Let me save some time: No need to watch the debates

So let me save you some time by telling you in advance exactly what is going to happen and even what most of you will think about it.

Obama vs Romney

If you’re a Republican or Conservative you will be upset that Obama lied so much, you will interpret any statement he makes as evidence of his further plan to socialize America, redesign the flag, take away all of our guns and ruin our economy, regardless of what the facts are.

If you’re a Democrat or Liberal you will be feeling very smug as Romney once again showed himself to be stiff and disconnected from the common man, confused on the facts and generally unpresidential.  You’ll be thrilled at how smooth the president comes off.

Biden vs Ryan

If you’re a Democrat or Liberal DO NOT WATCH THIS DEBATE!  Paul Ryan is going to slaughter Biden, he’ll seem confident, self-assured, he’ll lie and people will clap and Biden, as Biden always does, will demonstrate his extreme flexibility by inserting his foot deeply in his mouth while still standing at the podium and smiling all at the same time.

If you’re a Republican or Conservative, ITS PARTY TIME!!!  Invite your friends over, bring out the Ann Coulter posters, run the split screen Fox News Commentary, play let’s drill in Alaska Boardgames, and thoroughly enjoy yourselves.  If the poll numbers are accurate and the trend continues this may be your last happy night this election season.

Just another public service message in hopes of simplifying your life.  ~ ZD Blue

Why the United States is Doomed

The American experiment has failed, or more precisely is on the precipice of failing.  The sad part of this prognosis is that it’s not the American people who have failed directly, but make no mistake we all share some level of culpability.  We have failed through the poor choices we and our parents have made.  You see we’ve bought into some things and let some things happen that have brought our country to the edge of failure.  We have allowed our government to be about two things, re-electing incumbents and the influence of money.  It has all become solely about power and we have allowed for a system of governance where the determining factor for most elections is how much media can you buy, how many special interests can fund you and through that process how well can you distort reality to make your opponent out to be un-American, a Socialist, out to get senior citizens, planning to ruin our economy, planning to tax the rich, or not planning to tax the rich, not being born in this country, or being of the wrong religion, socio-economic class, or color.

The reason America is doomed is because what we have truly lost in the process of selling out our government is the truth.  You see the truth doesn’t matter any more, science is abhorred, unless of course it is being used to find a new way to get people high, or make your I-phone better, faster, stronger, able to masturbate you while you surf the web with unlimited battery capacity on a 4G network.

How do I know this to be true?  Because routinely when inaccuracies are pointed out by multiple fact checkers the political response is to misdirect or create confusion, to change the focus of the news as soon as possible.  BOTH parties do this, it is the standard operating procedure of today’s politics.  And people on both side of the aisle let pass because the other side does it to.

Also if you notice, both sides are always right, the other side is always wrong.  I would ask you simply, what ideology have you ever encountered that is right 100% of the time.  If that were possible, Fox News and MSNBC are never wrong and their stories, opinions and general bullshit are diametrically opposed, so they can’t both be right.  Poor CNN who actually tries to what FOX News claims to be, fair and balanced, has seen it’s ratings tank in comparison to MSNBC and FOX News, that’s our fault folks, we are the ones who watch the shows, we create the ratings.  We are telling the people who program our news that we are no longer interested in truth, or honest analysis.   We want to watch people argue, make fun of the people of the other view and find out what Marge in Omaha thinks via the anchor’s Twitter feed.

I constantly see television ads that are obvious lies.  If you believe what you see on TV, oil, gas and coal companies care more about local communities, economies and the environment than they do about profits.  Please comment on this piece if you actually believe that to be true, because I have ocean front property for sale in Utah and I want you to have the first crack at it.  This isn’t new folks, for decades people were told to smoke to soothe throat problems and that smoking isn’t bad for you and certainly not addictive.  Tobacco companies, like all big corporations will lie to maximize quarterly profits because they know at the end of the day, the lawsuits mean nothing compared to their profits.  You might think all of those smoking lawsuits destroyed the big tobacco companies, if you believe that, research a company named Altria.  You might know it better by it’s Tobacco company name, Philip Morris.

America may have at one time been truly exceptional, but it wasn’t exceptional by decree of God like most Conservatives seem to believe.  America was exceptional because we solved problems, we compromised when necessary to get things done, we put a priority on educating our children.  That is not a result of a decree from God instead those are the characteristics of a multicultural, evolving and concerned citizenry.   Not the petulant consumer children we have become.

There was a moment, shortly after the tragedy of 9/11 where America seemed like it found itself again.  We put away the partisan bickering, we felt compassion for our fellow Americans.  Except for a few incidents we didn’t go on a nationwide sweep of Muslims and close all of their mosques.  I was proud of America for the first time in my life during that small window of time. 

But that ended, we used the tragedy as a political tool to invade Iraq and it all slowly started to unravel again like a burning flag.  Since that time we have seen nothing but increasing divisiveness, fewer civil liberties, new laws against protest, an ever-increasing home security agency that reaches into every facet of our lives, there are even Homeland Security Documents as part of your loan package when you buy a house.

We have polarized our politics to the point where the minority party will cheer for our economy to fail for their political gain.  My God do you realize what that means?  As the economy tumbles more children go into poverty and therefore more children die due to reduced nutrition and medical care.  So in effect our governmental representatives would rather see children die than compromise 1% of their ideological beliefs.  Maybe we should rename those idiotlogical beliefs.  Now did any of them think that position through to that logical end, of course not, it’s just politics, a game that you win if you and your party get re-elected.

We’ve failed America, we’ve sold our truth, our country and our souls to special interests and corporations.  We did it so we wouldn’t have to think and so we can buy more things.  We abrogated our responsibility and in doing so have sold out our children’s future. 

Two men are running for President of the United States of America and both are probably decent individuals.  Both are the pictures of main stream America, family men, by all accounts good fathers and good husbands both are Christians as so many of you are and yet almost all of you hate one or the other and are willing to accuse them of horrible things.   But both have willingly been manipulated by the political process to put their chances of election, or re-election before their actual core values and it’s too bad. 

However neither of these men are worthy of your scorn or the names you choose to call them.  It is the process that we have condoned that created the polarization in this country.  Liberals are not interested in running this country into a Greek style debt crisis, Conservatives are not awful hateful people who don’t care about poor people.  In fact, I doubt there are many true liberals or conservatives out there.  Most of us have views that range across the spectrum, conservative on some things liberal on others.  If you don’t then you probably aren’t thinking, as I said earlier, no one ideology is right 100% of the time.

America is on the precipice of doom but we can prevent it.  The solution is to be compassionate, considerate of others views, the ability to compromise, a desire to operate off of facts, not opinions.  We need to remove the insane money that drives our politics and maybe even go to open elections instead of primaries and elections pitting one party always against the other.  Unfortunately, I’ve lost faith in this country, we are too selfish to do the things I suggest or to come to agreement on ways to improve things.  It makes me sad that both of my grandfathers fought in World War II for an America Dream that no longer exists.

Conservatives against Capitalism & Freedom: Chick-Fil-A vs The Muppets

In case you’ve been living under a rock over the last week the president of the restaurant chain Chick-Fil-A came out with a statement that the chain supports the idea of  “traditional marriage“.   This was met by the expected reactions by liberals and those who support the LBGT community of condemnation and talks of boycotting the chain.  A quick side note, one thing that has always bugged me about Chick-Fil-A is that it’s pronounced chick filet, when clearly the way it’s written it should be pronounced chick fill uh, a much less sophisticated name.  This is not really all that newsworthy as these type of things seem to happen with some regularity and not all that unexpectedly from a restaurant chain primarily situated throughout the bible belt.

However what really kicked this whole thing up to another level was when the Jim Henson company came out against Chick-Fil-A and their bigoted stance.  That’s right, even the Muppets are against Chick-Fil-A, when you’ve lost the moral high ground to puppets you really are in a bad place.  There are of course now lots of protests and protest responses occurring, there is a national support day on August 1st and a corresponding same sex kiss day.

As Conservatives are always quick to point out, the restaurant is a private entity and has the absolute right to support financially or otherwise the anti-gay marriage agenda.  However what I find funny is how up in arms Conservatives get that people are exercising their right to protest this stance.  One of the primary conservative political planks is supposedly the support of freedom and capitalism.  Well, in a free capitalistic society people have the right to protest a company’s obvious bigotry by exercising their right to convince people not to spend money at that business.  Unfortunately what people on the edges of political belief, both left and right, always fail to recognize, is that your opposition has the same exact rights that you do.

To me the saddest thing about the anti-gay marriage stance, is that to any person of reasonable intelligence can see the direction all of this is heading.  Like the civil rights movement of the 1960′s the equality of marriage movement will culminate in all people in the United States having the right to marry the people they love.  Being against that says three things about you. 

First, you are mired in an outdated world view that no longer makes any sense.  The biblical arguments against same-sex marriage are ridiculous.  The way the bible guides the lives of Christians has and will always be re-interpreted into modern times, for example, we no longer stone people to death for working on the sabbath.  Essentially you will soon find yourself on the wrong side of history.

Second, you don’t have a basic understanding of history or culture and you certainly have not spent time with the people in the LGBT community.  Yes that’s right they are people, not Gays, or deviants or any other term you want to use to dehumanize them, they are just people just like you.

Third, at the absolute core of it all you are against love.  You are in opposition of the idea that two people have the right to express their love for each other in the same way you do.  Basically you are denying them freedom, the same freedom you wave as a flag, the same freedom found in the Constitution of the United States of America.  So at the end of the day, opposing Gay Marriage, is basically un-American.

Sharing a blog post – 10 things Americans don’t realize

A really will written and excellent blog piece on things Americans don’t realize about America, check it out. ~ ZDBlue

http://postmasculine.com/america

America is not the greatest country in the world

I have written a couple of pieces before about how annoying the idea of American Exceptionalism is to me.  You see it takes all thought out of the equation, we’re America and we’re the best just because we’re America, circular bullshit reasoning with no critical analysis.  There are things about America that make it an absolutely wonderful country and there are things about America that make it a shit country.  This idea is not unique either, you could probably say the same thing about every country that has ever or will ever exist on Earth.  Recognizing this fact does not make you un-American, un-Patriotic or someone who doesn’t appreciate our country, it makes you a rationale thinking human being who is willing to look at reality without blinding or deluding yourself through the prism of ideology, or the name of a political position or party.  If your thoughts have to be filtered through your ideology or if you have to hate an idea because the other party came up with it, especially if you loved it five years ago when your party was in favor of it then you have blinders on, take them off, try to see the world the way it really is not how it was report on Fox News or MSNBC last.

A new show came on HBO Sunday night called the Newsroom and the opening scene did a better job of addressing the American Exceptionalism argument than I ever will, the link to the video is below.  The character who makes the speech basically becomes a political pariah, why, because he spoke the truth, exactly what happens to anyone in our country who tries to do the same.  Don’t buck the only political party we truly have, the re-election party, and don’t buck the people truly in charge of our country, the corporations.  Unfortunately what is quickly becoming the best advice I can give anyone is keep your damn head down and try not to be noticed.  That also seems to be advice that goes against everything America is supposed to represent or at least used to represent in the sanitized, virtualized and fantasized “old days.”  Enjoy the video and throw the blinders in the trash.

America is not the greatest country in the world

 

Call me when the revolution starts

I recently spent three weeks in Ireland, one of the things I really didn’t miss about being out of the country was the constant reporting on the upcoming presidential election between Romney and Obama.  More than that it was incredibly nice not to have to listen to all of the hate speech spewed back and forth between US politicians and all of the idiotic talking heads on the cable news channels.  So I’ve made a decision, I’m only going to get my TV news from The Jon Stewart Show, seriously he seems on a nightly basis to be able to summarize all of the idiocy up in about 18 minutes and do it in a way that makes me laugh.  I’m an information junkie so I’ll still troll through the news websites but I’ve given up news coverage on TV.

The bigger issue in all of this is the fact that our politicians don’t give a shit about the people, not Romney, not Obama, not Democrats or the Republicans.  What’s worse is that now everyone seems to have to be labeled and those who label themselves basically filter the world through that lens, if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail.  So all the conservatives see socialism under every bush and liberals see cruelty and discrimination everywhere, get a grip folks.  If the world was so damn black and white all of the problems would already be solved.

So I wonder is it time to tear it all down and start over?  If the answer to that is yes call me when the revolution starts, it may be televised, but I won’t be watching.

My State of the Union Speech

My State of the Union Speech

So tonight the president made his state of the union speech, this morning I had a vision of what I might do in the same situation, it would go a little something like this.  The first thing I would do as I approached the podium would be to turn off the teleprompter, then:

Hell o everyone,

The reason I turned off the teleprompter is because although there was a very nice speech written for me tonight, a speech full of the normal platitudes of office, nice things to say about each party, bold statements about what we’ll do this year, lots of mentions about how amazing our country is, in fact that speech is a bunch of bullshit.  Why?  Well mostly because none of you in our government actually give a shit about the American people.  Let’s face it, you all have one allegiance and that is to the re-election party.  The only Americans that you care about are the ones who can finance your campaigns or get you re-elected.

You have become caricatures of yourselves, pandering puppets to the most extreme wings of your parties because those elements are the ones that can get you past your primary elections.  Of course to do that you have to spout positions that appeal to no one but your base, this is a center-right country on most issues but you pretend that it is alternately a bastion of liberal morals, or a den of conservative closed mindedness.   You, all of you, who so consistently condemn Islamic extremists have become conservative or liberal extremists.

There is a lot of good with our country; in general people are good and kind, even if they don’t always want to think very deeply or very much.  The United States does a lot of good in this world, we support countries that are less fortunate than we are, we try to create peace and support democracy which as self-centered as that is seems to be a good thing.

But we are self-centered and much of what we do, regardless of what we say is in our own self-interest, you see, we are a narcissistic nation.  We believe we are better than everyone else; we have a great term for it, American Exceptionalism.  We believe that our form of government, our religion, our values, the way we see the world is right and unless you believe what we believe you are inherently wrong or evil.

We are not a peaceful nation, but we are not warlike either, not usually.  But recently Islamic extremists violated all that we hold sacred; they had the audacity to kill Americans in America.  We used the deaths of those nearly 3000 people to drive us to war in Afghanistan, we decided to drive out the Taliban, remove them from power and kill them because they gave shelter to our enemy.  Then Saddam Hussein outsmarted our president, no major achievement there, but he also outsmarted all of our so-called intelligence agencies as well.  So we decided to go to war in Iraq as well.  We avenged the deaths of Americans by driving the Taliban out of power, killing a lot of them, and a lot of innocents as well.  We got our former ally Saddam Hussein executed and killed a lot of Iraqis, a lot of terrorists, jihadists and children as well.  In the end we’ve changed nothing permanently in Afghanistan, no invading force ever has.  We’ve changed Iraq, maybe for the better and maybe we’ve unified Iraq and Iran in a way they never could have been before.  We killed Osama Bin Laden and have seriously disrupted Al Qaeda everywhere we could find them, no matter what their nationality including American citizens.  Those we haven’t killed we’ve locked up indefinitely in a foreign country, tortured some, and undoubtedly killed some others.

But what have we really gained from our wars?  As of September 30, 2012 we have spent 1.38 trillion dollars on the wars.  This debt, along with a lack of our government being responsible, or Wall Street remotely caring about anyone but their pocketbooks, has led us into the greatest economic downturn since the great depression.  Over this period of time more than 2.6 million Americans have slipped into poverty and my friends poverty kills.  How many lives have been lost here at home to finance our wars that we are fighting to avenge the deaths of people here in America?  To this point we have lost over 5,000 soldiers in combat in the wars, more disturbingly for the last two years we have lost more soldiers to suicide than combat.  Additionally we have over 47,000 American soldiers who have been wounded, many coming home without limbs, traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder.  This is the sacrifice we made to avenge 3,000 kills by madmen and to find imaginary weapons of mass destruction.  What we’ve sacrificed in goodwill and how many new terrorists we’ve created due to the massive levels of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan remains to be seen.  According to Wikipedia there are as many as 150,000 civilian deaths between these two countries in our wars.

America, tonight, I suggest we make a change, that we try to be more civil, more peaceful, that we do some really radical things.  First, that we try to look at things from other people’s perspectives not just our own, or our own party’s or our political base, that we actually try to govern instead of just trying to get re-elected.  Let’s actually look at America with a long-term perspective, what do we need to do now, that will pay dividends over the next 20 years instead of what dividends we can pay by the next election.  I’m talking about leadership and vision, you know, the things people actually expect from their political leaders and so rarely get.  Maybe if we employ these two characteristics we might just solve some of the problems we have and actually become as great a nation as we claim to be on the radio and on the talk shows.

Republican Presidential Nomination Battle: Target Gingrich

So in the game of revolving nut job of the month in the GOP Presidential Nomination race it looks like it’s Newt’s turn.  First it was Michelle “pray the gay away, HPV vaccine gives you retardation” Bachmann.  Then we moved on to the big guns of Rick “what’s wrong with a huntin camp called Niggerhead, just three things 1,2, uh….” Perry.  No fear though we’ve got former pizza chairman, Herman “let’s electrocute some mexis, what’s wrong with a little head” Cain up next, oh wait, not any more.

So now we’re on to the Newtster, the big gun, the man who led the 1994 Republican Revolution, you know, and then went to work as “not a lobbyist” for Freddie Mac.  That’s ok, don’t worry about that one little glitch, hell Republicans love that get elected then go to work for big business and then come back to government.  That’s the Darth Cheney kickin it with Haliburton blueprint.  So finally, we have someone who’s a real Republican to support, not that stick in the mud, Obamacare originating Romney.   What could a bastion of the American political system and a good family values conservative like Gingrich, who took down that immoral bastard Bill Clinton, have that could cause him any problems what so ever?

Oh wait….

Family and moral values are the key thing all conservatives bring up when they talk about Bill Clinton, they can’t argue with his policies, the economy under his watch or the fact that he left office with a budget surplus, so they attack his moral character and say he didn’t deserve to be president because of it.   That was the hallmark of what Gingrich protected America from.

Oh wait…

Gingrich who married his high school math teacher, served her divorce papers while she was recovering from cancer surgery.

But it’s ok, because he had already proposed marriage to his second wife.  It really is ok she was the love of his life and we all get the soul mate thing and they lived a happy moral life for ever after.

Oh wait…

While married to her Gingrich carried on a 6 year affair with a congressional aid, is there an HR department for Congress, and proposed to her, wife number 3 prior to even filing for divorce from wife number 2.

But have faith, we all know that any good conservative would throw out their core values to beat Obama, Machiavelli was a conservative right?

 

 

Somethings Happening Here….

Somethings happening here is the first line of a Buffalo Springfield song, the song feels very, very current because without a doubt something is definitely going on around here, first the Tea Party and now the Occupy movement.  What it is, ain’t exactly clear.

There is an undercurrent of frustration in this country right now.  In America, a lot of frustration runs under the surface, we pretend that discrimination is rare in our country but it’s not; there is plenty of gender inequity, racism and although many conservatives don’t seem to believe it, tremendous economic inequity.  The economic inequity maybe the hardest pressure of all and it impacts American across racial and gender lines.  Parents come in all colors, both genders and lots of different family configurations however they all share one thing, the fear of what their children’s lives will be like in the future.  A lot of people right now liberal and conservative fear for their children’s future.  Throw that in the mix with a generation that has a serious sense of entitlement, people my age who never quite knew what to protest, and a lot of old hippies fearing for the future of their grandchildren and I think you have a country wide powder keg.

 Of course what’s lighting the fuse right now is the “Great Recession”, folks pay attention, the “Great Recession” is in many ways every bit as brutal as the Great Depression was and if you ask a lot of economists, yes, even conservatively bent economists, we’re going about getting out of this recession the wrong way, extending the duration of this mess.

 I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States, it’s a fabulous book and it does something unique in looking at history, it follows the money.  There are a lot of parallels right now to the frustration, class warfare and economic inequity in the early part of the 20^th Century.  A time when there were large labor movements and violence in the street.

 So the fuse is lit, and the powder keg is present, the real question is what does it take to blow things up?  Personally, I think we are living in a dangerous time and one more significant pressure could make it blow.  Like what?  I don’t know, maybe people freaking out over 2012, maybe another financial crash, maybe well, maybe a lot of things.  No matter what, the next 16 months are shaping up to be very, very interesting, something is happening round here my friends, keep your eyes open.

Why do we make children recite the Pledge of Allegiance?

There have been a number of court battles and controversy around the Pledge of Allegiance:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/2011/06/justices_decline_to_hear_pledg.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance

The issue that is typically under discussion revolves around the use of the phrase “under god.”  A number of atheists have challenged this unsuccessfully using the argument that the phrase violates the separation of church and state.  A phrase, consequently that was added in 1948, the pledge was originated in 1892.

 However my question is why do we make children recite the Pledge of Allegiance?  I always thought it was ridiculous when I was a kid and I asked my teacher once if I had to do it, she said yes.  So, not wanting to get in trouble I continued to do it throughout elementary school, every morning like clockwork with the morning announcements.  At some point in my school career that little tradition disappeared but quite frankly I can’t remember when.  Today, it’s made fairly clear to students that it is an option and that makes me happy and I think really there is nothing wrong with optional participation.

My thought has always been this, if I told you that there was a country, that every morning made all of the children in the nation swear a compulsory oath of loyalty to the government, most of us would go off the wall assuming of course that we’re talking about North Korea or Iran.  Like a lot of the things we do in our educational system, the pledge is outdated.  In my opinion it was all part of the idea that the educational system should provide a passive, orderly and loyal workforce for the factories.  The world has changed.

Today my hope is that we understand that being a patriot is more about what a person does in their life by choice, not by indoctrination.  A person, particularly a child, is not disloyal or unpatriotic if they critically analyze their nation and its actions and you don’t need to publicly recite a loyalty pledge to love your country or be a patriot.