United Liberty

Bob Costas is one of my favorite sports announcers. I freely admit this. I know he’s one of those announcers that spark either hatred or fanaticism from sports fans; my response is fanaticism. My preference is baseball, but I could sit and listen to Costas call any game.

This past week, after the tragic news of murder/suicide from the Kansas City Chiefs, Costas opened his mouth and agreed with this article that calls for increased gun control, arguing that if we had more gun control laws, Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins would still be alive. That’s quite an assumption!

He could have killed her with a baseball bat. Should we make baseball bats harder to buy?

He could have killed her with a tire iron. Maybe we need more tire iron laws.

He could have killed her with a pickle jar. (click the link and scroll down)

He could have run her over with his car. Shall we outlaw cars?

A man his size could have killed her with his bare hands.

The point in all of this is that if Belcher wanted to kill Kasandra Perkins, he didn’t need a gun to do it. But when he used a gun to do this awful deed, gun grabbers jump at the opportunity to call for less freedom through more gun control laws.

As if criminals obey those gun control laws.

It’s only been a few weeks since Election Day, and already the 2014 election cycle is heating up. It doesn’t take long before the attention turns to the next election, and this year is no different. Here in Georgia, speculations are circling about who will challenge Saxby Chambliss.

My entry into the political world started in 2008 when Chambliss was running for reelection. I was (and still am) shocked and appalled that a professing conservative had the audacity to support the bank bailouts. I launched a web site at FireSaxby.com and quickly got national attention when the Associated Press interviewed me for an article about Chambliss’ race.

I’m excited about the coming election season. It’s a great opportunity for the conservative base in Georgia to reject liberal tendencies of Senator Chambliss. He really is one of the most despicable men in Washington. The good news is that there are some good possibilities for candidates to run against Saxby.

Herman Cain – I’m not a fan of Herman Cain at all, but he’s already got statewide recognition, which will be necessary to beat Saxby. On top of that, people generally like him. He’s not much of an upgrade over Chambliss though, given his past support of TARP and bailouts, but he’s not Saxby Chambliss, so that works in his favor.

A friend shared this interesting post with me the other day. Basically, with Romney losing the election and the Republicans trying to blame everybody but themselves, the question of the party having a “libertarian problem” arises. The author makes a couple of points that are worth considering.

Mitt Romney ran against libertarian ideals.

There was almost literally nothing libertarian about the GOP’s presidential ticket. They ran on a platform of government a little smaller than the Democrats would prefer. Expand the war on drugs. Expand globally with aggressive (“preventative”) war. Expand spending. Balance the budget at some point in the distant future. None of that sounds libertarian because none of that is libertarian.

The GOP has to have libertarians before it can have a libertarian problem.

In the Senate, they’ve got Rand Paul. Mike Lee isn’t so bad, either. In the House, there are a handful of decent members, but only 1 that I’d trust to make the right stand, no matter what. (I’m looking at you, Justin Amash.) That’s not much of a libertarian presence in Congress.

This weekend I watched the final quarter of the Texas A&M and Alabama game. I’m not much of a college football fan, but it was an interesting game to watch. Alabama was playing at home, and in the last couple of minutes of the game, managed to lost a game they had plenty of opportunities to win.

After the game was over, the TV cameras focused on some of the fans whose expressions spoke volumes: “Woah. What just happened?”

Election Night for the GOP was similarly shocking. They were sure they would beat Obama this year. He had a record of more debt, and they had the Comeback Team. Never mind the fact that the Comeback Team was a pair of lackluster career politicians whose primary selling point was that neither had the surname Obama.

And now, like Alabama’s football team, the Republican Party has to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Like many political bloggers, I have a few suggestions.

Stop hating free markets.

The Republicans are supposed to be the party that values free markets, but there are few Republican politicians willing to take a stand for truly free markets. They insist on “doing something rather than doing nothing,” which means government intervention where it shouldn’t be found. Get the government out of the markets, and let the market corrections happen.

Stop hating people.

The big news out of Tuesday is that we’re now dealing with four more years of Barack Obama, and a lot of people are obviously not happy about that. Though I’m no Obama fan, I’m going to try to be optimistic about the election. Here goes…

President
Harry Reid would have held up the Republican agenda for the next two years. Now the House can hold up the Obama agenda. The House won’t be able to hold up everything, but it’s not like the Democrats have full control and can push through anything they want. Obama’s win also gives assurance that Republican voters will remain furious through the midterm elections in 2014 instead of latching on to Romney’s moderate-to-liberal ways.

Are we better off with Obama than we would have been with Romney? No, but an Obama re-election isn’t the end of the world, either.

Senate
It’s hard to find an optimistic Republican view of the Senate results. They should have taken the majority, but instead are in a tougher situation, making a takeover in 2014 less likely. Still, it was Jim DeMint who said he’d rather have 30 good Republican senators than 60 bad ones.

The optimistic points in the Senate results from last night aren’t numerous, but there are a couple. Jeff Flake won in Arizona, and Ted Cruz won in Texas. Those should be two good additions to the right side of the aisle.

House
The real good news in the House is that the GOP kept control. Control of one of the branches of government is critical to keep Obama in line. They didn’t expand their lead, but they still managed to maintain their majority.

Some Republican friends of mine have been posting and reposting this video from WeAreChange.org. It’s a great idea for a video, really. They go out and find Obama supporters and ask them about Romney policy issues – well, they say they’re Romney policy issues, but the issues are all things Obama has done or supported since he took office.

Obama supporters talk about how crazy the policies are, how they’re an overreach of government, and then they are told the truth. That’s when we get to see the look of shock on their faces, hear the disbelief in their voices, and watch as they try to find words to explain why all of those bad policies are really ok after all as they try to find words to backup their Chosen One.

Classic.

But there’s an important piece here that these Republican friends should be careful not to miss: Mitt Romney also supports those horrible policies.

The PATRIOT Act
“With respect to national security surveillance and investigations, I strongly support both FISA as amended and the PATRIOT Act, and I will ensure that we use the full range of lawful authority to obtain useful intelligence about current or future threats to our country.” – Mitt Romney

Indefinite Detention under NDAA
“The Constitution, U.S. statutes, and the laws of war permit detention of enemy combatants — including U.S. citizens — until the end of hostilities, as has been recognized by the Supreme Court.” – Mitt Romney

I missed much of Friday’s news cycle, as I was traveling to visit my parents in South Carolina. We met them at our favorite local Mexican restaurant for dinner, and within five minutes, dad was telling me about how my Social Security number has probably been compromised and that I need to make a phone call to get free credit monitoring, courtesy of South Carolina.

About a month ago, someone from an international network compromised the South Carolina Department of Revenue’s web site to expose 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit card numbers. Of those credit card numbers, most were encrypted, but 16,000 of them were stored in plain text. All of the Social Security numbers were stored in plain text. The news of this fiasco hit the wire on Friday.

The reactions by South Carolinians that I spoke with this weekend were all pretty much the same: a mixture of anger and frustration. There are some people online calling for Governor Nikki Haley’s head on a platter, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that she would somehow know of vulnerabilities on a web server in a data center somewhere.

Yes, heads should roll; but Haley is the Governor, not the head of I.T.

This story has specific interest to me – first because I have paid South Carolina income taxes since 1998 – so my information is in data that was compromised, but also because I’ve managed web servers and security for equipment that handles this type of information. I understand the steps that are needed to protect this type of information.