The Dave Factor

It's been a week since the election...

2012-11-13T15:47:00.003-08:00

It's been one week since President Obama won a second term of office and I have done my best to avoid doing an endzone dance in the faces of all my conservative friends and critics, partly out of a sense of "winning with dignity" but mostly because it's not like I've been a huge Obama cheerleader this election cycle. I've supported him because he was the lesser of two evils and because of my sheer disdain for the current GOP platform, but it's not like he was "my guy" and I have any vested interest in his victory beyond just seeing the conservative ideology suffer another humiliating defeat at the hands of their own arrogance.

Yes, conservative arrogance, arguably the single biggest contributing factor to the defeat of Mitt Romney.

Don't believe the republican excuse makers on the "news" circuit, they lost this election due entirely to their own actions (or inactions as the case may be).

The excuses coming from the right have been amazing, too.

Yes, the conservative right has launched a full-scale class and racial attack on the majority who re-elected the president. All the code words have been thrown out there by all the talking heads, but the common "wisdom" within the conservative bubble is that everyone who voted for Obama is now part of that Romney-demonized "47%" who are freeloaders, bums and mooches looking for "free stuff" as Bill O'Reilly put it while the results were still coming in. That's how conservatives deal with a PR blunder - Romney's secretly taped lambasting of the 47% who won't vote for him - by doubling down on it and using it as the basis for their chief excuse as to why they didn't win.

According to the conservative base, America is now rocketing headlong into hell, driven by Obama and his legions of welfare queens, activist judges, labor unions and "people who don't look like us". Us being white males over 30 and the women who love to serve them. The racism and classism that was thinly-veiled for the last 4 years has now come racing out into the forefront. Conservative politicians and pundits alike have been lamenting the (de)evolution of America into one where white males are now the minority and the country is now being held hostage by minorities, women and "moochers" looking for "free stuff".

And it's all bullshit.

The white conservative male majority wants desperately to believe that they have the superior party, the superior platform, the superior ideology and the superior candidates and that the only way they can lose is through fraud, criminal activity or the takeover of America by those who wish to see our great nation reduced to a smoking pile of socialist rubble. And, as long as they continue to believe this myopic narrative, they will continue to lose elections and blame everyone but themselves for it.

For the guys who bill themselves as the "party of personal responsibility", Republicans sure have a hard time taking the blame for their own screw ups...

Here's why the Republicans lost the presidential election, and will continue to lose major elections until they pull their heads out of their hermetically-sealed asses:

1. Mitt Romney

He was a weak candidate from the get-go. His opponents destroyed him in the primaries, doing much of the Obama administrations work for them, and the only reason Romney won the nomination was due to lack of any better option. Who were Republicans going to vote for instead? Newt Gingrich? Michelle Bachmann? Hermann Cain? The pool was weak as hell and Romney was the only one who acted even remotely "presidential" at all. However, all the statesman posturing and posing can't cover up the complete lack of any core principles and basic dignity that characterized Mitt Romney as a candidate. He literally said anything he thought people wanted to hear in order to keep moving up in the polls. He would contradict his own stance on key policy issues literally within hours of each other. Depending on what year, week, day or hour you decided to pull a clip of Romney speaking, he was either pro-choice, pro-life, anti-immigration, pro-immigration, anti-taxation, pro-taxation, anti-entitlement, pro-entitlement, and so on. If a guy that completely bereft of integrity would have still managed to get elected president, it wouldn't have been the Democrats who lost, it would have been the entire American electorate.

2. Social Conservatism

Most people aren't rigidly pro-life. Most people aren't rigidly anti-gay marriage. Most people aren't rigidly anti-contraception. Most people aren't rigidly fundamentalist Christian. You can't win a popular election running on a platform that is unpopular with most of the country. At some point you would think someone in the RNC would have floated a memo telling the ultra-conservative male candidates for senate and congressional seats to shut the hell up about abortion, contraception, gays and the bible until after the election. The fact that this didn't happen betrays a fundamental ignorance of popular opinion by GOP policy makers. Even among people who agree with the GOP stance on these issues, most don't support the government getting involved with legislating these values on the general public. Pretty much any time you run on a platform of taking away or restricting freedom and liberty, you're going to have problems.

Unfortunately, if politicians like Bobby Jindal are any indication, Republicans still aren't getting it. Today Jindal said the problem with the GOP platform is that they need to move more towards the center on fiscal issues, while maintaining their staunch social conservatism. This is so ridiculous it's almost laughable. Fiscal conservatism is about the only thing that the majority of the country agrees with the GOP on. Most Americans support tax reform and reduced spending and smaller, less intrusive government. There's actually a broad base of support for the tenets of fiscal conservatism. To abandon the one core party principle that even sways independents, moderates and that coveted minority demographic, while doubling down on the divisive social conservatism that has dogged the party ever since they got into bed with the religious right is to ask for more of the same in the upcoming elections.

3. Conservative Media

If for nothing else than insisting that the first two things I listed weren't issues for the GOP at all, the conservative media complex has failed its demographic and cost its party the presidency. However, there was far more that the conservative media did to screw the GOP out of a presidential win than simply ignoring the two giant elephants in the room, shitting all over the furniture.

First, the conservative media screwed the pooch by making Mitt Romney the heir apparent from the jump. He was a terrible candidate all along, there's a reason the guy has spent over $1 billion in 3 election cycles and never won. He's a turd, a silly putty candidate who can be shaped and molded into any form and imprinted with anything you stick to him, but has no backbone and a completely soft center. If the GOP should have learned anything from the re-election of George W. Bush, it's that people will back a strongly principled and consistent candidate, even if he's completely wrong, simply because standing for something - even the wrong thing - is better than going any which way the wind blows on every single issue put before him. I mean, come on, John Kerry lost in large part due to being characterized as a "flip flopper" for changing his views on certain key issues, namely the war in Iraq, how did they think a serial flip flopper like Romney would do? Yet, they insisted he was the best man for the job - much to the anger and frustration of the Ron Paul nation.

Second, they set the narrative for the Republican party, and it was tone deaf on an epic level. Class warfare, demonization of the working class, extreme social conservatism and cheerleading of Republican obstructionism in Washington all fell flat with voters. Conservative media has been up its own ass for so long that they've completely lost touch with what most people without an extreme right wing ideology actually believe. To make matters worse, when the national public opinion polls began to point out this fundamental failing on the part of conservative media, they simply made up their own polls which reinforced their flawed narrative. Romney (in)famously said "our campaign isn't going to be dictated by fact-checkers" and unfortunately for them, it wasn't. Ignoring the facts in favor of whatever makes you look good is never a winning strategy.

So now it's a week later and the conservative media is in an incredibly advanced state of denial and manic self-preservation. They have attacked every one and thing they can in order to shift the blame from themselves. Instead of taking a critical, objective look at where they screwed up, they're doubling down on the flawed ideology that cost them the election in the first place and instead blaming the failure on anything but their own incompetence. Conservative media is blaming minorities for "stealing" America away from "real" (i.e. white) Americans. They're blaming the persistent specter of "liberal media" for failing to trash Obama and exalt Romney sufficiently to guarantee his victory. They're even blaming Romney for being "too moderate", the same criticism they lobbed at John McCain after the 2008 election. Anything and everything to avoid taking personal responsibility for the role they played in blowing it for the GOP in yet another presidential election.

Much like Karl Rove and his Crossroads GPS Super PAC, Fox News is going to have to answer for the terrible returns on the investment. However, unlike with Rove, it's not conservative billionaires who got shafted with a load of false promises and arrogant laziness, it was the poor, downtrodden white conservative male majority who got conned into thinking they were safe in their ivory towers and that they alone still had the numbers to beat back all those gays and browns and women who think for themselves to get their guys back in charge.

It's time to take some responsibility, Republicans. You can't just sit on your asses, feeling entitled to control of the country, and wait for government to hand it to you...

Guest Blogger: Mary

2012-10-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

Hello my loyal reader. Ah, but the updates come few and far between these days, do they not? My apologies for that. Still trying to settle into a new routine around all the other responsibilities that have been heaped upon me of late. In the meantime, I am greatly appreciative of my friends who have offered their own submissions for my blog. Today, I am featuring an article from my good friend Mary. I'm not going to use her last name per her request, but she sent me this a few weeks ago and has been incredibly patient with me as I lagged and procrastinated getting it up here. So, without further ado, I turn my blog over to an incredibly bright and talented young lady...

My husband and I have been happily married for nearly thirteen years. Do I think marriage is sacred? No, I believe marriage is precious and fragile. Marriage is a right that every human being willing to risk their happiness, their life, and their soul for another should be allowed.

Marriage is hard work. “Happily ever after” doesn’t exist without constant effort. You have to be there for one another even when your spouse isn’t much fun to be around.

Marriage is an extension of love, at least in most societies. Love is the most beautiful and compelling emotion displayed by humanity. It is the catalyst for our greatest joy and sadness. It can consume, fulfill, or destroy us. Those who dare to love are the bravest among us.

Sadly, we live in a world where a fraction of the population has always sought to dictate who should be allowed to marry. Until the later part of the twentieth century, many felt interracial marriage was an abomination. It was even a crime in some places. Today, most of us recognize the laws against interracial marriage as a great injustice in our history.

However, for all our progress, our growth as a species, we still deny this right to some. Do I believe in gay marriage? I believe in marriage. Any human being willing to put his or her self in such a vulnerable situation, to risk their very self in order to spend their life with another human being, should have the opportunity to marry.

Why do I care? I, as a heterosexual woman, would never be denied this precious, fragile right. Well, truth is I care for a couple of reasons. Number one, I believe as long as we, the human race, deny such a basic and valuable right to a portion of our society, we are flawed and inhumane. The second reason is rather selfish. I’m bisexual. It is my belief that my bisexuality is a result of my physiology, my biological makeup. I have been attracted to both men and women since I entered puberty. It has been a part of who I am as long as I can remember. I just happened to fall in love with a man and marry him. However, I may have just as easily fallen in love with a woman and wished to marry her.

The horrible injustice that I could have faced and that many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals face horrifies and confounds me. Why, in a world plagued with so much sadness, would anyone deny another human being the right to express his or her love for another? Love is beautiful, no matter its orientation.

The 47% Problem (I'm talking to YOU middle-class conservatives).

2012-10-05T11:44:00.001-07:00

Ok, so elephant in the room first. Yes, it's been too damn long since I've posted here. It's been a pretty hectic year for me, lots going on, new beginnings and changes and all that good stuff. But, I am hopeful that there will continue to be big things on the horizon and I will become and even louder and more annoying voice in the future. (winky face)

Now, I'm not going to go into a whole thing about the first debate. We all saw it, Obama came out weak and Romney came out with a head full of steam and a bunch of lies that the president bafflingly let whiff by like Casey at the bat. Debates are either really important or not important at all, depending on who's side won or lost, but really they only represent one small facet of the campaign process and one that statistically doesn't have much significant impact on the outcome of the election - with the notable exception being the infamous Nixon/Kennedy debate. Fact is, the first debate is usually all but completely forgotten by the third debate and that is usually a distant memory in the final 2-week push to election day. It's not the words of prepped candidates on the debate stage that carries weight with swing voters, it's the words those candidates say off the cuff or when they think no one is listening that matter.

When Romney made his now-famous comments about the 47% of Americans he feels are a drain and a burden on society, fostered into a life of entitled dependency and cultivated to be Obama voters through nanny state coddling, he drew a very clear line in the sand between the people he sees as valuable to his vision of America and those he could frankly do without. The problem with that is, a lot of people who work hard and don't feel like they are dependent, welfare mooches looking for handouts at all are a part of that 47%, even if they don't know it.

If you are a family of 4 and you make the middle-class average of $50,000, chances are you aren't paying income taxes at the end of the year and are instead receiving a refund. Does that mean you are a leech? Does that mean you are lazy and want to sit on your ass all day being taken care of by the government? Of course not. But, according to Romney, you are. It's ironic because some of the loudest conservative friends I have fall right into that income bracket.

Just like the retired military vets, elderly and working poor in this country who break their backs every day but don't make enough money to have an actual tax bill at the end of the year. See, in Romney's world, working your ass off but not ending up rich as a result of it makes you a bum, a mooch and a freeloader. Who cares you earned that modest paycheck sweating under a hot sun or in a factory or warehouse, if you don't make enough to pay a tax bill at the end of the year, you are a drain on society and Romney doesn't care about you.

The problem is that a lot of Americans who fall squarely into Romney's 47% don't think they are actually a part of it at all. People who get a refund check every year but bemoan the welfare state draining their income. People who collect a social security check but think the Democrats want to take away their benefits. People who have never been anywhere near "rich" in their lives and most likely never will be but are convinced that if they keep voting for the conservative trickle-down economic model that has done nothing but shrink their quality of life for 30 years, that somehow this will all change eventually. These people think Romney represents them, even as he's declaring them all to be freeloaders and entitled pawns of the Obama welfare agenda.

Romney can say whatever he wants in debates. He can deny that he supports policy that he's been running on since the primaries and he can accuse Obama of lying as he, himself tells lie after lie without a challenge. It doesn't matter what he says when he knows we're listening, it matters what he says when he thinks only people who can afford a $50,000 plate of food are listening. When Romney speaks to "his people", he thinks half the country are worthless scumbags, sucking off of his hard work and success. He proudly admits that it's "not my job" to worry about those people - half the country. A man who wants the highest office in the land doesn't care about half the people who live in it.

Now, if you're a millionaire or at least wealthy enough to pay taxes at the end of the year and still have a decent quality of life, then you can agree with Romney's rhetoric all you want. Frankly, it makes sense to do so. I've always believed people should vote in their own best interests and support candidates who support them. My issue is with the vast numbers of conservative voters who AREN'T millionaires who DON'T pay taxes at the end of the year and who DON'T enjoy a good quality of life and look forward to that tax rebate check as a means of trying to get caught up on a year of slowly-accumulating debt. I will never understand why those people continue to vote for a party that doesn't care about them. It's not just an opinion anymore, the guy that they picked to run the country on their behalf has flat out ADMITTED it. At what point do you wake up and smell the $50,000 a cup coffee?

Chick Fil Gay (lol)

2012-07-27T14:20:00.003-07:00

The way I see it, as a privately-owned company, Chick-fil-a can support whatever causes it wants to and its leadership can make whatever statements they choose in the media. I fully support the right of Dan Cathy to express his opinion whenever and wherever he wants to. This is, after all, America and, as of this afternoon, the first amendment still exists.

My only beef (get it?) with this whole gay marriage "scandal" that's put Cathy's company in the news and brought down a deluge of both anger and support from both sides of the gay rights issue is that his comments are just stupid and betray the hypocritical one-sided bias that the anti-gay marriage crowd displays every time they open their chicken pot pie holes and decide to spew another round of their self-righteous ignorance.

Cathy said "I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about."

What annoys the holy fuck out of me about that statement is, what exactly are Cathy and others who believe as he does trying to do? Are they not also audaciously defining what marriage is about based on their own selective interpretation of the bible? That's all the religious right does on the gay marriage issue - arrogantly define what marriage is about.

It's been said over and over again on scores of progressive blogs and websites that conservative Christians love to pick and choose which parts of the bible they choose to strictly adhere to and which parts are just "symbolism" and "open to interpretation", or better yet, "reflect an outdated era in society and should be updated to fit our modern times." These are arguments that I've heard to explain why conservative Christians don't still beat their wives for talking out of turn or beat their children for disobeying them. It's why we don't still see evangelicals stoning women for entering church with their heads uncovered or forcing them into isolation for a week after their periods. It's why modern evangelicals can wear mixed fabrics, eat shellfish, enjoy figs and make casual, non-sexual physical contact with a women while she's menstruating without also being quarantined until sufficient time has passed for them to be "clean" once again. See, the bible is chock full of rules and beliefs that are completely ignored by the overwhelming majority of the exact same conservative Christians who refuse to budge on the acceptance of gay marriage due to the strict letter of the bible. Never mind the fact that the same book of the bible - Leviticus - that denounces homosexuality is also the same book that prescribes all of the other aforementioned remedies for those odd and arbitrary offenses, because all that other stuff is just outdated, symbolic or just silly stuff and therefore doesn't have to be obeyed to the letter anymore... oh, but that gay stuff, there's no budging on that!

The above is a perfect example of my point. Chick-fil-a, like all other hypocritical conservative Christian organizations and people, has an unwavering adherence to their interpretation of biblical principles when it comes to the issue of homosexuality, but when it comes to the other decrees taken from the exact same book of the bible, mere paragraphs before and after the ones pertaining to homosexuality? Meh, we'll decide what that really means and we'll follow it as much as we think is necessary given the changing times.

Why is it that a restaurant chain that is so rooted in "biblical principles" that it closes on Sunday - the day of rest - at the cost of untold millions in lost profits, that it fervently supports the defense of "traditional marriage" - to the point of alienating even more customers and costing them even more profits, but they don't refuse to serve the biblically-banned "swine flesh" on their menu? IT'S FROM THE SAME BOOK OF THE BIBLE! It's not like you have to jump all over the bible and piecemeal quotes out of context together to make these points, they're written plain as day right along the same verses about homosexuality.

Incidentally, there's not a single mention anywhere in the bible about gay marriage. Don't believe me? Look it up. Don't worry, I'll wait...

That's another great hypocrisy in the evangelical homophobic agenda, they have to make ridiculous leaps and connect all kinds of invisible dots in order to extract preachings against gay marriage from the bible. While, at the same time, completely disregarding clear and direct commandments against things like eating pork and shellfish or allowing a woman to speak her mind without permission without beating her severely for it. They even ignore other rules about marriage from Leviticus that conflict with their arbitrary vivisection of scripture. For example, Leviticus also states that if a woman's husband dies, his brother has first dibs on claiming her as his wife and she is forbidden to marry outside of her late husbands family so long as their is a man in the family willing to take her as his bride. Another little Levitican tidbit - if a woman is a virgin and she is raped, then her father must pay a penalty for her purity being despoiled and she must marry her rapist. How's that hypocrisy taste? Not too good? Try a little Polynesian sauce on it, it really perks up the flavor.

So, like I said, if Dan Cathy and the company he heads want to base their company policies on the same "pick and choose to get what you want" mentality that drives their menu options, like good cafeteria Christians do, that's their right. I support Cathy's right to run his company based on an inconsistent, arbitrary and ignorant personal ideology just as much as I support the right of the American people to either support him or oppose him and make their chicken sandwich buying decisions accordingly. Really, I just wish these assholes would practice a little consistency, that's all. If you're going to be unwavering in your adherence to one chapter and verse in a particular book of the bible, then hold that same strict adherence to ALL the chapters and verses in that book. If you're going to oppose homosexuality, then stop eating pork, stop mixing your fabrics, put down that lobster or crab, start beating your wives when they talk out of turn, start killing people who violate church doctrines and start picking out a wedding venue for your daughters and the guys who bang them while they're passed out at a frat party. Seriously, are you trying to spend eternity burning in hell? What gives you the arrogant audacity to define what God's word is all about?

SCOTUS Upholds the Individual Mandate

2012-06-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

Today, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare". In the majority opinion, Justice Roberts said that the individual mandate was constitutional as a tax, but not as a penalty under the commerce clause as it had originally been pitched by supporters of the healthcare law.

"In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. "Such legislation is within Congress's power to tax."

While critics of the healthcare law have characterized the individual mandate as government "forcing" the American people to buy a product that they may not want or need, the majority ruling by the SCOTUS takes a different view. Their judgment was that the law doesn't force anyone to buy anything, it simply imposes a marginal tax on people who earn enough money to afford healthcare but choose not to.

What's the difference?

Well, under the individual mandate, anyone who still doesn't want to have health insurance doesn't ever have to get it. They can continue to go on with their lives without a health insurance plan. However, if that person earns enough money that they could afford health insurance if they wanted to, then they would have to pay a small tax as a penalty. This tax revenue would be used to offset the costs of providing medical care for the uninsured - which would include the individual being taxed.

Why is this a good thing?

One of the largest contributing factors to the skyrocketing cost of health insurance is the cost of covering uninsured patients. By law, hospitals cannot turn away anyone in need of life-saving medical care, so whenever an uninsured individual requires costly emergency care, those costs are eaten by the care providers. In order to offset these costs, providers charge more and more for their procedures, which means insurance companies pay more and then those costs are ultimately passed along to the consumer. In short, health insurance premiums are outrageously high because those with insurance have been paying for those without all this time.

Under "Obamacare", the individual mandate "tax" on individuals who choose to go without healthcare but who could otherwise afford it goes to offset these costs. The result is that health insurance premiums would lower as the costs of providing care would also decline. When everyone has a pool of money to pay for healthcare, there's less need to overcharge in order to create a financial safety net. This exact scenario has played out in every industrialized nation on Earth with a nationalized healthcare system.

What does this mean for you?

Well, that's up for debate. Critics maintain that healthcare costs will rise under "Obamacare", while supporters insist that costs will decline. Critics say it will add to the national debt while supporters say it will actually reduce the deficit. What is not up for debate, however, is the fact that children will continue to be covered by their parents insurance until they're 26, people will not be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions and those without health insurance will still be made to pay into the system in some small way for that inevitable moment when they have an undeniable need for medical care, so long as they are financially able to do so.

Sure, the Republicans may be up in arms about the individual mandate today, but let us not forget it was they who originally introduced the idea of the individual mandate back in 1997 when they were debating the merits of President Clinton's universal healthcare plan. Personally, I'm not a fan of the individual mandate as a means of ensuring adequate coverage for the general population, but I am a fan of having a national healthcare framework in place that provides quality, affordable treatment to everyone without pushing all the costs onto only those who have private health insurance. Today's ruling is one major step forward towards that reality.

I'm back

2012-06-27T13:57:00.001-07:00

It's been an unbelievably transitional month for me, but I'm finally starting to see a break in the storm and it's time to get this ship back on course. First of all, my apologies to my loyal reader who I have made suffer in the absence of new content. Second, there are big changes coming - personal and professional - that will no doubt have a tremendous impact on my humble little blog. Third, I'm going to endeavor to get back in the swing of things as quickly as possible and start pumping out the random collection of rants, raves, spin and time-wasting crap that you have come to love and expect from me. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read this stuff, even the ones who hate it and think I'm an idiot. It's a new day, time to get started.

Dave

Scott Walker survived his recall last night...

2012-06-06T15:21:00.002-07:00

...so fucking what?

Seriously.

Sure, this sucks for the people of WI who care about things like worker's rights and public education. Sure, the jobless rate there will continue to climb, right along with corporate profits, and there will be a mass exodus of middle-class workers leaving the state for better prospects elsewhere and sure, the state's educational performance will decline, but those are problems for the people of WI to deal with. The majority, by a margin of 7%, have decided they like the way things are in their state and God bless them, they're going to get more of the same for at least the rest of Gov. Walker's term.

But that's really where it ends.

MSNBC and Fox News both took opposite sides of this issue and brought it to the national stage. They both overhyped the significance of this recall election as a referendum on everything from union busting to defending the integrity of America. The hyperbole was thick and rampant on both sides of the aisle. Tons of money flooded in from out of state. Walker got millions from wealthy conservatives like the Koch brothers and his opponent, Tom Barrett, got a lot of financial support from labor unions. In the end, Walker out raised Barrett, and in the post-Citizens United age of politics, that's all it takes to win an election. However, for either news outlet to continue to pitch the line that this election is somehow a barometer of national sentiment or a precursor of the general presidential election is ridiculous.

Scratch that, it's not ridiculous, it just exposes the efforts of the national media on both sides to try and influence the political climate any way they can. Both sides of the mainstream media are using last nights WI vote as a litmus test of Obama's chances in November, but if this election has proven anything, it's that policy and politics are really secondary to the ability to raise money to defeat your opponent in the media war. In that regard, Obama is poised to defeat Romney handily.

There's also the fact that the same state that elected Walker also elected Obama by a nearly 15% margin over John McCain in 2008. Just the rough exit polling from last nights primary show Obama still enjoys a 7-9 point lead over Romney, and that's on the very same night that Walker survived his recall. When the general election comes around and a slew of independent and swing voters - as well as all the people who voted in 2008 but didn't care enough to vote last night - all turn out as well, there's every indication that Obama's lead over Romney will grow even more.

The hoopla over the Walker recall results are the desperate attempts of the conservative and liberal media to change that. They want to make the recall election a far bigger deal than it is. They want to create a national referendum based on a state recall election, when the inglorious reality of last nights election is that Walker didn't win so much as the recall itself lost.

I'll explain.

More than 60% of all WI voters exit polled last night said that they thought the recall was being abused. They believed that recalls should only be initiated when there's a case of criminal - or near criminal - misconduct on the part of the elected official. The majority of voters felt that bringing the recall against Walker was an inappropriate use of the ability. That's going to create a measurable level of sympathetic support, even by people who don't necessarily agree with Walker's politics, simply because they feel he was being unfairly recalled. It could be argued, therefore, that a fair amount of votes for Walker last night were really more like votes against the abuse of the recall and not any pledge of absolute support for his agenda.

Again, I'm sorry for my Democrat and progressive independent friends in WI who are lamenting the impending doom of their state over the remainder of Walker's term in office, but November is a long way away and anyone who thinks that last nights election in WI is going to have any significant bearing on the outcome of the general election is talking out of their ass and really just preaching to the choir because independent and swing voters will care not one bit about Scott Walker by the time they pull the lever in the presidential election. The only people who will still be talking about the Walker recall in 3 months as if it's remotely relevant will be the pundits and spin doctors on both sides of the aisle, desperately trying to still make an issue out of it that someone outside their extremist party wing will actually give a shit about.

And that's the way it is.

Go Vote.

2012-06-05T14:29:00.001-07:00

And, for my friends in WI...

I need to try bath salts.

2012-06-04T12:54:00.001-07:00

No, not those kind...

There we go.

I dunno, call me sentimental, but I long for a warm, sunny, summer day, a gentle breeze blowing through my hair, a cool drink in my hand and a homeless dude's face between my teeth.

I have to be honest, I don't think bath salts or any other drug caused Rudy Eugene to attack Ronald Poppo and eat 75% of his face off. I've been pretty high before on a myriad of fucked up chemicals and I've never had an urge to attempt forced cannibalism on a live victim.

I'm not saying dude wasn't fucked up or high, I'm sure he was both, but I don't think a drug made him do this. A drug may have altered his perception or blurred the boundaries a bit, but it doesn't create an urge to do something this over the top unless those thoughts and feelings were already there, somewhere in the back of his mind. Maybe those thoughts weren't even all that deeply contained. For all we know, Mr. Eugene would have done this stone cold sober, and until I see the toxicology report, I'm not jumping on the bandwagon of blaming a legal drug for criminally insane behavior.

It's this kind of over sensationalized media hype that causes knee-jerk reactions that always end up with the loss of our freedoms. Is being able to buy bath salts or salvia or fourloco or any other legal drug/drink that has come under fire and either been banned, reformulated or restricted as important of a right as freedom of speech or religion? No, but freedoms are still freedoms, even if it's the freedom to mess yourself up on some strange synthetic chemical compound and fuck your life up.

I know people who have used bath salts, I know people who have been high on every drug there is. I personally have done plenty of LSD and Psilocybin and not once have I ever felt - or met someone else who felt - an urge to commit an act like the "Zombie attack" in Miami. I think the authorities and media are blaming the wrong culprit in this attack. Rudy Eugene committed this crime, not bath salts. What ever happened to blaming someone for their own actions?

Seriously though, I need to get ahold of some bath salts, hook me up.

I'm not going to post about our military today.

2012-05-28T16:32:00.002-07:00

Taking one day out of the year to feign patriotic remembrance is for phonies and attention whores. Come talk to me tomorrow when it's not trendy to post about our military on your Facebook page. Besides, if you truly want to honor the sacrifice of our soldiers, then stop supporting the politicians who want to continue taking them away from their families and friends and send them off to fight and die over lies, bullshit and for corporate profits. Enjoy your BBQ, don't feel guilty for caring more about having a 3-day weekend than you do for the reason it exists in the first place, and sure as hell don't let some part-time weekend patriot lay a guilt trip on you about it from up on their high horse.

This week can kiss my ass.

2012-05-25T11:21:00.002-07:00

As you may have noticed... well, the 3 or 4 of you who actually read this shit every day and didn't find this blog while googling cosplay or pictures of Meghan McCain, that I haven't been posting much this week. That's because I've been dealing with a medical emergency involving my mother in law. I don't want to go into details, but suffice to say this week has been stressful and both emotionally and physically draining and we're still far away from a light at the end of the tunnel.

There has been one positive about this week, though. My wife's mother is alive and so far doing better. I can say without any hyperbole at all that she is only alive today because my president passed health care reform. Health care reform has allowed her to get the life-saving treatment she needed and it is also going to allow her to have the insurance coverage necessary for her long road to recovery despite the pre-existing condition that almost cost her her life.

Were it not for so-called "Obamacare", I would be helping my wife make funeral arrangements right now instead of making time for hospital visits.

If that's socialism, then that's socialism I can absolutely live with just fine. Call me a socialist, I don't give a fuck, at least my wife doesn't have to bury her mother this week.

Facebook Didn't Wreck Your Relationship...

2012-05-22T12:59:00.003-07:00

In my particular line of work, I get to enjoy a lot of daytime television programming. Perhaps "enjoy" is a bit strong... let's just say the TV is on and I see what appears on the screen and sometimes I even pay attention to it.

One common theme on daytime talk shows is infidelity in relationships. Now, obviously infidelity has existed long before social media or the internet, but the rise of the popularity of Facebook and other social media has created a whole new level of access for people looking for love both in and out of a "committed" relationship. More and more, arguments on the daytime talk shows about cheating spouses involve a jealous boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife gaining access to their partners Facebook or email account and intercepting clandestine correspondence between their significant other and a scheming other man or woman. This evidence is later brought out to the delight of the studio audience and viewers at home and, typically, there is a point where Facebook is criticized for wrecking relationships.

To me, arguing that Facebook wrecks relationships is like saying guns kill people. Specifically, pro-gun people always say "guns don't kill people, people kill people". The logic, of course, is that a gun just sits there doing nothing and harming no one until a man or woman picks it up, points it at another person and pulls the trigger. In the same way, Facebook doesn't wreck relationships, it just sits there doing nothing and harming no one until a man or woman picks it up and uses it to facilitate an affair.

See, Facebook gives you the tools to more easily interact with someone you want to cheat on your partner with, but it doesn't make you do it. The ultimate choice to seek out this relationship is yours and no one else's.

Now, certainly the growing proliferation of social media makes it easier for people to contact each other, both openly and privately. Our world is connected now in a way it never has before and with the recent record-breaking Facebook IPO, it's clear that social media is far more than a passing fad, it's a revolution in global interaction. Today friends can reconnect from all over the world, family can stay in touch from across the country and, yes, men and women with wandering eyes can hook up with old flames from high school, new friends of friends or even anonymous contacts met at random. There are entire websites devoted to helping people in relationships find outside sexual partners now.

Yes, the ability to pursue an extramarital affair is easier than ever thanks to the internet and social media, however the choice to do so still ultimately rests on the individual. I mean, the ability to buy anything you want, anytime you want is now easier than ever too thanks to Amazon.com and other online retailers, but the country isn't going bankrupt as a result of spending money non-stop on things people can't afford simply because they could do it online instead of in a store.

Social media is an important tool. Thanks to Facebook, we are connected to relevant social movements like Occupy Wall Street, we are made aware of atrocities being committed in other countries that would have otherwise been kept quiet by totalitarian governments and activists are able to connect with an audience like never before.

However, much like the internet itself, social media has been ultimately corrupted as a means to facilitate the delivery of porn and sexuality in new and exciting ways.

For every one person who uses Facebook to try and affect social change, there are probably 500 people using it to try and get their senior prom date to meet them somewhere for coffee and a blow job. This is just human nature, people like to fuck and the temptation to use this technology to make accomplishing that goal exceedingly easy is difficult to resist. Many of the deterrents to cheating the old fashioned way are gone now.

Back before the internet and social media, people had to try to find partners to cheat with through face-to-face interaction, they had to risk phone calls that could be overheard, they had to spend a lot of time away from their spouses sweet-talking potential new sexual partners. In short, it wasn't nearly as easy to find, cultivate and harvest some side action before the internet. So yes, social media has made it easier to cheat and that has caused people who otherwise wouldn't have the access or the opportunity to explore an affair to be tempted in ways that would have been much easier to avoid or ignore before, but it doesn't make a faithful spouse into a cheater.

Ultimately, there are people who will blame Facebook for why their husband or wife cheated on them or left them for another, but they're directing their anger and frustration at the wrong culprit. Many times, Facebook is the scapegoat not for the cheater, but for the person who was cheated on. It's easier to blame Facebook than to look in the mirror and ask what role you might have played yourself in the situation you currently find yourself in. If your husband or wife wants to cheat on you, they're going to do it. If you close their Facebook, they'll use email. If you turn off the internet, they'll use the phone. If you shut off the phone too, they'll cheat with a co-worker or classmate, they'll use the computer at the library, they'll find a way to do it even if they have to jump through ridiculous hoops. This is the way it's always been and always will be. Trying to prevent your spouse from cheating by isolating them from the outside world isn't going to stop them from cheating, it's only going to create even more resentment between the two of you that will just serve to fuel your spouses desire to cheat. In short, pushing a spouse away from all temptations to cheat usually only serves to push them further in a cheating mentality as they seek the company of a partner who doesn't treat them like an adversary to be conquered and controlled.

Social media has also made it a lot easier for couples to "stalk" each other and for possessive husbands and wives to monitor every minute of their spouses daily lives. We can track location and activity, we can tell which of our friends are online and where they are and we can even track their activity to create a frame of reference to hold them to. For example, a jealous husband sees that his wife made a trip to Starbucks in 15 minutes, so every future trip his wife makes there will be held to that 15 minute time frame with any significant deviance providing evidence of potential infidelity.

At the end of the day, any person who spends so much of their own time monitoring and obsessing over the online activities of their spouse is wasting their life. Stalking a spouse is the act of an insecure and selfish person. Trust isn't a guarantee, it's a gamble. You trust someone to be honest and faithful but you always assume the risk that they might not be. You can't spend your life controlling your spouse's every action to make sure they don't violate your trust because doing so completely violates their trust. Infidelity plagues even the strongest emotionally-satisfying relationships, you can't stalk someone into being faithful, you can't intimidate someone into being trustworthy and you can't guilt someone into innocence.

Likewise, any person who spends all of their time on Facebook trying to set up affairs with other men or women needs to step back and evaluate their own relationship and find out why they are compelled to constantly seek something outside their relationship that they believe is lacking within it. I have often given this word of advice to friends of mine "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it." Now, I have said that for a variety of situations, but specifically on the subject of cheating - or through one's actions enabling another to cheat - I believe it is apropos. Just because you could hook up with an old flame without your spouse finding out doesn't mean you should do it. Maybe just knowing you could if you wanted to can be satisfaction enough without taking a step that could end up costing you your relationship? Even people who claim to be in the most open-minded relationships can find themselves experiencing jealousy and feelings of insecurity and inadequacy when faced with the possibility of their spouse finding an extramarital sexual partner. I have seen marriages fall apart when the decision to have an open marriage soon dissolved into jealousy and bitterness.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're having problems in your relationship, don't blame Facebook, don't blame email, don't blame the internet or cell phones or ashleymadison.com. Relationships are built on the people who enter into them and they're maintained only through the positive efforts of both partners. A little communication and open honesty can save you a whole lot of wasted time stalking each other and the hurt feelings that inevitably result.

The rich shall rule.

2012-05-17T15:35:00.002-07:00

Yet another conservative billionaire has publicly pledged to throw millions of dollars in personal wealth behind the Republican efforts to defeat president Obama. Joining other extraordinarily wealthy men like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, billionaire and founder of TD Ameritrade, Joe Ricketts, announced that he will be spending at least $10 million of his personal fortune to back a superPAC with a plan to "do exactly what John McCain would not let us do". That being attack Obama's personal associations in the worst possible way, using racially-charged rhetoric and exploiting public fear and ignorance with everything from rehashing the Jeremiah Wright issue to picking up the well-worn conservative scare tactics of socialism and "destroying America" that have been thrown at the president ever since the 2008 election.

Back in 2008, John McCain told the PAC's to back off on the inflammatory rhetoric when it was becoming apparent that it was creating fear and unrest at his campaign stops. McCain was disturbed by the number of his supporters who believed Obama was a Muslim with a secret agenda to destroy America from within in order for his Muslim puppet masters to come in and take over, just to name one of the many outrageous conspiracy theories that were bubbling within the conservative base, fueled by Fox News and irresponsible comments from then-VP pick Sarah Palin. McCain was disgusted by the outrageous and deliberately false comments being made by the GOP and their talking heads and tried in vain to put a stop to them. It has been speculated that this highly-charged and divisive rhetoric was a major contributing factor to McCain's eventual defeat by Obama. Independents and moderates were turned off by the hate-filled language coming from the right in 2008. However, in 2012, the superPAC's believe that this type of hateful, dishonest and deliberately provocative type of mudslinging is the key to victory for the GOP.

Now, I know that my conservative friends will counter that wealthy liberals like Bill Maher have donated large sums of money to Obama's re-election effort and this is absolutely true. However, Bill Maher donated $1 million, Ricketts is planning to give $10 million and that's just a start. Sheldon Adelson has pledged to spend $100 million and the Koch Brothers have a history of spending tens of millions of dollars as well. Basically, one Sheldon Adelson equals 100 Bill Mahers in terms of political contributions. Simply put, there's just not the same outrageous personal monetary donations coming from the left that there has been from the right and that's a very important distinction between the politics of the two parties.

Yes, labor unions donate vast sums of money to Democratic presidential candidates, but those labor unions represent tens of thousands of workers, so there's still some kind of "democracy" in their actions - the are an organization representing a large group of "regular" people, even if they're backing a candidate that not all of their members support. A billionaire like Adelson or Ricketts giving tens or hundreds of millions of their own money only represents themselves and their own personal interests. There's not even an illusion of democracy in these donations, it's just a very small handful of very wealthy and powerful men using their vast personal fortunes to influence presidential politics in a way that solely benefits themselves.

This is the consequence of Citizens United. This is the consequence of the SCOTUS saying that money = speech. When money equals speech, the wealthier you are, the more your voice counts. That's the exact opposite of a democracy.

We have become a country where the wealthier you are, the more influence you wield over our legislative process. Now, lobbyists and the influence of wealth over politicians is nothing new, but never before has there been such an unrestricted free reign for the wealthy elite class to completely manipulate our democracy the way they can now. At least with a lobbyist they have to try and influence a person who was democratically elected by the people. With the post-Citizens United electoral process, wealthy interests can just make sure the guys they want in office get elected and then there's no question how they will vote once they're in there. The will of the people is supplanted by the will of the wealthiest people at every level of the democratic process - wealthy backers put forward their hand-picked candidates to run, wealthy media moguls give airtime to the guys they want to see in the general election, wealthy interests donate millions of dollars to superPACs to help their favorite guys win and then the lobbyists representing the wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations come in and essentially hand these picked and polished "public servants" the legislation that they will vote for and support. Democracy is completely out the window, it's not about what the voters want because even the votes we do get are meaningless. We're choosing between candidates who were already pre-screened to make sure that the interests of the real power brokers in this country are met. We're not choosing the best man or woman for the job, we're choosing the least undesirable option out of the crooked, corrupted choices set out before us.

If you think about our election process as a menu at a restaurant, in a true democracy we the people could order whatever we wanted to eat and the kitchen would whip it up for us. In our current "democracy", the menu has two choices, already determined by the chef and the restaurant owner, and we get to "choose" between those two options. That's not real choice, that's just an illusion of choice, as George Carlin used to say.

That being said, I don't think that Bill Maher being able to donate $1 million to Obama is any better than Joe Ricketts giving $10 million to a superPAC or Sheldon Adelson pledging $100 million to the Romney campaign. That kind of money coming from one individual in order to gain a level of influence over a politician that the average American can't have is counter to everything our democracy was founded on. We were founded as a nation where 1 man = 1 vote, but now we've become a nation where 1 billionaire = 1 billion potential votes. This is not democracy, it's plutocracy. It's not rule by the people, it's rule by the richest people.

The only way to restore true democracy and even the slightest shred of integrity to our political process is to eliminate the influence of big money on the political process. Citizens United needs to be repealed and we need to return to publicly-funded elections with hard caps on individual contributions. We need to return to a time when politicians were selected based on who would best serve the majority of the people, not who would best serve the wealthiest fraction of the 1%.

When people talk about "restoring America", it's typically a misguided call to return to a more oppressive and close-minded time in our history. However, there is an America of the past that I would absolutely support returning to - the America our founding fathers envisioned where one man has one vote and all men are created equal. Only then can we call ourselves a democracy with a straight face.

I've been playing the hell out of Diablo 3 all morning...

2012-05-15T11:05:00.001-07:00

This first boss is pretty tough though...

As California Goes...

2012-05-14T11:40:00.001-07:00

California is a microcosm of the national hypocrisy regarding our economy - Republican leaders came in and gave massive tax handouts to big corporations and the super-rich and, instead of decreasing the size of government and reducing expenses to compensate for this huge reduction in revenues, they GREW government and spent against a deficit until the state/country was so far in the red that we're on the verge of collapse, then they leave office, a Democrat takes their place and, for the next 4 years, all those same Republicans do is cry about the massive deficits, oversized government and unstable economy that the DEMOCRAT is inflicting upon us.

To make it worse, when those democrats start talking about rolling back the tax giveaways that the Republicans put in place, the Republicans start screaming about tax hikes and "punishing success". They tell us total bullshit like it's pensions for middle-class government workers that's bankrupting the system, it's the 47% of the population who don't pay federal income taxes because they're TOO POOR that are wrecking our economy. It's not $800 billion in bank bailouts that's screwing us, it's $100 billion for foodstamps and welfare. Anything and everything to keep the middle-class busy fighting amongst themselves and protect those sweetheart handouts for the big corporations and rich campaign donors. But, most of all, anything to con the average voter into thinking that Republicans are in any way smarter when it comes to managing your tax dollars than Democrats are so they can keep winning elections and keep funneling your tax dollars out of the state and federal budgets and into the bank accounts of millionaires and billionaires and companies who ship jobs overseas and put you and your neighbors out of work, take your houses and charge you $5 a gallon for gas that costs them less than $1 a gallon to produce.

I'm not saying that Democrats are saints, their priorities aren't exactly admirable and they're too stupid to figure out how to keep from getting constantly set up to take the fall for failed Republican trickle-up handouts, but ever since Reagan left office - who would be considered a filthy liberal by current GOP standards - every subsequent Republican president's economic policies have resulted in a recession. In contrast, the two Democrat presidents since Reagan have both presided over significant economic recovery from those Republican-induced recessions. At what point do middle-class American voters pull their heads out of their asses and stop letting Fox News tell them that it's raining while Republicans piss on them? At what point does the average Republican voter realize that the policies of their party will NEVER benefit them and, in fact, are directly contributing to why it's getting harder and harder to make ends meet? You bitch about $5 a gallon gas? Well, who's the party that coddles the oil industry? Who's the party that fought and continues to fight to loosen the Wall St. regulations that have allowed rampant speculation to drive up gas prices? Who's the party that thinks the banks deserve to be bailed out for wrecking the housing market, but you don't deserve any help with your ridiculously underwater mortgage? Who's the party that thinks middle-class Americans should give up their benefits and pay more for healthcare while their bosses should get even more tax cuts?

What's the Republican plan to create jobs? Build a border fence? There's already a huge decline in immigration from when Bush was president and it's because Mexico's economy is growing while ours is declining. We don't need a fence, our shitty job market is keeping immigrants out just fine. What's the Republican plan to grow the economy? More tax cuts for millionaires who are already paying the lowest tax rate in history? More tax breaks for corporations who get money BACK every year already? Republicans LOVE to talk shit about the poor people in America who pay no federal income taxes, but what about the 10 wealthiest corporations who GOT TAX REFUNDS? General Electric got more money back from the government this year than every person who got an EIC tax break in the state of California. Why is that ok with the average Republican voter? What's the Republican plan to lower gas prices? Drill more oil? Experts have said that we wouldn't even see that oil enter the market for at least 10 years and, even then, it would be traded on the global oil market and if we're lucky it might lower the cost of a gallon of gas by about 25 cents.

The Republicans aren't even trying to hide their economic policy anymore, it's out there in the open for everyone to see. The Republican plan is to take as much money out of the general economy and put it in the hands of the wealthiest Americans. Not paying your taxes is only ok if you're a billion-dollar corporation, if you're a hard-working single mom making less than $20,000 a year, you're a scumbag and should be ashamed of yourself taking advantage of the system like that. Republicans want to create two classes in this country - the wealthy, elite ruling class and the impoverished labor class to serve them. They want to raise taxes on the middle-class and poor and lower taxes for the rich. For Republicans, "fair" means making the poorest, most disadvantaged Americans pay even more money that they don't have so that the most privileged and fortunate Americans can contribute even less to the country that they owe every last ounce of their success to.

See, in the mind of the Republican policy maker, the people who have benefitted most from the opportunities for success that we have in America are obligated to do not a damn thing to pay it forward. If you were able to find success in America and make your fortune due to the freedom and liberty that we are blessed with, then the Republican party thinks you should be able to turn around, look at your fellow Americans who are struggling to get even a scrap of the success you have been allowed to realize and say "Go fuck yourselves", take your money and run to the Cayman Islands to hide it all in tax shelters so you don't have to pay even the historically low tax rate imposed on you. Then, those same Republicans want to take the poorest Americans, who are struggling to make ends meet and living day-to-day and tell them "The free ride on the gravy train is over bitches, start paying your fair share!"

Then, in the greatest stroke of irony ever, Republicans accuse Democrats of "envy".

Yes, the Republicans who want us all to be jealous of the fact that 47% of the country doesn't pay federal income taxes have the balls to say that asking the richest people and businesses in the country to actually pay what they're supposed to in taxes is to envy their wealth and success. I've never met anyone more envious of the lifestyle of the poorest Americans than the Republicans. To ask the average Republican mouthpiece, you would think that the poor in this country live the life of Reilly. You would think it's all lazy days and free money aboard the gravy train that the poor are riding along on. Watching Republicans talk shit about the poor in this country not paying federal income tax is like watching two buzzards sitting on a bloated carcass and bitching about the flies filling up on all the shit that fell out of that dead animals ass.

Democratic "envy" is saying the richest people and companies in America should pay 2% more in taxes.

Republican "envy" is saying that your neighbor who makes $40,000 a year is enjoying a "bloated salary and benefits" because he works for the state or federal government and should have his pay cut in half and his benefits stripped.

Democratic "envy" is saying that we need to close the tax loopholes that allow corporations like GE to make billions in profits and get billions more in TAX REFUNDS from the government.

Republican "envy" is saying that we need to raise taxes on the poorest Americans because they've been enjoying the easy life of barely keeping their heads above water long enough.

Republicans like to vilify the poor in America. They like to pretend that the poor in this country pay no taxes at all, that they're gleeful scofflaws who take, take, take and never give anything back. Of course, the reality is that even those Americans who don't pay federal income taxes still pay state taxes, local taxes, sales taxes and spend every penny they make into the economy. See, unlike the wealthiest Americans who put most of their income into savings and investment accounts and make money from money, taking that wealth out of the general economy, poor and middle-class Americans tend to spend everything they make, which means income for local businesses, who in turn use that revenue to grow their business and hire more employees. Now, unlike the Republicans, I am not going to be so purposefully obtuse as to pretend that the wealthy in this country don't do a lot to keep the wheels turning, they absolutely do, but to act as if the working poor in this country are little more than cockroaches scavenging off the hard work of the rich is not only completely untrue, it's incredibly insulting and betrays the sheer disgust and disdain that the Republican party has for the very men and women who keep this country running day to day.

What's worse is so many of those same, hard-working poor and middle-class Americans who identify as Republicans are more than happy to support the very policies that contribute to their struggles.

Again, I'm not going to pretend that the Democrats have all the answers or that voting exclusively Democratic will solve everything. If I believed that, I would be a registered Democrat and I'm not. However, I will say that, right now, the Democrats economic platform would benefit the average American a whole lot more than the Republican plan. Fixing a broken tax code, telling tax-dodging corporations like GE to start paying their fair share and bringing the jobs back to America that were shipped overseas under Bush's watch are all things that would make life easier for the average American worker. More real jobs, more assistance to help get back on track and less handouts for companies that don't invest in America all mean a better, stronger and more prosperous middle class.

Republicans don't care about the middle class because the middle class represents everything Republicans hate right now - specifically, a vast labor force that costs businesses way more money then it should because they expect things like a strong, competitive wage, good benefits and an adequate retirement package. Why are companies shipping jobs overseas? Because those countries don't have a protected middle class, those countries only have rich owners and poor workers. Labor is cheap, they don't ask for much because they're used to having nothing, so anything at all is an improvement. That's the vision Republican leaders have for America. They want us to be like Russia, China, India and South America. They want a vast labor class that gets the smallest possible piece of the pie necessary in order to keep them alive and working and everything else goes to the owner class.

Look at the Russian economy. When "Western Capitalism" arrived there two significant things happened. The first was that Russia produced more billionaires than any other country on Earth. The second was that Russia produced 200 million more people living below the poverty level. Those same economic principles are currently failing spectacularly in Europe, where massive austerity measures have led to rioting and brought countries like Greece to the verge of civil unrest. The people have seen the results of plutocratic trickle-up economics, they saw how it has created a massive wealth gap in Russia, India and Latin America and they are rejecting it when it comes to their town. America is the last battlefield in the war on the middle-class. If the American working class - the proudest and historically most well-protected labor class in the world - can be broken and reduced to indentured servitude, then the rest of the world will inevitably fall in line. This is the vision for America that the Republican party wants for you.

If you make at least $1 million a year, then I totally get why you would vote Republican. I think that voting for the party that wants to preserve your interests is a smart thing to do. If I were a millionaire, I might find myself wanting to vote Republican too. I mean, why would I volunteer to make my life a little less easy or decrease my wealth by even a few percent so that I can help out a bunch of people who obviously didn't work as hard as I did or else they'd be rich like I am too? If I were rich and didn't give a fuck about anyone who wasn't, I would absolutely vote Republican and be glad to do it. However, if I wasn't rich, if I didn't have $1 million and if I wasn't trying to preserve my privileged standing, I can't see why I would ever vote for the current Republican party. Forget the social conservatism that would drive me away from the GOP even if I did somewhat agree with their awful economic policies, just from a fiscal standpoint, why would I ever support a party that wants to elevate the elite class even more while pushing literally the entire rest of the country down into economic slavery? Why would I ever support a party that wants to make the American Dream even harder to achieve, that is working to condition the American worker to do more and more and expect less and less in return?

I look at my state and I see the mess that Republicans made over the last 10 years and have left for a Democratic governor to try and clean up. I see how we're in such a mess now that massive tax hikes and severe cuts to essential services are the only way to get out of the hole we're in and I see that same scenario playing out on the national stage and I wonder how much more shit the middle-class in this country is going to have to eat before we look up at the buzzards sitting on that fat, bloated carcass and say "What the hell is going on here? YOU get down here and eat this shit, we're getting some fucking MEAT for a change!"

If you want to really reduce government waste. If you want to really get rid of the useless, overpaid government employees that are putting a drain on our economy and doing nothing to earn the completely undeserved salaries they're paid, then fire congress. Trust me, it's not teachers and correctional officers and mid-level administrators that are wrecking this country and pushing that American Dream farther and farther out of reach.

Everyone has the right to love.

2012-05-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

The recent rehashed fracas over same-sex marriage following the presidents official statement of support for it has prompted a slew of comments and opinions from people on all sides of the issue. For the record, I support same-sex marriage because I support equality for all human beings. I've heard a lot of arguments against same-sex marriage, though, and I have yet to hear a single one that I consider valid. Yes, I am biased because of my own opinion, but I'm not so obtuse as to not recognize a good argument, I just haven't heard one yet.

"If we allow gays to marry, we may as well allow people to marry animals and inanimate objects!"

I call this the Bill O'Reilly argument because I have heard him make this same ridiculous point numerous times on his show. The idea is that, under the equal protection clause, allowing gays to marry will force society to also recognize marriages between humans and animals or humans and objects. This is a terrible argument simply due to the fact that equal protection doesn't currently allow gays to have the same marital rights as heterosexuals. If this argument were valid, then there wouldn't even be a debate over allowing gay marriage, it would simply be legal under equal protection. Since this obviously isn't the case, then it stands to reason that society could allow gay marriage without also having to allow beastiality and marriage to inanimate objects.

Never mind the fact that animals and inanimate objects aren't citizens, they cannot enter into legally-binding contracts (such as a marriage) and are therefore no more allowed to marry under the law than a 6-year old child is. Animals can't buy houses, they can't buy cars, they can't make real estate deals and they can't get married.

But, let's humor this laughable ignorance and assume that somehow the legalization of gay marriage in this country led to men and women also legally marrying animals. Let's ignore the fact that this is not the case in any country on Earth where gay marriages are legal, let's ignore the fact that gay marriage legalization has not caused any increase in acts of beastiality or a rise in polygamist marriages in any country on Earth where those marriages are legal. Let's ignore all of the empirical data that disproves this absurd argument and just humor the bigots... well, so what?

So some guy in Arkansas decides he wants to marry his horse, so what? Leona Helmsley left her dog $12 million in her will when she died and that was perfectly legal, so is there some difference between people doing stupid shit like that with their animals and people who want to marry them? Beasitality is a crime, it's cruelty to animals. Allowing humans to marry animals is like allowing adults to marry children, it's abuse of an innocent victim by a perverse and disgusting perpetrator. There's no way under the law that a human being would be able to legally marry an animal, but let's assume that a man and his horse are in love with each other and have a mutual, romantic relationship, in defiance of all the laws of nature... How does that affect a heterosexual marriage at all?

This is the question I can't ever seem to get a good answer to from those who oppose gay marriage. I keep hearing about how "if we're gonna allow gay marriage then we may as well allow men to marry animals and blah blah blah!" and, even if that were remotely true, how does that affect your heterosexual marriage?

Right now, somewhere in the country, a man is having sex with an animal. It's not pretty, it's not right and it's not even legal, but it's happening. It's going to happen whether it's legal or not, because some people are just disturbed and compelled to do whatever they want regardless of the law. So, how has this fact impacted the act of sex for heterosexuals? Using the anti-gay marriage logic, if allowing gays to marriage ruins the entire institution of marriage for everyone, then wouldn't men committing beastiality ruin the entire act of sex for everyone? I mean, how could two God-fearing straight people have sex when there are people out there having sex with animals or children? Yet, in spite of the fact that beastiality and pedophilia exist in this world, straight, religious couples are having sex every day, engaging in an act that has been tainted by perverts and sodomites.

Hell, what about prostitution? Surely that is a disgusting insult to the sanctity of procreation? Having sex not just for pleasure but for money as well? And not even trying to get pregnant from it? Surely that's an affront to the traditional, "moral" ideal of sex?

If allowing gays to get married will completely destroy the sanctity of marriage, then allowing gays to have sex has already destroyed the sanctity of sex between consenting, straight adults. Therefore, any so-called Christian who is still having sex is doing so in celebration of a tainted, vile and Godless act.

But I still don't know how gays getting married affects heterosexual marriage at all.

My wife and I have been married a little over a year and in that time many states have allowed gay marriage and many thousands of gay couples have been married. In that time, much to my surprise, our marriage has remained valid in the state of California. I almost couldn't believe it because I was sure that when gay marriage was allowed in CA, that would completely negate all marriages in the state and turn us into a vast, amoral wasteland of people living in sin and having children out of wedlock. However, despite gay marriage becoming legal and then illegal again in CA, my wife and I continue to be legally married and our rights as a married couple are still unchanged.

Also incredibly shocking to me was the fact that people marrying their animals didn't skyrocket once gay marriage was passed here. Now, I know gay marriage wasn't legal in CA for very long, but given the difference between human years and dog years, even a few months of legalized gay marriage would be like years of legalized man-on-dog marriage and yet, in spite of that obvious fact, I don't know of a single person in the state of CA who married an animal due to the temporary legalization of gay marriage in my state. According to gay marriage opponents, the floodgates of beastial marriage should have flown open, but apparently animals still prefer casual dating to serious commitments, perhaps the problem is that humans were trying to romance the wrong species of animals? I hear dolphins mate for life, maybe chasing after dogs and horses is just asking for heartbreak?

"God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!"

Ok, technically, if God creates all life on Earth, then he created Adam, Eve, Steve, Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice. God created us all in his image, or so they told me in Sunday School. Even when humans procreate naturally, God is given credit for creating the life that grows inside the expecting mother, so, unfortunately, that means God created gay people, straight people and even those weirdos who want to marry their cats or bacon or whatever.

Be that as it may, however, there is an important flaw in this logic: Adam and Eve were never married.

Yep, there was never a ceremony, never an exchange of vows, nothing. Hell, before they even got settled in to their garden villa, Eve got them kicked out for eating that damn apple, so these were just two sinners, procreating out of wedlock.

Also, Eve was created from Adam's rib. She was formed from Adam. Now, I'm no anti-gay marriage legal expert, but if it's considered a valid argument that gay marriage equals bestiality, then wouldn't having sex with a part of yourself be considered masturbation? Adam was essentially having sex with his own rib, plus a little extra meat and fat that grew around it after God took it from his side. So, technically, Adam was having sex with himself, out of wedlock of course because that would just be weird to let someone marry themselves...

Well, according to Leviticus 15:16-18, spilling ones seed on the ground is considered a sin of the same caliber as homosexuality. There is no distinction drawn that says one is just a misdemeanor and the other is a felony, they're both labeled as unclean acts. Thus, by allowing Adam to have a sexual relationship with Eve - who was made entirely out of Adam - God was essentially allowing Adam to engage in masturbation. Does this mean that all women - as descendants of Eve - are really just pieces of Adam and that having heterosexual sex is just masturbating with a rib that happened to grow legs, breasts and a vagina?

I know what you're thinking "But Dave, ribs can't get pregnant!" Yeah, well last time I checked, ribs don't turn into girls, either, no matter how long you cook them, but God works in mysterious ways!

Here's another quandary about gay marriage equaling beastiality, which person in the gay relationship is considered the beast?

If two guys having sex is equal to a man having sex with a dog, then which man is the human and which is the dog? This is important to determine because what if the man-who-is-really-a-dog happens to be bisexual and has sex with a woman? Didn't she just commit beastiality too? What about women? Which woman is the dog in a lesbian relationship? Is it the one who receives? Or the one who gives? Many times, gay sex is carried out in the "doggy style" position, but is the pitcher the doggy, or is it the catcher? Or, is it both of them? It can't be both of them, because then that would just be normal sex between two animals and that's perfectly ok. I think it's essential to this debate for there to be a generally-accepted consensus over which partner in a gay relationship is the animal and which gets to keep being a human, the sooner we can determine this, the better.

Also, if a gay man has sex with a dog, is this legal? It should just be considered an animal having sex with another animal, right? Surely no one freaks out when they see a dog trying to hump a pig, do they? I believe, in fact, that this sight would make for quite a funny Youtube video, that poor dog trying to hump on a pig, that will never work! It seems to me that if we aren't going to lock that silly dog up for trying to mate with a pig, we shouldn't lock up gays for trying to have sex with other animals either, right?

"This is all about preserving the sanctity of marriage."

So was this.

Seriously, all of the arguments being made against gay marriage today are almost identical to the ones made against interracial marriage in the 1960's. Back then, opponents of interracial marriage also equated it with beastiality. The argument back then was "If we allow people from different races to mix, then what's next? Men having sex with animals?" We were told that children would be forced to learn about interracial marriage in schools and indoctrinated into a society where interracial marriage was not only ok, but you would be considered an outcast if you didn't participate in an interracial relationship. "Your children will be exposed and you will have to explain it to them!" Sound familiar?

The bible was invoked then, as well. People who didn't have the guts to just admit that their opposition to interracial marriage was just simple prejudice and bigotry hid behind the bible, they hid behind a false concern for "children" and what they would be taught about interracial marriage, they hid behind a sense of duty to "preserve traditional marriage" and keep it from being turned into a mockery by allowing different races the same rights to marriage that couples of the same race already enjoyed. They claimed interracial marriage would lead to an explosion of beastiality and people marrying inanimate objects. They claimed it would undermine our economy, cause property values to decline as interracial couples moved into "normal" neighborhoods. They claimed it would destroy the family unit as scores of "half-breed", mixed-race children infiltrated our society with their bastardized culture and genetic disposition towards amorality.

Nearly 60 years later, the same arguments are being recycled by the anti-gay marriage crowd. Literally, the same exact language. Replace "whites and negroes" with "gays and lesbians" and you have the current anti-gay marriage talking points to the letter. Is there a reason why this kind of talk was hateful ignorance in the 60's but it's values-based morality today?

Another interesting fact - nearly twice the percentage of the American population was opposed to interracial marriage when it was federally legalized in 1967 than the number who are opposed to gay marriage today. About 72% of the population was opposed to interracial marriage when the SCOTUS legalized gay marriage in all states and 48% - or nearly half the country - felt that gay marriage should be a crime punishable with jail time. Legalizing interracial marriage was a wildly unpopular act at the time, but our society is better, stronger and more diverse today as a result.

"Don't force your gay agenda on me!"

This is possibly my favorite asinine anti-gay marriage comment. The idea being that telling people who are opposed to gay marriage "You can be opposed to it all you want, it's still allowed" is forcing gay marriage upon them. There is a great quote "Saying that someone else's gay marriage is against your religion is like being mad at someone for eating a donut when you're on a diet." It's simplistic but true. Being opposed to gay marriage from a religious standpoint is absolutely your right, if that's how you believe, but Muslims exist in a world where people eat ham and bacon, Jews exist in a world with non-kosher foods and all religions exist in a society where not everyone shares their beliefs and yet everyone in these religions feels as though they will be allowed entry into heaven, despite the fact that there are many other people on the planet who don't believe as they do and who, according to their beliefs, are most likely doomed to an eternity in hell for it.

Legalizing gay marriage doesn't "force" anything on anyone. If you're not gay, you still get to be not gay in an America with legalized same-sex marriage. If you're in a heterosexual marriage, you still get to be in that heterosexual marriage in an America with legalized same-sex marriage. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is being "forced" on you.

If gay marriage is legalized tomorrow, the gay police aren't going to show up at your door and force you to have gay sex, or marry a gay person, or attend a gay wedding or even send a nicely-worded card to a recently married gay couple. You don't have to change a single aspect of your life, you don't have to do anything any differently than you ever have. Your wife or husband will continue to be your wife or husband, your children will continue to be your children, your heterosexual sex life will remain whole, intact and preserved.

However, if gay marriage continues to be illegal, then gays can't get married, they can't have legally-recognized same-sex commitments, they can't enjoy the rights and privileges of a traditional married couple. Simply put, allowing gay marriage doesn't affect anything for the average straight American, but keeping it illegal affects everything for a committed, same-sex couple who wants the same rights and privileges as a heterosexual couple.

Legalizing same-sex marriage doesn't "force" anyone's morality on a heterosexual person. Keeping same-sex marriage illegal does force someone's morality on the gay community, however. Nobody is going to arrest you for not having a same-sex marriage, but North Carolina just arrested two women this week for trying to get a same-sex marriage license in their state.

Stop trying to force your homophobic agenda on the rest of us.

"If it's such an important issue, then just put it to vote! Let the people decide what they want! Leave government out of it!"

Essentially, this is a valid point and I agree with the principle behind it, except rights aren't subject to popular vote, that's what separates rights from privileges.

See, being allowed to drive when you're 16 or buy a gun when you're 18 or drink when you're 21, those are privileges. They can be taken away if you violate the law, for instance. Men and women are not denied the right to marry just because one or both of them have broken the law. Americans are guaranteed rights under the constitution. These rights aren't subject to the law, they are the law.

Or, as Rachel Maddow put it:

Boredom should no longer exist in our society.

2012-05-10T12:57:00.001-07:00

Seriously. I was thinking about this today while I was washing my hair and listening to Pandora radio on my iPhone. If I had the kinds of things that kids have today to occupy my attention, I would have never been bored. To be fair, it's not like being a teenager in the 90's was horrible, we had cable TV and Nintendo and I mean hell, I could take a stick and a trash can lid and entertain myself for hours when I was a kid. But, I can only imagine how much more awesome my childhood would have been if I had an Xbox 360, a computer with high speed internet and a smartphone, to name a few.

Think about it, a kid today can wake up, jump on the Xbox, text some friends and if they can't come over, no big deal, jump on Xbox Live and game with each other over the net. Then, if that gets old, go mess around on the computer for a while, surf the net. Mom wants to go to the store, cool, there's a freaking DVD player in the car and maybe even another Xbox hooked up in there. Don't want to be bored in the store, so plug the headphones in to the iPod or smartphone and listen to music or watch videos while you follow mom around with a look on your face like you couldn't be more miserable in your fantastical, electronic wonderland.

You know what, just the high speed internet drives me crazy. When I was a hormone-fueled teenager, I had to hide a stash of porno magazines under my bed and it was the same 5 or 6 magazines and they didn't even show penetration back then. I had every picture memorized to the point that I was almost sick of them but if I got too greedy and built up too large of a collection, I risked my parents catching me and then the whole pile would be in the trash or, more likely, returned to my dad's drawer where I pilfered them from in the first place. Yes, checking out hand-me-down porn from the early 80's was how most of my generation worked through puberty. If I had access to the internet? That vast sea of filth and depravity? Forget about it. Once I learned how to properly clean my history I would have been an unstoppable force of nature, jerking my way off along the information superhighway. Oh to be a teenager in a world where girls have been so desensitized by scat and piss porn and seeing amputee midgets fisting chicks asses that asking them for a casual blow job seems downright friendly and innocent.

I remember playing Super Mario Bros. for hours on end, getting to the point where I could beat the game sprinting the whole way and using all the shortcuts without dying. A game like Call of Duty would have made my head explode. That was the stuff we used to play out in the field. Back then, a first-person shooter involved BB guns and the losers were the ones with the most welts at the end of the day. MMORPGS? Forget about World of Warcraft, we used to play good old Dungeons & Dragons with pen and paper and multi-sided dice and all anyone ever wanted to do was find the inn and bang wenches. Maybe, if we were lucky, we might actually make it to the entrance of the dungeon before it got dark and everyone had to go home. Even when I was a kid, being bored meant you just weren't trying hard enough, but to be bored today? I think that would make you an asshole.

When I was a teenager, I had three ways of connecting with my friends - the house phone, a pager and "the hill". The house phone was the early contact device, you called everyone as early as possible in the evening so you could catch them before they left. Hopefully, if they did leave, they had the cool kind of parents who would tell you where they went (or where they said they were going, which would still let you know where they really went) instead of the parents who just said "He's not here" and hung up. If you were one of the lucky kids who's parents didn't think pagers were only for doctors and drug dealers, then you could page them and find out what was up as soon as they could get to a phone. I remember all my friends had different code numbers so that whenever I got a page from a number I didn't recognize, the code would let me know who to ask for when I called. Yeah, I had a pager, but only because I sold weed. Then there was "The Hill". The hill was a vacant lot across the street from the Texaco in town where everyone would go and park their cars every evening and just hang out there as more and more people drove by, recognized their friends and stopped themselves. Eventually, when a sheriff cruised by and hit us with the spotlight, we knew it was time to move before we got hassled and that's when the group would come to a consensus as to where to relocate the party. If you didn't make it to the hill before the party relocated to one of the many isolated party spots out in the country, then you had to wait for someone to cruise back into town to bring the girls to use the bathroom or get more beer or something, unless we got lucky and one of the rich kids was borrowing their parent's car with a car phone in it and then you had about 5 minutes to talk to them or else the bill would be ridiculous.

I can only imagine having a smartphone then. Everyone being able to call each other or send unlimited texts to coordinate the party? Not having to risk getting busted by the county sheriff with beer in the trunk waiting for the rest of the crew to show up so you could follow each other to the bonfire out at the weir? Social interaction today is fucking easy mode!

And Facebook... well, I am actually kind of glad there wasn't Facebook when I was in high school. It's bad enough being an awkward, insecure and goofy teenager when it's only a small group of friends who witnessed most of your embarrassing fails. Having it broadcast to the entire social network, with accompanying photos, and then enduring your family members trying to defend you and only making it worse... yeah, that would have sucked all kinds of balls. It was easy enough to be humiliated in front of the entire school without a permanent photographic record going viral in cyberspace.

Although, banging my hot teachers would have probably been a lot easier.

But yeah, it kind of annoys the piss out of me when I see kids complaining about being bored these days. There are so many ways to mindlessly kill hours upon hours of free time that I don't see how any kid or teenager could be bored, unless they're just a bunch of jaded pricks. I guess that's just the way we are though, I mean I was certainly bored in a world of Nintendo and cable TV and hours-long phone calls with my friends, my parents grew up without video games and they only had about 4 channels and you could only talk on the phone until someone else on the party line had to make a call, plus the cord was only about 3 feet long and you had to sit at the kitchen table in front of the whole family. If I got bored as a kid with all the stuff I had, growing up in my parents generation would have been torture. I don't buy it with today's generation, though. The Xbox is fucking ridiculous, the internet is amazing and smartphones are unbelievable. I would have spent all day creating websites and become a dot com billionaire if I would have grown up with the internet we have today. Who am I kidding, I would have died of dehydration in my room after masturbating for 96 hours straight. One thing's for sure though, I wouldn't have been bored!

Obama officially supports gay marriage.

2012-05-09T14:16:00.003-07:00

Obama made his support for gay marriage official during an ABC news interview on May 9th.

President Obama has finally made his support of same-sex marriage official, marking the end of the long "evolution" of his position on the issue that has been gradually softening and moving towards support since his election in 2008. During the 2008 campaign, Obama had expressed a support for civil unions and the ability for committed, same-sex partners to share certain legal benefits and protections, but stopped short of a full endorsement of gay marriage, taking the popular and moderately conservative stance of restricting marriage to heterosexual couples only.

The president's statement came in response to growing pressure on him to clarify his position in the wake of vice president Joe Biden's statements on gay marriage days earlier. The VP had stated he was "absolutely comfortable" with gay marriage, which led many to speculate that the president would either be making his own statements in line with Biden's or that there would be an awkward disagreement and a whole lot of backpedaling within the administration.

Personally, I think this is a long overdue affirmation of a position that has basically been attached to the Obama administration since the president first expressed anything other than across-the-board opposition to gay marriage, civil unions or any other form of legitimization of the gay lifestyle. Despite the fact that Obama took the easy way out and tried to have his cake and eat it too by supporting civil unions but not supporting actual marriage in order to coddle moderate and independent votes in 2008, he was basically labeled as being a pro-gay marriage president by conservatives anyway. In the last 3 1/2 years, with actions like repealing DADT and instructing the justice dept. to stop defending DOMA, Obama has been showing his hand even more that he would eventually be coming out fully in support of gay marriage in time for the election.

It's a smart move too, really.

Conservatives are going to label Obama as pro-gay marriage regardless, because of those aforementioned policy changes and especially in light of the sudden and radical far-right swing that the Republican party has taken ever since they were co-opted by the Tea Party during the mid-terms. The Republicans have doubled down on extreme social conservatism and with their silly putty candidate, Mitt Romney, fully prepared to allow himself to be molded and shaped into the perfectly-coiffed poster child for the new, radical conservative movement, they have staked out a platform that leaves no room for deviation from that hardline ideology. Any position other than full, unequivocal opposition to gay rights in any form will be met with scorn by the right, so trying to play the middle road and not taking a firm stance on the issue would only hurt Obama. Thus, taking the pro-gay marriage stance doesn't really hurt Obama anymore than taking a muddled, pro-civil union stance.

When it comes to moderates and independents, however, the Obama strategy of full endorsement that would likely have cost him some important votes in 2008 also has a much more benign impact in 2012. In an election where moderates still had some small place in the Republican party and independents were a voting body worth softening the hardline conservative position to appease, it was smart strategy to remain vague on this issue, but in the current incarnation of the GOP, there is no place for a socially moderate viewpoint and any independents that don't embrace social conservatism are dismissed as liberal and pushed away by the unflinching far right. Thus, when it comes to social issues in this election, you're either in lock-step with the far right or you're "one of them", there's increasingly no room for exception.

Romney's camp has indicated that they don't see the hardline, far right social conservatism of the Republican primaries carrying over into the general election. This is the infamous "etch-a-sketch" comment where they feel Romney can "shake" his position and completely reset it and the voting public will simply give him a pass. There is some logic to this statement, obviously, because with the 24-hour news cycle and the ADD nature of our media, it's very easy to manipulate public opinion on any given issue by simply controlling what or how much coverage is given to the subject. It stands to reason that between now and the home stretch of the presidential election there will be some narrowing of the gap between Obama and Romney that is currently reflected in the polling. Certainly the economy, gas prices and an abundance of other issues that resonate much more strongly with independent and swing voters will affect both Obama and Romney's popularity going into the voting booths and how the president handles those issues will have the biggest impact on how voters will pull that lever when the time comes. Really, the pressure is still fully on the president to either make or break his re-election through the way he publicizes his successes and spins his shortfalls on these key issues.

However, when it comes to the social "wedge issues" like gay marriage, abortion and so on, the Republicans have done a lot during the primaries to make Obama's job much easier in terms of winning over undecideds and independents. Regardless of the Romney campaigns attempts to distance themselves from their hyper-conservative primary rhetoric, the Republicans in office continue to push the extreme social conservative agenda, be it Arizona cutting funding for Planned Parenthood or North Carolina taking it's stance against gay marriage. Conservative politicians are still out there reminding the general public that their hardline stance isn't just primary campaign red meat rhetoric, it's a plan of action and, most importantly, that social moderates have no place in the new Republican party.

So, taking a definitive stance in support of gay marriage is a win-win for Obama. It ignites the Democratic base and earns him brownie points with liberals and progressives and it forces the Republicans to respond. Given the Republican policy of taking the polar opposite stance on whatever position Obama supports, they will almost certainly find themselves compelled to come out in the most strongly contrary manner possible. If Obama supports gay marriage, then Republicans will say that they think homosexuality should be illegal. In the middle of all of this will be undecided and independent voters - who statistically are moderate with a slightly progressive leaning when it comes to social issues. These voters will see two clear choices for the election when it comes to those social issues - either vote for the party that supports full equality, which is a position they may not fully endorse but aren't necessarily fully opposed to either - or vote for the party that absolutely opposes full equality in a way that makes it incredibly hard to throw your support behind if you don't want to be labeled as an extremist conservative idealog. At least, this is how the Obama administration seems to be playing it and, given the spectacular failure of the Republican's war on women, it's a safe bet this too will be a smart strategy.

For now, though, having a sitting president come out publicly in favor of same-sex marriage is a remarkable and ground-breaking event. Regardless of how the election turns out, the gauntlet has been thrown down and the conversation has been started. If Obama loses in November, gay rights will almost certainly be rolled back in a completely draconian and punitive manner just to stick it to the liberals, but the seeds have been sewn and public opinion has been influenced regardless. The average American is much more tolerant of gay rights than they were even a decade ago and the wheels of social progress continue to turn. Same-sex marriage under a Romney president may well be kicked down the road a decade or more, while an Obama win all but guarantees the passage of same-sex marriage in the next 4 years, but either way it's going to happen. Progress is inevitable, the will of the people will always triumph.

The Avengers is a Great Movie.

2012-05-08T13:06:00.004-07:00

Like most of the country, I contributed to the record-setting opening weekend box office gross for The Avengers movie by going to see the highly-anticipated superhero film. I had already heard from everyone I know that had watched the movie before me that it was amazing and one of the best superhero movies they had seen, so I had my expectations set pretty high when I sat down in my seat, diet Pepsi in hand and 3D glasses in the ready position.

What followed was over 2 hours of mind-bending action and special effects that literally flew out of the screen at me. When the final credits rolled - the ones after the obligatory easter egg, that is - I felt like I had just been on a roller coaster, my heart was pounding, my skin was tingling with excitement and I had a perma-grin on my face that didn't subside until we were halfway home from the theater. The Avengers might not be a perfect movie - it certainly has some plot holes and isn't the most fluid progression from the individual films that introduced the Avengers team members - but it's easily one of the best superhero films I've ever seen.

First of all, director Joss Whedon did a remarkable job accomplishing an incredibly daunting task - uniting each of the grandiose members of the Avengers into a dysfunctional yet unstoppable force without neutering their respective personalities or diminishing their strength as individuals. I draw a comparison here directly with the X-Men franchise, which had the same duty of bringing together a team of superheroes, but where far more often than not the individual strength and stand-alone charisma of each hero was diluted in the group setting. While Wolverine might be a perpetual lead role whether we're talking about X-Men Origins or X-men 3, many of the rest of the X-Men took alternating turns in the back seat. I'm not saying that Cyclops or Storm or even Rogue weren't important parts of the films, but their respective scenes in the movies were interchangeable - any scene where Rogue did something heroic, Cyclops could have easily taken her place instead. For the X-Men that weren't essential to the main storyline, their appearances were often just generic "superhero to the rescue" scenes that were only personalized by the use of that heroes respective super power. So, Storm saves some people by using a lightning storm, if it had been Cyclops he would have blasted something with his eye beam and achieved the same results - meanwhile Wolverine is over here with Magneto doing something important to the movie.

This was not the case with The Avengers. Instead of taking one or two of the heroes and constructing the plot around them with ancillary performances by the rest of the team, Joss Whedon gave each of the Avengers important, instrumental roles in the film from the beginning to the unbelievable final act. From the subplot involving Hawkeye being mind-controleld by Loki to Bruce Banner learning how to control the Hulk to Tony Stark's benevolent turn from his self-absorbed persona to a selfless team player, everyone gets a turn in The Avengers, every character gets developed and treated with enough respect to make their individual fan base happy. It's not easy to give equal time and effort to a cadre of superheroes without making a 6-hour movie or completely muddying and overcrowding the finished product, but Whedon handled the task better than anyone who has attempted it, be it the aforementioned X-Men series or Zack Snyder's work on Watchmen.

The second great thing about this movie, which is another credit to Whedon's direction, is the awe-inspiring action sequences. By the time the final act kicks in, it is apparent that Whedon knows how to choreograph a grand-scale battle on multiple fronts with a congruency that is remarkable. We have Iron Man flying around the skies, Hawkeye sniping from a rooftop, Thor, Captain America and Black Widow kicking ass on the ground and Hulk... well... smashing everything everywhere in between. However, as much as these respective battles were separate, the action often spills from one area to another and that keeps the viewer aware that all the action is tied in together and not just existing in a handful of scattered bubbles. Again, it's another mark of good direction to be aware of both the micro and the macro of a setting and it definitely shows the skill of the director when they can maintain both aspects without cutting corners. When you see a flying, 3D fight sequence where a part of a ship that was blown up back here flies forward and takes out a second ship over there and then here comes Hulk jumping through and smashing something there and then Iron Man blasts something else over here and it all ties in seamlessly and at such a blistering pace that all you can do is say "holy crap, that was awesome!" That's good filmmaking!

Also, not for nothing, but The Avengers also happens to be the best Hulk movie ever made.

"Puny God"

I'm a big Edward Norton fan and I was more than a little disappointed that he wouldn't be reprising his role as the Hulk in The Avengers. However, Mark Ruffalo is possibly the best Bruce Banner since Bill Bixby. Ruffalo does a great job of portraying the mild-mannered scientist with both sympathy and self-effacing humor and the build-ups to each of the appearances of the Hulk do a great job of stoking anticipation, which the Hulk delivers on and then some. I went into The Avengers thinking that Iron Man would end up being my favorite character because of how much more I enjoyed the two Iron Man movies than any of the other individual hero movies, but when the movie was over, the Hulk was far and away my favorite Avenger. Holy crap is he a bad ass!

Speaking of bad ass, my second favorite Avenger was Scarlett's butt in those body suits. Seriously, her hotness was off the charts in this movie. I found myself thinking "Man, they sure are giving a lot of screen time to Scarlett, considering her character is probably the least powerful Avenger next to Tony Stark without his Iron Man suit", but at the same time I didn't care because every scene she was in was like a tribute to her relentless sexiness.

All of this action and eye candy would easily have made The Avengers a quality popcorn flick on its own, but what really takes this movie to the next level is the witty script and great writing that preserves the color of the characters from their individual films and uses them brilliantly to underscore the difficult task of integrating a room full of egos into a fluid, cohesive fighting unit. Of course there's going to be a bunch of smart ass comments and clowning from Tony Stark, not only is it expected, it's where Robert Downey Jr. really gets to shine and show why he's the perfect actor for that role. But, in The Avengers, Stark gets his egotistical bravado slapped in line in the presence of stronger, tougher and more focused guys like Captain America and Thor, who plant the seed of putting the team over the individual that eventually leads Stark to his turning point moment at the climax of the film. Likewise, Starks knack for diffusing a stressful situation with a non-sequitir or a sarcastic joke rubs off on his more serious teammates, which makes for some great laughs on their part as well.

Thor (speaking about Loki): "He's my brother." Natasha Romanoff: "He killed 80 people in 2 days." Thor: "...he's adopted."

Sure, there are some plot holes. There were events and circumstances at the ends of some of the individual hero movies that seem to be completely ignored or at least unexplained in The Avengers - not the least of which is how Thor and Loki were both able to come to Earth when Thor left Earth seemingly unable to return and Loki was banished to a supposedly unescapable dimension - and where the hell was the S.H.I.E.L.D. flying aircraft carrier heading anyway? Also, I don't want to spoil too much of the plot, but I get that Loki is the trickster God and everything, but his "plan" to manipulate the respective Avengers into fighting amongst themselves was so weak and it really seemed more like everyone just decided "Hey, Loki is going to try and turn us against each other, so let's let him do it." without him having to do much of anything at all. These are relatively minor criticisms though because ultimately, this movie delivered across the board in spectacular fashion. I mean, really, it's a summer blockbuster. It's a popcorn movie thrill ride. It could have had a way flimsier plot and still been an amazing and wildly entertaining movie, easily worth the overinflated ticket price to see it in 3D.

Also, note to Michael Bay, this is how you do 3D in an action movie. After fighting off motion sickness and trying to figure out what was an autobot, what was a decepticon and what was a bunch of random, pointless metallic crap flying around amidst chaotic, out of focus explosions in the last two Transformer movies, it was refreshing to see high-speed 3D action sequences that were actually easy to follow and where the characters were distinguishable. It actually is possible to have a bunch of crazy, 3D exploding CGI action on the screen without it looking like a kaleidoscope train wreck, who knew?

Lastly, honorable mention has to be given to the uncredited star of the movie (at least in my opinion), the Acura NSX roadster that Tony drove. Much like the Audi R8 (which is so, so sick as hell) that he drove in Iron Man, Stark unveils another badass road demon in the NSX.

Suck on that, Bruce Wayne.

Speaking of which, The Dark Knight Rises is going to be balls as hell, but that's for another blog! Go watch The Avengers, it totally lives up to the hype and then some.

Discourse is one thing.

2012-05-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

The beauty of writing a blog that often takes a political slant is that I am graced with responses from people who agree with me as well as people who strongly disagree with me. I'm fine with being called an idiot and told my opinions are stupid, that doesn't bother me and, in fact, it actually brings a smile to my face because a pissed off person visiting my blog to tell me how dumb I am means traffic, clicks and, inevitably, money in my pocket. To that end, I encourage those who disagree with me to share my blog with as many people as possible and visit daily to make sure I'm not writing anything else that might piss you off and demand an immediate and angry response.

See, trolling and being trolled, hating and flaming on the internet is par for the course when one dares to make their opinions public. It's a fact of life that one must either deal with or avoid entirely by never posting anything that anyone would want to comment negatively on, ever. You can either lurk in silence and watch other people catch hell for saying things you silently agree or disagree with, or you can wade out into the muck and open yourself up to the same anonymous abuse and insults by legions of internet tough guys. I can understand why the majority of people who frequent web forums and other opinion sites don't post anything themselves, it takes a thick skin to deal with being flamed for everything from the ridiculousness of your viewpoint to your improper use of punctuation.

But, like I said, the internet is where the trolls dwell, discussions on the internet will almost always devolve into flame wars, random insults and general douchebaggery. It's a public forum, open to contributions from all segments of the population, from people with serious, well thought out points to smart asses just looking to get some attention by saying whatever shocking or outrageous thing they can. However, the internet is also the best place for these scenarios to play out. A public forum is also a self-policing forum. Trolls are outed and bashed, bad opinions are argued with good ones and there's always the option to just pull the ripcord and stop feeding the trolls by refusing to add to the discussion any further. Most of all, though, the internet is not that serious. Arguments on forums might get people angry in real life, they might cause people to get their feelings hurt or angrily repost said conversation in hopes of getting friends and others in agreement to rally to ones defense, but at the end of the day it's just words and arguments and comments and it's not seriously affecting anyone's lives.

Politics, on the other hand, is a different story.

When there are disagreements in politics, work shuts down. Progress is halted and the country gets put on hold while our elected leaders are expected to reach an agreeable compromise as quickly and effectively as possible in order to get back to the business at hand and get our country moving forward again. Historically, this has been the case and it's been an integral part of the democratic process. Opposing political parties have differing views on the best way to deal with the issues facing our nation, they have differing priorities regarding which issues should be addressed or which policies should be implemented first. In spite of these disagreements, our legislators have always found some common ground and while not every agreement has been equally satisfactory to all parties involved, agreements have always, ultimately, been reached.

Our political system today is less like the traditional political discourse that has shaped our nation and more like a bunch of angry, anonymous forum trolls looking for attention and playing to their "fans".

The spirit of compromise and agreement has all but been tossed out the window and replaced with a new attitude of unflinching contrarianism. Civil discourse and polite, respectful disagreements have been replaced with public trash-talking, name calling and wild hyperbole. All the while, the business of the people sits on the back burner while the people we elected to serve us bicker and argue like children and nothing gets done.

The bottom line is this. If you sat down and talked with the average person on the street, more than likely you would find that you both agree on more issues than you disagree on. You would find that we all have much more in common with each other than we have at odds. Sure, everyone has different values and priorities and we all feel that there are different paths to take in order to move our country forward and make our lives better, but we all want to move forward and enjoy a better life. The relatively minor disagreements about how best to move forward and better ourselves as a society can easily be resolved when we all share that same, positive overall goal. However, the "business" of politics prospers from conflict, not cooperation. There is far more to be gained by keeping the voting public at odds with each other than there is by helping us realize we all really want the same things in life and perhaps these jokers we put in office are the biggest barriers between us and our American dreams.

I know that I have engaged in some very biased political rhetoric. I don't apologize for that, nor will I retract my statements or change my beliefs. My politics are flexible, my principles are not. What that means is, I'm willing to agree with anyone who has a good idea that would move our country forward and I'm definitely willing to disagree with anyone who's ideas would only push us backwards, regardless of what party those ideas come from.

What I am saying, though, is that conversations that don't advance the discourse and move us in a positive and constructive direction might have value when it comes to creating drama and electrifying the partisan bases, but they have no value when it comes to progressing our society. Therefore, while I have no intention of compromising my core principles or softening my rhetoric when I feel some tough criticism is warranted, I intend to focus on finding solutions instead of just creating drama for drama's sake. I still welcome any and all criticism from people who think I am an idiot who needs to be set straight, but I would encourage anyone who disagrees with me to offer solutions instead of just piling on more problems. Yes, this is the internet and trolls, flamers and keyboard warriors abound, but there are also intelligent adults with real ideas too. If we're ever going to expect our leaders to get their shit together, then we must expect no less from ourselves.

What kind of scumbag uses military victories for political gain?

2012-05-02T15:21:00.002-07:00

Seriously, what kind of asshole capitalizes on killing a hated American enemy just to advance their own political career and improve their approval ratings?

Until the Light Takes Us is a really great documentary.

2012-05-01T13:11:00.003-07:00

You should check it out.

George.

2012-04-27T15:25:00.001-07:00

Supply, Demand and the Illusion of Choice.

2012-04-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

George Carlin had some amazing rants about the illusion of choice under which we live in this country. He used to say that we don't have freedom in America, we have the illusion of freedom and we don't have choices in America, we have the illusion of choice. His quote was "You know what our choices are in this country? Regular or decaf. We don't have real choices."

This quote and Carlin's rant pops into my head whenever I hear someone talk about supply and demand in our current economy.

Anyone who's taken a high school economics class understands the basic concept of supply and demand. It's brilliantly simple, for every good or service on the planet there is a finite supply and a potentially infinite demand. Because there is only so much of a good that can be produced or only so many people able to provide a particular service, the greater the demand is, the lower the available supply becomes. This results in an increased price. On the other hand, if demand for a good or service is low, then the supply will be higher than the demand and the price will fall. The supply/demand curve is illustrated simply in this diagram:

Supply and demand primarily affects price, but it also affects production. If demand for a product is high, then manufacturers increase production to keep up with demand. Conversely, if demand for a product is low, manufacturers will decrease production. The equilibrium point for production in the supply and demand curve is the point where the two intersect - as is indicated by the dotted lines in the above diagram. This is the point where there is the most demand for the product at the highest possible price that will result in the greatest overall profit. This is the sweet spot that all producers seek - if the price is lower, demand will increase, but profits will decline. If the price is higher, demand will decrease and profits will also decline. At the equilibrium point, your profit will always be the highest possible, or so is the case in a pure competition based market.

The strength of the basic supply/demand model is that the consumer drives all the essential aspects of the market. They keep prices reasonable, they keep quality high and they keep supplies adequate to meet demand. In a pure competition market, poorly made products would have a low demand and the producers of that product would either have to lower prices to increase demand or increase the quality of that product.

It's this simple concept of a consumer-driven quality control mechanism that has deceived people into believing that the current market we are living with today has anything at all in common with the autonomous controls in a free, pure competition market that we learned about in school.

See, we have been taught that, in a capitalist, competition-driven market, the consumer will always have the most choices, the highest quality and the best prices. The flaw in this system occurs when there is not enough competition in the market, for one reason or another, to create a true competitive choice.

In our current economy, basically every major industry is dominated by a handful of mega-corporations. 90% of the banking, oil, energy, food production, healthcare, automotive, transportation and communication industries are controlled by 5 or 6 corporations. Many of these corporations are so large and diversified that they own interests at multiple points down their supply chain and in many different industries.

This changes the supply/demand model drastically.

When 90% of the food you buy in your local grocery store is produced by one of 5 companies, your choices are limited and prices tend to be less flexible to demand. It doesn't matter if the people want a significantly higher average quality or lower price, because the power of choice becomes less and less of a factor the fewer actual choices you have.

In basic economics, we learned that this state of the market is found in a monopolistic economy and, from a political standpoint, these types of economies typically exist in socialist, totalitarian or communist regimes. In a monopolistic economy, one company controls all the production in a particular industry. Due to having a 100% control of the market, this company will set prices and supply at their whim and their equilibrium point would exist much higher than in a pure competition market, since when you only have 1 choice, you pay whatever price that item is selling for or you don't buy it. Of course, the long-term effect of a monopoly is that quality will steadily decline and so will demand, which will result in decreasing revenues until the company can no longer continue to operate, or so we're told.

In America, we have a system currently that is very close to a monopoly. Instead of 1 company controlling an industry, we have about half a dozen. This gives the illusion of choice, because people see more than one business in an industry and assume those companies will be competing against each other to give customers the highest possible quality at the lowest possible price. We've been taught about anti-collusion laws and other regulations that protect consumers from price fixing by suppliers. We learned about anti-trust laws and the efforts of the government to break up monopolistic trusts such as Standard Oil, Bell Telephone and recently Microsoft.

However, in the last 3 decades, there has been an ongoing and consistent effort on the part of these large corporations to influence lawmakers to loosen and lift regulations. The argument is that the less restrictions you impose on the market, the stronger and more healthy it will be. If government steps out of the way and lets the market do whatever it wants, then it will always do what's best for the consumer.

This is simply not true, and history has proven it.

Using the food industry again as an example, when government stepped out of the way and allowed mergers that would have been blocked 30-40 years ago, we went from having several dozen different competing companies in the food industry to about 6. This has resulted in less brand choice and price increases that outpace inflation. Additionally, because there are fewer companies controlling a significantly larger share of the industry, these companies are vastly wealthier, more powerful and more influential. Food producers are able to spend billions of dollars lobbying our elected officials to loosen or eliminate regulations affecting the quality and safety of their products in order to maximize their profits. Consumers are not able to use the basic power of the supply/demand model because our choices have been concentrated and homogenized so that we really have no choice at all.

Take the recent "pink slime" issue. There was a strong public reaction when people began to learn about ammonia-treated ground meat being added to things like hamburger patties. This "pink slime" is meant to kill e-coli bacteria and act as a filler in beef products. The rise of e-coli presence in the meat industry is, itself, a product of the efforts of the beef industry to loosen regulations on sanitary conditions as well as the diet of beef cattle. The overwhelming reaction of the general public to pink slime was negative - people didn't want pink slime in their hamburger meat. However, pink slime is still being used, nothing has significantly changed. But, how could this be? According to supply and demand, the public dislike for pink slime should result in meat producers discontinuing its use entirely. Additionally, increased public demand for pink slime-free meat should lead to the rise of new meat production companies that would offer slime-free meat and rake in huge profits by appealing to this growing public demand. This obviously isn't the case.

So, why not? Well, for one thing, 90% of the beef industry is controlled by about 5 major companies - all of whom use pink slime. These companies make huge profits because they are able to keep production costs low by using pink slime. To discontinue using pink slime would increase their production costs and lower their profits, so they continue using it. So, why can't we the consumers simply stop buying meat from these producers and buy it from companies that don't use pink slime instead? Well, because the handful of companies that control the meat industry have erected huge, prohibitive barriers to entry that make it almost impossible for a small, independent producer to effectively compete with the big industry leaders.

Put another way, McDonalds, Burger King, Jack in the Box and every other major fast food company uses beef that contains pink slime. They use it because it's the cheapest beef available and thus will result in the highest profit potential. Further, these businesses have contracts to buy their beef from one of the handful of beef producers that dominate the industry and are offered a price per unit that is so low that it's only profitable when production numbers are incredibly high. There is no way an independent beef processing company could make enough pre-processed beef patties to compete with the scope of a company like Cargill or Tyson, they don't have the resources and never will because they're stuck in a catch-22 situation. They can't grow large enough to compete with the major corporations because they can't produce as much beef as they can and sell it for as low of a price. They can't produce this beef for this price because they aren't large enough to accommodate that level of production. Basically, you can't get big enough to compete unless you sell at their level, but you can't sell at their level unless you're big enough to compete. This reality of the industry is why you will regularly see small, independent food companies that emerge on the scene, gain some national sales success and then are promptly bought out and absorbed by one of these industry-leaders, where they fall in line with their parent corporation's objectives.

40 years ago, this would have been considered monopolistic trust creation and these large food production companies would have been broken up into smaller, more competitive entities. Today, these same companies are allowed to simply absorb their upstart competitors, which not only allows them to continue to grow larger and more powerful, but also ensures that any real competition for our consumer dollars is eliminated and we continue to live with the illusion of choice.

So, you can either buy your pink slime burger from this brand or you can buy it from that one, but you're buying a pink slime burger.

Supply and demand work only in a market where there is real competition and a vast and diverse pool of producers willing to accommodate a vast and diverse pool of consumers. When you have 5 or 6 companies offering 5 or 6 different versions of essentially the same product at essentially the same price, there is no real competition, there is no real choice and instead of consumer demand driving production, production drives consumer demand.

Gas prices are another example of the illusion of choice vs. the reality of a production-driven demand curve.

You notice how gas prices all rise at about the same rate, regardless of the company? Yet, the oil that these gas companies use to make their fuel comes from a variety of different sources. Yes, this oil is all sold on a global market, so the individual price fluctuations from one producer to the next basically evens out into a roughly flat sell price. However, surely a company that was looking to expand its market share would find a lower price/quality equilibrium point that would allow them to still make a profit while undercutting their competition significantly enough to win enough public demand to best their competitors. Yet, this never happens. You never see an oil company holding a 50% off sale, you don't see a significant difference in fuel quality from one brand to the next. Instead, what we get is different fancy terms from different companies for additives in their respective fuels that supposedly will result in increased mileage and better performance. However, EPA fuel economy figures don't fluctuate to reflect the different performance numbers from the different gasoline brands and this is because there is no significant difference. Filling your car up with 87 octane fuel from Shell will result in the same basic milage and performance as filling up with 87 octane from Texaco or Valero. 30 miles per gallon is 30 miles per gallon, regardless of where those gallons come from. Thus, all the fancy "techrons" and "techrolines" that these companies use to give you the illusion that buying your gas from them will be the best choice for your dollar is just that, an illusion of choice. In spite of all these different proprietary additives that are alleged to improve performance, gas prices are identical within a few cents from one company to the next. In fact, it's not brand competition that drives fuel costs, it's location - gas prices in the more affluent parts of town are higher than in the poorer areas. There aren't more people driving more cars more often in the poorer neighborhoods, they just have less money to spend on fuel, so, in order to make sure that these consumers don't do something crazy like start riding a bike or taking the bus to work, gas companies will lower prices by about 10 cents or so in order to, once again, give an illusion of consumer control.

Why do prices always skyrocket during the busiest travel days? Because they can. What are you going to do, fill your car up with orange juice? Oil companies have known that Memorial Day is the busiest travel weekend of the year for decades. If they were bound by a supply/demand market, there would be a competition to offer the lowest prices possible on that weekend in order to earn the largest share of that substantial demand spike. However, the opposite is the case, each company hikes up gas prices so they can maximize profits. Consumer demand is irrelevant because every gas company is doing it. You can't get pissed off at Shell for raising their prices 15 cents right before the weekend and go to Texaco because they raised their prices by 16 cents. You can't go to Valero because they raised their prices 14 cents. The difference in price is negligible and never favors the consumer at any point. This is the pricing behavior we were always taught existed in a monopoly only, unlike the monopoly model, these companies are enjoying record-breaking profits. Why? Because, unlike in a monopoly where consumers realize they have no choice and just decide to do without, consumers in a collusion market live under the illusion that there is a difference between Shell gas and Chevron gas. They see a 5 cent price difference and think that's a product of competition driving prices down, rather than the result of market research to determine how much of a bone the consumer needs thrown to them in order to keep accepting the status quo.

This is the result of our current, conglomerate-driven economy. Producers choose the options that you will be given and you get to decide which option you like best - or dislike the least, as is more commonly the case.

This same mentality has polluted our politics, thanks to the two-party system. The general unpopularity of Mitt Romney among conservatives is a product of him not being the best-liked option, but rather the least-disliked one. Romney isn't the candidate that most conservatives wanted, but he was the least objectionable choice from the limited field they were given to choose from. Any more, our elections aren't about the best man winning, they're about accepting the candidate viewed as the lesser of two evils. People are no longer electing leaders based on who they think will do the most good for America, we're picking them based on who we think will do the least harm.

You can go to McDonalds for your pink slime burger or Burger King, but either way, you're gonna eat that slime.

Obama is Destroying America!

2012-04-25T15:15:00.001-07:00

"Ahh, my diabolical plan to get elected president of the United States and then systematically dismantle the entire country from the inside is almost complete! I just need 4 more years and America will be a smoking pile of rubble! HAHAHAHA!!!!"

Yes, Obama is destroying America. I was in denial of it for the last 3 1/2 years, but I think I am finally seeing the light that my Conservative friends have been forcing upon me through countless emails, copy/pasted Facebook statuses and mis-attributed, out of context quotes. The evidence is mounting and I think it's undeniable at this point that president Obama has a clear plan to destroy America as we know it and turn it into a Marxist, socialist dystopia.

1. "Obama is imposing a socialist, wealth redistribution system and raising my taxes!"

This chart clearly shows Obama's plan to raise taxes! Ok, well, technically, this chart shows how both Obama and the Republicans have budgets that lower taxes for all Americans, but Obama's plan only lowers taxes for the richest 1% by just over $6,000 per year, while the Republican plan gives the 1% over $100,000 in tax cuts! Also, never mind the fact that the Republican tax plan doesn't give as big of a tax cut to the middle class as Obama's does, because that's just pandering for re-election votes, everyone knows that. We just need to focus on the fact that Obama is STEALING over $90,000 from Americans making over $1 million per year by not giving them the same tax cuts that the Republicans want to give them. Yes, both Obama and the Republicans want to lower taxes, but Obama is still a socialist because... well... I mean it's obvious, isn't it? I mean, all you have to do is look at this chart and it should be abundantly clear which party wants to redistribute wealth to a privileged minority!

To further illustrate my point, here's a chart showing how Obama's tax plan compares to other frightening and dangerous socialist presidents in our nation's history. While Obama obviously isn't on the level of crazy, anti-American socialism demonstrated by past Marxist presidents like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon or Dwight Eisenhower, he is a small sliver above GW Bush, which puts him firmly into Soviet Russia territory.

2. "Obama is intentionally creating policies to deliberately raise the price of gas!"

I spoke about the insidious plan of the Obama administration to intentionally raise the price of gas in this previous blog post. With the help of the completely unbiased, spin-free journalist Bill O'Reilly, I showed how both Bush and Obama had complete control over gas prices and intentionally manipulated them to suit their own dastardly, anti-oil agendas. Also, as this chart clearly shows, Obama is proudly continuing Bush's anti-oil policy by keeping oil production down at the low point it was at the end of Bush's second term of office.

A quadrupling in oil rig operation is a clever way to hide the fact that you're actually reducing the amount of oil production! I mean, never mind what "charts" and "facts" say, gas prices wouldn't be the same rate that they were back in 2007 if Obama wasn't continuing the Bush policies of hostility towards oil companies and a socialist agenda to use gas prices to force Americans into buying hybrids and electric cars! Well, it didn't work under that commie Bush and it won't work under Herr Obama either!

3. "Obama is hostile towards investors and he wants to punish success!"

According to this chart, if you invested $10,000 only under the leadership of Republican presidents for 40ish years, you would have about $11,700, $51,000 if you count the Hoover administration. However, if you invested that same $10,000 under 40 years of Democratic presidents, you'd have just over $300,000! Now, before you say "wait, isn't having a $290,000 profit a lot better than having a $1,700 profit?" THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK! You see, everyone knows that Obama hates the 1%. Everything Obama and his administration want to do is in the interest of punishing the 1% for their success, so what could be more evil and hostile towards the average American than creating an economic environment that allows you to more easily become a part of that hated 1% bracket!? It's so diabolical it's frightening! Obama wants you to make a lot of money so he can punish you for it afterwards! Remember when you were a kid and your dad caught you smoking so he stuck you in a closet with a pack of cigarettes and wouldn't let you out until you finished the whole pack and it made you never want to touch a cigarette again? Well, Obama wants to do that to you with money! He wants you to have so much money that you hate it and want to be poor forever, at which point he will gladly step in and take all of your extra money and give it to his cronies in the solar energy industry!

See, Bush tried to stop the Democratic plan to make the average American sick of money by helping them make tons of it, but ever since Obama took office, he's been hell-bent on continuing that Clinton-era agenda. If we don't do something soon, there's no telling how much the market will grow and how much wealth will be forced back into the American economy. I don't know about you, but any America where investors see astronomical returns on their investments isn't one that I even recognize anymore. Our founding fathers would roll over in their graves if they saw this kind of behavior. Nothing is more hostile towards investment and business growth than a president who wants to push the Dow back into record highs just to lull everyone into a false sense of economic security and then make them sick of wealth by drowning them in it.

4. "Obama is on a reckless and destructive path of massive debt accumulation that will bankrupt America and turn us into China!"

This chart should make that abundantly clear. As you can see, while Bush increased government spending by 88% in 8 years, Obama has added another 7.2% on top of that! Can you believe that!? A 7.2% increase in government spending! On top of the 88% Bush already inflated government by, that's like 95%! Did you know that if you add up all the government spending by all the presidents before Obama and then add Obama's government spending on top of it, that you would have a number that was higher than all the past presidents combined, not counting Obama!? Seriously, if that doesn't keep you up at night then you obviously don't care about America.

Here's another example to prove my point. As you can see, Obama's massive government bloat is only surpassed by GW Bush. Granted, Bush contributed nearly 50% of our current $14.3 trillion debt, but Obama is president now. Liberals have been using the excuse of "Hey, Bush made the mess, we've just been trying to clean up 8 years of disastrous policies in only 4!" But they need to save that crap for Rachel Maddow. Smart Americans like us know that it takes way less time to clean up a huge mess than it does to make it. We also know that living in the past is for dinosaurs, the only way that we're going to restore America to the golden age of the 1950's is to stop living in the past!

Here's the final nail in Obama's socialist coffin, or "Lenin's tomb" if you will. As you can see, Obama's decision to make Bush take the country to war in Iraq and Afghanistan back when he was just a junior senator, his policy of having former president Bush drastically lower taxes and push the policies that led us to recession, combined with his post-election agenda of bailing us out of the recession that he created back before he began his presidential election campaign are the reason we have the massive debt we're saddled with today. While Obama was able to do the majority of his damage to the deficit through his puppet, GW Bush, he still was able to add about 15% to Bush's 43% contribution, which makes for a 58% debt increase due to Obama's socialist, debt-growing, 12-year plan.

No matter how many different ways you break it down, the facts don't lie. Everything that happened while Bush was in office is Obama's fault and everything that happened since Obama took office is Obama's fault, therefore all of this debt is Obama's fault since he could have easily paid that debt off completely in the last 3 years without raising taxes or completely dismantling the federal government and gutting military spending, he just doesn't want to.

5. "Obama's policies are putting more and more Americans out of work every day!"

We know that in the last 2 years, the job loss rate has actually become a job gain rate and net job creation under Obama now is almost identical to where it was at the start of the Bush presidency during the peak of the bubble market. We also know that Obama has completely reversed 8 years of consistent job losses under Bush in 2 years and is now growing jobs at a rate that continues to rise every month. However, behind these seemingly positive numbers lies the true indicator!

BOOM! Public sector job growth is DOWN! While private sector job creation is soaring, the number of government jobs being created has declined under Obama. This goes right along with the socialist agenda of our Marxist president. Everyone knows that socialists operate by making government smaller and private industry larger and more independently prosperous. It's this principle that almost destroyed the Russian economy and has China on the brink of bankruptcy today. Obama's socialist plan to reduce the size and scope of government and encourage more private sector job creation is a one-way ticket to bread lines and a shameful appeasement to the public-employee unions that helped him get elected.

Unemployment claims are down and continuing to decline under Obama and have almost returned to the level they were in 2007. This might look like a positive thing for the mindless Liberals who want us to think Obama has actually been a good president, but we know that unemployment is only going down because people are just tired of looking for a job and the rest of them have started living on welfare or selling drugs instead. Your positive, left-wing numbers aren't going to fool me any longer, Libtards!

6. "And don't even get me started on ObamaCare!"

These numbers show the dismal failure that is ObamaCare. Even though costs under the Affordable Care Act - the term Liberals have given to ObamaCare to try and distance this total legislative failure from it's chief architect - are about 15% lower than they would be without it, that can't distract us from the fact that ObamaCare has made healthcare more expensive! Private healthcare companies have been steadily raising their premiums ever since ObamaCare was first introduced. While these price increases have only gone to create record profits for these companies and their shareholders, rather than as a reaction to any actual new costs of compliance with ObamaCare, we all know that it's only a matter of time before ObamaCare starts actually costing these companies more money and then, in order to maintain the same record profits they're enjoying now, they will have to further increase premiums!

Here is another indicator of how damaging ObamaCare is to America. The coverage gap for prescription medication has made it harder for the sick and the elderly to have affordable access to medication that they need to survive or treat their various medical ailments. Under ObamaCare, that gap has been significantly decreased and is projected to only get smaller and smaller until all Americans can easily afford their necessary medications. Why is this a bad thing? Well, it should be obvious. If more Americans can afford their prescription medication costs, then more Americans will take their prescription medication as prescribed. The result? A nation of drug addicts, courtesy of ObamaCare! "I'll do anything for a refill of my heart medication, Mr. Obama! You want me to suck your... Oh, just vote Democrat? Sure, I can do that, just give me another hit of that sweet, sweet Lipitor!" Terrifying!

Look, you can either keep living with your head in the sand and ignoring all of the horrible and destructive policies that this administration is putting in place to weaken and eventually completely dismantle the America we all know and love or you can wake up and open your eyes to the growing socialist menace that's looming on the horizon. This proud country cannot withstand another 4 years of positive job growth, lowering medical costs, increased investment and wealth generation and a tax rate that doesn't punish the middle class to benefit the wealthiest 1%. We cannot take 4 more years of energy policies that reduce our dependence on foreign oil and promote alternative energy research. If you want solar energy, move to China, I hear they have one of the best solar energy industries in the world. Clean, renewable energy is all fun and games until you are ordered to only give birth to one child!