There’s a nice opinion piece on CNN.com today about why expanding the use of CCTV surveillance cameras is a bad idea. Take a read if you’re so inclined. I don’t even know why the argument needs to be made – it seems obvious to me that part of being a proud American is a desire for freedom, not a hankering to slip our faces under the boot of Big Brother. Yet it appears that people in this country are only too willing to give up their freedoms and their privacy for the feeling of security, even if that’s all you’re getting…a feeling, not actual security.

Sigh…if you needed more proof that the two party political system has merged into one party that spends all its time screaming at itself, all you have to do is check the news. Apparently all the folks on the left who screamed and yelled about the Patriot Act and how it trashes personal privacy in the name of a false sense of security are now silent. Probably because the Democrat-controlled house has passed a year-long extension of the Patriot Act. I had hoped that one of the few good things to come out of the current political climate would be a reduced or at least better-managed version of the Patriot Act. I guess that’s too much to hope for, especially when Democrats and Republicans are pretty much one and the same. I guess I knew it wasn’t going to be good when President Obama kept Bush’s state secrets defense in place. But at least he was keeping up with his campaign promises…oh, wait…

Say you’re a woman with a history of asthma. Say you’re looking to buy a condo. Say the condo you love smells like cigarette smoke, something that you probably don’t like if for no other reason than you have a history of asthma. You ask your real estate guy why it smells like smoke, and he says something along the lines of, “hey baby, don’t worry about it – a little paint and that smell will go away!” Say the real estate guy refuses your request to get in touch with the previous owner to talk about the unit. Say you visit the unit “several times” before you buy it and smell smoke every time. Say you really, really hate cigarette smoke. What do you do? If you’re the woman in this story, apparently you shell out $400K and buy the place.

Then, when you trace the smoke to your downstairs neighbor’s condo and the residents therein, and realize that the smoke is coming from a resident who, surprise, is a cigarette smoker. What do you do now? You sue the real estate agent AND the two guys who live in the unit below you. Then you get your story in the Boston Globe and they spin it all sad and tragic about how badly your world sucks. But you know what? You’re story isn’t sad, it’s a testament to your own mistakes. But instead of taking responsibility for your decision, you try to foist the blame onto anyone other than yourself.

You blame the real estate guy for lying to you, for misrepresenting the fact that there was a smoker downstairs in order to make a sale. Then you blame the guys downstairs because one of them has the unmitigated gall to perform an activity that is 100% legal in his own home (and yes he lives with the owner and is not actually the owner). Did she have any options? She might have said, “I should hire a contractor to seal my unit better.” She might have said, “Maybe I can work with my condominium community to make this a smoke free condo association.” Or she might have said, “I wonder if I do something nice for my downstairs neighbors if they’d do me the favor of smoking farther away from my unit, especially if I let them know I have asthma.”

I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Maybe she tried all of these, maybe not. Was she demanding and angry when she approached her neighbors about the smoking, or what she outgoing and friendly? Did she try to compromise or did she insist on her outcome alone? Did she get anything in writing from the real estate guy about his alleged comments regarding the smell of smoke in the unit? All I know is that she sued them all.

And you know what’s the worst? The downstairs neighbors settled with her because it cost them less to settle than it would have to defend themselves. And they were legally in the clear – they did nothing wrong. They shouldn’t even have had to defend themselves – the suit should have been tossed. It’s NOT illegal to smoke in your own home. And for that litigious act, forcing her neighbors to settle when they hadn’t done anything wrong, I denounce this woman as a bully and a crybaby. I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I find it amazing that she couldn’t find any other solution to her problem beyond litigation. It just smacks of a sense of entitlement. I don’t know – I don’t know her, the case or the others involved…I would like to hear the other side, because from what little coverage of the other side there was in the story, they sounded much more reasonable to me:

As the symptoms for her lifelong asthma worsened, Burrage says, she asked Schofield to smoke outside. She said he replied, “This is my own home.’’ She also asked Allan to hire a contractor to seal his unit, she said, but he refused.

Allan disputed that in the pretrial memorandum, saying he had a contractor seal areas where smoke could waft up to Burrage’s condo, bought an air purifier, and asked his roommate to smoke on the lower floor of the apartment.

Everything in that quote above smacks of the aggrieved person yelling, “do what I say, do what I say!” without actually offering any changes of her own. And why should he pay for a contractor to seal his unit? Why shouldn’t she have a contractor seal her unit instead? She’s the one complaining!

And for the record, I don’t like the smell of cigarette smoke and I hate it when I smell it wafting up from my neighbor’s deck. But you know what? It’s a community. I don’t expect that everyone bends their wills to mine just because I moved in to the top floor unit. If you didn’t want to deal with the hassles of living in a shared community, you should have bought a house or a detached condo.

Check out this editorial on the Detroit News site. The author, John Samples (of CATO.org, a Libertarian think-tank), urges the largely decentralized Tea Party organization not to fall under the GOP’s banner but to, instead, remain independent and focused on their goals. I agree. This isn’t about party politics (even if most Tea Party members lean to the conservative side of the fence), but rather about the people standing up against overreaching, over-powerful government. The GOP are a part of this problem and should be treated as such.

Is this kind of thinking what we’re in store for in the United States? I hope people are a little more protective of their privacy and less supportive of invasive governmental/police practices, but I don’t have a lot of hope. The idea that there are hidden cameras (which the police refuse to identify) snapping tens of thousands of pictures a day of people’s license plates and/or the people in the car, and that the data is being stored for a year or longer, and that it’s searchable and is used to track movements/behavior for part of some nebulous notion of “crime prevention”…and that people aren’t rioting about this kind of behavior…oy. It hurts me to think that people are actually OK with this. Oy!

So you want proof that Massachusetts is a nanny state? Well how about the recently enacted law from the Department of Early Education and Care that requires that any child in a MA-licensed daycare who eats a meal or is there for more than four hours must brush his or her teeth? I can’t make this shit up! The government is now telling you when to brush your kids’ teeth!

Now to be fair, parents can opt out, but that’s not the point. Nor does it matter that it’s a “good thing to do” – we all know that oral hygiene is important and that kids need to be brushing their teeth. But you know what doesn’t work? The government mandating that we make our children brush their teeth. These kind of “nanny state” actions, these “we know what’s best for you and yours” attitudes from lawmakers, these kinds of freedom-sapping laws that seem so hard to argue against just because there’s good intentions behind them are the things that scare the crap out of me. And if people start blindly accepting or blithely adhering to them, then that gives invasive governments more motivation to pass other, more restrictive and tyrannical laws.

It truly is, in my opinion, a slippery slope. If the government can dictate that you must have your children’s teeth brushed, doesn’t that set a nasty precedent? Can they then dictate how often you bathe them (because your children come in contact with others at state-licensed day-care centers, so isn’t it in their purview), or when they must go to sleep, or the number of hours they must stay in bed, or what kind of “play” constitutes exercise and how much exercise a child must receive? Then what? What kind of clothes they must wear (much like the bike/rollerblading helmet laws)? What music to listen to? What books to read? What thoughts to think? When do we start becoming China?

I know it sounds like I’m overreacting, and maybe I am. The simple fact of the matter is that I do not want the government telling me how to live my life or how to raise my children. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the law is, it’s simply not the government’s job or business. We should be making these decisions ourselves. We should be accepting responsibility for our decisions and the decisions we make for our families. We shouldn’t be ceding responsibility for our lives and the lives of our family members to the government just because we’re too lazy, irresponsible and weak to think for ourselves. That’s accepting tyranny. Even when it’s disguised as “caring” it’s still tyranny, and that’s not what our country is supposed to be about.

Yet another reason the current Health Care bill is dangerously flawed is that the tax on so-called “Cadillac” health-care plans isn’t going to impact just the wealthy (the favorite target of liberals) but the middle-class as well (who liberals say they care about). Hell…even the Boston Globe is reporting on this. I know it’s going to fuck me over – I pay for the best possible health-care plan my company offers, and it saved my ass when I had my heart attack a couple of years back, and I’m sure as shit no wealthy executive. So thanks, Obama and crew, for trying to force a bill through that is going to break the back of our country and penalize your core…good thinking.

I noticed something interesting on my ride up to the RMV and my subsequent ride to work this morning: I didn’t see a single Martha Coakley sign. I saw dozens and dozens of Scott Brown signs. I like that.

Once I got into work, I checked my email and saw another from MoveOn.Org about this MA race. The amusing bit in this email is the following line:

“Right wing smear merchants are spending $1 million or more on attack ads, and the tea partiers are out in full force for Republican Scott Brown.”

I live in Massachusetts and I watch TV. I’ve seen the ads. You know who started with negative, smearing, attack ads? Martha Coakley and her Democrat supporters. She started in when she realized, just recently, that winning the election wasn’t a lock, that she might actually have a fight on her hands, that just being a Democrat was (for once) not a guarantee of a win. She aired the first attack ad, and I remember seeing it and thinking “she’s scared, she’s getting dirty.” | Read the rest of this entry …

During a recent debate, the moderator asked Republican contender, Scott Brown, about sitting in “Ted Kennedy’s seat” (Massachusetts’ vacant Senate seat). What did Brown have to say to that?

“…it is not Ted Kennedy’s seat, it is not the Democrats’ seat, it is the people of Massachusetts’ seat.”

If you needed a reason to vote for Scott Brown, that quote should suffice. It may have been a sound bite, but it illuminates the problem with MA politics, which is currently utterly liberal: the Democrat representatives aren’t interested in representing the people (and they have a history or ignoring voter approved measures), only in their own political careers and legacies.

As is now all over the national news, Scott Brown and Martha Coakley are in a tight race for the vacant Senate seat in Massachusetts. Ted Kennedy, who recently shuffled off this mortal coil, had held onto the seat as though it were his career…oh wait, that’s exactly what it was (have I mentioned I’m in favor of term limits for every public office?)…despite the fact that it was supposed to be public service. The news is the fact that Brown has pulled even with Coakley in recent voter polls. That’s not supposed to happen in traditionally liberal MA. Unfortunately, I think the national attention is actually detrimental to Brown’s campaign, as Coakley and her cronies were banking on the assumption that the liberal voters who put her in office without even thinking about it (which is a pretty safe assumption in MA where all you have to have is a (D) next to your name to make your win likely), and I’m not the only one. Now the liberal voting bloc will get involved.

How do I know the liberal voting bloc will get on the ball? I started getting emails about it from MoveOn.org. I’d signed one of their privacy petitions many years back and am on their list now, even though my politics and theirs rarely match. Still, I admire their grassroots efforts and how passionate they are about their politics. Brown was able to raise $1.3 million in 24 hours using a similar approach to MoveOn.org’s own fundraising tactics, so MoveOn.org is now pushing for the same. Here’s their wording (direct from their email):

The bottom line is, we can’t afford to lose this race. We must save Ted Kennedy’s seat and make sure we have the votes in the Senate to overcome Republican obstruction.

Ted Kennedy’s seat. Sigh. Another reason I support Brown, is the sheer arrogance of MoveOn.org and Coakley when they refer to the vacant Senate seat as “Kennedy’s seat” (and apparently there are alerts coming from BarackObama.com with the same wording). I fully agree with Brown that is it NOT Kennedy’s seat, but the people’s seat. Our governmental representatives need to remember, as do we all, that they represent US and not themselves. Brown seems to get that, although for all I know it’s just another carefully worded soundbite designed to engender that reaction in me (and other independents). I’m still hopeful that Brown will pull off the upset mostly because I’m sick and tired of the arrogance of the Democrats in this state and of one-party control in the Federal government (and yes I hated it when the Republicans were in charge too – I’m neither Democrat nor Republican).

Update: probably not a good thing for Coakley to have her aides roughing up conservative reporters either. Watch the video and you can see the aide, Michael Meehan, push the reporter what looks to be twice, knocking him to the ground. Then he “helps” him up and proceeds to block him from interviewing the candidate. Yep. That’s what concerns me about the “compassionate” party – they’re only compassionate to those who walk in lockstep with them.

I consider the United States’ War on Drugs to be an utter failure. It was a war that could never be won. Prohibition of alcohol failed with disastrous consequences for our country (the creation of organized crime, increase in prison population, rampant corruption, etc.). Why did anyone think attempting the same thing on drugs would work? Instead, we’ve created a massive infrastructure to support the “war” (Drug Enforcement Agency, expanded prisons, a Drug Czar and office, etc.) and a very profitable black market filled with gangs, cartels and terrorist groups all cashing in on producing, smuggling and selling drugs. Now we’re learning that the Al Qaeda terrorist groups are linked up with cocaine producers and operating a rogue aviation network ferrying drugs from South America to Africa, where tons of cocaine are then transported into Europe. This is raising untold millions of dollars for this terrorist network as well as enriching corrupt officials and destabilizing already fragile governments in Africa. Happily, our crack Intelligence and Government agencies have been busily ignoring this connection for the last couple of years, allowing what was a developing problem to grow into a “global security threat.” Yes, that “happily” was sarcasm.

Hey, you know what would put a stop to this? End the unwinnable drug war. Legalize drugs, even the hard drugs that are addictive and deadly. Give governmental agencies the chance to produce, sell, and tax these products, since the people want them and will get them regardless. Remove the illegality and start regulating. Use and expand our existing addiction treatment centers and stop jailing addicts. Remove the illicit nature of drugs and you immediately cut back on the allure. There will still be ways for terrorist organizations to make money, but at least this incredibly profitable option will be off the table. In fact, our governments could stand to rake in a considerable amount of money from people finally able to legally purchase recreational drugs.

The War on Drugs cannot be won. Period. And while it seems seedy and perhaps immoral for governments to be drug pushers, we already regulate the sale of alcohol and tobacco (which are arguably much worse for people than some currently illegal drugs, like marijuana) so we have precedent. We also know the failure of alcohol prohibition. Factor in the boost to the economy and the reduction in gang and terrorist crime by removing their primary income generator and it just seems like common sense to me.