Has evolution stopped?

Had a thought this morning. Has the process of human evolution simply stopped? Have we reached perfection? Why are there no evolved examples of humans with, say, a third or fourth arm? There have been many, many times I thought having a third arm would come in very handy. How about a third eye, maybe in the back of the head? Or a pair back there, for stereoscopic vision with depth perception? How about a hearing membrane on the back of a hand, to make it easier and cleaner to hear somebody trying to whisper something to me? It just seems that, over the entire course of human evolutionary history, there should be some examples of at least one handy adaptation or another carried down via reproduction (the normal kind).

The Reelect Principle

I have created what I am calling The Reelect Principle. It conveys the single most important principle that will guide my voting from now on, and that I hope will help guide every American's voting for every office at every level of government beginning in 2012:

"I will not reelect anyone who has failed to prove in their current term that they will govern within the constraints of the Declaration and the Constitution in their next term."

That is a little too long for Twitter, so a shortened version suitable for Twitter is:

"I will not reelect one who fails to prove they will govern within the constraints of the Declaration and Constitution in their next term."

I believe this conveys in a pithy fashion what must become the single overriding guideline in voting to bring our country back from the brink of the abyss we find ourselves on - will we continue the dream established by our Founders, or will we descend into the status of a "normal", no longer exceptional benevolent, semi-socialist state?

Will we allow ourselves to be fooled again?

Will we? I sure hope not. In 2007-2008, Obama ran as a moderate centrist. Way too many people believed him, only to find they had elected the most radical left-leaning president in at least our modern history, if not our entire history.

We saw how he governed in 2009-2010, when he had an almost unstoppable congressional majority at his beck and call. Now he is again giving the appearance of tacking to the right, while simultaneously waging a regulatory war against America and capitalism.

His outward, in-words-only move to the center is happening not because he believes that the center is correct, but in order to lull us to sleep again long enough to reelect him. Imagine how he will govern when he doesn't have to worry about reelection. All he is showing us is that he is willing to give up 2 years of appearing to support his real agenda (while not actually giving up anything) to gain an additional four, completely unaccountable years to finish his destruction of the America he "loves" (NOT).

I really hope the people are not fooled by this blatant attempt to play us for fools just one more time.

The Fallacies of the Tax "Cut" Arguments

A couple of thoughts.

A lot of the talk about whether or not to extend the Bush tax cuts includes words like "will cost $700 billion over 10 years" and "will increase the deficit by n dollars", and "are not paid for".

All of these lines of thought must be based on a premise that the money is the government's to start with, so rather than a perspective of allowing people to keep more of what they earn, they like to paint this as a "cost" to the government. By that logic, any tax rate less than 100% represents a "cost" to the government, and increases the deficit by the amount that is not being confiscated by the government. This is a very, very dangerous way to view taxes.

It is also true that talking about extending the Bush tax cuts as tax cuts at all, trying to portray the extension of the current rates as "the Obama tax cuts", for instance, is the same as claiming that not raising your taxes to 100% represents a tax 'cut' by the amount of the difference between your current rate and 100%.

Many Democrats do not view the money you earn by working as 'yours'. They view it as theirs, except for the portion they graciously allow you to keep (and they view whatever they allow you to keep as a 'cost' to them), and they believe they should be able to 'adjust' that portion you are allowed to keep at any time, and in any amount according to their perception of 'fairness'.

Our founding fathers would have viewed the current tax scheme as theft of private property - because the sweat of your brow, the money you earn, is YOUR private property, which is protected by the Constitution. But many Democrats do not give the Constitution more than a passing thought, and if they do at all, the thought is along the lines of "Does it matter? Nah, it doesn't."

The Abomination of the "National Popular Vote" movement

This is almost beyond my ability to believe, but 6 states have so far adopted the "National Popular Vote" bill.

The intent of this bill is do effectively do away with the Electoral College system by negating it. The provision is that every state that adopts this bill agrees to give up its sovereignty in presidential elections as soon as enough states to equal 270 electoral college votes have adopted the measure.

The bill actually provides that, upon activation, all of the adopting state's electoral college votes will be awarded to the presidential candidate who gets the most total votes across the country. This means that a state's population could well have given the majority of their votes to one candidate, but have their votes rendered null and void because a different candidate won the popular, nationwide vote, causing all of that state's electoral college votes to be given to that other candidate. Taken to an extreme, even if 100% of the citizens of a state voted for candidate A, the state could be required to support candidate B and put him/her in office over the objections of every voter in the state.

How anybody of good faith could support this bill is quite beyond my ability to comprehend. But, maybe, that is the issue, and the people who have put this in place in Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington are NOT people of good faith, but something else entirely.

Let us hope that the expected Republican landslide in governorships and state legislatures will roll this back in many of these places, perhaps enshrining opposition to anything like this in their state constitutions so simple majorities in the state legislatures will not be enough to strip the citizens of the state of their right to decide, as a state, who should be president of the United States.

Restoring States' Rightful Place in the Balance of Power

The federal government was created by the states. It took ratification of the Constitution by the states. The states, therefore, should be the masters of the federal government, not the other way around. The federal government should only by able to govern with the consent of the states. The states, on the other hand, answer to the people of the state, and should only be able to govern with the consent of the people of the state.

Things have gotten very turned around, with the federal government exerting power never delegated to it by the states. The courts have proven that they are not adequate protectors of the states.

A couple of changes would fix this. One is to repeal the 17th Amendment, and restore the selection of Senators to the state legislatures. The original design was that the House of Representatives would represent the people directly, by being subject to election by those people, and that the Senate would represent the states, by being subject to selection by the state legislature. This would return us to the smarter original design and intent where both the people and the states would have representation in the federal government.

The other would be to give the states, collectively, effective veto power over federal legislation by allowing a majority of the state legislatures to vote to overturn any federal legislation. This would require a constitutional amendment, but it would put ultimate power back into the hands of the entities who originally created the federal government and gave it all of its delegated powers.

Progressives and statists will hate both of these provisions, which makes them all the more important. (It is interesting to watch political ads in Colorado against Republican Senate nominee Ken Buck proclaiming that he wants to "rewrite the Constitution" and "take away your right to vote" by repealing the 17th Amendment and restoring representation to the states. If only people knew their history, they would see this for what it is. What he really wants to do is un-rewrite the Constitution and restore the original wisdom of the founders.)

A Lesson to Learn for the 2012 Elections

For me, the 2010 elections are about one thing, and one thing only: stop the train by replacing as many Ds with Rs as possible. I don't care about the qualifications of the Rs this time. This is about stopping the bleeding with whatever is handy.

For 2012, we will have the opportunity to get more picky. And I hope we all remember to be very, very picky. No longer should it be acceptable for a candidate to paint his promises with such broad strokes that everybody can read into them what they wish. We must nail candidates down to specifics, we must look at everything - their record, their experience, their associations. And we must force them to tell us exactly where they stand on the issues that will matter most to us. No waffling. No room to later spin their words to have meant something else entirely. We really must hold them accountable, and not just hope they are what we want.