This election year, some of the talk is about turnout – how Democratic turnout is higher than Republican turnout in the primaries. Which got me thinking – why not force people to vote? After all, you’re not telling them who to vote for. They can do write in candidates, cross parties, do what they want. But if you threaten people with fines and imprisonment for not showing up to jury duty, isn’t it just as important for them to vote?

Right now, some areas can force you to do jury duty for 2 weeks. Voting takes part of a day. Even allocating for travel time and time away from work, at most you allocate ½ a day for voting. So why not require voting just like you do jury duty?

The objection might be “the system is fixed, it doesn’t matter who I vote for, I won’t play the pawn in someone else’s game”. Really? Consider the legal system, where the number one priority for both sides is the fight over evidence – what can be included and what can be excluded. The winner of that battle can shape the jury’s decision by limiting what evidence they see – and goes a long way to producing a “predictable” verdict, regardless of who the 12 jurors are.

Having said that, criminal defendants don’t want to face a judge alone, and since imprisonment, life, and death are on the line, you can make a good argument for jurors to be compelled to serve. But how about civil cases?

In civil cases, there is pressure to settle out of court. Why waste everyone’s time and money? The problem is that plaintiffs like to go for the big money. So even if they have a weak case, they can always try to sway the jury. If relevant evidence can be excluded, so much the better. The one civil case I was on was a definite waste of time that should have been settled out of court. But that’s the problem, you cannot force a plaintiff to settle. They can force us to be pawns in their greedy game by pushing frivolous cases through the system, consuming everyone’s time and money, while they roll the dice hoping for a jackpot settlement.

How to deal with this?  What if there was no jury in civil cases and both sides just presented their case to a judge? The case would go much quicker, with no jury selection haggling to go through. And think of the court costs we would save.

So I’m for some consistency in public service – either force people to vote just like you force them to serve on juries, or  remove jurors from the civil courts and give the people their freedom back.

 

As people debate whether John McCain is a true conservative or not, I’m thinking back to one of Winston Churchill’s comments – when you are 20 years old you should be a liberal, and when you are 40 years old you should be a conservative. And it’s very revealing in how conservatives and liberals relate to each other.

If you think about it, this makes conservatives more tolerant. After all, they were once liberals themselves. They understand what it was like to be young and idealistic. But they have become conservatives because of accumulated life experience, lessons learned, etc.

Now contrast this to liberals. They are filled with energy, passion, and excitement for the liberal cause. And they are confounded by conservatives who keep getting in their way, blunting the liberal agenda, and pursuing policies that liberals don’t understand. And why would they understand conservatives? They’ve never been conservatives themselves, so they have no framework for understanding the conservative point of view.

The result? Since liberals don’t understand conservatives, they equate them with some evil, unknown force. They call them fascists. They label conservatives as racists. And a great favorite of liberals is the construction of the evil advisor to the President. Under Ronald Reagan, it was Bill Casey. Under George H.W. Bush, it was Lee Atwater. Under George W. Bush, the evil genius was Karl Rove. Not contenting themselves with one evil advisor, the liberals added Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to help Rove with his secret planning.

You see, liberals can’t admit that conservatives have a point. To admit that would be a rejection of the liberal ideals – the growth of government, the nanny state, helping “the children” and so on. Newt Gingrich laid this out in detail when discussing the Republican victories in 1994. His thought was that Democrats, after losing the House for the first time in decades, would realize that their ideas were flawed and modify/fix them. But liberals cannot admit that their ideas are bankrupt. So they went the evil advisor route instead, claiming that the Republicans tricked their way into power. They started smear campaigns against Gingrich and Dole. And it worked – both Dole and Gingrich were marginalized and driven from power.

This idea that Republicans cheat is a constant theme – from conspiracy theories about Reagan and the Iran Hostages to the Willie Horton campaign ads under George H.W. Bush to the Supreme Court fixing the 2000 election for George W. Bush. Can’t liberals ever admit that they lost an election fair and square?

The whole idea of Reagan as a “Great Communicator” is a liberal attempt to marginalize the ideals he ran on. The people couldn’t have really voted for strong defense and smaller government, could they? No, it must be Reagan’s superior communication skills. Or his “Teflon” armor. Or Bill Casey’s tricks during the election campaign.

All of these symptoms – conservatives are evil, conservatives win by trickery, conservatives are empty suits controlled by evil advisors – mask the real problem. Liberals don’t understand conservatives or the ideas they believe in. And since many liberals start out in life that way and never change, the chances that they will eve see another point of view are exceedingly slim. So the smear campaigns continue. John McCain, the New York Times article is just the beginning. Win or lose, it’s your time in the barrel.

 

Newt Gingrich gave a speech at CPAC – the conservative group for young conservatives that meets once a year in Washington DC. In his speech, he outlined where George W. Bush went wrong – too much compassionate me too conservatism, too many big government programs, etc. But on close examination his alternatives are no better.

On the one hand, Gingrich laid out how he and his fellow 94 republicans took control of the House of Representatives and kept control for the first time since 1928. How they energized the conservative base of the party. How things went wrong in 2006. But what is his solution to conservative problems?

His analysis of the situation is that while Republicans are very good at winning elections, they are lousy at governing. Gingrich admitted that he underestimated the entrenched position of liberals and their skill at defending their policies from a minority position. His solution is that conservatives need training in how to govern. This is where I disagree with him.

After all, what good is it to have conservatives run liberal bureaucracies? The core tenant of conservatism is that centralized government robs the individual of freedom, while failing to deliver its utopian promises (eliminating poverty, racial harmony, etc). So putting conservatives in charge of these programs is surrender to the forces of big government, just as George W. Bush’s creation of prescription drug entitlements and the no child left behind federal education program was a surrender to the left. So Gingrich, for all his tactical skill and intelligence, is strategically bankrupt of conservative ideas. And he says the Reagan revolution is dead? If so, he had a big hand in killing it.

 

Today, I was given a book called the nine, about the Supreme Court. It’s basically a left wing partisan attack on recent Supreme Court decisions (Bush vs Gore) and the appointment of Justices Roberts and Alito. The Roe vs Wade defenders, so sure of their victory for over 30 years, are getting very nervous.

The curious thing is, why are the pro-choice people so scared? Let’s suppose the unlikely happens and Roe vs Wade is overturned. How long do you think it will take liberal states like California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and a host of others to pass state laws legalizing abortion? About 30 days. So what’s the big deal?

Well, you can’t have 30 states approving abortion and 20 states outlawing it. I mean, it’s not like you have some states legalizing gambling and some outlawing it. Oh, wait a minute – you do. In fact, we have varying positions from state to state on marriage, divorce, business regulations, environmental regulations, and almost any other public policy item you can think of. So why not let the state legislatures decide on abortion?

Because it’s about centralized control. The leftist elites are intolerant to the extreme. No other position is allowed, it must be dictated centrally from Washington. And the Republicans are not immune to this either. Whether it’s educational standards or diversity guidelines or affirmative action quotas, our lives are increasingly dictated from Washington. It’s getting to the point where you can abolish the local and state governments and we can all live under a monolithic blob.

Getting back to the book, their take on the Bush vs Gore election controversy was laughable. Here you have an activist Supreme Court that has stuck its nose into every issue in American life for the last 50 years. But on this one issue, where the entire country is uncertain about the process, the court is supposed to stay silent. Right!

The rest of the book is fear-mongering about the activist conservative judges on the Supreme Court. Well, if you don’t like activist conservative judges, you shouldn’t have cheered so much when activist liberal judges rammed their opinions over the voters(for example, overturning California referendums as unconstitutional when they had over 80% voter approval). Isn’t it irritating when your opponents turn your own tactics against you?

Ron Paul is an isolationist – there’s no doubt about that. And he’s the only Republican who opposes the war in Iraq. Now, if he wants to oppose the war, I’m fine with that. What I’m not fine with are his reasons.

 

Paul is on record saying that the US presence in the Middle East provoked the 9/11 attacks. He weaves that into a broader isolationist message that wants to call troops home from Europe, Japan, South Korea, and everywhere else they are stationed in the world.

 

This bothers me on two levels. First, I remember someone else blaming the United States for the Cold War and wanting to call troops home from South Korea. Someone in the 1970s. Someone named Jimmy Carter. Remember him? His foreign policy centered around blaming the United States for the Cold War and for human rights violations around the world. Carter’s answer? If we left them alone they would leave us alone. Accommodate and apologize to our enemies, cut off support to US allies, and reduce America’s overseas commitments to apply resources to pressing domestic problems.

 

Second, this kind of political naivete has surfaced before. Remember the aftermath of WW1? Politicians and historians in the US were full of conspiracy theories blaming US arms dealers for the slaughter in the trenches. The argument went that the US manipulated the European nations into war for the profit motive. This led to neutrality agreements and absurd international agreements in Locarno that purportedly would outlaw war.

 

Looking back, this was pure nonsense. No one forced the Kaiser’s belligerent attitude or France’s desire for revenge after the war of 1870 or the Serbians to provoke the Austro-Hungarian empire. Historical events are not clearly cause and effect. To offer other examples, Japan was not forced to attack Pearl Harbor, Italy was not forced to bomb Ethiopia, and the US merchant navy didn’t cause the war of 1812. But there are always conspiracy theorists ready to make hay out of world crises by offering simplistic cause and effect solutions, which invariably point the finger of blame at the favorite target of jealousy and envy of the day. And there was a large and loud isolationist wing of the Republican party that sponsored a great deal of the post WW1 angst. The result of these naive arguments was the appeasement of Hitler and a larger world war within a generation of WW1.

 

What was the result of Carter’s schoolboy naive foreign policy? The Soviets sensed US weakness of character and resolve and poured it on, taking over countries in Africa, South America, and Asia. US arms control talks and cuts in military spending were answered with an increased Soviet arms buildup. Through it all, Carter continued the self righteous rhetoric and continued to blame the US for what other countries did, offering the usual simplistic cause and effect arguments.

 

And then, the final straw came. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. And for once, reality intruded on the grade school foreign policy of the liberals. They had no choice but to admit the threat the Soviets presented to both the US and the free world. Carter’s feeble efforts to change course – boycotting the Olympics, instituting grain embargoes, an increased military budget – were too little, too late. Americans understood that all the self righteous rhetoric was meaningless and opted for a real leader in Ronald Reagan.

 

Now you see Carter style arguments reborn in Ron Paul. If only we left them alone they would leave us alone. Our presence forces others to do things. As if disaffected countries had no other option but to crash planes into skyscrapers. Aren’t they supposed to try sanctions and UN resolutions first?

 

Which brings up another point. According to liberal dogma, you are supposed to go through all these hoops before going to war – going to the UN for sanctions, performing weapons inspections, putting forth UN resolutions with deadlines, getting Congressional approval, and so on. But they forget the price for all of their bureaucratic requirements. If you put out a list of procedures that must be followed, and they are followed to the letter, then everyone is required to support the war, because all the proper UN sanctions and UN resolutions and Congressional declarations were obtained. But that’s not what happened in 1990 and the gulf war. George H.W. Bush followed all the liberal instructions, had the UN resolutions and multi national force ready – and the Left still opposed the war.

 

All these procedures and safeguards don’t mean a damn thing – they are just obstacles and Trojan horses thrown up by liberals. When the chips are down, they will ignore their own sacred procedures and do what they want.

 

Which explains George W. Bush’s actions leading up to the Iraq War. If liberals are going to ignore their own procedural rules, why bother? Skip the meaningless resolutions and go do what needs to be done. Which infuriated the liberals to no end. Don’t conservatives know that they’re the only ones required to play by liberal rules?

 

You can see this happening with global warming and the Kyoto accords. Everyone wants the US to sign on. Lost in all the hubbub is that the Europeans who signed on are blissfully violating Kyoto – and no one cares that they break their own rules. No one cares that the Chinese are putting up coal plants without scrubbers. Their sole focus is on the United States – the rest of the world can put up all the offshore oil platforms they want.

 

We live in an era of government regulation, mandatory diversity classes, and endless policies and procedures to go through. These are structured to create the maximum amount of litigation possible, because no matter how well you follow the rules, you can still be dragged into court by money hungry lawyers looking for an easy settlement. Which makes all the procedures and policies useless, now doesn’t it? And I have no interest playing the pawn in someone else's game.

It’s almost official – John McCain will be the Republican nominee for President. On the surface, things look good. While Obama and Hillary face off in a death match to the finish, McCain can tidy things up and get his strategy ready for the national campaign.

 

However, there are a few flies in the ointment. Look at the turnout for super Tuesday. The Democrat primaries drew around 14 million voters, while the Republicans only drew about 8 million. That spells trouble for the GOP – lots of people are disenchanted and staying home. Will they even vote in November?

 

The other thing is, McCain seems to anticipate that his opponent will be Hillary. If that’s true, voters will turn out just to say no to her. But what if Obama wins the Democratic nomination? People don’t know enough about him to dislike him yet. And that’s the formula that recent Democratic winners have used – Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were unknown outsiders when they won the Presidency.

 

Finally, there’s been a lot of talk about how McCain is the only Republican who can win. Maybe he is, but I can’t help but remember Bob Dole – the 1996 candidate who was another war hero, greatly respected, but lost badly in the general election. Now having said that, McCain has something Dole did not – the war on terror. But if he wants to win he needs to run exclusively on that issue.

Bush’s last proposed budget is 3 trillion. With 515 billion for defense spending, or about 17 %. Which means the other 83% is consumed by pork barrel domestic spending.

 

So what’s the deficit? About 400 million. Which means that the government is raking in 2.6 trillion in revenue. That’s the part you won’t hear about.

 

The scare mongers are out, talking about trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities and so forth. What they never say is that with over 2 trillion in tax revenue coming in every year, trillion dollar deficits don’t mean that much anymore.

 

There’s still time to be fiscally responsible. Still time to get spending under control. But it won’t happen. Because we’re not a crisis stations yet. And everybody except the talk show hosts knows it.

 

We’re on the brink of the Democrats taking the White House and spending more of our money on their Santa Claus programs. Global Warming. Green technology. Aids money. Money for the children. All the programs democrats love to pander to.

 

Take California. The big name propositions are the Indian gaming ones that promise billions of revenue in the future. The focus is still on the seemingly endless sources of revenue, both for Federal and State governments. No one is ready to cut spending in either party. That’s how you know there’s no crisis brewing.

 

So when President Hillary proposes her first 3 trillion dollar budget, you’ll know that there’s no monetary crisis, we’re not on the brink of a global money meltdown, and that there’s still plenty of money to spread around for all the pork barrel spending the Democrats could want.

All season you heard about it. Undefeated. Best prepared. Hardest working. Most talented. And on and on.

 

I just didn’t buy it. This Patriot team was impressive and could score and all that. But they never scared teams like the 85 bears. They didn’t overwhelm teams like the 80s 49ers or 90s Cowboys or 70s Steelers.

 

And not only that. The Patriot Super Bowl winning teams scraped by with 3 point wins over the likes of Carolina and the Eagles – whom no one will consider great teams or even nearly great teams. And this years team, although it looked impressive beating up on weaklings like the Dolphins, Bills, and Jets, never faced a great defensive team. Until now.

 

I can’t say enough about the Giants. Their defense was dominant. Yes, they wore down in the second half. But so did the Patriots. And when it came down to it, Eli Manning came up big. And Tom Brady did not.

 

And let’s not forget the girlfriend factor. After all, if the media is gonna make a big deal out of Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson, they can now make hay out of Tom Brady and Giselle Bundchen.

 

The other thing is, the Giants had seen the Patriots before. And like other underdog teams of Super Bowl past – the 83 Raiders against the Redskins, for example – the Giants learned a great deal from that first meeting. They knew they could pressure Brady and they did. They knew that they could score against the Patriot defense and they did. And they knew that despite all the media hype, that the Patriots were in no way the best NFL team ever, and they did us all a favor by proving it.

 

Sometimes, there’s justice in the world. A good but not great team was exposed tonight, and we were all saved from years of Deion Sanders telling us about the “great” Patriots dynasty. And we were also spared from seeing Randy Moss get a super bowl ring. After dogging it in Raiderland for 2 years, dropping easy passes and displaying his sulky attitude, it would have been criminal for him to score the winning touchdown. No Randy, karma’s gonna make you pay back some more before you get a ring. If ever.