AlanBarber.Org
Politics & Government
Friday, December 05, 2003
Mission to the Moon?
Yesh! FoxNews.com is reporting that President Bush wants a mission to go to the moon.Oh man what's up with that? He better not be thinking of pulling some JFK like move at the State of the Union address. It's a bad idea to be dealing with space stuff right now. While I'm sure they're just fishing for reactions right now I hope they don't get any crazy ideas. I mean I know it's tempting to make some big announcement to give people something positive to think about. However, in the current state of the country/world it's just silly.
The war on terror hasn't exactly been looked upon favorably lately. Starting NASA on some big moon program now will just backfire. Liberals will just have a field day running around saying it's a smoke screen to distract people. They're already bitching about the billions being spent to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan so saying you're going to spend more to go to the moon will just drive them into a fury.
Right now the best thing to be do is just focus on cleaning up Iraq. Get an official government in place fast and start shifting power and control of the country to it's own people. The same goes for Afghanistan. We should be shifting to the smallest size deployments in the country as possible and keeping the deployment times short. It'll be good for both the troops and politics.
Anyways, it's just not good right now to be thinking about space. When things calm down on this planet then lets talk about a renewed energy in space travel. Plus the current state of NASAs shuttles are very questionable. If anything the President should take the advice of Dennis Miller [Dennis Miller just might have a point] and strip NASA to it's bones and build a national rail system. If he announced that at the State of the Union he'd probably have the election in the bag. Just doing something to improve the lives of people at home would sucker all the moderates and on the fence liberals to support you.
Just think about it Mr. President.
on 12/05/2003 at 03:43 PM
Thursday, November 06, 2003
2003 Election - Good and Bad
It's been a good and bad year for Republicans in the election.We managed to get two more governors, well 3 if you count Arnold out in California. Ernie Fletcher(rep) beat out Ben Chandler(dem) for the Kentucky governorship. The first time a Republican has been elected since 1967 by the way. In Mississippi Haley Barbour(rep) managed to oust the current governor Ronnie Musgrove(dem).
On the local front, thanks to the help from several college republican clubs in Ohio, Janet Weir Creighton (rep) won the mayoral race for the city of Canton. This was actually a White House targeted race. Why you ask, because Canton is the largest city in Ohio the democrats don't have a stronghold on the mayoral race. Our local club was actually called by the White House to personally request our help on the race. We had originally planned on helping in the Kentucky race. However, that changed when the White House called. So we all spent a Saturday afternoon roaming around Canton handing out literature.
Lit drops as their called are really boring. Basically you get handed a bunch of little bags full of post cards, flyers, etc and a long list of addresses to hit. It depends on what they want but you do one of two things. You either just do a hang and run or you actually try to talk to the people. The hang and runs are used more for mass canvassing where you hit most houses on a street. You usually only get asked to talk to people when it's very targeted. In that case it's not rare to only hit 2-3 houses on a street. The individuals are usually registered Republicans that have not voted in the last election or newly registered. The idea being to make sure to get those you know for sure will vote for the candidate to actually go out and vote.
Personally I prefer the hang and runs. There's just something oddly satisfying about looking back down a street and seeing every house with a little white bag handing on the door. Maybe it's because I know it's going to piss off a bunch of Liberals.
Anyways that's the good. The bad is that It appears that democrats did a major sweep of local governments all over the place. While we won the Mayor seat in Canton, 8 of the 10 city council spots went to democrats. Similar in my hometown where the Republican mayor won re-election, the democrats took 4 out of the 5 council spots. And looking at statewide numbers it appears the same all over.
So it's been good and bad in 2003. However the real fun will be next year.
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Hilliary Clinton files with FEC to run for President!
Ladies and gentlemen this is no joke! It appears that Hillary Clinton has filled with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run for President.The FEC lets you search through campaign finance records. Doing a quick search on Clinton finds you the following results:
http://herndon1.sdrdc.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?P00003392
quote:
CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM ID: P00003392
Office Sought: President
Election Year: 2004
State: Presidential Candidate
District: 03
Party: DEM (Democratic Party)
However there is no guarantee that this filing came from Hillary or her crew. In fact there is a slight issue because the filing shows the city as Arlington, VA. All the official Clinton filings are in Washington D.C., New York, and Little Rock. For all we know someone faked it.
Still this is very interesting as a Clinton might run in '04 after all.
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
A Different Point of View
There's a really great article on Iraq at Frontpage Magazine. With 90% of what I hear on TV reports being negative it's nice to read about the positive things that get passed by.Maybe it's just the media in general but all they report on is negative. More death, riots, shootings, blah, blah, blah... It's so depressing and it's driving me nuts. This kind of reporting never makes it to the big outlets but luckily we have places like frontpage mag willing to report.
Frontpage mag is run by David Horowitz who is just an amazing individual. He was a major player in the anti-war peace movement in California during the 70. He's done a lot of good for civil rights and anti-censorship throughout his life. But what’s more amazing is that he realized as he was getting older that his views on politics and life were more inline with conservatives than liberals. He's switched sides and now is a strong conservative speaker. As a part of the local Republican club on campus we brought Mr. Horowitz to speak at our campus and I was amazed by his speaking.
I highly suggest people go out and read some of his books. You'll learn a whole lot!
Monday, July 14, 2003
French banned from using email
Well ok they aren't actually banned from using email. The law states that all government publications must use the term "courriel" instead of "email". "Courriel" is sort for "courrier electronique" or "electronic mail" in English.
It was originally published in a Austrailian news site.
Talk about politics run amok! What can I say? This is exactly why governments should keep to dealing with the basics; Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Worrying about what language people use in a field is just downright moronic. Out of all the things that need to be dealt with, I highly doubt this needed the time they probably spend on it. This is modern government after all. It takes months of debates, studies, etc to get any law created and passed.
Continue reading "French banned from using email"
Saturday, July 12, 2003
Fair Use Ruling
There was an interesting blurb over at SATN.org about a court ruling on fair use of copyrighted images.
A photographer sued a search engine company for copyright infringements. The companies ran a search engine for pictures on the web. The engine would go around the web looking for pictures and make thumbnails to display as results to searches on their site. The photographer requested to have his site not linked to. The company did remove him but he proceeded to file a lawsuit anyways.
The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the creation of thumbnails would be covered under fair use that is part of copyright law.
There's a nice 16 page ruling worth a read for the law types that do mind reading pages of lawyer speak.
Continue reading "Fair Use Ruling"
Thursday, July 10, 2003
Will We Ever Get an Anti-Spam Law?
Will we ever get a national anti-spam law on the books? Not if the morons in congress keep doing what they do best!
I read this article at PCWorld.Com this morning after seeing it reported on another site.
This was originally going to be my normal rant on spam and how we need to solve the problem but after seeing the following quote in the article I became so upset this turned into a rant on government.
"'I don't know what spam is,' said Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) near the end of Tuesday's hearing by the House Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security Subcommittee. But Waters opposes limits on e-mail, fax, and telephone communications: 'I'm just not in the business of that kind of censorship,' she said."