Sane America, Stupid America

While the U.S. economy continues to improve, Americans today still keep finding more and more ways to pit ourselves against one another, while failing to address the truly important issues. We're not even talking about the blue/red political divide, or the urban/rural divide.

There's also the idiotic traitor or hero divide surrounding NSA leaker Edward Snowden. The writer Glenn Greenwald and GOP Rep. Peter King did a marvelous job on Wednesday exposing the ability to have an amateur pissing match over that issue, while both men mostly avoided the real security versus liberty debate.

The immigration battles going on in Washington, DC are another perfect example of Americans taking sides, while not really fixing the problem.

Of course, there's also the Blackhawks/Bruins divide or the Heat/Spurs divide, if sports is more your thing - though there's also a nasty division going on right now between funding for sports and funding for education in America.

You may have recently missed the story about the city of Chicago making massive cuts to their school system, and closing fifty public schools - all while investing $100 million as part of a new sports arena for DePaul University. In truth, we can't see how Chicago's Mayor Rahm Immanuel can legitimately call himself decent, let alone call himself a member of the Democratic Party, when he's gutting education like that.

It shouldn't be entirely surprising, though. A chart posted to Deadspin.com in May noted that in every state in America, the highest paid public employee is either a football coach, a basketball coach, or an executive member of a state college - a department chair, dean, or college president.

As our staff members are all fans of Husker sports, you can probably understand why our antennae perked up when we saw a writeup by Brian Rosenthal in the Lincoln Journal Star, about the newest member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Husker men's basketball coaching staff, Kenya Hunter.

Hunter - who looks to be a great addition to Husker basketball - will be the highest paid assistant coach on the Nebraska men's basketball staff. Hunter joins Nebraska from Georgetown, a school known for both solid education and a strong basketball tradition - so we hope the investment the university is putting into him shows on both the new scoreboard at the Pinnacle Bank Arena, and in the grades of the student athletes on the team.

Admittedly, it was likely easier for the University of Nebraska to make the decision to pay its coaches well this year.

For the University of Nebraska, the economic picture has been like it is for much of the rest of the country - steadily improving to the point where Governor Heineman agreed with University Regents to allow for a one year tuition freeze for in-state students - the first tuition freeze in twenty-two years. Nebraska's state university system is also adding professors and forging ahead on projects like a new NU College of Nursing.

It's easy to seem sane when the money is rolling in, and the economy is improving.

When things eventually turn downward again, though, the question will likely remain unanswered: Where do our priorities really lie, as taxpayers? The time to ask and answer these questions is now.

Someone Should Go Hungry

As a staff full of people who grew up in or now live in Nebraska, there are some traits we share that are prototypically Nebraskan.

We all enjoy working hard, and we usually enjoy a "see food" diet - when we see food, we eat it, especially if it's good. We also tend to enjoy old-fashioned, common sense sayings about topics like work and food. For example, 'Those who do not work, do not eat."

That particular saying, in fact, has been on our minds recently as we've watched members of the U.S. Senate struggle, argue, and eventually come to a compromise on the 2013 Farm Bill, which they passed with solid bipartisan support on Monday, 66-27.

Of course, while the U.S. Senate was busting its ass, working hard to find compromise to get that farm bill passed, members of the U.S. House were effectively sitting on their asses, throwing placating remarks into the media about passing the farm bill, even as they continued to toss political and verbal darts at President Obama. Like immigration reform and the background check bill, serious doubts remain that the farm bill will even make it to the floor of the House this year.

That makes us more than a little bit angry with the do-nothing House of Representatives, where too many of its intellectually lazy and dishonest members - especially on the Republican side - have done little actual work this year.

Frankly, in line with that old work and food axiom, we're wondering if more of those House members shouldn't literally starve a bit, for motivation.

Yes, we're aware the "Farm Bill" isn't strictly about farms, but is really more about food for all Americans - how it's grown, what crops are subsidized, what happens to those crops when bad weather comes, and finally, how the food our nation raises and grows can be distributed to all Americans, not just the richest among us.

Brad Plumer over at Wonkblog did a fantastic job of dissecting the farm bill, and he breaks down the many component parts, from crop insurance and commodity programs, to subsidies and conservation. The biggest sticking point however, remains the portion of the farm bill that deals with food stamps.

While the Senate wants to cut about $4 billion from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for poor and elderly, tea party extremist Republicans in the House want to cut food stamps and other food programs for the poor by $20 billion or more. Hypocrites like GOP Rep. Stephen Fincher have displayed brutal attitudes towards the poor, even while he's been receiving his own farm bill welfare subsidies - $3.5 million worth - since 1999.

As The Economist magazine made clear in 2011, most Americans receiving food stamps are either children or elderly, and most are living far below the poverty line, even though they have at least one job. In other words, those people House Republicans want to starve are the working poor.

Meanwhile, when was the last time the U.S. House passed any worthwhile bills, with a majority of all House members, from all political backgrounds - that would also pass the Senate? Frankly, we can't remember the last time the Republican-led House of Representatives did anything that could seriously be called "work."

When it comes to the farm bill, we do agree with those lazy, selfish, extremist Republicans on one thing - someone should go hungry. We just don't think it should be the working poor.

Nothing To Fear But Ourselves

For almost a week now, we've covered many aspects of the NSA leaks controversy, from the unsurprising "revelation" our government is spying on us, through the sloppy and less-than-professional way the story surrounding the NSA leaks was broken in the Guardian and Washington Post.

Unsurprisingly, two of the three members of the media that the leaker Edward Snowden trusted to break his story now appear to be squabbling about who was REALLY responsible for 'discovering' Snowden. Sadly, that kind of selfish and unprofessional behavior merely validates our previous opinion of at least one of the three.

For much of the nation, however, this childish squabbling, and indeed the entire debate over security and liberty is one they seemingly could care less about.

From cameras on nearly every corner, to every phone and most laptops having a camera, for a nation once proud of a President who declared "The only thing we have to fear… is fear itself," we've now become a nation that seems driven by fear, with electronic eyes seemingly everywhere.

As a Pew Poll released on Monday makes clear, most Americans today continue to be generally OK with giving over some of their freedom and privacy to their government, in exchange for a level of security that Americans now routinely demand.

It's not just the government that we're all handing our data over to, though. It's corporate America, who - unlike the military or even the government - often has no rules about how they use or misuse our information.

From online companies like Facebook and Google, to old fashioned brick-and-mortar retailers like Wal-Mart and Target, just about every corporation wants to track nearly everything about what Americans do. And Americans often - far too often - gladly give up our personal information, in exchange for a shiny online trinket, or access to some special song or video.

Yet, when the government tries to get that same information, suddenly, some Americans scream that there are eyes on them everywhere. That reaction is both hypocritical and stupid, since the government will often just buy, trade, or take the info it wants from those corporations, anyway.

The key to settling down the hype is the one President Obama pointed out last Friday, the same issue we mentioned Monday morning, and the same issue Greg Sargent of the Washington Post nailed Monday afternoon: That there can be a balance between giving our information over and living in a perpetual surveillance state.

On giving our information to government, as Sargent notes, that balance can be achieved by refining laws that narrow the scope of information government can obtain, and by bringing greater transparency to existing programs.

On  giving our information to corporations, Rainey Reitman, Activism Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a recent interview with blogger Alan Henry there are also ways consumers can rein in their data - including opting out of certain types of advertising.

As you can see, Americans have little reason to fear how our information is being shared unless - as things are now - we're too lazy to be responsible about how we handle that information.