With a Capital T

President Obama plans to unveil a new deficit reduction plan on Monday.  He plans to cut three TRILLION dollars in ten years.  That's over four times the amount his stimulus package cost.  He plans to do it with 1.5t in tax increases and 1.5t in spending cuts.  You see how both of those numbers are the same?  That sounds like compromise to me.  You know how else it sounds like compromise?  A socialist president is calling for cuts in medicare and medicaid.  Now I guess I have to DVR the roast of Charlie Sheen to watch the speech...

Freedom of Speech

I'm going to break from my usual posting style. I'm not going to quote very much. I'm going to shoot from the hip a little bit. I would like to say that I am glad that the Supreme Court realized that they were making a decision about the right of a group of people to peacefully say what they thought needed to be said and didn't undermine the strength of the first amendment of our Constitution. As much as it pains me to say, they made the right call and the people of the Westboro Baptist Church are allowed to their opinion. By the way, if you're not familiar with that particular church, you can read their message at http://www.godhatesfags.com I promise that is their real website. You can also see it on signs.

Anyway...

The point of this post isn't to discuss the merits of their message. I would merely like to say that it would be nice if people used the first amendment the way it was actually intended to be used. It would be nice if people would gather peaceably and discuss things that actually matter. I was just watching the Daily Show and the topic of major discussion was the rally against teachers in the Midwest. Not to even get into that whole mess, it deserves its own post, I think we need to spend our first amendment right to free speech to talk about the issue at hand. The issue isn't are teachers paid too much. The issue isn't that they only work 9 months a year. The issue isn't what kind of benefits they have. The issue is whether or not it is the government's job to educate our young people. Please comment and let me know what you think, I'm interested to hear.

The issue isn't where we should have our troops. The issue isn't who we have alliances with. The issue is do we want to be the world's police.

The issue isn't the rising cost of healthcare. The issue isn't the raiding of the Social Security account for bailouts or wars. The issue is how to deal with an aging population.

The issue isn't a black man in office. The issue isn't the Republican party splitting in half between the conservative and the more conservative. The issue isn't how much money is spent on lobbying. The issue is how to make government accountable and efficient in the 21st century.

Everyone is so busy bickering over tangential points that they don't take the time to realize what they should even really be talking about. Obviously if someone thinks Obama is a Muslim I won't be able to change his or her mind. I don't think that anybody should even begin to talk to Birthers about schools in Indonesia. Talk about stuff that matters: like whether or not free speech is so important as a principle that even God-fearing fag-haters are allowed to thank Him for dead soldiers in public near the mourning families of homosexuals and soldiers.

Are you ready to free yourself from the noise and start to speak about what matters?

Words Fail Me

Like Obama! He won't tell us who the next leader will be in Egypt! He won't cut spending as much as we will! He probably wants the Muslim Brotherhood in charge because he's secretly a Muslim! He wants to spend our country to ruin because he's also secretly a terrorist!

I think that's my quota for exclamation points for this month. Please read the two stories I linked because they deserve their own time. If Mrs. Palin actually read all of the magazines she said she does, she would know very well that nobody knows who the next leader will be. Nobody even really knows what kind of leader it will be yet. I'm really glad that her speech will be aired on the same show whose host said that America deserved 9/11 on 9/12.

Mr. Hensarling is also an idiot. At the bottom of the article he says quote, "There is no limit to the amount of spending that we’re going to be willing to cut." Well actually there is a limit. Another Republican congressman returns his salary to the Treasury minus the cost of his living arrangements, travel, and other necessary costs. How much money would we save in ten years if the other 534 members of Congress did that? Somebody work on that.

What about cutting the Defense so that it matches the next highest defense budget in the world?

According to a guy who knows more about this than I do, China is second on the list of military spending with $125 billion. We could save $875 billion dollars every year right there. That's not even really asking us to fall behind the curve, that's asking to get back in line. Russia only spends $69 billion a year. So matching China's budget would still be almost double Russia's and neither of those countries wants to go to war with us.

Social Security is next on the list of top three expenditures. I'm sure Republican Michele Bachmann of Minnesota wouldn't mind ending the program. At least in theory. If she, or anyone else, actually proposed to end Social Security there would be no re-election. For all the vitriol, congressmen are still at the whim of their constituents. The elderly are the most likely to vote regularly and also benefit the most from Social Security, so good luck cutting that and surviving November when your number is up. However, sometimes leaders have to sacrifice themselves for the good of all. Even if the good of cutting spending means not providing for the poor and elderly. I guess you have to then go into a discussion about which is the greater good (I'm not going to).

What about Medicare? Score two for the elderly. If Congress were to approve a budget without any appropriations for Social Security or Medicare and an 87.5% reduction in defense spending, not only would spending be down, but the national debt would probably be paid off in a couple of years (just a guess, if anyone wants to do some number crunching I would love to hear about it). Then we could cut taxes to a bare minimum. That's assuming that by the time we've made those kinds of cuts, other things like the Department of Education has been shut down, grant funding and other silly things like that have been disapproved. We could probably do away with income taxes, lower property taxes, and do with just a sales tax. Wouldn't that be great?

Of course, without any of that spending we wouldn't be able to afford to have an intelligence network that spanned the globe. Without that intelligence network we wouldn't be able to know who the next leader in Egypt would be. Then again, even with their $80 billion per year budget they didn't see the uprising in Tunisia going how it did. Talk about a bad return on investment.

I suppose what I'm saying is that before you go out into the world and say something stupid, run it by someone who knows what they're talking about first. Otherwise you turn into the one thing nobody in Washington wants to be:

The Jasmine is Budding

Jasmine, the national flower of Tunisia, is derived from Persian meaning "gift from God." It is widely popular as a fragrance, a tea, and as a houseplant. When protesters in Tunisia were looking for a name for their cause, they decided upon the Jasmine Revolution. Like the scent of the flowers, the revolution is spreading.

Tunisia is that purple one at the top of Africa between Algeria and Libya. Contrary to normal wind patterns... the revolution spread to Egypt next (read the previous blog for more on that). As soon as people saw, through Twitter and Facebook, that normal Arabs were standing up for freedom, they knew it was possible everywhere. Jordan, which is east of Israel, watched their king immediately fire the whole cabinet and bring on new people to prevent the wide spread protests. The new Prime Minister of Jordan, Marouf al-Bakhit, has already started talking to opposition parties to try to implement major democratic reforms. Yemen's President has vowed not to run for reelection. There have been call for protests in Syria. Some people have been talking about possible uprisings in Morocco. Iraqis and Saudi Arabians are looking on to see how the events unfold. To put that into a sentence: every Arab nation in the Middle East is about to throw off the post-colonial chains of the West and become self-governing nations.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has vowed to not take advantage of the situation. Hamas, an extremist Islamic group in Palestine, told people not to go out in public to show solidarity with the Egyptians. Hizbullah in Lebanon has been fairly quiet about the whole ordeal. I mention this because it is incredibly significant. The fundamentalist religious groups that everyone fears will prevent democracy are stepping aside to help it grow. Certainly the Muslim Brotherhood would like to have a few seats in the new Egyptian Congress, but they don't expect a supermajority.

Israel needs to move very quickly and efficiently. If every major Arab nation becomes democratic they will be led by the popular will of the people instead of the Western-backed leaders. If Israel doesn't make peace with the Palestinians very soon their problems will be two-fold. First the new governments will move to impose sanctions on Israel until peace is accomplished. Some might even go so far as to try military options. If you look back at the map you'll notice a lot of Arab nations surround Israel. Sanctions would be devastating to their economy and the United States is already pulling back from Israel. If the entire Arab world, as a democratic whole, were to condemn Israel the US would be hard-pressed to back them as the US currently does. Second, all of the Arabs that live in Palestine will see the effects of uprisings around them and get a few ideas in their heads. The roughly 4 million Arabs that live in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank might decide it's time for them to join the Jasmine Revolution and protest against the 5.8 million Jews in Israel. Israel has been able to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state so far because every government around them was supported by the US. That seems to be about to change.

To be sure, it is going to take time for the new democratic governments of the Middle East to become fully functioning. They are going to need help and guidance and they probably aren't going to ask the United States for it. There are two governments in the Middle East who are thought of as democratic, Turkey and Iran. As discussed in the last post, Turkey is moving away from the Western circle. Iran is as far from the Western circle as it gets. So which government will these new ones follow? Both countries want to be leaders in the Middle East and both are poised to be so. Nobody, here or there, knows what is going to happen next.

I can only hope that the people who live there decide what will happen for themselves.

Letter to the Blind

He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafter fall with the greatest loss. - Niccolo Machiavelli

This post is written with two audiences: to he who is blinded by his own ambition and to those who are unable to see this post because they cannot access the Internet.

Hosni Mubarek took office in 1981 and has held his power ever since. The United States government has supported him because he represented Egypt without Islamic fundamentalism and because he supported efforts to bring peace to Israel-Palestine. When Barack Obama took office, he gave a speech in Cairo that was widely criticized. He spoke about ending what seemed to be a United States jihad on Islam and a new sense of cooperation between the West and Middle East. When the United States makes an ally with an Islamic nation, it is hard pressed to break that alliance (see Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan). Turkey is helping Iran deal with sanctions, Pakistan is harboring terrorists, and Afghanistan is led by a corrupt president. Even though all of that is true, the United States will not sanction Turkey, invade Pakistan, or oust the corrupt president it put in place as the lesser of plenty of evils. Mubarek doesn't really like Iran, isn't a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and wasn't put into office by the United States military. However, Egypt as a country is overwhelmingly Muslim (as is Iran), is home to the Muslim Brotherhood (terrorists), and is led by a corrupt president (Mubarek).

What is the United States supposed to do? It can't jump up the tree, else be knocked to the ground. It can't stay on the ground and listen to the cries of the smaller cat and risk the smaller cat falling, either. To apply that to the situation: the US can't explicitly back Mubarek because if the protests turn to revolt and revolt to overthrow, it will have backed the wrong horse. The US also can't sit back and not support the government in charge or else the international community will think it doesn't want to support its allies. A major problem with supporting the protesters is the unreliability of the protesters to pick a pro-US replacement. It would be very easy for the protesters to overthrow the government with US support and then snub the US in favor of a more Egypt-first domestic policy (Iranian Revolution, 1979, anybody?).

The United States could look to others for help in the situation. The United Nations is busy with things like the Afghanistan conflict. The European Union has a few money problems. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are military organizations and aren't equipped or intended to maintain peace during anti-government protests. The African Union is dealing with Somalian pirates, money problems, uprisings in Tunisia, bloodshed in Darfur, tyrants in more countries than not, and diseases like AIDS and malaria.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in 1979 and current Johns Hopkins University professor, said that, "Egypt is seething." The youth are doing what they always do, they get angry about what they cannot change, and they set about changing it. I had a history professor in college who said that any time a political movement had the word 'young' in the name, it was probably in favor of violent regime changes (Young Italy, Young Tunisians, etc.). The difference this time around is that the Internet has allowed young people from a much larger area to communicate with each other to compare ideas and strategies. Hence the internet being shut off across the country.

Peter Beinart wrote in Newsweek:

Middle Eastern tyrannies aren’t falling the way George W. Bush predicted. America isn’t the hammer; if anything, we’re the anvil. But Bush’s argument that Middle Eastern democracy could help drain the ideological swamp in which Al Qaeda grew may yet be proved true. Osama bin Laden has never looked more irrelevant than he does this week, as tens of thousands march across the Middle East not for jihad, but for democracy, electricity, and a decent job. It’s a time for hope, not fear. America can survive having less control, as long as the Arab people have more.

Egyptians have a right to control their political destiny. The Middle East needs more countries like Turkey, willing to snub powerful Western nations to protect domestic interests. Iran and Syria are close behind, but they are still waiting for their own democratic revolutions to really work. It is a scary thought for the US to allow Middle Eastern nations to control their own policies. Then again, I'm sure most European nations were uneasy in 1776 when a few colonies declared that they were independent from England.

I know that Hosni Mubarek will not read this article. I also know that if he did it wouldn't really change his mind. I know that the people of Egypt can't read this article. If they could, I doubt they would feel like they needed my words of justification. The message applies to anyone who can read this, however. This drama is the same that is played out anytime a third party tries to assume its interests are more important than the first two parties. It was the the wise Nunya Bidness who said, "This is an A and B conversation, so C your way out of it."