Did you catch Obama on the Colbert Report Monday?  I was just getting caught up on the Report and was astounded. Obama ordered that a general shave Colberts head!

See it here: (continue reading…)

I understand the purpose of establishing goals. A good goal gives you something to strive for, and a purpose to your actions. But some goals can be set so high that they are completely unreachable, and some so low that they are pointless.

Obama released on Tuesday a goal for auto manufacturers, saying that all light trucks and passenger cars need to get at least 35.5 mpg by the year 2016.

This would be the equivalent of saying “my personal goal is to eat a sandwich by the end of the year.”

This goal is unreasonably realistic. With rising gas and diesel prices, there has already been a major push in the auto industry to produce more fuel efficient cars and trucks. Hybrids are already taking up more and more spaces at car dealerships, the design of pickup trucks are being changed so that the fuel economy increases. Even VW has released its 2009 Diesel Jetta, boasting a seemingly magical 50 mpg.

So why bother setting a goal that auto makers already had incentive (and already strive) to meet?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t think that setting a goal is a bad idea, we just need to set goals that are high enough that some kind of work is involved.

Photos courtesy of  Jurveston and KQED QUEST - Some rights reserved.

As part of his candidacy Obama promised us that he would create a more open government. People say he will bring government into the 21st century. He was, after all, the internet candidate, amassing Facebook friends and Twitter followers in the millions. His inaugural speech has now had some 3 million views. Surely if anyone can update the government, tightening the connection between that big system and the people it is supposed to represent, he can.

Then I read a recent report by Wired magazine in which they sat down with the people who have been in charge of the federal government’s online presence (consisting of 24,000 separate sites). They expressed doubt in what Obama would be able to do. See, they had been trying to do it for years and, at every turn, the bureaucratic mess of our government got in the way. The system is full of rules: a part of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act makes sure that every website is “reasonably accessible” to disabled users; web pages of the federal government can’t link to nongovernmental sites to “avoid the appearance of endorsing one product or organization over another;” the Presidential Records Act makes it so that posted web pages cannot be altered or changed, only replaced.

Notice the reasons why those regulations exist. The first was to help the disabled, the second was to ensure an unbiased government, and the third was to require transparency and prevent cover-ups. But look at what they do to us. Instead of providing freedom and equality they do something else all together: they lock us into an unfathomably complicated system making it so that we can’t do anything at all. The whole principle of democracy is that the people and the government are supposed to be intimately connected. Yet, in the past two hundred years we’ve seen our government become such a mess of rules and systems and protections that it is no longer accessible to the everyday citizen.

Why is it this way? Because we have drifted away from the principles of freedom and equality, replacing them with fairness and security. Ultimately these are counterintuitive.  Freedom allows equality by ensuring that everyone can act as they will. But freedom only promotes equality when it is grounded in social values, not forced by the hand of government. This force promotes something different: fairness. This is like forcing the best sprinter in the world to use a wheel chair in a race just because someone else might need to. Then, in a desperate attempt to ensure freedom and force integrity, we amass a series of obstacles and place them on the track.

Congratulations America, we’ve sat Obama in a wheelchair and told him to go through an obstacle course. I hope he really can produce miracles.