Reviewing the Second Amendment

Of all the amendments to the Constitution, the one that is the most often misquoted is the Second Amendment. It clearly states:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Infuriatingly, this amendment is almost exclusively quoted beginning from the word "the" after the second comma, leaving out the prerequisite reference to a well-regulated militia. One slight understandable problem is the use of the two commas. However, other than the commas, this is indisputably one sentence. The Founding Fathers were protecting the individual citizen's right to own/carry/utilize a firearm, but only those who were members of a militia, not the right of the individual citizen to own a firearm independently of a militia. The latter is much too general and carries too great a risk of accident and death. The former is much more specific and safe, particularly considering the danger posed by guns.

A larger point, in my view, is that this amendment itself needs to be amended. It is outdated and needs to reflect the fact that we no longer have militias comprised of the general citizenry, and that if a citizen desires to own a gun, that they must comply with and follow some basic safety regulations (yes imposed at the federal level). It may be a right but not without restrictions. As it is now, too often this amendment is interpreted to mean that the general public has the right to own a gun with little-to-no restrictions or regulation. In other words, just like laws in place to better insure safe driving, gun use by the general public needs to have laws in place that protect the safety of the general public.

This leads me to the NRA. I think for a president who has proven that he and his administration can handle more than one difficult issue at a time (multi-tasking), to avoid standing up to the NRA with the reinstatement of both the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban is simply allowing the NRA to intimidate the federal government. Gun violence has been a problem in the United States for a very long time, and President Clinton at least had the courage to tackle the problem head-on and with legislation. True, some members of the House and Senate lost their seats in 1994 due to their support of these very measures, but Bill Clinton did the right thing. If President Obama needs to wait a little longer before reintroducing this issue, I just encourage him to make sure he's smart about how long he waits and not to ignore the issue entirely. Prudence is one thing, but being reluctant to confront the NRA or being too afraid to tackle an extremely contentious issue is highly imprudent, unassertive, and irresponsible. This president got my vote in part by how assertive he is. If there was ever an issue that needed more assertiveness and action by our government, it is protecting our citizens against the senseless accidents and deaths caused every day by guns.

Turn it off, or take it outside! Cell phones are for private not public use

Though not a known health risk, cell phone use in public places is as much of a nuisance as smoking.

I was very slow in the purchase of a cell phone. I have an iPhone 3GS now, but the first time I used a cell phone was in 1996 in a friend’s car making a call to my mother at her home. It felt very strange to be able to call anyone from an automobile when I was so used to stopping for a pay phone. But it was handy and, now that I have owned one for many years, I can personally attest to the fact that cell phones are a predominantly positive invention. They are definitely more of a help than a hindrance. Like my first experience with a cell phone, having one in your car, for example, is, unquestionably, a huge asset, especially in an emergency.

However, I also think that, as with anything, along with a new item of technology should come responsibility with the availability of its use. Cell phones should only be used by the driver while they are at the wheel and in motion with a headset, and texting while driving should never be done. That is the largest problem with cell phones. The number of automobile accidents caused by drivers talking on their cell phones (without headsets) while they’re driving is well documented. (My mother was hit by another driver who accelerated out of an intersection without looking her direction because, as she thought she remembered, he was talking on his cell phone.) Unfortunately, cell phone reception is sometimes quite good in traffic where it is less safe.

Another, far less potentially deadly problem with cell phone use is that many people (perhaps unwittingly) violate the comfort and relative privacy of others’ by turning their private conversations into public addresses systems. It took years for public places to acknowledge and enforce smoking and non-smoking sections, and cell phone use in public places will take a similar amount of time to regulate; some public places have signs requesting that patrons not use their cell phones in their lobbies, but far more do not or do not even bother to enforce their own policy. The general public can be very resistant (and sometimes rightly so) when it comes to the idea of regulating anything, so regulation of cell phone use in public will be more tricky implement. 

Smoking is now known to cause severe health risks including death, even for non-smokers nearby (second-hand smoke); case-in-point, Dana Reeve. Though cell phones are not a known health risk (probably nil for second-hand users!), hearing someone else’s cell phone ring and their subsequent conversation in the booth, table, or area next to you, is annoying in the extreme. But, like smoking in public places, it will take equally long to prohibit.

  
I think the answer is easy. In addition to the possible regulation I suggested above with cell phones in automobiles (which is already in place in some states like New York and California), cell phone policy in public places needs to be treated in the same way as public pay phones. If you want to use your cell phone or receive a call, leave your table, group of friends, or the peopled area near you and walk outside, to the lobby, or to the area where there is/are pay phones—if any still exist!—and talk privately. This is really very simple and I think common sense. Part of this aspect of the cell phone problem is that cell phones have become too easy to use and carry around. More people own one now than not. So now even though it may appear that, “Everyone talks on their cell phone in public,” those who do talk on their cell phones in public assume that it is not bothersome to anyone. (That last sentence, and our trust in it, is not only untrue but the largest problem in our perception of using cell phones, in addition to just being plain unconscious and inconsiderate.)

An additional problem is the fallacy that if we don’t take the call at that moment we might not only miss the call but we might lose the business or not hear the personal news as quickly as we think we need it. What is not a fallacy is that the speed of life has undeniably increased which has made the invention of the cell phone practical and necessary. What is untrue is that we need to respond to the cell phone, or place a call, faster than it would take us to move somewhere where we would not force other people to listen to our conversation; sadly, I will speculate as well that some people actually enjoy broadcasting their conversations in public because it makes them feel more important.

In short, talking on a cell phone near other people in public places is rude, bad manners, and an invasion of public space. After all, a public place is just that, public. The space belongs to everyone. A phone call is private. The two do not and should not mix. Just because a phone is not constrained by being connected to a wire and connected to a wall doesn’t mean that the sudden ease of a wireless phone should make us forget the boundary between public and private. There are other, more “thorny” and sensitive issues involving the distinction between public and private. This would be one issue regarding their separation that would be far easier to regulate, observe, and practice.

 

President Obama's Summit on Health Care

President Obama made a great point about the fear of government regulation of health care (which the Republicans don't want at all). The president just pointed out that the federal government already regulates the inspection of food and drugs and that that costs the taxpayer money but is necessary because of safety benefit to the consumer. 


His point is that the federal government needs to also protect the citizens against private health insurance companies with regard to purchasing and affording adequate and dependable health care; that is also an issue of the safety of the public and needs federal regulation. Obviously, with no regulation now, the private insurance companies can charge whatever they want and change prices whenever they want and it's making everyone suffer because when people are uninsured all the prices balloons exponentially. So just like food and drug protection by the federal government, so does the federal government have to be part of the answer in protecting the citizens from the abuses of the private health providers. The Republicans object to the federal government protecting people's health care, because they feel that federal government regulation is intrusive at all and too much “big government.” But it's inconsistent thinking. The problem is that the bigger the problem the more the federal government has to be involved. The Republicans are not realizing that we are already using the federal government for food inspection and drug inspection, so we need it for health care too. And, mandating heath coverage purchase by the federal government is for purchasing any type of health coverage, not only the kind the government decides. The only thing that the federal government is in control of is mandating its citizens have some kind of health coverage so that they are protected and so that the system is healthy as a whole. 


The Obama administration is proposing that there be a system set up where there are many options of coverage to choose from, where the individual can choose which kind of health coverage they buy. If they like the coverage they already have they do nothing and are unaffected. But everyone must buy some type of health insurance. If someone doesn't buy health insurance and they get sick they are a drain on the system because they are uninsured. That’s the extent of the federal government intrusion into the public sector. The individual must buy some coverage for the stability of the nation. The Republicans are objecting to the government having anything to do with regulating the system at all because they are afraid that any federal government control at all would limit individual choices by its very involvement at all. That's too extreme in my opinion. It's verging on paranoid. The federal government needs to step in because the insurance companies are not being responsible. They are taking advantage of consumers because they don't have to answer to anyone. They are unregulated. So some regulation is needed. The Republicans want the states to offer their own versions and keep the federal government out of it. (That is an old fear of the federal government becoming socialist or communist or like a dictatorship. That is old, antiquated thinking.) The Democrats fear is that if left to the states that the states will not regulate the insurance companies enough. It is a legitimate concern because the insurance companies are not regulating themselves enough and the system is suffering. The Republican ideal is too much toward free market and less government control and regulation. But then businesses, like insurance companies, can do what they want. The Democrats don't trust that the individual states would regulate the insurance companies enough. This is perhaps where the Democrats are too extreme. Maybe a compromise between federal control and state control is needed with health care more than with food and drugs. 


I personally think that the bigger the problem the more the role of the federal government will be. States are more local. Health care is a national problem, not only a state problem. The fear of the federal government taking control of even a portion of the health care system is too extreme and a myth as I've written about before.

We Want It Both Ways

The above phrase is clearly an unrealistic and  selfish position. We would say to a child or adolescent who uttered this that they can't have it both ways. It's akin to "wanting their cake and eating it too." 

We elected Barrack Obama to help steer the country out of the recession, help create jobs, reform the health care system, help defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and help move our energy consumption to cleaner forms, among other important issues. And yet at the same time we want him to take care of these issues, we also fear our federal government too much to let him do any of the more major work or pass any of the more important legislation necessary to right the damage. It is a dysfunctional paradox. We want the system to be fixed, but we're too afraid to let the person we hired take the steps to fix it.

President Obama has unveiled his own proposal for reforming the health care system. It is thorough, well conceived, sensible, and realistic. He is also clearly open to other ideas because, in addition to saying so repeatedly (and already having spoken to the Republican members of the House), he has scheduled a bipartisan meeting for tomorrow, February 25 to discuss alternative ideas. Clearly too, the unveiling of his proposal is an indication that he prepared for that meeting. Congress needs to be prepared to and accept his invitation. In short, we need to stop obstructing and agree to cooperate in light of this overture from president, on this issue and all others.

I have said it before in other blogs I’ve written. Those of us in the United States who are in support of blocking almost anything that President Obama proposes are in my opinion responding and acting from paranoia and not from constructive intelligent thinking. President Obama has made many excellent proposals and has already passed some key important legislation. He is doing a good job. But too many of us in the country are not letting him do what is necessary and what he is capable of doing. We are just getting in his way simply because we don’t want him to succeed and we fear our federal government too much. It is a greatly exaggerated and unwarranted fear.

True, we don’t want a dictatorship and government that allows its leaders to do what they please without its citizenry questioning (the reason for the Bill of Rights) their leaders. But we do not have a dictator in President Obama. His presidency is so far one of the most transparent in history—not to mention that this president is one of the smartest in history—and those who oppose him are doing so with such a zeal and fervor that you would think that the White House had barricaded their doors and threatened to shoot anyone on the spot who disagreed with them. In fact what we have now is exactly the opposite. We have an administration that is being very honest, very transparent, that knows what it’s doing, is trying to implement ideas, is attempting to actually do something about all the problems the country is facing, but is being ridiculously stymied by too much mass paranoia.

I understand that in extremely difficult times (such as we are still in now) it is not easy to trust a centralized government. But we as a nation have forgotten whom we elected as president of United States. We have a brilliant, caring, and compassionate man at the helm, and though we need to exercise our individual and collective rights, we also need to relax more and let him and his administration do their job. In fact, they have been trying to do their job ever since they took office. It is “we the people” of the United States who are getting in his and their wa

We The People...are not using our heads.

We Americans are really living in preposterous times, both with the economy but also with ourselves as a citizenry. This country elected a new president in November 2008 to help rebuild this country. Rebuilding is not free. Even in times of serious financial hardship, spending money to repair damage is an unfortunate necessity. In any financial crisis or temporary emergency, it would be understood that the expenses needed to repair any damage previously incurred would soon level off. As the health of the structures that were damaged regain their momentum, that initial expenditure of money would cease or be redirected and used for other things, say for lowering, and then eliminating, the temporary and former debt. 

Our national economy was nearly bankrupt. The solution at first has to be a solution at the federal level and with federal money. The country asked Obama to help by electing him as our next president. The Obama administration took their job seriously and took necessary steps to save that bankruptcy from happening. That assistance was not going to happen with little-to-no expenditure by the federal government. The economy is now healthier than it was a year ago. However, the public is still being critical now, but for a different reason. President Obama is being criticized for spending the money that was necessary to rebuild simply because federal money was spent. We are only seeing that more money is being spent and added to the already bulging deficit, but we are not understanding the importance of how and why the money is being spent. It is necessary and it has been effective. The recession that we were facing has diminished. Not all the problems facing the country are over of course, but they have been lessened and improved. But the public is only seeing the temporary necessary spending as more federal government wasteful spending in the face of an enormous deficit. However, in this case it is not wasteful spending. The spending of the Bush administration that created the enormous deficit (after Bill Clinton’s surplus) was wasteful. What the public at large does not see is that even in the face of a deficit, some money needs to be spent in repairs in the short term to ensure that the economy regains its footing and rebuilds for the health of the country for the long term. Once again, this is an example of many of the citizens of this country being much too short-sighted and wanting results too quickly. But it is simply not possible to correct eight years of disastrous policy in only one year. The preceding year needs to be looked at in terms of money necessarily spent in order to begin to rebuild.

Jacob Weisberg wrote a very direct and astute article in Newsweek (“Down With the People: Who’s to blame for the political mess? You.” Newsweek, February 15, 2010, p. 20) asserting that the American public wants in both ways. We want the federal government to solve the problems facing the country, but we don’t want the federal government to use any of our tax dollars to do it. As Weisberg points out, this is utterly unrealistic. It is also unreasonable and uneducated. You have to continue to spend some money to rectify a serious mistake, no matter who is to blame. To think that the Obama administration can implement any successful recovery from the recession (that we’re still in though less severe now) without a largish temporary price tag is just not using our collective heads.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233158 

We need to wise up as a country, take a deep breath, swallow hard, and face the fact that we are going to have to spend some money (probably by increasing the federal deficit, plus revenue from some higher taxes (yes, mostly on the wealthy because they can afford it, and because some of them got us into this mess in the first place) ) temporarily so that we can curb spending more later. This is just common sense, mature thinking, and the mindset that the nation had (even if only subliminally) on Election Day, November 2008.

  

The Continued Saga of Sarah Palin

 

The speech that Sarah Palin gave at the Tea Party Convention was once again evidence of her strong personality but lack of skill and knowledge. She has a commanding presence on stage and has a projecting voice, but her scope of world knowledge and her concept of government is much too narrow and limited. So though she is touting limiting government, her mantra of “less” or “limited” government is in itself too narrow a concept and position. Curiously, and ironically, though her main point is limiting the role of the federal government, what has been more conspicuously limited from the moment she stepped into the public spotlight as John McCain's running mate is her vocabulary and knowledge of national and international issues. This is evident not only in the frequent reference to a single issue (less government), but also, in this speech, by the notes she had scribbled on her hand during the speech and that she awkwardly referred to during the question and answer portion of her appearance. 

She is also limited in her ability to make substantial points. She resorted to making derisive comments about President Obama more than once. (Incidentally, making derisive comments about her is something that the Obamas completely refrained from doing in their campaign, and are continuing to refrain from. It’s a petty form of making your points which the Obamas have the grace and dignity to avoid.) Palin referred to President Obama as a, “charismatic guy with a teleprompter.” This when she had notes written on the palm of her hand, which is silly, elementary, and even tacky. It’s grade-school preparation. She should have had her talking points memorized. But then I find Sarah Palin’s complete persona and presentation grade-school and almost elementary. 

Also referring President Obama she said, “We need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” The fact that President Obama was a professor of law is an enormous asset to the presidency, not a detriment. It doesn’t take much observational intelligence to notice that. Like Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s speech on health care, Sarah Palin’s comments reveal much more about her own ignorance and lack of qualifications than those of President Obama. And finally, she said mimicking addressing the president, “How is that ‘hopey, changey’ thing workin’ for ya?” This is childishly ridiculous. Even if she had had a legitimate point (which I don’t think she does), the way she chose to phrase it is mocking and juvenile, even if only somewhat playfully. This lack of skill with mature oratory is not a quality becoming of a serious adult, much less a potential candidate for president.

The plain truth in my view is that this country was smart enough to recognize Barrack Obama’s smarts to elect him president of the United States, but that when it comes to accepting the work that needs to be done (and that he has demonstrated that he is prepared to and can do) that some of the same people who elected him have become prematurely fearful of the actual reality of the work that is necessary. They have begun to lose trust in the qualities of the very person in whom they put their trust on election day, November, 2009. Conservative Republicans did not trust him already, so there is no surprise in that portion of the drop in his poll numbers. But some liberal Democrats have begun to distrust him because they are allowing themselves to feel their short-term fear more than his and their long-term thought process. President Obama is essentially doing an excellent job. But partly because there are still so many dire issues in the country, and partly because the solutions to the problems will take much more time, the country is feeling impatient and wants results too quickly. Many of the problems the United States faces right now are large, national problems and therefore the responsibility of the federal government, not state governments. The Republicans (the new “Tea Party”) are encouraging a distrust and paranoia with the federal government, promoting the view that most of the serious problems should be handled by the states, even if the problems are too large to be handled effectively by the states, such as health care, transportation, unemployment, and the crippled Wall St.. Limiting the size of the federal government is not always the solution. But again, focusing only on limiting the degree of involvement (size) of the federal government is too narrow and incomplete a point of view. It is clearly no coincidence that this new “party” calls itself the Tea Party after the “Boston Tea Party” which was an excessive reaction to federal government taxation, and a revolution on a small scale. The reaction by the Republicans (and the “Tea Party”) to the federal government now was referred to by Sarah Palin as a “revolution” and

is also excessive.

Palin is no more qualified now to be considered as a candidate for president or vice-president than she was when she ran with John McCain. The truth is she never will be. Her education and skill is not in that league. Add to that that her comments about President Obama are derogatory and disrespectful and not exemplary of a serious political candidate. They indication of lack of substance of her part and proof that she has to revert to “cutesy” insults to make her speech and arguments strong. It is in fact the opposite. Her oratory is juvenile. She is a strong personality, but that is all. She is ignorant, immature, mediocre, paranoid of the federal government, and not in the least qualified to run for federal public office.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7gVp3diPbI

President Obama's open discussion with House Republicans, January 29, 2010

In a word, this was fabulous! President Obama was invited to this discussion by the Republican House members which is very much to their credit. I’m very glad he accepted and even more glad that everyone present was civil and respectful. (Clearly the Republicans had learned from Joe Wilson’s ridiculous and juvenile outburst at the president's speech on health care to the joint session of Congress last September.)

In addition to the civility of the entire discussion, what particularly struck me was how well prepared President Obama was with some of their proposals. He had read many of the copies he had been given in advance so was able to talk about some of the specifics of their plans and how they might be incorporated into his own proposals.

Furthermore, not only did President Obama attempt to answer all the questions thoroughly and with care, but he also respectfully contested a couple of the questions when he thought they were either incomplete or plainly false.

President Obama did a splendid job with this discussion and it only confirms what I have always thought since he took office: that the United States has one of the best presidents at present that it has had in its entire history. 


http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/29/president-holds-open-discussion-across-aisle