Tag Archives: Obama

President Obama Believes That Compulsory Voting Will Counteract the Role of Money in Politics

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Quite often, when discussing politics and the long-running issue of how the majority of Americans don’t ever vote, the suggestion of compulsory voting is brought up as a solution. The argument is simplistic, indicating that because money is such an influence on politics that if more people participated, it would somehow negate the effect of the money people on elections. There are a couple of false causality loops playing into this theory, in that an argument is made that (correctly) points out that younger people tend not to vote, younger people’s issues are generally not entertained by politicians who follow messages put out by money (generally older and richer voters) (correct), and that if we enable more of those younger citizens to vote, we’ll see change (which I will sadly state is a falsehood, no matter how much I wish it were otherwise).

You see, part of the problem with elections in the U.S. is that our field of choices for who to elect is extremely limited, and ironically enough, limited to those who have money to get their message out there. If you’re not a representative of either of the two national parties (Democrat or Republican), you’re most often a marginalized candidate that is seen more as an outlier, or, worse, as a joke candidate. An example is Jimmy McMillan of New York City, who was the leader of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party. As you may suspect, his party had one issue, specifically rent being too damn high, and pretty much a list of other thoughts that no one paid any attention to. He was completely marginalized, and even though he might have had a real message that people should have listened to, he was considered a joke candidate, and his party as well.

If you consider that type of party to be a joke and think that more realistic third parties are better, just remember the examples of both the Reform Party (led by Ross Perot) or the Green Party (led at one time by Ralph Nader). Both candidates (and their parties) were considered disruptive to the mainstream parties, and thus, both men have been completely ostracized by their original parties ever since, unless they endorse the majority candidate of that party, and then they’re ignored again.

So, the point is that if you’re not voting for one of the two main parties, then you’re basically wasting your energy because very little gets accomplished outside of that sphere.

But those who are part of those parties will tell you that you should contribute because somehow those two parties will somehow represent you. But do they?

When I look at these dynamics, I usually ask myself a couple of questions of the candidates and their parties. Being in serious financial debt because of student loans, I ask myself which candidate will do something about that problem. Most often, the Republican will state that students put themselves in that probem, so why should they do anything to help? So, their response to that issue, to health care, to keeping food safe, well, they generally don’t care and will throw out some feel good statement like “the market will fix itself”, “a rising tide lifts all boats” or my favorite one: “Those who need help just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps and do better.” Yeah, those are all positive responses to real situations (yes, that’s sarcasm). So what issues DO they actually deal with I might care about? Taking care of veterans? Used to be a huge one for the Republican Party. Turns out they’re really only interested in “helping” veterans while they’re still fighting wars, and quite often not even then, as we discovered when Republicans ran companies that ripped off the Army for food supplies during the Gulf War (which was never actually accounted for), created companies that profited heavily from war administration costs, like security and logistics, and when questioned, used political leverage to stop those questions from being further asked. Unfortunately, these days Republicans seem to be mostly interested in financial things that benefit very wealthy people, so after all the flag waving, I tend to avoid a lot of their rhetoric that doesn’t actually seem to be all that productive.

Which leaves me with the Democrats that historically have been on the side of the people rather than the rich. Well, somewhere around the 1960s, it was figured that this dynamic wasn’t going to remain because those Democrats started seeing government office as a place to make money rather than a place to do good government work and redistribute the money back to the people. The Republicans, usually happy in state governments (which kept them close to home where their big businesses were) started to see that money, too, and began funding PACs that fed a machine that brought more and more Republicans into national politics. Now, we have a Congress that is completely controlled by the rich class (the Republicans) and a good deal of the other side now pretty damn rich as well. What it means is that as both parties try to compromise with each other (which they’re not very good at doing these days), they side with anything that helps big business and rich people get richer. Let’s face it. The poor aren’t being sent to Washington, and when they are, they don’t stay poor for very long as they take advantage of all sorts of avenues for fueling wealth (even stealing if the opportunity arises).

But are Democrats out to solve the few problems I mentioned earlier? Like student loans? Nope. When it came time for them to do something about this, they sided with the credit card companies and the banks, just like the Republicans did. As for students, they basically threw them under the bus. Health care? Well, the Democrats were all for Obamacare, before they were against it, I suppose, but they haven’t done anything to actually fix it, letting it just run pretty broken, patting themselves on the back for passing it without first reading it and kind of hoping that it results in good things. An example: Passing the Affordable Care Act meant more people got insurance, but no attempts were made to get those insurance companies to be a lot more useful to those now under that insurance. Like me. I am under the same insurance now that I was under last year, but for some reason my insurance company has decided that it no longer pays for a drug I need to survive. With it, my condition improved. Without it, my health is completely falling apart again. Appealing is like shouting into the wind and hoping for results. Those are the kinds of things that no one is dealing with, so yeah we’re getting health care, but not actual care about our health. And most people won’t say anything because they’re thinking they got health care, but once they need to use it, they’ll find out they don’t really have it, and probably die before anyone can determine there was a problem.

Oh well.

So this brings me back to voting. How does voting for literally the same candidates that were decided for you before you ever had a chance to input your thoughts somehow equate to more democracy? Answer: It doesn’t. Right now, the Democrats are fielding Hillary Clinton for president. I never voted for her. I never supported her. She was a secretary of state because she was previously a senator. She was a senator for a state she didn’t even live in because her husband was previously president. Before that, she was someone’s wife. Good for her, but that’s not vetting a candidate. It’s choosing the most convenient name on the docket because we’re too lazy to actually find viable candidates who stand for something.

Is she for fixing student loans? No idea. She will probably never bring them up, unless there’s a path to victory for doing so. Does she support veterans? No clue. That’s the kind of candidates we get, and Obama is now telling us we need to participate more and vote for these kinds of people to somehow become more democratic. Sorry, but I just don’t see it.

And don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike Hillary Clinton. I just don’t know anything about her and hate that the only time I’ll find out is when she’s already deadlocked into the nomination.

In the words of the renowned philosopher Forrest Gump: “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Solving the School “Costs” Problem

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star-wars-darth-vader-senseRecently, President Obama push forward the idea of making community colleges “free” to students. This, supposedly, will give downtrodden students an opportunity to get an education and improve their lot in life.

A nice thought. A nice idea. But again, it does too little and in the wrong place.

First off, I think it’s great that our president is talking about cutting the costs of education and in a roundabout way, talking about cutting down on student loans. But this is another one of those attempts to create savings in an area that is actually not the problem. Community colleges are generally pretty cheap, and if you’re living a normal life, there’s no way that you really can’t pay your way through a community college program. Where the real problem exists is in higher level institutions and in the student loan fiasco that exists in that realm. But as I’m sure you realize, no one is doing anything about the fact that so many people who have student loans are basically screwed for the rest of their lives.

And that’s really the problem they need to address and never will. Instead, what seems to happen is you mention the student debt problems, and you get a sort of Mitt Romney response of “you shouldn’t have taken out the debt if you weren’t planning to pay it back.” Yeah, that’s true, but people took out so much debt to pay for college based on this fantasy that jobs would be prevalent after graduation. And that hasn’t been the case.

So, what should government do?

Well, for one, forgive student loan debt AND then work on making colleges affordable so that people don’t need to take out so much debt. But we’re not doing either one of these. Focusing on community colleges for savings in tuition is like going to a random soda machine and making everything half priced in one place at one time where few people are going to even know it’s happening. If you wanted to make a difference, you go to the original distributor, put all the sodas on an inexpensive rate and then notice as everyone pays less money for soda. Discounting a discounted tuition (which is what community colleges basically are) doesn’t solve anything as no new people are going to be able to pursue education because they’ve already scraped the bottom of the barrel by making those school affordable to anyone who actually has time. If someone can’t afford a community college now, their problems are probably much worse off, meaning they’re focusing on whether or not they should pay the heat bill or the electricity rather than whether or not college is affordable.

What caused the problems of today was that bankers decided that college debt should not be forgiveable, and they made Congress back that up with law. Meanwhile, they allowed themselves to declare bankruptcy if they make stupid financial decisions and had Congress back that up as well. In other words, if you make a stupid mistake like try to get an education, you will never be forgiven for that mistake. If you take billions of dollars of money that you don’t actually own and invest it in blow and hookers, you can declare bankruptcy and five years later you can do it all again. As long as that mindset is part of our dynamic, we’re NEVER going to solve the problems inherent in our system. Mainly because the people who can solve it are benefiting from the problem in the first place. In the end, it all gets paid for by the people who can’t afford to get a good job because their educational goals have stifled any future economic advancement.

So, when I hear a president say he’s REALLY going to solve the student college problem, I need to hear a lot more than “we’re going to trim a few leaves off a tree in hopes of growing a forest.”

And this is coming from someone who actually likes our president. That doesn’t mean he gets a free pass every time he does something like this.

So what does the sequester mean for the rest of us?

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Sometiimes you have to back up your words
Sometiimes you have to back up your words

I keep reading, hearing and watching doom and gloom stories about how the apocalypse is now upon us because of the sequester. A few weeks out, it was warnings of all government services suddenly stopping on Saturday morning. When that didn’t make much of a dent in everyone’s day, we started hearing about how the Defense Department would have to stop giving out guns and issue recycled plastic sporks to soldiers instead, the homeless would be fed turf grass, and our income tax returns wouldn’t be returned to us until the Year 2375.

Then Friday happened, the two parties couldn’t come to an agreement, and then the apocalypse came upon us. The news stories around then seemed to all have the same point: “The other guys are being really mean to the good guys, and now the world is at an end.”

Now, I understand the whole desire to blame the other guys; we’ve been doing that sort of thing as long as we were old enough to point fingers at other people. One thing we never really learned was how to stop pointing fingers and just get things done. This would be easy if we didn’t have a government that’s so two-sided that they are completely incapable of coming up with compromise. The funny thing is: In Morris Fiorina’s must read book (if you were doing a Ph.d in political science it was, in fact, a must read book), Divided Government, having a government where one side wasn’t in charge (which is what we have now) is the greatest thing ever because that means both sides compromise and work out solutions that benefit the most people. Unfortunately, it hasn’t looked that way for about a decade now, and I don’t perceive it going back to the way things were before. Hell, even Fiorina turned around last election and heralded Ron Paul as a solution to our problems, basically throwing his lot in with someone who had zero chance of winning whatsoever. If our main political scientists have given up on both sides, it can’t mean good things for the Republic.

But right now, we’re in sequester land, which means Monday morning a lot of sober people are going to have to look at the government they’re leading and realize it is going nowhere very fast. Does that mean we’ll start to see compromise, or will it be more of this zero sum crap we keep seeing all of the time where one side has to lose so the other side can win? Instead of governance, we get kids in the playground laughing at the handicapped kids because they haven’t been taught that’s inappropriate.

There are some real issues that need to be worked out, but probably never will because the people who have to work them out are rich, out of touch with the population and more interested in being reelected than they are in making things better. What they don’t realize is that there aren’t two sides to this problem; there are three: The Republicans, the Democrats and then everyone else who has to actually fund these two sides in their esteemed places in government. That third party (the people themselves) often is seen as only signficant when it comes to elections. Otherwise, they’re mostly ignored and spit on the rest of the time.

It should be interesting to see where things go from here.

Presidential requirements (my new proposal)

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Recently, Mitt Romney announced he felt a requirement for anyone running for president is that they should have to serve in business for three years before running for the office. Regardless of the self-serving nature of this, I’ve been thinking about this a lot since hearing that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and after awhile I realized what would truly make a solid difference. We’ve been going about this all wrong. On one side, we have people saying we need businessmen to be president, because businesses create jobs (not always a given as most businesses in this country are one man operations), and other sides saying we should have prior government service to lead to higher leadership positions (which I’ve always found to be self-serving more than anything else).

 What I propose is a conclusion of my analysis of what fields actually provide true jobs. The largest employer in the United States is known to be Wal-Mart, and who is the first person a job seeker sees when they go into a Wal-Mart? The CEO? Nope. They never see the CEO, so they aren’t really getting a job from that guy. No, they see the greeter at the door, because ALWAYS they ask that old guy where they can find the employment office. And believe it or not, the second largest consistent employer happens to be the adult film business, in that all of its female employees are guaranteed to make MANY movies over their illustrious careers.

 So, what I propose is that all future presidents (and maybe even all politicians) should have to either be a Wal-Mart greeter for 3 years or a producer of porn movies. These are truly the job creators of America, and if we want America to be strong, these are the people who need to be in power.

Talking About Student Loans Is Pandering; Doing Something About Student Loans Is Progress

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The latest appeal to the votes of young people involves the student loan crisis. President Obama has started to “talk” about student loans to show that he’s paying attention to young people issues. Mitt Romney is talking about student loans to show that he’s not overlooking the issue either. Students (or former students with debt) are thinking, hey, they’re finally paying attention to an issue that’s near and dear to me.

Fact: They’re not. In fact, what both the president and his opponent are doing is called pandering. Pandering is when someone talks about an issue that is important to people, but in reality, they’re not actually going to do anything substantial about it. They might, if forced into a corner, make some minor stride, but when pandering, the point is to show that you care without actually really caring.

Obama mentioned yesterday that he just recently paid off his student loans. So young people should understand that he “feels” your pain. No, he doesn’t. He’s a one percenter who is filthy rich and will never have to worry about paying off a loan again in his lifetime. He mentioned he paid off his loans 8 years ago. 8 years ago, he was in the Senate, which meant he was in a position that allowed him almost unlimited access to the abilty to paying off his debt. THAT is how he paid off his student loans. Not through some great government assistance that came to his rescue. Unless you consider that government assistance to be a position in the Senate.

And Romney talking about student loans is just a filthy rich billionaire who doesn’t give a flying crap about people in debt. He made his money off of other people, and when people do that, they don’t care about the struggles of others, especially when your company that made you rich makes a mint off of people who are struggling anyway.

What’s of more concern here is the fact that so many of us are overwhelmed with student loan debt that we may never be able to pay off in our lifetimes. Generally, the response of the rest of society (usually from people who are well off and have never had to really suffer under any real debt) is that it’s all our own fault for going into debt, that we’re a bunch of lazy young people who need to go get a job, or some other innane banter that unravels once you actually start thinking about it.

Neither President Obama nor Citizen Romney have any intentions of doing anything to upset the apple cart of student loan debt that so many banks are profiting off these days. Government looks after the wealthy and the banks, not students or common citizens. Instead, government panders to the common people, throws them table scraps and then pretends they really care.

Expect more of this kind of drivel leading up to the Election of 2012. Neither Congress nor the President is going to enact anything that really helps students. Keeping a loan rate at a lower interest rate ISN’T assisting anyone in any great way as the debt still exists, the balance continues to increase, and nothing actually got any better. It’s just more of the same, kind of like “keeping Bush’s tax cuts” is somehow supposed to “create jobs” by doing exactly what we’ve been doing before when somehow that wasn’t leading to the creation of jobs in the past, but is somehow going to lead to a surplus of jobs that logical economics can’t seem to figure out how to make happen.

What would solve the student loan problem? Mass forgiveness of debt, kind of like people have been advocating for forclosures, which are forgiven through bankruptcy. The problem with student loan debt is that bankruptcy does NOTHING to assist someone. If you fall under, you fall under for life, and you’ll never get back out under it because the lobbyist groups that put our government people in power were on the side of banks that wanted to screw over students with student loan debt. Think about this for a moment. You can gamble away every cent you might ever borrow from a bank and be forgiven, but if one dime of that was in student loan debt, you’re screwed. As long as that one issue remains, no politician is ever going to help out the little guy. Why not? Because they honestly don’t care.

If they tell you they do care, they’re pandering. Remember that because no one else is going to tell you that. Instead, the media will tell us what a great job both sides are doing at “caring about” the problem by doing absolutely nothing but painting over the broken foundation.

Why the Wall Street Movement Needs Your Attention

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There’s been a lot of conjecture from the mainstream media about how the Occupy Wall Street Movement is the liberal flip side to the Tea Party Movement. Unfortunately, they couldn’t be more wrong. It’s not like the mainstream media isn’t known for completely missing the boat even after it runs over them, but perhaps we need to explore what’s really going on to understand, perhaps, what’s really going on.

Let’s go back in time a bit with Duane’s special little time machine to, say, the middle of 2007. At this time, H. Clinton was the front runner for the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama was mainly known as a superstar senator from Chicago. A few people were talking about him as a possible political challenge to Clinton, but at the time there was little more going on with him other than the introduction of his book, The Audacity of Hope (released in 2006). During this time, I was focusing on Clinton, although not a real fan of her but figuring she had to be better than the crappy presidential administrations we were getting from the Republicans. I was probably wrong, but that’s another story.

Anyway, during this time, one of my fellow grad student colleagues started reading the book, and let’s just say he was overly enamored with Obama at this time, trying to get EVERYONE he knew to read the book because he had somehow found the new messiah. It was like you couldn’t hold a conversation with him without it turning to how great of a messiah Barack Obama was. And then, out of nowhere, it was like living in the world of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where rational people had been replaced by strange, pod people who didn’t become robotic but became Kool Aid drinkers of this new messiah of politics.

For months, it was nothing but a series of encounters with people that felt a lot like I experienced when I stopped drinking alcohol and started to notice that all of the drunks in bars were extremely stupid, but they couldn’t see it themselves because they were all drunk. That’s the kind of sensation I was getting on a daily basis as I dealt with people who I had normally discussed politics with. It was like all rationalization had been thrown out through the window.

What I started to suspect was something that took several years to occur, but I began to believe that we were being sold a messiah of politics, which meant one of two things was bound to happen: He was either going to fulfill that mission and everyone would feel wonderful (kind of as if we had a brand new John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan), or a lot of previously apathetic people who bought into the whole dream were going to emerge very, very pissed off at everything involving politics.

Well, the former didn’t happen. Sure, he got the Nobel Peace Prize for showing up for work on time and not actually doing anything that caused peace, but that’s about it. People had hopes and dreams with the guy, but the faith they had in him has diminished, and like waking up after a bender with a hangover, a lot of people have started to realize that four more years of the same would not really result in better circumstances, kind of like the Einsteinian definition of insanity (“continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results”). So, we’re left with a lot of freshly enfranchised citizens who bought into the hope and change mantra hook and sinker, but didn’t get any positive results. So, where do we go from here?

If you listen to the mainstream media, they haven’t learned anything from what has happened, kind of expecting to go on autopilot like they have for the last four decades. Well, chances are pretty good that they are missing the boat yet again.

If you look at the Tea Party movement, you have a bunch of people who come from the right side of the fence, so it’s pretty obvious why they’d protest against a left sided president. Face it. No matter what he did, or does, they would never be satisfied. However, it’s pretty weak analysis if the belief is that the Occupy Wall Street movement is just the polar opposite of the Tea Party. If you think about it, you have a lot of people who didn’t care about politics before who are suddenly much more aware of current events and pissed that they didn’t get the messiah or religious experience they desired. So, of course, they’re going to be pissed.

But if the belief is that they’re pissed at Wall Street, one isn’t really paying attention to what’s going on. Wall Street serves as a great masthead for the corruption and problems going on, but if people are pissed off about the fact that “hope” didn’t result in positive “change”, the protests aren’t going to stop at Wall Street. Recently, President Obama has been trying to act like he “understands” the movement and “understands” the frustration. But if someone is part of the problem, then the chances are pretty slim that he actually understands enough to make a difference. It’s great if you’re trying to gain political capital, but if you’re trying to appease an angry population, that kind of patronizing is only going to piss them off more.

You see, the people are pissed at Wall Street, BOTH political parties, all politicians, corporations, lock-step police forces that defend everything they’re angry about (quite often with hostile approaches to everything without any desire to understand why the people around them are angry…police have never been very good at that sort of thing, and while it’s not exactly their fault, it’s not exactly their best attribute either), and a docile population that tends to side with the forces that are their own worst enemies. It was recently reported that the US has the worst CEO to worker pay disparity of any democracy (the numbers reported this year were 475 to 1, meaning for every $1 a worker makes, a CEO makes 475 dollars; that’s just absurd when you see countries like Great Britain at 35 to 1). But if no one seems to care, then obviously people are going to be pissed.

But what’s more important is where do we go from here? Do the protests start to turn to riots? Are leaders going to emerge that steer those riots/protests in any one direction? Or will they fizzle and people will go back to being sheep, like they’ve always been? One thing that probably won’t happen is that the people are never going to rally behind a passionate promise maker like Obama (or a group that makes promises in his name), which means that we’ll end up with even more apathy, which historically leads to either revolution or civil war. The only positive of those outcomes is that the population may become so apathetic that a revolution or civil war might occur and no one will show up.

That’s hope and change, I guess.

America Needs a Social Messiah

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Most people feel it but don’t really know how to put it into words. Something’s wrong with our country, everyone seems to know it, but no one really knows what to do about it. Our politicians keep claiming they have it all figured out, but they’re floundering, unsure of what to do and constantly going back on everything they say because they’re as confused as the masses. Something’s wrong, and we’re at a stage where something needs to happen to fix what’s wrong.

Having said that, I have to point out that one of two things is going to happen (aside from nothing happening and this state of morass continuing for more years before a solution finally occurs). Either someone is going to come along and rally everyone together to lead them off the end of a cliff, or someone, or some thing, is going to arrive and lead us to a better place. We’re at that stage where we need something, and unfortunately everything already in place is totally incapable of doing the trick.

This is part of why Obama became president. He came after a crappy period in US history, when we had a president and and administration that led the country down a road into near despair and depravity. He came along and promised a new sense of America that would put the country back on track, kind of like a political messiah who would lead us to the proverbial promised land. Instead, he gave us a lot of what we already had, and basically became Bush Light, leaving us in a state where we’re still waiting for someone to come along and pick up the slack he was supposed to actually use to make things better.

It’s not just a bad economy that’s causing the frustration. It’s a sense that no one knows what to do with the most powerful country on the planet. We have no rudder, steering us to some place better because we honestly don’t know where a better place might exist. Technologically, we’ve created the computer and hand held devices that make life simpler, although they tend to make things even more complicated (adding to our work day instead of cutting it down). Intellectually, we kind of have a lot of science and medicine already figured out, although we still can’t provide health care for everyone, our medicine is created by companies that make only the drugs that are profitable and lobby to make sure things don’t get better for the masses, and we pay our businessmen far more than our engineers and scientists, which means we’ll always have more people making money than making better products. Our political landscape hasn’t changed since the 1800s, as we still rely on diplomacy that requires tit for tat game theoretical models which reward last year’s actions and beg next year’s compliance (even the Roman Empire planned five years ahead, rather than this “what have you done for me lately” policy we seem to have fallen into).

In other words, we don’t seem to have a direction, or even a clue as to how to get ourselves pointed in any direction. People are so focused on the now that they could care less about the future, and anyone who things progressively is seen as foolish and foolhardy, which means we are like ten year olds planning for lifetimes of mediocrity.

This is the time when someone can come along and change things. This could be a great thing, especially if we find an enlightened thinker, but unfortunately we’re so 18th century in our thinking that we all seem to believe we need an enlightened “leader” rather than an enlightened “thinker.” Think about that for a moment. When it comes down to it, we’re going to end up going to the polls, or erecting an homage to a power base, rather than follow the enlightened ideas of someone who has the right ideas. We’re so Hobbesian in our ideals (needing a leader to lead us) that we have forgotten that the US was created in Lockeian ideals (where we control the leader), and really should have been leading to Rousseauian ideals (where the group identity has more power than the individualistic desires that we have today…where some corporate entity can dominate the masses because it has economic power that speaks louder than ideas and voices).

Part of my fear is that most of the west is filled with people who are only capable of the lowest levels of Maslowian achievements (basic needs) rather than higher level analysis (using logic to figure out ways to fulfill needs rather than immediate gratification). This means that when someone comes along and tells us what we want to hear, we’ll comply and expect great results, and when that person proves to be no better than your average Detroit politician (i.e., corrupt), we’ll back that person even when things turn into Ponzi schemes and false hopes and promises. When people are incapable of thinking logically through higher level concepts, they’re constantly doomed to being cheated and exploited by their leaders (kind of where we are today).

The ideas of Rousseau are probably interesting to point out here because the ideas he espoused were those of an enlightened society that realizes its needs are met through its communicative knowledge, but as long as we want things fulfilled within easily constructed plans, we’re always going to be doomed to Hobbesian outcomes (the leader telling us to do what to do so he can get the payoff instead of us). The solution, unfortunately, involves more and more people talking to each other about how to make things better, but as long as media is one-way communication (them to us), we’re never going to get there. Social networking is designed to be two-way, but as I look at the recent approaches of Facebook and Google+, all I see are attempts to create celebrities with bullhorns, rather than a process to open communication between both sides. Which means we’re moving further and further away from where we need to be.

At the end of a diatribe like this, I’m sure the logical question will come: “Do we need to know this for the test?” And when I say no, thinking stops and texting starts.

So I give up again.

Can Anyone Actually Beat Obama in 2012?

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There are a bunch of Republicans trying to run for office, and tons of talk about stupid subjects, like will Sarah Palin run for office, but what no one really seems to be discussing is the HUGE elephant in the room, and that’s the fact that the incumbent rarely loses, especially when no one else is massively popular in the same arena. If you would have asked me back during the second election for George W. Bush if he was going to win or lose, I would have actually thought his chances of winning were slim. But it turned out that incumbency was the overriding factor that propelled him towards a second victory.

We’re in that ballpark again right now. We have a president who was thrown into office with a massive wave of popular support, but even his most loyal critics would be willing to say he’s been quite disappointing as a president. There was a lot of hope for hope and change, but unfortunately the only thing that really changed was the person in office, and to be honest, this man has been somewhat of an after the fact speech maker who seems to think that the bully bulpit is the only thing he needs to run the country. It’s one thing to have a great orator in office, but when all he does is make great speeches, you start to wonder what kind of person you really put into the Oval Office.

But having said that, the Republicans have absolutely no one with any sense of popularity that can get someone elected. Their options are crap, more crap, and a lot of the same. Their show stoppers are carnival clowns that make the audience jump up and laugh, but other than that, they have no one capable of doing any real damage during the election. So, unless they somehow find an underdog that no one is expecting, or one of the boring people running right now suddenly becomes infused with superpowers, I don’t see anything happening this time around other than another four years of a very insignificant, do-nothing president who will basically be a place-holder until someone new comes along.

If you think otherwise, say something. Let us know. I certainly don’t have the last word here, but for some reason people seem so quiet over this issue, or they end up being reactive, falling into political paradigms and relying on talking points that don’t mean anything. So speak up and let us know what you have to say. Otherwise, this is going to be a very boring election with absolutely no surprises whatsoever.

2 Factors That Will Seriously Influence the 2012 Presidential Election

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The Ivory Tower I live in where everything makes much more sense

Unfortunately, whenever it comes to political topics, almost every article or piece of analysis is so tied into someone’s personal political perspective that very little information is ever shared. The 2012 Presidential election is no different. If someone is a diehard Republican, the person probably doesn’t like President Obama and will argue all sorts of things negative about him, his current administration and his future prospects. If someone is a diehard Democrat, chances are pretty good that the person will see only great things about President Obama and horrible things about any conservative, and blinders will lead the conversation that way. Almost always, someone on one side of the fence will see any analysis that favors the other side as biased, and everything that favors his or her side as on the level. Some things rarely change.

I’ll come straight out and say it. I don’t really care who wins the presidency in 2012. If Obama wins, great. If a random Republican wins, I’m fine with it. If Zippy the Wonder Clown wins, I’ll dust off my clown shoes and laugh right alongside him. Again, I don’t have a stake in this race.

What I do have is a perspective that is seeing where things are starting to come out right now. And two factors will make the biggest difference for 2010. Not really anything else, aside from some cataclysmic event or great deal of fortune that no one has anticipated. Those sorts of things always make a difference, and as I can’t predict those sors of things, I’ll just leave it at that. So, let’s talk about the two factors.

1. The Economy and Jobs. Right now, this is probably the one factor that will make or break a reelection for President Obama. And unfortunately, most economists don’t seem to have a clue on this one, so I’ve stopped listening to them because most of them are myopic tunnel breathers who are so stuck in their own thoughts that they haven’t come up for air to realize what’s really going on. First off, the economy is not the stock market, or even the housing market. It’s not the banks. It’s not the future of Google, Best Buy, IBM, Microsoft, GM, Ford or Texaco. What really matters right now is the perception of jobs. And I don’t mean Steve Jobs. People are out of work, and the job outcome is getting worse, not better. Just as the Bush Administration tried to lie its ass off and pretend that it was creating new jobs, the Obama Administration is doing the same thing. And like before, people don’t buy hype and crap for long. When people are out of work, see other people losing their jobs, hear nothing but horrific stories of the job market, a Wall Street economist talking about how great the job market is means very little.

Just today, the Navy announced it was going to be letting sailors go and not approving as many for continuing their careers. The Air Force is about to do the same thing. The Army is about to move into a wind-down with its conflicts, and the obvious next step is going to be the same kind of layoffs there as well. Government has decided the military is no longer off limits for cuts, so cutting is exactly what’s going to happen. More people are going to lose jobs and be tossed out of the military when their tours are complete. This means a whole bunch of young people are going to be pushed out into an already depressed job market. More people are going to be competing for the same soft labor jobs that have been so scarce already.

What exactly does that mean? Well, let me ask you this. Do you really want thousands of people who just came back from war put into no-win labor markets where they trade stability for dispair and uncertainty? I’m not sure I do. But then no one really asks me these things. I’m not exactly sure I feel all that comfortable with discouraged, out of work, young men who have been carrying around guns for the last few years with people who hated them shooting at them as their former career. I don’t see a lot of good things coming out of that mix.

But the point is: If Obama doesn’t find himself in a situation where jobs are being created left and right, his reelection chances are pretty slim. All other factors are irrelevant. Much as the first Clinton election proved, it really is all about the economy. The economy took a previously popular war president and made him unemployed. Without something changing quickly, Obama doesn’t look like he has a great chance at a sure-fire reelection.

2. The Republican Candidate. Now that I said Obama needs to turn around the economy before the election, there is one factor that might make the economy somewhat irrelevant. If the Republicans don’t come up with someone they can rally behind, then a bunch of ghosts yelling profanities at the president aren’t going to lead to an election that pushes the incumbent out if there’s no one there to replace him. Right now, the Republican front runners are horrifically lacking in any merit. None of them have any real charisma. None of them have a futuristic vision, aside from “Obama sucks”, and none of them have any ideas that sound any different than “stop Democrats from taxing us” and “cut spending”. Neither of those ideas are worthy of rallying a group of people towards a positive election.

As long as the Republicans continue to run around with no head and spend their energy taking pot shots from behind the barn, Obama may just win by default, even with the worst economy in recent history, even with no jobs created, and even with defaulting the government because the president is incapable of providing enough leadership to cause an actual brokered deal. There’s only so much, “the Republicans are evil” that the public will take. But again, if the Republicans (evil or not) can’t come up with a solid hitter to back for the election, none of it makes a difference.

Which leaves us with a very dismal election that might end up being the lowest turnout in many decades because people may just give up on the whole enterprise. The 2008 election caused people to become invigorated with the idea of changing government for the better, but because it hasn’t really changed, other than a new group of incompetent leaders replaced a group of previously incompetent leaders, that wave of energy may just sit out the whole next election. And that would be a horrible result, because the one thing I hate more than incompetence, corruption and narcissistic leaders is a country of people who don’t care because they don’t feel their input really matters and that things are going to suck no matter who they put into office.

Now, the funny part of this article is that if it gets any review at all, it will probably be massively negative because neither side will come away from the reading thinking I was on its side, and therefore, they will disapprove. That’s somewhat ironic because that’s the problem our country is going through right now. And no matter how much I try to point it out and push us to a better place, you can’t make a horse drink even after leading it to water. Sometimes, you have to get a new horse and let the old one starve.

Advocating Peace Elsewhere & Still Needing to Get Your Shit Together At Home

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Over the last few days, President Obama has been trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This isn’t anything new. Every president from Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon and Kennedy have been trying to do the same thing. NONE of them have ever succeeded. A couple of them got momentary results that sounded great, like Carter. And the world was so grateful, they even gave some of these presidents Nobel Peace prizes for their great efforts. But in the end, the peace fell apart because Israel and Palestine know only two modes: Cease fire and open fire. Long term peace isn’t in their vocabulary. They have generations of hate between them so that the only way they’ll ever end up with peace is for one side to completely eliminate the other. Sorry, but the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same stupid things over and over again, hoping for better results.

But that’s really not even the issue I want to discuss. What I find even more fascinating is that we have a president right now who is trying to instigate peace (I guess he wants to actually earn that Nobel Peace Prize he got for just showing up for work without actually doing anything to deserve it; hey, I voted for him and supported him, but even I know that was the most ridiculous prize awarded in the history of the Nobel, right after the one they probably gave to Vlad Putin for creating peace by wresting with bears). No, what I want to talk about is this ridiculous tendency we have to try to create “peace” around the world when we can’t seem to figure out how to instigate it in our own country.

Believe it or not, there is a non-violent civil war going on in the United States right now. The only thing missing is actual violence, because we have a line right down the middle of the ideological sides of the country, and neither side is capable of getting along with the other. Just look at the current state of the Republican Party. There’s a man running for their nod for president (Gingrich) who is being chastised because he dared to side against Republicans through some of the usual stupid things he normally says (like disagreeing with Ryan over the budget mess). At the same time, we have members of Congress on the right who are probably going to lose their backing because they might have made the mistake of being friendly with other congress members on the left. And then we’re starting to see the same kinds of actions from the left, chastising their own members for daring to work with the right. The Gang of Six (a group of legislators who dared to come to the middle and try to work things out) has been deep sixed (for lack of better words) because the rest of their parties are outraged (outraged, I say!) that members on one side would dare to come to any kind of consensus with the other.

If you go to places like Wisconsin, you see entire parties rallying against the others to the point of advocating criminal actions against the other side (how dare you leave the state to avoid a lopsided vote!). Read a column by Ann Coulter, or even the more even-handed Michelle Malkin, and you read nothing but vitriolic hatred waged against the other side. Read (or listen to) anything coming out of Michael Moore’s camp, and you experience the exact same kind of hatred from the other side. People in this country are communicating behind battle lines and the hatred is so present in practically everything they say that I’m not surprised that this country has become completely dysfunctional. No one is willing to cooperate with each other because everyone is so angry, and when people become angry they become incapable of thinking clearly and justly. The goal is to achieve points in an ideological battle, not consensus and understanding. And even worse, they’re incapable of even recognizing that, or if they are capable, they see it through filters that see the other side as the one responsible and everything they do is rational and just. These are the kinds of conversations that appear as screaming sessions on late night news shows, where people aren’t communicating, but they’re trying to get as much of their arguments in as possible because if they stop to listen it would take away from the time they get to present their full case.

This is the environment we live in today, and yet our president is trying to foster peace elsewhere. If President Obama wants to foster peace, how about actually trying to do it here. I don’t mean compromising, or making the other side look bad, because that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few years. I’m talking about actually putting forth a serious initiative about creating peace in the United States. Stop using rhetoric to push agendas, unless the agenda is to stop using rhetoric to push agendas. We’re really good at anger and hatred; I’d like to see how good we can become at being a unified country again. We haven’t been one for a very long time now. And I’m sure a reader is probably thinking to himself/herself, “well, that’s because of the people on the other side.” And that’s why we’ll never move forward.

Which is why we’ll never have peace in the Middle East, I should point out. Because as much as I’ve been talking about the stupid rhetoric of the people in the United States, believe it or not, it’s the same reason we’ve never had peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Both sides have to be right, to the point of swords and death. Compromising means weakness, and thus, a direction we can never move. Why would anyone expect a country where we can’t agree on whether or not fixing the budget is a national priority that we’d somehow be able to instill peace somewhere else?