Milk and Kool-Aid

The Way Things Are

I should probably explain the recent hiatus from the blog.

Oh, not that there aren't still topics and news and goings-on that are worth talking and writing and fighting about. Obviously there are. And as I can, I will post on here. But, especially after the State Convention next month, my posting here will be dropping dramatically.

The truth is I have other, larger projects going on that are going to require my attention. By larger I mean something longer than the typical 1-2 page post I put on here.

So, as I get to it, I will be posting. Otherwise, I am focusing my energies elsewhere.

Don't Caucus Me, Bro!

The word “revolution” has been used to describe many beneficial or life changing events in history and right now it is being thrown around again. There are several within the Oklahoma Republican Party who are looking for another “revolution."

What many people don’t seem to realize is this: we already had an American Revolution. We had it on November 4, 2008. Our founders wisely put in place a system of government specifically designed to create the perfect set of circumstances for a bloodless revolution and transfer of governmental authority between opposing ideologies every two to four years. But that’s not the kind revolution these people are talking about.

There is a faction in the Oklahoma Republican Party, many of them people who went out last week and shook tea bags protesting that their voices weren’t heard, who are now trying to take away the voices of their neighbors. Ironic, no?

We’ve got a group among us who are so embittered by the results of the democratic process they would make Che proud. “We didn’t like the way this whole voting thing turned out. Here’s an easy solution: no more voting!”

Their reasoning? Primaries don’t elect the right candidates. Translation: we didn’t like how you chose so we’ve decided you don’t get a choice anymore.

Full disclosure - I didn't support McCain in the primary. For that matter, no one I know did. My guy didn't even come in second. And yet, I don't have a problem doing this whole "letting the people have a fair say" thing again, knowing that the potential for my candidate to lose still exists.

It’s like whenever USC or Texas or Florida doesn’t get invited to the National Championship, suddenly we have to abolish the BCS. It’s biased! It’s corrupt! Forget that it’s all based off of statistics and numbers, there’s favoritism being shown, I tell ya! And yet when they do get to go, well what do you know, this BCS thing isn’t so bad after all, and we’ll just let it slide one more year.

By the way, if you ever needed a proof-positive argument that we don’t need to abolish the BCS, here it is: Obama wants us to.

The main arguments for the caucus system, or as I like to call it, the Abolishment of the People’s Right to Vote, are mainly as follows.

1) It will encourage more honest elections

This one will take some time, but it needs to be dealt with first for the subsequent points to make sense.

In the utopian vision of an Oklahoma caucus they are presenting, it all starts in the neighborhoods. Some precinct chairman calls a meeting and invites his or her neighbors, through door-knocking or flyering or what have you. They meet in his living room and decide they are all like-minded, well-intentioned individuals who largely want to achieve the same goals, even though they may disagree on some minutia. They all then sign up to be delegates to their county convention.

Then they go to their county convention, meet more like-minded, well-intentioned individuals who largely want to achieve the same goals, and sign up to be delegates to their district convention.

At the district convention, they meet even more like-minded, well-intentioned individuals who largely want to achieve the same goals, and sign up to be delegates to the state convention.

At the state convention, they participate in a caucus as unbound delegates to elect the primary candidate for the state of Oklahoma. Everyone gets to vote for whoever they want to vote for, and at the end, no matter who wins, we’ll all join hands and sing the friendship song as we proclaim that, even if our choice for candidate lost, the best choice was made.

Did you see what happened? Unless you made it to every single meeting, you do not get to vote on who Oklahoma elects as our primary candidate. If you miss just one of these events, you have a limited amount of time in order to appeal to a board for approval to be a delegate at the next highest level. And there’s no guarantee you will be approved.

Now, in a world where the sky is blue, here’s what will happen.

We go back to the precinct chairman. He’s obviously not a dispassionate person. And he knows already who he wants to be Oklahoma’s primary candidate. So he goes door to door and visits with his neighbors and figures out which ones support his candidate and which ones do not. Then he goes home and decides the date of the precinct meeting, and guess who he conveniently forgets to invite?

Now, the objection will be raised, but those other people, they can go before the credentials committee after the fact, they can come and appeal to be a delegate, they can work around the system, it’s a built-in fix just for that.

But how will they know about that option unless their precinct chairman or some other official tells them? And even if one or two people who support another candidate does get in after all, how would that stand in proportion to a stacked deck? Because you can be sure this wouldn’t be happening in just one precinct.

Of course, those committee members are volunteers from the initial precinct meetings. And, again, there’s no guarantee your petition will be approved.

Right now, I want you to picture a person involved in the local party that you do not trust. I know it’s hard to just pick one, but for the sake of the illustration, make an effort. Can you honestly say that you know that they would have less control over the primary outcome under this caucus system than they would under a straight voting primary system?

2) It will bring people into the party.

I’m surprised anyone can say this with a straight face. Yeah, nothing encourages involvement like taking away people’s voices.

What they mean when they say this is not that it will bring people into the party in general. They mean they will have the opportunity to stack the party with more of their people, people they can control, and quash the rest of us. That’s the “more people” they are talking about bringing in. See answer #1.

3) It will elect better candidates

You can fill in the blank with whatever “better” is supposed to mean. The word “better” will be defined by the group we described under answer #1.

They have also thrown around the justification that it will help implement real campaign finance reform by ensuring that state funds don’t go to primary candidates and people will have to pay for their own campaigns.

Actually, we already have a procedure for implementing that. It’s called "legislation," and it’s pretty similar to that voting thing, so my guess is they’re against that, too.

Really, it all goes back to #1. None of these other issues matter as long as the threat of absolute control by one small group remains.

And now we see the real “revolution” they are talking about: the French Revolution, where it’s us vs. them, a fight to the death, and off with the heads (or, more accurately, expulsion from the party) of the losers, no exceptions, no inclusion, no cooperation.

How do I know? Because of this exact proposition.

They want to cut our heads off. They want to take away our voice in our own primary. They want to take our vote away because they are afraid of us. And ultimately, they want us to leave the party and let them do whatever they want to do unopposed and unchecked.

Just because you don’t like the way an election turned out doesn’t mean the problem is with the election process. Just because your team didn’t go to the BCS championship doesn’t mean the problem is with the BCS. Your team had a bad season. Be an adult, suck it up and try again next year.

Make no mistake – this is a deliberate attempt to silence voices opposing a specific political figure or agenda. The only way to prevent this is to preserve the right of the people to vote, whether it be in a primary or a general election.

Come to the county convention and help us stop this disastrous un-American proposal and keep our right to vote by standing up to remove this resolution from the county platform. Your vote depends on it.

For more on this issue, also see:

http://chathamviews.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-obama-stole-nomination-from-hillary.html

Didn't The Original One Actually Have Something To Do With Tea?

I know I've gotten bad about reposting stuff lately. But this is really worth passing along.

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Tea Party Protests Sweep the Country: But What’s the Message? http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/tea-party-protests-sweep-the-country/

With protests taking place all around the country, there should be no doubt that the Tea Party movement is something real (see PJTV’s coverage of the Tea Party protests here). The voices are loud — and becoming louder with each successive demonstration. Disapproval of the stimulus/spending bill continues to grow, and I expect the crowds in places like Nashville, Kansas City, and, of course, Washington, D.C., will also continue to grow.

Still, if you’ve been unable to hear a message other than “We’re not happy,” you’re not alone. The objection to the spending bill is real, but other than objecting, what is the purpose of these protests?

An unscientific poll at Instapundit suggests we’re mostly protesting in order to elect fiscal hawks. I don’t know about you, but it seems like it would have been more effective to simply run fiscal hawks as candidates, rather than protest their absence less than five months after the election. Still, let’s say that is the driving factor for most Americans taking part in the Tea Party protests. Will we continue these protests until the 2010 elections? What if we don’t get what we want?

More importantly, what if the events taking place are momentous enough to be worthy of more than just our scattered and somewhat incoherent cries of protest? Is our only response a loud proclamation of opposition to the trampling of our rights? Are we allowed to protest with our voices as long as our bodies acquiesce? History tells us that is an empty freedom. Voices that have no force of authority behind them are weak weapons against the soft bondage of socialism and totalitarianism, and hollow voices of protest mean nothing when bodies willingly enter into a state of servitude.

It may be that we’re nowhere near that point, but the fact remains that far too many of us remain oblivious to the idea that we could ever face the reality of our individual liberty being subsumed by the State. Why? It’s not as if this concept of a servile nation is some heretofore unknown idea. More than 400 years ago, the philosopher Etienne de la Boetie wrote of this phenomenon in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Speaking of Rome in the time of emperors, he said:

Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, “Long live the King!” The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them. … The mob has always behaved in this way — eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably endured.

A centuries-old philosopher describing a society that has been extinct for nearly 2,000 years, and yet it bears a remarkable similarity to the entitlements of our own generation. But bread and circuses are not for us, and neither are the promises of “new and saved jobs” if only we hand over unheard of amounts of money and power to our most distant form of government. We are not a mob. We are reasoned people. We are learned people. We have the ability to make our own decisions, and if we ever choose servility we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

I’d like to think that many of those protesting are worried about such things, even if they are still thinking about these dangers in an abstract sense. Isn’t it better to once again have a national conversation about these things, even in theory, rather than face the possibility of a constitutional crisis in which the American people are unprepared? I hope Americans will remember that we don’t need to take to the streets or fight a revolution. All we have to do is abide by our conscience. We don’t demand unreasonable things. We only demand that our property, our liberty, and our rights remain secure. We demand these things in the name of the Republic and the millions who have sacrificed their lives for these principles. We demand these things for the Americans not yet born, who are entitled to the right to their own property and should not have to tolerate the confiscation of their earnings to pay for our own sins.

I worry that, despite the Tea Party protests, too many of us will find it a bother to ever stand up for ourselves. La Boetie recognized this too. In fact, he wrote that tyrants are created by the people.

… when a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth, any more than valor can be termed the effort of one individual to scale a fortress, to attack an army, or to conquer a kingdom. What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name?

I cannot accept that Americans who speak so fervently in favor of liberty are only paying lip service to that exalted ideal. I cannot believe that those who see danger in our current policies will choose to ignore the crisis and leave it up to our children to fight our battles, though they will be less equipped and less inclined to fight for their liberties. In fact, if the current situation is as dire as our pundits believe it to be, by the time our children are old enough to stand up for themselves, they will have forgotten what it means to do so.

La Boetie anticipated this as well. He believed that once liberty is lost, it becomes nearly impossible to regain, because of society’s “forgetfulness of its freedom.”

It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born.

This is why we must be ever vigilant to our entering into a state of voluntary servitude. There are real dangers that if we leave it to the next generation to deal with the loss of liberty, they will not even recognize what they no longer have. Diminished liberty will be the new normal, and those of us who believe in limited government, the right of the individual, and the ultimate authority of the people will be left on the fringes of political philosophy. Perhaps that will not be the case, and our children will be the ones embodied with the boldness to act. They will be acting against interests that will be more entrenched and that will make their job more difficult. If we ever determine that we are in fact becoming a servile people, we cannot stand idly by while liberty is dismembered.

La Boetie wasn’t the only philosopher concerned with voluntary servitude. John Dickinson, a moderate who ultimately refused to sign the Declaration of Independence (but still fought in the Continental Army after independence was declared), believed voluntary servitude should be resisted. He, along with Thomas Jefferson, wrote in 1775:

We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. As we wonder how far we may have fallen towards a state of voluntary servitude, it may help to think back to the original Tea Party participants. In 1774, as a direct consequence of the Boston Tea Party, British Parliament passed a series of punitive economic measures that came to be known in the colonies as the “Intolerable Acts.” What, I wonder, would we consider intolerable, as opposed to ill-advised or merely detrimental acts of our own Congress? The answer to that question may not be as theoretical as we think, and could help determine the future course of this nation in the months and years to come.

Trust, But Verify

Have you heard the one about Obama changing the armed forces oath?

It goes like this:

One day, deciding to comment on Obama's disregard for our Constitution, a blogger wrote a satire piece, pretending to be posting a news article claiming that Obama is going to change the military oath from stating loyalty to the Constitution, to loyalty to the President, namely, Obama.

The people latched onto it and it spread like wildfire, only not the way the original blogger had intended.

Somehow, through the beauty of the internet, the satirical nature of this post was lost, and many other blogs and aggregators began treating this piece as though it were legitimate news.

The reason is obvious; it's just so darn believable.

But it's not true.

Here is the original post, clearly stating this is not to be taken seriously.

If you want a good laugh, read the comment section.

You can check it out on Snopes, too.

In the words of the Great Communicator, "Trust, but verify."

Bill to Require Full Disclosure of Adoption Fees Heads to Full Senate

HAT TIP to Okiecampaigns.

A measure to create more uniformity in adoptions and ensure full disclosure of fees has cleared its first major hurdle in the Senate. Senate Bill 1029, by Sen. Steve Russell, was approved by the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Russell, R-Oklahoma City, said that as an adoptive parent, it was an area of law of special concern to him.

In Oklahoma, prospective adoptive parents can utilize public and private agencies as well as attorney-assisted adoptions. Russell said while those are all good options, a 2006 grand jury investigation uncovered a number of abuses that need to be addressed, including some cases of “adoption” fees being used for personal vehicles, computers and other items.

“My legislation requires full disclosure of all fees, so that adoptive parents know exactly what is required up front and what all the fees are for,” Russell said. “We need to make sure we have a uniform standard for adoptions. Under current law, some things, like home studies, can be waived. Procedures aimed at ensuring the safety of the adoptive child should be enforced.”

SB 1029 would also ensure parents have a full disclosure of all state laws dealing with adoption as well as regulations impacting the adoption of children of Native American ancestry.

“Making sure all adoption laws and fees are completely transparent will improve the process and help eliminate the potential for abuse,” Russell said. “This is simply good public policy.”

Russell’s legislation now moves to the full Senate for further consideration.

Red Envelope Project

I stumbled across this recently and thought I would pass it along.

As a method of a peaceful, tangible form of protest, someone (I haven't yet found out who) came up with the idea of the Red Envelope Project.

The Red Envelope Project is to allow anyone who can afford a stamp and chance to show President Obama that we do not support his pro-abortion and pro-infanticide policies.

Here's the idea:

Get a red envelope.

On the front, address it to:

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500

Don't put anything inside.

Seal it and on the back, write the following message:

This envelope represents one child who died in abortion. It is empty because that life was unable to offer anything to the world. Responsibility begins with conception.

Put a stamp on it and mail it.

It's that simple.

All it costs you is the price of a stamp.

Will it do anything? You never know. There are never any guarantees.

But what will doing nothing accomplish?