Politics
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Things I Wish Obama Would Say In A State Of The Union Address
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 27, 2010 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010It really boils down to simple things, like HEY AMERICA! You’re fat, rude, and greedy! Chill out!
For quite some time, I’ve wished that when a president says utterly irrational things in a State of the Union address, he would say positive things instead of things like “everyone wants to kill us because we’re so great and they’re jealous so we’ll just have to bomb someone”. So when I voted for Mr. Hopey Changey, I think I was fantasizing that in one of his speeches he would say something like “Our team of political and social analysts has spent the last year reviewing the key problems in America, and have reached some simple conclusions and developed some simple solutions. First of all, you’re all too fat, lazy, greedy, rude, and watch WAY too much TV. Y’all need to stop eatin’ those sticks of butter and supersizin’ all six meals each day. Get off your butt and at least GO FOR A WALK if that’s all you can manage. Once you’re off your butt, when you run into people, make eye contact and say things like ‘HI! HOW ARE YA?’ and hold doors for them and let them go first in line, and say ‘EXCUSE ME’ if they’re in your way instead of snorting and having a hernia. If you’re one of those fortunate enough to own six cars, two houses, and have more than a million in cash at your disposal, THINK ABOUT SHARING some of that. How many houses can you live in at the same time? We’ve also decided that corporations and government should BENEFIT PEOPLE OTHER THAN THE ONES THAT RUN THEM. Therefore, we’re stripping corporations of their human rights (um, they’re not human, right?) and stripping legislative, executive and judicial pay back to nearly nothing, so that whole “public servant” thing makes sense again. You’re also no longer allowed to sue people every time you stub your toe on their sidewalk, but all medical malpractice suits are hereby judged in favor of the patient. We all know that even the flippant ones were the result of the greed and mismanagement of the health care industry, right? And this whole lawsuit thing extends ESPECIALLY to kids. Children can no longer sue their parents, and parents can no longer sue the kids’ teachers. If the neighbor’s kids are acting up, BUST ‘EM. And you and the teacher are the grown ups, remember? TALK IT OUT. Oh. And no more padded playgrounds and helmets. All the dumbest and clumsiest kids are surviving grade school and creating a really feeble gene-pool for the next generation. I think that should cover it for this year. We’ll be back next year to see how things turned out. There may be a pop quiz in June though.
Why Democrats Always Lose & Why American Voters Need A Brand
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 21, 2010 by admin in Politics
Thursday, January 21st, 2010Or, If You’re So Smart How Come You’re Losing? Also, help us pick a mascot for the American Voter. Our first pick is a monkey, but would love your input.
I realized recently that it’s a lot easier to think and talk about politics if you don’t take the topic seriously. I came to this conclusion while having dinner with my liberal friends the other evening. They were mostly talking about what they’ve donated to help Haiti, and how shocking it was that Scott Brown had won in Massachusetts. I accidentally started an argument by asking if they had put their donations on credit cards, asked how much personal debt they carried, what they thought about the federal deficit, if they had thought about Haiti much prior to the earthquake, and what they had done about military spending lately. It really was an accident, but the ensuing brouhaha made clear a point a conservative friend of mine had made recently, which is that people in power love it when the liberal intellectuals get engaged in political discourse, because then they get so busy debating the finer points of the issues at hand that they end up not doing anything about them. And that’s why I reckon we’ll have no new health care plan, a couple new wars, a quadrillion dollar deficit, and a Republican president in 2012. Seriously. Sure, America elected its first black president and the first democratic congressional majority in a while last year, but it took two wars, thousands of deaths, a nationalized banking and auto industry, a massive loss of privacy rights, and a thoroughly gutted economy to do it. And what are liberals talking about a year and a half later? Haiti, a health care bill, and a single republican senator in New England. Don’t get me wrong, this works on conservative voters too. Tell a bunch of hillbillies in a bar that Cat Stevens hates Jesus, that Asians and Mexicans are taking all the jobs, and that allowing gay marriage will turn their kids into atheist homos, and the next thing you know you have George W. Bush in the White House. The Lutzian/Rovian strategy of pandering to voter ignorance is now standard operating procedure for campaigning; ironically the Obama campaign is one of their best proofs of concept. So given this profound dopiness on the part of the American populace, it occurred to me that if the GOP has its elephant, and the Dems have their donkey, the American Voter needs a mascot too. I figured a monkey was a good choice. What about you? Any suggestions? Read the rest of this entry »
Is Obama’s Proposed Bank Tax Purely Political?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 15, 2010 by admin in Politics
Friday, January 15th, 2010Well OF COURSE it’s political, but something like it is certainly warranted. Or maybe we could do the old Roman thumbs-up thumbs-down thing, complete with lions and stuff.
If you’re a conservative, you may be finding yourself in a slightly untenable position right now. Your obligatory knee-jerk response to Obama’s new proposed tax on bailed out banks will be to say: “Sure. More taxes are the solution for everything for you ignorant weepy liberals“. At least that’s the stance of business-minded republicans like Tom Donohue, the CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, who calls the plan a bad idea. So why is your position going to be untenable? Well, the first part of your problem is that if they’re not taxing the banks, they’ll be taxing you and your offspring for generations to come. And because the next part of your argument is going to be that that the banks won’t even feel it, or will pass the buck to consumers. Which suggests that either a.) The fees should be even higher, or b.) That we need to regulate the banks so they’ll stop raping the consumer and anybody else in sight that they’re not directly invested in. Granted, this is a complicated situation, and there’s a fair amount of political populism in the president’s proposal, but how could any American – other than a banker who just got his multimillion dollar bonus, of course – be against the idea of punitive measures against the bankers who created this entire travesty continuing to benefit from their failures and miscalculations? I mean, especially if you believe in Ayn Rand-driven laissez-faire capitalism like a good Republican should? Even Timothy Geithner says it’s sensible. Of course, he’s got his own problems, so maybe that’s some personal damage control at work. In any case, I have a better idea for dealing with the bankers. Put it to simple popular vote and see what the average hardworking American would do about it. I’m sure the results would be fairly grisly, but gratifying. What do you think?
Is That A Bomb In Your Underpants? Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 10, 2010 by admin in Politics
Sunday, January 10th, 2010Whether or not you think the underpants bomber was a terrorist Depends™ on your point of view, I guess. Although his crime was Hane™-ous, we felt no Fruit of the Boom™.
  Oddly, this book was NOT authored by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s children. |
I haven’t found terrorism and politics this much fun since 2006, when prankster John Hargrave stuffed a dildo in his pants before boarding a flight, just to see what would happen. As someone who – every single day – is finding himself a little further outside the value system of either political party in America, I’ve been finding it easier and easier to be amused rather than angered by what’s going down in this country. Especially things like paid dillweed Larry Kudlow of Politico ranting about how Obama should ix-nay the ending-spay, as if the Bush gang didn’t do anything to start the biggest spending spree in US history. Or Rudy Giuliani claiming that the date September 11, 2001 was magically not a date that was on the calendar during the Bush administration. It’s Rudy’s gaffe that I find most amusing, and I don’t care that he admitted his error later. The original statement is what most xenophobic hillbillies with cable will remember. But the thing that I find really funny about it was that he was suggesting that a lone looney with fireworks in his undies was a terrorist. C’mon people. The serious press is already calling him the “Underpants Bomber”. And if you don’t believe he was a confused and inept individual acting on his own, I suggest you download and read his collected rantings that had been posted on Islamic Forum Gawaher.com; Wired has graciously provided them with a link to a zip file in their recent piece Analyze This: The Mind of the Underpants Bomber. And never mind all that. Let’s not forget he was flying into DETROIT, for cryin’ out loud. Obviously Rudy’s never been to “The Big D”, or he’d know that the nation has nothing to worry about from an undies bomber entering HERE. We’d shut that sh– down in NO time.
Why I Don’t Care If The Health Care Bill Passes
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 3, 2010 by admin in Health & Wellness, Politics
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system. But the Health Care Bill certainly will present someone with a bill.
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When I’m in a hospital room, I usually have a |
I feel sorry for Barack Obama. Not only will history likely blame him for the long tail of the bank failures and bailouts for which the Bush administration was actually responsible, it will also likely blame him (because of the passage of the health care bill that has divided the country recently) for the continued malignancy that is our decrepit, bloated, and corrupt “health care system”. I put that phrase in quotes because I believe that – as the late Walter Cronkite once said – “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system“. While a bunch of Democratic congressmen who have nothing to worry about regarding their health care plans sit around patting themselves on the back for passing a health care bill that has supposedly been the dream of generations of Democratic politicians, the fact is that things won’t change for many, and we’ll still be left saddled with the most expensive and least effective health care in the developed world. The bill does NOTHING to fix what any intelligent person sees as the fundamental problem; it might in fact worsen it. Whether you describe the problem as being a result of government meddling and insurance, or as patient overuse of treatment because insurance will pay for it, or as a result of doctors requiring malpractice insurance, you will notice the word “insurance” keeps popping up. The fact is that the mind-boggling arrangements for billing and payment that exist today would be IMPOSSIBLE without the insurance industry supporting its piece of what really is an incredibly elaborate and blatant ponzi scheme being pulled off by an industry and a profession that operates under the ultimate smokescreen: an illusion of benevolence Read the rest of this entry »