simple exercise plan

Exercise.  A lot of us hate to hear that word.  We know we need to do it, but most of us don’t do it nearly as often as we should.  And the main reason for that in many cases is a lack of motivation.

It’s just a whole lot easier to sit on the couch or in our easy chair and watch television, surf the Internet, or chatter away on the phone.  Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.  Often until they are unconscious.

Well, my friends, I am here today to tell you that I have discovered a way to get and stay motivated to exercise.  For the past year and a half I have walked a mile every almost single day, regardless of what the weather is like outside or how energetic I feel that day. 

Let me assure you that I do not just love walking that much and that I’m not some kind of fitness freak.  I stumbled on a way to ensure that I was walking everyday completely by accident.  The best part is it’s a very simple plan that anyone should be able to follow.  It consists of only three steps and I’m going to share them with you right now.  Ready?  You might want to write this down.

Step 1: Get a dog.

Step 2: Decide on a time during the day when you will have 30 minutes or so to devote to exercise.  For me it’s right before or after dinner in the evenings.

Step 3: Leash up the dog and take him for a walk.  Do this for a few days in a row.

That’s it.  From that point on, the dog will take over and motivation will never be a problem again.

Dogs are creatures of habit and for whatever reason they love to take walks.  They love it more than anything in the world.  When it is “walk time” my dog will do whatever he has to do to get my attention and he will not leave me alone until he is in his harness and headed for the door.

He will not take “no” for an answer.  It is never too cold, too hot, too windy, or too wet to walk.  If I am lying on the couch, he will climb on top of me and stare at me until I haul myself up and put on my shoes.  You will never have a better “exercise buddy” than a dog, that’s for sure.

You don’t have to take my word for it either – scientific surveys back me up.  A study published in the “Journal of Physical Activity” showed that dog owners are 34% more likely than non-owners to get the federal government’s recommended amount of exercise.  Another health survey I found showed that 60% of dog owners who took their pets for regular walks met the recommended standards for regular exercise while less than a third of non-owners did.

Of course getting a pet is a big commitment and it’s not for everyone.  I hate to see people adopt animals and then not give them the care and love that they deserve to have.  It’s a big decision and one that should be carefully considered.

But if you do adopt a dog, or if you already have one, I strongly encourage you to use their innate walk-loving nature to help you get into better shape.  You will never have a better (or more reasonably priced) fitness coach than your four-legged buddy.

One word of caution however for any novice dog-walker – watch out for squirrels.  That’s especially true if you have one of those big, more powerful breeds.  A casual walk can turn into an unexpected sprint very quickly when a wayward squirrel crosses one’s path.

Coming soon: the Bible TV network

The History Channel has been airing a mini-series called “The Bible” for the past few Sunday nights and quite a few people have been watching.  More than 50 million people have tuned in to some part of the broadcast over its first three episodes.

A little controversy doesn’t seem to have hurt the ratings, either.  It seems that the actor playing the part of Satan in the series bears a striking resemblance to an aged version of our current President.  Given the likely target audience of the series, I’m not surprised that the resemblance doesn’t seem to have turned away too many potential viewers.

The only thing that is surprising to me about this series is the fact that anyone is surprised by its popularity.  There are a lot of Christians in this country and they like to be entertained as much as anyone else. 

There aren’t exactly a whole lot of viewing options for devout Christians being offered by Hollywood, so when a decent religious-themed movie or television program comes along it shouldn’t be a shock that people show up to buy tickets or tune in for it.

In fact, I think there is huge untapped potential with Christian audiences that someone could turn into a very lucrative business venture.  The Bible is chock full of good stories, and I don’t think the 10-hour miniseries the History Channel has produced even scratches the surface of the potential programs that could be produced based on material in scripture.

I think one could easily launch a whole television network filled solely with shows inspired by the Bible.  And I’m not just talking about shows that rehash stories we’re already familiar with and have seen before like the story of Noah or Moses or Jesus. 

The writers for the Bible Television network (BTV) should think outside the box a bit, and give people a fresh look at some of the people and places from scripture.  Here are a few ideas for Bible-based series off the top of my head.

- Leaving Eden (Mondays at 8 PM): Follow the adventures of the original “first family” as Adam and Eve learn to cope with life after the fall.  The drama is sure to be intense as they are forced to learn to fend for themselves in a suddenly hostile world.  Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Adam, Vanessa Hudgins as Eve, Morgan Freeman as the voice of God, and Alec Baldwin as the serpent.

- Solomon Knows Best (Wednesdays at 9 PM): It’s not easy being the wisest king ever.  People are always bringing you their toughest problems and they expect you to have the answer.  But Solomon always comes through before the end of the hour, and his solutions are always delivered with a healthy dose of his trademark acerbic wit.  Starring Hugh Laurie as Solomon and Beyoncé as the Queen of Sheba.

- James the Less (Thursdays at 8:30 PM): Jesus had 12 apostles, and two of them were named James.  One James was a member of Jesus’ inner circle and the first of the 12 to be martyred.  The other James has always been something of a mystery as little is said about him the Bible.  Until now, that is!  Follow the hilarious misadventures of “the other James” and find out why a Gospel writer was once rumored to have said “the less known about James the Less, the better.”  Starring Rowan Atkinson as James the Less, Bradley Cooper as James the Greater, and special guest star Jim Caviezel as Jesus.

- The Real Revelation (Fridays at 12 AM): For the true Biblical literalists out there comes this animated series that tells Revelation as it is, straight up with no interpretation.  See the seven-headed Beast of the Sea, the red-eyed Dragon, the terrifying Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and even the scorpion-tailed locusts brought to life in colorful high definition images sure to keep you awake for many nights to come.  Sure to become a cult classic!

The sequestration blues

I don’t know of any context in which being sequestered is a good thing.  Until recently I associated the term with being held prisoner in a hotel room while serving jury duty for some high profile case.  Now the word has an even worse connotation for me and a lot of other people in Middle Georgia, as the federal government’s version of sequestering us might result in a 20% pay cut for the rest of this fiscal year.

Those of us who work for Uncle Sam are starting to feel like we are suffering from battered employee syndrome.  We’ve already had our pay frozen for several years and that could go on for some time.  Like everyone else we also got hit with higher Social Security taxes at the beginning of this year.  And now it is very possible that we will be sent home without pay one day a week from late April through late September.

Factor in inflation and it’s obvious that federal workers have been losing ground financially for some time now.  In a town like Warner Robins, where the salaries of Robins AFB workers pretty much drive the economy, the pain is going to be felt by every business in the area as many of us have less and less money to spend.

I’d like to take this opportunity to recognize all of the players in Washington who had a hand in this fiasco, from the President on down to every single member of Congress in both parties, for the role they’ve played in screwing over not only federal workers but the entire country.  You are all, every single one of you, a disgrace to the office you hold.

I especially enjoyed the fact that Congress took an extended vacation right before sequestration took effect.  I couldn’t be more disappointed in each and every one of you, and yes that includes the men who represent my district.

Maybe you think I’m being too harsh, especially if you lean towards one party or the other and would like to lay the blame at the other side’s feet.  That is (for lack of a more family-friendly term) nonsense. 

Our representatives in Congress should have been standing on their desk in the Capitol building, refusing to eat or sleep until both sides came together and passed a budget that really dealt with the deficit issue and gave us a long term financial plan.  Well, I hope they enjoyed their vacations.

I think we’d all be able to live with the financial hardships this sequestration thing is going to cause for us if it was part of a plan that was actually going to solve our nation’s financial problems.  But it’s not going to do that.  Not even close.

It does not touch the entitlement spending that is the real driver of our runaway expenses.  That problem is still hanging over our heads.

What’s more, because of the ham-handed, poorly planned way in which the budget is being cut, there will be strong repercussions in the business world that will have the effect of lowering tax revenue in ways we can only guess at.  We can’t really be sure how much money these cuts will really save the government when all the repercussions are felt.

What we do know is that these budget cuts are being forced on government agencies with no time to plan how to make them intelligently.  It was set up that way, to be so unpalatable that Congress and the President would be forced to come up with a better way of trimming the deficit before it took effect. 

It turns out it was a dumb idea, because it made the assumption that our government is not completely dysfunctional and is able to accomplish its most basic task.  That was obviously a very bad assumption.

Do not be too eager to deal out death

In one of his recent opinion pieces, columnist Thomas Sowell had this to say regarding people who have an issue with the federal government’s policy of attacking US citizens who are suspected of terrorist activities in foreign countries using drone strikes:

”If an American citizen went off to join Hitler's army during World War II, would there have been any question that this alone would make it legal to kill him? Why then is there an uproar about killing an American citizen who has joined terrorist organizations that are at war against the United States today?”

We hear this same kind of reasoning anytime there is a protest raised against any action the government takes in response to suspected terrorist activities.  It doesn’t matter if the issue is the detaining of people indefinitely without due process, wiretapping without a court order, or blowing people into tiny pieces, the reasoning is pretty much the same. 

These people are terrorists, the argument goes, and they deserve no mercy.  And if you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about.

People who make those kinds of statements are making a huge assumption, one that is very dangerous to make.  They are assuming that the government bureaucrats who “pull the trigger” on eavesdropping on, detaining, or even killing American citizens are always motivated by the purest of intentions and don’t make mistakes.

You see, just because some high-ranking government official claims that someone is a terrorist does not make it true.  Being suspected or accused of something and being guilty of it are not the same thing. 

Giving anyone the kind of power we have invested in certain government officials without oversight is a bad idea.  The whole reason we have due process is because we hold it as a first principle of governing that a citizen should not be deprived of their life or liberty until an effort has been made to establish that they are guilty of the crime that they’ve been charged with committing.

I don’t think most people have a problem with the idea that sometimes it’s acceptable to attack terrorist cells with drone strikes, even when US citizens may be killed as a result.  But what process is being followed to insure that the potential target is, in fact, a terrorist actively plotting violence against our country and not someone who is a victim of mistaken identity or someone who the individual giving the order to shoot has a personal vendetta against?

The answer is we don’t know what process is being followed, because it’s all being done in secret.  However, a recently leaked white paper on the subject that the Justice Department provided to Congress suggests that there really isn’t much of a process.

The paper states that if an “informed, high-ranking official” decides someone is involved in terrorist activities they can make the call to have that person taken out.  I guess the question is – do you trust a faceless, unelected official in the Obama administration (or any administration in the future, Republican or Democrat) to have unchallenged authority to sentence US citizens to death without any form of oversight?

I’m not that trusting.  I believe the government needs to have the ability to strike against active terrorist cells to prevent attacks on US interests and of course these things have to be done with some secrecy to be effective.  But there needs to be a process of review by the judicial and/or legislative branch so that the power to take the lives of American citizens does not lie in the hands of one unaccountable individual.

Congressional officials are demanding more information on the drone strike program from the White House and we should get behind them, not question their patriotism.  Checks and balances between the branches of our government are a key principle in our Constitution, and we shouldn’t let the specter of terrorism scare us into ignoring that principle.

We will have a King over us

I had one of those “I wish I had written that” moments on Monday of this week while I was reading The Telegraph’s Viewpoints page.  Robert Lehane of Fort Valley wrote in to say that:

“Our democratic republic has been transformed into a constitutional monarchy with very little emphasis on the Constitution.”

Mr. Lehane did a great job of succinctly stating what I believe has been a very bad trend with our system of government that probably started with FDR and has been getting worse ever since.

When our country was founded, the men who set up our government had just escaped the tyranny of a monarchy and they carefully designed the Constitution to include plenty of checks and balances on the executive branch so that our President wouldn’t wield too much unchecked power.

It was a good plan, because history shows that it’s never wise to invest too much power in a single human being.  People are much too fallible to be given god-like powers over other people.  Even the best among us are not fit to make unchecked decisions that rule everyone else’s lives.

Unfortunately our recent Presidents have gradually accumulated so much control over our government and our society that they are beginning to take on an air of royalty. 

They regularly get us into wars without the Constitutionally-mandated declaration from Congress.  They bully Congress into passing poorly thought-out, feel-good legislation by manipulating public opinion.  And they seem to have an endless capacity to direct massive amounts of public funding in whatever direction they choose.

I don’t believe that is at all what the Founding Fathers had in mind.  There is an obvious intention within the Constitution to check every presidential power with oversight from the Congress.  For example:

-  A law passed by Congress requires the President’s signature to go into effect, but a veto can be overridden by a two-thirds majority in Congress.

- The President is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but only Congress has the power to declare war.

- The President can enter into treaties with foreign nations, but only with two-thirds majority approval from the Senate.

The last time Congress declared war was during World War II, but we’ve spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives in undeclared wars around the world since then at the discretion of the man who was in the White House at the time. 

As for spending bills and other legislation, the President seems to get his way on those counts as long as he can amass public opinion behind his position.  It is very difficult for Congress to “vote their conscience” when the President is all over the news cheerleading for his pet causes.

In fact it is the manipulation of public opinion that is probably the key to the rise of Presidential powers in modern times.  FDR used the radio to connect directly with the people when he wanted to “rescue” the country from depression via massive government spending.  And does anyone really think Congress could have done anything to derail the space program once Kennedy made his stirring speech on the subject to an enraptured TV audience?

It’s much easier to relate to a single charismatic individual than that boring cast of hundreds who no one watches on CSPAN.  We like having one guy who we can love or hate and blame things on when they go wrong. 

The fact is we haven’t put up much of a fight as our Presidents have gradually rendered the checks and balances on their powers more and more irrelevant.  It’s a trend that I don’t expect to change.

Our President is basically the star of his own reality show now, and we all want someone who can act the part of a decisive leader and make us feel better about whatever is making us anxious at the moment.  It sounds rather silly, but we’ve become a nation of silly people.

How to deal with Facebook envy

A few years ago I set up a Facebook account using the email address I use to get feedback from readers of this column.  My intent was to give readers another way to stay in touch with me, but it turned out that not very many people who read my column wanted to stay in touch with me enough to bother “friending” me on Facebook.  My Friends List was embarrassingly small.

But once I had an account I went ahead and connected with family members, coworkers, and some people I went to school with.  My Friends List is still pretty small compared to the hundreds, if not thousands of “friends” a lot people have on Facebook, but for an introvert like me the illusion of having that many social connections was pretty satisfying.

I think the key to my satisfaction with Facebook is the fact that once I was happy with the size of my Friends List I stopped logging on to it.  My generally favorable opinion of the site is probably closely tied to the fact that I don’t use it to actually try and communicate with anyone.

A recently published study by two German universities would seem to validate that theory.  It found that 1 in 3 people who use Facebook regularly were measurably less happy with their lives as a result.  The ones who were most likely to be unhappy were users who merely browsed other people’s contributions to the site and did not actively post information of their own.

The source of their unhappiness seemed to come down to envy.  The most disenchanted Facebook users tended to be driven to despair by the fact that they received less birthday wishes and fewer “likes” and comments on their pictures and postings than other users on their Friends List.  It sounds a lot like high school, doesn’t it?  No wonder I never felt compelled to spend much time there.

Facebook reminds me a bit of the year-end newsletters that some people stick inside their Christmas cards.  You know what I’m talking about – the ones where they tell you how awesome their lives have been over the last year.  They don’t actually include the line “you should be jealous of me,” but it’s certainly strongly implied.

Facebook is a lot like that, it’s just more high tech and it’s available all the time instead of just once a year.  It’s just another way technology is making our lives better, I suppose.

So you should probably stay away from Facebook, but if you just have to see what the people you love, like, or barely know are up to, keep this in mind.  Just like they do with those Christmas newsletters, people edit heavily on Facebook.  They tell you all the good things that happen to them but they generally leave out all the unpleasant or embarrassing details that befall all of us with great regularity.

Most people aren’t going to tell you that their son just got a DUI, their daughter got another tattoo, or that Mom broke Dad’s nose when she found out he was sleeping with a coworker.  A very small number of Facebook users do actually post about embarrassing stuff like that (and frankly they are the only ones that are worth following) but most people are going to whitewash everything and make their lives seem nearly perfect.

Just remember that a person’s Facebook profile represents what they want their life to seem like to the outside world and you should be able to keep your envy down to a reasonable level.  If that doesn’t work just post this quote from a recent CNN article as your status on Facebook today and you’ll feel a little better:

“Research from Western Illinois University showed a link between the number of Facebook friends you have and how active you are on the site to the likelihood of being a ‘socially disruptive’ narcissist.”

Time for GOP to make their stand

This is a tough time to be a Republican.  First they lost the presidential election and then the whole fiscal cliff thing seemed to put them in an even worse position.  Many of them ended up having to cave in on their no-tax-increase-ever pledge and that seems to have caused more division within their already fractured ranks.

Honestly, I feel bad for them.  They were put in a really tough spot having to decide whether to vote for a plan that would raise taxes on some of us or do nothing and see taxes raised on almost everyone.  I’m not going to pile on Republicans who voted in favor of the plan.  I might have done the same thing in their position

But the Tea Party crowd is not as understanding as I am.  They are promising to challenge any tax turncoats who voted in favor of the fiscal cliff compromise in the next election cycle.  I understand their frustration, I really do.  And I don’t think for a minute that the legislation that was passed was any kind of solution to our perilous financial situation.

But I think we need to show a little patience – this thing is not over yet.  Republicans still have a chance to take a stand against the outrageous deficit spending that is the real root of all of our financial difficulties.

We have once again reached the point where our national debt ceiling will have to be raised in order for the government to be able to pay its bills.  And many of the Republicans who voted to approve the tax increase at the first of the year have stated that they will not support raising the debt ceiling unless it is coupled with serious cuts in deficit spending.

Our own Senator Saxby Chambliss, who voted in favor of the fiscal cliff compromise, is one such legislator.  He’s getting a lot of heat from some right-wingers in the state (such as Telegraph columnist Erik Erikson, who sadly will not be running a sure-to-be entertaining campaign against Chambliss himself in 2014 as was briefly rumored) for having displayed an increasingly disturbing trend towards moderation.

Chambliss has stated bluntly that he will press hard to tie major spending reductions to the raising of the debt limit.  Other Republicans who voted in favor of the tax hike have echoed that sentiment, and the lead Republican in the Senate has said that further tax increases will not be considered in future deals with Democrats.

Our president has other ideas, however.  He has declared that he “will not have another debate with this Congress” over whether the debt ceiling will be raised.  He has said he is willing to discuss budget cuts, but also that he believes that further tax increases on rich folks should be part of a deficit reduction plan.

If the Republican Party was ever going to act as united force and show some backbone, this would be the time.  They need to hold the line on more tax increases.  And they should refuse to discuss the debt ceiling issue until there is a budget plan that includes dramatic cuts in federal spending, and by the way they need to come up with their own spending plan to cut spending that includes specifics.

The president cannot “refuse to negotiate” on something that requires congressional action to occur.  The GOP needs to forget about opinion polls, the next election cycle, and all the things that idiots like me in the press say (with the exception of this column) and do what they know to be right.

Draw a line in the sand.  Call the president’s bluff.  Get our spending under control or let the debt ceiling situation unravel and live with the consequences.  The president and really the whole country are in dire need of a wakeup call.  As Apollo Creed once said to Rocky Balboa, “there is no tomorrow.”