California is having a special election on November 8th.
Every day for the last week or so, I’ve come home to find voice mail promoting one political agenda or the other - all of them recordings. As I hate this sort of thing with a passion, I usually deleted them without listening to the whole spiel. I did catch a few, though.
Several of the messages were polls of some kind, clearly aiming to determine if I’m a Democrat or a Republican (hint: I’m neither). My guess is that if I started responding, I’d be treated to some sort of push poll trying to get me to hate one politician or the other.
A few more messages were dramatic pronouncements in support of Proposition 73, which would institute a mandatory 48 hour waiting period prior to a minor terminating her pregnancy, during which time her parents would be notified. Cultural conservatives have been trying to push this one along under the guise that it’s for the health of the child, but it’s obvious that the goal here is to give parents the opportunity to goad their teenage daughters into completing a pregnancy they’re probably not ready for. Suffice to say I’m against this one, and the fact that these people have been clogging my voice mail with pre-recorded messages just makes me more determined to show up at the polls on Tuesday.
Since telemarketing reforms in 2003 established an FCC-run “Do Not Call” list, I’ve seen a significant drop in the number of commercial telemarketing calls (there are still a few - mostly recorded - which boggles my mind). I have seen a sharp uptick, though, in similar calls by political groups and charities. These groups are exempt from the regulations.
This is a bit of a sore point with me. It seems that any time that a piece of legislation is brought forth that protects the privacy of people, politicians make a point of neutering it to their own advantage. Why wouldn’t I want the option to be exempt from receiving calls from political lackeys looking to push an agenda? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would block them, too. This is how politicians get votes, though, so they conveniently left open a loophole for their own use.
It doesn’t stop there, though!
Remember the CAN-SPAM act of 2003? This Federal law was put in place in order to restrict the actions of spammers (senders of unsolicited bulk email) - a Federal law, I might add, that specifically pre-empted much stronger state laws already on the books. CAN-SPAM is, in a word, toothless - it pretty much allows people to continue spamming, simply limiting the degree in which they can forge headers and engage in other deceptive practices. In other words, spammers can still make you pay for their promotions (bandwidth, disk space and CPU cycles aren’t free, you know), but they have to let you know who it was who did the spamming. These regulations have caused many in the anti-spam community to refer to the law as the “YOU-CAN-SPAM” act.
The most galling thing about this is that the politicians exempted themselves from these half-assed regulations as well. Congress apparently thought that forging headers, using deceptive subject lines, and leaving out unsubscribe capabilities could be useful practices to them at some point, and ensured that the regulations only applied to commercial email. Plus, as CAN-SPAN specifically pre-empts existing state laws, any alternative legal apparatus that could be used to punish political spammers no longer exists.
I hate the self-serving nature inherent to the politicians that make up our country’s leadership. From the top on down, they are only interested in themselves.
