Tag Archives: government

YouCut, Citizen Cosponser

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Recall the YouCut program that the House of Representatives Republican caucus instituted in the wake of the 2010 mid-term elections.

Now, building on the heels of that program’s success, the Republican caucus under the leadership of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R, VA), whose leadership also led to the YouCut program, is instituting a new program that moves the House—and by extension the Federal government—closer to us citizens.  This program is CoSPonsor.gov, and it presents all legislation openly and clearly and allows each citizen to become a cosponsor of any piece of legislation—or not.

Here’s Cantor’s email that announces the plan [emphasis in the original]:

When we launched YouCut three years ago, we never imagined how engaged people would become and how successful the program would be in achieving its mission of changing the culture of spending into a culture of savings.
Millions cast votes across the country to encourage the House to cut spending, and that is exactly what we continue to do. Throughout the program, we’ve seen YouCut proposals drive public discussions, pass the House and even become signed into law. Now, as our new Majority continues to work to cut spending and grow our economy, it’s time to leverage the latest technology to expand YouCut into its next phase.
I am excited to announce the launch of CoSponsor.gov – a new platform that allows you to become a Citizen CoSponsor of any bill in the House.
Now, any engaged citizen can become a Citizen CoSponsor and track the status of the legislation they care about in the House.
Whether you want to cosponsor new legislation like the Kids First Research Act or become a Citizen CoSponsor of legislation that has already passed the House, like No Budget, No Pay, you can now do so here.
House Republicans believe that transparency, open government and engagement are vital to a modern Congress, and CoSponsor.gov is an important step in that direction.
Visit CoSponsor.gov today and become a Citizen CoSponsor of the bills you care about:
http://www.cosponsor.gov/
Regards,
Eric Cantor
Majority Leader
—————-
What issues do you care about? Visit CoSponsor.gov today to become a Citizen CoSponsor of any bill.

The link to CoSponsor.gov has been added to the right sidebar, near the top.

Too Big to Handle

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I’ve written before about the morality of government welfare as a first resort.  Here’s a practical reason for cutting back: it’s too big to manage effectively.  Here are some failures from that too big to handle:

A postal worker who ran marathons found her race times improved after she began drawing federal disability checks for an alleged back injury.

Another disabled federal employee went scuba diving, skied in Switzerland and did flips on a trapeze.  She spent part of her $193,000 in disability payments on a boat named “Free Ride” before she was caught.

A Justice Department lawyer collected $90,000 in annual disability checks after claiming the stress of his job kept him off the job.  Apparently the cable TV show he began hosting while drawing disability pay wasn’t so stressful.

And

15,000 recipients are 66 or older.  Six of them are over the age of 100—well past retirement age.

The Federal government compounds this by being disinterested in controlling the failures and the resulting waste of taxpayer wealth being redistributed.

funding for all agencies—about $3 billion per year—is automatically appropriated and run through the Department of Labor.

And

the federal [disability] program does not require employing agencies to order a second opinion. The claimant can pick his own doctor.

If his claim is rejected, he can file for a different disability, as often as he likes.

And

The Department of Labor, which administers FECA for 70 federal entities, doesn’t track fraud referrals and convictions[.]

The program is too large to be properly controlled, and it needs drastic paring back for economic and legal reasons as well as moral.

A Whistleblower

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I offered this first as a comment to a Spiegel Online article.  Here it is with slight modifications to support its stand-alone status here.

Edward Snowden, of Verizon metadata and PRISM outing fame, thinks of himself as a whistleblower, and so do many who agree with him that the US’ PRISM program and its program for collecting metadata from cellphone providers are terribly wrong programs.

I agree that the programs are anathema to individual liberty.  However, the programs are legal under US law.  The only question here is whether the programs’ limits and checks are being honored–and that’s a matter of trust, since the programs and its procedures are secret.  That secrecy and the need for that blind trust in Government (not just the Obama administration, but any Government) form a large part of my dismay over the programs.

However, the programs’ legality mean Snowden cannot be a whistleblower; he’s simply a man who has illegally revealed classified data to the public.

What about civil disobedience, then?  Is he practicing this honorable means of protest of a government behavior to which he objects?

There are many legal avenues of calling legitimate attention to these flawed programs, including, for instance, any of the several formal whistleblower and Inspector General facilities to which he could have taken his case.  Given the damage already done by these programs (stipulating arguendo that damage to individual liberty has been done) any additional damage done through the delays of going through these legitimate programs would have been quite trivial.  Yet Snowden eschewed these programs and went directly public.  From within a foreign country.

Were this an act of civil disobedience, it would have had to satisfy two criteria: he would have had first to exhaust his legal remedies.  As I noted, he chose not to do so.

Secondly, he would have to have been willing to face the consequences of his actions.  It is, after all, those consequences and their absurdity in the face of the disobedience and the thing over which the disobedience is occurring that give force and credibility to the disobedience.  Snowden’s reason for being in Hong Kong, as stated by him, is to avoid facing those consequences.

If Snowden truly believes that what he has done is just, he must return to the US and face the outcomes of his actions in open court.  Let him make his case in front of the American people (where he’ll find no small measure of support) and convince our representatives in that court case–the jury of his peers–that his act was justified.

Of course he risks not being supported by our representatives, that jury, as there also are a large number of Americans who disagree with what he has done.

Snowden’s flight and so far refusal to return indicates he’s unwilling to take that risk, that he does not have the courage of his convictions.  In that case, Snowden did not commit an act of civil disobedience; he is simply a small man who is placing his ego above justice.

Another Overt Harassment

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This is just starting to come out, even though it occurred in early April.  The Examiner is reporting that Tom Francois got a visit from President Barack Obama’s Secret Service.  Francois had been a cabinet maker of some duration and skill until the Panic of 2008 did his business in.  Since, he’s been an active critic of the Obama administration via various social media.

From his critiques, the Secret Service paid him a visit, followed by a visit to his daughter and to his ex-wife.  They also demanded to see his weapons and threatened to confiscate them if he “stepped over the line.”

Had he crossed that line yet?  No, according to the agents.  Then why are you visiting me?  [mumble]

The agents justified their…visit…on the basis of the Twitter following Francois has accumulated, and “the things I said could be acted upon by some nut case out there.”  Sure.

The agents also pulled out an image of Air Force One and asked Francois whether he had posted that image.  Francois wanted to know where the rest of the image was along with his copyright mark, since he always signs his work and asserts his copyright when he posts it.  The agents had no answer.

Here’s the offending image, below the added post-visit caption:

Keep in mind that this April visit occurred before the IRS and DoJ had been caught harassing large numbers of Americans and American groups who disagree with Obama and his administration.

Hmm….

Progressive Government Run Amok

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In no particular order, we’ve had in just the last few months the following:

1.  The State Department leaving Benghazi consulate personnel to die, with too little security and no effort to help real-time; a President who absented himself from the situation in favor of a political campaign; and subsequent lies and cover-ups by both about events surrounding that.

2.  The Department of Justice targeting our free press and individual members of it in order to suppress reporting of the secret doings of our government.

3.  The Internal Revenue Service targeting American conservatives.  The low-level IRS staffers now are testifying before the House that they weren’t just ordered to target those who disagreed with the present administration, they were given the specific subjects and questions to be used and to forward specific cases to their bosses for further “treatment.”

And there’s this little IRS gem:

On May 23, Michigan Senator Carl Levin (D, MI) dropped the bombshell that his subcommittee has been in constant contact with the overseers of the IRS political-targeting scandal since it started, and even discussed the applications of “certain” specific groups.

4.  The secret metadata collection program, consisting of the gathering up of the phone calling records of millions of Americans who use Verizon (and presumably of the other American phone companies, also; we don’t know yet because the whole thing is…secret).

5.  The reading of all of our emails, text messages, video down/uploads, and so on via the Internet through another secret program, this one called PRISM.

6.  The government justifying the spying on Americans by claiming it to be a

critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats.

And

The information “allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” a senior Obama administration official said Thursday.

This in light of the fact that DHS has already labelled (deliberately and overtly, early on) American military veterans and those who oppose the Obama administration as extremists and threats.  Thus, it’s important to note that the information, as broadly swept up as it is, also allows a Progressive government to surveill known or suspected persons who disagree with the government’s policies and to hinder their activities.