The Ambulance Driver takes #1 Dinosaur to task for taking what he calls a “step over into moonbat territory.”

The post he takes issue with is this one, in which #1 Dinosaur quotes this post favorably:

[A]ll of them are asking for their America back. I wonder which America that would be?

Would that be the America where the Supreme Court picks your president instead of counting all the votes? Would that be the America where rights to privacy are ignored? Would that be the America where the Vice President shoots his best friend in the face? Or would that be the America where an idiot from Alaska and a college drop-out with a radio show could become the torchbearers for the now illiterate Republican party?

I’ve only been reading the Dinosaur’s blog for a few weeks. I started when the release of her book “outed” her (she was anonymous up to that point, as I understand it) and Ambulance Driver mentioned it. I’ve enjoyed the blog. She makes a lot of sense, even when I don’t necessarily agree with what she’s saying. So, I’m with AD in finding this particular post to be a bit disappointing, since the quoted material is unnecessarily hateful (and downright dishonest, in the case of the “Supreme Court picks your president” lie).

I’m not going to quit reading her blog anytime soon – despite the title of this post, she’s really not a moonbat – but I do find this post annoying and disappointing.

Oh, and one last thing. Someone calling themselves “Mule Breath” in the comments accuses AD of an “inability to see (or at least to admit) moonbattiness and the over-the-edge thuggery of some of those professing to be on your side.” Mule Breath needs to reconsider that statement. Craziness on the right is wingnuttery, not moonbattiness.

Irreducible Intentional Complexity

In an earlier post, titled Irreducible Complexity, I theorized that the size of some recent bills being passed through congress was a deliberate attempt to keep people from reading them.

Eric at Classical Values goes one step further, pointing out that it’s not just the size; the text itself is a barrier to understanding:

As there is no way to read that kind of garbage without looking up other laws and other paragraphs in other kinds of garbage, reading it is pretty much a waste of time.

It’s almost as if they’ve come up with something which was never designed to be read, except later by the salaried bureaucrats who wrote it — and whose job it will be to enforce it. The latter write the laws, and politicians who vote to enact these laws are not really making the law in the sense that the Constitution requires; they are doing as they are told.

Emphasis mine.

In my opinion, any law that cannot be summarized into one or two pages using language that a sixth grade civics student^[a] can understand should never be proposed, much less passed. I would fully support a law (or, if necessary to make it really official, a Constitutional Amendment) requiring that a.) any law passed by Congress must be attached to a summary that fits the description I just used, and b.) any law found to fundamentally contradict said summary would immediately be null and void^[b]. Unfortunately, that’d be hard to pull off, I think.

However, we have to stop letting our legislators get away with claiming that they “didn’t know” that certain clauses were in the bills for which they voted. Soldiers following orders they know to be blatantly illegal aren’t excused; why should Congressmen be excused from passing evil laws just because “they didn’t know”? That’s especially true when the entire point of having a representative republic is that the elected officials should have both the time and the ability to read, understand, and deliberate on the laws they are passing. If the Founding Fathers had wanted deliberately ignorant people voting directly on the law of the land, they would’ve simply created a democracy!

I find it easier to swallow that the people of Massachusetts would re-elect Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick than that anyone would vote for someone like John Conyers, who admitted that it was no good for congressmen to read the bills unless they had two days to read it and lawyers standing by to explain it to them. (Granted, Conyers hasn’t been up for re-election since then, so maybe no one will vote for him.)

I’m a big fan of Dave Ramsey and one of the things he says, over and over and over is that you should never put your money into something you don’t fully understand. Congressmen shouldn’t put their support behind something they don’t fully understand, and for them to do so is to fail to do their jobs.

1. That is, a literate sixth grade civics student. Given the state of our educational system, I don’t think that goes without saying, sadly. [↩]
2. Additionally, it’d be nice if we could throw language in there saying that any Congressman who voted for a law so nullified would be ineligible for re-election in the next cycle. [↩]

…when the people telling me that there is start acting like it. ($550,000,000 edition)

McKAY: I think it’s highly unlikely. Besides, geo-engineering’s a dumb pursuit anyways. I mean, no one person’s gonna solve global warming. We all have to do our part.

KELLER: Like not take private jets.

McKAY: Well, they were going our way anyway.

There’s been a bit of an uproar over the fact that the House has budgeted $550,000,000 to buy private jets for Congress.

I’d like to say I’m surprised by the hypocrisy involved in Congress’s working on legislation intended to combat Global Warming while wasting $550,000,000 to buy private jets, but nothing about corrupt government officials (I repeat myself…) spending money on things they’d like to have while doing their best to keep the common citizen from having any money (or freedom) to buy things for himself surprises me anymore, sadly.

Why does Congress have its own fleet of private jets? In theory, congresspeople could just as easily travel using commercial aircraft on their own dime, rather than passing the cost off to the taxpayers for private jets that just add more pollution to the air.

Perhaps a better question is, why do we still send Congresspeople to DC? Wouldn’t they be able to better serve their constituents if they stayed at home, where they could actually meet with the common citizen?

Sure, they have to meet and discuss bills and such, but we have technology that could handle that much cheaper than the cost of sending them all to DC to meet. It could work much like Xbox Live’s 1 vs. 100, and the resulting virtual Congress could be broadcast on C-Span just as easily as the current one is. I bet it would get more viewers, too – Congressman Big Daddy (I-Rapture) would almost certainly be more fun to watch during a long-winded speech than, well, pretty much anyone else.

This would have quite a few advantages. Taxpayers could save money on travel expenses for our legislators. Travelling legislators would not be contributing to pollution. Common citizens could meet with representatives (and senators) more easily, and lobbyists wouldn’t find their jobs quite as easy. Both of those last two would contribute to making our representatives actually, you know, represent their constituents.

I’m getting more and more tired of politics, and I think that Dafydd ab Hugh explains why in his post, “Rules for Conservatives” (The title is a play on Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky):

By the way, please don’t assume that I approve of tactics such as shouting down people at meetings; I think it’s reprehensible. I applaud opponents who can debate in a collegial atmosphere. However, I see the frustration of ordinary citizens whose congressmen treat them with condescension and disdain.

Discouraging tactics such as shouting down people you disagree with is like using poison gas in wartime. It only works if both sides refuse to use it. As long as the Left feels that it’s fair for it to disrupt meetings and shout down speakers, conservatives are going to do the same.

The one thing I won’t do is shed tears about the breakdown of civil debate: That died years ago. The truth is that the Right is finally learning how to play hardball.

I think Dafydd is right; the Left has absolutely no qualms about shouting down their opponents, disrupting meetings (witness the Code Pink assault on the Republican National Convention last year), or anything else, as long as the ultimate goal is to get their policies enacted (or, at the very least, to prevent the Right’s policies from being enacted). However, they feel it’s somehow wrong for the Right to do the same.

For my part, I think such tactics are generally deplorable as a whole, and the Left’s embrace of such tactics is one of the things I find most deplorable on that side of the political spectrum. I think it’s sad that the Right has to take up such tactics just to be fighting on “even ground”, and the fact that they (we?) have been driven to that point goes a long way toward draining the enthusiasm I had for discussing politics.

The “Cash for Clunkers” program, which spent all of the $1,000,000,000 allocated for it after just one week, has been extended. The House passed the extension earlier this week, the Senate approved it on Thursday night, and President Obama signed the bill into law on Friday morning.

Hang on. I’m starting to remember something…

Candidate Obama promised that, once a bill was passed by Congress, it would be posted online to be reviewed for five days before he signed it. When it became obvious that he had absolutely no intention of actually following through on that pledge, he changed the terms, saying that he would allow five days from the point that it became clear that the bill was going to come across his desk^[a].

On Thursday, July 30th, the administration told us that money was running out and that the program would be suspended as of midnight Thursday. The House passed HR-3435 on July 31st, 2009, one week before the President signed the bill. It then went to the Senate, where it was, ultimately, passed without amendment, though six different amendments were proposed on July 6th.

Even under the President’s “revised” promise^[b], there is no way he could’ve known what was heading to his desk before July 6th, because there were still debates going on about amendments. Yet, he signed the bill less than 24 hours after it was passed.

I guess promises mean something different in Chicago than they do here in West Virginia.

1. I’m going to ignore, for the moment, the fact that the change means that the bill could be changed during the five days it was up for review, making the alteration of the pledge pretty silly. As the linked article points out, the pledge itself meant that the public could comment when it was too late to change the bill anyway; was he promising to veto everything that he got too much bad feedback on? [↩]
2. That is a trick I’m going to have to try. “I promise that if we have Mexican food tonight, then we can go to Taste of Asia tomorrow.” “Well, I’m not going to keep that first promise, because I’m a liar it’s just too hard to keep, but now I promise that if we have Mexican food tonight, you can get take-out Chinese food tomorrow.” [↩]