The Flow of Consciousness

Update 2010-06-03: This was letter was published in the Tribune-Review on Wednesday, June 2, 2010.

Sent via email 14 May 2010 to USAToday, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Beaver County Times, New Castle News, and the Sharon Herald

Recently, nationally funded ads have mislead Pennsylvanians about the FairTax. These ads claim that the FairTax will add 23% to the cost of everything. This is true, but the ads omit the most important part of the tax reform plan.

What these ads irresponsibly fail to address is that the FairTax would fully rid citizens and businesses of income taxes, federal payroll taxes, inheritance and estate taxes, capital gains tax, social security and pension taxes, and the “marriage penality”. Additionally, it fails to mention a key provision: the prebate, a pre-refund of all taxes paid up to the poverty level, which amounts to $500 per month to a family of four.

Personally, I’d pay about 5% less tax with FairTax.

FactCheck, a nonprofit and non-partisan information verification agency set up by UPenn, agrees, calling these ads “false and misleading“.

While I appreciate the attention to the FairTax, it’s important that people know the facts and realize that they’d have more money to spend because they wouldn’t have any income tax taken out of their paychecks, plus the prebate gives another $500 per month, enough for food, or perhaps a car payment, or an iPad, whichever they deem fiscally responsible for their own needs.

I had an interesting dream last night. I dream most nights–in full color and sound, like a movie– but most dreams aren’t worthy of blog posts. This one is.

Obviously, I’ve embellished a little in my written account of it, but the scene and events would tell everything themselves if I could pull the images from my head and put them on YouTube like something out of the first Final Fantasy movie.

The setting was St. Patrick’s Day, sometime in the future by several years. Some friends, Brigette, and I walked into a bar. By the looks of it, it was probably Villa or the Crane Room, but that doesn’t matter. The door was tiny, like it was a ’20s speakeasy trying to be discreet.

The bouncer asked for our ID and our “(something)s”. It sounded like “privates” or “privies” or something like that. “Priv” something. Everybody produced not only their drivers licenses, but another card, as well. We showed them to the bouncer as we passed him, continuing in to enjoy the evening.

Finding no room to sit near the back like we prefer, we found a table very close to the front and within earshot and sight of the bouncer. We got our drinks and carried on.

Every now and then, someone would come in, show their ID to the bouncer, look really pissed off when the bouncer said something, turn around, and walk out of the bar. Sometimes a really drunk, attractive woman would plead with him, or a dude bigger than he would flex and he’d let them in.

I tuned in and listened once to what he was saying to one of the people he turned away.

“Honey, I can’t let you in. Federal law prevents us from serving alcohol to anyone on public insurance. We can’t serve you, and you’re not even supposed to drink. You could go to jail and we could get fined. Sorry, we can’t let you in here without proof that you’re not on public insurance.”

I shook my head and turned back to the conversation. The dream got worse, though.

A few minutes or hours later–it was immediately after in the dream, but who knows how long in the story, a guy in a trenchcoat walked into the bar. The bouncer stood up in front of him, but then the trenchcoat man produced something from his pocket. The bouncer tensed, perhaps thinking it was a gun, but I don’t understand why he didn’t react accordingly. Little did I know that he could see what I couldn’t.

The bouncer stepped aside and the trenchcoat man entered, with approximately four police officers in tow. Some people got quiet, and some people started to get really loud as they quickly tried to disburse.

Trenchcoat man cleared his throat. “Under the authority of the US government, we are federal agents enforcing the Healthy America Act,” he said. “We have evidence that a crime is being committed in this establishment and we have a warrant for search.”

He took of his hat and waved a badge in the air, as if the posse of cops behind him was insufficient proof of his authority and intent.

“We are acting lawfully. Each person must show proof of private health insurance or submit to a sobriety test as the law allows, in order to ensure compliance with the Act. You may recall that it’s illegal to consume alcohol if you rely on Uncle Sam to keep you healthy.”

The bartender made some gestures and left the bar, retreating into a back room with another bartender and a waitress in tow.

The cops started toward the crowd unassumingly. They each pulled out some kind of PDA.

Apparently accustomed to such searches, folks produced their “privies” — a private insurance card — so as not to be subjected to a breathalyzer test and subsequent herding into a paddy wagon. One of the cops and scanned a barcode on each. He walked away after a grunt.

The guys at the table next to us roused the rabble, though and refused to show anything. One screamed loudly about the civil rights and how he should be able to drink in peace without the government asking to see his “license to drink.” He and the others made some gestures and the cop started getting angry. He whipped out a Taser and a bunch of girls not far away screamed.

A mass of people stampeded toward the door. A tiny little door at the front of the bar.

It all went to hell in a handbasket after that. Details unnecessary.

Call my dreaming brain creative. Call it deceptively oversimplified. Call it needlessly worried and say that the government would never do something like that. Call it whatever you like.

I reflect on this dream and wonder if it’s a vision of the future. I make no warrant of clairvoyance. I’m not that type. This is merely a report of a dream I had.

I didn’t blog as much as I would have liked to this year, mostly because of my crazy busyness.

My article on how to install Gears on 64-bit Linux continues to see quite a bit of traffic. I even host a copy of Gears, even though it’s likely out of date. Also in the Linux vein, my articles on how to buy DRM-free music online with Amazon MP3 on Linux and Android were moderately popular. I wrote an article on how to add CACert root certificates to Chromium on Linux and it sees more traffic than most of my other posts combined.

I wasn’t as active in the open source community as I would have liked, but I did make some contributions to Gwibber, Astrid, Celtx, and Lernid. I mentioned the first three in my Launchpad activity update. The latter is a newer development by Jono Bacon. I contributed the entire Esperanto translation less than two days after it was available on Launchpad. I have no way of verifying it, but I think that the Esperanto translation was the first complete non-English variant translation available.

I recently wrote two brief articles on how to automate some tasks on Facebook. One was how to rapidly expunge friend suggestions, and the other was how to select all friends in a friend select dialog.

I met Tom Dickson of Will It Blend? fame at CES last year. He was really cool and friendly.

I also wrote a few articles on politics, my favorite being A Comment on Socialism Defined, a comment left on a friend’s blog, Strike the Root!. I’ll not go into how much I think Obama and his friends have screwed up the country already (it’s not all been bad—he has done some good things). That’s something for another article.

A new hobby this year for me has been stock trading. I’d saved up some money and decided to use some skills I learned in middle school to make a buck or two on the stock market. Ironically, not 12 hours after I blogged about my flagship stock being up near 200%, that stock, SPNG, dropped 27.66% in one day, costing me $23,000 of value on a $10,000 investment in 65 minutes. It recovered, and I still made out with a profit, but I learned a very, very valuable set of lessons. I still kick myself occasionally because of this and probably will for a long time. My goal of getting into stocks was to generate enough money that I could pay off my student loans really quickly. I could have paid off more than 2/3 and I didn’t cash out when I should have.

I did meet many, many new people in the stock world, especially Stockguy22 and the Bulls on Wall Street crew. I said goodbye to StockTwits after I was temporarily banned for cheering on Vonage (VG) when it was less than 50 cents, riding it to 80 cents, and cashing out. They called it a worthless, crappy penny stock. A few weeks later, it spiked to ~2.20 and has been above a dollar since. HA!

I got some neat advice from friends while considering the purchase of a MacBook Pro (which I got and love) and the acquisition of a PS3 (which I did get).

The biggest changes in my life were in my location and work. I got a new job in March at Vivísimo, a search platform maker in Pittsburgh–I even wrote a post on the corporate blog! I moved in with some friends in May, but realizing we were a little cramped, I moved into a new apartment in July (I didn’t write about that!).

I wrote more than 28 articles for Bob Buskirk‘s ThinkComputers. My favorites were the Masscool MP-1371RS Media Player and QNAP TS-809 Pro network attached storage device. I use the former alongside my PS3 for video formats my PS3 can’t stream from the latter. The NAS has become the central storage hub for all of my computers, replacing the QNAP TS-109 Pro I reviewed two years ago.

BIOS LEVEL was fairly inactive this year, largely because of a major server outage from May to August. I did write an article on the Orbita Mouse, which I still use to this day at work. I did record and post several videos from Ohio Linuxfest 2009, including Linux Journal editor Shawn Powers’s keynote, Jorge Castro‘s talk on building a community around an open source project, and more on licensing, making money from open source, democratized design, and talking to policymakers and legislators about open source. All Ohio Linuxfest videos with a write-up are available on BIOS LEVEL, or on BIOS LEVEL’s Blip.tv channel.

Jon Daniel and I spend most of November cranking out a beta version of Profyle.at, a personal profile directory service. We’re not entirely finished yet, but sign up for our Profyle.at beta and you’ll likely get in! We want to help people find you on the Internet so your friends and family can follow you on whatever sites and networks you like the most. We pitched for funding and didn’t get it, but were cordially invited to present again during the next round in a month.

Brigette and I are still together, and going strong. We’ve spent most of her winter break together, driving throughout western PA to be with friends and family, too. She’s been working on her web site for her beagle and vizsla show dogs, Glade Mill Sporting & Hound. She’s come a long way, from using a completely WYSIWYG editor to redoing it with a mix of code and WYSIWYG with Adobe Dreamweaver. I’m eager to see what she’s planning for it.

I originally posted this as a comment on Strike the Root!, but thought it relevant enough to be posted here as a full entry unto itself. It might be easier to understand it if you read it in context in the entry “Socialism Defined”. This comment in response to another comment which is very much anti-capitalism.

However, it’s important to consider the value of the land owner to the worker. If the worker were solely responsible for taking care of the land, machinery, and other tools of the trade, then that worker would be far less productive.

Let’s muse upon this. In the ideal situation, the worker creates something of value to others. He continues doing so, using his own equipment, land, and resources. He receives in its entirety all earnings from his labor, and uses those earnings to invest in more land, equipment, and resources. His investment provides income to no one, because he is doing everything himself. He is a producer, not a consumer.

He realizes that if he pays another person to gather resources, to construct equipment, to prepare land, he can spend more time producing the actual product himself. So, he sacrifices a portion of his earnings in exchange for a needed product or service.

He continues to realize the value of relying on others to do the tasks he’d rather not do (vendors) so that he can spend more time doing what he does want to do.

Eventually, he arrives at the point where the only things he does for his enterprise are coordinate these vendors and produce his product. He’s able to find a balance between the earnings he keeps for himself (profits) and the earnings he sacrifices (expenses) so that he can spend the optimal amount of time producing a product.

As in any industry, he’s bound to encounter both competitors and aspiring competitors. He proposes this to them: “I’ll reduce your expenses by permitting you to use my resources. You get more profit because you can spend more time producing and less time coordinating vendors. All I ask in return is a small portion of your profits, as I act as a vendor because I coordinate vendors, and I do the things you’d rather not do, such as care for the equipment, facilities, and land, and I actually sell the product.”

Our man has his first employee, and has become management. In another way, the employee is also the employer, because, in a way, the employee pays the employer to provide the equipment, land, and resources so that the employee can produce the product.

This carries on ad infinitum until our man has become The Man, because he spends more time coordinating vendors and managing employees than actually producing a product. Should not he be compensated for his work coordinating these vendors and selling the product?

The key here is that all of this interaction is willing. If at any point any person is wholly unwilling, it becomes slavery.

Government works similarly. Citizens, or, really, signatories of some agreement forming a government, federation, coalition, or other such body of people, sacrifice a portion of their earnings so that they can pay a vendor to do the things they don’t want to do. These things include caring for the land of the government, and the equipment and resources required to do so. Laws became necessary to protect the rights of citizens from abrogation by other citizens (and, arguably, the choice deities for the realm) and to ensure that the commons of the government fall not into tragedy (see Tragedy of the Commons).

The people who provide these services are vendors to the government. We call them firefighters and law enforcement (police, code enforcers, etc.).

The factor differentiating our man’s enterprise from our model government is that government need not generate a profit. It is merely a cost center financed by those who willingly and gladly pay to have others take care of the things they’d rather not do. In this way, the government is the employee of the citizens, and the government may employ citizens who are vendors.

There’s another observation to be made here: the government is only paying its vendors/employees in return for a service. Also, the citizens are willingly sacrificing a portion of their earnings in order to finance their government, which employs willing vendors, who provide a product (or a service) to the government.

The government can only spend as much of these earnings as it has, but it can request that citizens contribute more. Citizens who are willing contribute more, those who are not willing voice their opinion. Both sides look to the original agreement and successive laws for direction and decide who gets their way: the government or the citizens. If the government gets its way, citizens must contribute more or cease participation in the government.

You can see the problem here. Our laws have been written so that it’s impossible to leave the government because of a disagreement. Instead, we subject ourselves to this oppression, contribute more of our earnings, and hope that we can alter the government so as to reduce the contributions, by an outright reduction or a reduction in the use of vendors employed by the government, thus a reduction in the services which the government provides to the citizens.

The “exploitation of the worker” occurs when The Man takes more than his share and does not provide sufficient value to the employee, and the employee is unwilling or unable to right the situation, or feels that there is nothing wrong with the arrangement when outside observers disagree. It’s a tragedy of capitalism caused by greed, a human factor which can only be controlled through education of moral values (religious and non-religious, although the former seems to be easier to use) and self-determination.

The “exploitation of the citizen”, their sentiment that taxes are thievery, occurs similarly to exploitation of the worker: the citizen is unwilling or unable to right the situation, or feels that there is nothing wrong with government when outside observers disagree.

Fortunately, the government of the United States is set up in a way in which the citizens employ a vendor who represents their interests in the government–a representative and/or senator. Like our man’s enterprise, if the citizens do not like the product of that vendor (here, laws which care for the lands, equipment, and resources of the government, and protect the rights of the citizens), they can choose a different vendor.

Unfortunately, altruism plays a larger factor in government than in our man’s enterprise. If the man realizes that a portion of his business is failing, he can choose to stop producing the product (see the argument of the square wheel versus the round wheel). The government does not have a product, and thus has nothing which it can or needs to stop producing.

However, if the citizens decide that they want to provide vendors with earnings without that vendor having provided any service or product to the government, and direct the government to ask citizens to contribute more of their earnings in order to compensate these vendors who have provided no value through a product or service, these citizens and their government are edging toward socialism.

The justification is that these vendors, who are likely citizens with who are unable or unwilling to provide a service or produce a product, are of value to the citizens or government on some inexplicable, immeasurable level: altruism.

This is all well and good, until a citizen decides that a vendor is not of value and should not receive earnings, as the vendor has provided no value to the citizen, even by proxy of the government.

Our modern government has grown to a size where “exploitation of the citizen” is commonplace because of the peoples’ unwillingness, inability to let their voice be heard; to choose a new vendor who represents their interests and philosophies. They’ve lost hope. Because of this, they call their government thieves, because the government takes valuables from unwilling contributors and redistributes those valuables to those who are unable or unwilling to provide some value in measurable terms.

Sent via e-mail to Senators Specter and Casey, as well as Congressman Altmire, all of Pennsylvania…

Senators and Congressman,

I write in regards to a bill with the short title “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2009″. This bill was introduced with virtually the same text into the House by Mr. Smith of Texas as H.R. 1076 and into the Senate by Mr. Cornyn as S. 436.

While the overall goal of the bill — a reduction in the use of the Internet to facilitate the trafficking of child pornography — is noble, I am concerned that a key section of the bill is overbroad and unenforceable.

The section to which I am referring is Sec. 5, the “RETENTION OF RECORDS BY ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS.” I include the text of the section here for reference:

Section 2703 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following: “(h) Retention of Certain Records and Information- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”

My interpretation leads me to understand that this section would require any person operating an electronic communication or remote computing service to retain at least two years of logs of temporarily-assigned network addresses.

If interpreted as broadly as possible, this law could require every person who owns an Internet router — a very common, inexpensive, often wireless-capable networking device — to retain these logs for two years. These devices have a very limited storage capacity and generally do not have logging facilities enabled by default.

This law would essentially obsolete every home and small business router, as Americans would be compelled by federal law to buy a certainly more expensive router capable of storing an great amount of log files. This device would also have to be capable of backing up these logs to one or more external devices in order to ensure that the owner is protected from device failures. The price of these new routers would be much higher than the current market price of a router and this legislation would open the possibility of lawsuits against router makers when a router fails to log or retain the logs.

While this procedure is standard rigmarole for computer- and technology-savvy Americans, including information technology professionals, it is a difficult and potentially costly one for those who are not so inclined.

A single power outage or accidental or natural disaster could put someone in a position where they have violated federal law, as they acted as an electronic communication and remote computing service provider and did not retain records as federal law requires.

This is, of course, assuming that the federal agents responsible for enforcing this legislation do in fact police it. Instead, this new data retention requirement will go largely unnoticed, unacknowledged, and unenforced. It will become a law used to convict the ignorant, the careless, and the negligent instead convicting those actually responsible for exploiting children.

I can assume that one or more of you has a wireless router in your home. This law would apply to you, as well. You would need to ensure that your wireless router logs all addresses which it assigns, and you would need to ensure that your logs are retained for at least two years. If for some reason something happened and those logs were lost, you would be guilty of violating federal law.

Moreover, the identifying information contained within these logs is easily fabricated and even easier to masquerade. Two of the three major operating systems can masquerade the most commonly used unique network hardware identifier — a MAC address — with a simple command. A trivial program does the trick for the third. Such a simple fact would easily dismiss a MAC address as evidence in a court test of this entire law, not just the section against which I am campaigning.

I understand that these bills have probably been referred to committees for further exploration. I urge you to exercise extreme caution if this bill comes up for vote alone or as a part of a larger piece of legislation. I urge you to see Section 5 stricken in its entirety on the grounds that it is unenforceable and overbroad.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you wish to discuss these or other technology-related bills, my phone is always handy and I’m always willing to share my knowledge.

Colin Dean
Volant, PA

CC: Senator Casey, Senator Specter, Congressman Altmire

Blog reader note: Slashdot links to an excellent summary by C|Net’s Declan McCullaugh entitled Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police.

Senator Judd Gregg, a third-term Republican from New Hampshire, withdrew himself from the Secretary of Commerce post today, citing “irresolvable conflicts” regarding the controversial economic stimulus bill, as well as the upcoming 2010 census.

An GOP insider told CNN that Gregg didn’t want to be a “powerless token” and didn’t agree with many of the economic policies, among other things.

Another Obama appointee falls. At least it’s not for tax reasons, but for policy, principle, and philosophy reasons.

To PA federal Senators Specter and Casey, by e-mail 9 February 2009:

I write to urge the Senator to oppose the economic stimulus bill which will be voted on soon.

This economic stimulus bill has cut out the majority of the programs which would benefit the most from it, leaving programs which already have sufficient support from private interests.

Furthermore, this bill does absolutely nothing to stimulate the taxpayer. The money from this stimulus will simply line the pockets of government contractors at every level of government. Moreover, it will yet again increase the size of the government, creating more bureaucracy and wasting more taxpayer money.

The worst part is that it is essentially deficit spending. We’re cutting taxes while increasing spending. We’re living beyond our means, and because of it, we are destined to live beneath our means.

Since Congress often defenestrates principles such as these during heavy votes such as this, I also will point out that a vote /against/ this bill is far safer politically than a vote /for/ it. If the Senator votes for it, the bill passes and it proves ineffective and wasteful, the vote could be ammo for a political rival. If the senator votes against it and it proves ineffective, he can say “I knew it wouldn’t work.” If it doesn’t pass, he’s safe on any vote.

I again urge the Senator to oppose this legislation.

Nancy Killefer, Obama’s choice for the newly created "chief performance officer," has tax problems: she failed to pay unemployment taxes for household help at her D.C. home. She withdrew herself from consideration.

Tom Daschle, Obama’s choice for the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has tax problems, too: he "recently filed amended tax returns and paid more than $140,000 in back taxes and interest for 2005-2007," according to CNN. He withdrew himself from consideration, as well, and Obama publicly blamed himself for his "embarassing" choice.

Timothy Geithner was approved as the Secretary of the Treasury despite having underpaid his own taxes by $43,000 while involved with the International Monetary Fund. Read that article—it’s entitled "A Comedy of Tax Errors" and it’s totally fitting. "A future Treasury secretary using TurboTax? The mistakes were multiplying." I agree. The worst part of this one is that Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle were defending him. What a farce.

Hilda Solis, Obama’s candidate for Secretary of Labor, does not herself have tax problems, but her husband does. He neglected to pay $6,400 in business taxes on his auto repair business for more than 16 months. NBC Los Angeles reports, though, that "White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said Solis and [Sam] Sayyad [her husband] were unaware of the liens until asked about them this week." Her nomination is delayed while the Senate discusses the effects of this tax problem.

Tie this in with the non-tax-related withdrawal of NM Gov. Bill Richardson as Secretary of Commerce amid grand jury investigation into a state contract awarded to political donors, and one simply has to ask a question.

What is Obama thinking? Do we have a worker in office instead of a leader? I question Obama’s ability to pick legitimate candidates for the posts which he is Constitutionally tasked with filling. I also must question the Senate’s motives in approving a Secretary of the Treasury who was involved in the IMF, which is essentially a worldwide central bank (but then I remember that most of Congress believes in statist Keynesian economic theories, not the sound, libertarian Austrian economic theories of such scholars as Ludwig von Mises).

The representatives of the American public sided with it in the electoral college and chose this president. Can this president chose a staff which meets his goals of transparency, efficient government, and change?

Update 3 March 2009: Obama’s nominee for U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk agreed to pay taxes he owes. The madness continues!

Update 1 April 2009: Health and Human Services nominee and current Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius paid nearly $8,000 in back taxes.. You know where you and I would be if we didn’t pay our taxes? Jail.

I received today an email from Working America, some kind of subgroup of the AFL-CIO which I unknowingly signed up for when a visitor rang my doorbell during the summer months.

Congress is moving toward an agreement to provide emergency bridge loans for domestic automakers, but significant roadblocks remain. These loans are urgently needed to avoid a collapse of our U.S. auto industry, which would send shockwaves across our entire economy and deepen the current recession.

To protect America’s workers in this economic crisis, we need your immediate help. Members of Congress need to hear from you directly. Call your senators today and make sure they get the message: Provide emergency bridge loans to the auto industry.

Call Bob Casey and Arlen Specter via the Capitol Switchboard today at (202) 224-3121.

To make your call as effective as possible, keep your message short and direct and begin by making it clear that you support providing an emergency bridge loan to the U.S. auto industry to protect American jobs. Communicating this simple message is enough, but if you’d like to provide additional information for why you support an emergency bridge loan, here are some talking points you can use.

* According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute:

o Nearly 2 million jobs have been slashed already this year, and we could lose 3 million more if emergency loans for the auto industry are not approved.

o If the auto industry is not rescued, jobs could be lost in all 50 states, including workers at parts suppliers and in dozens of supporting industries, not just workers in the Midwest.

* Any emergency bridge loan should include requirements that will protect the taxpayers, and ensure accountability and the long-term viability of the domestic auto companies.

I felt compelled to respond, both here and through the reply address.

And while we’re at it, we can bail out the CRT monitor makers and bail out the fax machine makers. While we’re at that, we could wish we would have bailed out the carriage industry in the early 20th century.

The Big Three have failed to innovate; they have failed to adapt to their circumstances and surroundings. Natural selection says that these companies should feel the consequences of their failures and go the way of the dodo. There are more useful, acclimated birds in the sky these days.

I feel for the workers, whose livelihoods and families depend on their income. I feel for the retirees, who rely on their pension income. However, the fault for this will lay in the hands of management and the stockholders. It will be they who must answer to their employees, perhaps by cutting their own salaries down to a more responsible level.

If the government must intercede, it would be far more worth the $34 billion to give new car vouchers to any taxpayer with a car older than so many years. Imagine the jobs that would be created! There would need to be more salesmen. There would need to be more gas stations, too, so that increases the number of construction workers and suppliers. There would need to be more people to recycle junked cars. There would need to be more people to administer all of these peoples at all levels. Entire industries could be created overnight, while the Big Three keep their money coming just the way they’ve always gotten it: from the responsible, always-right consumer, the one looking for the most car for the least price.

Really, what the American autoworker needs to do is hold management and the stockholders responsible for the financial mess, but prevent them from asking the federal government for a handout.

Update 2008-12-10 0903: Treehugger has an excellent fake advertisement for the bail out which so perfectly describes the feeling of the responsible American public.

Who did we just elect? Where Obama and I differ on social and economic policy, as well as civil liberties and philosophy of the role of government (read: just about everything), I thought we agreed on military service and conscription.

Apparently, that’s not the case.

Obama calls for US military mobilization.

But it’s also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it’s important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some.

I don’t know how I missed this back in September. I don’t know how I don’t know about this. It’s conceivable that I was on a mental vacation that day, but I would think that there would have been more hullabaloo about it on the news.

Oh, wait, the Republicans wouldn’t mind it, too. They’re just too smart to sponsor at this time H.R. 393, the Universal National Service Act of 2007, also known as the latest version of NY Democrat Chuck Rangel’s Draft Reinstatement Act.

Here are the particularly scary parts of H.R. 393:

SEC. 102. NATIONAL SERVICE OBLIGATION.

      (a) Obligation for Service- It is the obligation of every citizen of the United States, and every other person residing in the United States, who is between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform a period of national service as prescribed in this title unless exempted under the provisions of this title.
      (b) Forms of National Service- The national service obligation under this title shall be performed either--
            (1) as a member of an active or reserve component of the uniformed services; or
            (2) in a civilian capacity that, as determined by the President, promotes the national defense, including national or community service and service related to homeland security.
      (c) Age Limits- A person may be inducted under this title only if the person has attained the age of 18 and has not attained the age of 42.

SEC. 103. INDUCTION TO PERFORM NATIONAL SERVICE.

      (a) Induction Requirements- The President shall provide for the induction of persons described in section 102(a) to perform their national service obligation.
      (b) Limitation on Induction for Military Service- Persons described in section 102(a) may be inducted to perform military service only if--
            (1) a declaration of war is in effect;
            (2) the President declares a national emergency, which the President determines necessitates the induction of persons to perform military service, and immediately informs Congress of the reasons for the declaration and the need to induct persons for military service; or
            (3) members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps are engaged in a contingency operation pursuant to a congressional authorization for the use of military force.

The bill requires women to register for selective service, as well. It addresses conscientious objectors by placing them in noncombatant positions, meaning there is no way out of this.

The bill does not specify penalties for noncompliance, nor does it address post-secondary students (does allow high schoolers to continue until they earn a diploma, drop out, or turn 20).

What’s the likelihood of H.R. 393 suddenly getting passed? Slim and none. However, it exists, and Congress has been rather swift to move on things such as the PATRIOT Act, the DMCA, FISA Amendments, and the recent Wall Street bailout. Moreover, there is significant, indefatigable evidence that Obama supports the reinstatement of the draft.