Starbucks has just moved up a notch in my book. Vote on Tuesday and they’ll give you a free coffee.
Tag: voting
Sarah Palin did and interview with Brian Williams recently, with McCain by her side of course, and was asked an interesting question:
Now obviously she doesn’t condone abortion clinic bombers but it’s a little ridiculous that she couldn’t call them terrorists. Why couldn’t she say the word? Is she associated with an abortion clinic bomber? Is she afraid of offending the abortion clinic bomber crowd? Is she just an idiot? The answer is probably the last suggestion there but that whole little conversation is interesting regardless.
Another interesting campaign story is the one about a girl who was “attacked by a big black man who carved the letter ‘B’ into her cheek”. This didn’t actually happen but guess who reported it anyway?
This was a McCain campaign volunteer who has obviously gone off the deep end either in her support for McCain or her hatred of black people. Seriously, she didn’t have to say that this imaginary attacker was a black guy but she did. That could have had some serious implications for the racial divide in that city and it would have been based on a lie. I kind of hope that she cut that deep enough into her face that she’ll be stuck with a ‘B’ on her cheek for the rest of her life. It would be like a cooler real life version of the Scarlett Letter where you don’t have to feel sympathy for the person branded.
Lastly, I got my sample ballot yesterday and I would like to point out to everyone that we are voting for more than just the president on November 4th. Just to make things easy on anyone who’s lazy but might have some inclination towards voting, here are some quick links to find out about these people.
For the US Senate:
- Frank Lautenberg
- Dick Zimmer
- Jeffrey Boss
Personally, I’m going for Lautenberg. Zimmer has some bad ideas on how prisons should be run like taking away all luxuries from the prisoners to save money. That sounds fine until you realize how much more dangerous a prison becomes when you don’t have some form of entertainment to keep those guys and gals docile. I know this because my dad runs a prison. He also seems somewhat along the lines of a neo-conservative. Lautenberg is a little more liberal than I like but he’s better than Zimmer, to me, by far. And Jeff Boss is just some crazy truther who thinks people in Mexico have tried to kill him to shut him up.
For the House of Representatives:
- David Kurkowski
- Frank LoBiondo
- Gary Stein
- Peter Boyce
- Costantino Rozzo
- Just some crazy Buddhist guy.
Personally, I’m going Kurkowski. LoBiondo is the incumbent and the last time I looked at his record he was pretty much a mirror image of Bush. He’s a partisan hack. The only thing I know of that he’s stood his own ground on is the bail out bill which he voted against but it’s questionable whether that was the best way to vote or not. In this case I’m kind of voting against LoBiondo instead of for Kurkowski. Kurkowski was a school teacher and is a small business owner and doesn’t have much to say but at least he’s not a Bush clone. The other three couldn’t even be bothered to make a proper web site that says anything about their ideas so I can’t be bothered to vote for them.
For Cape May County Sheriff:
- George Hallett
- Gary Schaffer
There isn’t much info on these two other than their resumes and I like Hallett’s more. He’s been in a secret service agent, a CIA agent, and a police officer. He also sounds level headed. Schaffer has just been a long time Ocean City cop. I trust the guy with the diverse background over the guy who’s biggest problem for the last 25 years has been rounding up underage drinkers. Also, I was told that Schaffer, while walking the streets campaigning, found a little girl and told her to bring his flyer up to someone’s door instead of doing it himself. Apparently this little girl didn’t have a clue what she was doing or who the guy was. That just sounds weird.
For Lower Township Mayor:
- Harvey roach
- Glenn Douglass
- Michael Beck
There’s hardly any info on these three. I’m leaning towards Beck because of some vague idea of his positions but I’m still unsure about this one. Check them out for yourself.
That’s the low-down though. If you’re voting on the 4th for president and don’t want to leave those other parts blank or just check off who you want based on party then it might be worth looking into these guys. It doesn’t take very long, honest.
There has been a lot of talk about ACORN. This is an nationwide organization that aims to register low income people and minorities to vote. Recently it’s been brought to the attention of the national media that in some areas ACORN has turned in a lot of fake registrations. You can hear daily from the Republicans about how this is voter fraud and evidence that Obama is trying to steal the election. It’s not.
First of all, the most important point, Obama has not used ACORN at all during the general election.
Now that that’s out of the way, there are very good reasons why this has become such an issue. ACORN was paying people by how many registrations they turned in. The natural reaction for some would be to write up a bunch of fake registrations and get a lot of money for no work. These people have, for the most part, been fired. The registrations they turned in were flagged by ACORN as being fake. In some states every registration collected must be turned in to the election board so that the board can be in charge of deciding if something is fake or not. ACORN followed this rule and sent the bad registrations with the good and flagged each to be clear. That’s it. That’s the whole situation. Now, somehow, ACORN is destroying democracy and they’re becoming a focal point of the election. Remember those issue things? Yeah, all that stuff about policy and the real problems our country is facing? The GOP would apparently like you to ignore those things and focus on manufactured crap like this ACORN “issue”.
Also, for the record, this isn’t voter fraud. Voter fraud would be someone actually showing up and voting illegally. Brave New Films has put out a video that gives a good explanation for all this. They get into stuff about how Republicans want voter turn out to be low, and I’m sure there are some that do, but that may be the unfair part of this video. Anyway, watch.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t. It’s very easy and common to have a disconnect from the happenings in the world anymore. So even when we may have been witnessing the biggest financial catastrophe (or the greatest financial bet) in the last one hundred years most of you probably didn’t bat an eyelash. I think that’s a problem.
Yesterday the House of Representatives voted down the financial bail out bill. Some 40% of Democrats voted against the bill as well as the majority of Republicans. The bill failed by twelve votes and the market reacted with the biggest single day point drop, for the DOW, in history. That’s not in the last decade or two, that’s ever. This isn’t the biggest problem though, the biggest problem is that credit may just completely freeze up. Anyone who needs a loan for anything (a house, a car, payroll, to order inventory) may be out of luck. Our credit based economy could very soon come to a halt. Some people have even said that your ATM or credit card may not work anymore. That one is a bit of a stretch but I think it’s worth it to check the performance of your bank’s stock. ING has dropped from $48 to $20 in the last six months so I’ve seriously considered moving my money.
There is a really good side to this. The bet that a lot of politicians in the House are betting on is that doing nothing is doing the most to fix this problem. After all, why should we prop up failing businesses? Maybe we should let those businesses fail, even if it hits us hard in a lot of ways, so that better businesses can take their place. This may even be the best way to keep our market free while giving powerful firms a very good reason not to partake in the shady trading practices that helped get us here in the first place. The bill was going to include oversight on this kind of thing but wouldn’t it be nice if we instead told the market that if they screw up it’s completely on their shoulders? It’s like teaching a kid responsibility. You don’t help them learn this valuable skill by fixing all the problems they create for themselves.
Of course, there are very good reasons for propping these businesses up like I have mentioned already. In the end this all seems like a wild guess at which choice will help the most. No one is crunching numbers to find out and it wouldn’t really be helpful as economics is as much a social phenomenon as it is a mathematical phenomenon. Personally, I lean to the “let the crap fall out” side but I’m regularly going back and forth on the issue. The only thing I know for sure is that you should all be paying attention. As much as we all like to think we live in a vacuum, we really don’t. We elect the people who decide these things and their decisions could decide whether we enter another Great Depression or not. If we do, it’s not the politicians we should blame, it’s the people. We should blame the people who have become lazy and bought into the idea that nothing we do makes a difference. We should blame the people that take the success of their nation for granted and choose to forgo the voting rights that others in the past were willing to die for, whether they were soldiers or just minorities that wanted a voice. In short, inform yourself.
I can remember a time, not even all that long ago, when I didn’t care all that much about voting. I would usually only vote in the presidential elections and never, ever, ever for a democrat or republican. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t agree with their views, I didn’t even really know what their views were, it was more this subconscious feeling that there was something wrong with only having two realistic options in every election. Even more prominent was this feeling that no matter who was put in the White House my life really didn’t change at all. I didn’t feel effected in the slightest by the people running the country. This seemed to also manifest this feeling that these people were making empty promises since they always would talk about how things will be better when they’re put in office yet it never seemed to make anything better.. or worse.
What finally convinced me that it really does matter, that I’m effected, by who is put in charge of things was George W Bush’s presidency. Good ol’ GW managed to be so absurdly bad at running a country that there are now constant reminders to show how much a president can really do. It wasn’t some angelic savior of the people that made it obvious that the president determines the quality of life for Americans, it was a stubborn alcoholic who can’t even repeat a proverb correctly (anyone remember the “fool me once..” screw-up?). From our deteriorating dollar and all its economic implications, to the Iraq War, to soaring gas prices, to the attempts to strip Americans of constitutional rights, Bush has done a thorough job of showing how much power a president really has.
I won’t get into the details about all the ways he has screwed up, unless you somehow missed these things and would like me to, but I will draw some conclusions from this revelation. If one man can run a government into the ground so thoroughly, can one man or woman also turn our lives into cushy bastions of pleasure? Now that may be a stretch, but not all that much of a stretch. It’s not so much that every little thing will be taken care of and we’ll never have any worries, just that the opportunities to put ourselves into a position where we have no worries can be created. Do you know how much college costs now compared to 8 years ago? Do you know how much gas cost 8 years ago? Do you know how easy it was to find affordable housing 8 years ago? These are pretty concrete changes that effect everyone who doesn’t want to live with their mom for the rest of their lives. If we could fall off the wagon to this degree then I don’t see why we couldn’t hop back on that wagon with the right management and get it moving even faster.
I think there’s also this growing since of responsibility for one’s world that comes from getting older. As a child and a teenager you’re, usually, very sheltered from the realities of the world. Once that shelter disappears you start to realize, or at least I did, that the things that you seemed to be able to take for granted didn’t come without a cost. Some of this I realized when I lived in New York. I remember when it would get hard, and I’d be trying to stretch each penny, and my biggest concern was the idea of having to move back to south Jersey and take a hit to my pride when I needed to rely on a parental figure yet again. It made me think, what if I didn’t have those figures in my life? Parents aren’t there forever. There’s always that chance that you won’t have someone to pick you up in life when you’ve royally screwed yourself over. All those solutions that I could have followed up on when I lived in New York would have been necessary if I didn’t have some enormous safety net to fall back on.
The point I’m getting to is that, while it may seem like it on the surface, life is not something that should be taken for granted. Anything can happen and the world that seemed so safe and secure as a kid was really illusory. If you want to maintain that illusion you have to be proactive. When this stops seeming true, just remind yourself of what a guy like Bush can do to your life.
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