The Editor's Desk

Our reporters focused on a brand new conflict over the contracts to build a wastewater facility at the latest council meeting, but the council also approved the second reading of its eminent domain ordinance for the Barstow Redevelopment Agency. The vote results were the same, 4-1 (with councilmember Joe Gomez dissenting) as the first reading.

So the city now has affirmed a policy as an ordinance that allows them to take private property to sell for private development.

I’ve had my say on the matter and didn’t have that much an impact, but I want to point out a bit of a contradiction. Last year, Barstow Mayor Lawrence Dale spoke out in favor of Measure O, which prohibited the county from taking private property and then turning around and selling it for private developer.

So a year after opposing inappropriate use of eminent domain in the county, the mayor votes in favor of allowing the city to do exactly what he once opposed.

I think the lesson here is that when a politician says he’s in favor of less government, he’s referring to other governments, not his own.

I frequently admire that people feel strongly about so many important issues that affect Americans.

However, if your response to an issue is to head to some Web site to have a form letter e-mailed out en masse as a letter to the editor, you probably don’t feel strongly enough about the issue to bother.

I’ve been inundated this morning with a collection of extremely similar e-mails from different e-mail addresses complaining that the Bush Administration is declining to get involved in a Supreme Court case regarding whether investors can sue to recoup money when a company is charged with fraud, like Enron.

We don’t run form letters. Very few newspapers do, if they know what they’ve received is a form letter. The intent of the letters section of the newspaper is for readers to tell the public their opinions in their own words, not filtered through some other activist group’s Language Conformity Machine.

And newspapers our size don’t even run letters from people with no connection to their coverage area. These letters are coming from all over the place, not from Barstow. Most of them are being deleted without being read.

So if you’re mad and you don’t want to take it anymore, and your response is to get a Web site to do your work for you, you’re not nearly mad enough.

Courtesy of Brave New Foundation:

We maintain a discriminatory policy in the military for the (alleged) benefit of a minority of people who just simply can’t deal with certain realities. As a result, we are throwing away resources that would help protect lives and reach our goals.

It makes me wonder if the administration even wants to succeed in Iraq.

I returned from our Freedom Communications conference slightly heavier (and not just from the excellent hotel food).

The Desert Dispatch received a “Best of Freedom” award for 2007. Specifically, reporter Aaron Aupperlee and former reporter Adrienne Ziegler were commended for their coverage of the arrest and subsequent sentencing of Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, who was one of five soldiers charged with a role in the rape and murder of a teen Iraqi girl and killing of her family in Iraq. Cortez was from Barstow.

Aaron and Adrienne both worked extremely hard to help paint a picture of who Sgt. Cortez was and how he ended up in this situation, with the help of community members who knew him and cared for him. They were able to gather information that not even the Associated Press could track down, and I’m very proud of their hard work.

In other newsroom news, we have a new reporter starting today. Jason Smith comes to Barstow from Burlington, Vermont (and yes, he’s already commented on the heat), with a degree in economics with a minor in Latin American studies. He’ll be taking over many of the responsibilities in governmental and environmental reporting. His fluency with Spanish (he spent four months writing for a newspaper in Mexico) will also assist us in covering our growing Hispanic community.

So how does a lifelong lefty liberal ultimately find himself drawn toward libertarian philosophy?

It’s a bit of a paradox, really. My dislike of the behavior of President George W. Bush and his administration led me away from the left toward the center over the course of several years.

That probably doesn’t make much sense, so I’ll have to explain. Way back in 2000 I was living and working in San Diego. One day I was having lunch with an acquaintance I knew from my work as an editor. We were discussing the presidential race and I was expressing my dissatisfaction with Al Gore (I thought he was a condescending phony – and still do). He had already decided he was voting for Gore. He was a gay man with an adopted daughter. His fear was that if Bush won the election, there would be a serious rollback of gay rights, and he would lose custody of his daughter.

That’s certainly pretty heavy reason for his decision, and I don’t blame him for his logic, even though a rollback that severe didn’t ultimately happen. I recall thinking at the time how scary it is to have to hope for a particular side to win the presidential election in order to hope to have your rights secured.

But that’s exactly what happened in America. Our civil liberties are no longer being defined by the Constitution – they’re being defined by whoever happens to be in power.

Like any good leftist , I wanted to preserve my own personal liberties and those of my friends and allies, and use government to make the world of better place by collecting taxes and redistributing the money to help people I thought needed it.

I can’t exactly pinpoint the moment of epiphany. I think I might have been watching “The Daily Show” and listening to a rant or joke referring to the oppressive politics and misbegotten priorities of the Bush administration. Jon Stewart, quite accurately, enjoys skewering Bush over his arrogant expressions of power despite so much public opposition. He won. He gets to decide. He’s “The Decider,” if you’ll recall.

It’s the nature of Bush’s arrogance that led to my transformation. I realized that the real difference between my beliefs in government influence and Bush’s was not how much influence and control the government should have on citizens’ lives, but merely the direction in which the control would be manifested. I was just as willing to allow the government to curtail people’s rights, particularly property rights, in order to pursue what I believed to be an ideal society. So does President Bush. We differed only in our distinctions of what makes an “ideal society.”

Logic dictates that if I believe that I have the right – when people who share my values are in control of the government – to shape and curtail individual rights in order to build a society I want to live in, then I also have to accept it of Bush and those who support him. He won. He gets to be “The Decider.” I had to accept his authority if I were to demand the right of government to make similar decisions in a reversed situation.

But I won’t accept the right of the president to curtail civil liberties just because he and his party won. That runs counter to the very idea of civil liberties and makes a mockery of our own Declaration of Independence, which set forth the idea that certain rights are innate and not subject to government suppression. And so I, after a bout of soul searching, abandoned many of my beliefs that the government should play a role in shaping society. The society that government shapes would always be defined by whoever is in control, and at times, those people are not going to share your values and ideals.

Ultimately that journey led me to libertarianism, where everybody gets to decide for himself or herself what kind of life to lead, and the government is responsible for preserving our security and rights. And to think, I used to believe libertarianism was an extremely selfish political philosophy.

Somebody has apparently taught budding press release writers to pretend as though they actually know the thousands of strangers they’re e-mailing their requests for media attention to.

They probably think it makes the recipient more comfortable and inclined to read or react to the press release. It does not. It creeps them out. Here’s an example of a press release I got today from the Hallmark Channel:

“Hello Scott!

Hope all is going well for you… The weekend is almost here! Any special
plans?

I just wanted to pass on this sweet Hallmark Moment from our original
production Avenging Angel starring Kevin Sorbo. Avenging Angel premieres
Saturday, July 7 (9/8c).

I appreciate your consideration of this photo.

Thanks so much!”

I wonder how she would react if I actually responded with my weekend plans. She might be thrilled to hear about all the yard work I’m doing, since we’re such close friends. Maybe she has advice on trimming my rose bush.

A couple of interesting quotes from today’s Freedom School seminars:

 ”It becomes very difficult to defend liberty when you cave in on your favorite political projects.” — Tibor Machan, Freedom Communications Inc. libertarian commentator and advisor.

Tibor was giving a speech on markets and morality and why a foundation of personal liberty was vital to any realistic discussion of ethics and morals. The quote is particularly important to me because it feeds directly into another blog entry I’m working on explaining a little bit more about my transition toward libertarian thought.

“People use numbers the way they use rocks. They throw them at each other.” — Joe Cobb, former chief economist for the U.S. Republican Policy Committee.

Joe Cobb was speaking on the extremely vocal, emotional public conflict regarding illegal immigration. Joe is in favor of eliminating immigration quotas and argued that illegal immigration is a victimless crime, although there was a recognition of the drain on public services by illegal immigrants. Part of a libertarian perspective, though, is that the problem is our entitled attitude toward public services in the first place, not that illegal immigrants have access to them.

We’ve been working on putting blogs together for months, so of course they would actually finally go live while I’m out of town.

I’m in Tempe, Arizona, attending an annual company conference we call “Freedom School.” This conference is a gathering of editors, publishers and other leaders of Freedom Communications where speakers educate us on current issues regarding personal liberty both in America and abroad.

One of the more notable speakers today was Timothy Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation, talking about the status of eminent domain in America. He was a very informative and entertaining speaker, though the lesson I took from the discussion is that property rights are essentially dead in America. Not a positive outlook I’m afraid. I’ll have an editorial in Wednesday’s Desert Dispatch about City Council’s decision to allow abuse of eminent domain intentions in the Barstow Redevelopment Agency. (Sandefur is in favor of abolishing redevelopment agencies entirely, and leaving matters up to market forces)