Daily Campus Article Roundup

For those who missed them, here is a roundup of my Daily Campus articles since school began. For legal reasons, I cannot post the full articles here, but I can post links and short summaries

Britain Wrong To Punish Assange for Forcing Accountability: Why WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be commended, not condemned (August 27)

Legalized Marijuana Supporters Deserve a Better Reputation: Why people are wrong to assume all pro-legalization advocates are "potheads", and why it matters. (August 29)

Libertarian Ideas Growing Strong in American Political Culture: Why libertarianism is no longer so strange. (September 4th)

How the Mainstream Media Influences Elections

Update: An updated version of this article was included in the Alternative Political Society's magazine, The Alternative. You can view it here (PDF).

Recently on The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly responded to a viewer's question about why he did not provide coverage of GOP candidates Ron Paul and Herman Cain. After all, isn't O'Reilly supposed to be the "no-spin zone"?. Bill's response was simply "they have no chance of winning". Aside from the fact that the show still covers unwinnable wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, this illustrates a major paradox of election coverage.

Paul and Cain are not being denied coverage because they have no chance of winning. Rather, they have no chance of winning because they are being denied coverage. Below is a list of current GOP candidates, and the number of Google News articles for the last 30 days referring to each of them as of 2:20 PM on August 20. The names were put in quotes, to avoid articles about Paul Rudd and Ron Berkle from being included in this.

Michele Bachmann: 15,400
Ron Paul: 10,400
Mitt Romney: 17,200
Rick Perry: 23,200
Herman Cain: 5,320
Rick Santorum: 5,520

With Bachmann, Perry, and Romney being hailed as the front-runners, it comes as no surprise that they have far more news stories than Paul, Cain, and Santorum. However, is this a cause or an effect of their lack of success? First of all, Ron Paul finished a close second in the Iowa Straw Poll. But the media still ignored him. Jonathan Martin of Politico.com wrote an article which originally had the headline "Michele Bachmann wins Ames Straw Poll, Tim Pawlenty Gets Third". After Pawlenty withdrew, the headline was revised to simply note Bachmann's win. However, at no point did it note Paul's second place finish, even though he received 2,500 more votes than Pawlenty.

This attention bias is not new. During the CNN-Youtube debate for the 2008 Democratic nomination, fringe candidate Mike Gravel questioned whether it was "fair" that he had received significantly less airtime than Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards had. Indeed, according to the Wikipedia article, 13 candidates were asked to all the candidates, though Obama, Edwards, and Clinton were frequently given more time to answer these. Furthermore, seven questions were specifically directed at Edwards, ten at Obama, and nine at Clinton. So-called "minor" candidates Joe Biden and Dennis Kucinich were given five questions each. Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson, also dubbed "minor" by the mainstream media, were given seven each, the same as Edwards, but many of those were redirects that had already been asked to a major candidate. Gravel himself received six questions in addition to the ones for everybody.

In the 2010 New York Governor election, the TV networks managed to hold a debate featuring all seven candidates on the ballot. In addition to Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Carl Paladino, five minor party candidates were featured. Howie Hawkins (Green), Warren Redlich (Libertarian), Jimmy McMillan (Rent is Too Damn High), Charles Barron (Freedom) and Kristin Davis (Anti-Prohibition) all appeared in person. This is a change from the standard practice of only featuring the Democrat and the Republican and ignoring everyone else.

The results showed. Hawkins, Redlich, and McMillan all exceeded their parties' highest vote totals ever in a NY governor election, and in the case of Redlich and McMillan, by a large margin. Hawkins managed to obtain 50,000 votes and get the Green Party "major party" status in New York, thus entitling it to easier ballot access in local elections within the state for the next four years. The Libertarian Party came within 1,500 votes of the magic 50K, whereas it had never even achieved more than 15,000 votes before. McMillan, on the other hand, become somewhat of a celebrity, inspiring a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Of course, "major party" and "minor party" status is just as bad as "major candidate" and "minor candidate" differentiation, but nevertheless, helping these third parties gain more attention is never a bad thing. I give a lot of credit to NY1 for organizing this, and to Cuomo and Paladino for agreeing to it, something most Democrats and Republicans would never do.

I hope that in the future, we will stop seeing less of a media bias against alleged "minor candidates", both in the primaries and general elections. I also hope that voters themselves will stop refusing to vote for minor parties simply because they are "minor". The Saratoga, NY newspaper The Post-Star endorsed Andrew Cuomo in that election. However, it said something rather curious about Redlich and Hawkins.

We've been particularly impressed by Libertarian candidate Warren Redlich, a Guilderland town councilman and attorney who distinguished himself at the lone gubernatorial debate with reasonable, well-considered, educated responses to discussion of the state's problems. He is willing to be specific about how he will eliminate several state agencies, end corporate welfare, and cap public sector pay and pensions as a way of stopping the state's wasteful spending practices.
With more governing experience and by broadening his voter base, Mr. Redlich could become a serious statewide candidate in the future. If you're casting a protest vote, Mr. Redlich is your best choice. But now is not the time to install a newbie in the governor's office, even an articulate one with good ideas.

Perennial Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins, a UPS worker from central New York, is running on a modified New Deal platform that calls for public works projects and taxing the rich, as well as legalizing marijuana and free SUNY tuition. He's not ready to run the state.

This begs two similar questions. Why isn't now the time to elect a political newbie as governor? Has politics as usual worked yet? And why isn't Hawkins ready to run the state. So they don't agree with his platform. I certainly don't either. But they also obviously don't agree with Paladino's platform, or they would have endorsed him. Yet they don't say he's not ready to run the state. (Interestingly enough, the Daily News did mention that the GOP failed to field a remotely credible candidate in their endorsement of Cuomo. Had they said anything else, that wouldn't be too unusual. They didn't.)


So to summarize, we should judge for ourselves who the best candidates are. And we should be given the resources to consider ALL candidates equally, not just the ones the media wants us to consider. So to both the media and the voters in general - be open to those candidates you consider "minor". With your help, we can make them major.

Forget Weiner - Congress Will Still Screw Us!

Yeah, that got you to look, didn't it?

Well, now the news has broken - New York Representative Anthony Weiner has admitted to sending several sexually explicit photos to young females, yet he will not resign. But the best part is - his wife is Hillary Clinton's aide. Well, at least they'll be able to start a White House support group for women with unfaithful husbands.

But seriously, what point am I trying to make here - after all, there are crooked politicians from all ideologies who lie and cheat (the latter in more ways than one). So am I saying that I feel a libertarian politician would be more honest than a liberal or conservative one? No. I'd hope that a libertarian politician would keep his integrity, but I'd hope the same for any other politician as well. But inevitably, some of us will give in to our moral weaknesses and do things we regret. As Wes Benedict, Executive Director of the Libertarian National Committee said in his weekly email message this past Monday,

That's one of the reasons why government should have as little power as possible. When human beings have the power to control others' lives, our natural fallibility makes us very dangerous.

What's worse, power tends to corrupt us and make us even more dishonest, conniving, and cruel.

We Libertarians understand that humans are fundamentally imperfect, and we will always be imperfect.

Libertarians aren't simply looking for honest politicians. We are looking for politicians who understand this problem, and who will stand on principle to take power away from government, and return it to the individual.

For those who are unfamiliar with libertarianism, Benedict uses "Libertarian" with a capital "L" because he is referring to the party. I use "libertarian" with a lower-case "l" in most cases because I am referring to followers of the philosophy, who may or may not be LP members.

But back on topic, of course there is a chance a libertarian leader in a libertarian government would do something wrong. I won't deny that. But as Benedict says, that leader would have less power and authority. So, that leader would not be as capable of having his actions spill over and effect the American well-being. If Rep. Weiner had no discretion in his personal life, why should we expect him to have discretion in his political affairs?

In fact, as Wayne Allyn Root noted on his blog, Congressman Weiner introduced a bill to loosen immigration requirements for foreign models. Don't get me wrong, I support the loosening of immigration requirements, so in theory, this would be a good law (although it shouldn't just be for models). However, you'd be kidding yourself if you thought Weiner was doing this merely because he supported open borders. He wasn't thinking out of the goodness of his heart, but out of the goodness of his ... err, let's go with "the goodness of his last name".

First of all, Anthony Weiner should definitely resign from Congress immediately. As I said, if he can't control his personal life, why should we expect him to be able to control his politics? In fact, as we saw through the model bill, he has already exhibited signs of indiscretion in that area. Second, we need to create a country with less government so that leaders like Weiner and like Governor Schwarzenegger from California who, like all humans, are prone to exhibiting indiscretion, do not have the power to exhibit that behavior in political affairs.

In fact, I said "like all humans". That is key. No human is perfect. So it would be crazy to expect our leaders to be perfect. I recognize this. That is exactly why we need to place more responsibility on the individual for their own affairs and less responsibility on the government. The logic behind this is twofold. First, the obvious - politicians are prone to indiscretion. So we need to do damage control before they cause damage.

Second, citizens are prone to indiscretions. And the government should not be policing our minor indiscretions and charging 18-year-olds with felonies, thus giving them a criminal record and ruining their entire life, merely because they had seventeen grams of marijuana in their possession which they may or may not have been smoking. The War on Drugs is beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that many young adults are seeing their whole future ruined by a far-too-powerful government merely because of one indiscretion.

And for those who still feel strongly about drug prohibition, there are plenty of other examples. A CNN story from 2009 reported that eighteen-year-old Phillip Alpert was mad at his sixteen-year old girlfriend after a fight. So, in a momentary indiscretion, he sent a nude photo of her to dozens of her friends and family. He had just turned eighteen when this happened, and was charged with distribution of child pornography and placed on a sex-offender list for the rest of his life. The sex-offender list should be for rapists and pedophiles, not an eighteen-year-old boy who made one bad decision. Not to mention the fact that I must question whether someone deserves to essentially be blacklisted for life for one bad decision even if that decision was rape (that, once again, is beyond the scope of this article). Don't get me wrong, many people on the sex offender list deserve to be there, but those like Mr. Alpert certainly do not.

In fact, what Rep. Weiner did was far worse than what Mr. Alpert did, but Weiner is going to remain in Congress while Alpert essentially ruined his whole life. That doesn't seem fair. If someone in any regular profession had done what Weiner did, sending hundreds of explicit photos and messages to multiple young women over three years, then (perhaps inadvertently) posted one of those photos to my twitter feed, I would be fired from my job and you could safely bet that no employer would want to hire me. That's the kind of thing for which you somewhat deserve to be blacklisted. But Weiner, being a politician and using the authority that that position brings him, will remain in power, and will keep making our laws and running our country. That doesn't seem fair. But as I said, even without Weiner, the federal government is ruining this country. And that will continue until the role of government is substantially downsized.