Jennifer Baily (got her name this time; I didn't write it down before; my bad) called again yesterday afternoon, and boy was she upset. She seemed to think I was going to be, as she put it, "more reasonable."

I guess that means she thought I wouldn't tell the world that one of our elected Representatives doesn't want to hear from his constituents, and is in fact the only member of Congress who has made that request.

From where I sit, having the distinction of being the only elected official out of the entire United States Congress to explicitly ask that faxes from constituents be blocked is an act that bears wide public disclosure and scrutiny. In fact, in our first conversation (reiterated yesterday) Jennifer was told that when we've had communications problems in the past with some offices, including a number of high-profile Democrats (whom you'd expect would be rather hostile to the content in these petitions) those offices have gone so far as to give me an alternative fax number on different equipment, typically in a district office, specifically to guarantee that their constituents voices ARE heard.

Whatever is being smoked in the Cannon Office Building, Room 203 these days can't possibly be legal.

Its rather obvious that someone forwarded yesterday's Ticker to her and she took offense to how I characterized our conversation.

Life's tough.

Calling me back to whine yesterday just guaranteed Mr. Paul a second run, and this time, with top-of-the-fold billing.

Hint to Mr. Paul's office: When in a hole, the usual advice is to stop digging.

Second Hint to Mr. Paul's office: Arrogance is extremely common in Washington DC. When you attempt to "strut your stuff" in front of people trying to help your constituents, you should expect a strong response. Believe it or not, some of us "ordinary peons" understand that you serve at the pleasure (and expense) of the electorate, not the other way around.

I think I perfectly represented the position that Ms. Bailey elucidated as the official position of Mr. Ron Paul, Republican Texas, in yesterday's Ticker, and absolutely nothing in our conversation changed any of my conviction in that regard, nor did it do a thing to sway my viewpoint from the previous day.

In fact that conversation strongly reinforced my opinion that Mr. Paul, despite his attempt to "hold court" as "a friend of the common man", and "in favor of sound money" instead notched another tick mark in demonstrating that he's just another forked-tongue fast-talker embedded in the joke that is Washington DC.

In short, here's the deal as I understand it after two discussions with Ms. Bailey:

• They consider the fax number at his office "only for their constituents."
• Ms. Bailey claims that "nobody in their office gave me the number" and demanded to know how I got it. (Hint: I called and asked for it, explaining that I had a fax from a constituent; whoever answered the phone gave it to me.)
• Someone transmitting a fax at the express request of one of their constituents (as the petition system does) "is not welcome to send that transmission", even though it went out at the explicit request of someone living in Mr. Paul's district. The obvious logical disconnect that arises if you don't own a fax machine and walk into Kinkos to transmit a fax appears to be lost on them. Since I fail to believe that Ms. Bailey is actually that dense, I am forced to conclude that this is just another example of mendacious behavior emanating from our nation's Capitol.
• Ms. Bailey claims that their office never got a copy of The White Paper (even though my fax log shows that all pages were sent and acknowledged), nor the signatures from constituents in Mr. Paul's district. She was aghast when I told her exactly what equipment they had at their end and demanded to know how I discovered that fact. Hint to the peanut gallery: When you connect with a remote fax machine, it identifies itself by manufacturer and model number. If I had not sent those faxes successfully, that information wouldn't be in my logs. It is.
• Despite claiming not to have received them, she explicitly refused me permission to retransmit the signatures or White Paper. That is, she told me NOT to send to Mr. Paul the petition signatures of people in his district who believe he has already received their message (yes, I WILL be emailing those people separately tomorrow, pointing them to this Ticker so they know that Ron Paul has, as a matter of policy, told them to "Go To Hell" with regards to their desire that he work as their representative to enact The White Paper.)
• I further explained that if 100 constituents were to, for example, print a copy of The White Paper and fax it to Mr. Paul's office individually, they would receive about 1,500 pages of fax transmission. If, on the other hand, I batched up the signatures and sent them all at once, which is what the software usually does, Mr. Paul would receive about 15 pages instead, or a savings to the taxpayer of about 99% in consumables, staff time and telephone congestion. Ms. Bailey did not care; despite the obvious greater efficiency, Mr. Paul still does not want to hear from constituents in this fashion. So much for Mr. Paul being "a steward of the public budget." I guess he's not much of an environmentalist either; shall we go saw down some more trees for you Ron?

Ms. Bailey then asked why I don't use email to send these out. In truth there are several reasons, with the first being technical - the fax server works with Postscript documents. 99% of PCs out there cannot display a Postscript document on the screen as they lack a viewing program. Second, a huge number of printers, including virtually all inkjet and many laser printers, cannot print Postscript, especially HP models.

For obvious reasons what you can't print will simply get tossed away unread.

The more compelling reason, however, is plausible deniability - something that I find repugnant when it comes to elected representatives.

Ms. Bailey unwittingly stepped right into that Bear Trap all on her own, without being prompted.

Let's deal with the innocuous problem first - if I have a petition with 20 signatures on it from 20 people, who do I say the email came from? Do I send 20 copies? We're back to being wasteful and clogging people's inboxes if so. If not, who do I identify the transmission as having come from?

The more serious problem, however, is accountability.

With email the fact that I have a "sent" confirmation does not mean you got the email nor that someone actually looked at it, no matter how briefly. It is trivially simple to set up Thunderbird, Outlook and other email clients to "silently discard" mail with specific subjects, senders, or other keywords in it.

If you do this the sender is never notified.

The SMTP email protocol provides no way to return "enforced" return receipts. As a programmer who writes spam filtering software, I am acutely aware of this limitation, as it has bit some of my clients in the past.

Fax machines don't work that way.