A Guide to the Democratic Candidates

Now that the first Democratic debates are over, I'm certain that we've all learned a little something about each candidate. Currently, there are 25 confirmed presidential hopefuls, vying for an opportunity to trade insults with Trump. As I eagerly watched the debates, I was keenly focused on who had the best plans for the future of our nation.

While I occasionally write "pro Trump" pieces as described by my family and the few friends I have left, I'm actually a registered Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama. I was vehemently against the investigation and subsequent impeachment of President Clinton for lying about the cigar box he had in the oval office. Back then, my father argued that the president should be a moral pillar for the country while I was more practical. I was relieved that the guy with his finger on the nuclear button had the same finger in a pie. It was years later that I learned President Clinton actually lost the nuclear codes for months. I was just as much against special counselor Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump as I was opposed to Kenneth Star's investigation of Clinton. Using taxpayer funds to unleash a team of lawyers to look into anyone's background is just not a fair game. With enough money and time, twenty lawyers could likely unearth mud on the Virgin Mary.

Since I always vote in the primary, I need to know something about all these candidates. Some would have more success with a gun shop in Lancaster County than ever becoming president. So I'm focusing on just a few of the contenders for the 2020 Presidential Election.

Joe Biden

As the leader in the polls, Biden has a target squarely on his back. A former vice president and senator from Delaware, Biden stands out as a centrist except for how he behaves in picture opportunities with the wives and daughters of his colleagues. He has a long history of public service swaying moderate Republicans and independents as well as staunch bigots. At 76 years of age, some say he should heed his own words to "pass the torch." Biden has declared that he's "still holding onto that torch," but his outdated tactics of making young girls "feel comfortable" by trying to bury his head in their hair and kiss them gives me some good ideas where he can insert that torch. The video he put out mansplains that he believes governing is "about connecting with people." President Trump connected with a lot of women too, especially over furniture shopping.

To illustrate how ancient Biden's thinking is, he declared that as president, he'll "cure cancer." Back in the '70's, people used to think that all cancer was the same, and a single cure was possible. Today, we know that's just not the case. I think Joe Biden's expiration date has long passed.

Bernie Sanders

Sanders is the socialist senator from Vermont who owns three houses. Born in Brooklyn, he wants public college tuition to be paid for by taxpayers, which means we will all be complicit to the collective bad choices of millennials selecting useless majors. I wouldn't pay for my kid to get a degree in anthropology. Why should I pay for yours? Bernie also wants Medicare for all even though when they tried to do this in Vermont, the governor scrapped the idea because it was too costly and more complicated than setting up a Starbucks on Mars. At least Bernie admitted he would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for all of his bold, socialist ideas. He can be forceful and argumentative, but he seemed to fade in the latter half of the debate as the event pushed past his bedtime.

Elizabeth Warren

A senator from Massachusetts, Warren is a sometimes Native American, although she posted to her website a cringeworthy video femsplaining that she never benefitted from her phony minority status. Being from Tax-achusetts, most of her plans are going to be paid by a "wealth tax" levied against the handful of Americans making over $50 million and a special tax on the three people who made over a billion. Look out Kylie Jenner. Elizabeth Warren is coming for you.

Marianna Williamson

Best selling author of spiritual self help books and advisor to Oprah, Williamson lost her bid in 2014 for a congressional seat in California. She promotes racial reconciliation through reparations and a more humane immigration policy. She wants the government to pay $10 billion a year for ten years to African Americans. When asked what the first thing she would do if elected, she answered,

"My first call is to the prime minister of New Zealand, who said her goal was to make New Zealand the place where it’s the best place in the world for a child to grow up. And I will tell her, 'Girlfriend, you are so on.' Because the United States of America is going to be the best place in the world for a child to grow up."

I'm glad that at least one candidate has a foreign policy that reigns in those pesky kiwis.

Kamala Harris
 
A former prosecutor in California, Harris most recently was the states attorney general before she was elected to the US Senate. She is known for the Lift Act, a middle class tax break similar to the Earned Income Credit (EIC), which is tax relief for people who don't actually pay taxes. Harris had the big moment in the debate when she went after Joe Biden for boasting about his past work with his racist colleagues as well as his stance against busing early in his career. She said,
 
"There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.”
 
Before we declare busing a success, let's find out what happened to the kid Harris bumped so she could go to a different school.

Cory Booker
 
Hailing from the nation's armpit, New Jersey, Booker is a junior senator who graduated from Stamford, Oxford and Yale and is a Rhodes scholar. He's known for the "baby bond" program giving every child a US Treasury bond at birth with larger sums going to poorer kids. He's also known for a deer in the headlights stare during the debates when Beto O'Rourke started speaking Spanish. I think he was trying to recall the Spanish word for "handout." Either way, the internet got another viral meme out of it.

Julián Castro

Castro grew up a poor kid from San Antonio, but managed to graduate from Stanford and Harvard. He worked as the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary in the Obama Administration. He is a strong supporter of free trade. During the debate, Castro was asked whether his healthcare plan would cover abortion. He said,

“Yes, it would. I don’t believe only in reproductive freedom. I believe in reproductive justice.”

He should have stopped there upon a safe Democratic talking point. Instead he added,

"And, you know, what that means is that just because a woman — or let’s also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female — is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the right to exercise that right to choose. And so I absolutely would cover the right to have an abortion.”

Finally, a liberal cause with a manageable cost, abortions for people with no uteruses.

Andrew Yang

The former tech entrepreneur promotes only one issue, protecting Americans from robots stealing their jobs. Yang proposes giving everyone over 18 years of age $1000 a month to help pay bills after they lose their job to a robot. That comes to $3.2 trillion dollars a year. He would pay for it by a value added tax that would result in a "trickle up" economy as people spent their free government scratch. Seems to me that the smart thing to do is to take the $1000 a month and enroll in robot repairman school.

During the debate, there were other one liners worth mentioning like when Tulsi Gabbard, US Representative from Hawaii, corrected Ohio Congressman, Tim Ryan, who said that the Taliban flew planes into our buildings, by saying,

"The Taliban didn’t attack us on 9/11, al Qaeda did."

Just like an American to pile everyone into the same basket of deplorables.

When co-moderator Savannah Guthrie said, "This is a show of hands question and hold them up so people can see. Raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants."

Ten candidates raised their hands including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson.

Yesterday, I saw a bumper sticker which pretty much sums it up.

 

A Free Society

The Slants

The boy band, The Slants, recently won a landmark case in the Supreme Court reaffirming their fundamental rights granted by the First Amendment. For eight years, the Portland based rock group has been trying to trademark their band name which was ruled a racial slur by the Patent and Trademark Office, in accordance with the 1946 Lanham Act which prevents trademarking "scandalous, immoral or disparaging" language. The odd part in this saga is that the word "slant"  has been trademarked millions of times. The reason the band couldn't use the word was because they were Asian.

Band founder, Simon Tam, chose the name to usurp a derogatory word for Asians in attempts to change the meaning like the colonists did with the song, Yankee Doodle. British troops sang the tune to disparage American soldiers as macaronies, which were men who dressed fashionably and spoke in an effeminate manner in an attempt to appear noble. The colonists took the song as their own and sang it with pride, turning the tables on dandy shaming. In fact, the tune is the Connecticut state song.

Some people feel institutions have a responsibility to provide protections against hate speech while others think that the government should not censure any language. The Washington Redskins have been battling groups, opposed to their name, logo and mascot, who feel the label denigrates Native Americans. A recent poll by the Washington Post indicated that nine out of ten Native Americans are not offended by the football team's name. The results mirrored the same conclusions obtained in a 2004 poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Institutionalized censorship is most widespread in public schools which often site the safety of the students as justification. The courts feel that minors are not capable of absorbing differing opinions so they censure students across the board. Recently, the valedictorian of a high school in Pennsylvania, Peter Butera, was stifled during his commencement speech when he got off script. Butera said,

"Despite some of the outstanding people in our school, a lack of real student government combined with the authoritative attitude that a few teachers, administrators and board members have prevented students from truly developing as true leaders."

Butera's microphone was shut off, cutting short his speech. This was not censorship rooted in safety. It was suppression based on disagreement. According to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, forty percent of millennials believe that offensive speech about minorities should be prevented by law. The First Amendment specifically protects speech that people might find offensive. It's not the job of the government to protect us from what we might not want to hear or see. This is why Saint Patrick Day Parades are forced to admit a Gay Pride or a Nazi themed float. It's up to us to decide how we will react to the words we hear and the images we see, not the government.

Recently, the attorney general of California blocked state funded travel to Kentucky, Texas, Alabama and South Dakota in response to what he considers laws enacted in each state that he feels disparage LGBT groups. There are many exceptions to the ban, mainly affecting "non essential travel." One person in the California government is deciding that all state workers will be denied funding for their "boondoggle" out of office trip to Texas. This in California, a state that voted against gay marriage in 2008 on a state wide referendum known as Proposition 8.

We're seemingly always at a divide in this country. Political parties will never find common ground due to diametrically opposing fundamentals. The left believes the rich should pay more taxes. They say that the "one percenters" need to fork over their "fair share," implying that these people are somehow avoiding income tax. Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance for the University of Michigan, siting 2010 IRS data, stated,

 "The top 1% of taxpayers pay almost as much in federal income tax as the entire bottom 95%, and half of that bottom group paid no taxes at all."

Upwards to 40% of tax payers get more money back from the government than they pay in through the Earned Income Credit (EIC) program. The rich who are avoiding taxes are the 0.01 percenters, that is, Warren Buffet and Mitt Romney, who realize most of their income as capitol gains which is taxed at far lower rates.

The right believes in smaller government with less regulations except when it comes to what consenting adults do in their bedroom or women do with their bodies. They believe the government should let market forces guide corporations even though in the past children worked in factories six days a week, companies broke up strikes with armed mercenaries, offered no sick nor vacation time, and often provided places of work that were so dangerous that worker died on a regular basis.

What we need is a new political philosophy not rooted in either party, but one based on the Constitution. While the cornerstone of our system of government is the First Amendment, the foundation is based on freedom. My political philosophy is,

A free society is a permissible society.

Any time legislation is purposed to restrict behavior, it should be rejected on the basis that a free society is an unfettered society. The government allowing abortion is not supporting killing unborn children. It's supporting freedom of choice. The job of preventing abortions should be left to religious organizations and activists. Access to guns should not be restricted. Reducing the clip size of a weapon supports the notion that a few deaths is better than many. If someone kills people with a screwdriver, should we ban that too? What we need is real commitment to paying for sound mental health in this country instead of letting HMOs criminalize psychological disorders because it's cheaper for them to let the prison system deal with the mentally ill.

Politicians often seek binary issues like flag burning to help bifurcate the vote. If we adopt a stance that most of what our legislators are debating about is none of their business, maybe the country can move onto more important and difficult issues. For example, same sex marriage provides a means to clarify the law and in a free society, what people do with whom is essentially none of the government's business. Local governments tie revenue to property taxes vesting them in the upkeep of your property. This has resulted in town statutes concerning lawn mowing and house repair. Fundamentally, this has removed your right to maintain your property to your own standard. A free society should not evaluate restrictions based on utilitarian aspects, but instead allow you to do what you choose. You think the house you live in is yours. Try not cutting your lawn and see what happens.

Some countries allow drug use and prostitution, but these governments don't promote these activities. Instead, they allow them while making them inconvenient to access. We should do the same with cigarettes. It shouldn't be illegal to smoke, just illegal to profit from the sale of cigarettes. If you want to smoke, you would have to join a farmer's co-op that grew tobacco and manufactured cigarettes for its members. By making cigarette's available, but inconvenient, the number of new smokers would be dramatically curtailed. The tobacco companies would never let this happen. They have too much money and power to let anything disrupt their business model.

The attorney general in California has no business refusing funds to state workers traveling to places that he perceives as unfriendly to a particular community. Not only is this not a law, it is likely that most Californians would not support this overreaching advocacy policy if it was put on referendum. This should never happen in a free society.

Sometimes, I hear people talk about liberty as if it's something tangible as in,

 "We have a lot of freedoms here."

In general, we enjoy freedom of movement, although Arizona inland border patrol are stopping people at the state border and asking them if they are citizens. Such immigration checkpoints depend heavily on people not understanding their basic constitutional rights. Most of our "freedoms" are being quietly eroded by restrictive legislation established by overreaching government entities. It's not the job of the government to protect ourselves from ourselves. In 1961 during his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy famously said,

"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

Today, with celebrities talking about blowing up the White House and assassinating the president, we should say,

"Ask not what you should do to the government. Ask what the government should not do to you."