Courage

"No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV," noted one Democratic senator, who spoke on the condition on anonymity. "The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us."

(This is a great D.C. Profile in Courage moment: An anonymous senator, quoted about a supposedly "independent" outside groups that will have to deliver tough shots that Democrats won't take publicly about an increasingly unpopular war.)

David Postman. "Postman on Politics: Is this David Petreaus' war?" The Seattle Times, 10 September 2007

Being something of a cynic, and a tired one at that, I commonly chalk up the lack of political backbone in the United States not the fact that everyone in government is a member of the club, but to the fact that we as the public don't reward honesty and candor, even when we say the stakes are high. If Mister Postman's anonymous Senator thought that calling Petraeus "a liar on national TV" would help him in the polls, you couldn't have stopped him with wild horses - at least, so goes my reasoning. But I think that honesty and candor are laudable traits and should be rewarded - so why don't I write letters to legislators, praising them when they do well, and castigating them when they do poorly? Or just to let them know what I, as a constituent and a voter, expect them to do for me this week? Of course, I realize that my writing a letter isn't going to change anything. But ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million letters probably would.

It's because I allowed myself to think of myself as being the only voice in the wilderness, rather than potentially being the straw that broke the camel's back. If there is going to be a revolution within politics, we're going to have to drive it, from the bottom up, and that means participation - not because we think that we're going to do something as individuals, but because we're tired of being one of the people that allowed the triumph of evil through our own inaction. Politicians aren't hatched from eggs - they're members of the public, like us. So political courage must come FROM us, and not be something that we expect someone to exhibit FOR us.

419 Forever

Dear Aaron,

My name is Barr, Muhammad Jeffery Charles, I am a legal practitioner with Wong Tong Law Firm in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I saw your contact and profile i decided that you could cooperate with me in this proposition.I have a client who was deceased in March 12, 2004, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.I am contacting you because you have the same surname as my deceased client and i felt that you could help me in the distribution of funding that were left in my deceased client's bank account.

This funds is closed to be declared UN-serviceable by the bank as there were no indicated next of kin or next of beneficiary of the funding in the bank account.

The bank had issued to me a notification to contact the next of kin of my deceased client for either to re-activate the bank account or to make claim of beneficiary of the funding in the bank account, with a month surcharge of 6% to be deducted as an Escrow safe keeping fee of the bank account,so as to avoid the indefinite closure of the bank account.

My proposition to you is to seek your consent, and to present your kind self as the next-of-kin and beneficiary of my deceased client, since you have the same last name with him.

This means that the proceeds of his bank account would be paid to you as his next of kin or the legitimate beneficiary. When the proceeds in his bank account are paid to you, we would share the proceeds on a mutually agreed-upon percentage of 60% to me and 40% to your kind self.

All the legal documents to back up your claim as my client's next-of-kin would be provided by me. The most important thing I would need is your honest cooperation in this proposition.This would be done under a legitimate arrangement that would protect you from any breach of the law.

If this business proposition offends your moral and ethic values, do accept my sincere apology. Please contact me at once if you are interested by replying the mail and ignore it if you are not.

Best regards,

Muhammad Jeffery Charles Esq.

Wow. This made my day on SO many levels. I know that I've made this point before, so I'm not going to harp on it again now, but do these guys REALLY expect to find someone so dim as to fall for this?

That's Strange?

While it's not Earth-shattering news, the story of Jane Balogh and her dog, Duncan M. McDonald has been floating around here for a few months now. A little over a year ago, Balogh registered the dog to vote in the state of Washington "by putting her telephone bill in the dog's name and using that as identification when she mailed the form to election officials." Her point was that she believed that recent changes to voting laws made it much easier than it should have been for people to register to vote, as one needed no proof whatsoever that one was actually eligible to vote. And with most of Washington turning to an exclusively vote-by-mail system, you don't have to actually go to a polling place and show any other identification. In Ms. Balogh's opinion, it's a system that's just asking for voter fraud. (I'm not sure that I disagree with her on this point.) So she set out to demonstrate to elections officials just how easy it was. Ms. Balogh never actually committed voter fraud - she voided out the ballots that had been sent to her dog, signing them with Duncan's paw print, and she readily fessed up when elections officials called to inquire. She pled "Not Guilty" to a charge of "Making a False or Misleading Statement to a Public Servant," a charge that many felt was designed to make an example of someone who'd so easily embarrassed an elections system that's already been under fire for years, and the charges are being dropped in return for 10 hours of community service, a $250.00 fine (Wanna bet that there are people volunteering to pay it for her?), and staying out of trouble with the law for a year. Case closed. Now the local media aren't the only ones who picked up the story. The Associated Press wrote a piece on it for distribution, which was reprinted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Aside: Why does the P-I run the AP versions of local stories that they've already reported, sometimes quite extensively?) It was listed in the "mypi" bar in the "ap: odd news" section, and its URL is: "http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1120AP_ODD_Dog_Vote.html."

Okay. So... why is this odd? This doesn't strike me as being one of the "wacky and offbeat" stories that you'd expect to be labeled as "Odd." I've never understood how this determination is made, and I've come to believe that it sometimes trivializes important stories. Ms. Balogh set out to prove that the only thing that prevents illegal voter registration is personal honesty - and as far as I'm concerned, she's done that. That seems a little more serious than women mowing laws in bikinis, or a retiree squabbling with a subdivision over the fake palm trees in his backyard.

I'm also somewhat impressed that we haven't seen some sort of organized, high-profile Republican or otherwise conservative push to make changes. After all, the political Right has been raising Cain over voter fraud up one side and down the other, to the point that many have speculated that the scandal over the firing of United States Attorneys was predicated on failures to more aggressively pursue alleged Democratic cheating. But when a clear example of a sloppily written registration law practically falls into their laps out of a clear blue sky, nothing...

Can I Get a Do-Over?

If there is anything else as reliable as death and taxes, it's that politics is strange. Senator Larry Craig (R - Idaho) seems to be trying to pull out of his nose dive before impact, and is now hinting that he might undo his announced resignation from the Senate, and fight to overturn his guilty plea to a disorderly conduct charge in Minnesota. Given my understanding of this hullabaloo, there's the idea in the public that Senator Craig's actions up until this point indicate that he could very well be a closet homosexual. Therefore there could be some value in seeking to shed that label by fighting, either until victory, or until the bitter end. Personally, I don't think that it will work. It's going to take a lot more than that (say, divine intervention) to get people to give up that idea - in large part because so many people want to believe it - and one would think that someone with the savvy to be elected to the United States Senate would be bright enough to understand that. Senator Arlen Specter's (R - Pennsylvania) comments notwithstanding, it's unlikely that at this point even an acquittal in a jury trail would "exonerate" Senator Craig. After all, remember how well that worked for O. J. Simpson. The legal system can say whatever it wants, but the Court of Public Opinion has already handed down a verdict, and the best that Senator Craig can really hope for is to have been considered to have "beaten the rap." Which, of course, won't do much to placate Senate Republicans, who are trying desperately to burnish their collective reputation as the 2008 election cycle grinds on.

Killer Kernels

Just in case you were inclined to forget that anything that actually tastes good is bad for you (when eaten by the double-handsful), it looks like researchers in Denver may have found a man who may have damaged his lungs from being: "a heavy, daily consumer of butter-flavored microwave popcorn."

In other news, several Denver residents were trampled to death by personal-injury lawyers beating a path to the researchers' door.