Cowboy Confessional

Let’s hope my prognostication powers are as poor as my choice in ex-wives. Otherwise bloggers may become exes as well.

The art of political persuasion is communications. For almost the entirety of the American experiment political conversation was guided, if not completely controlled by the media. Politicians raised the canard of the military-industrial complex as a red cape before voting bulls. It was a distraction in the early age of television when politicians saw new advantages in mass communication via the extended media. Since the media owned all the means of communications, government and politicians needed to leverage it to win elections and launch wars.

Let’s call it the government-media complex.

This beast with two backs controlled American political dialogue for decades. Typical citizens had three network news channels (ABC, NBC, CBS) and if they were lucky, two competing local papers. These narrow venues of information limited what people heard about the world outside their neighborhoods, which suited politicians/government just fine. Job holders had insufficient time and means to become investigative journalists and thus relied on Huntley, Brinkley, and Cronkite to guide their world view.

Huntley, Brinkley, and Cronkite depended largely on the government.

However, like life itself, information and economics finds a way. Radio was originally dominated by music before the advent of FM. When high fidelity stereo hit the airwaves, music followed and leaving tinny sounding AM bands largely abandoned. Orphaned AM stations seeking revenues stumbled upon talk radio as a way of feeding a news hungry nation who held the sneaking suspicion that Huntley, Brinkley, Cronkite and the government had been misleading them all along. Talk radio exploded, providing more information and data that differed from the ABC/CBS/NBC world view. Simultaneous with talk radio’s ascendancy, Americans became so efficient at putting satellites into orbit that television up- and down-links became dirt cheep — affordable to any broadcaster catering to every perverted preoccupation.

Which explains the Golfing Channel.

Nuevo news channels were whelped though most rapidly amalgamated into the government-media complex. They had little choice because the government could instantly pull their broadcast licenses. All churches tolerate a little heresy, but only a little. The Church of the State is no different. Which brings me to the brink of Obama and the point of today’s post.

The newest variable in political communications is the Internet. Anyone with $12.95 a month can be a broadcaster. The world is now rifle with every political opinion. Most are ill informed and seemingly psychotic, but that be a mere reflection of societal demographics. The most interesting aspect of Internet activism is the velocity of fact and effluvium. It spreads faster than anyone in government could hope to control it. Give me a nugget of news and I can spread it to a million people before breakfast.

So can you.

Such spread has kicked the legs out from under the government-media complex. They are no longer in control of the political conversation. Since most of user-generated media is utter claptrap, those formerly in control of American political monologue largely do not care about the terabytes of wasted words on the Internet for that is the small heresy that is tolerated. But the government-media complex does care about a few select and highly effective and influential people who in an instant can change public perception of a political issue.

The government-media complex soon may have a mechanism for choking them silent.

Though the U.S. government can instantly shut-down the entire Internet, they would have no legal basis for doing so. It would also be such a heavy-handed assault that pitch fork and torch carrying rabble would storm the White House in an instant. Surgical removal of non-conformist is thus necessary and there must be some allegedly legal means of execution.

Kentucky seems an unlikely place for the next great civil rights battle, but they have built half of the machine needed to neuter any blogger or news web site. Obama and a Democrat majority may build the other half.

The State of Kentucky was recently awarded ownership of 141 domain names (web addresses) previously owned by online casinos. Internet gambling being deemed illegal, the state decided the only way in which it could restrict you from placing a digital wager would be to shut down the casino sites entirely. The registrars holding domains like absolutepoker.com and ultimatebet.com were ordered to transfer control to the government. Once the state had ownership of the domains, they could reset the pointers therein and guide gamblers to an Internet dead end.

Could they do the same to a web site that was guilty of illegal speech?

Our Canadian neighbors (who really hate it when I kiddingly call them the 51st state) have some odd hate speech laws. In Canada one can lodge a complaint against a person or business if they feel that the speech used by that person/entity is hateful. A pack of unelected bureaucrats then decide if you are hateful and which criminal penalties apply. Canada has set down a dangerous path of defining what is allowable speech as opposed to what is harmful speech.

My prognostication is simply that the two could converge in the United States. If sufficiently broad legislation outlawing hate speech were enacted, then criminal penalties could apply. If an Obama-packed Supreme Court upheld the very concept of hate mongering being a criminal act, then any prophylactic penalty could be applied.

This includes what Kentucky does today - taking control of the critical mechanism of the internet, the domain name. Saying something that a candidate for office dislikes would result in hate speech charges being filed. If a politically allied judge agrees the speech was hateful — though it never endangered anything except a candidacy — the domain name could be transferred to the candidate or the government. Salon.com — gone. FoxNews.com — bye bye. DNC.org — adiós.

The nature of government is a never ending attempt to restrict freedom, and the nature of free men is to resist. The horror show I’ve outlined can occur only if we elect people who see government as the arbitrator of everything. The American President is pivotal in the devolution of democracy as he appoints judges to the Supreme Court and they in turn ultimately allow the demons of human destruction to be enacted.

Remember this come Election Day. You vote indirectly for the next Supreme Court justices and they will ultimately decide if you can speak your mind.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

Doonesbury is doomed.

In my obstreperous youth I encountered a book on student activism. This tome taught me a few valuable lessons in artfully annoying academic administrations while seeking to unshackle their seemingly arbitrary and capricious rules. Of course in my advancing years those same rules make perfect sense, and had I children of my own I would inflict those very rules on them. But when you are young and convinced of the self-evident enfeebled condition of everyone older than 25, rhetorically kicking their shins is great sport.

One lesson the book provided was simply that the put on is mightier than the put down. Insults are easy as any observer of the current election cycle can attest. Ragging on the opposition with grace and humor takes intelligence. When humor is lost, so is one’s advantage.

This is why Garry Trudeau is sunk.

A pair of Sunday comics paints such a stark contrast between political observation and humor that it shows why old comics should fade away (click on either thumbnail to see the cartoons in question). On this day both Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) and Chris Muir (Day by Day) opined on current issues and on Joe the Plumber. Muir showed finesse while Trudeau showed contempt (elitism might be a more accurate description but that word has been so overused of late that it has started to irritate like a burr under a saddle).

Now Joe is … well… an average Joe. Most Americans are of modest means and more likely to associate themselves with Joe than Trudeau. Joe the Plumber is the every man. Joe is guilty of nothing aside from asking Obama a simple question for which Barack is guilty of providing an honest answer. Thus taking a swipe at Joe would be mean spirited on top of being foolish, the same kind of meanness that caused America to kill John Kerry’s campaign four years ago.

In today’s strip Muir pokes fun at the main stream media (MSM) of whom Garry Trudeau is a dues paying member in good standing (if good is the appropriate adjective). Muir uses symbolism in correctly painting the MSM as a sinking ship. In the final panel Muir notes how Joe the Plumber might have been the MSM’s salvation had they recognized what Joe represented — the audience that the MSM is rapidly losing.

Trudeau’s toon however has no humor, which is an odd stylistic choice for a comic strip (note to Trudeau - comic derives from the same root as comedy). In six panels Trudeau paints a plumber as being dishonest, inept and uneducated but certain of his own “common sense”. Trudeau thus associates the working class and the concept of common sense with three horrible traits. Garry stereotyped every man (i.e., you) as contemptible.

In tomorrow’s strip Trudeau will undoubtedly proclaim that all blacks are lazy and all Mexican steal.

Herein irony rules. Muir finds humor in reality. Across the country television news program ratings are tanking, newspaper circulation is dwindling and every man audiences are turning to the so called alternate media — talk radio and the Internet. Yet the MSM mistakenly believes that they are still in control of the national conversation. Thus every time someone like Joe the Plumber demonstrates otherwise, members of the MSM lose their composure and attack.

Like Trudeau.

Hilariously the MSM also fails to learn that such attacks are tracked in the alternate media as well. Thus a Trudeau tantrum is echoed outside of MSM’s control and accurately portrays them as elitist, which Webster defines as “consciousness of or pride in belonging to a select or favored group.” Such disconnections from the populace in turn distances the MSM from their audience, driving ratings and circulation lower still.

Doonesbury is doomed and its days are numbered. I can’t say it will be missed.

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Follow-up: I received a message from TheManagement@doonesbury.com. The message maintained that Doonesbury strips are (a) submitted several weeks in advance and that (b) the Sunday strip in question was not about Joe the Plumber.

I decided to page a cartoonist friend who confirmed that many syndicated cartoonist file strips ahead of schedule. However, cartoons of a political nature have much shorter lead times in order to remain current and any single strip can be yanks and replaced in as little as 24 hours (perhaps longer for Sunday editions).

I am unconvinced by the denial. Doonesbury’s disclaimer is vague and non-specific to this particular instance. Even if the strip had been filed in advance, fifteen days lapsed between the infamous interchange between Barack and Joe. Trudeau at best is guilty of not recognizing that a staged strip would be perceived as critical of Joe and Every Man and create a substitute. But for a political cartoonist fifteen days is more than ample to compose, draw and submit a strip to their syndicate.

Thus the timing of this is too coincidental for coincidence.

More damning perhaps is what a certain Cowboy Confessional reader observed. This is not the first time Trudeau has shown his elitist persuasion. I was forwarded Doonesbury strips that dressed-down the new media and hostilely held academia as superior to common sense. Trudeau’s most recent strip then is one of a continuing series that paints Every Man as inferior and as such meets the dictionary definition of elitism.

The good news is that Joe is not suffering from any fallout. In less than 20 days Joe has acquired more than 20,000 Google news entries and has his own Wikipedia entry. He is a regular on talk shows and the media — in a rare more of sobriety — seeks him out for plain spoken political insight.

Every Man has his day and his say.

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Follow-up #2: Well, this saga continues with fresh indictments of Dooesbury.

The response I received from Doonesbury management included a link to their explanation of the strip. In it they claim “… the syndication schedule requires that Sunday strips go into production six weeks before they appear in the paper.”

Perhaps there is a difference in Sunday strips and dailies, but six weeks significantly differers from what Doonesbury’s syndicate says about lead time in general. Commenting in response to news that Trudeau has submitted a November 5th strip proclaiming Obama the winner of this election, Kathie Kerr, assistant VP/communications for Universal Press Syndicate said that Trudeau typically runs close to the deadline to keep his strip topical and fresh. She notes the November 5th strip was submitted about two weeks before the publication date.

Two weeks, eh? That is almost exactly the same time span between Joe the Plumber’s appearance on the world stage and Trudeau’s hit piece. I’m not a big believer in coincidence and thus I disbelieve Doonesbury, Trudeau and David Stanford, the “Duty Officer” at Doonesbury Town Hall.

Microsoft has managed to annoy millions of Chinese, something the U.S. government was unable to do for the last 60 years.

As the single party state of China approaches its 60th anniversary, and as it grows to become interwoven into global society, some cultural cracks and crackpots are beginning to show. Nowhere is this more evident that the intersection of intellectual property and a society robbed of all private property in 1949 when Mao and his minions man-slaughtered their way into power.

As Mao meant to say, progressiveness comes from the barrel of a gun.

Walk the back streets of any Chinese metropolis and your will find knock-off market places, stalls brimming with name brand goods not intentionally made by brand name manufactures. Often assembled in the same factories using secret third-shift workers, these counterfeit products flood the Asian market with China being the well hole of manufactured theft.

Gucci has no idea how popular their handbags really are.

When someone steels your freedom and property for sixty years, theft becomes a legitimized way of life. Hence the Chinese retail underworld that operates completely aboveboard. Take the worst aspects of capitalism and communism, mix in a batter of desperation and you have modern Chinese business ethics, which make American business ethics saintly in contrast.

Enchanted with the Internet (the tool that will eventually bring down the PRC government) China’s wired population greedily consumes PCs and software. Since most of the world’s end-user software runs on Microsoft Windows, inappropriate and entirely illegal copies of XP and Vista are a bountiful as Mao caps once were. Any Beijing street vendor can pull out bogus copies of Windows and let them go for twice the duplication costs, which was nearly nothing. Faced with a full retail price for Windows or a clumsy clone of the same software for a fraction of the price, no semi-starving Chinese person would choose the real thing.

Facing lost sales to 1.3 billion people, Microsoft took action … and the reaction is precious.

Starting with XP, Microsoft launched their “Genuine Advantage” program which provides a genuine advantage only to Microsoft. It enables Microsoft to clobber a computer with illegally copied instances of Windows. Microsoft didn’t actively disable computers until recently, firing something of a digital warning shot over China’s user base.

Chinese digital addicts are pissed. Not in the pleasant, happy, inebriated U.K. use of the word. No, Chinese PC users are pissed in the boiling mad, American redneck mode.

“Why is Microsoft automatically connected with my computer? The computer is mine! Microsoft has no right to control my hardware without my agreement.” This blogger missed the salient point that his hardware is working exactly as it is designed to work when no operating system installed.

A master stroke of anti-genius came when the same fellow said “If the price of genuine software was lower than the fake one, who would buy the fake one?” I can’t even create a joke in response to his absurdly obvious analysis of micro economics. I suspect if this fellow took a long sip of tea and contemplated his own words, the glow of lucidity would lift him into a rapturous high. If not the same vendor who sold him his pirated copy of Windows could likely sell him some low grade hash to complete his intellectual transformation.

A Chinese lawyer opined that Microsoft was the “biggest hacker in China with its intrusion into users’ computer systems without their agreement or any judicial authority,” Now American lawyers are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, this being evidenced by the ones elected to Congress. Evidentially Chinese lawyers have IQ’s slightly lower than your average fence post. This Shanghai shyster bemoans a lack of agreement to Microsoft disabling their own software without noting that Microsoft never agreed to allow pirated copies of their products to be installed in the first place.

Next, Chinese lawyers will litigate against God for failing to deliver milk and honey per scriptural contract.

To my friends in China I say welcome to capitalism. Free markets are built on trust and enforcement, and theft is not tolerated. If you want to be capitalists on a global scale, you have to play by the rules.

I’d rather be writing songs than writing about health care, but some days duty calls.

I was politely challenged by a Democrat and left-leaning to the point of toppling over friend on my assertion that Barack Obama’s proposals, aside from being socialist and thus by definition un-American, were a series of slow motion train wrecks. My alleged friend allowed me to monologue on any single topic. Given that I’m sick of this long presidential race, healthcare seemed like an appropriate subject.

Obama’s proposals (shifting as they do like the sands of the Sahara) are semi-permanently documented on his campaign web site. Ignoring for the moment that there is nearly zero Constitutional authority for any of his schemes (which is odd considering he once taught constitutional law) we see the following logical and economic disasters in waiting (note that the proposals are directly copied/pasted from Obama’s site):

Proposal: Require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions so all Americans regardless of their health status or history can get comprehensive benefits at fair and stable premiums.

This proposal requires two elements of force: First, it requires insurance companies to cover people with known risks. The modern parallel is the subprime mortgage mess where government required banks to lend to people with known risks (low income, spotty credit histories, etc.) The natural response for any businessman would be to raise prices to cover these risks, but Obama promises “comprehensive benefits” (i.e., everything is covered) at “fair and stable prices” which would require price fixing. So Obama will raise insurance company risk while restricting their revenues which will lead to bankruptcies and people losing their coverage.

Great plan Barry. But Barry was dumb enough to snort coke so his risk assessment skills are pretty low.

Proposal: Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpractice insurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.

Rephrased, Obama will restrict insurance companies from charging the rates they need to survive the onslaught of ambulance chasers. This squeeze will result in companies getting out of the malpractice insurance business. Unable to find malpractice insurance will cause doctors to go out of business and be forced to practice in HMOs … and we all know how popular HMOs are.

Proposal: Make employer contributions more fair by requiring large employers that do not offer coverage or make a meaningful contribution to the cost of quality health coverage for their employees to contribute a percentage of payroll toward the costs of their employees health care.

In other words if you do not provide your employees health insurance then we will force you to provide it anyway, and to provide as much as we tell you to. This could result in employers dropping more than insurance coverage — they’ll drop employees. I’d rather have a job and buy my own insurance than have no job and no insurance to boot.

Proposal: Establish a National Health Insurance Exchange with a range of private insurance options as well as a new public plan based on benefits available to members of Congress that will allow individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health coverage.

Barack foresees a government run exchange (as opposed to the existing public exchanges) with the addition of a set of taxpayer subsidized insurance plans that compete with private plans. This will drive private insurance into the grave because private insurers do not receive subsidies from the taxpayers. This will insure “universal health care” because soon there will be no alternatives to government coverage.

Proposal: Lower drug costs by allowing the importation of safe medicines from other developed countries, increasing the use of generic drugs in public programs and taking on drug companies that block cheaper generic medicines from the market

The problem is that the drug prices in other countries for American designed drugs are lower because foreign countries set the price below market value. To compensate and make back the billions of dollars they spend on R&D, the drug companies raise U.S. prices. If Obama has his way U.S. drug companies will not be able to make back their R&D money and thus will quit inventing new drugs, effectively killing the American pharmaceutical industry and a few Americans in the process.

Proposal: Reform the insurance market to increase competition by taking on anticompetitive activity that drives up prices without improving quality of care.

Problem here is that the government created an anticompetitive insurance industry at the request of … the insurance industry (I’d love to not have competition too). You are not allowed to buy insurance from the state or country of your choice, and states (with Congressional support) mandate the services you must pay for, even if you don’t use them. For example my gay friend David bitches that he has to pay his insurance company for contraceptives and in vitro fertilization service that he obviously will never use.

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If all this sounds good to you, then you need socialized medicine and need your head examined.

What are they putting in the water in Charlotte County, Florida? Given the serial sexual antics of their elected representatives there is now a movement afoot to rename that turf to Harlot County.

Congress swung Democrat in 2006 due to the perversions of former 16th District Republican Mark Foley. Don’t take my word for the damage Foley wrought during that election cycle. According to Election projection, whose results are spooky accurate, the House and Senate were still in Republican control until the Foley scandal broke, their lead dropping nearly 20 points shortly thereafter.

Foley had a thing for teenage boys, and in his quest for twinkies had the bad judgment to leave electronic trails of his seductions via email and text messages. Foley’s attempt to mate with underage men ran somewhat counter the GOP’s family values manta.

Now his successor has been implicated in serial affairs.

Enter stage left Tim Mahoney, a Democrat who dashed into Foley’s former job on a campaign promising to return morals and family values to Washington. You have to give Mahoney credit for taking on a task that would make Sisyphus flinch. Evidentially Harlot County morals include not only seducing teenage boys but also committing serial infidelity.

Mahoney’s hardship now lay in his damaged brand. When your actions are contrary to your brand, people respond with rejection. A brand is a promise, and since trust is the foundation of all relationships, when one violates their personal brand they violate trust. Foley broke his “family values” brand and was chased out of office. Now Mahoney has broken his “morals” brand.

Naturally the Republicans are dancing down every Charlotte County street today, sensing an opportunity to reclaim what Foley threw away.

What neither my Republican nor Democrat friends will admit is that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between their candidates. Politicians are in the game for power. People who crave power are by nature corrupt or corruptible. We should be thankful that their sexual appetites keep them too busy to steal even more money from us.

I best contact the Charlotte County water management district. I have a sibling who lives near by and I want to make sure she isn’t suddenly desiring to run for office.