I got one of those surveys from my new Congressman, Rob Woodall, yesterday, with the usual vague questions like “Which of the following issues do you consider most important?”.  I checked off health care reform, but after further review of his position on that, I hope I will not be used as a statistic to support the repealnik bandwagon.

Congressman Woodall advocates replacing it with “targeted health care reforms”, but doesn’t actually name any.  We cannot afford to waste any more time and money rearranging the path of our health care dollars without doing something about the total dollars spent.

Both parties consider “National Health Care” as being “off the table” from the beginning.  But what is health insurance, really?  The concept is that groups of us can negotiate lower prices than each of us individually can. That’s why IBM gets a better deal than my little company.  IBM is a bigger “buying group”.

Buying Group – sounds pretty capitalistic to me.  Doesn’t sound socialist at all.  Unless you are an insurance company currently making huge profits off of something (health care) that EVERYONE needs.  And what is the biggest buying group we could put together?  That’s right, all of us.

There is still plenty of capitalism to go around in this plan – health care providers have to figure out how to make a profit based on what we, as a very large group, are willing to pay.  Innovation won’t die, and providers that don’t innovate will go out of business, because the current health care business model is “just hand me your wallet and don’t ask any questions”.  Whether the wallet goes through insurance company premiums or government taxes is immaterial.  This is not an us versus them issue – there is only us.  ”Government” doesn’t need health care, we do.

The Patriot Act is scheduled to sunset (again) this February.  Last year Congress debated, but ultimately discarded, a number of reforms that would curb the worst of the unconstitutional abuse of the Fourth Amendment it contains.

This past November, a bunch of new representatives were elected running on a platform of smaller government and strict Constitutionality.  Each bill is supposed to cite the part of the Constitution which authorizes Congress to act.  HR 67 does not one of these things.  Instead it blindly changes only the expiration date of sunset provisions in previous laws.

Instead of protecting American citizens from governmental abuses of power, Congress appears to be set on continuing practices which we condemn when practiced by Iran and China – warrantless searches and seizures accompanied by gag orders.

Bill Parcells, can we draft you for public service?  You’ve proven you can take a bunch of irresponsible overpaid egomaniacs and make them into a team with a purpose.  This Congress desperately needs a coach to whip them into shape and make them realize they need to work as one team on the hard stuff, not just punt every time they can’t declare victory over one another.

Tuna in Twelve, anyone?

I’m not a big fan of Twitter.  I think that many of our problems (and a huge amount of our inability to solve them) stem from an attention span limited to 160 characters.  Much as I deplore War & Peace size legislation, I’d limit it to two pages, not 160 characters.

I do, however, respect Twitter’s management for standing up to the federal government’s unconstitutional request for information on the Twitter accounts of past and present WikiLeaks supporters, including an Icelandic legislator and all (estimated 643,000) followers of WikiLeaks Twitter account.  It is suspected that FaceBook, Google and Skype have received similar government demands, and their silence on the matter tells me that they have decided NOT to fight the request nor the gag order, as Twitter has done.  Hope you don’t have anything incriminating in your Gmail or Skype accounts, because President Obama and Attorney General Holder think they can go through your communications if they even suspect you might have at some point communicated with someone who communicated with someone they don’t like, and no one will even tell you it is happening.  (FaceBook fools, it could probably be argued, have already given up any pretense of privacy.)

WikiLeaks is the last bit of journalism NOT under the control of the government (see the report on the latest indictment in the leaks, including how the NY Times agreed not to publish the info from that leak), and this seems to be infuriating Obama and Holder.  Their unconstitutional attack on a publisher should have everyone concerned.  Even if you don’t support WikiLeaks, the next victim could be someone or something you do support.  It could even be you.

Sarah Palin had a map with 20 targets marked in rifle sight crosshairs on her web site, until the recent shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords  by a (probably deranged) follower, Jared Loughner.  No government official applied pressure on her web host to take down the inciting material.

Back in November of 2010, YouTube, under pressure from British and American officials, removed a number of videos by Anwar al-Awlaki,  an American-born, Yemen-based cleric who routinely incites young Muslims to jihad.  One of his YouTube fans was convicted last May of trying to assassinate a British legislator.

Why are these two treated differently?  Neither actually pulls the trigger, and both seem to revel in the celebrity that attaches to their outlandish pronouncements.  Yet one is considered a candidate for President, while the other is labeled a wanted terrorist.

While reasonable people can easily ignore both of them, there are plenty of people all over the world so troubled and disillusioned that they will latch on to anything to feel important.  I consider censorship to be among the ultimate evils, but the media should stop making celebrities of those who preach hate and fear, no matter what group or country they are preaching for or against.

Reasonable people can no longer afford to be the “silent majority”.  We must call the hatemongers on their behavior, and demand that our representatives govern with respect and rationality.

There is this delusion floating around that maintaining the tax rates in the same place that they were before and during the recession will somehow create the jobs we need to get out of said recession.  Is there any business owner out there who is actually operating on this belief?

There is only one reason why a business creates a new job, and that is because the owner believes that he can make more money with that job in place than he will without it.  How much of that added profit goes to taxes is immaterial.

If my business depends on my ability to keep my “same day shipment” promise, and order volume goes past what current staff can ship each day, then I have a choice to make:  hire another shipping person, or lose customers to my competitors.  If another shipping person costs $30,000/year, then I have to decide if late shipments are going to cost me more than that.  If the late shipments are only costing me $10,000/year in lost profits, then I don’t hire.  If I project them as costing me $50,000 in lost profits, then I hire, and put $20,000 (less taxes) in my pocket.

While I would prefer the “less taxes” amount to be as small as possible, I also want many of the things those taxes pay for, like education for my kids, and so I have a pool of educated people to hire from.  Regardless of the tax rate, I still would choose the option that maximizes profits without putting the survival of the business in jeopardy.

This is the difference between small and large businesses:   management of large corporations operate to maximize their bonus  this year, hopefully to the detriment of the long term survival of the company so they can be fired and collect their golden parachute on top of the bonus.  Small businesses operated by the owners care about the survival of the business.

I was hoping that the lame duck session would get Congress to forget about politicking and actually do its job, but I guess that was delusional.  I am deeply disappointed that Obama caved on extending tax cuts for the rich.  He had the opportunity to put the Republicans in the light of causing a tax increase for all if they were too intransigent in their support of tax cuts for the rich, but instead put Democrats in that light if they opposed the “compromise”.

Those who thought that the November election was about telling Congress to stop the borrow and spend crap are probably just as disappointed.   The “compromise” consisted of everybody getting all the spending they asked for, while punting the tax rate decision until 2012, where we will play out the same scenario with the same actors all over again.  Anybody expecting different results?  I’m not…

Congressional Democrats recently announced that they were scrapping plans for a vote on a comprehensive climate and energy policy bill, but might bring it back during the “lame duck” session after the elections.  What does this tell us about our legislative branch?

First of all, it tells us that the answer to the question “Are you really that stupid or do you just think we are?” is that they think we are mostly stupid enough to not look beyond the sound bites and edited videos.  Too many people would rather be angry and assign blame than actually be part of solving a problem.  It is much easier to blow stuff up than it is to build a functional, inclusive society that values and empowers everyone.

Second, it shows that the only way to get Congress to do what’s right, to make the hard choices on tough issues, to put the long term survival of our country and our planet ahead of the price of gas next week, is during the only couple of weeks they are not running for re-election.

It is time to force our representatives to focus their energies on doing the job they have been elected to do, and NOT on the next election.   Serving in Congress should be full time job.  Campaigning for it certainly has become one.  You can’t do two full time jobs at the same time, especially when there is a clear conflict of interest between the two.

All elected offices should have term limit of ONE.   No one should ever be running for “re-election”.  Being elected to office should also be treated like military service:  you are committed to serving out the full term unless you receive a dishonorable discharge.  And during that term, you are not allowed to run for any other elected position at any level of government.  You are not allowed to collect even one penny of campaign contributions.

If the only way to free Congressmen from their corporate pimps is during a “lame duck” session, then all the sessions should be “lame ducks.”

Last Friday the ultra-conservative faction of the Texas State Board of Education enacted new curriculum requirements for textbooks on social studies which include an alarming emphasis on ideology over facts.   The same fools who want to claim Genesis is science and Darwin is speculation now want to ignore Thomas Jefferson and anything else supporting separation of church and state.  Another amendment to the curriculum attempts to justify McCarthyism.

This is not education, it is brainwashing.  It is bad enough we have this kind of posturing by the politicians, but to write the posturing into our educational system, which is already devoted to teaching to standardized tests instead of preparing students to adapt to changing world, further sends our children down the path of irrelevance.

And more than just Texans are harmed by this triumph of indoctrination over education, as Texas is one of the biggest markets for textbooks.

America didn’t become great just by preaching it.   We became great by being the place where a free flow of ideas produced more and better new ideas, and where people were encouraged from an early age to be innovators.  If we let the Texas Taliban ideology dictate the content of our students’ curriculum, we are in serious danger of losing our edge at a time where competitiveness on  a world-wide basis has never been higher.

It is once again the Church of the Holy No(t if we can’t take credit for it) versus the Church of the Holy Handout bringing Congress to a standstill.  This time it’s a group of Republican Senators wanting to block stimulus funding of alternative energy because some of the manufacturing will take place overseas.  Rather than address WHY that happens and how to solve the problem, they just want to block it.  And if it keeps us in thrall to Holy Oil, so much the better.

The reason we have not seen the investment we need in manufacturing of alternative energy products in the US is because the investment is not going to happen until and unless there is  stable environment for it so investors can have a reasonable chance of making a return on their money.  Temporary stimulus bucks don’t do that.  A long term plan that prices carbon emissions will.

It is time for Congress to recognize the science side of capitalism as well as the religious one.   Pricing carbon will steer the market forces towards creating a United States that is self-sufficient in energy and can lead the world out of the Carbon Age.  Or we can keep on as we are doing, and eventually manufacturing will come back – as sweatshops where our grandkids and great-grandkids make cheap trinkets for the Chinese and Indian middle class.

John Linder (R-GA) announced  on February 27 that he will not seek re-election to Congress.  Following on the heels of similar announcements from Joseph Kennedy and Evan Bayh, this is an excellent trend.

I have disagreed with Linder on just about everything, and found him such a frustrating person to correspond with that at one point I finally put in a letter to him something I had been thinking about many politicians for years:  ”Are you really that stupid, or do you just think I am?”  He supported laws which trash our Constitutional liberties in the name of delusions of security.  When asked specific questions, he did not respond.

To those who are thinking of running for these seats in November,  I ask the following:

Are you an American first, or a [insert the name of your favorite church or political party]?

If you are not willing to tell the Republican or Democratic bishops that you are voting your beliefs and not theirs, then please do not run.  Better yet, run as an independent.