Tag Archives: 2016 election

Considering a congressial run in the GOP

FINALLY! A Secular non-tea-party Republican has run a successful campaign!

I know. Record screeching to a halt. What?  Yes.  Trump’s victory forever changed the GOP.  It dissolved both the Tea Party and the Evangelicals in one blow.  Yes, of course he made overtures to them during his campaign.  And he will fulfill promises to them.  But both Tea Party conservatives and hard evangelicals campaigned as hard against him with their #nevertrump as any Democrat.

Meanwhile, in his simple populist message Trump made inroads to Black and Latinos that have flummoxed the Republican party for decades.  He basically cracked the race code.  And I want to build on that.  Trump’s victory is a blow to PC culture which might actually grant us a real discussion among each other as Americans.  And I think that all peoples and races share some basic core values which make them natural Republicans.  Issues like family, Law and Order, Work Ethic, Public Service.

It’s these issues Trump laid the groundwork for.  If we can build on this, and really push forward a new Republican agenda of enlightened classic liberalism, we could go into the 21st century making it the greatest one yet.  And we can go into it with a consensus that really represents America.

Once again, California is a perfect starting point for this visionary future.

In his Victory, the Death of the Democrats

The Republicans reel from the dissolution of these wings which they depended on for their mass base.  But they will recover.  And they will come out stronger than before, ready to handle this century of challenges.  Already a new generation of anti-PC secularist militants sympathetic to Trump are organizing.  Mind you, these are not your leftist secularists.  We do not begrudge people their religion, we don’t attack their beliefs, in fact we enshrine their right to behave as they see fit.

The Democrats, unfortunately, are still saddled by their militant wings, which are pulling the party ever more into irrelevance.  One would think their base would see the error of their ways after Trump’s election, and drift away from identity politics and branding everyone and everything as a racist.  They are not, and in fact are doubling down on their politics.

But this is the symptom of a party that has been in power too long and has not needed to become self conscious.

I was a lifelong Democrat.  I worked for the Democrats in a number of campaigns, I see how they behave, especially in my home state of California.  I consider myself of the vein of such Democrats as Chuck Schumer, Jim Webb, and Jerry Brown.

But with Trump’s election, I’m flipping to the Republican party.  Because Trump effectively took over those wings of the Democrats, and now they are part of a GOP conversation.  I want to be a part of this dynamic conversation they are having.  The Democrats stopped having a conversation, and I fear there is not much for them as a party at this point.

This will be the first of many articles about my stances on various issues.  The major question at this point is how to run as a GOP candidate in California, which is effectively a one party state.  I would like to discuss how it became a one party state, how damaging this setup is to our politics and our society, and how we can reverse this trend.

Hillary’s E-mail Question

I should begin by saying I generally don’t consider issues like this “30,000 emails” thing.  I consider them theatrics for the masses, much like a politician’s sexual details or tax returns.  That being said, I’ve been running Exchange (Windows) mail servers for the past 15 years so I know a thing or two about how mail servers are run.  So watching this whole issue unfold brought up some interesting issues for me, with our government, with Hillary, and with what changes really need to happen in 2017.

The tipping point was when my wife and I were listening to an episode of This American Life which was trying to justify Hillary’s private e-mail server.  The basic premise was that this private e-mail server wasn’t some Machiavellian scheming on Hillary’s part, it was just a certain cluelessness and carelessness about a technology that the government hadn’t really adopted yet. I’d read some other justifications, like that it’s accepted protocol to destroy an old phone with a hammer.

First I’d like to debunk some of these justifications.  And first among those is smashing a phone with a hammer.  This is not just untrue, it shows real stupidity on the part of whoever decided to smash it.  Smashing a phone will just smash the plastic and glass, more than likely it won’t smash the flash memory on which sensitive data may reside.

Of course, in the private sector, business e-mail needs to be encrypted on a phone in such a way that it can never be retrieved if someone were to get the phone.  It technically doesn’t even sit on the phone.  And if a phone is stolen, the e-mail administrator has the ability to remote wipe it.  If you’d like to know more about that you can check out IBM’s MaaS360.

Second was Ira Glass’s charge that a lot of government officials use private e-mail accounts, citing Colin Powell’s use of an AOL account.  Now let’s get this straight, there is a huge difference between using a personal commercial e-mail address and hosting your e-mails on your own server.  An AOL account can be subpoenaed.  AOL follows proper data storage protocols, they can pull up any and all e-mails that ever went through their organization.  If Colin Powell were under investigation for something, the FBI could gain access to this.

Not only that, this is a compliance requirement of all private sector businesses.  I’d like to introduce you to an appliance I have personal experience with – the Barracuda Message Archiver.  All businesses with compliance requirements need something like this.  Any e-mail that goes in, out, or through the company gets passed through this archiver, to be stored for eternity.  Nobody gets away with deleting anything.

This is in addition to backups.  Without regular backups, Exchange simply doesn’t work.  You could technically skimp on the backups and keep a short retention history, but you can’t do that with the archiver.

So, my understanding is Hillary’s team made backups, even offsite backups, but didn’t archive.  The only way this could result in so many e-mails being deleted by chance is with some combination of deleting e-mails as they come in, and having a very short backup retention policy.  Which, if you’re going to keep backup retention that short, why even have them offsite?

Okay, so you see where I’m going with this?  Two possible stories surface here, both of which spell something scandalous.

  1. The traditional story that Hillary’s camp purposely used a private e-mail server so they could write each other e-mails outside the realm of scrutiny, knowing what they were doing was illegal.
  2. Government agencies do not have the compliance requirements of the private sector, which puts them above the laws they create. Hillary’s team’s carelessness about this is just a symptom of a much larger issue with a public sector that needs a tech overhaul.

Either story speaks of a scandal.

A quick way to vet which story is true is to find out what other senators, candidates, or any political officials run their operations with a private e-mail server.  But I have a hunch Hillary’s camp is unique in this behavior.  Really, e-mail is so much more complicated than a server.  Maybe 15 years ago we could get away with a simple server but we’ve been in the era of strict compliance and sophisticated spam filters for years now.  We generally talk of e-mail more in terms of systems than servers.  I haven’t even gotten into so many of the other features we have to keep in our e-mail organization.  Really, unless you’re an organization of at least a thousand people, it’s more efficient to outsource it.

Unless you have something to hide.

Why America needs a Trump candidacy

Most of my coworkers are Latinos – most of those are El Salvadoran.  So when we went out for lunch one day, it was only a matter of time before they found out I was leaning towards Trump.

Needless to say, it got awkward at first.  First came the comments about his disparaging attacks on Latinos.  Then his comments about Muslims.  But after I wasn’t knuckling other to either one, since I honestly think both charges are bullshit, the silence led one of them to make an illuminating comment:

“Of course we need to have laws.”

We need to have laws.  Indeed.  That’s the crux of the Trump candidacy, and it’s the crux of the European electoral tumult.

I’ve been in politics a long time – since my naive days of Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign.  I can say that the primaries are a brainstorming session for both parties – they let any comers shoot off any strange and unformed ideas they have, and see what sticks with the voters.  It’s only towards the end of the primaries, heading into the convention, that they decide it’s time to close down the session and rally around a candidate they feel represents them.

Only sometimes it doesn’t quite work as planned.  Like this year.  This year has been a real popular backlash against ruling class policy – that of abolishing all immigration law, and allowing anybody on earth to move anywhere they want.   We may have our “illegal immigrant” problem here at home (I’ll get to that in a bit).  But it’s nothing compared to the brilliant EU loophole of allowing “refugee” status to people in any one country and then letting them in through that back door into any other country in Europe.

As Douglas Murray puts it “‘imagine there’s no countries’?  We don’t have to imagine it, we’re seeing the real consequences of getting rid of borders, and that’s people blowing themselves up in the heart of Paris.”

It’s no stretch to say this is deliberate policy.  And part of that policy is to smear anyone who criticises the scrapping of immigration law and borders as a bigot.  This is happening both in European and American governments, both Democrat and Republican parties.

And that’s why when Trump comes in and says things like “build that wall” or “seal the borders” it’s a signal that he supports something THEY CANNOT ALLOW TO HAPPEN.

The remarks themselves aren’t even worth scrutinizing that much.  In a brainstorming session, one wants provocative remarks like this, because they spur thought, reaction, debate.  Nevermind if they’re unworkable or offensive, we have plenty of time to take those comments, see the direction they’re going in, and hammer them out into workable policy.

Like the “ban all Muslims” remark.  Nevermind that they twisted what he said.  Nevermind that there’s no way to ban based on religion.  But there are bans based on country of origin.  It’s not that hard to go from one to the other, and we did it to Iran after their hijackings.

But back to the American issue of immigration.  If I make one point, it’s this.  It’s okay to demand immigration be made legal.  It’s okay to make sure those immigrating here legally can do so more easily than those who don’t.  It’s okay to demand that those who pose a terrorism risk aren’t allowed in.  The more voters who make these demands are made to feel like bigots, the more they will rally and solidify behind a man like Trump.

It’s in everyone’s interests that everyone in this country is here legally.  The fact is, someone who is here working illegally is someone who is working with no rights.  Are there issues with this?  Of course.  That’s a whole separate article.

But nobody’s saying “kick out all the Mexicans” or “Mexicans are criminals”.  Those are just slanders.  Trump’s main remark, time and again, is that we can’t just ignore our own laws and let people pour over without any record.

That’s a great starting point.  If we’re short on workers, nobody has a problem with liberalizing immigration law.  As my coworkers told me, and I suspected, poor Latin Americans can’t immigrate legally to USA.  Only the rich can.  Well, that’s a problem.  And we can change that.  With laws.  Not by ignoring laws and ridiculing those that have a problem with it.

It’s no secret that America’s a nation of immigrants.  My coworkers relay to me their parents’ stories of escaping violence and poverty to seek a better life in America, and honestly, it doesn’t sound too different from anybody else’s story.  That’s why nobody’s doing themselves any favors by claiming the Trump campaign anti-immigrant.  Because those who’ve been paying attention to Trump’s remarks realize it’s a “pro-law” campaign.

Because America is a nation of immigrants, but it’s also a nation of laws.  And one doesn’t trump the other.