Are you serious?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AJCdxIyPDI&feature=related
Now I’m not trying to be a “hater” here, but man, the criteria for who gets a parade here in the U.S. seems a little bit off to me.

I saw this fly under the radar about a week ago. After nine years of war, and a hell of a lot more sacrifice than throwing a ball around for an hour and a half, Iraqi war vets got a parade from the City of St. Louis, MO.  St. Louis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ-5SwQmSpg&feature=related

These guys in St. Louis were pretty passionate about what was going on.  I love the old For the People theme music in that last video.  Again, a hell of a lot of effort and it barely breaks a hundred plus views on Youtube.

Why not a ticker tape parade in the Big Apple for our real heroes?  What about it, Bloomberg?

“think a parade would be premature while we still have so many troops in harm’s way around the world.”

What?  Premature?  I thought we were done?  Premature like this:

We’ve forgotten all about that.  C’mon Bloomberg, grow a pair and give the heroes a “parade to remember”.

“Big Blue gave us a game to remember, and on Tuesday we’re going to give them a parade to remember,” said Mayor Bloomberg.

http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleFriendlyLTN.jsp?id=1202539614010

So say we all:

http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-part/constitutional-law/when-machines-are-watching:-how-warrantless-use-of-gps-surveillance-technology-violates-the-fourth-amendment-right-against-unreasonable-searches/

Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo.

Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo.

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Excerpts:

-”So, guided by the brilliant Madison, our federal system was abolished and a new national one was created, under a Constitution that granted national powers “far beyond those exercised by the British Parliament,” including the power, without consent of the state legislatures, “to levy money directly upon the people themselves.”

None of this sits well with today’s descendants of 18th century opponents to ratification of that Constitution. Without exception, they would have voted “NO” with their reactionary predecessors. Think of those who have suggested secession, would nullify U.S. law, argue for their own coinage, loathe every national enterprise and its “socialist, central planning,” would in fact see Washington defer to the states.

Then think of Madison’s observations in his Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: “Too much stress was laid on the rank of the States as political societies,” he said, warning that for an egalitarian nation to defer to state authority, sanctioned merely by the accidents of geography, would eventuate in inequalities. Today, there is sad and ample proof that he was right, from inequalities in education and health care to taxes and minority rights.”

-”Madison’s voice was not the only one arguing for “centralized planning” and reduced states rights. Elbridge Gerry asserted in convention, “We never were independent states, were not such now, & never could be even on the principles of the Confederation. The states & the advocates for them were intoxicated with the idea of their sovereignty.”

Alexander Hamilton… saw through the specious anti-constitutionalists’ argument that renouncing state sovereignty is to give up liberty: “It is a contest for power, not for liberty.”’

-”This is not without its irony, since those same opponents to the Constitution with its pre-eminent power, granted and sustained by the people directly without state intercession, endlessly praise it and plead that we “get back to it.”

Indeed, do let us get back to it.”

Them’s fightin’ words for the modern conservative.  Thoughts?

After a long slog, 10th West is opening to the public.  We’ll talk about “phase two,” which begins next year, and what the new road will mean for traffic in Logan.

A look at Utah’s highest paid city employees.

Every election cycle some group (in 2008, it was “Third Way) wants to just see more play dates and bipartisanship in our politics.  If everyone gets along, everything will be much better!  These organizations are there to be mocked and shunned.  Usually.  Ezra Klein, writing at Bloomberg on Mike Bloomberg’s “No Labels” says this group will surprise you.  They have some actual suggestions, like bringing back the real filibuster, up-or-down vote on nominee’s after 90 days, and more.  Should we be taking these guys more seriously?  Read: No Labels Stops Whining and Offers Real Agenda.

FTP Quickfire at 5.  3 talking heads + 90 seconds per headline = enough news to choke a camel.

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4-5: Former Logan mayor Doug Thompson will be joining me as a guest host today and in the first hour we will talk with his son Marshall Thompson, an Iraq War veteran, about the official end of the war. What can be learned from our adventure in Iraq and can anything positive result?

5-6: In the second hour we will be joined by Bracken Longhurst for an in-depth discussion of health care policy in the U.S. Bracken recently published a paper in the Nevada Law review on the possibilities of Health Care Exchanges as an amendment or replacement for Obamacare. From the abstract of Bracken’s paper:

“Health care exchanges would combine a health insurance exchange with a similar health provider exchange and reward consumers that focus on value. Exchanges would fix the health care system and deliver the major commitments and goals of proponents and opponents of PPACA, namely: 1) lower overall health care costs; 2) lower health insurance premiums; 3) increase the number of people covered by adequate health insurance; 4) remove the pre-existing conditions barrier to adequate health insurance for nearly all individuals; and 5) allow individuals to keep the doctor and health insurance plan of their choice. ”

Doug will provide his expert analysis as former executive director of the Logan Regional Hospital Foundation. I will mostly take notes.

It’s a solid day of policy on this holiday week edition of For The People!

Programming note: we will push FTP Quickfire to tomorrow when Jason and Jonathan will rejoin me in studio.

This week Washington Post’s Ezra Klein linked to a graph from a Gallup poll showing an increase since the 1980′s in Americans’ fear of “big government,” save a noticeable dip after 9/11.  It reminded me of a book I had read by author David Sirota, Back to Our Future: How the 80′s Explain the World We Live In Now.  Some examples from the book:

1. Ghostbusters (1984): Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddmore seem like happy-go-lucky guys, but these are cold, hard military contractors. Between evading the Environmental Protection Agency, charging exorbitant rates for apparition captures, and summoning a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the merry band shows a Zoul-haunted New York that their for-profit services are far more reliable than those of the Big Apple’s wholly inept government. At the same time, the Ghostbusters were providing 1980s audiences with a cinematic version of what would later become the very real Blackwater–and what would be the anti-government, privatize-everything narrative of the twenty-first century.

2. Die Hard (1988): Though the 1980s was setting the stage for the rise of anti-government politics today, it was also creating the Palin-esque “rogue” to conveniently explain the good things government undeniably accomplishes. Hitting the silver screen just a few years after Ollie North’s rogue triumphalism, John McClane became the ’80s most famous of this “rogue” archetype–a government employee who becomes a hero specifically by defying his police superiors and rescuing hostages from the twin threat of terrorism and his boss’s bureaucratic clumsiness. This message is so clear in Die Hard, that in one memorable scene, McClane is yelling at one police lieutenant that the government has become “part of the problem.” Die Hard, like almost every national politician today, says government can only work if it gets out of the way of the rogues, mavericks, and rule-breakers within its own midst.

Rep. Ron Paul gets history wrong

On Sunday an op ed by Presidential candidate Ron Paul appeared in the Deseret News.  The topic was familiar as the headline read, “Utah needs to protect state and local authority, decentralize government”.  For the record let me state that I absolutely agree with Dr. Paul on several of these key points.  The structure of federalism in our country is profoundly out of balance.  Federal overreach into nearly every facet of our everyday lives is oppressive and a very real threat to individual liberty in 21st century America.  Some level of push-back from the states is appropriate in both political and historical contexts.

But I do not believe the case for protection of states’ rights is bolstered by the re-writing of history.  In the opening lines of his op ed Dr. Paul perpetuates one of the great historical myths of modern conservatism. “Our Founding Fathers understood the dangers of a massive and intrusive federal government.

That’s why they gave us the U.S. Constitution — establishing a very limited, decentralized government to provide for national defense and little else.”  This is, quite simply, a direct inversion of the historical realities that led to the convening of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  Ignore, for a minute the preposterous idea that America’s Founding Fathers “understood” any single issue of government with a unanimous mind and turn your attention to the idea that the U.S. Constitution was somehow drafted to limit the powers of the federal government and decentralize that power on behalf of the states.  This is a modern conservative talking point that has been repeated so often it is now accepted by many as fact.  On the contrary however, the federal Constitution was drafted to establish a powerful centralized government.

When James Madison entered the Philadelphia Convention in June of 1787 he did so with a revolutionary plan to free the Union from its dependence on the states.  Enjoying near autonomy in their loose association under the Articles of Confederation, it was the failure of the states to unanimously approve needed amendments to those Articles, to meet the financial requisites of Congress (this had been a problem since several states refused approval for funding for Washington’s army in the Revolutionary War), and their failure to abide by the provisions of the Treaty of Paris which ended the War that these called into account the fundamental premise of the Confederation: that states would exercise their sovereign powers in good faith to fulfill rather than frustrate essential national interests.

Madison and most of the other delegates attending the Convention came to Philadelphia with a determination to secure a vibrant and powerful Federal government capable of properly subduing these destructive tendencies in the states.  (Most who thought like Dr. Paul does today about local and state governments purposefully ignored the federal convention in Philadelphia as they considered the idea of a powerful federal government both dangerous and a betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution…sound familiar?)  In fact, the key to  Madison’s plan was a Congressional veto of an any state law deemed in opposition to the national interest!  Delegates from the South balked at this idea and eventually Madison was forced to settle for the “supremacy clause” in Article VI, a compromise he feared would prove a weak and ineffectual check on the influence of unruly state legislatures.

Writing to Thomas Jefferson who was serving as U.S. Ambassador to France during 1787, Madison gave his observations on the reasons for calling the Convention.  “The evils issuing from the states contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention…than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects” (Madison to Jefferson; October 24, 1787).
Nowhere in his notes on the Convention do we find the rants against centralized authority that would characterize Madison’s writings in the partisan wars of the 1790s and Tea Party rallies of 2010.  In fact those arguments were made forcefully in 1789 by the opponents of the Constitution.

The history is clear that the impetus for the urgency behind the drafting of the Constitution was the “evils issuing from the states” and the threat those evils posed to the very survival of the Union.
Again, I don’t mind Dr. Paul’s calls for a new emphasis on reclaiming local government in the digital age, but an attempt to claim the philosophical and political high ground by flipping the historical record on its head seems at the very least, unhelpful, and at the most dishonest and destructive.

(It should be noted, interestingly, that Madison’s political thought at this time (1786-1789) stands in stark contrast to his thinking both before and after the Constitutional period.)

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor.  We’ll invite listeners to call with their stories, and discuss the impact we still feel from that day, as well as how WWII influenced our foreign policy and how that compares to what our presidential hopefuls are advocating now.  We’ll also point listeners to some of the best Pearl Harbor remembrance going on.

Cache Valley’s Sub for Santa chapter needs your help.  Craig Hislop sits down with Sub for Santa reps to find out how you can give it.

FTP Quickfire at 5.  90 seconds per headline and a buzzer.  More news than should be legal!

Sen. Lyle Hillyard made some comments on Crosstalk with Jennie Christensen Tuesday that hint at a very different caucus night in 2012 than the 2010 tea party takeover many feel was the night Fmr. Sen. Bennett lost his seat.  Are we about to see a tea party vs. establishment battle for the Utah GOP?  If so, who are you rooting for?

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Podcasts of this and previous shows are available here.

Sutherland Institute president Paul Mero is talking government spending and spending caps in this week’s Mero Moment.  As a primer before we open the phone lines, you can see where Sutherland is coming from here:

When we rely on the economy nearly 100 percent to drive government spending, government often becomes overextended in the good years, and then is forced in the bad years to either increase taxes or to make significant and painful budget cuts. For example, one small Utah town had to cut its police protection in half, some school districts in Utah permanently raised taxes – property taxes – to fill temporary budget gaps or increase class sizes. Some disabled Utahns in sometimes very difficult and dire circumstances have their government health care services put at risk. And it’s not that these are the best health care policies per se or the best educational policies; it’s just that we had a budget issue, and we had to close that gap.

Agree?  Weigh in today at 4pm.

A group of local artists surprised Black Friday shoppers with a flash mob to promote the Utah Festival Chorus (video here).  We’ll talk to flash mob organizer Loralee Choate, as well as PR/social media guru Preston Parker about how creative promotion is not only something anyone can do but also the future of marketing.

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Podcasts of this and previous shows are available here.

Will Romney’s faith be an obstacle to his support from the GOP base after all?  He can’t break the 24% approval ceiling with registered Republicans, and Newt has assumed the front-runner status this week.  Many have said in the end electability will get even the most hesitant evangelical conservatives to hold their nose and support him.  Slate, in their new election ’12 series, says some data show that might not be the case in “The Search for the Mormon Haters.”

Utah lawmakers are expecting an additional $400 million in the 2012 budget cycle.  While this is a good sign, they’re quick to remind this is not a surplus, just unexpected.  So what can that additional revenue go toward restoring after two years of aggressive cuts?

“Low information voters” and political press.

Herman Cain has suspended his book tour campaign for the White House.  Where do his votes go, and why was he even here?  And who will make us laugh now?

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To keep things fun, we’re launching a “who’s music device?” challenge (can’t say iPod, we’ll get spammed) for listeners.  Andy will explain the rules.

When can tax hikes save you money?  Salt Lake County illustrates.  We take your calls.

Industrial espionage is still a crime, and it’s happened right here in Cache Valley.

A local organization has filed a GRAMA request for documents showing total expenses for the state defend Congressional candidate and state Rep. Stephen Sandstrom’s “enforcement only” immigration bills.

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Technology is changing the way we fight wars and the way we think of them.  But where is it all headed?

On the same theme, author Charles Kurzman argues in his book Missing Martyrs that terrorist groups have never posed a real threat to America, or any nation.  We’ll break down his argument and ask listeners to weigh in.  Has America basically over-reacted for a decade?

Do Mormons and Progressives share than Utah’s red-state status realizes?  And what does this mean for Romney if he gets the nomination?

Like many other American churches, they organized programs designed to take on the social problems of their age: a Young Men’s and Young Women’s Improvement Association; a primary school for young children; a Sunday school—among others. Though participation was voluntary, these associations reached far in the 1910s, and today it is assumed that members of the church will participate in all such organizations for which she or he is eligible. By the time of the Great Depression, the Mormons had erected the Church Welfare Program, a charity system that encouraged recipients to offer labor in return for donations and cultivate habits of thrift and industry.

Even though he hasn’t announced yet, State Senator Dan Liljenquist is drawing a few shots from Sen. Orrin Hatch over health care.

And speaking of Hatch, he’s co-sponsoring this.  We’re angry.

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435-753-5868 or 1-800-369-5868. Your calls are welcome.

Podcasts of this and previous shows are available here.