Tag Archives: republicans

Coming Under Fire…trying to achieve the honor of being placed on the highest court in the land

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Years back when I was in the Army, a grizzled NCO pulled me aside one day and explained something to me. Now, if you’ve ever watched an old Clint Eastwood war movie, or one of the many like it, you’ve heard this story before, so I’m not telling you something you probably already shouldn’t know. But I’m going to tell the story regardless, and even though you’ve heard it before, I’m going to explain how hearing the story doesn’t mean anything until you’ve experienced it. Anyway, it goes like this:

Two new lieutenants or two new privates come into a unit for the first time. They’re fresh out of combat training and ready  for their first assignment. Soldier A is gung-ho and looking for a fight. Soldier B is scared of his or her own shadow and looks like the one most likely to run from a fight. And then shit goes down for the first time and the whole unit is under fire. Soldier A marches into the theatre of battle looking ready for the fight, but when the first shot is fired, finds he or she can’t even move, freezes and basically fails everyone, including oneself. Soldier B, realizing that Soldier A is under fire and unable to move, jumps into the fight, drags Soldier A from the battle and fights back oncoming forces in the process. Soldier B proves to the be hero, and Soldier A has disappointed everyone.

Trial by fire we call it.

People often tell this story, thinking it is specifically about battle but fail to understand what it actually means. It means that everyone lives within their own narrative and tells their own stories.  But until something happens that tests one’s own abilities and shows that person that everything you’ve prepared for doesn’t explain a current dilemma, and you have to develop a new narrative based on walking through fire, you don’t really know how you will ever handle the stress of having to pull yourself out on the other side. Will you honor yourself and others? Or will you fold and prove yourself to be a complete failure? You can tell yourself you’re going to do one or the other, but until you’re truly tested, you never know what you’re going to do to get to the other side.

I’ve been fortunate, or unfortunate, to have had that test come across me a few times in my life. And each time has helped me to build upon my beliefs of what I thought might happen.  So far, I’ve been lucky in that I’ve not had an encounter turn out to be the opposite of what I hoped it would be. Sometimes, the outcome hasn’t emerged as best as it could have, but at the same time, I feel confident in the sense that I’ve not humiliated myself or brought dishonor upon anyone else in my care. Sometimes, that’s all you can hope for.

So, let’s talk about Brett Kavanaugh. A few days ago, he was undergoing his trial by fire as he was made to face a past accuser and to confront a hostile Senate that wasn’t about to let him just play legal games when answering their questions. Instead of just owning up to simple failings in his past by saying: “Yes, I drank a lot, and I made a lot of mistakes back then, but I’m trying to be a much better person these days. That’s all anyone can do.” he took the frat boy-no consequences approach and from what could be seen just bullshitted his way through the entire confirmation hearing, hoping that partisanship would keep him from having to take any responsibility.

And that hurt a lot.

As a veteran, my one thought watching this whole disaster on the screen was that I’d never be comfortable under fire with this guy backing me up. To be even more blunt, I wouldn’t be comfortable getting drunk with this guy in a bar. This is that guy that breaks a crime while drunk and then blames you, even though you were throwing up in the bathroom the entire time, telling the cops he only had two beers.

The trial by fire moment in this man’s life put him in front of the nation and asked him to make the right decisions. To quote the grail knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “He chose poorly.” While he may still get a chance to get on the Supreme Court because of partisanship alone, most cases of trial by fire only get one chance to get it right. In a combat unit, he’d be that one soldier relegated to holding up the rear until the colonel can transfer him out of the unit where his actions won’t threaten to get any other soldiers killed. You rarely get a second chance to prove you’re no longer a coward. That first time is all a group of soldiers will allow; they may never trust you again.

While even if he was denied the Supreme Court pick, he’s proven he doesn’t even deserve the lofty position he already has, but he’s life locked into that position as well, meaning that he snuck his way into the elite unit and there’s really no way to usher him out. He’s now like that brigadier general who got his position by doing administrative work his entire career and once discovered to be a complete failure at combat is now being sent to some office in a corner of the Pentagon where he can’t affect anyone again, at least until someone can convince him to retire.

But I fear we’ve not seen the last of him yet.

And that should frighten a lot of people because the only reason this guy will ever be allowed a second chance is to fulfill a quota of people who just want a slot filled by someone on their side. And even they know he’s a horrible pick for the position they’re going to pigeon him into.

And the sad part is that there are so many other better people who should have been considered and seriously vetted instead of him. But they probably won’t be, so we’ll be stuck with him for decades.

Kavanaugh, Boys Will Be Boys, and Why This Problem Will Never Go Away

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I was watching Vice News Tonight, and they were covering some of the Kavanaugh garbage that we’re seeing on a daily basis right now, and it just sickens me that we have a bunch of men in charge of our government who apparently don’t care one iota that they’re about to empower (with enormous power and responsibility) someone who may have tried to rape another woman. And even more allegations are starting to emerge. And they’re trying to railroad him into the position so fast that NO OTHER WOMAN can possibly come forward in time to stop it.
 
One thing that was interesting was that they brought on a woman who was literally halted from testifying during the Anita Hill hearings for Clarence Thomas who ALSO had a sexual harassment story about Clarence Thomas, but she was shunted away by the people who wanted him put into power until the hearings were over. They made sure that atrocity happened, and THOSE SAME PEOPLE ARE STILL IN POWER TODAY. They’re the same people trying to push through the current guy.
 
But you know what really got me? At the end of the whole segment, four or five other women were giving their own stories of when men attacked them sexually but they were also never believed when these things happened. And it got me to thinking: How many of these types of guys have I known my entire life? The cool guy in high school. The jock in college. That guy who got all the girls. And now the weird guy who no woman ever talked to but is now in an office establishment with all sorts of other women who are forced to be around him all day long. So many people, and so many stories, which could mean this happens all the time.
 
Because that’s what I’m getting from all of these stories. These incidents aren’t rare. They’re more the norm. And if you are brave enough to hold a conversation with a group of women and just let them start talking about it, what you’ll discover is that almost ALL of them have a similar story of when this happened to them. Not one or two out of a room of 50. But 49 or 50 of them all have a horrifying story of some guy that violated them in some way.
 
And this is what we should be facing.
 
But we won’t. We’ll shuffle it under the rug, pretend it only happens with really bad people who, oh I don’t know, must not go to church or something equally ridiculous. And it will continue happening because we choose to let it happen.
 
Like people shooting up schools with guns. Because we choose to let it happen.
 
We’re all responsible, but we will blame a boogeyman who doesn’t exist, or just might exist. But we’re all responsible. And we’re responsible because we don’t do anything about it but act shocked and surprised.
 
Right now. Instead of doing something about this, the people who CAN do something are saying: “This is just a political witch hunt. Get him in the office and the problem goes away.”
 
And that’s what’s probably going to happen.
 
Or, we’ll get brave this one time (honestly, I don’t believe that will happen), but we’ll do nothing about the larger problem because it’s too hard. It takes too much work. We can never solve this. Or whatever weak excuse we will give, including my favorite: “It’s not me, so I don’t see what trying to stop it will do because there’s no way to tell who is responsible.”
 
I already told you. WE are responsible.
 
And WE will do absolutely nothing.
 
Now, I’m going to go back to killing aliens in a video game because at least there the world makes a lot more sense.

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.”

Still no such thing as a free lunch

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Some moron running for senate in Georgia thinks he has a great idea to, well, I don’t really know what it would solve, but like usual, a House Representative in Georgia, who wants to rise in power, thinks it’s a really good idea to put school children to work to earn their “free lunches.” Basically, U.S.Representative Jack Kingston thinks it would be really nifty for the poor to put them to work sweeping up cafeterias for their lunch money, because somehow this would instill in them the idea that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you think about it, he’s advocating a legal fix to an old adage that doesn’t actually have a lot of connection to anyone’s reality.

The obvious counter to this whole situation is this belief that somehow this is going to make poor kids feel like they’ve “earned” their lunch. No kid pays for his or her own lunch at that age, or at least very few do, because no kids have their own money at that age. Their parents give them money, so they aren’t learning money management skills. They’re learning that their parents have money, or they’re learning that their parents have no money. That’s really the lesson that gets taught here no matter how some Republican Neanderthal wants to spin it.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Well, it’s not really a secret, but I grew up dirt poor. My mom was uneducated and my dad split when I was too young to ever know him. So my mom worked crap jobs and was basically too uneducated (and proud) to take government handouts. She probably should have. It didn’t help that she was sick and then went blind in one eye. She tried and that’s really all that’s important.

So, at one point I was put on discount lunches. Somehow, even though our apartment was overrun with cockroaches on a daily basis and our neighbors were crack addicts and prostitutes, we were too well off to get full free lunches. So, my mom had to pay a certain amount of money and then got discounted lunches for me when I went to school.

Let me tell you about those discounts. They gave you a special paper card that you had to present each and every time you presented for lunch, and the system was so obviously designed to point out that you were using this card, which meant that every other kid looked at you when you were presenting it, and I can’t tell you how bad kids are at making someone feel like shit in some weird process of making themselves feel better about themselves. It was humiliating every time I had to present that card and then pay my token of the discount I was allowed to pay. There were many times when I skipped lunch because it was easier to not eat than to have to go through that process each and every time at lunch.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Representative Kingston never had to go through that experience when he was growing up. And I’ll bet that not once has one of his children ever had to go through such a thing just to get a stupid lunch meal. That sort of thing scars you for a long time, and even in my middle age these days, I have never forgot how it felt to have to present that stupid card when I was at that age.

And that’s the problem with a lot of our representatives who think they actually represent people they serve. Edmund Burke argued a long time ago that he could “represent” miners in his district even though he’s never been a miner because he knows what’s best for them. He was wrong then, and Kingston is wrong today. I’m sure there’s a special place in Goddess Hell where Kingston has to ask for a school lunch each and every day and is told that no, he must starve because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

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.

Why Don’t Politicians Discuss the Poor?

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There’s an interesting essay on CNN this morning by Roland S. Martin that takes the stance that Republicans do not ever mention the poor even though the most important red states are heavily infected with poverty. While it’s a thought-provoking article, it’s obviously very partisan in its approach, almost as if saying (without actually saying it) that Democrats DO care about the poor while Republicans do not. While it’s easy to throw mud on the GOP over this particular issue, I’m going to take a different tact and introduce the question of: Why don’t politicians discuss the poor? Because, as much as Democrats like to see themselves as the party of the people, when it comes down to discussing issues that actually alleviate poverty, neither side really does a good job.

For those waging class warfare, you might disagree with me, thinking that Democrats have always been on the side of the poor, but honestly think back and try to figure out when was the last time Democrats actually went out of their way to do something to alleviate poverty, aside from talk about it or use it to get re-elected. When I was pursuing my Ph.d in political science, I remember putting forth the argument (to a group of Democrat-professors) that asked the same question but in terms of race. It was during a seminar on party politics, and I asked why the Democratic Party actually felt it deserved the votes of blacks. And the room went silent because it was one of those questions you don’t really ask. I tried to push away the “you must be a racist to ask such a question” responses quickly by indicating that while the Democrats may have more African-Americans making up its ranks, what exactly was the Democratic Party doing to help African-Americans when it came to either ending racial discrimination or anything that had to do with bringing all races into a sense of equality. Responses all seemed to point at Civil Rights legislation and other such issues, but I kept pointing out that much of these efforts were started in the 1960s by politicians who were either very old or dead. Recent attempts to actually “make things better for everyone” weren’t really being made. My argument was that the Democratic Party seemed to be expecting African-American participation and support solely on the basis of not being the Republican Party. Needless to say, this caused all sorts of negativity in the room, and to be honest, to this day I’ve never achieved a sense of anyone really going out of his or her way to address the issue. Instead, I often see race being treated as an issue with already decided expectations that make it so that no one actually discusses the issues but instead do a lot of scholarship that consists of doing what has been done before without much further effort.

I bring this up because the issue, for me, is the same when it comes to poverty. There are more poor people in this country now than there has been in a very long time (since the Depression itself), yet politicians don’t seem to really be focusing on it. Instead, the focus has been the deficit, getting people back to work (the middle and upper classes), and a couple of areas of foreign policy. The War on Poverty became a “war” in name only, as we haven’t really done anything to alleviate poverty, unless you look at current trends as a War on People in Poverty, which we seem to be conducting quite admirably as we cut money to shelters, food banks, food stamps, schools and practically every other area of society that has anything to do with the poor.

But no one really seems to care. On the local news website (MLive.com), I read daily scribes by the common citizens that attack anyone who is poor as lazy, a criminal and a drain on society. Whenever someone puts forth ideas to alleviate poverty, that person is treated as part of the problem, and the masses don’t even want to discuss the issue further. And this isn’t even some right-wing media outlet. It’s the outlet used by the majority of people who read the local newspapers on a daily basis.

I don’t know about you, but I would love to see every politician start talking about what he or she is going to do to get people out of poverty. That would be so refreshing. But that never happens, and the reason for that is because it’s so much easier to not do anything about it and make up other issues that aren’t important, but are easier to hold conferences about. One of the big issues going into the presidential election is most definitely going to be the deficit, but at the same time I would not be surprised to see other ridiculous issues become part of the common conversation, like same sex marriages, abortion, religion in schools and taxation. It would not surprise me if one of these issues becomes the reason why one politician wins rather than any other.

Another factor to look at is political power itself. Since the poor first became poor, they have never really had an advocate working on their behalf. Congress is constantaly barraged with lobbyists over every issue under the sun, except for those that have anything to do with poverty. And that’s because there’s no money in it, which is somewhat ironic because that’s the problem in the first place. Lobbyists exist mainly to push political interests that then serve economic interests as well. When the economic interest is in getting people out of poverty, there’s no basis for creating a political process behind it. It’s a game theoretic where there’s no payoff for anyone involved, so no one gets involved, and the poor are left to their own lives of poverty without anyone really caring about the struggles they go through.

Instead, we end up with people thinking they know what poverty is because they brushed with it somewhere in the past but never really experienced it. I used to see this all of the time in the academic environment whenever poverty was discussed, and some college student who once struggled to make a decision between buying a new CD and purchasing food because of a limited budget actually thinks he went through a bout of poverty, so he thinks he completely understands it. And that person, when living somewhat of a decent lifestyle, is confronted with the idea of poverty, immediatedly thinks of poor people as the lazy people who couldn’t sacrifice that CD to put food on the table that one day when in reality the idea of buying a CD is a luxury most of them wouldn’t even consider in the first place. So when a poor person actually owns a cell phone (because it’s the only way they can communicate, making it an immediate Maslowian need), that former student scoffs at them, saying stuff like: “Well, if they can afford cell phones, obviously they don’t need assistance.” Again, it’s an inability to completely understand the bigger picture brought about by the fact that no one is ever going to take the effort to want to learn in the first place.

So what is the solution? Stop ignoring it and do something about it. Write your leaders and say something about it. But we won’t because we’re as lazy as we claim the poor must be, and we rarely do anything about it. If a politician doesn’t have constituents yelling at them about poverty, it’s not an issue on their dashboard. Unless someone starts telling them about it, they’re never going to even be aware of it because they don’t travel in circles that requires them to have to see the homeless as they live on a daily basis other than the random one who happens to be begging on the side of the entrance to the interstate, and like most people, the politician probably ignores them, thinking that if they don’t look at them, they don’t have to worry about them; or worse, they give them a dollar to get some alcohol, and somehow feel like they’ve done their all to address the poor.

Asking politicians to do the right thing is the recipe for failure every time. Asking YOU to make them do the right thing IS the answer. But I suspect we won’t because it’s too much work, and we all know those poor people are really lazy people who just don’t want to work like the rest of us. Right?

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?

When it comes to the deficit, the numbers are just too much for the American people

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There’s a brilliant scene in one of the Austin Powers movies where Dr. Evil, played by Mike Meyers, is announcing to the UN, or world council, or whatever fictitious organization was in charge of the world in those movies, that if they do not give him what he wants, he will unleash his viciously evil plan. What he asks for is “a MILLION DOLLARS” and his advisor tells him that a million dollars isn’t a lot of money anymore, so he has to up his demand to “a TRILLION DOLLARS.” They replay that same scene in a subsequent movie where he time travels back to the 1960s and he demands “a TRILLION DOLLARS”, causing the world council people to laugh at him because they recognize there’s not a trillion dollars in existence in that 1960s period.

Fast-forward to today, and the United States is trying to figure out its budget. The Republicans, the Democrats and President Obama are stuck on how to do it, how much to do it with, and what exactly they should be doing in the first place. The architect of the Republican plan, some guy previously unknown to anyone named Ryan, proposed a future budget cut over years of some numbers of trillions of dollars. President Obama, as of today, is announcing a plan to cut the budget by $4 trillion. Currently, we’re trying to head off a government collapse because our debt ceiling needs to be raised beyond its current level of $14.3 trillion, so there’s this request to raise the debt level even higher.

Here’s the problem. It’s not the fact that the government is now spending enough money that we’re currently $14.3 trillion in debt. Okay, that’s a problem. But the real problem is that $14.3 trillion means absolutely nothing to the average American, because the average American is lucky if he or she has $50,000 to access at any one time, and it’s easily arguable that most Americans are lucky to have $20 in their wallets at any one time. So talking about $14.3 trillion in debt is like saying we have a gazillion dollars that we have to cut because we’re already spending a quazillion each year. In other words, the numbers have absolutely no relevance to anyone.

Years ago, when the debt was somewhere around $1.2 billion, the news media used to do really inventive little games like say something along the lines of “if you lined up dollar bills all the way across the planet, you’d still have money left over after crossing the entire globe” or other equally interesting, yet ridiculously ludicrous examples. It would always cause the listener/reader to go, “wow, that’s a lot” but that’s usually all it would do. Then they’d go back to being oblivious to the events of the day because, to be honest, the events of the day didn’t really matter to them. Archie Bunker was on TV, so it was more important to get home and watch that.

Now, we have politicians on all sides of the aisle trying to convince the American people that this outrageous amount of money is important to the average American. But it’s not. Because it’s so much money, and so much out of control, that people just laugh at it and pretend it wasn’t mentioned. I mean, who wants to deal with the some ridiculous amount of debt when you might have debts of your own to deal with? I have a student loan I’m trying to pay off, so that number of thousands of dollars is far more significant to me than $14.3 trillion that was racked up without me ever having a say so whatsoever. Because when it comes down to it, they’re either going to figure out what to do with it, or the country is going to collapse. But no matter what they do, I’m still going to owe thousands of dollars in student loans. NO ONE is going to bail me out. Because no one cares about me like they seem to care about a phantom amount of money that was spent by people who were spending money that was never theirs to begin with.

And that’s the problem right there. The money we’re talking about was spent by people who took it upon themselves to dole it out any way they saw fit because it was never theirs to have to worry about in the first place. It was all fiat money that they imagined, yet they spent it as if it was real, lining the pockets of very rich people and very well-connected corporations. But when it came time to pay the piper, they turned back to us, the people, and said it was our responsibility to pay for what they fucked up because they never gave the implications a second thought when mom and dad went out of town and left them the keys to the liquor cabinet, the car and a credit card with no limit.

So, when the president gets on the horn and tells the rest of us that the debt is out of control, and WE need to do something about fixing it, he should sort of understand that rest of us really don’t give a fuck. We were never involved in the spending of that money, no matter how many arguments are made about how “we” put them in power to abuse the system in the first place. People we didn’t know had access to spending money they never should have spent, and now it’s time to pay up. Well, none of us are all that concerned. As a matter of fact, we see a lot of the bickering going back and forth between politicians as whines about how they don’t have access to more money to blow and spend like there’s no tomorrow. We don’t see the Republicans as the “fiscal conservatives” no matter how many times they try to pretend they are. And we don’t see the Democrats as the keepers of responsible government. All we see are a bunch of kids who had access to mom and dad’s credit card and now that mom and dad are at home, seeing the bill from the credit card company for the first time, there’s not a whole lot of compassion from the American people towards these kids who are now arguing about how we should raise their allowance because they already spent their money on video games.

So, if you’re going to try to convince the American people that they should care, you have a great deal of work in front of you. And so far, not a single politician has ever even attempted to do that.

What is the Future of Government in a Twitter/Facebook World?

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We keep hearing stories of how governments are being toppled by people armed with Twitter and Facebook accounts. While these accounts keep forgetting to point out that you need more than Twitter or Facebook to topple an oppressive government, what we should take from these examples (like Egypt, Tunisia, currently Libya and possibly a future Iran) is that revolutionary movements have been assisted by these social networking technologies. And that’s no small deal.

What doesn’t get addressed is something I find even scarier, but seems to be completely off the radar (or gps) of everyone involving this issue. What these technologies definitely do is provide immediate access to higher up entities than have ever been experienced before. What do I mean? In the olden days, a king communicated with his people by throwing up broadsheets that people would read by wandering out into the village square where they were posted. If they were lucky, a town crier would yell out the messages to people as well, which mainly assisted a population that was generally illiterate. As education has emerged and moved from the upper class to the middle class and now finally to all of the classes, people are capable of reading their own messages, so that town cryer is no longer necessary. And because technology has emerged alongside this development, people are now able to receive instanteous communication from higher-ups. This was the paradigm that brought us up and through the 19th and 20th centuries

But Facebook and Twitter also do something else that 19th and 20th century technology did not allow. Instead of just reading messages from leaders, we now have the innate ability to communicate BACK to our leaders. Add email to the mix, and our ability to actually speak to a previously untouchable leader has completely evolved into something kings and queens never imagined (and certainly never wanted). Today, we are moving from a receptive community to a community that is able to push rather than just receive.

What are the implications of this? Well, for one, it means that our need to rely on government is quickly diminishing. In the old days, we had government developed for us because basically we weren’t smart enough to maintain affairs on our own. That’s not the case today. In an enlightened society, or one that may soon be one, the need for government is minimized, which means that those people who have gained access to the halls of power are now seen as oppressive entities rather than those who serve the public good. Right now, we have a debate going on between Congress and the President of the United States as to whether or not government is even necessary (they’re thinking of shutting it down because they can’t pay their bills). What no one is addressing is the reason why this is happening. Those who advocate big government are pretty much behind the idea of needing government to take care of every need and desire, and I’d argue they’re not wrong in that a lot of people DO need government, but there is another segment of society that is slowly divorcing itself from the constraints of government, and unknown to a lot of average people, a whole bunch of them were actually elected to national office. We call them the “Tea Party”, and even though progressives use them as the butts of their jokes. a real movement is taking place right now in this country that should be seen as very dangerous to the natural order. If you want to understand why a lot of Republicans believe that government should be shut down, perhaps people should actually listen to the Tea Party instead of just making up jokes about them and figure no one takes them seriously.

Personally, I think the message that is being put out by the Tea Party is premature, in that I don’t believe the country has moved to that level of sophistication yet. Yes, believe it or not, I actually see their arguments as highly sophisticated; unfortunately, the ones receiving the majority of attention are the most unsophisticated ones imaginable, which is ironic just on that level alone. Only about 70 of them are in power right now, and that’s nowhere near enough of them to make the impact they want to make, so all they’re capable of doing right now is disrupting government, rather than shutting it down.

But what should be seen is the longer term implications from ideas that they do espouse. Our Twitter and Facebook technologies have actually developed movements that coincide with this attitude of the people believing themselves to be superior to government. Granted, another irony is present as well, as most of the Tea Party thinkers are usually way behind the learning curve when it comes to emerging technology, but that’s really for criticism and derision more than an argument. What we should be focused on is that that these types of movements (the usage of technology in its ability to supplant government rather than supplement it) tend to grow, not go away.

My more important question is the one that fronts this entire essay: What is the future of government in a Twitter/Facebook world? In other words, if we finally reach a point where people feel they are on the same level as government, rather than recipients of messages from government only, do we present a new paradigm for the future? Essentially, does this equal status present a situation where people can finally rise above government, believing themselves to be superior, and thus, believe government should be eliminated, or at least changed drastically to reflect the submission of government to the people, as was originally intended by the Founding Fathers? Or do we end up becoming the enemy of government, which will hold onto its last grip of power until finally removed by those who have deemed it no longer worthy?

Personally, I don’t think anyone is thinking this way yet. That’s okay. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Although it was destroyed in one.