As we all know, the Reps are just itching to get back into power and they actually think they have a chance this year to make some significant changes. So I’ve been reading up on their ideas and I’ve come up with what they have in mind for us, if and when this great upheaval occurs.

1. Dismantle those dreadful health-care programs that Obama is so proud of.
2. Take the Tarp money away from all the banks and let them fail. Dog-gone it, there is no such thing as “too big to fail”. Just let them fail, who cares! Conveniently forget that it was the banks that failed in the Great Depression and in the four years of the Hoover administration, nothing occurred to help the US economy. It was only when FDR arrived on the scene that things started to get better.
3. Same for car companies, take that Tarp money away from them too. Who needs car companies if they can’t make it.
4. Use that Tarp money to pay down the national debt, or least the debt that Obama created. The 7 Trillion that Bush spent is sacred and doesn’t need to be repaid.
5. Dismantle the Green Revolution. Don’t do anything to curb global warming because as we all know, it’s just a hoax concocted by liberal eggheads who really have no clue about what’s actually going on.
6. Also conveniently forget that it was Bush who got us into the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place and left a monumental fuck up for Obama to fix. Complain loudly about the cost of the war.
7. Declare torture as legal as long as you call it something else.
8. Once and for all, take away the right of women to have abortions, even though it is in fact a constitutional right. At the same time, keep misinterpreting the constitution with regard to guns, claiming that individuals, including gangs and gun nuts, are in fact well armed militiamen, which is what the constitution calls for: a well armed militia. To Republicans, gangs are well-armed militias. However, don’t ask who they might be protecting.
9. Give big tax breaks to big businesses who have managed to overcome all odds and are now back in business making huge profits without the need to rehire old employees. They deserve to keep everything they make.
10. The model city for this administration will be: Detroit. Housing prices are extremely low and there are plenty of jobs in Detroit for private security firms to protect well-to-do neighborhoods. Also on the horizon more work is planned — digging moats and fences to protect those neighborhoods. As soon as the fence building is complete along the Texas border with Mexico they will start on the Detroit fences and moats, alligators will be optional.

There’s more:
11. Combine church with state. Down with democracy, up with theocracy. Oh, and dash of hypocrisy too. Put God in charge but don’t forget who pays the bills for the GOP to stay in power: big business, big oil, big pharma, and of course, the ever-lovin’ NRA.
12. There doesn’t seem to be any plan for the future, there are no ideas about how to solve the depression (the new one just created when the banks fail), or unemployment, or the state of the rest of the world, but nobody expects us to. After all, we’re the Party of No. We don’t think ahead, and we don’t care about “others”, only stupid liberals do that.

And finally, thinking about the next presidential election, recreate the glory of the Bush years by running Sarah Palin for president, Rush Limbaugh for VP and Glen Beck for Secretary of State or Defense or maybe both.

So, if all of this really resonates with you, hurry up and join the nearest Tea Party. You are a tried and true Republican. If, however, it makes you sick at heart, you are probably a liberal.

The spammers never give up, huh? That’s why it isn’t easy for legitimate responders to have their say on this blog. As usual, we’ve been inundated with creeps who want to use this blog as their personal toilet. They are sure you want to read about where the best porn sites are, how to get drugs easily, where the online card games are, and that you have no other way of finding out this stuff, except by reading this blog. They are so stupid, but apparently they have success with this practice, so they keep bugging us.

I can’t wait for the day that the internet finally becomes a little more civilized. But you know what that means — more rules, more enforcement of rules, forces in control making people behave themselves like good citizens. Maybe then, I won’t have to spend time deleting all these foul messages.

The Phantom

Amazing
Inspiring
heart-felt
Intelligent
World-wide applause and breathing sighs of relief
Hope for the future
The world will be a better place
Flawless election process
Tearful, yet hopeful, acceptance speech
A new puppy in the White House

Obama says that the candidate’s family is off the table. He means Sarah’s family. Okay. But what about the candidate herself? What kind of a person is she really? First off, she’s a truly died-in-the-wool conservative. Yet she glibly thinks that she can gather up the Hillary dems simply because they are both women. Well, that’s where the similarity ends between those two. Good grief. Hillary stands for everything that Sarah is against. I was definitely pro Hillary but now I’m pro Obama. Sorry, Sarah, this feminist simply cannot vote for you.

And then, of course, there’s Sarah’s personal stuff. In an interview today on NPR a gushing Alaskan delegate to the Rep convention said: well, she has raised five children. RAISED FIVE CHILDREN? What? One of them is only four months old, and a special needs child. I hardly call a four month old special needs child to be already raised. Won’t that little boy need to see his mom once in a while? And of course the other problem is Sarah’s pregnant seventeen year old. Where was Sarah when she was about to be sexually active? Off doing politics somewhere. Nobody was around to tell her what’s what. Of course, Sarah is against sex ed, especially in schools. I guess she must be against sex ed at home too. (Hello, Sarah, it is possible to raise little girls to grow into mature women who don’t accidentally have a baby.) Who is going to help that child-woman through what will definitely be a difficult pregnancy? She will probably be delivering it in January, Sarah could possibly be at the swearing in ceremony, not in the nursery helping her daughter and first grandchild (to say nothing of her own baby). Who will teach her how to be a mom? Sarah? I doubt it. Sarah wasn’t there for her daughter and she won’t be there for the rest of the family. As far as Sarah is concerned, her family is already raised. She has moved on to bigger things.

And then the other idea that the Reps are trying desperately to float is how much they embrace pregnant teenagers. Another one said today, again on NPR, that all families have the pregnancy problem. What? I had no idea that all the Reps families are so prolific. We all know they are anti-abortion, and against sex ed in school, but I thought they were pro-marriage, especially between a man and a woman. That means, obviously, between seventeen year olds too. Sarah is quick to point out that the seventeen year olds will be getting married soon. As if that will solve all their problems.

Of course, the reps tradationally ignore those unwed moms’ babies after they get out of the womb. They want to deny them access to day care, to health insurance, they would even deny school lunches if possible. The poorest people in the USA today are children, especially those of single moms. And poor families have a hard time making a living on the minimum wage, even though the dems wrung some money out of them after years and years of stone walling that responsibility. But according to Sarah, they will be married. But what do they know about being parents? What did Sarah teach them? Will either of them work? Will they be independent or will they be living in Washington, where the “help” will help raise these children?

And then there’s McCain. What was he thinking? Even though the reps are denying it, I don’t think they looked past Sarah’s winning smile when they decided to choose her. There are plenty of qualified reps that are willing and able to take on the job of VP. Isn’t it sort of a slap in the face to them to choose somebody like Sarah Palin? It seems pretty scary to me to think that McCain could make such an unwise choice for a running mate. He wanted to be daring, he wanted to do something that would take our minds off of the dems. (Of course, there is presidence for goofs in choosing VPs: remember little Danny Quail?)  I give you that Sarah is a smart and successful woman, but what about the price she is paying? I’m sure her family is very proud of her, but it really doesn’t look good for her family or for our country to have a person like her so close to the White House. She, like McCain, suffers from a serious lack of good judgment. And worse, McCain obviously thinks that VP is a job that really doesn’t matter in the long run.

There were 43 cars in today’s race. Shall we do the math? It’s a 500 mile race, the cars will each use approximately 100 gallons of fuel in their trip from nowhere to nowhere - an endless circle of speed. So that’s approximately 43,000 gallons of gas used in just one race today, and there are probably lots of speedway races going on around our country.

Lots of people watch the races AT THE TRACK. Maybe 100,000 folks on a good day attend these spectacles of boredom, watching cars running in circles trying to go nowhere faster than the car behind them, while they breathe polluted air and grow deaf as the speedsters roar by. Say there are 30,000 spectator cars and trucks at the track, and they drive an average of 25 miles to get to the track - some drive lots more, some less of course but for the sake of argument: that would be about 750,000 miles driven by the spectators. Say they average 15 miles per gallon. That gives us another 50,000 gallons of gas burned up in one day on this one race track. Isn’t that rather appalling!

And we could probably add another 50,000 gallons of gas when we consider all those trucks, trailers and RVs littering the center of the oval, all those camp followers drive thousands of miles every week, burning up the roads between tracks all over the country.
I’d love to be able to factor in the amount of pollution rising into the sky from the exhaust pipes, from the burned up tires and brake pads. I wish I could factor in the amount of sewage generated in one spot by all those people, the time wasted getting there, sitting there and then getting back home, the amount of junk food that’s eaten and the pile of garbage that is generated by those 100,000 people. It boggles my mind.

While this is horrendous waste of our country’s valuable and scarce resources are being burned up this afternoon, thoughtful and worried people around our country are trying to figure out how to save a mile or two while driving to run errands, are car pooling to work, spending lots of extra time using public transportation, doing whatever they can not to use an extra drop of gas. People are switching to more fuel efficient cars, are taking their lives in their hands bicycling and riding scooters to work, while wringing their hands at the rising cost of fuel. People are asking questions like: should I turn off my car’s engine while waiting at the red light? Should I drive more slowly? Should I, gulp, buy a hybrid?

And have you noticed that the news commentators are still talking about four dollar gas, as if that’s something awful. In California it has reached five dollars in many places.

Meanwhile at the track, the tracksters and speedsters simply raise the ticket prices to pay for the added expense and give no thought at all to what this sport is doing to our country.

There’s an item in Yahoo stating that 57 young men have been arrested in Saudi Arabia for flirting! Flirting is a crime there. Hard to imagine, right?

Does anybody not know that the US murder rate is higher than any other country in the world? Google it. Check it out for yourselves. While we mourned the 3,000 killed in the 911 attacks, 20,000 others were murdered during the same year. We kill off approximately 100,000 people in the US every ten years. Now that’s a crime. What do we do about it? Nothing really. If we told President Bush those statistics, he’d probably declare war on us, or, maybe Canada. After all, he went after Iraq for no real reason in order to avenge the 911 killings and in great fear that those evil doers might come after him again, and in the process probably a half a million people lost their lives (although we are trying every way possible to cover up those statistics).

Speaking of statistics, we have to recognize that some countries do not keep track of their murders: countries in Africa principally. Among the places in the world that do keep track of murders is Puerto Rico. That’s the only place with a higher murder rate than the US, but we own them! So they are really us.

Guns are the big culprit. Nations without guns have fewer deaths. If we eliminated the guns, murderers would have a harder time killing their victims. Yet we are too afraid to even try to get some of the guns off the streets. Unfortunately, our new hero, Obama, said the other day that he would do nothing about the gun problem.

It’s depressing, isn’t it?

If you’re like me, you are very happy that the new year has begun. All the Christmas stuff is out of sight for the next 10 months. Yeah. It will be back before we even know it.

FYI: for anybody who wants to make a “legitimate” comment to this site, you’ll have to register. The blog spammers caught up with me again. They are a ghastly bunch. They spew their horrible ads for awful stuff all over the comment pages. I do not want to see their advertising for porn sites, gambling venues or cheap phony meds on these pages. So, as a result, we all suffer.

Let’s hope together we can make a better world starting this very year.

Happy 2008!

We’ve just published the latest issue of Clever Magazine, www.clevermag.com, our first environmental issue. We asked for “good news” and we got some, but it’s not enough. As Al Gore pointed out in his Nobel speech, we must act quickly because “too late” is almost here.

In the meantime, the USA and China, the biggest polluters and the cause of the problem in the first place, are dithering. Unfortunately, the environmental crisis must be solved through political action. Individual efforts are not enough. That’s why the good news about individual efforts is not enough.

Both Bush administrations were firmly anti-environmentalist. The current Bush wants to turn back the clock to when we were even bigger polluters in the interest of oil men and run-away capitalism. It’s frustrating to watch our politicians doing nothing except blocking all bills and ideas that could help tackle this problem.

What On Earth will it take to start the US on the right direction? I’m thinking 2008 is the year that will bring us a change. We must ask all the presidential candidates what they intend to do about global warming and then choose accordingly.

Can the Earth wait that long?