who you gonna vote for? Ron Muthaf@cking Paul

American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (Introduced in House)

HR 3835 IH

110th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. R. 3835

To restore the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

October 15, 2007

Mr. PAUL introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, and in addition to the Committees on Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Select Intelligence (Permanent Select), for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

A BILL

To restore the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007'.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS AND PURPOSE.

(a) Findings- Congress makes the following findings:

(1) Unchecked power by any branch leads to oppressive transgressions on individual freedoms and ill-considered government policies.

(2) The Founding Fathers enshrined checks and balances in the Constitution to protect against government abuses to derail ill-conceived domestic or foreign endeavors.

(3) Checks and balances make the Nation safer by preventing abuses that would be exploited by Al Qaeda to boost terrorist recruitment, would deter foreign governments from cooperating in defeating international terrorism, and would make the American people reluctant to support aggressive counter-terrorism measures.

(4) Checks and balances have withered since 9/11 and an alarming concentration of power has been accumulated in the presidency based on hyper-inflated fears of international terrorism and a desire permanently to alter the equilibrium of power between the three branches of government.

(5) The unprecedented constitutional powers claimed by the President since 9/11 subtracted national security and have been asserted for non-national security purposes.

(6) Experience demonstrates that global terrorism can be thwarted, deterred, and punished through muscular application of law enforcement measures and prosecutions in Federal civilian courts in lieu of military commissions or military law.

(7) Congressional oversight of the executive branch is necessary to prevent secret government, which undermines self-government and invites lawlessness and maladministration.

(8) The post-9/11 challenges to checks and balances are unique in the Nation's history because the war on global terrorism has no discernable end.

(b) Purpose- The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 is intended to restore the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

SEC. 3. MILITARY COMMISSIONS; ENEMY COMBATANTS; HABEAS CORPUS.

(a) The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is hereby repealed.

(b) The President is authorized to establish military commissions for the trial of war crimes only in places of active hostilities against the United States where an immediate trial is necessary to preserve fresh evidence or to prevent local anarchy.

(c) The President is prohibited from detaining any individual indefinitely as an unlawful enemy combatant absent proof by substantial evidence that the individual has directly engaged in active hostilities against the United States, provided that no United States citizen shall be detained as an unlawful enemy combatant.

(d) Any individual detained as an enemy combatant by the United States shall be entitled to petition for a writ of habeas corpus under section 2241 of title 28, United States Code.

SEC. 4. TORTURE OR COERCED CONFESSIONS.

No civilian or military tribunal of the United States shall admit as evidence statements extracted from the defendant by torture or coercion.

SEC. 5. INTELLIGENCE GATHERING.

No Federal agency shall gather foreign intelligence in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.). The President's constitutional power to gather foreign intelligence is subordinated to this provision.

SEC. 6. PRESIDENTIAL SIGNING STATEMENTS.

The House of Representatives and Senate collectively shall enjoy standing to file a declaratory judgment action in an appropriate Federal district court to challenge the constitutionality of a presidential signing statement that declares the President's intent to disregard provisions of a bill he has signed into law because he believes they are unconstitutional.

SEC. 7. KIDNAPPING, DETENTIONS, AND TORTURE ABROAD.

No officer or agent of the United States shall kidnap, imprison, or torture any person abroad based solely on the President's belief that the subject of the kidnapping, imprisonment, or torture is a criminal or enemy combatant; provided that kidnapping shall be permitted if undertaken with the intent of bringing the kidnapped person for prosecution or interrogation to gather intelligence before a tribunal that meets international standards of fairness and due process. A knowing violation of this section shall be punished as a felony punishable by a fine or imprisonment of up to 2 years.

SEC. 8. JOURNALIST EXCEPTION TO ESPIONAGE ACT.

Nothing in the Espionage Act of 1917 shall prohibit a journalist from publishing information received from the executive branch or Congress unless the publication would cause direct, immediate, and irreparable harm to the national security of the United States.

SEC. 9. USE OF SECRET EVIDENCE TO MAKE FOREIGN TERRORIST DESIGNATIONS.

Notwithstanding any other law, secret evidence shall not be used by the President or any other member of the executive branch to designate an individual or organization with a United States presence as a foreign terrorist or foreign terrorist organization for purposes of the criminal law or otherwise imposing criminal or civil sanctions.

Relationships

It is always interesting to me just how easy it is to allow a relationship to derail in the early stages.
This seems almost counter intuitive at first glance as you are in the early good phase where everything seems possible and your partner can do no wrong. However, it only takes one misstep, miscommunication, or moment of insensitivity. In reality it is this phase of a relationship you are much more likely to make said mistakes, you don't know your partner as well as you think an d this is when you start learning about each other. This can be a positive experience that allows the both of you to grow in the relationship; it is a good opportunity to move past old baggage(if possible, this is not always the case) and to build a real level of trust. Conversely, you can begin the recriminations, accusations, and loathing of your partner at this point. It really just depends on whether you really want a healthy relationship or just more of the same(based on the assumption that the previous relationships did not work for whatever reason......not that they were bad but that they did not work).
I however am very grateful that my hot gamer girlfriend Lindsay and I have been able to weather the storms that life has thrown at us in these last couple of weeks and it gives me hope for the future...........because I love her very much

New Blog

I am starting a new blog to document my experience in software development. The new blog will be at http://noneuclidiandevelopment.blogspot.com, this is where I will discuss programming and tech related stuff.

On Games and Dating

Something has been on my mind lately.....the mythical hot gamer chick. Not the gamer chick who playes a Wii; one who owns dice, knows how to calculate a attack bonus, and still manages to be a otherwise cool person. This is a hard thing for male gamers to do and if you just look at the percentages.............the hot gamer chick is as rare as a politician who talkes about issues that are right and true without being popular(just see Ron Paul for one of the few examples). You almost never see the hot gamer chick, and those that exist in the wild are always snapped up quickly(hopefully by a gamer, the alternative is just too depressing). I know that I snapped up mine just as soon as I could, was not about to allow her to stay out there for long.
Anyway, this is just my obtruse way of letting you all know that I recently got back together with an old ex-girlfriend that I had not dated in about 7 years. Her name is Lindsey and she is cool as f%$k.

Our Changing Culture

I attend college at KVCC. At our downtown and Texas Township campuses we have a couple of Unisex bathrooms.

These are not the unisex bathrooms of our past, these are multistall bathrooms. The really funny thing is that the bathrooms are all laid out in pairs and usually have a male and female bathroom. Where we have unisex bathrooms however there is a female and a unisex bathroom. I have only used the unisex once and had women in there at the same time.

It is interesting that there is a female and unisex and not a male and unisex there. If this were the case then I believe there would have been an outcry against making the women college students walk to another bathroom to use it in samesex conditions. Why was the assumption made that men would not mind. I personally don't care one way or the other.......although I probably would not use it in cases of massive gastrointestinal distress.

The one time that I used it a girl was taking a very noisy poop, and I wondered whether the girl was self-consious about using it and having guys realize that they have noisy poops too.

Something to ponder.........Until next time.

Death and Life in the USA

• Lately, I have been thinking about death. My aunt Clara just passed away after a two year fight with colon and liver cancer. Clara was diagnosed with stage four colon and liver cancer about two years ago. She probably had the cancer in her body for three to four years before the diagnosis was made due to a some symptoms that she was having that led her doctors to perform a colonoscopy. Her chances for survival were rather small, due to the advanced nature of her disease at the time of diagnosis. The doctors gave her a year to live and a minuscule chance of survival, even with treatment they thought that they might be able to gain a year of life for her. Clara sought more advanced treatment options at the U of M Medical Center in Ann Arbor. The doctors in Ann Arbor treated her with chemotherapy and radiation. In the end, the original doctors were proven right in their initial diagnosis and prognosis. This in my mind raises some questions.
  
  
• Was it worth it to try the advanced treatments in Ann Arbor?
• First, the cost of Clara's treatments were largely met my Medicaid and later by private insurance. So, in both systems the costs were spread out amongst many people who pay into the systems involved. So the barrier to seek treatment was low enough to allow her to do so.
• Secondly, we can apply Pascal's Wager to examine the philosophical arguments of whether or not to seek treatments in Clara's case. In the first case we can look at what would happen if she did not seek treatment, traditionally in Pascal's Wager there are both good and bad scenarios for each choice but in this case we can diminish the likelihood of the good outcome to be negligible, leaving the bad outcome of death at one year from diagnosis with all the consequences of that outcome. In the second scenario we see Clara seeking treatment. In the good outcome we see her cancer fought into remission and her quality and quantity of life improved for her and all the consequences of that outcome, we have to realize that the probability are small but they are significantly higher with treatment than without. In the bad outcome after seeking treatment, we see Clara gaining a little time but succumbing to cancer anyway, with all the consequences of that outcome. It is not hard to look at this and decide just based on probabilities that the best decision is to seek treatment. Not only are your chances of survival greater, but at worst case you get a little more time with your family and friends. We can attempt to compare the cost of treatment with the extension of life for a arbitrary amount of time. But this is a fallacious comparison, life and money are not two things that can be compared in any objective way, because there are too many subjective arguments for the value of life that have their own merit and cannot be discounted.
  
• Would Clara's disease have progressed differently had she been diagnosed earlier?
• This is the question that has been nagging at me for two years...........If Clara had been diagnosed three to four years earlier the probability of survival increases dramatically. So why not get regular colonoscopies? First, we cannot make the assumption of a rational actor in this situation, as we as humans rarely act in a rational manner.
• The barriers to this procedure are financial and emotional. Financially the cost of the procedure is high without health insurance, but it is less than that of treating a advanced case of cancer. But, is it high enough to create a legitimate barrier to those without insurance? I believe that it is. It is easy to second guess the decisions that people make and find fault after the fact. It would be easy to say that of course Clara should of sought this procedure no matter the cost, as it would have possibly led to her beating her cancer. But, what are the consequences of that decision? Where should the money come from? Rent? Food? Electricity? When you look at it from her perspective you can see the choice to spend money on guarding against a really low probability outcome with consequences that are almost certain to have a negative impact on her family's financial well being. This I see as the most cogent argument for a single payer health system, with regular health screening for the low probability health risks the costs of treating the diseases will decrease overall as well. In our country we spend the most on treatment per capita world wide, yet we do not get the best care. We are ranked 37th worldwide for quality of health care delivered.
• Emotionally, the barriers to getting the colonoscopy are relatively easy to see. I know that Clara had symptoms for years before she was checked out. Why wait this long? It is easy to rationalize and say that this is just a small problem probably related to diet........but that is not what it was. Clara had problems with bowel movements for a number of years, always believing that it was just a problem with her diet. We all do this in a number of ways every day in our lives. "Oh, what is the worst that can happen? I only smoke a pack a day. I am young yet, I don't have to worry about cancer or heart disease untill I get old." I am a smoker. If I do not quit, it will kill me in a painfull and slow way. This is a guarunteed outcome, yet we still see people that smoke, eat in an unhealthy manner, don't get enough exercise, and the list goes on and on. This is the same rationalization that Clara made. "Ok, so I don't have the stamina that I could. I am a little overweight. But, otherwise I feel healthy." The sad truth is that we are all complicit. Another sad truth is that I could die driving home tonight.
  

Hemingway

I have always had a deep appreciation for the writing of Ernest Hemingway. Recently however, I have written a paper for a College Writing II : Literature on Hemingway. The incites gain from writing this paper have only deepened and enriched my love of Papa Hemingway and his work.

The assingment was to analyse the style of a author of story or poem that is discussed in our textbook and then to argue wether this work was indictative of the authors style or a departure from the style. 'Hills Like White Elephants' was the only Heminway story in our book, my only other choice that interested my was a short story out of Dubliners by James Joyce. Initially, I wanted to do the analyses of Joyce's style but quickly realizing the inconsitentcy of style between Dubliners and Joyce's later work I found this unsatisfactory.

What really struck me as the paper lay completed before me, was the main stylistic and thematic components of Hemingway's work.

Stylisticly his prose is suprisingly like good poetry, the loading of the prose is such that the work seems symplistic untill a deep and thurogh understanding(grokking) has taken place. Heminway does not tell you how to feel about a character or situation, but instead presents the characters and situations in such a cold and objective way that we develop our own feelings for them. This more approaches the Truth of a situation, Truth is realative to the observer, a Truth that Hemingway observed might be different than a Truth that I might observe nearly 80yrs after the fact. There is a certain intellectual honesty in this.

Thematically, Hemingway uses a dualistic conflict between meaning and non-meaning('nothingness'). His characters struggle to find meaning during a struggle that is often doomed to failure, the lesson is that failure or defeat is acceptable, but humiliation or loss of dignity is not. Many times Hemingway uses violence or violent situations to expose this conflict and to raise the tension of the conflict. In each and everyone of our lives' we struggle to find meaning and to overcome obstacles that are set before us, the lesson finally is two-fold:

1. Do not let life bow your head, maintain your dignity. Facing defeat with dignity, gives the struggle meaning.
   
2. We all die in the end. Ultimatly we face the personal violence and darkeness of the confrontation of death and we face it alone. Facing death with dignity, gives life meaning.
   

Three Things Today.............................

1. A little birdy told me that my Grandmother really likes Spiced Jelly Beans. So, I embarked on a odyssey involving three hours of driving around Kalamazoo and Portage looking for Spiced Jelly Beans....to no avail. Apparently, you have to order them online now. Grandma has been sad lately and I wanted to do something nice for her. Just as her problems with her vision has been getting worse for years and years with no easy outcome, Spiced Jelly Beans have become a endangered species. If only her problems with her vision could be solved by ordering something online................................................

2. Apparently, when you do the snooze alarm shuffle the alarm clock stops dancing after a while. So, I was late to class today. I think that I just need to not use the snooze anymore. I had no problem being on time to appointments when I just worked for a living, I did not allow myself the luxury of a snooze alarm then. Now, I find that since I have become a student I have been late to meet friends and now to get up to go to class. I wonder if being a full time student has altered subconsciously my perception of time itself?

3. U.S. diplomats met this weekend with representatives from Iraq's neighbors for talks concerning the stability situation in Iraq. This is the first time that U.S. and Iranian officials have met in a official capacity in decades. Hopefully, this will lead to more talking involving the diplomats from the U.S., Syria, and Iran. I cannot see how we can solve the problems in the Middle East without dialog between all parties concerned. Here's to a solution that doesn't involve us invading anybody else.

Bubba Ho-Tep

Mummies, 80-yr old Elvis, 80-yr old black JFK, west Texas nursing home. One of the best horror movies to come out in a long time. Casting Bruce Campbell as Elvis is a wet dream, and Ozzie Davis turns a fine performance as JFK. The Oval Office as a nursing home suite is a sight to see as well. Well off to class........................................

Iran and a Nuclear Middle East

Well now we have a Iran with a missile capable of putting a payload in orbit.

What does this mean, you ask? This means that if we allow this to go on, we have a Iran with the ability to make Chicago or any other city in the world a very bad place to live.

Why don't we just go in and kick some butt? This would be a bad idea for two major reasons.

1. Iran will not fall in the way Iraq did. Just look at the tactics used by the Iranians in the Iran/Iraq war. They gave boys and old men headbands and sent them to the front lines in human waves, knowing that most would die. But, when the survivors overran the Iraqi lines they armed themselves and attacked with the Iraqi weapons. This is important...............When engaged in a conflict the most important factor is the will to achieve victory at any cost, and we don't have the will to fight a war on those terms. The Iraqis did not fight the war on our terms, they are still fighting the war on their terms and looks like they will win.
   
2. If you think that terrorism is bad now? Just wait. Iran, unlike prewar Iraq, actually is a state sponsor of terrorism. Get the picture? The middle east will go up like a powder keg if we launch military strikes against Iran. It is just too terrible to even contemplate, because Iran will not pull any punches. Even if they had nukes at this point, they will not use them. This is for the same reasons as why the Russians never launched a nuclear first strike against us. Iran and much of the Middle East would cease to exist. Not even Al-Qaeda wants that, their whole purpose is to establish a new Caliphate in the Middle East, and if Mecca is uninhabitable due to radiation fallout then they do not get it.

Well, then we need to negotiate with Iran to stop their nuclear enrichment programs. Easier said than done. The main problem as I see it right now is the Israeli nuclear program. As long as Israel has a nuclear program the international community is complicit and hypocritical while they apply a double standard in the Middle East. It is ok for Israel to have nukes, but not Iran. How can any Arab country have nuclear security with Israel in possession of nuclear weapons. As history has shown, Israel really likes the idea of preemptive strike on it's perceived security threats. So the inevitable breakdown over Iran's nuclear program may well lead to an Israeli first strike and we can only pray for a conventional attack.

Well, what the Hell do we do then? We can only achieve our foreign policy goals in the Middle East if we are seen as a rational and fair actor in the negotiations. Israel's occupation of the Palestinian State, the illegal settlements, and their nuclear program must all be on the table. The only way to solve this issue is to solve the real issue. Iran will never feel safe with a nuclear Israel as a neighbor.

My future at WMU

Well it seems that the WMU CS Department had been flown out to Redmond WA to receive a part of the Evil Empire's largess. They apparently will be dumbing down their "advanced" CS degree and moving away from Unix/C and towards Win/C#...........Apparently they have stopped teaching b-tree algorithms and have just shown how to extend the C# B-Tree class.


This is distressing news at best, but as it is from a source that is reliable it merits further investigation. I just don't know what to do if I cannot get the degree that I want at WMU......I guess that it is time to start shopping other Universities.

:<

Tom Waits + KVCC = ?

I bought a Ipod last weekend and took it to school for the first time today. It was interesting listening to "Heatattack and Vine" while walking down the hall. It is definitely a different educational experience.

Last night I also broke down and installed WoW on my windoze partition. Not sure how I feel about that right now.