If I Were King

The Republican Study Committee has made a proposal to cut $100 Billion from this year’s budget, and to ramp it up from there. Perhaps not a bad idea at that level, but they render it absurd by exempting the military and the major entitlement programs. That’s not going to work.

The military is the only part of the government that has any significant amount of fat to cut, and everything they do, at least in detail, is discretionary. Defense Secretary Gates has shown that the military is ready to devote the creative effort to learning to fight wars at a lower price, budgetary pressure on DOD would go a long way to help eliminate expensive toys that our forces don’t need to fight the wars we’re involved in, and likely to be involved in in the years to come. It will also help streamline the military at home, which has long spent vast sums to make sure there were major bases or defense contractors in as many Congressional districts as possible. That was a big help for protecting the department’s budgets, but didn’t do a damned thing to make us safer.

Given the likelihood that anything that the Department of Homeland Security has spent money on has actually made us safer suggests another budget to look at with cold logic and analysis. I know, it’s not going to happen.

At the same time, the entitlements need to be addressed, because we flatly cannot continue them with the current rules. I have no interest in slashing either Social Security or Medicare, but as people live longer, the structure of those programs simply cannot work, absent the sudden availability of some very safe high-yielding investment opportunities, something that can’t be expected in my lifetime. (If we could arrange investments like that, we wouldn’t need Social Security in the first place.) If we need to move back the starting date for drawing Social Security, and the demographics say we certainly will, it would make sense to start moving that back now, say set it back a quarter every year for the next twenty years. That wouldn’t help much right away, but it would provide the information individuals need for planning, and would make a huge budgetary difference over the next fifty years. It would be much preferable to waiting five or ten years and having no choice but to do something drastic.

Of course it wouldn’t hurt to actually consider health care reform, something that has never once been considered at Washington City. Yes, I know, it’s been in all the headlines, but if you actually read the stories there has been no actual discussion about lowering the cost of health care at all. Not word one. All that has been proposed has been changing the rules of who pays for how much of whose care. The proper term for this is “rearranging the deck chairs” and our health care system is certainly titanic.

The committee’s proposal reminds me of the hue and cry to cut earmarks last year, a similarly inane attempt to wrest big bucks out of the smallest parts of the budget. If I Were King, I would require IQ testing for those chosen to consider public policy options. I’m thinking this group wouldn’t have made the cut.

According to a story in yesterday’s The New York Times, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said after passage of the $4.3 billion bill, “Some have tried to portray this debate as a debate between those who support 9/11 workers and those who don’t. This is a gross distortion of the facts. There was never any doubt about supporting the first responders. It was about doing it right.” This is a crock. For the Republican leadership, the issue was about doing it cheap. Royalty is not always generous, but one hopes some semblance of style prevails. If I Were King, you can bet the needful costs would have been covered without giving weasels like McConnell any chance to do anything but marvel at our good judgment.

According to today’s The New York Times, the FCC is set to issue regulations to ensure net neutrality for the wired web, while giving the wireless services a pass. The justification is that because wireless has less capacity and is a newer industry it is somehow qualitatively different. This is bovine excrement.

If a service provider enters the marketplace and offers to carry data using some set of resources, this has to be seen as a good thing. Not all providers will offer the same service. Wireless services will allow mobility, metro fiber carriers can allow staggering volume. No one should expect every technology or every provider to offer the same level of service. But what is absolutely essential is that each of them offer that service without regard to the actual content the end user chooses to send or request.

The concept of “reasonable network management”, which some vendors would like to think allows them to cut off any service they don’t like, is only reasonable if it means preventing some users from hogging so much bandwidth that other users suffer as a result. The concept of “paid prioritization” can never be considered reasonable.

I don’t use any mobile network access, but it’s obviously going to be important to millions of people in the years ahead. Far too important to be hamstrung by the very services that we expect to provide it. Far too important for the FCC to wash its hands of its responsibilities.

In today’s The New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd asks if the country is ready for a gay commander in chief. Jimmy Carter says yes, but he’s never been known for being in synch with the zeitgeist. Barney Frank doubts it, and having been a gay congresscritter for nearly three decades he’s probably  closer to having a handle on the issue.

Bill Maher weighed in with what Ms Dowd and I both suspect is true: “Can you imagine how much a gay president would have to overcompensate to please the macho ninnies who control our national debate? Women like Hillary have to do it, Obama had to do it because he’s black and liberal, but a gay president? He’d have to nuke something the first week.”

So how about we try something a little less ambitious? How about we get the Republican National Committee to end their “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Even Think About It” system? After they dump their moronic loose cannon chair, perhaps there’s a chance we can reap one benefit from the Tea Party assault on that party: a shift away from the homophobic passion for control of the nations sex life.

The stupidity known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was finally ended by a 65-31 Senate vote today, with the one-time maverick John McCain still in thrall to a simplistic vision of human sexuality that fits a high-school locker room but which the armed services can now get beyond, even if McCain’s own mental processes, once flexible and active, are now too canalized for actual use.

Today’s Seattle Times coverage of the vote also quotes Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos, “I don’t want to lose any Marines to the distraction. I don’t want to have any Marines that I’m visiting at Bethesda with no legs be the result of any type of distraction.” Wow! You’re lying in the dirt facing an enemy that wants to kill you. You’re only in this particular location because of intel provided by someone who could well work for the enemy. Your supply of rations and ammo, not to mention your path back to your base, is dependent on roads that could be mined with IEDs. Your wife back home is struggling to balance a job and caring for your two kids by herself. And this nitwit thinks that your awareness that the guy next to you might have a boyfriend will be a distraction?

I’m sure both McCain and Amos have made contributions to this country that they can be proud of. They have both, apparently, gotten to the stage in life where their reactions are no longer based on the high level of intelligence that got them to their current positions. If I Were King I would thank them both and send them home.

It appears nearly certain that the full Bush tax reductions will be preserved, and I think that President Obama was right to cut the deal with the Republicans. Like the president, I think it’s high time that the upper reaches of the economy contribute more to the operation of government. It would have been better to end the cuts at the top end, but today it’s far more important to extend unemployment for those that have fallen completely out of the economy.

Tax cuts for the lower and middle strata are a benefit to the economy. Those groups, who generally spend everything they earn, will put those dollars right back to work. The same isn’t likely to apply at the top, anyone who has a current-year taxable income of a million bucks has plenty of assets and isn’t going to change his grocery-buying habits because of a few percentage points difference in income tax.

I also can’t see the concern over inheritance taxes, or that there is any excuse to impose them. This is money that has been earned over a full life, and all taxes due on it has already been paid. The original idea was to prevent huge family fortunes over a span of generations, but the reality is that no family actually manages to continue accumulating assets. Anyone with the intelligence to accumulate billions of dollars has the intelligence to transfer it to the next generation before death. And then, if the second generation, raised in wealth, doesn’t squander it all, the third generation is almost certain to. To my knowledge, there are no significant family fortunes that are four generations old.

But back to the fray at Washington City: President Obama cut a deal with the Republicans, a deal that wasn’t perfect but which will work to the benefit of almost everybody. The result was his own party screaming that he had sold them out. I don’t know what Obama said to the House Democrats, but I know what he should have said: “Quit your bellyaching, vote for the deal I put together, and if you don’t like it, go out and get me a majority for the next Congress.”

In late November the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit of the Department of Homeland Security seized 82 domain names of retailers alleged to have sold counterfeit goods. As reported in yesterdays <em>New York Times</em>, one of the domains was OnSmash.com (click here to see the clever Federal replacement), a blog covering hip-hop music. (I think that’s the current term for rap, which I still don’t recognize as music, but I digress.)

Kevin Hofman, the owner of OnSmash.com, learned of this through an early-morning phone call from one of his technicians, on Thanksgiving Day no less. According to Hofman, the “pirated” music on his site was “leaked” to him. That is to say, he didn’t go out and grab it surreptitiously, or rip commercial CDs to post on the site, this was content that the promoters of various artists wanted to have out there where fans could hear it.

Hofman asserts that he’s in thick with the hip-hop artists, invited to far more parties and concerts than he has time to attend, talking to the performers regularly on the phone. That he’s part of the music infrastructure. I absolutely believe this, from my limited contacts with the industry I know it’s exactly how the game is played. Perhaps the same principal, although much more healthy, than the cash payola of the ’50s and ’60s.

So two questions and one answer: First, if Hofman is part of the marketing engine for this sector of the music business, why was he targeted? Easy, the RIAA targeted him because he isn’t playing by their rules. Nobody, artist or fan, should give a rat’s ass what the RIAA cares about, but they have high-paid lobbyists on call as Washington City. Yes, there’s still a role for money to influence the music business.

Second, why did Hofman find out his domain had been seized from a tech? Why wasn’t he served with papers? How did it happen that anyone other than a federal judge sitting in open court made this ruling?

If I Were King, there are people at ICE that would be wondering whatever happened to their paychecks and pensions today.

In yesterday’s New York Times article U.S. Pushes to Ease Technical Obstacles to Wiretapping, Charlie Savage relates current efforts by the Obama administration (Justice and Commerce departments and the FBI) to enhance their ability to tap your communications. Apparently, the misbegotten Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act isn’t doing the job that the Clinton administration hoped for. It seems law enforcement is surprised that panning for nuggets in the torrents of communications pulsing through the nations arteries isn’t trivial.

It’s a battle they can’t win. Although criminal undertakings are facilitated by secure communications, the same can be said of many personal and commercial communication. If they press too hard, and the same goes for India and the Arab nations that have been leaning on Research In Motion over the secure Blackberry messaging system, they’re going to see the whole process end up out of reach. How might this come to pass? Simple: open source software solutions. The heart of secure communication is encryption, and governments have never been all that good at it. In recent years, the most secure encryption methodologies have all come from the OSS community and, in reaction to the Clinton-era attempts to block secure encryption in the US, this is almost all done outside the US. One of the few OSS projects that American programmers can’t work on is OpenBSD, developed primarily in Canada, because the lead developers fear that anything developed in the US might be compromised by government action. Security for most online transactions come from the OpenSSL Project, none of the core participants are from the US.

What would an OSS approach look like? It would look just like a standard e-mail client, only it would offer end-to-end encryption. In order to tap it, the FBI would have to have a warrant to monitor the sender or the receiver, a process about as obvious as thrusting a microphone in the faces of two people talking quietly in a dark corner of a bar. In other words, they couldn’t do it until their investigation was over. Further, the program could be made such that without the owners active cooperation, there was no readable information on the computer. Would using such a program identify a person as a terrorist? Not at in a world where business and technology secrets are sought after by those who don’t have the talent or patience to develop their own technology.

When this nation was founded, the police could get a warrant to search your premises or to arrest your person, in either case you knew of the warrant when it was invoked and it was issued by a judge as a matter of public record. The FBI feels put upon to be spending $20 million a year to “help” communication vendors comply with CALEA. They shouldn’t, they’re getting information that they have no business hearing or seeing.

If I Were King, communication would not be a matter for law enforcement, only criminal acts in the physical world would be.

Last month The New York Times reported that Russian officials, with the active and eager cooperation of attorneys representing Microsoft, raided several non-profit groups under the pretext of cracking down on pirated software. Now it’s certainly true, and well known, that piracy is prevalent in Russia, and even moreso in China, but the fact that the raids were all directed towards groups opposed in some way to government policies made it pretty clear that the primary motivation was not, in truth, making sure Microsoft got paid for every copy of Office. Microsoft may be a greedy blood-sucking monster, but they aren’t so far gone as to feel the need to milk non-profit environmental agencies and small newspapers operating under oppressive governments.

Microsoft has always had generous programs to provide free or inexpensive licenses to NGOs and education. Now the company has broken new ground. According to the official Microsoft blog, because some NGOs don’t know about the available programs, as of the 23rd of last month and extending through 2011, all Microsoft software used by most NGOs in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam is immediately and retroactively licensed. That is, even if an organization pirated all their software, that software is now legal, for at least the next year, and MS is encouraging those NGOs to apply for permanent licenses on the same terms. Further, Microsoft is taking the initiative to notify officials in the affected countries.

If I Were King, I would enjoy no exemption from eating crow from time to time. Although I have never actually said that Microsoft was always evil, it would be understandable if some reached the conclusion that I felt that way. Well, I’m happy to say that they got this one right, in spades, with style. I’d tip my crown to Redmond if I had one.

Eric H. Holder, Jr, the US Attorney General, yesterday announced that the Department of Justice would aggressively prosecute federal marijuana laws in California if state voters approve legalization on 2 November. Somehow I think the nation’s top lawyer has better things to do.

Of course, I also think he has things to do that make sense, and throwing endless resources into prohibition decidedly does not. It is obvious to the intelligent observer that the vast majority of ill effects from drug use in the US today stems not from the drugs, but from attempts to eliminate them. This is true of every drug banned, with the possible exception of methamphetamine, and the only reason that meth is a factor is that it’s easy and cheap to make in the face of government actions that eliminate safer alternatives. (There is simply no way that users are going to buy meth, or PCP for that matter, if they have a full range of choices.) But this post is not about general drug policy, just marijuana.

Marijuana is not without problems. It makes you lazy. It makes you stupid. But it doesn’t make you violent, it doesn’t make you spend the rent and grocery money, and if it’s legal it doesn’t have any risk of drive-by shootings to establish distribution territories. I don’t smoke pot because I don’t want to, the microbrews in the Pacific North Wet are too appealing. But that is a personal decision, I certainly don’t need help from Washington City to make the choice.

If I Were King, Mr Holder would be instructed to do real research into a sensible drug policy. And if he insisted on attempting to enforce ancient prohibitions against marijuana in jurisdictions where the voters or the legislators decided it wasn’t a crime, he would be instructed to do some research into applying for unemployment.