Justice Department officials reported that the administration supports extending three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are due to expire at the end of the year. These items include the authority to access business records, monitor individual terrorists and conduct roving wiretaps. The administration is willing to consider additional privacy protections as long as they don’t weaken the effectiveness of the law.

I am gravely disappointed.

I am, politically, most accurately described as a libertarian, however, I’m definitely not a candidate for membership in the libertarian party. (Staunch stronghold of freeze-dried-whackaloons!) Philosophically, libertarians cover a wide spectrum, but tend to support strong personal rights to life and liberty, free market capitalism, private property rights, minimal government regulation, minimal taxation, and rejection of the welfare state, all within the context of the rule of law.

The Patriot Act, initially passed by a bipartisan majority just 45 days after the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center bombings, has been highly controversial.

The Cliff Notes version of the act is:

Title I: provides for enhanced domestic security services
Title II: expands availability and flexibility of surveillance procedures to law enforcement officials.
Title III: extends anti-money-laundering provisions to detect and prevent terrorism
Title IV: beefs up border security, the INS, and associated detention guidelines.
Title VI: provides aid to victims and families of victims of terrorism
Title VIII: redefines criminal law around terrorism, cyberterrorism and support activities
Title IX: establishes priorities for collection of foreign intelligence
Title X: adds miscellaneous provisions not covered under other sections

The primary arguments against the Patriot Act are that it:

• Expands terrorism laws to include “domestic terrorism” which could subject political organizations to surveillance, wiretapping, harassment, and criminal action for political advocacy.

• Expands the ability of law enforcement to conduct secret searches, gives them wide powers of phone and Internet surveillance, and access to highly personal medical, financial, mental health, and student records with minimal judicial oversight.
• Allows FBI Agents to investigate American citizens for criminal matters without probable cause of crime if they say it is for “intelligence purposes.”
• Permits non-citizens to be jailed based on mere suspicion and to be denied re-admission to the US for engaging in free speech. Suspects convicted of no crime may be detained indefinitely in six month increments without meaningful judicial review.

On September 11, I posted an update on Facebook, “I’m grateful for America’s freedom today.” Responses were mixed – some shared my gratitude, and some were dismayed at our eroding freedoms. My response?

You know, we may have lost some of our innocence and some of our perceived freedoms – I’ve written about my loathing for the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay before.

Still, I can post whatever I want here without getting thrown into jail. (Myanmar) I can protest for or against anything I want downtown without getting shot in cold blood. (China) I can wear whatever I like – and drive alone – and execute my own legal agreements. (Iran)

It may be far from perfect, and the pendulum has swung well toward paranoia since 9/11, but America is still my country and I’m still grateful.

Still, I’d have to agree, in principle, that our freedoms are eroding. We are losing our civil liberties and privacy. I’m neither a constitional law scholar nor a political analyst, and I can’t say where the line should be drawn. I do strongly feel that the Patriot Act is Orwellian and goes too far. I’d hoped for better from our current administration.

In my current foggy brain state, I thought I’d share with you things that are on my mind that I’m not going to write about because I can’t do them justice.

• The easing of trade and travel restrictions with Cuba. This restriction has always seemed ludicrous to me, and I’m glad we’re opening the door.
• The Obama’s new puppy. Breeder sourced or rescued, and will it make the breed too popular? Holy crap – in the scheme of things expected of a president, this is UTTERLY IMMATERIAL. Find some actual news to report on, people.
• My sister’s workplace (a hospital) was evacuated today for a bomb threat to the adjacent pharmacy. Apparently a druggie couldn’t get his fix and left the bomb beside instead. The bomb squad actually detonated the not-particularly-lethal bomb. I’m very glad she and her colleagues are ok.
• Taxes, which utterly suck.
• Going through a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff, which also utterly sucks and I have not even begun on it.
• Sleet (in Poulsbo) and snow (in Anchorage) in April is a really bad idea on the part of the weather gods.
• My smug sons, one of whom is coping marvelously and the other of whom is driving me nuts. (no guesses needed)
• The demise of WASL standardized testing and exit exams in Washington. (Yeah!) Which will probably be replaced with some other form of standardized testing. (Sigh.)
• The incredible, enduring value of friends in my life.

Please feel free to add, subtract or elaborate on any of these subjects.

Last night we went to our long awaited blast-from-the-past concert. Cheap Trick, Heart & Journey, at the White River Amphitheater in Auburn.

I mention the venue because the concert isn’t actually the story here.

The White River Amphitheater, located 10 miles east of Auburn on an Indian reservation, is a partially covered outdoor concert venue that seats 20,000. Many relatively big name bands are booked there, to the dismay of concert-goers throughout the Puget Sound.

You see, the location is served only by a pair of two lane rural roads, and traffic in and out is disastrous. It can take cars two, three even four hours to reach the location, and 90% of folks who attend a White River Amphitheater concert swear never to go there again.

All recommendations were to use the park and ride shuttle location at the local mall, so we did. I had a few reservations about the concept – the shuttle buses, rickety local school buses, had to traverse the same congested two lane roads as everyone else, so the only net advantage was less cars on the road and front door drop-off.

We left downtown Seattle at 4:15 for a 7:00pm concert. Under good conditions, the drive to Auburn is an hour, and the drive to the amphitheater another 30 minutes.

Conditions were far from good. We didn’t get to shuttle parking until about 5:40. We ran into McDonald’s to use the restroom and then… oops. There were several hundred people in line, wrapping up and down two rows of cars in the parking lot. And why is it that the assholes who cut in front of you in line are more likely to be 1) drunk, and 2) chain smokers?

We made it on a standing room only rickety school bus at 6:30, and headed out into stop and go traffic. The 10-mile country road drive took an an hour and ten minutes.

After about 45 minutes, a couple of people were absolutely desperate to go to the bathroom. They were asking to be let off, regardless, in the middle of nowhere. The bus driver would not, stating policy; she wouldn’t let anyone off until we reached the destination.

Eventually, a couple of the most desperate made do with a shared big gulp cup in a section walled off with blankets and coats. It was quite a pathetic group bonding experience. I don’t think those folks took the shuttle bus on return.

In spite of starting our journey very early (4:15 pm) and concert starting late, we missed the first 25 minutes, arriving just in time for Cheap Trick’s encore. The concert was excellent, I’ll post about that separately – the real story here is the transport.

We skipped Journey’s encore to line up for the shuttle bus returning to our car. There were already a couple hundred people in line, and yes, we again encountered booze & cigarette-fortified line-jumpers. We allowed them to live.

We made it onto a bus fairly quickly, there were several lined up, and headed out. Almost immediately, the driver took an unfamiliar turn. “Oh, she’s taking an alternate route to miss traffic, good.”

Uh, wrong!

Nearly forty-five minutes later, completely disoriented after driving down several long dark back roads, the bus driver admitted she was lost. She asked if anyone had a GPS or a map. She called her dispatcher, and got her first set of directions back to civilization. Another bus was following, and we turned around and followed it for a while.

A half hour later, as we headed up what looked like a low mountain pass and past a state park, one guy admitted to having a GPS and pointed out to her that she was way off-route and that again, she’d missed a turn and we’d be dozens of miles and a very long time getting back to town. We turned around and backtracked – the other lost bus, for all I know, is still driving around in the dark.

The bus dispatcher was, by this time, no longer answering the radio, but GPS guy sat up front near her and navigated her back to civilization.

At this point, the bus was divided into two camps – the mildly irritated, laughing and patient majority that assumed we’d figure it out, and the hostile and nasty minority who were screaming insults, random directions, and for her to slow down and speed up.

When we came to the main road again, we crossed a concert traffic police roadblock. Several folks screamed for her to stop and get directions. Most of the nasty minority stomped off the bus (no “must stay onboard” policy by this point!), swearing they’d get home some other way. (How were they going to call for a ride, since they didn’t know where they were?)

One of the cops gave directions, while another cop took the driver off the bus – not that she was in trouble, just walked around with her, calmed her down, made sure she was ok to drive. (I give the woman credit – I’d have been a quivering wreck by then.) A third climbed on the bus and spoke to those of us still onboard. We assured the officer we were fine with her driving skills, just had no confidence in her ability to find the broadside of a barn.

At our nearly unanimous request, the cops provided an escort all the way back to shuttle parking for the poor bus driver. The cops also gave the nasty minority a chance to re-board. The rest of us onboard allowed them to live.

We retraced our route to the concert venue and drove back to the shuttle parking, and the cop pulled over on the exit and waved the bus driver on. With about five blocks to go, the driver managed to get lost one last time on the way to shuttle parking. She missed the turnoff to the mall and had to backtrack to finally get us there.

We had been on one of the first buses to leave the amphitheater, but when we finally arrived after two hours of wandering lost, the parking lot was nearly empty and our cars were the last ones there. I retraced our route, here:

I think we’ve joined the 90% of concert goers that will not be attending another White River Amphitheater concert. It’s too bad, they book some great acts.

My son is in 11th grade history this year, his last required year. It’s – surprise! – US history. Again. This makes me cranky.

I am not a history buff. I am, however, a believer in a solid education, and I think our educational system should be turning out more students who are fired up about history.

I remember my history education as a blur of repetitive American history. Coumbus blah blah American Revolution blah Lewis and Clark blah blah Civil War blah blah Industrial Revolution blah World Wars then, well, the school year was over. (They didn’t want to tackle the tricky Vietnam and Cold War.) All the schools ever seemed to teach was the same tired stuff, year after year, and what they required from us students was rote memorization of dates, battles, places, and presidents. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”

I had only one class that stood out, a contemporary world problems seminar, where we read newspapers, debated current events and talked about issues as they unfolded through the eyes of the everyday citizen. It was the only class that engaged us on every level.

It’s no wonder that our American system turns out so few history geeks. We teach it as a dead field of study, we teach only dead facts and figures, and we skew it so heavily toward our own history that it distorts our young people’s view of the world around us.

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one’s own culture. It often entails the belief that one’s own race or ethnic group is the most important and/or that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other groups.

I did a survey of Washington state’s educational standards, and here’s an oversimplified summary of the 12-year history curriculum:

1st grade – none
2nd grade – none
3rd grade – US history
4th grade – state and US history
5th grade – US history
6th grade – world history
7th grade – state and US history
8th grade – US history
9th grade – US history
10th grade – modern world history
11th grade – US history
12th grade – Contemporary world problems or other social science (elective)

That’s 7 years of US history, 2 years of world history, and one social science elective. Pardon me, but is the last 500 years of one country’s history on one continent proportionally – 7:2 – so critical? Are we Americans really so special that we need to review the American Revolution and Lewis and Clark seven times in seven years, cover multiple milennia of Chinese history once for three weeks in sixth grade, and never touch on modern Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian history at all?

History could be so much more compelling to students if we taught about the people behind the dates, places & battles, their stories, hopes & dreams. We need to cover the ideas and philosophies that were flashpoints for historical change, and why, in the context of their times and culture, they drove people to such passionate measures. We need to not be so afraid of religion, in the historical and comparative context, in schools, religion was and continues to be a significant impetus for conflict and political change.

I’ve often been told that the reason we study history is so that we will learn from our mistakes.

Is quisnam does non perceptum ex history est fatum ut revolvo is.
He who does not learn from history is destined to repeat it.

We’ve always tried, on this blog, to avoid politics. It’s divisive, and not really what the site is about. But I feel strongly about a politician, for the first time in a while, and wanted to write about it. So, we’ll set aside the rule for now.

As most of those of you who read here know, Jeri and I lived in Alaska before moving to Washington state in 2005. I’d lived there, off and on, for a big chunk of my life, from 1969 until we moved here. So yeah, I’m an Alaskan, even though I live in Washington. I’ll always identify with the place.

Alaska politics is odd mix of not immensely sophisticated and weirdly chaotic. Alaska has been a “red” state for many years, but with an odd penchant for mavericks and oddities. Sometimes relatively conservative Democrats do well there, perhaps the best example being ex-governor Tony Knowles, former governor and mayor of Anchorage. Of late, the Republican Party has been wracked with charges of corruption from state legislators up to Senator-for-Life Ted Stevens. The Alaska GOP has for years assumed its supremacy and often paid the price for that arrogance. Politics in Alaska have generally been a mix of amusing and exasperating. So, you know, like most places.

Me, politically? I tend a lot to sit on the fence, uncomfortably, as a moderate, but have leaned Republican and conservative for the most part. I split from the party here and there, somewhat strongly…gun control, for example. I totally agree with Obama’s point from his convention speech that we can still honor the First Amendment and keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I am not evangelical about politics (or most things, mind you), but I don’t suffer fools gladly, especially disingenuous politicians. I’m sick to death of rhetoric. I’m bone weary of two plus year long campaigns for federal office. I think most politicians – not all, but most – are suspect. I find Rush Limbaugh equally repellant as James Carville; I’m tired of the BS from both of them. Jon Stewart is absolutely my hero – even though I don’t agree with his politics – for going on CNN’s Crossfire a couple of years ago and telling those idiot pundits to shut the hell up: they were hurting America. And lo, CNN heard and cancelled, and it was good.

I went to high school for a couple of years with Sean Parnell, Sarah Palin’s Lt. Governor. Played football with him. I don’t consider Sean to be a close friend or claim any sort of “in” with him…I just like him; I think he’s a thoroughly decent guy who in my few dealings with him has been genuine and honest. I’ve never met Governor Palin, though, but I think she’s cut from the same cloth as Sean.

Enough background. I’ve decided, after some initial trepidation, that I am totally stoked about Sarah Palin being the Republican vice presidential candidate. Here’s why.

It’s not because she’s a woman, any more than I’d be stoked about Barack Obama being black, or me being a fat guy from Poulsbo. To me, that should be and is irrelevant, and I truly believe we are never, ever going to get over discrimination until we quit worrying about it and move the hell on. We’re different racially, religiously and sexually, and that’s sometimes interesting, sometimes troubling, it sometimes causes us to act differently, but worrying about that so much is about three-fourths of the problem. If the being a woman part of it impresses me, it’s because she frickin’ gave birth 4 months ago (men still can’t do that) and never skipped a beat doing her job. And I complain when my feet hurt! I do “get it” that being a woman puts her in a hole with some people. I just think that’s their problem, not mine.

No, I’m stoked about Sarah because I think she’s really, truly different as a politician. Her honesty is important to her. Getting the government out of people’s way, but using it as tool for the common good is important. Corruption, to her, is loathsome, and she doesn’t give a crap who the bad actor is, they deserve no place in government and she pushes them out. She appears (and I say “appears” because how the hell do you really know, absent direct inside knowledge) to be a great family person. As I watched her speech in Dayton accepting McCain’s offer, I was struck by the time out of that few minutes she had to be introduced to America that she took to talk about her family, in particular her husband and oldest son. Unlike many such platitudes from politicos running for office, it struck me as very genuine.

I also have feeling that while she would love to win this election, if she doesn’t, she’ll be quite content to go home and watch her husband Todd win another snowmobile race and, oh yeah, run the largest land mass state in the country, one loaded with natural resources we’re going to need to manage. Or maybe go shoot a moose. I doubt she’ll go off wailing and gnashing her teeth, gain weight, grow a beard (well, figuratively) and sulk. Why do I think this? Because before McCain called the last time she talked about the VP job she not only downplayed her chances, but laughed a bit about the office itself; the proper attitude, even though I do think the position is important given McCain’s age.

I like that the mistakes Palin makes, like maybe not being the best debater, not having the pat answer, seem to be mistakes of honesty, not lying. This thing with the ex-brother-in-law state trooper is an overblown piece of muckraking crap, with the chief rake-r being a guy she beat handily in the last election. My take on that whole thing: the trooper in question is a bad guy, who I wouldn’t want carrying a gun as a public protector. If she can’t force his firing, if that’s what happened, regardless of who he was married to, then what the hell is her job, anyway?

I do think experience is an issue. It’s one in her favor, ultimately, to me. She has no experience in Washington DC – and other than that meaning she’ll have to learn how to wade through the crap, I think that’s good. She’s been running a state the last two years while Obama, McCain, and Biden have been, well, running for President. She’s been in the executive branch; the other three are legislators…lawmakers, not leaders. Foreign policy? Well, other than personally having a multinational background genetically, what does Obama have more so than Palin – voting on State Department funding? Isn’t that why we have career diplomats and experts? The details are up to them, the policy is up to the President. It’s a wash, folks, at worst for Palin, in spite of what you’ll be hearing.

So, I’m dropping my overt political indifference to say, give Sarah Palin a look. Forget the pundits, the Fox News screamers, the Air America snits, and the Monday morning quarterbacks of the network news. I feel better about a national politician than I have in a long, long time.

I just hope I’m not jinxing her.

Note: For a different, but equally positive, take on Sarah Palin’s newly-minted candidacy, check out Alaskan blogger Jim Wright’s excellent summary at Stonekettle Station.