I'm done!!!!

Earlier today, I checked out of high school, and got my cap and gown for graduation next week.

As of several hours ago, I am no longer a high school student.

This means I'll be able to write more. Tomorrow, for instance: I've finally found something worth writing a review for, and I will do so; and I will post my thoughts on the state of the Democratic primary race I've been following so closely.

Announcement: I'm going to nationals!

That's right: On Saturday, I qualified to go to the National Forensic League's national tournament this June in Las Vegas. I'll be competing in National Extemporaneous Speaking, which you can read about here if you're interested.

Hillary Clinton: The Electoral College Choice

There's an article over on Salon.com that I cannot possibly improve upon in any way, regarding the fact that if the Democrats used a winner-take-all system (which is most in line with the electoral-college reality), Clinton would be winning the nomination contest. It also makes a few other claims about Barack Obama's failure to represent true democracy. It's definitely worth a read or two to anyone who's even mildly interested in this nomination.

4,000

Yesterday, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq reached 4,000.

That's 4,000 lives cut short. 4,000 hearts that will never beat again. 4,000 families and groups of friends that will never be the same again. And for what? For a war that was sold based on lies that those who told them knew were lies. For preemptive war, the idea that you can get rid of a threat before it becomes a threat, the most dangerous theory of modern times. For vengeance, against people who had nothing to do with what we seek vengeance for.

But that's not what the president wants you to think about. He wants you to think of Iraq as the next great proving ground of Democracy; the next step in our nation's legacy, in the yet-unfinished Grand Experiment begun by our founding fathers in a hot, cramped room in early July, 1776. He wants you to think of the Iraqi people suffering under the rule of a ruthless dictator, who does not think twice about slaughtering them by the thousands; and he wants you to demand that we stay in Iraq, to ensure Democracy prevails there, fulfilling the responsibility we brought upon ourselves by toppling that dictator.

Everything else that the president says about the War in Iraq - that if we leave, the terrorists will follow us home; that Al Qaeda in Iraq is the physical manifestation of the greatest threat America has ever faced; that we should not be opposed to giving up certain liberties to purchase the safety supposedly bought by the war - is, quite frankly, thinly veiled bullshit. And the reason why he brings up the support of Democracy in reference to the Iraq War - because every other justification for the war he tried simply failed - leads me to the conclusion that the president doesn't personally believe his own words, and is only really promoting the war for his own personal benefit, which makes me sick to my stomach.

But that one single idea - that Iraq can become a part of America's legacy of Democracy, the place where the West faces off once and for all with this newest form of extremism - makes more and more sense to me every day.

If it is indeed true that Iraq is "our country's destiny" - as the president put it in his Memorial Day speech last year (which I vehemently attacked in this very blog) - then there is no doubt in my mind that we are going about it with the wrong mentality. We need to step back, and look past the immediate danger of Islamic terrorism, and into the soul of America. We need an Abraham Lincoln to tell us that the conflict we are in right now is just one part of a broader narrative - a narrative which we can, in some small way, shape. We need to resolve ourselves - not to "kill all the damn terrorists" and perpetuate the irrational ideas that brought us to Iraq in the first place - but to continue our pursuit of Liberty and Democracy, at home and throughout the world.

If we cannot bring ourselves to see that deeper conflict, and declare our intent to see that through, the war must end now. But if we can turn this tragedy into the next step of the Grand Experiment, perhaps the deaths of these 4,000 brave men and women can be worth something.

More College News

I have been accepted to the engineering school of the University of Colorado at Boulder (a little blue jewel in red Colorado, often called "The People's Republic of Boulder").

The Colorado School of Mines sent me financial aid confirmation this past weekend. I will receive $7,881 in grants, $1,500 in work-study, and $7,500 in subsidized federal loans. This leaves $5,000 outstanding on the estimated costs, should I choose to attend there.

College Announcement

From the Colorado School of Mines Admissions Office, dated February 12, 2008:

"Dear Zachary:

As part of our Golden Scholars Program, it's a pleasure to offer you admission for fall 2008. You're among the select students who will attend Mines, and we congratulate you on your achievements."

I just opened this letter. I'm sure it's been here at my dad's house for a few days, but I've been at my mom's house. The Colorado School of Mines is an engineering school - in fact, it's pretty much THE engineering school of Colorado. The University of Colorado at Boulder has an engineering program, and not a bad one at all, but Mines is probably better. :P

This is exciting. You should be excited.

Why Iowa?

This will be a short post, because my opinion on the matter can be summed up rather quickly, and I see no need to really go into extreme detail about such an obvious stance.

In this year's presidential primaries, a few states, primarily Iowa and New Hampshire, have received most of the attention of the candidates from each party. And this is a practice that has been going on for some time, and shows no signs of changing. Political pundits and analists speak openly about how the candidates can best strategize around their performance in these early primary and caucus states, as though that's the way it ought to be. The entire nation simply sits by on our couches and watches the pundits speculate on which way the vote in these two states of no particular significance is going to go, and we eagerly await the final results in Iowa today, hoping these voters of no particular significance go for the candidates we want. And if these voters of no particular significance happen to throw us a curveball, the pundits say it will probably change the course of our votes, openly admitting that the additional media coverage of the winners in Iowa and New Hampshire will sway more people to vote for them on Super Tuesday.

I do not even begin to understand the justification for this system. It is a direct affront on democracy, working to subvert the will of the people nationwide and replace our decision-making processes with the decisions made by a few voters of no particular significance.

In a perfect world, all the states in the nation would hold their primaries on the same day. The only way any other system could possibly be justified is if there were something wrong with that ideal system. And I have not heard a single solid argument against the idea of all the states holding primaries on the same day.

Primary Season and My Favorite Candidate

Note to reader(s): I intend to get seriously writing for the remainder of my Christmas break (which ends on the 7th). Primary season is coming up, and now's the time for all of us to be looking into the candidates and issues most seriously. I will be filling this blog, and the identical one over on MySpace, with posts dealing with the race for the presidency. For the first of these posts, I want to discuss my general views on the '08 presidential race, and profile the candidate who comes closest of all to getting my all-out support.

I know most people my age, and the majority of people in general, don't care about politics much, if at all. The 2008 presidential election, however, presents us with a choice that will shape American politics and foreign and domestic policy for years to come. A presidential election is never a good thing to get wrong. But with America having problems in everything from healthcare, to our civil liberties, to immigration, to the war in Iraq, the stakes are raised so high that we simply cannot afford to get it wrong this time around. For this reason, if not for any other reason whatsoever, we all ought to be very seriously considering our options.

The most significant piece of my opinion on the 2008 presidential field is a general disappointment in the choice of "top-tier" candidates; frankly, they all suck, spewing the same dressed-up rhetorical stump speeches their respective parties have been giving for years, trying to distinguish themselves from each other through the slightest of differences in opinion. This is not the political system as I imagined it when I was just starting to learn about it in the 2000 election. This is not the America I thought I was growing up in, where people have a diversity of opinions that are all (or mostly) given a proper place in the national debates and elections.

And to make matters worse, it's all too heavily influenced by rich special interests and corporate lobbyists. Mike Gravel, as I recall, was fond of suggesting in the Democratic debates earlier this year that just about everyone else on the stage was a puppet of special interests ("Follow the money!" he would say, shaking his fist, though the fist-shaking may just be my imagination). Unfortunately, though Gravel tends to seem rather nutty in just about anything he does, he's not wrong. There is something ingenuine, something plastic about them all, and I can't help but feel like they don't really have the best interests of the people at heart, and are instead obsessed with getting the support of the special interests, at any cost.

Out of this disdain for the process and its front-runners came my love of Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich. For the greater part of this year, I was in love with his campaign. He was the first politician I'd ever seen who is truly honest, intelligent, and reasonable. (generally, it seems, politicians are only one or two of those, if any at all). His ideas are all so fresh, so populist, so Democratic. Universalize healthcare. Reform trade negotiations with other nations, to reflect a pursuit of human rights and environmental protection. End the use of war as an instrument of foreign policy.

Recently, however, two things have happened that have persuaded me that he is not the best candidate in the race. Firstly, it has become quite obvious that his campaign is hopeless. He has not been treated fairly by the media, and his campaign simply hasn't come up with enough money or support to force anyone to pay attention. Secondly, I have found a candidate whose ideas make more sense than Kucinich's ever have, despite being on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

That candidate is Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is a Republican, currently serving as a U.S. Representative from Texas, a position he has held 18 of the 31 years since 1976. He is 72 years old, married (for 50 years) with 5 children. Before joining into the political arena, and during the lapses in his Congressional service, he has been an ob/gyn physician, delivering over 4,000 babies. He was also a flight surgeon in the Air Force from 1963 to 1965.

But it is his politics, not his personal life, that make this man extraordinary. In a day and age when politicians shape their views around the shifting of special interests and political parties, Ron Paul has not only stuck to his beliefs for his whole political life, but has based those beliefs on the most simple, powerful foundation imaginable: The United States Constitution.

And it is that foundation that makes his message so powerful. He's not treading new, radical ground, but urging us to go back to the old way of looking at the federal government: In the words of Thomas Paine, revolutionary and author of "Common Sense" (and who I'm possibly related to), "That government is best which governs least."

Profiling Dr. Paul's viewpoint on every issue facing America would make this blog far longer than I want it to be. But I'd like to look at a few highlights:

He is a strong believer in states' rights, prefering to leave issues like education, stem-cell research, abortion, and marriage rights completely out of the hands of the federal government.

He is a proponent of a non-interventionist foreign policy, in which the U.S. does not police the world with its military, but instead pursues, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." He says the war in Iraq is patently unconstitutional; in the days leading up to the war, he repeatedly put forth a resolution to declare war on Iraq, and it was repeatedly struck down.

He believes the civil liberties of the people are vital to the interests of the nation, and that they have been seriously undermined by the war effort. In the words of James Madison, another of our founding fathers, "The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." He believes that the best way to be a strong nation is to be a nation of free people. Liberty from government control and regulation is central to his message, and his belief system.

He wants to abolish the IRS and all federal income taxes and repeal the 16th Amendment that allows for it, citing the fact that income taxes account for only a third of federal government revenue, and that cutting federal spending by a third would put it at 2000 levels, which obviously wouldn't be very hard to do. In addition to this, he wants to phase out government entitlement systems like social security and welfare, prefering instead to allow everyone to keep the fruits of his or her labor and use them as he or she sees fit; again, a view straight from Jefferson, who believed we ought to "prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them". Ron Paul has great confidence in the free market, and in each person's ability, right, and responsibility to take care of themselves.

Through all of this, there is a clear theme of going back to the America that the founders intended to create, the America they set forth in the Constitution. In fact, Dr. Paul has a nickname on Capitol Hill, "Dr. No", which emphasizes his extreme unwillingness to vote for any bills or resolutions that are not expressely permitted by the Constitution. He is, in short, a true conservative, holding to the beliefs that made that political mindset actually make sense before it was hijacked by social conservatives in the past few decades.

Typical "Ron Paul Revolution" banner.
Taken from http://www.rescue-us.org/

And unlike the other "long-shot" candidates in the race, Ron Paul's views have actually caught on, putting him in a position from which it is not entirely impossible for him to win the Republican nomination. His current fourth quarter fundraising total is $19.4 million, more than any other candidate in the race, including over $6 million on one day, December 16, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. And this fundraising is entirely grass-roots, spontaneously organized by people who have no official connection to the campaign. His message has found a large niche in the Internet community, a community that has, through these donations as well as all the straw polls and post-debate polls that Paul has won, proven that it has the power to make a candidate viable.

I do have my misgivings about Ron Paul. I don't have the same unquestioning faith in the free market as he has. I think the federal government needs to be involved in some things like healthcare, in order to make sure the vital needs of the people are handled properly. I have said before that universal, socialized healthcare is the way to go, and I don't think there's anything Ron Paul could say to me to change my mind on that. I also disagree with him on some of his personal social views, but he says those things should be left up to the states, so it doesn't matter anyway. All things considered, though, he is the best candidate that I see in the race right now.

Any thoughts on this are greatly appreciated.