Politics

Overheard this morning in the office, spoken by an otherwise smart and talented 20 year old: “It’s not fair. People who have higher incomes obviously worked harder for that money, so why should they be taxed at a higher rate? It’s just not fair.” Spoken like one who has only known those higher income levels. Let’s go talk to some minimum wage factory workers and tell them that they’re simply not working very hard. Also: “Someone who works three jobs and earns the same income as someone who just works 9 to 5 is taxed at the same rate. That’s not fair.” Honey, someone who works three jobs is probably doing it to simply make ends meet and not earning enough to even be taxed in the first place. This is the same woman who informed us that, although she is a Republican, she was going to vote in the Democratic primary, for Hillary Clinton, so that Barack Obama wouldn’t win the nomination, thus giving John McCain an easier win in the national election. And you know what, it’s not even 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. It’s too early for this crap.

I early-voted last week in the primaries. This is the first time I have ever voted in a primary, and it’s also the first election in which I have ever donated money to a political candidate. I guess that this time around, I feel that there is so much at stake and our current embarrassment of a president has run this country so far into the ground, that we have a huge opportunity to make changes. I’d say “it can’t get much worse, right?” but then I think back to Orwell’s “1984” and realize that, while we’re getting closer and closer every day to that kind of reality, it’s not entirely here yet. However, Dubya has another 329 days in office (and counting!) and I’m fairly certain he’s going to do a lot more damage before he’s booted out of the Oval Office. I have never wanted to vote in a primary election before because doing so would officially register me as a Democrat, and I have never wished to declare an official affiliation with a major political party. After all, I have voted for third-party candidates plenty of times, and will continue to do so as I see fit. But I like what Barack Obama has to say, and I definitely would prefer to see him in office over Hillary Clinton. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll vote for whichever one of them wins the Democratic primary, but his ideas inspired me to donate to his campaign. Anyway, when I went to vote, the lady at the computer asked me which party I wanted to vote in, and slowly and methodically entered my information from my voter card. I don’t think she liked computers very much. She completed and printed out my paperwork and very carefully instructed me to first […]

The incomparable Molly Ivins died this past Wednesday at age 62 from breast cancer. She was a fiery Texas liberal with a razor sharp wit and writing style. She coined the term “Shrub” to refer to the current President Bush, and was an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. I never met her and truthfully didn’t know all that much about her life other than what I’ve gleaned from her columns these past many years, but from reading a little bit today on the news sites, she sounds like someone I really would have liked to have known. A strong woman, a woman who told it like it was, a friend to the legendary Texas governor Ann Richards (whom I also would have liked to have known). You know that hypothetical question people ask, “What historical figures would you like to have dinner with?” I think that I would say my grandma, Ann Richards, and Molly Ivins. Wow, what conversation that would be!

That shirt you’re wearing right now? Chances are, Dick Cheney hates it. That car you drive? Thinks it’s for whiny un-American pansies. The fact that you’ve probably eaten tofu and wear designer shoes and have actually had sex while standing up? Pervert heathen traitor to the real America, Dick thinks. He hates that. Some days, Dick has trouble counting all the ways in which he hates you, the world, life. Some days, he hates the fact that there are not enough hours in the day for him to count the ways in which he hates you and all you probably stand for. This makes him sad. Which he also hates.

VICTORY! The Democrats are now the majority party in both the U.S. House and the Senate. As reported moments ago, Virginia, the last state to report, went Blue by a mere 7200 votes, thus confirming the Democratic majority in the Senate. The House went Democratic by a fairly wide margin, confirmed yesterday. I’m so happy that, as Arushi said, Americans show up to the polls when it’s important. And Rumsfeld resigned. !!!! (But will one evil supplant another? I don’t know much yet about his successor, Robert Gates.) If I wasn’t feeling like I’d been hit by a truck full of phlegm, I’d be dancing in the streets. Of course, here in the Giant Red State of Texas, it’s still vastly Republican/conservative. The closeted homo slick used car salesman Rick Perry won the governorship again — not that there’s anything wrong with that — the homo part, I mean — but it wasn’t by anything that you could call a “landslide.” And good old Kinky Friedman, bless his heart, took a full 13% of the vote. Not bad for a no-bullshit-taking Jewish cowboy poet. For the record, I voted a straight Democratic ticket with the exception of a vote for Kinky, and in races where there was no Dem candidate I voted for the Libertarian candidate instead, and that’s only because they frighten me just slightly less than Republicans do. The funny part is, so many of the people I talked to, both liberal and conservative alike, voted exactly the same way I did. Also for the record, I am not a member of the Democratic Party and am not of the mindset that Democrats = Good and Republicans = Evil. In fact, sometimes the shades of grey inbetween extend so far to each side that it’s hard to tell […]

yes, that’s OK, go ahead and keep laughing at the cleverness of my post title. really. i’ll wait. … … dee dee dee, dum de dum, hhmmmmmmmm hhrmmm mmhmmm… now that you’ve got ahold of yourself again, thank you very much for the laugh. i feel validated. 🙂 i know by now we have allllll heard about the vice president of the united states, dick cheney, shooting an elderly man in the face last saturday when he mistook him for a quail. everyone’s reporting it as an accident. and i agree, i’m sure it was. the guy is supposedly a friend of his, after all. it’s not like he was out hunting with, like, michael moore and OOPSIE! i won’t even talk about how i feel about guns, and hunting, and the theories that they were trying to keep it quiet and not tell the media. then yesterday, we hear that the poor guy he shot had a heart attack in the hospital, to boot, directly caused by a pellet to the heart.