Part-Time Pundit

The Pettiness of Local Politics and Frivolity of Illinois Election Law

The election season for local offices is heating up in Champaign. Recently the deadline passed for city mayor and city council. Of the 13 sets of petitions to get on the ballot, 11 had objections. Some of those objections are significant. For instance, mayoral candidate Mingee did not get enough signatures. Others border on absurd, such as the objection to city council candidate Freddie Gordon (he didn’t staple the forms). The entire list of petitions and objections can be seen here.

First, candidates for office should follow the rules and be fully familiar with them. If a candidate cannot be trusted to file paperwork correctly they can’t be trusted with political power. It should be just as simple as that. Some of the packets that were filed in the election show that the candidates simply did not put much effort into them. There should be no reason to have “scratched out” content when the form can be submitted with no errors in the first place.

However, the amount of landmines that appear in the quest to get on the ballot can only be designed to keep rookies off the ballot. Rookies, for the purpose of this article, are people like you and me as opposed to professional politicians. They are the exact people the Founding Fathers wanted in office when they talked about citizen legislators.

Starting with the challenge to the incumbent mayor, it should first be noted that the challenge was filed by Michael Richards who lost his election bid for County Clerk. His objection for Mayor Schweighart is that he did not put which city he was running for mayor for. To file for election in city races, one must file the petitions with the city clerk of that town. To run in Champaign, you file with the Champaign City Clerk. In Urbana, you file with the Urbana City Clerk. It is patently obvious where one intends to run for mayor, it is the city they filed the packet in. It’s obvious that Richards is spending his free time harassing actual elected office-holders.

The objection for city council candidate Freddie Gordon shows just how easy it can be to be knocked off the ballot. All that he missed was not stapling his petition sheets together. Other candidates did not put the right date for election; some did not refer to the office in the precise technical manner.

While candidates for office should take the due time and attention to file their papers correctly, the fact that the smallest of details can cause a candidate to be thrown off the ballot is disconcerting. It should not take a team of lawyers to review paperwork ensuring proper stapling to get normal people on the ballot. The voters are perfectly capable of determining which candidates are worthy of office, there doesn’t need to be hurdles placed by the election commission to trap people for innocent oversights (not to be confused with patent stupidity).

Ballot access should be relatively easy and without undue burdens for those who don’t wish to affiliate with a party. Democracy is best suited when there is the widest array of choice possible. Voters are capable of figuring out the rest.

Full Disclosure: I am pursuing candidacy for the Champaign Unit 4 school board. (Filing date: Jan. 29-Feb. 5, 2007).

Know Your Rights

Do an attorney search and get your legal matters taken care of properly. It’s best to have an attorney you can trust when you need to navigate the confusing realm
of labor law politics, so find discrimination lawyers or legal representatives that work for you.

December 29th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Chambana, Elections, Politics | 3 comments

Radio Interview on Iraq

I was on the Extreme Wisdom Radio show and gave some of my thoughts on Iraq. Listen to the podcast below, or go to the Extreme Wisdom website and listen to the podcast of the entire show.

You can thank Billy Joe Mills for the AIM sounds during the call.

December 22nd, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Iraq, Politics | 2 comments

Al Qaeda’s Economic War and Online Identity Theft: A Perfect Storm

Online identity theft has become a constant concern in a world of online shopping and bill paying. In the rush to move to the internet age, many companies simply neglected security concerns and the result has luckily not been as bad as it could have been.

In 2005, I did an estimate of the amount of money that was compromised because of online identity theft and came up with $24 billion in the United States alone. With the help of Agnieszka Klus, I redid the study recently with more realistic numbers and found over $55 billion was compromised. That amount is enough to pay off the entire state debt of Illinois.

Despite this large amount of money being at risk, very little of that money actually gets stolen. What investigators have found is despite it being relatively easy to steal money online, the current fraud protections make it hard to steal a great deal of money; “The straw is only so big”, according to one government source. The running assumption is that online identity theft would be used for theft and there is a finite limit of the amount of theft that can actually take place. This has allowed financial institutions to build in this amount into their business models and simply write the cost of fraud and fraud protection into the price for their services.

The idea that we, as a society, should rely on only one layer of protection (the limitation on how much can be stolen) is absurd and violates defense in depth. Eventually someone will figure out a way around the straw. More importantly, however, earlier this month proved false the assumption that identity theft would be used solely for stealing money.

On December 1st, the Department of Homeland Security warned of an “aspirational threat” to United States banking interests by Al Qaeda. A website claiming to be affiliated with Al Qaeda encouraged the cyberattack against US financial interests using denial of service attacks and viruses. While the specific methods of attack are “low tech” and easy to prevent, it shows that terrorist groups are moving to expand their tactics to include economic warfare.

If the goal of identity theft is to make money, the incentive is to keep taking as much as you can. If the goal is economic warfare, the behavior changes dramatically. As a concrete example, Al Qaeda could use run-of-the-mill hacker techniques to build a large botnet to steal identities. It could then use those machines that they have taken over to process fake transactions in the name of that consumer.

For instance, they could use a consumer’s home PC and process transactions at amazon.com to buy a bunch of books using the credit card information and home address of the consumer. It is not clearly a case of fraud because the hacker is not getting any personal gain. Does Amazon or the credit card company believe that the consumer really didn’t make the order when the product is going to their home address?

Now repeat this attack for a thousand consumers, ten thousand consumers, or one hundred thousand consumers. What would happen with the ensuing media coverage is that consumers would think twice about shopping online if their assets can’t be protected. They would think twice about paying bills online or banking online if they’re bank accounts can’t be protected. If done correctly and on a large enough scale, it would lead to a dramatic loss of confidence in electronic commerce and could push the United States economy back ten years.

The fundamental problem with electronic commerce is that transactions are not effectively authenticated. If someone knows all the right information, they can place a transaction in your name. We’ve learned that in the digital age that stealing information from consumer PCs is remarkably easy. However, there exists technology today to fix this problem.

Two-factor authentication (something you “have” and something you “know”) would mitigate the risk of stolen information. Some banks use key chains that generate random numbers to authenticate users to their bank accounts. This must be widely applied to not only bank accounts but general financial transactions online. As another example, instead of entering credit card information with a keyboard, a user could insert a credit card with an embedded smart card into a card reader attached to their computer. The reader could have a keypad to enter a PIN to make the transaction secure and the card reader would happily give the online merchant all the information it needed to complete the transaction.

There are a variety of technologies to properly authenticate users to make purchases and these should be adopted. Al Qaeda and other groups are already on the lookout to undermine our economy. The question is will we stop them before it’s too late.

Learn More Online

Ever thought about learning online? It’s easy to get an online bachelors degree in anything from foreign policy to political science. Just look into finding a great online college and you’ll be on your way to getting an education in something you love!

December 22nd, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | InfoSec, Information Security, Military / War, Politics, Technology / Internet, Terrorism | one comment

New URL for Part-Time Pundit

I’ve just finally gotten parttimepundit.com for the web address of this blog. The old URL (jcb.pentex-net.com) will remain active for the forseeable future, but redirect blogrolls to http://www.parttimepundit.com.

December 22nd, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Politics | one comment

The Media Mob: “Written by partisans to be read by the naïve”

It seems standard fare for second-rate columnists to write broadsides against bloggers. It’s particularly ironic for the journalistic community to berate blogs for poor writing. After all, blogs have supplanted journalism for the literary gutter. To then boast displays the arrogance of someone who claims bragging rights for finished in second-to-last place.

It is true; blogs “produce minimal reportage”. However, most blogs don’t claim that they are even trying to report. Many bloggers quite clearly state they are giving their opinion on events. This is in contrast to most journalists who claim to report but merely shroud their opinion journalism in the faux cloak of “objective reporting.”

What blogs do accomplish, at least the few that actually try to be media instead of diary, is fact-check the “objective journalists.” This is where the real contempt for bloggers comes from. Blogs have outted journalistic frauds that would have gone undiscovered despite all the checks and balances in the traditional media.

It is true that our educational system has produced a couple of generations of people wholly intellectually unsuited for intelligent political discourse. That is not a problem of blogs, it is a problem of society. Let’s be honest, it’s not like reductionistic discourse doesn’t have a home in the traditional media too. Before blogs there were sound bites. Before blogs reporting, at least on political matters, was largely receiving faxes from the national parties and repeating their talking points. Fatuity is not unknown to the 24 hour news channels or the nightly news.

Blogs, for their part are quite easily played by the media and politicians alike. All a journalist has to do is criticize blogs and a previously unknown journalist becomes news of the hour on the Internet. Most bloggers do behave like yard apes. The only difference between most bloggers and most journalists is that the later has a sense of elitism about being an ape because they happen to wear a suit while doing it.

Blaming blogs of the “decay” of journalism is more than a little absurd. Journalism was already in a state of decay long before blogs because of their monopolistic attitudes that allowed them to get sloppy. Bloggers took the “journalistic” reigns because of the dramatic failure of the traditional media to (1) report the news effectively and accurately, (2) to be objective or at least honest about their bias, and (3) adapt to the information needs of society.

The free market requires many outlets so that consumers can pick the outlet that meets their needs. If no outlet exists, one will be created and so it was with blogs. That isn’t to say all blogs are worthy outlets, they aren’t. Most of the hundred or so million blogs get trivial amounts of traffic. However, there are serious blogs out there and serious organizations trying to get blogging professionalized (see the Media Bloggers Association which I am a part of).

It’s true that finding a decent blog is like finding a needle in a haystack, but with blogging soon to be on the decline to more serious players will stand out. For those nostalgic for the “good ole days” of journalism, this is decay. For society who wants and need solid, reliable and accurate information and opinion, it is progress. Painful progress, but progress nonetheless.

December 21st, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Blogging, Politics, The MSM | 3 comments

The Problem with the Culture of Drive-Thru Abortions

In the quest to remove any and all obstacles and delays in the race for a woman (or girl) to get an abortion, people starting become aware that abusive men were coercing women against their will to get them. By bringing down the full force of constitutional law to make it not only constitutional to kill one’s unborn child, but to be able to do so as fast as possible, it made it possible for women to be abused in the process.

First, Planned Parenthood knows and knowingly covers up obvious cases of abuse. One study shows that Planned Parenthood and related organizations failed to report about a minimum of about 10,000 cases of child sex abuse in Illinois in the year 2000 alone. The law is clear that medical providers are required to report suspected cases of abuse. When authorities try to investigate child rape, they are thwarted by Planned Parenthood, who has a financial stake in the problem remaining unaddressed. Legally, this is called a “conflict of interest.”

Second, women are coerced to get abortions. I know this because I know women it has happened to. By eliminating even the most sensible restrictions such as parental notification (note that is not parental consent), a woman can be rushed to have an abortion and no questions will be asked. This is a boon to men who don’t want to pay child support, don’t want to “lose face” for having a child, or want to cover up for their crimes of impregnating a minor. Coerced abortions are a problem.

However, laws such as HB 5882 in Michigan are a profoundly bad idea. Instead of going after coerced abortions by preventing them, it makes it a crime for a man to even be involved in the decision-making process in any way except for complete deferral. It’s another attempt to separate men from children. “Constitutional” law says men have no say in the decision to get an abortion. This law says they aren’t even allowed to speak on the subject. Considering the current state of child support laws and custody laws, apparently the only thing men can contribute is their paycheck and all other effort is disallowed.

Sure, the law could catch men who engage in coercion. However, how such violations would ever be proven is a problem since it is entirely a “speech crime.” Further, “battered woman syndrome” suggests that women most in need of protection are least likely to seek help and the redress that such a law would allow. In short, more innocent men would be prosecuted than true domestic abusers who ought to be nailed to the wall.

The problem is not that there are no laws to punish coercion, there are. The problem is the weight of the Constitution being brought down to rush women through abortion mills without question. Planned Parenthood has no incentive to think twice about killing a child, abortion is a profit-center for them.

Taking the typical image the pro-abortion crowd likes to use, imagine an abused woman (or girl) who has an abusive boyfriend or family. She discovers she is pregnant and she knows her family or boyfriend will be livid once they discover the pregnancy. She is lonely, scared and has no place to turn. In come the knights in crimson-stained armor, Planned Parenthood. They pledge to help this young woman and bring her into their clinic. They abort the child and send her on her way. The problem is they send her right back into the abusive situation she came from. The problem wasn’t the child, the problem was the abusive relationships that remain unaddressed until the next time she gets pregnant and Planned Parenthood wants to make a buck.

It is the failure of “constitutional” law that leaves these women prey to abusive and coercive relationships. The solution is not more bad laws but to rethink the culture of drive-thru abortions.

December 19th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Around the US, Freedom of Speech, Law / Legal Issues, Politics, Pro-Life, Religion | 6 comments

Part-Time Pundit Interview on Radio

I was interviewed for 2 hours last night by the Uncooperative Blogger on his radio show. You can listen to the archive here.

Also, check out Uncooperative Bloggers’ site, he’s the founder of the Coalition Against Illegal Immigration and has some good stuff.

December 17th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Politics | one comment