The United States Postal Service (USPS) is not my friend. I’ve always ended up spending more of my time disappointed in them than satisfied with their performance.
I got a letter from Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA 10th)—nothing interesting, just a boring form letter. Representative Wolf’s office sent the letter on February 4, and USPS apparently processed it the same day. It had been addressed to my old address, so the USPS diligently identified that it needed to be forwarded and slapped a yellow forwarding sticker on it. The sticker had my correct new address, and the date of “2/4/10” up at the top right (the date the sticker was printed and affixed).
Well, I don’t know what happened to it from there. It arrived in my mailbox yesterday—3/26/2010. Yes, that’s more than seven weeks after it was sent . . . locally. It was also pretty crinkled.
Here’s something you might not have expected to find in my home: a retail copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium.
No, I’m not abandoning Mac OS X (or Ubuntu Linux, for that matter). While Windows has not been my primary operating system for a long time, I have pretty much always had a copy of Windows around either on a secondary computer or in virtualization environments. I need it to do cross-platform web site testing, run some mobile emulators that only work in Windows (primarily BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile), and a handful of other ‘occasional’ tasks.
I’ve been running Windows 5.1 (XP) for ages as my pet Windows and, like most of you, I skipped version 6 (Vista) entirely. Now that Microsoft has a stable, functioning version of Windows on the market, XP support is finally starting to fade away. Microsoft has already announced that the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 will not run in XP, and the development kit and emulator for Windows Phone 7 will require Vista or higher too. If I intend to support these platforms (and I do), I need to upgrade.
Plus, I’m getting more and more tech support requests from friends on Vista and 7, so it’s about time that I got more familiar with the newer platform.
In light of the madness that has occurred in the halls of power over the last several years—trillion dollar bailouts, nationalization of the auto and banking industries, a requirement that we buy health insurance whether we want it or not, etc.—I want to remind our officials of the solemn oaths they took upon taking their offices.
How many of our officials (on either side of the aisle) have actually worked to ‘support and defend’ the Constitution lately? You don’t support and defend something by shredding it, and the previous and current administrations seem to have had their Constitutional shredders working a lot of overtime.
The President of the United States, on taking office, promised this:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Members of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives promised this:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Members of the federal judiciary, including Supreme Court justices, promised this:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm), that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me, according to the best of my abilities and understanding, agreeably to the Constitution, and laws of the United States. So help me God.
Hold your representatives accountable. Demand that they do what they swore to do. If they refuse, and many of them will, it is incumbent on you and me to vote them out of office as soon as they are up for reelection . . . before elections, too, become part of the Constitution that the government just ignores when it’s inconvenient.
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a sweeping health care reform bill by a narrow 219-212 majority. This version of the bill was passed by the U.S. Senate in December, and will now proceed to the President’s desk for signature or veto. President Barack Obama (D) is expected to sign the bill.
The House has also passed a reconciliation bill to make changes to the Senate reform plan by a similar 220-211 margin. The reconciliation bill will still need to be considered and approved by the Senate before going to the president for signature or veto.
The health care reform bill is considered to be the largest social program passed by the United States Congress in over forty years, and has been widely criticized by the Republican minority and the general public. Most recent polls indicate that solid majorities of the American public support health care reform, but oppose the specific bills passed by the House tonight.
Contrary to the way it has been couched in the media and elsewhere, the debate going on in Congress tonight is not between ‘pro-health care’ and ‘anti-health care.’ There are a number of accurate and semi-accurate ways of presenting the argument, but that isn’t one of them. People like me who vehemently oppose the plan that will likely pass the House tonight don’t do so because we are ghouls who want children to die, or any of the other things that we are accused of. We do so because we think this plan is horrible and goes about reform in entirely the wrong way.
I concede without significant disagreement that access to health care is a human right. For many years, health care has been one of the few issues where I agree more with the ‘liberals’ than I do with the ‘conservatives.’ But the bill that will probably be heading to the President’s desk tonight is so fundamentally flawed that it will likely do more harm than good, and should be wholly rejected.
There are many reasons for this. First and foremost, I believe in the United States Constitution. Without a Constitutional amendment, health care is not and cannot be a federal issue. If we truly want to make health care available to everybody, it must be done through fifty state-based systems—the same way we have provided public schools to our nation through fifty state-based systems in the absence of an amendment to federalize it. There are a few elements of health care that rightfully fall in the federal purview, but they are things this bill doesn’t even cover! For example, the federal government (under the Interstate Commerce clause) may permit the sale of insurance plans across state lines, which would increase competition and decrease costs.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
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The United States Postal Service (USPS) is not my friend. I’ve always ended up spending more of my time disappointed in them than satisfied with their performance.
