Before Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, unleashed full-body-imaging scanners and "enhanced" pat-downs on American airline passengers, she subjected Arizona drivers to red-light cameras. In August 2008, Napolitano, then the governor of Arizona, instituted a statewide system of 200 fixed and mobile speed and red-light cameras, which were projected to bring in more than $120 million in annual revenue for the state. She was aided in this endeavor by the Australian corporation Redflex Traffic Systems.

Two years later, after widespread complaints that the cameras intrude on privacy and are primarily a money-making enterprise for the state (income actually fell short of the projections because people refused to pay their fines), Arizona put the brakes on the program. And while other states - including Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Wisconsin - have since followed suit, many more municipalities, suffering from budget crises, have succumbed to the promise of easy revenue and installed the cameras. (Davenport began using red-light cameras in 2004.) As the Washington Post notes: "A handful of cities used them a decade ago. Now they're in more than 400, spread across two dozen states. Montgomery County started out with 18 cameras in 2007. Now it has 119. Maryland just took the program statewide last month, and Prince George's is putting up 50. The District started out with a few red light cameras in 1999; now they send out as many automated tickets each year as they have residents, about 580,000."

To Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, deflation is regarded as Public Enemy Number One.

In the words of New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, the "real [economic] threat is deflation." Krugman advocates additional and even more aggressive government deficit spending.

The normally on-target Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, international business editor of The London Telegraph, favors more "quantitative easing" (i.e., a policy whereby the Fed would create trillions of new dollars with which to buy government bonds and other financial junk) to prevent deflation.

Why is deflation - by which Bernanke et al. mean "widespread declining prices" - so feared?

An Iowa Worth Fighting for was created to serve as a future firewall against entrenched status-quo power following the November 2010 elections. On August 17, 2009, the content of this comprehensive review and recommendations debuted on the Jan Mickelson radio show in Des Moines.

It spoke to some basic principles, and addressed core governing concerns - like government is best that governs least.

But it offered more than platitudes. It offered specifics that included strategies to reorganize, reduce, and re-prioritize state government; to create accountable, efficient local government; to rebuild our economy based on tax reform and citizen - not government - stimulus; to reform our education system; to promote a healthy Iowa the effective way - not through government mandate; to affirm core rights, such as the right to property; to protect Iowa's citizens; to interdict Iowa's severe drug crisis; to reform illegal immigration; and to advance real leadership principles.

On November 2, 2010, the political pendulum reversed course. Republicans again control statehouse politics. It was not even a decade ago they controlled both the House and Senate in Iowa. Which is to say: It was not a decade ago that they fought education reform, welfare reform, and the introduction of sound fiscal and management practices. When Terry Branstad left office, he had a Republican House and Senate. He did not fix welfare, education, our prisons, our courts, taxes, or our economy. While he managed the status quo much better than Governor Chet Culver - thanks to dozens of tax hikes and data manipulations - Branstad and the GOP did not repair, restore, or rebuild Iowa.

Now that he and Republicans have returned to power, simply invoking a term such as "conservative" isn't good enough. This group of statehouse leaders must lead, but to lead they must first have a plan. This means not just an agenda, but a specific vision of how we fix Iowa.

An August 28 article at the privacy-rights Web site Pogo Was Right argues that schools are "grooming youth to passively accept a surveillance state where they have no expectation of privacy anywhere." Privacy violations include "surveilling students in their bedrooms via webcam, ... random drug or locker searches, strip-searching, ... lowering the standard for searching students to 'reasonable suspicion' from 'probable cause,' [and] disciplining students for conduct outside of school hours ... ."

"No expectation of privacy anywhere" is becoming literally true. The schools are grooming kids not only for the public surveillance state, but also for the private surveillance states of their employers. By the time the human resources graduate from 12 years of factory processing, they will accept it as normal to be kept under constant surveillance -- "for your own safety," of course -- by authority figures. But they won't just accept it from Homeland Security ("if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear"). They'll also accept as "normal" a work situation in which an employer can make them pee in cups at any time, without notice, or track their online behavior even when they're away from work.

This is just part of what rogue educator John Taylor Gatto calls the "real curriculum" of public education ("The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher," 1992). The real curriculum includes the lesson that the way to advancement, in any area of life, is to find out what will please the authority figure behind the desk, then do it. It includes the lesson that the important tasks in life are those assigned to us by authority figures -- the schoolteacher, the college instructor, the boss -- and that self-assigned tasks in pursuit of our own goals are to be trivialized as "hobbies" or "recreation."