Electoral college

I oppose any movement away from the Electoral College. I oppose any actions by the States to proportionately allocate their electoral votes instead of committing them in the present "winner takes all" system.

Intellectual property

I comment on Shannon Love's post about how digital property and privacy rights conflict.

Further on intelligence

Pejman Yousefzadeh agrees with me, I think, regarding the separation of intelligence analysis from intelligence operations, in this TechCentralStation column.

He also brings up a valuable point I had missed in my own earlier post: one weakness in our intelligence services has to do with how they recruit people to serve in them, and the kinds of people the recruit. It has been said that our spooks consist almost entirely of Mormons and thugs; Mormons who live such a "clean" lifestyle that the people who assess applicants for their security risk are likely to give them a pass, and thugs who bring just enough of the "evil Kirk" with them to leaven the Mormons. Some thugs must be admitted just to get the job done. Other thugs simply slip through because they have so little remorse over the thuggish things they've done that they don't register on a polygraph.

This is a formula for disaster. We have to recruit people from other walks of life, and predicate hiring less on security risk and more on creativity, talent, breadth of experience. The builder of the OSS, precursor of the CIA, wanted Ivy Leaguers because in his words "they make the best second-story men." He knew he needed people who would take risks and not necessarily keep their noses clean.

Polygraph examinations and occasional drug abuse keep some very useful, talented people out of the running for our intelligence community. Polygraphs discourage people because there's no scientific basis for using them, so their only remaining purpose is to intimidate. Too bad they didn't intimidate that guy named Hanssen. Bright people tend not to want to work for organizations that predicate their hiring on a twentieth-century equivalent of phrenology.

Drug abuse, well, nobody wants to cop to that. Nor does anybody want to admit that the millions of people who have used recreational drugs do so only occasionally, leaving no lasting mark on their performance or reliability. By the way, I inhaled. I'm neither a Mormon nor a thug.

But let's get on with the real issue. We need good people working in the intelligence community, and apart from Mormons, thugs, and enemy spies trained to defeat polygraphs, we don't have enough diversity hiring into this community.

Defense acquisitions

I am critical of the Stryker combat vehicle. It has its place, but that place is not the narrow streets and RPG traps in Iraq.

The up-armored HMMWV is not adequate to that task. Attempts to apply more armor to the Hummer so it can duke it out in Iraq more than doubles its cost and exacerbates the wear on its pneumatic tires.

We have many M113 armored personnel carriers, that fare better against RPGs and IEDs than the up-armored Hummer, can turn within their own footprint (the wheeled Stryker cannot), will support applique armor better than either, is air-liftable and air-droppable---today. And the M113 Gavins are bought and paid for, while we have to wait for Strykers to be manufactured and Hummers to be uparmored. We can probably fight effectively in Iraq in Gavins we have now, while others are being improved.

Whining about 527s

Mr President, when you signed McCain-Feingold into law, you either knew what you were signing and signed it anyway for the votes, or you didn't know what you were signing, in which case you should have vetoed it.

Sir, you have no right to complain about the effect that law had on how political speech is now bought and paid for, or who's buying or paying. And I suspect that the votes you thought you were gaining by signing McCain-Feingold won't be there anyway. Those voters aren't your kind.

It's going to get worse before it gets better; now 501(c)'s are going to get scrutiny from FEC as well as IRS. NRA is very unhappy about the curtailment of their political speech, for example, and President Bush is going to need NRA to win four more years.

A possible upside, though, to the likely reelection of the President: it may prove to the activists, to Congress, and to the attentive voter that elections cannot necessarily be bought. If George W Bush wins a second term, while being outspent two or three Soros dollars to his one, maybe we can build the case to the American people that campaign finance reform isn't even needed: when Americans vote they follow their hearts and minds, not advertiser-bought eyeballs.

Changing how campaigns are financed has not improved our political processes. Then we must answer the question, then what will?

Intelligence czar?

The Central Intelligence Agency was supposed to be the, uh, central intelligence agency---all intelligence gathered by all of the various US intelligence arms was supposed to pass through the CIA so it could assess, assemble, integrate and analyze it.

I don't support the creation of yet another cabinet-level post just to ride herd over an agency whose purpose was to ride herd over other agencies.

Though I do not have a background in US intelligence matters, nor have I read in this subject widely, I have a sense of what I will and will not support regarding fixing it. I do concede that our intelligence apparatus is broken.

• Separate the operations and gathering functions of CIA (let's call them the Spooks) from the analysis and integration functions (let's call them the Wonks).
  
• Pass all intelligence from all sources through the Wonks. That includes Naval, Army, Secret Service, and domestic FBI sources, and NSA intercepts, as well as from the Spooks.
  
• Place both Spooks and Wonks under the DoD where they belong. It's what they do.
  
• Separate the domestic counterespionage and counter-terrorism functions of the FBI into their own agency under DoD, and ensure their mindset is one of intelligence rather than one of law enforcement.
  
• What's left of the FBI stays with DOJ. Remind me, what exactly is Constitutional about a Federal law enforcement agency?
  
• I don't care much for the Department of Homeland Security either. Isn't that what the DoD is for?
  
• Overhaul how information is declassified, and apply more people and better criteria to the process of declassifying state secrets. Put this function in the Wonks' agency.
  
• Rotate case officers and analysts from the using agencies through the Wonk agency, and indoctrinate them to push more of the intel together ("connecting the dots") and outward to the agencies who would exploit it.
  

For readers who are concerned that I would preserve, or enhance, a dangerous feature of the modern Hyperstate: the United States has enemies. Like it or not. Some of these enemies were once our friends. Some of our best friends were at one time bitter enemies. Things change. Even if perfectly-inoffensive model Libertarians were in charge today, and had been in charge of US policy for the last century, we'd still have enemies.

Our government would be abdicating its first responsibility if it did not take measures to identify those enemies, their intentions, and their capabilities. A peaceable government will take great care to collect such intelligence and use it responsibly. It will save more lives than it will take. Keeping the government peaceable and responsible is up to You, the Voter.

Judicial nominations

If elected, I assure you that I will vote to invoke cloture against any filibuster intended to keep a judicial nomination vote off the Senate floor.

It will not matter whether I support or oppose the nominee. The nominee deserves the up-or-down vote of the full Senate.