October 19th, 2008
In just three weeks it’ll be time for our listeners to do their civic duty and step up to the polls.
It’s a frustrating time of year for those of us who are politically minded. Turnout at elections is always dismally low, and many of the people who do show up are woefully under-informed about their choices on the ballot. I’m not even talking about those unfortunate people who believe that Senator Obama is a terrorist.
Far too many of the sample ballots and voter information guides mailed out by our county election officials are tossed into the recycling bin, or put into that stack of magazines that you’ll get around to reading tomorrow.
And while I hope that everybody’s aware of the candidates for national office, I know that many of our listeners out there don’t know anything about the candidates for their local school board. Most people simply don’t bother to read the official Voters Guide.
That’s why the Timothy Jordan Show News staff sits down with a case of whiskey each and every election season to read through the entire voters guide cover-to-cover, the full text of each bill, and every candidates’ statement.
The next morning, ink-stained and hungover, we assemble and edit our unfiltered comments from the night before into a radio-safe version of our own easy listening Voters Guide.
Our November 2008 Timothy Jordan Show Voter’s Guide will be spooled out over the next three weeks, first looking at the local county-wide measures and candidates, then to the State-level. Our coverage of the national election will be limited because we don’t feel as if we really need to cover the outcome of the Presidential election following our world-first call of the 2008 Presidential Election for Barak Obama back in February of 2007.
This is the ever-presicent Timothy Jordan Show News for the 19th of October, 2008… now with more electoral power.
If you’re uncertain about your own electoral power, there’s still time to get registered to vote, but not much. The deadline is tomorrow night. You have until midnight tomorrow night to register. County elections officials will be offering voter registration services from 5pm to midnight at the County Building on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz and at City Hall in Watsonville. If you aren’t yet registered, this will be you last chance to do so before the November 4th election.
We’ll start our actual guide this year with the lone county-wide measure.
Measure B applies to residents of unincorporated Santa Cruz County. It would repeal the existing Emergency Response Fee of $1.47 that appears on our land-line telephone bills, and replace it with a communications users tax of the same $1.47 to be applied to all telephone lines that are billed in the unincorporated areas. The bill’s supporters, consisting of nearly all of the County’s emergency response officials, say that Measure B is necessary to provide additional funding for the 911 telephone system.
While this sounds quite reasonable, the Timothy Jordan Show News staff recommends a NO vote on Measure B.
There are two rather large, gaping problems with the Measure. The existing Emergency Response Fee goes directly to fund the county’s 911 operations; but Measure B would replace that fee with a tax that goes into the county’s general fund. While it’s possible that most of the funds raised through this tax will be made available to support 911 operations, there’s nothing in the Measure to ensure this. New tax revenue paid into the general fund from Measure B could be used to pay for any number of projects in the county, projects unrelated to providing what this Measure claims, better 911 service for those of us who live outside of city limits.
In addition, Measure B would extend the communications tax to cellular phones with a billing address in the unincorporated areas of the county. Now I, like many people, don’t mind paying for something that I’m going to use. But like many people living in the unincorporated areas of the county, I don’t actually have cellular service at my billing address. There are no cell phones used at the Fortified Mountain Compound.
This means that if Measure B passes, I’d be paying a communications tax on a phone that I can’t use to communicate in my part of the county. Granted, a $1.47 isn’t a lot of money, but I’d like to be ensured some kind of benefit for my contribution to the General Fund, and Measure B doesn’t do that.
•Measure B information, via Santa Cruz County Elections
We’ll look to local candidates next week, and as always, a full Voters Guide written up and posted at timothyjordan show *dot* com.
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This is my moment to say whoo-hooo… and yay for the Sunday evening broadcast time, because earlier this morning former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Senator Obama for President. While nice for his opposition, it represents a stunning defeat for the hopes of the McCain campaign.
Officials from both campaigns have been courting Powell and his friends, and rumors of a decision on the endorsement began circulating weeks ago. Once a leading figure in the Republican Party with broad-based support from political independents, Powell was often suggested as a presidential candidate himself.
Even following the aftermath of his now infamous appearance before the UN Security Council during the run-up to invasion of Iraq, Powell retained the respect of many people on both sides of the political spectrum. His departure from the Bush Administration in 2004, reportedly over long-standing disagreements with the President over U.S. foreign policy, marked him as an outsider in the Republican party and restored some of his earlier public standing.
It was this outsider status in his party that made Powell’s support crucial for the McCain campaign. Self-styled maverick McCain desperately needs to expand his appeal to independent moderates. Powell could have both delivered those moderates and shown a kind of stable independence from the Bush Administration’s policies.
Instead he told reporters this morning that McCain would, “… essentially execute the Republican agenda, the orthodoxy of the Republican agenda… with a new face. And I think that he’d be quite good at it, but we need more than that. We need a generational change.”
• full transcript of Powell’s appearance on Meet the Press
• via CNN, Powell speaks to reporters following his endorsement
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Next up, a return to the coming election with our look at some of the State Propositions.
We’ll begin, naturally, with Prop. 1A, the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act.
With a name like that, they could have only broadened the appeal by offering blowjobs, the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train and Blowjobs Act.
Unfortunately there’s nothing about oral pleasure in the bill, but we’re still going to recommend a YES vote on Proposition 1A.
If passed, the 9.95 billion-dollar bond would fund construction of a high-speed rail line between the Transbay terminal in San Francisco, Union Station in Los Angeles, up to Sacramento and dozens of cites in between them.
Their goal is to provide non-stop passenger service from San Francisco to Los Angeles in no more than 2 hours and 40 minutes on electric-powered trains moving at least 200mph, where conditions permit. Travel time between San Francisco and San Jose would be less than a half hour.
Opponents of the Proposition cite the cost as their main complaint. We at the Timothy Jordan Show consider this an extremely short-sighted view. The Proposition is about expanding our state’s infrastructure, bringing rail service between our largest cities up to international standards. Nearly a billion dollars from the bond would be allocated to fund the extension of local train and mass transit services and allow interconnection with high-speed rail stations.
The system’s construction would create thousands of jobs in a time when we need to boost the economy. But what got us most excited about Prop 1A was realizing just how much a working high-speed train system would change the map for people who commute into the Bay Area, Sacramento, or Los Angeles from bedroom communities.
Think about all of those people who spend hours in their cars each day traveling between the places where they work, and the places they can afford to live. The distance between Stockton and San Jose gets a lot smaller when you’re moving at 220mph.
It would literally change the map, and that’s a good thing. We’re recommending a YES vote on Proposition 1A.
• Prop 1A on the State Voters guide
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We’ll consider the rest of the Propositions in the coming weeks, but we also have to cover our regular stories as well.
One of the most consistently ignored stories in the national press has been the ongoing fight over our government’s warrantless wiretapping program.
We hung our heads in shame earlier this year when the Democratic leadership in Congress and our next President voted in favor of a compromise bill that legalized and institutionalized the clearly illegal warrantless wiretapping program, while also immunizing the dozens of companies that participated.
That retroactive immunization meant that the nearly forty lawsuits pending against the government and the country’s major telecommunications companies in a San Francisco Federal Court were null and void.
One of the major plaintiffs in those cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, responded this week with a new lawsuit targeting the new Congressional authorization of the wiretapping program. They charge that the FISA Amendments Act is unconstitutional in four main areas.
First, they say that Congress broke the law by making it impossible for a judge to review and provide legal relief for people who believe that their 1st and 4th Amendment rights have been violated.
They add that Congress violated the Separation of Powers by giving the Executive Branch an ability to summarily dismiss wiretapping lawsuits and prevent discovery by the courts.
The case also argues that the constitutional right to Due Process by excluding the courts from having a meaningful role in opposing government action.
And finally they charge that the changes to FISA allow an Attorney General to keep his certifications of wiretaps, and any evidence to support those certifications, secret and completely hidden from an open courtroom. The law actually allows the censorship of court documents by the Attorney General’s office to prevent disclosure of certifications and evidence.
This, the EFF, says, is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment and Article III of the Constitution by not only preventing the open disclosure of evidence in a civil courtroom, but also by removing the ability of the judicial system, granted in Article III, to determine if there’s a legitimate interest in keeping any evidence private.
They’re essentially saying that Congress pissed on the Constitution when it buckled under pressure from the telecoms and Republican leaders.
I think that’s a fair assessment. The case will go before the desk of Judge Vaughn Walker, who’s been overseeing all of the pending wiretapping cases, on the 2nd of December. We’ll bring you more then.
• EFF motion “RE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY TELECOMMUNICATIONS RECORDS LITIGATION, MDL No. 1791) ” PDF
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We’ll bring you excellence right now. Like… now.
This, as a general rule, isn’t a crowd in the studio that handles arbitrary authority very well. Things like the sham that is airport security cause us no end of frustration. I mean, it was one thing when I couldn’t carry my pocket knife anymore, but toothpaste and pudding cups?
It is a sham, providing only the illusion of security. The country’s most recognized expert in the field, Bruce Schneier, calls it “security theater.”
He met with our winner this week, a writer for the Atlantic, Jeffery Goldberg, to talk about the problems with airport security. Then Mr. Goldberg, armed with this information, set out to get himself arrested at an airport.
He printed fake boarding passes, upgraded himself to First Class to skip security lines, carried a collection of banned items like box cutters right through checkpoints, acted strangely in airport bathrooms, worked himself up to a nervous sweat in the presence of TSA officers, and sported an array of Hezbollah flags, bin Laden t-shirts, and an inflatable Yassar Arafat in his carry-on bag.
In an article published in next month’s issue of The Atlantic Monthly Mr. Goldberg describes how he was able to make himself as conspicuous as possible and still carry 80 ounces of fluid through security lines by wearing a Beerbelly device more commonly used to smuggle beer into sporting events. He passed a full secondary inspection at O’Hare International while wearing the Beerbelly.
Even using a fake boarding pass, wearing a heavy coat in the middle summer, over an Osama bin Laden t-shirt, acting nervously, sweating profusely, he was able to get through security without even showing an ID, telling the officer that he’d lost his driver’s license, but really needed to get to Washington D.C.
The officer let him through.
And for that, Jeffery Goldberg is this week’s winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
• via The Atlantic, “The Things He Carried”
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That’s the News for the 19th of October, 2008. If you haven’t registered to vote, your deadline is tomorrow; and if you don’t know how to vote, our full list of recommendations will be posted in one week at timothyjordanshow *dot* com.