McCain Solicits Russian Envoy for Campaign Cash!?

John McCain is accused of soliciting money from a foreign agent.

The McCain campaign is using some very odd tactics to raise money. Odd tactics that are explicitly illegal and disturbing. The McCain campaign sent a letter to a Russian envoy to the United Nations asking for not just the $2,300 that would be legally allowed to be contributed to his general election campaign by a citizen of the US, but a letter asking for $5,000 from an officer of a foreign government!

Vitaly Churkin received the letter, with McCain’s signature allegedly on it (it has not been confirmed as an authentic signature, it may be printed on), asking for more money than is legally allowable to give to a campaign. They also included a very clever clause in the letter, stating that if Vitaly Churkin gave them the $5,000, they would return any unused amount in a check after the October 24. Very clever in that it gives them opportunity to use the full $5,000 dollars to earn interest, or provide a larger amount of financing collateral, while not needing to report the full amount as a donation.

Vitaly Churkin

There are so many legal problems with their request for money from a foreign national, especially from an official in the Russian Government. Another problem is the use of private money in a publicly financed campaign, such as McCain’s. McCain cannot accept private donations, except for use in accounting and legal spending which must be put in separate accounts to ensure separation of public and private monies. McCain therefore is attempting to fund his legal and accounting expenses not only at this late date (which he has plenty of general election funds raised before he declared for public financing for that use), but also from Russian government officials. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want the Russians involved in the presidential campaign.

The Russians are quite upset about this solicitation from the McCain campaign, not only for its impropriety, but also for McCain to make blustering charges against them, then with the other hand attempt to get money from them. The seriousness with which the Russians are taking this matter can be seen in their formal dissemination of a press release from Ruslan Bakhtin, the press secretary of the Russian mission to the UN:

We have received a letter from Senator John McCain with a request for a financial donation to his presidential election campaign. In this respect we have to reiterate that neither Russia’s permanent mission to the UN nor the Russian government or its officials finance political activities in foreign countries

If this letter had been perceived as merely a mistake, it is hardly likely that the Russians would go so far as to formally denounce the solicitation.

I have yet to hear the McCain campaign explain why they were soliciting money from a foreign agent.

On My Political Views and Universal Healthcare

I’m a fiscally conservative liberal. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I promise you, it isn’t. I’m certainly not a libertarian, and I do not propose that I fall anywhere in your neat little political spectrum graph you have embedded in your head. I believe in providing some basic necessities of life, such as healthcare, retirement security, and social safety nets through grouping our resources as a community. I believe that we can do so in a cost saving manner, while ensuring a quality of life that is greater than current conditions.

That is how I view the function of government. I see it as our collective ability to help each other, and ourselves, through working in concert on the most basic of needs. We needn’t create massive bureaucracies to do so, nor do we need to give up our individual rights. No one wishes to have a government that is oppressive, or one that takes too much, and provides too little. These are the ingredients to doing the opposite of the what was intended.

The free market is fine and dandy for many, many things. It has proven effective at controlling costs up to a point, and provided us with ingenuity and inventiveness unseen for the vast majority of human history. It seeks to fill needs not yet provided, and punish those who would attempt to become robber barons. But it doesn’t always work. We know this. It isn’t that it needs to be done away with, or massively overhauled, it doesn’t. It just needs common sense measures to ensure it’s proper functioning.

The best example of the free market’s imperfection can be found in the mills and factories of the early twentieth century. Men, women, and children forced to labor in squalid conditions, and made to live as slaves within a framework of freedom. As a people, we rejected this, and rightly so. We put in place regulations and guidelines to correct the abuse of a few on the many, and the system was saved from catastrophe.

We have these dilemmas on a smaller scale each generation. Today, we have a few that need to be addressed. The free market has attempted to provide inexpensive healthcare while regulations have been put in place to help those that the corporate structure cannot, or will not help. These regulations are seen to have have worked against the goal of providing healthcare at a less expensive rate, making insurance and related costs skyrocket. Whether this is necessarily true is debatable, but I think there maybe some truth to the argument.

How are we to both provide inexpensive healthcare and also ensure the health of the population at large? We cannot sit idly by as millions of us suffer cruel fates because of the free market, just as we cannot let our desire to help collapse our ability to provide these services. We must choose a direction, either one that is less regulated, but may abuse those it provides services to, or one that is given to all of us, and is thus protected from such inequities. Either way, there is no doubt that lawsuits must be limited, and bad providers of services found and kept from hurting people. I don’t think anybody will disagree with that last point.

The best example on the world stage may very well come from a stereotyped people. The French. Sure, the French are the symbol of everything bad to the conservatives, yet there healthcare system may be the very best example of a market driven universal healthcare. A decent jumping off point for future discussions on the ability to help all without hurting everyone in the process.

The Frech system is not perfect, of course, but it does provide a wonderful array of services for almost half of what individual expenditures are here in the United States. The per capita cost in France is about $3500, while in the US it’s closing in on $7000. The french get to see their own doctor, and are reimbursed buy the government for a vast number of services. The individual can chose to get further private insurance for procedures that don’t fall into a basic medical needs category, and thus the extra costs of abuse of the system is avoided.

The system doesn’t have the long waits and poor service that conservatives put forward as arguments against universal coverage, and it’s bureaucracy is limited by the use of electronic filing and streamlined electronic transfers of funds. They limit the costs, and maintain a system that was rated number one in the world by the World Health Association in 2001. Half the cost, and everyone is provided for.

Businesses still provide their employees with extra insurance, as benefits, and a way to attract the best workers. Some self employed even completely forgo the system and provide themsleves with their own full coverage insurances. It’s a flexible system that does a number of exceptional things, while maintaining exceptional savings.

Here’s a more thoughts on this from a month ago

The Rated R Election

Just some quick thoughts on why I think this election cycle has become so contemptuous.

If this election ever gets made into a truthful movie, it could never receive a PG-13 rating. There’s too much vitriol, too much hate, and all together too many allegations of the worst sort. I remember as a child being able to watch every second of news, and read every article about the presidential elections. If I were that same child today, I would hope my parents would shield me from this.

Remember Carter-Reagan, or Mondale-Bush? Campaigns that made some silly points, and attacked each other for sure, but nothing like calling your opponent a terrorist or mischaracterizing their ancestry and religion. That just wasn’t done. Sure, some fanatics deep in their own ideology no doubt cast aspersions upon anyone they disagreed with, but the technology of the day kept it confined from public mass consumption. Today, The political feeding trough of the country is filled with this offal, unfit for safe consumption, yet cheaper than actual commentary.

I’m guilty of it. I realize that. I push the hard edges, and make no bones about it. Maybe I’m stuck in a physics equation dealing with the conservation of energy, the muck gets thrown at my side, and I have an equal and opposite reaction (losing a little of the muck lost as heat energy in the process). I’m not a political science professor concerned with riding the fine line between informing and balancing–I’m a blogger taking advantage of the technology and the voice given to me.

Am I making a plea for this all to stop, for us to refocus our attentions toward a common good? I don’t know. I’m not going to let up on my posts reporting the disgustingness appearing from the other side, just as I’m not going stop being inspired and hopeful that after this election is put in the books, we have a chance to redefine ourselves to the world community and ourselves. I think many of us are this way. We have these two sides to our political reality. On one, we have a vision of perfection being created from our deeply held political beliefs, and on the other, we see the horridness, the antithesis of our vision being fought for from our political opponents.

What the main concern of both sides seems to be is our personal freedom. The ability to go through our lives unharassed by the intervention of forces beyond our control. The noble vision of each man and woman living as they see fit, and having a piece of the happiness we all dream of. I think it may be this simple.

When the ‘other side’ is viewed, we see the extreme negative consequence of their vision, the ultimate ends of a misguided means. The conservatives see government programs as the enemy, and corporate involvement in these very same activities as the ultimate good. The liberal element sees corporate involvement in some areas as profiteering on the fundamental necessities of life, when a communal good could be provided at a cheaper cost by pooling our resources. Neither side wants to be burdened with understanding the honest benefits that the other view could provide, just as we do not want to consider our own views as misguided.

It’s not that both sides are right. But it’s not that one side may be right, while the other is wrong. The world isn’t so simple. There is no black and white world where this is so. The world is a shade of grays. Now, I do not, and can not say that a combination of the two sides ideas would be better than the alternatives, that is also a foolish path that leads to the solution of problems that do not exist, and problems arising from solutions that are not needed. It is quite possible that either side is right for a given set of circumstances.

The election has turned into an exposé of this problem of black and white rationalizing of a gray world. Our hackles are raised at every turn, both by our vision of a terrible outcome, and the reactions to reactions to reactions of reactions. The endless froth of contempt is spilling over from hearts, and into our souls. Hatred is being born where misunderstanding once resided, and misunderstanding is beginning to creep into our own political visions.

Of course Senator Obama isn’t a Muslim, just as he’s not a socialist, a terrorist sympathizer, or a secret agent sent by a foreign government or group. These fearful indictments aren’t born from actual events or truths, they are created in the fearful reaction to a perceived worst case scenario. Maybe it can’t be helped, this attempt to justify our visions of doom, but at least we can understand it. It isn’t evil that resides in the souls of those that spread this fear mongering, it is the vision of evil that does it.

Defenses are up now. Soothing the fearful soul can only come with time, just as the mental trauma from a car crash gently fades from consciousness and finds it’s place somewhere calmer, and more reflective. I can no more rationally explain to a person spewing forth hysterical denouncements of Senator Obama’s character than I could magically heal a survivor of a horrible accident. It will take time for these people to heal themselves, and we can only hope that the scars also fade.