Stephen's Statements A little bit of everything from Stephen Duncan Jr, a Programmer/Web Geek working in the defense industry

Michael J. Totten is a fantastic independent journalist. He's currently in Isreal. Check out his latest piece on Gaza. Or this piece from the Israel-Lebanon border. Hopefully from there you'll want to read everything he's been writing. If, like me, you find that Michael is providing valuable information in a direct fashion you can't get elsewhere, then make sure to donate some money to him so he can keep reporting from the Middle East.

Labels: politics

Labels: memes, politics

Defense Department Briefing on Ongoing National Guard Response to Hurricane Katrina

Q: One quick follow-up. Is it fair to say, using the convention center as an example, that one reason it took until Friday to get aid in is the National Guard needed time to build up a response team with military police to ensure law and order because the New Orleans Police Department had degraded so much?

GEN. BLUM: That is not only fair, it is accurate. You've concisely stated exactly what was needed, and I told you why. We took the time to build the right force. The outcome was superb. No lives hurt, nobody injured. It was done almost invisibly.

Q: And you estimate there's about a third of the New Orleans Police Department left. Do you remember about how many are in the New Orleans Police Department?

GEN. BLUM: On a normal day they should have 1,500 paid officers in New Orleans, give or take. Some people have said it's 1,650. It's in the rough order of 1,500-man police force, and I think the mayor told me they're down to less than 500.

Labels: politics

Jason at COUNTERCOLUMN is a National Guardsman from Florida, with experience in hurricane relief. He has made several posts about logistics. Check out his blog for a dose of rationality compared to some of the criticism of the handling of the relief effort so far.

Labels: politics

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in this radio interview (transcript) about one cause of the looting:

And one of the things people -- nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders. People don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it.

You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will.

And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun.

Labels: politics

I've finally written another post over on my politics blog. For those that read before, and may have been concerned over the somewhat conservative tone during the election, you may wish to read this post, as I do go after a bit of what I perceive to be conservative hypocrisy.

Labels: politics

Ann Althouse wonders about the results of her poll on her "conservative" status. Her e-mailer update comes from me:

I think you're missing an important feature of internet polls: The funny answers win, not the correct ones. :)

Labels: politics

I've started to read a lot of political blogs, and I wanted a way to share the best stuff I see out there. I also want to discuss politics every once in a while. But, I definitely don't want to bombard my normal audience (interested in my personal life, or technical posts) with poltical stuff. I don't much like reading other techies politics stuff in their normal blog, so I do you do either.

So, I took advantage of the fact that Blogger let's you create multiple blogs. So, now I have a Political Blog. If you're interested, check it out, or subscribe with Bloglines to keep up with all the best commentary I find on the web on politics, or, occasionally, my own commentary.

Labels: politics

This will be a ongoing topic. This isn't really about political issues. This is about structure of government: philosophy and civics. It's about ideas that generally don't receive much discussion in that civics class you probably took in high school.

Proposal: All national elected government positions should be voted for by the whole population, rather than on a by-state basis.

Reasoning: While federalism has its purposes, the representation by states was primarily a product of the fact that, at the time of the founding of our nation, individual states did have some sovereignty. They could easily have decided not to join the Union without a constitution that respected that sovereignty. In modern times, however, the national government is now where people primarily look to fulfill the necessary roles a government performs. People move more, and feel tied to their state less. People participate and are interested in the national government far more than state or local governments.

Advantages: Potentially, a significant decrease in localized pork-barrel projects. It would free congressman to vote for what's best for the nation, not what's best for their home state/district. It might also increase voter interest in elections for positions other than President, as people mostly on pay attention to national politics.

Disadvantages: Too hard for voters to know everything about the candidates. The media attention that makes a presidential race work in America can't possibly be stretched across all members of congress being elected in a given election.

Compromise: It's clearly too far-fetched to elect our Representatives at-large. Senators, however, might be feasible. A Senator was initially intended to be a representative more of their state government than of the people, but since the Constitution was amended to proscribe direct election of Senators, that purpose no longer applies. So why not know make the Senate the chamber of congress representing the people nationally, rather than by state? Obviously, a lot of theory work on how apportionment should go with this change would be required. At a minimum, I think some number of senators, perhaps additional ones, should be at-large national senators, rather than representatives of a particular state.

Labels: politics

An alternative history regarding the Bush administration, terrorism and Sept. 11th, 2001 (or the lack thereof).

As pointed out by CuteCuddlyKitten of xForums: "If Neville Chamberlain had declared war on Germany before Poland he'd be remembered as the guy who started WWII."

Labels: politics

AltaVista: Image Search results for: war on drugs

(Yes, I'm having fun going through the logs for my webpage)

I am the number one image search for War on Drugs on AtlaVista. Pretty damn sweet.

Labels: meta, politics