I think Obama may be more open to some of the changes you are talking about then you are now willing to admit. McCain certainly ain’t going to change anything, about Iraq or anything else.

I interviewed him at a hearing on the FCC a couple of years ago and he was all for free time on the public broadcast airwaves for presidential candidates and removing the money on K street from influencing politics. But saying it and doing it are obviously two quite different things, and certainly impossible if you are trying to win the Republican primary nomination for president. In a world of total “unreality,” truth doesn’t matter. Only well crafted sound bites that sink down through the ether to the heart stings of simple people.

I was talking to one such individual yesterday by a babbling brook and trying to explain the Siegelman story – and the civil jury system. After a few cans of Busch, he had to close his eyes while he was listening to me and I had to talk slower than usual, but I think it finally sunk in. It is his rights they are taking away, and his tax money they are using to spy on us.

It’s not just the city of Birmigham, it’s the U.S. Homeland Security Department, the giant new bureaucracy created by Bush to destroy FEMA and turn it over to the Brownies of the world.

I plan to write more about this in a story in the works, after the 60 Minutes piece aftermath cools down, but in Birmingham, they now have computers and software dedicated to listening to every sound in the city limits. The local press releases on it, given first to the Fox affiliate of course, showed the focus on the sound of gun shots. What a nice thing to have, eh? Cops can get to the crime scene in minutes.

Unfortunately, as with any computer system, sources tell me most of the calls are false alarms – much like the FBI’s complaints about the NSA requests for interviews with innocent citizens who were falsely red-flagged as terrorists by the computer system that scans for key words in all those saved e-mails and phone calls.

The locals who still, after everything we know, back Bush as “the man,” think the problem are the blacks running Birmingham – not the Bush Justice Department and Homeland Secruity. Hey, the local press doesn’t tell them any different, so what are they supposed to believe?

Another solution is the Swiss-style plural presidency which has the added benefit of more than one party getting a 2-year turn at the presidency during every 6 years. And, major decisions have to come by vote of the multi-person presidency. I think Switzerland has 5 and calls it the “executive council.”

Imagine the difference during the last 8 years if we’d had an executive council with not just Bush but Gore, Hillary, McCain, etc. all on it. The quantity of devilment would have been considerably less, presumably, or at least the devilment would have been “compromise devilment” of a more restrained nature.

Juries ought to be in charge of a lot more than they are. They’re local, they’re randomly drawn, they legally can have no personal interest in cases they try, and they’re theoretically sovereign. EPA-licensed polluters would hate to hear that administrative regulation had ended and we’re going back to English common law and juries. They’d clean up their pollution tomorrow. Right now, courtesy the Sausage Factory on K Street, they own the regulators.

Give individuals back their sovereignty through such institutions as the local jury and a lot would change. Right now, that original “yeoman sovreignty” is inoperative with feudal power residing in the political elite in DC.

And, as bad as Bush seems, I think it is illogical to assume “anybody but Bush” would be better. The underlying problem is the “heroic” or “imperial” presidency which, with a huge concentration of power and patronage, cannot help but attract the worst political meglomaniacs to it. My laundry list of proof of that again: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixson, and most recently George W. Bush.

Decent people in the office of U.S. president have been rarer than unicorn horns during the last century. That’s a fairly good argument that the problem is the office as it has come to be empowered and accepted, because our choices for it will almost always be limited to individuals who fall into that meglomaniac category. Truly decent people don’t want anything to do with it.

I just don’t see how we get from here to there under your libertarian view, although I agree with much of the analysis. I don’t know how to fix the Constitution to recreate American Democracy with a parliament instead of a Congress. I would be happy if the governor of Alabama were required to hold a press conference every once in a while.

Would I love to see Bush have to face the House of Commons like Tony Blair did, before he was forced from office? You bet. Now show me how you are going to amend the Constitution to bring about that change, and if I like what is written, maybe I’ll get behind it : )

In other words, I don’t see or expect system-wide sweeping changes coming anytime soon as to the organization of the U.S. system of three branches of government.

I agree with you most of all here about the jury system, which has been obliterated, and corrupted in the Siegelman case, and not by Democrats.

Can you say Karl Rove and “jackpot justice” and “liberal judges” and so-called tort reform?

Obama talking about how the people must help him is nonsense. His campaign is about Obama becoming president, not about empowering you and me to run our lives. His policy proposals (just like Hillary’s) all envision wider government control of individuals and higher taxes. Bringing new people into the political process has happened regularly over the decades. When they get to Washington and get a government policy job or Congressional staff job, a weird transformation takes place. They become just like the folks who came before them.

A good mental picture of this is produced by reading the scene from Animal Farm where the pigs, now thoroughly in charge of things, become indistinguishable from the humans who preceded them. Or as The Who said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

This is real world, not theory. This is K Street, a block or so away from here and the staffers thronging out to lunch or drinks after work from Capitol Hill, not theory. The allegory in Animal Farm is real and I see it up close and personal every day.

Maybe you are right about Republicans and independents breaking for Obama. Stranger things have happened. But this is February and November is a long way off. The two major party conventions are still a long way off. And I don’t watch Fox News. In fact, I get most of my news from the BBC text website, some from Time, and some from the Washington Post.

Much government policy is in fact determined by the president. This is precisely the fundamental problem with the “imperial” or “heroic” presidency that has evolved since the time of Teddy Roosevelt. The Constitution is very clear in limiting the powers of the executive, and for good reason.

An executive out of control – which we’ve seen numerous times from Woodrow Wilson through George Bush – is a direct threat to our constitutional liberties, millions of innocent lives, the economy and world peace. Bush has been particularly egregious in his adoption of the John Yoo-Al Gonzales definition of the presidency, a definition that falls only a little short of Octavian Caesar’s definition of his powers as first “imperator” of Rome. But, as noted in another post, FDR and LBJ were just as destructive.

Unhindered presidential power – enshrined in legislating-through-executive order – should be challenged more aggressively by Congress. But the boys and girls on the Hill have been supine about this for decades, and are at their most supine when a president of their own party is in office. At these moments, the Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, cease to exist except in name.

Only when there has been a clear dilution of power, with one party in the White House and another controlling Congress, has there been anything like the restraint needed to keep the president from becoming a dictator. Obama or Clinton in the White House – take your pick – and Democrats in control of Congress equal more bad years ahead. Same if we ended up with McCain and the Republicans.

Actually, I do care about the environment. I just do not agree that political, administrative regulation is the best way to protect it.

The EPA legally permits more pollution than it stops. If pollution is permitted under various federal and state administrative laws, it is virtually impossible to sue polluters for damages.

The old English common law tort system, were it still in effect, would permit just that and would leave decisions in the hands of local juries, not federal bureaucrats in DC or Seattle.

Poverty, crime and stability in the economy are complicated questions. Income is not created by government social programs, it can only be re-distributed. It is created by a truly free market. There are real world examples to prove this.

Most Western European nations, with high taxes and high rates of social spending, are dominated by industry-union alliances that freeze everything into place. The high degree of unemployment among recent immigrants, such as Algerian Muslims in France and Turks in Germany, is due to this cartelization of the economy.

Conversely, countries which have free economies have risen from poverty to prosperity in a few short decades: Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. Now India, Estonia, the Czech Republic and others are joining that list. Ingredients for success feature low taxes, restrained social and military spending, balanced government budgets with small or no deficits, etc. Again, these are real world examples, not theories.

Crime can arise from poverty, but it is more often a result of a number of factors, including the fact that there are evil people out there. White collar criminals commit offenses not because they are starving, but because they are venal and amoral. Serial killers are typically sociopaths who have jobs, and usually profile out as white males. Urban gangs are even more complex to analyze because, from a libertarian perspective, some aspects of gangs represent an attempt to protect individuals in the gang’s neighborhood from what they see as police abuse of power. Dealing in illicit drugs has often been their chief source of income, an avenue opened up to them by Drug Prohibition.

Economic stability is also an elusive thing. Does that mean low unemployment and low interest rates, along with enough economic growth to insure all who want jobs continue have them? If it does, that can be achieved, to a large extent, through monetary policy. As Greenspan showed while at the Fed, this can be accomplished without much action by Congress and the President, provided they resist the urge to hike taxes sky high or increase deficit spending and unfunded liabilities by trillions of dollars. A Republican Congress allowed Bush to run the deficit and unfunded liabilities into the tens of trillions. The Democratic Congress that followed it, astonishingly, has done little to stop this.

This will escalate out of the stratosphere if the next president and Congress are again from one party. As noted previously, partisan gridlock during the Clinton years had the direct effect of moderating the impulses, and spending, all around. A budget surplus was the result.

Policy scholars address issues in different ways depending on the ideological stance of the institution for which they work. Most at think tanks here in DC, including neoconservatives, favor policies that expand or strengthen government control of some aspect of human activity. They take it as a given that government control is good, despite overwhelming evidence that it is not. They assume that without aggressive government action all these human problems just won’t ever be solved, despite overwhelming evidence that government is the worst possible choice of venues to do so from moral, ethical and practical perspectives.

The moral and practical superiority of freedom has been validated over and over again. The destructiveness and immorality of unchecked government power has been proven over and over again. The entire 20th century is an indictment of the latter. To state that more of the same is the solution for problems – almost all of which were created by uncontrolled government in the first place – is a horrible distortion of reality.

Yet, that is precisely what we are hearing from the three senators, Obama, Clinton and McCain, one of whom will doubtless be the next president. This is not cause for celebration.

I do not worship any politician. As I have made clear before, I don’t much like any of them. But right now, we need a sea change. And have you seen Obama speak? He always, always talks about how it’s going to be up to the people to help him change America and it is going to take a lot of new people getting involved in the political process to change things. He is bringing them in, which is why he will win…

As for the business of the landslide, that’s just not me saying it. Republican sources and pollsters are saying it. They are looking at the polls and THEY are expecting it. People are so mad at Bush and the war and now the economy that the independents are breaking for Obama. People want change. And as I’ve said many, many times before, politics matters. And it matters who the president is. That’s not the only thing that matters. But government policy at all levels is determined by who is in the White House.

Did you see my story recently on the Bush EPA’s plan on mercury? It’s not just the government, as AP reports it to be fair and balanced. IT’S THE BUSH EPA!

I know you don’t think the environment matters, but what about my question on poverty, crime and stability in the economy? Isn’t there a Cato fellow somewhere who knows something about that?