Jay Longtoe

A Comment on "The doers against the 'thinkers'"

In response to David Harsanyi’s The doers against the “thinkers”.

The most dangerous thing about Mr. Hoover is that he can’t see the difference between what he is “doing” and what Jim is doing. Mr. Hoover doesn’t understand that, at best, everything he does it speculation, and what Jim is doing deals with actually getting something accomplished.

I’m an undergraduate doing research, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found this attitude in the professors I work with. I’ve found outright disgust for people like Jim, because they they “don’t think” about what they’re doing and typically get better compensation than the Mr. Hoovers of the world. I ask them, “Well, Jim actually took the risk. Shouldn’t he be paid for that?” That’s when they start assailing Jim’s work—he didn’t come up with a theoretical model/dynamic 10-year business plan/demographic study!

In reality, we all need to be a little bit of Mr. Hoover and Jim—they aren’t building a business without knowledge of the field, or designing theoretical models without experimental data. But only in government and academia can the pure theorist survive and thrive, isolated from the consequences of their work.

It’s a fight between theory and reality, and the theorists don’t understand the difference.

A Letter to the Crimson-White

My letter is in response to David Kumbroch’s letter published Thursday, August 20th. While I laude the University Fellows’ Black Belt Experience program for their high-minded goals, it seems as though their program is focused on treating the symptoms of poverty, and not the causes.

The problems which face Alabama’s Black Belt are structural in nature: inadequate health care, lack of employment, poor education, and crumbling infrastructure. No amount of study by well-intentioned honors students will lead to any effective change without directly addressing these problems.

To bring prosperity to these people, we should focus on delivering critical infrastructure improvements—not dance workshops, podcasts, arts appreciation seminars, and photography exhibitions. The Fellows program could learn from Engineering Students Without Boarders, who installed a baseball field last year which is still in use today. We should focus on projects that continue to impact the community long after our students have moved on to other interests.

I applaud any individual’s community service and hope everyone would take more time to help those in need. However, I question the effectiveness of any program which takes an entire year of planning to deliver a few weeks of “feel-good” workshops. While these experiences may profoundly effect those involved in the Fellows program, I doubt any number of liberal arts programs will help those left in poverty.

FOIA Request to HSS for flag@whitehouse.gov

On August 4th, 2009, the Official White House Web Log solicited information from the general public about disinformation regarding the President’s proposed Health Reform plan. The post asks members of the general public to collect information on the nature and origin of this misinformation. The relevant paragraph is quoted below:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

As the woman most prominently featured in this post is Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, I supposed that her office would be in charge of collecting and analyzing this information. (The post is rather unclear.) Searching on the WhiteHouse.gov website lead me to HealthReform.gov, “an official U.S. Government Web site managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.”

Thus, I am lodging a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain access to the electronic information sent to “flag@whitehouse.gov”, as well as any relevant documents which analyze the content of the messages sent, including any reports listing individual persons, email addresses, and/or web sites which list information “about health insurance reform that seems fishy.”

If this is the incorrect office to contact to obtain these records, I apologize for the error and request that I be directed to the correct contact for lodging such a request. (As the “Health Reform Office” seems to act between the White House and HHS, please understand the error.) Thank you.

A Letter to the Deputy Assistant Under-Minister of Truth

Received: from 208.69.36.132 Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:18:29 -0700
From: Jonathan Lanctot
To: Linda Douglass flag@whitehouse.gov
Subject: Two Traitors Amongst Us!!
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 03:18:27 -0500


Dear Linda Douglass:

I thought I would send forth information as requested by our Dear Leader as to inappropriately “fishy” information to be disseminated to the masses via the Internet. It is my hope that Party officials will take swift action against these traitors amongst us!

It has come to my attention that Evan Coyne Maloney of the “brain-terminal” online web periodical has posted disinformation about the legality of our Dear Leader’s orders! He has suggested that record-keeping of individuals violates the Privacy Act, which states that:

[T]he purpose of the Privacy Act is to balance the government’s need to maintain information about individuals with the rights of individuals to be protected against unwarranted invasions of their privacy stemming from federal agencies’ collection, maintenance, use, and disclosure of personal information about them.

Ha ha! Little do these stooges know that whatever our Dear Leader requests of us, we are to obey!

However, David Hardy of the “Of Arms and the Law” online web periodical further spreads disinformation by disseminating a supposed subsection of the aforementioned Act, which states:

(7) maintain no record describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment unless expressly authorized by statute or by the individual about whom the record is maintained or unless pertinent to and within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity;

Clearly this individual is a traitor to our Dear Leader’s wishes for a more lawful, transparent government. By disseminating these supposed laws, he is further slowing our Dear Leader’s progress towards a more healthful tomorrow!

Please swiftly punish these traitors to the Party! I look forward to my next communique, wherein I will follow the footsteps of the great Pavlik Morozov!!

Forward my fellow Comrades towards a more healthful tomorrow, thanks to our Dear Leader Barack Obama!!

Jonathan Lanctot

"Taxation without Representation"

I saw this at National Review Online:

[T]he IRS data shows that in 2007—the most recent data available—the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. […] Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined. In 2007, the bottom 95 percent paid 39.4 percent of the income tax burden. This is down from the 58 percent of the total income tax burden they paid twenty years ago.

But numbers are numbers: what does this actually look like?

Well, a graph of the data given looks like this:

But that doesn’t help: each point contains a dramatically different portion of the population. It doesn’t help illustrate this point:

To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent is comprised of just 1.4 million taxpayers and they pay a larger share of the income tax burden now than the bottom 134 million taxpayers combined.

Factoring in the size of the entire tax base, we get this graph:

Remember: this is only taxpayers! This doesn’t include something like 32 million tax payers who do not earn enough to have an income tax, nor anyone unemployed. And yet, Democrats are looking to fund their Healthcare Plan through yet another tax on the rich! How Progressive do we need to be?!

[T]he recent IRS data bolsters the findings of an OECD study released last year showing that the U.S.—not France or Sweden—has the most progressive income tax system among OECD nations. We rely more heavily on the top 10 percent of taxpayers than does any nation and our poor people have the lowest tax burden of those in any nation.

Many people wonder what the Tea Party movement means by “Taxation without Representation”. This graph illustrate how a dramatically small minority of the tax base is use to fund an exceedingly oppressive federal government—and this is without state taxes, which add yet another burden on the taxpayer!

Our tax system is fundamentally unfair to our most productive members of society, and yet these people are demonized for not paying their “fair share.” Unbelievable.

A Letter to the Editor of the Belleville News-Democrat

I am writing in response to the article “Edwardsville rally urges Congress to act on health care” as published online on Thursday, July 30th.

Last Saturday, more than a thousand people filled the Alton Riverfront Amphitheater to protest the proposed healthcare bill; the Alton Telegraph reported the event. Monday night, a question and answer forum with citizens who overwhelmingly opposed to the bill had to be moved to the Forest Park Community College cafeteria; KSDK covered the event.

Together, these two events represent a thousand-fold voice in opposition to the bill in Congress, and yet the News-Democrat chooses to cover a gathering of fifteen people on a sidewalk with no mention of these much larger protests. Such selective coverage of an important and contentious issue leads me to question the the News-Democrat’s objectivity.