Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

I just finished my morning class on Friday and was responding to email when I heard that John McCain was visiting the university at noon. I called Debi, who doesn’t have classes on Fridays, and asked her if she wanted to see him. Regular readers will know we don’t generally lean Republican, but we are always willing to listen to ideas, even if they are coming from someone we don’t generally agree with.

So, we headed to the room (in my building) where the meeting was supposed to be. When we arrived we were told it was an “invitation only” event. I’m not sure why politicians do that, but we were a little annoyed. We kind of pushed to see if there was anyway we could get in but all they would offer was, “Well, if you wait, there may be a little room in the back and we can sneak you in.” I had class at 1:00 so I couldn’t wait forever, but after about 30 minutes of waiting for Senator McCain to arrive, one of the campaign people tapped us on the shoulder and asked if we wanted to go into the meeting. I had to say no because I had a class, but Debi went in.

She stood through the meeting at the back. It was mostly filled up with military brass (in civilian clothes) and McCain’s speech was mostly pro-military, pro-war. We don’t often think about the strong military influence in Tampa, but there is a huge air force base in Tampa (MacDill), so military issues are popular.

Debi thought he seemed nice enough and he was actually able to respond intelligently to questions without resorting to guttural monkey speech (like our current monkey-in-chief), but she wasn’t sold on his positions. After a little more research she realized that McCain has pledged to overturn Roe v Wade without exceptions. As a genetic counselor, that is an untenable position. If Senator McCain had ever sat down with someone who has a child with a very serious genetic condition that guarantees the child will die, he might just change his mind. But, of course, he has to speak to the evangelicals who will help him get the nomination from the Republican party.

Anyway, it was a good chance to see a candidate, even though it’s not a candidate we would consider voting for in the actual election.

Saturday we walked past the Gasparilla festivities here in Tampa. We were thinking of going to one of the parades, but once we got there we realized it wasn’t really our scene. Everyone there had a cooler of beer on one shoulder and a beer in their free hand. It seems like an excuse to basically get drunk and stay drunk all weekend. That’s not really our sense of fun.

Instead, I came home and began the tedious process of extricating our chimney from our wall… Okay, that sounds funny, but long story short, when the last person to do a major remodeling on our house was working on it, apparently they figured it would be cheaper to just leave our chimney in the wall then remove it for closet space. So, they cut off the top, roofed over it, then sheetrocked it in. As uber-cheapos, I figured I could use the bricks from the chimney for a garden. So, I chiseled the top 6 rows or so off on Saturday, cleaned them up, then used some of our compost to build a small garden. We figure we’ll add to it slowly as we extricate more bricks and get more compost. For now, we just planted peas and cucumbers. We’re supposed to be able to harvest in a couple of months. I’ll let you know how it goes.

A friend sent me a link to this quiz to get a sense of how you measure up to the current candidates for President: http://glassbooth.org/

I’ll tell you who most closely matches my views if you tell me who most closely matches yours.

I was reading the local paper Monday morning when I happened upon a notice that Mitt Romney was holding an “Ask Mitt Anything” meeting in Tampa that same day at 5:30 (like 5 minutes from our house). We’ve been swamped getting all of our stuff moved into our house in Tampa, getting ready for the classes we’ll be teaching soon, and getting ready for a short trip to California. But we didn’t want to pass up on a chance to see Mitt Romney spout his anti-working class ideas in person. Even though I knew there was absolutely no way I’d ever vote for him before I went (e.g., he opposes civil liberties for people he doesn’t like – like habeas corpus – and is anti-choice), if there was even a smidgen of truth to the idea that you could literally ask him anything I had a few questions I thought would be fun to ask. So, we headed to La Teresina Restaurant in Tampa around 5:00 pm to see if we could get a seat. It was pretty full, and the local media were there in full force, but we got a decent seat. I came with three questions prepared:
-Why does Mitt think atheists and agnostics are unfit to be President of the US? (see his quote here)
-Why does he not value civil liberties like habeas corpus? (he wants to double the size of Guantanamo Bay Cuba, where habeas corpus is not a right and people are unethically, immorally, and unjustly imprisoned without the right to challenge their imprisonment)
-And how would he reconcile his law of consecration temple covenant (which basically says that he will put Mormonism first, always) with his duty to uphold the Constitution if elected President? (this is the question the media doesn’t seem knowledgeable enough to ask him)

Not surprisingly, I was not afforded the opportunity to grill him. The meeting was supposed to start at 5:30. He arrived around 6:00. There were four or five questions asked in the short 45 minute meeting, all of which seemed basically canned. One guy even asked, “How can my wife and I help you in your campaign?” It was pretty pathetic, frankly. Everything he said, regardless of how inane, was accompanied by waves of applause and people waving signs. They even tried to put a sticker on me as I arrived to indicate I supported Mitt – that didn’t last. I took it off before I even got inside the main room to find my seat.

So, why don’t I support Mitt? It’s not that he isn’t a personable guy. To get this far in a presidential campaign you have to be personable. He seems nice enough. He’s also good looking and looks very healthy for a 60 year-old. What do I have against him?

Here are a few of the positions Mitt staked out:
-He wants to increase the size of the military by 100,000 troops and increase military funding, claiming there are lots of “bad people” out there. He didn’t say where the money would come from nor why we need that many troops, but he insisted on this (probably because Tampa is a military town; MacDill AFB is just south of the city)
-He wants to make George W. Bush’s tax cuts permanent, get rid of taxes paid by the middle-class on investment income, and abolish the estate tax (which he, of course, referred to as the “death tax”).
-He wants any convicted sex offender to serve a very harsh sentence and then be tagged with a GPS tracking system for life (honestly, I’m not making that up).
-He wants to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely.
-He has no idea what to do about Israel and Palestine (someone asked him that), but he knows the words ‘Hamas,’ ‘Fatah,’ and ‘independent state.’
-He wants to strengthen families by magically reversing the growing trend of women having children outside of wedlock (little statistical tidbit for you – about 30% of births in the U.S. today are to unmarried women, but many of them are cohabiting with essentially permanent partners; this pales in comparison to the percentages in Western Europe, and I and most other demographers don’t really see it as a problem).
-He wants to “give people control” over their social security retirement by instituting personal retirement accounts. This one is pretty obvious for someone like Mitt who made his millions running an investment firm – investment companies would make trillions of dollars off such a deal, while leaving the average American hung out to dry making poor investments while the wealthy get wealthier.

Basically, I don’t agree with pretty much anything he said. His positions are so contrary to the needs of everyone but the upper middle class and the wealthy that it would be a terrible shame for the working class and the poor to have this man as President. He didn’t mention the poor once. Not once. He didn’t suggest anything that would help the poor. Another fascinating element of this meeting was the fact that there were virtually no racial or ethnic minorities there. I know there was one Hispanic person there because he was a “dignitary,” a current state representative, Trey Traviesa. But I don’t recall seeing a single black person nor another Hispanic person (and virtually no Asians, either). That’s pretty remarkable considering the meeting was in a Mexican restaurant in Tampa, where the Hispanic population is increasing by leaps and bounds. You can’t throw a wiffle ball into the wind in Tampa without someone saying “Hola!” to you and offering you authentic Hispanic cuisine (both of my neighbors are Hispanic and and the person who lives across the street is Asian). Yet, no minorities. Hmmm… I wonder why? Maybe because Mitt Romney is the perfect presidential candidate for the super rich and, like George W. Bush, doesn’t care about poor people.

Mitt also didn’t have anything nice to say about the Democratic Presidential candidates. He verbally insulted Hillary, Obama, and John Edwards on multiple occasions, resorting to ad hominems and insults rather than reasoned and intelligent commentary on their positions and ideas. I was appalled.

In short, here’s my current take on Mitt Romney for President: Mitt is slick and attractive and wealthy. His policies would favor white, wealthy people. If that sounds like something that interests you, go for it. But if you are interested in equality, opportunity, and new ideas (see Debi’s comments below), Mitt’s not your man.

In the interest of offering a slightly different take on the meeting, I grilled Debi about her experience. Here are her thoughts:

What do cabbage, cauliflower, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush have in common? According to Mark Twain, “a cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education” (meaning it has been cultivated). The same is true of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush – Mitt Romney basically thinks everything that George W. Bush does (i.e., he has the same DNA, like the cauliflower), but Mitt Romney can string these terrible ideas together in a way that makes them sound slick and well-rehearsed, unlike George Bush’s broken, stuttering sentences. In short, Mitt Romney is a cultivated George W. Bush.

One of the first things he said was, “I’ll get rid of the death tax.” At that minute I knew where his priorities lay… Mitt Romney is a multi-millionaire who wants to pass his money to his kids. He repeated this assertion a number of times. Make no bones about it, Mitt Romney is a big-money Republican.

Additionally, Mitt wants to implement the same social security personal retirement accounts as George W. Bush. It really is the same ideas with just slightly prettier and more eloquent packaging.

Update 9/17/2007:
I forgot to include the pictures I took with my crappy cellphone camera. This first one is of the setting before Mitt arrived. It turned out clear, so I thought I’d post it.

This one is of Mitt. Like I said, my cellphone camera sucks.

… But I think I’m allowed one political post. Just read this editorial from The New York Times and realized that it sums up in a few short paragraphs everything that is wrong with the Republican domination of our government right now. I’m a political independent, so don’t think I’m saying Democrats are any better (clearly they are part of the problem as well), but this brief synopsis of what is wrong with our current government goes pretty far in expressing my sentiments:

The Difference Two Years Made

On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory. Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.

That is why things are different this year.

To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House – and for the most part, the Senate – during President Bush’s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil.

Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power. They methodically shut the opposition – and even the more moderate members of their own party – out of any role in the legislative process. Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.

The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.

That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women’s rights.

For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans’ attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don’t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.

An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.

Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.

After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.

In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president’s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush’s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.

This election is indeed about George W. Bush – and the Congressional majority’s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.

There are several good articles in the NYTimes this morning about the direction the U.S. government seems to be heading as regards civil rights and Presidential powers. Here’s an excellent op-ed about a similar situation faced by the Romans:

Excerpt:

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book – the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” – powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant – all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar – the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate – was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.