I didn’t.

I voted for and hopefully helped to elect representatives to think about running this country in a way that keeps the running of it out of the way of living in it as much as possible.

Texas Republican Joe Barton is pushing through a bill that would get Congress involved in whether or not there should be a college playoff structure to their football season. Ummm, don’t you have FAR more important things to worry about?

Barton’s argument is that college football is a multi-million dollar industry and since they’re tasked with congressional oversight of other large industries, then why wouldn’t they get their hands dirty on the college gridiron?

Here are some quotes from the article:

“With everything going on in the country, I can’t believe that Congress is wasting time and spending taxpayers’ money on football,” Bill Hancock, the BCS executive director, said in a phone interview. “We feel strongly that managing of college sports is best left to the people in higher education.”

and

“We just can’t imagine that the members of Congress will think it’s their job to dictate how college football should be played,” Hancock said.

and from our President

“I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit,” Obama said at the time. “I think it’s the right thing to do.”

I’m very interested in hearing everyone else’s opinions on this matter. I think similar to the steroids issue in baseball, this is not what I want my government worrying about instead of other things. At least not until they’re all sitting in their congressional chambers twiddling their thumbs with nothing else to do.

Image: Source images from sxc.hu

Post from: EveryJoe

Congress Should Get Out of College Football

I wrote awhile back about the CMP.LY website that allows bloggers to quickly link to an appropriate disclosure statement that describes how they may be connected or influenced to write their posts.

I begin to wonder exactly who these changes are protecting? One person commented on my cmp.ly post about he just wanted to post a link to the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution that says I have free speech and can say whatever I want?

Don’t most people expect that there could be some strings or the potential for a person to have received something at a discount or completely for free that might impact their opinion of a product? Is it also too far-fetched of an idea to think that an individual could still provide an honest opinion of a product regardless of their connections?

Do we really need regulations and government involvement to protect us from people who are potentially no different than some individual standing on a street corner spouting whatever information they wish without retribution or regulation?

Post from: EveryJoe

Blogger Disclosure Changes Debate

Here’s some of the reasons I think this might be a good idea. Let’s look at the functions of the United States Postal Service:

• delivery of mail (connecting people)
• delivery of packages
• official endorsement of dated materials (think tax returns being postmarked)
• official government documents (issuing of passports, etc.)
• economic exchange (delivery of paychecks, tax returns, invoices)

These are the basic functions that I believe are provided by the postal service. As I stated in my earlier post, thinking about the Internet being considered more of a utility, what would the impact of the USPS being the entity responsible for the management and protection of that infrastructure.

• delivery of mail ultimate function is to connect to people. The functionality of the Internet in this capacity is obvious.
• delivery of packages is more of a challenge. I think this could easily be completely taken over by FedEx, UPS, DHL and other delivery companies
• official endorsement of documents could be enabled with more development on digital signatures
• the issuance of official government documents could either be continued to be down by the USPS, or perhaps distributed out to local BMV’s
• economic exchange could be pushed more to electronic distribution with more development and enforcement of secure transactions

Post from: EveryJoe

USPS Should Ditch Mail and Manage Internet

I’ve always considered Internet access more of a luxury item than something like a utility. If you didn’t have Internet access you could still get by with life.

My decision may have changed though as I started to think about another government service that has been visibly getting replaced by the Internet, and specifically e-mail. That’s right, the United States Postal Service.

Similar to my last post about phone books and yellow pages, I begin to question why we still need and keep the post office around all of our towns and communities. Although we don’t always think about the other services and functions that the United States Postal Service provides to us and our communities, they do a lot more than just deliver envelopes and junk mail to our doors.

Stay tuned as I’ll share more of my thoughts on exactly what the USPS does and how I think the standardization and infrastructure responsibility of the Internet could potentially become the postal service’s next life efforts.

Later we’ll talk about how I really think the infrastructure of the Internet could be a good effort for government involvement.

Image: Gregory Jordan on flickr

Post from: EveryJoe

Internet Access as Government Utility

Sparty for President! Image: Newscom

Perles is the CEO of the Motor City Bowl, an MSU board of trustees member, and a fundraiser for the Special Olympics. He says that he’d focus on recruiting should he be voted into office. Essentially, he’d do for the state what he did on the field – try to get more people to come to Michigan.

Name recognition is big in politics, so while Perles seems like a long shot, he does stand a change in this race. Would you vote for him?

Post from: EveryJoe

Ex-MSU Coach could be Governor

I’m guessing the functionality works similar to Rollyo, in that they’ve picked a group of sites that focus on Microsoft information and search for your request among this specific group.

What I’m not able to figure out is what sites are searched. I’m wondering how you get your site listed in that group?

Google has other specific search sites for:

• UPDATE: Microsoft
• U.S. Government
• Linux
• BSD
• Apple Macintosh

Post from: EveryJoe

Microsoft Specific Google Search