Steaming Turd

I just got done reading The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett. It’s (I think) the ninth Pratchett book I’ve read, though it’s only the second book in the Discworld series, and this offering serves to pre-iterate that Pratchett is a wordsmith in the truest sense of the word. You know those scenes in sci-fi movies and TV where they do the long pull-back from the protagonist all the way out to the local cluster of galaxies or whatever? Well, Pratchett did this too, but with words. He wrote it with perfect subtlety as well, so that when you get done reading and realize just what you saw in your mind’s eye, you can’t help but smile.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200504/s1352292.htm

So I’ve been getting calls from some miscellaneous toll-free number on my cell phone recently. I’ve been fairly careful not to submit that number on any forms or anything, and I registered it on the Do Not Call registry, so I would hope not to get many calls. I decided not to call the number back on the off chance that calling it would increase the crap calls I get (much like with spam unsubscribe links).

However, a couple days ago, one of those calls hit my cell phone, and they managed to get through to my voice mail. I discovered that the people who have been spamming my cell phone are Sprint PCS, the same company that provides me with cell phone service! It’s a “very important message” from Sprint PCS, and evidently my voice mail should please stay on the line for the next available representative. (That’s another crock, them having balls huge enough to tell me to wait for them to get around to harassing me.)

Anyway, I went to their webpage and submitted a snippety message to their “contact us” link. Their response:

Dear Barry,

I understand that you do not wish to receive calls from the
telemarketing department.

As you do not wish to receive the telemarketing calls, you may sign up
for the ‘Do not call list’. This can be done by visiting the following
Web site:

http://www.donotcall.gov

Alternatively, you may also register by calling the toll-free number
1-888-382-1222 from the number you wish to register. The registration
can be done for free.

We are not equipped to handle the request from here.

Thank you for contacting us, and we look forward to serving you in the
future.

Does anybody else see the problem here? Well, there’s a specific exemption to the Do Not Call registry for companies with whom a consumer has a prior business arrangement, and since I get cell phone service from Sprint, I obviously have a prior business arrangement with them. That means that adding that phone number to the registry (which I already have) doesn’t do jack crap toward making them stop calling me. That’s one reason for companies still being required to maintain internal do-not-call lists according to the old system of getting telemarketers off your phone. I suspect - since I did log in before submitting the message on Sprint’s website, and so there is proof that the message was written by me, their customer - that they are actually required by law to accede to my request, whether they are “equipped” to do so through their website Contact Us form. Yet, it is likely that I will have to give someone an earful of rudeness the next time they call me if I want anything done. Either that, or send a certified letter to their corporate headquarters.

(Oh, by the way - the snippet I quoted above wasn’t their whole response. After the CS rep signed his name, they proceeded to spam me with an advertisement for their Directory Assistance service.)

And combine to form Voltron!

Actually, this is a brief rant about what happens when I accidentally close a window in Firefox when that window isn’t maximized. Once I do that, anytime after when I click a link that opens in a new window by itself, the window opens non-maximized (it’s expanded to fill the screen, but isn’t maximized). Supposedly, you can fix this by opening a new window, making sure it’s maximized, and closing Firefox windows in some particular order, but the only way I’ve ever managed to get that to work is through some stochastic process I don’t pretend to understand.

If anybody else has had this problem and knows how to solve it, let me know :p

If you’ve ever played Nintendo, you have to watch this.

Please see the new page I’ve added outlining a proposal for a federal identity clearinghouse, purposed with reducing identity theft and fraud. Comments are welcome!

In other news, Crazy Finger Lady has been arrested. She was charged with attempted grand larceny for the Wendy’s case, and grand larceny for an unrelated case where she is accused of selling someone else’s mobile home for $11k.

You all remember last Tuesday’s post about religious backlash in/against government, right? (And by “you all” I mean the five or so people who read this blog.) Well, I think it’s worth bringing up a related story that’s developed significantly in the past day or two:

The Family Research Council is complaining that Senate Democrats are using judicial nominees’ religious beliefs as grounds for including them in filibuster threats. (Note that the linked article is on the FRC’s website, and so it obviously only has one side of the story. For a dose of equal but opposite knee-jerking, feel free to go here.)

Now, you can take this story with a grain, lick, block, or entire mine of salt if you like. In fact, it’s fairly obvious that the true litmus test at work here is the abortion issue, and I haven’t seen any evidence presented that suggests that religion is specifically being targeted aside from the connection between religious conservatism and anti-abortion views. Nevertheless, I think there are a few things worth saying about this situation.

A. If Democrats really are targeting religious conservative nominees for the filibuster because of their religious beliefs, I think that’s atrocious. It suggests that the only people who can become appellate court judges are agnostics. The key here is whether a person can operate within the bounds of the law and the Constitution, and if a person stays within those bounds, letting one’s religious beliefs guide one’s judgment is just as commendable as finding inspiration and guidance from Plato or Alexander Hamilton or Thurgood Marshall. If this sort of anti-religious crusade really is occurring, then Perkins and Dobson have reason to be outraged.

2. If Tony Perkins is just blowing smoke to rile religious conservatives into action (the riling part is confirmed, it’s the blowing smoke part that has some amount of doubt attached), then he’s playing some shameful politics. Bill Frist, as a Senator, should also be ashamed of playing religion* for political gain. By the other side of the same coin, if there is not an anti-religious crusade occurring (and while I believe there is such a crusade in some arenas, I have serious doubts that it extends this deeply into Congress), then Republicans shouldn’t invent such a crusade in order to mobilize the masses.

* Note that I have no problems with religion being a factor in motivating the masses. However, if religion is being used as a false pretense for political gain, that’s where the problem lies.

III. Either way, the target here is the filibuster. My opinion? Well, the Republicans (this time around, anyway) have been saying they want an up-or-down vote on judicial nominees, and the Democrats (remember, this time around) are saying that judicial appointments are too important to leave to a simple majority. Both statements are whitewashes of the truth, which is that both parties see abortion as up-for-grabs depending on who gets to be a judge, especially since the Supreme Court is progressing past “ancient” and right on into “venerable”. But you know what? I agree with both statements. Judicial appointments should be either directly approved or directly disapproved, with none of this languishing in the Senate without a result. And judicial appointments are too important to leave to a simple majority. The solution? Change the rules to require a three-fifths majority for judicial nominations while at the same time forbidding the filibuster on confirmation proceedings.

I got an e-mail from my friend and neighbor Amanda the other day:

I was going to put this somewhere on your blog, but couldn’t find a good place and decided email would work best.
I was wondering, what are your thoughts on the growing (apparent) influence of religious interests on the government of our country?

Recently several attempts have been made to bring religious issues to the fore of debate in the government–beginning with Terry Schiavo, and continuing with closed-door briefings between top congressional leaders and religious right leaders, and now with Frist appearing in a telecast that says Democrats are against people of faith, and so are the courts.

I’m sure there are more examples, but the bottom line is that religious groups seem to be garnering a lot of political support recently…

Amanda

My response:

Well, first off, I think the rather surprising turnout demographics in the 2004 election grabbed ahold of the Republican leadership and has turned them to face due east. I think that’s a dangerous game to play, because the 2004 election was about very transient issues that might not work in the future. In the process, Republican policy is headed in a direction that I eventually will find myself in substantial disagreement with. My personal stance on religion in government is that for those who have some religious belief, religion can and should play a significant role in guiding their personal judgment in their day-to-day political lives. I also think religion serves as a good motivator for people to make positive contributions to society (the whole “faith-based organization” deal). Religion is a part of our society and our history (regardless of one’s conclusions on the old “were our founding fathers Christians or just deists” debate), and as an academic, I believe that both the most fundamentalist Christian and the staunchest atheist should be able to examine religion and its influences on society (both good and bad) without feeling like their own personal beliefs are being threatened.

As for why religion has grown so significantly in governmental influence - I think there’s been a bit of a backlash against what most religious conservatives for decades have seen as their nemesis in government. Specifically, a lot of religious conservatives are concerned about an effort to purge religion from public life altogether. (I think that debate has become overblown, with people on both sides of the debate caring only about their own personal beliefs and not taking two seconds to understand their opposition’s perspective.) In any case, the effects of this governmental iconoclasm has put religious conservatives on the defensive for many years. When this is combined with the single biggest issue to motivate religious conservatives - the Massachusetts court ruling on gay marriage (a topic I could go into some other day, I suppose) - religious conservatives switched from a bristling defensive stance to a doggedly offensive one. Hence, the surprise turnout in 2004, and hence, the significant efforts by the Republican leadership to keep those voters motivated.

Of course, in order to keep those people motivated, there has to be some moral issue keeping them on the offensive. The Republican leadership is searching frantically for such an issue to bring up for the 2006 races. With President Bush (whose stances on moral issues have generally been due to pressure from the party leadership) decidedly uninterested now that he’s in his second/final term, and with no obvious frontrunner for 2008, the people within the Republican leadership are also vying for top dog status.

I think there are two particularly bad things to come out of the recently growing influence of the religious political bloc (as opposed to the generally dull influence it has had for decades past). One is that many who place themselves within that bloc hold to the concept that they are, de facto, correct in their views. Tom DeLay’s outlook on the Schiavo matter is a great example - even in the face of the majority of the nation disagreeing with him, he still holds to the belief that some sort of barbarism took place in letting Terri Schiavo pass away. While I understand the notion from a “gut-feeling” perspective (in much the same way that I understand the anti-nuclear-power argument from the same perspective), the situation is far more complicated than that. I fear that many people who base their political views solely upon what their religious leaders tell them don’t take the time to look at the issues from the other side of things, and I have a lot of trouble respecting the viewpoints of someone who doesn’t take the time to entertain the opposing viewpoint before reaching a conclusion.

That sort of leads me to the second bad thing, which is the incredible amount of polarization in our government (which in 2004 showed that it had pervaded American society in general). Religion obviously isn’t the source of this polarization - I personally think it goes back at least to the Clinton impeachment trial, if not even earlier - but it has served as yet another brick in the wall that divides the two ideological halves of the legislature.

My final comment is about where I see this movement going from here. I see the massive support from the religious bloc as being balanced on knife’s edge. As I mentioned before, there has to be some motivating issue in order to keep these voters mobilized. That means, in the short term, that the Republican leadership will continue to try to dredge up moral issues and put them in the spotlight while at the same time taking far polar positions on those issues in order to spark outrage among religious conservatives. As soon as an election comes and goes where those voters don’t turn out in the numbers the Republicans are hoping for, that strategy will get dropped like a hot potato. There’ll be a drastic change in the sort of people leading the party at that point, and the party platform will move back toward the center. My bet is 2012, but that depends most importantly on who gets elected to the Presidency in 2008 (if somehow Hillary ends up elected, I can see things going like this even longer).

In Responsum: Private e-mail

Seems that Crazy Finger Lady decided not to sue Wendy’s due to the “extreme emotional distress” caused by the entire situation. Next thing you know, she’ll be refusing to testify against Kobe Bryant.