The Colonel's Forum

I talk a lot about politics because I love this country, and because I believe that an engaged and informed citizenry is one of the most important things we can have to ensure our future. Because of this, I find the current state of political discourse in this country alarming. At some point it became "impolite" to talk about politics. Our founding fathers would be furious at this, because it's the ability to freely talk politics that separates us from fascist, totalitarian regimes.  The media is a circus, and we can't wait for the next act. Good journalism is nearly impossible to find. The republican debate last week was more like Wrestlemania than a proper political debate.  Ignorance has become fashionable. Don't understand the issues? Don't care for science? No time to actually research a topic? Can't be bothered to know US History? Welcome to American politics in 2015 where you'll fit right in! I know this stuff isn't new this year, bu...

Two news stories caught my attention today: 1) Scott Walker says that building a border fence on the Canadian border is a good idea 2) Chris Christie says he wants to hire FedEx to track immigrants The only people to whom "ideas" such as these appeal are idiots. "FedEx tracks stuff, let's hire 'em to track those Mexicans!" Yeah, brilliant idea. You willing to get a tracking number assigned so that the guv'mnt can track you? Didn't think so. Me either, really. The idea of tracking humans, citizens or otherwise, is so fundamentally un-American that it boggles the mind. Let's talk about civil liberties, freedom, small government, and the ability to move freely across borders. These aren't just rights that we believe American citizens should have, they are rights we believe every human has. These are our principles. Of course, the GOP never let a double standard get in the way of some good ol' xenophobia. And a fence on the border w...

This month's mass shooting event, oh wait, we've had two. I mean the one in Lafayette, Louisiana. Fun fact: over the past twenty years, the average number of days between mass shootings in the US has been cut in half . This one in Louisiana was committed by a guy that had definite mental health issues. Mental health is often a factor in mass shootings (for the record, guns are a factor in 100% of them). Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's governor, in his terrible press conference about the event, noted that we should have better screening for mental health issues before we sell people a gun. Oddly, this makes him a left wing nut relative to the rest of the GOP field. The NRA is ready to run him out of town on a rail for suggesting something that most Americans, and even most gun owners, think is pretty logical: let's not sell guns to crazy people. Here's the rub - governor Jindal himself just finished cutting mental health benefits state-wide . He did this to compensate f...

My favorite Senator (don't get me wrong, I can't stand either of them, but Rand Paul is absolutely @#$%^& nuts) has taken a bold, creative approach as he pretends to "fight the good fight" and "save coal." He's decided to paint it as a "state's rights" issue. Mitch is a master politician, I've always given him credit for that, and he definitely understands the importance of good marketing. Framing this as "don't let the big scary Federal government boss you around, governor!" allows him to divert attention from the facts surrounding the issue, namely: Presidents don't control energy markets. There are actually 9,000 more coal miners working in the US today than the day Obama took office, they're just not working in Kentucky. Coal has been a dying industry in Kentucky for all 30 years that Mitch has been in office, so apparently the "war on coal" started with Reagan. The biggest reasons we have a...

One topic that has been in the news lately is the trend of state legislatures wanting to dictate school curricula that align to a particular political ideology. If that sounds like a terrible idea, that's because it is. I love a good political debate as much as the next former PolySci major, but the place for that debate is in coffee shops and on facebook, not in our classrooms where it affects our kids. Period. In addition to the usual suspects for curriculum debate (sex education and evolution), there are two newcomers these days: history and climatology. Here is a summary of recent history on the matter. Issue #1 - NGSS: Next Generation Science Standards . 26 States collaborated with the National Science Teacher's Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science to develop these standards. This process was supported by wacky left-wing organizations like GE and DuPont. The goal is to provide students with world-class, benchmarked science education...

The title really says it all. As the media begins to spew talk of the 2016 election cycle at us (ALREADY?!), let's review some recent examples of the differences in the parties when it comes to fiscal responsibility. If you think Republicans fix budgets, you're just plain wrong. If you think tax cuts spur economic growth you're also wrong. There's simply no evidence to support either point. I can, however, show 6 examples of Republicans cutting taxes where the result was a ruined budget AND zero economic growth, often where the state education system is ruined in the process. Sam Brownback, Republican governor of Kansas: cut taxes, resulting in a $278 million budget shortfall, which he's going to address by not spending money on infrastructure, cutting education spending, and further depleting the state's already under-funded pension plan. He inherited a budget deficit of $60M , so he's increased that 400% in just four years; impressive! 71 of the state...

It's like the young and the restless, except for Congress. What we've seen this week is a preview of coming attractions from a GOP majority in Congress. Rather than addressing a very real issue facing this country (immigration, including a refugee crisis), they've done nothing but posturing, pontificating, and basically being a bunch of windbags. We're a nation of immigrants. When the Europeans arrived, they treated the ACTUAL locals like shit, giving them lovely new diseases, killing them by the thousands, and ultimately "relocating" them to "reservations." Every group that arrived here has very quickly taken the position that, wherever the next wave of immigrants is coming from, "THOSE people are going to ruin the place so we have to keep them out!" The English and Germans fought to keep out the Irish and Italians. Today it's the Mexicans we have to keep out. "Build a wall!" At various points in our history we've trea...

Today I got to "go to work" in my old hometown of Chicago. I only lived here for a couple years, but it's a city that gets in your blood. I'm not sure if that's because of the freezing wind off the lakefront that seems to blow through your veins, or from the unique grease content within a Chicago hot dog (or perhaps a Portillo's Italian beef sandwich) that clogs up your veins. Either way, if you live here for any length of time, it becomes part of you. Walking to work in the Loop, you can't help but notice a sense of productivity and commerce that seems almost tangible among the locals. Chicago has always been known as the city that works, the city with broad shoulders, and I think that's a sentiment that spans the economic classes here. Take a stroll down California street in San Francisco's financial district, and you'll see plenty of bankers and barons of industry going about their day, don't get me wrong. San Francisco just has a com...

Now that McConnell will be serving 36 years in the Senate, and the coming 6 as majority leader, I think it's reasonable to expect that he delivers the goods for Kentucky. I mean, a Senators #1 job is to serve his state, right? Can we at least agree on that? Don't get me wrong, I don't think there's any chance Mitch will actually do that. He will serve himself first, the GOP 2nd (gotta stack the deck for your party in the next election, right?), and the Commonwealth will be a distant 3rd if it's on his list at all. I was wrong once though, and it could feasibly happen again. How will we know? I propose defining a list of metrics to measure McConnell's next 6 years. Since his party controls Congress for at least the next two years, we can expect great things right? My GOP loyalist friends are already making excuses of course for why Boehner and McConnell will fail to accomplish anything; that Reid will be obstructionist and Obama will veto everything. To this...

Some people would have you believe that there is a simple answer to this: Obama sucks. While I disagree (I'm still rating him "average"), I'm also smart enough to know that sucks is a subjective term. Some people believe he sucks, and will continue to do so. The people who think he sucks weren't going to vote for Democrats anyway, and Obama wasn't on the ballot. This was a big victory for the GOP any way you slice it; even bigger than the RNC expected. Hell, it was even bigger than Nate Silver , my favorite data scientist, expected. So, objectively, what happened? My summary is as follows: 1) The party of the sitting president loses mid terms, that's just a fact . The average loss is 25 House seats and 3 Senate seats (since FDR). Those numbers jump to 30 and 6, respectively, when the sitting president is a lame duck. As of the time I'm writing this, the Dems lost 7 Senate seats, and 12 House seats, so, technically, their losses were favorable (LESS ...

One of the sad truths about Kentucky, my adopted home state, is that there are a lot of good people here who are poorly educated. There are a lot of historic reasons for that, but two key parts of the history are that: Coal mine owners have been exploiting the poorest of the poor here for generations. This fact is not in dispute. Hell, they didn't even pay people in actual dollars until the 1950s. Prior to that you were paid in company "scrip" that was only good at the company store. There's a song about that. For the first 150 years of coal production (1820-1970), state, local, and federal governments sided with mine owners over miners roughly 100% of the time when it came to labor disputes, working conditions etc. (today it's down to about 85%). Take a 1932 Kentucky law that forbid the conversion of scrip into actual cash as an example; I wonder whose idea that was? Scrip is just one obvious and particularly egregious example. Dangerous working condition...

Contrary to popular belief, and by popular belief I mean the GOP Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaign that precedes every election talking about how whomever the Democratic candidate is has secret plans to repeal the 2nd amendment, Obama has yet to take away anyone's guns. When he didn't do this during his first term, the NRA need an explanation. After all, they swore this was his plan. Interesting side note, during his first term, Obama actually expanded expanded the list of places you can carry a gun while simultaneously failing to renew the assault weapons ban. The NRA should recognize this as a home run, but of course they can't give a Democrat credit for anything because they've given dump trucks full of money to the RNC. In fact, Obama has repeatedly stated that " No single law — no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, " Sounds pretty logical to me. He proposed no new laws after ...

This article grabbed my attention last week. Among other things, it provides a historical perspective on a major topic in American politics today - rich versus poor, makers versus takers, the notion that all poor people (or a full 47% of the country, according to Romney) are freeloaders. Here's another spin on it from my ideology-shifting Senator, Rand Paul. Rand, never far from a conspiracy theory, wants you to believe that the reason Obama is  pushing for a higher minimum wage is as a diversion, to draw attention away from the fact that the middle class is getting screwed these days. Right. A diversion, which implies that the Dems for some reason are trying to hide... what exactly? They just won two presidential elections by appealing to... the middle class who's getting screwed by... the 1% who fund the PACs that fund the GOP. If you're mad about the number of people getting public assistance, you either have to support raising the minimum wage or admit that you...

Yet another demonstration this week by the GOP that they are: Completely out of touch with popular sentiment Couldn't care less about rebuilding our shrinking middle class Are much more interested in taking symbolic, confrontational stances on issues than actually doing the logical (and moral) thing.  Always going to side with big business over the common man I've blogged before about the staggering collapse of the middle class. It's a fact, not an opinion. It's not about Obama or W; it's been taking place for over 30 years now. The '08 recession definitely hurt the middle class a lot, but they were in pretty bad shape by '07 anyway. If you care to read about the topic, Carville & Greenberg wrote a great book on it. Are they biased? Hell yes they are. But let's be clear - just because they work for the Dems doesn't make them wrong. They're brilliant, and the book is filled with economic data that is not in dispute; any way you loo...

Excellent reflection on the rise of Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin: The rebuilding of ‘Soviet’ Russia http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26769481

Obamacare has been in the news so much this week because of the looming deadline, it got me to thinking more about the real people who are impacted by it directly. Living in the mid-west (sorry kids, Kentucky ain't the South), and having grown up in a very nice whitey-McWhitey-pants suburb, it's not surprising that I have a lot of conservative friends. To clarify, when I use conservative I mean it in the true sense, not the Fox News idiot sense (although I have some friends in that category too). I mean people who don't like big government, and people who generally support free and open markets. If you think the government should be involved in banning gay marriage or protecting religious bigotry, you're not a conservative (but there's a good chance you're a jerk). Anyway this means I have a lot of friends who hate Obama, and also hate Obamacare. I have a generally favorable opinion of both, though I fully recognize they're not without their flaws (see my...

It's been a while since my last rant about the stupid model by which Americans get mobile phones and wireless plans. Part of this model is driven by the fact that our wireless carriers here have really strong lobbies in Congress, so they do everything they can to protect their vested interests in NOT having an efficient market. CDMA, LTE, UMTS, HSPA+, EDGE,GSM... I don't even try to keep with all the variations in technologies used in this country, but that's one of the things that locks people into a particular carrier. Technically there are 4 major carriers in the US, but since there are really only two main technologies deployed, what we really have is 2 pairs of carriers, and even within those pairs they've done what they can to make it useless to switch. In Europe and Asia, any phone works on any network. It's wacky. The other big difference of course is this subsidy/contract model. Americans tend to sign two year contracts for their phones, and part of the ...

This weekend marks 4 years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The GOP re-branded it as "Obamacare," in hopes that those who hate Obama would similarly hate "his" healthcare plan. There are at least 3 flaws with that: 1) he didn't write the bill 2) some Obama haters directly benefit from this plan and 3) the GOP has given the Dems a great marketing tool here: there are now over 10,000,000 people who are fans of Obamacare because it has given them the health insurance they wanted and couldn't get previously. Ask P&G about the marketing power of 10,000,000 consumers who are out there saying "I just bought this product and it's really helping me and my family." There's not much point reviewing the law and how it's been rolled out, as that is a well-documented and over-analyzed debacle. I find the IT issues particularly embarrassing as I work in that industry and it reads like a classic case of how NOT to run a large IT pro...

Mitch is a politician I love to hate. Sadly, he's also my Senator. He's spent 30 years in the Senate, a career politician by definition, and in that time has done effectively zero to improve the quality of life in one of the poorest states in the nation, Kentucky. He's really good at sending pork barrel projects home though, and that has proven highly effective at getting him re-elected. This year, he's actually got a legitimate challenger. He's down in the polls. The GOP "brand" has basically got negative equity these days because the only loud voices in the party are the "I think the tea party has got some great ideas here!" types, not the moderates who are actually greater in number. Ten polls that came out in the first week of February all have him trailing her, or have them in a dead heat. It's possible for 1 poll to be off, but not 10. To put this in perspective, he's never, ever been even close to being unseated. From his first...

I have a lot of friends who identify themselves as conservatives. I used to call myself a conservative, but that's no longer the case. My views haven't changed, but the definition of conservative has. I stand for smaller government and personal liberty. That means you can marry whomever you want, you can carry whatever kind of gun you want, you can smoke whatever you want to, and we shouldn't be giving handouts to oil companies, farmers, or solar panel hippies. That's not what conservative means today though. In 2014, "conservative" means "I believe in Jesus, and I believe Fox News tells the truth, handouts to farmers are ok but handouts to poor people are shameful, and legalizing pot and gay marriage would ruin the moral fiber of our country. I believe that my religious views should be applied universally, to everyone, regardless of what the constitution says about the separation of church and state." Today we have the tea party and a rising libe...