I just had to post a little rant…a little food for thought. Feel free to argue with me if I’m missing something. Also note, that when I say “we”…I mean the collective “we” and certainly include myself in that.

So here we are, facing the biggest economic crisis of our generation.

(http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/united_states_economy/index.html)

All the warning signs of another Great Depression are looming over like a big black cloud. Locally, Micron announced 2,000 job layoffs by summer. You can add an exponent to that number if you look at how that will impact local businesses.

And yet we’re more concerned about playing the blame game. It’s Bush’s fault, It’s the Republicans, fault, it’s the Democrat’s fault. It’s that damn Obama…he’s been in office since January 20th and hasn’t fixed our problems yet.

George Bush did not cause our current problems. We did. We put him into office. Some may argue that our electoral system allowed that to happen. Well…who voted our electors into office? We did.
For 8 years we sat on our hands fat, dumb and happy living the American dream of having more things than we can afford, and when we reached the end, when it was too late, we blame the guy in charge. If we had put the Bush administration under the same scrutiny as the current administration where would be??

Currently, our Congress, the people we voted in to represent us, are doing absolutely fucking nothing for our interests. They are too engrossed in partisan politics and are too busy trying to make the other side look worse for the next election. It’s not about fixing our mess it’s like a cheesy sci-fi movie Republican Vs. Democrat.

Pardon me for yet another analogy, but it’s like we’re on a big huge cruise ship that’s sinking and the people we put in charge are arguing over what color the chairs should be in the lifeboats.

Recently “the Governator” of California started a “deficit clock” that counted “The number of days that the California legislature has failed to act”. Someone needs to do the same for our U.S. Legislature.
So my point of it all, is that everyone needs to share and take ownership in the responsibility of our current situation and get over expending useless energy on the blame game.

Recently a friend of mine reminded me that our country was founded by a bunch of guys sitting in pub drinking beer and talking shit about how ridiculous a certain King was.

The birth of the American spirit.

Far be it from me to post a revolutionary manifesto in a public forum, but why are we not at least meeting in pubs, “talking shit” about the status quo and sending, emails, letters, phone calls & petitions to the people “representing us” letting them know we’re pissed that they’re doing nothing? When did the American spirit turn into a fat junk food eating, video game playing couch potato willing to let our fate fall in the hands of someone else?
I said my peace. I feel a little better.

“Be the change you want to see in the world”
–Mahatma Gandhi

There are times  when it’s embarassing to me a citizen of this state.

http://www.ktvb.com/news/localnews/stories/ktvbn-jan1609-inauguration_in_class.d69cfac.html

http://margaretandhelen.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/sarah-palin-sit-down-and-shut-the-hell-up/#comment-10790

Too funny!! I had to share this one!!

So we, the American people elected this idiot not once…………. but twice into office.

People honestly believe that McCain is a…no…I won’t use the “m” word.  McCain is still a republican.  He maintains the same core values & policies of the current administration.  Is he really going to bite the hand that feeds?

He constantly claims Bipartisanship while making blanket attacks against Obama, Democrats and “liberals”.  How is that considered “reaching across the table” maybe he meant reaching across and bitch slapping those liberal socialist bastards?

Here is some further info for my fellow Obama supporters still remaining optimistic.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060814005496&newsLang=en

Americans are more familiar with the Seven Dwarfs, The Three Stooges, Harry Potter, Homer Simpson and Superman than the news of the day, world leaders or classic literature according to a national poll* commissioned by the producers of Gold Rush, a groundbreaking seven-week interactive reality game focused on pop culture, and conducted by Zogby International. The survey was commissioned by the game’s producers to gauge America’s pop culture know-how, and help shape Gold Rush’s pop culture trivia challenges. Gold Rush, from AOL and Mark Burnett Productions, will be available at aol.com/goldrush beginning September 13, 2006.

Surveys yield that American knowledge on U.S. constitution is limited

Three different surveys administered a during a 20 year time period yielded the same
results-American’s knowledge of the U.S. Constitution is lacking.

Most american voters don’t have a clue what they’re voting for, it’s more of homecoming queen contest.  This is what the electoral college is for.  To help protect from mob rule or as what is often referred to as the “tyranny of the masses”.  There are still people that honestly think we live in a democracy.  If you look at history…every pure democratic government has crashed and burned.  Our constitution outlines a bicameral Republic.

My point is, I don’t believe that the country is hungry enough for real change.  I haven’t given up all hope but I won’t be surprised that next week will bring McCain & Palin into the White House.  I won’t be surprised that Americans honestly believe that 2 people can fix something that is outside of their constitutional powers.  If we really are this stupid…I guess we get what’s coming.  I just don’t want to hear anyone bitch about it like what is occurring with Bush’s administration right now!

I’m off to chase a toddler around the house.  See you at the voting booths Tuesday!

A great blog from an Alaskan writer regarding the Alaskan view of Palin.

Sarah Palin: The view from Alaska

Amid “Troopergate” and other government scandals, including killing wolf pups, an Alaskan writer explains why the Palin phenomenon rings hollow in his home state.

By Nick Jans

Editor’s note: For Salon’s complete coverage of Sarah Palin, click here.

---

Oct. 11, 2008 |

I sat on the bank of the Kobuk River in northwest arctic Alaska on a mid-September morning. Upstream somewhere, wolves were howling — their chorus filling the silence, close enough that I could hear the aspiration at the end of each wavering call. Behind me, the slate-gray heave of the Brooks Range spilled off toward the north, the shapes of some peaks so familiar I’ve seen them in my sleep. The nearest highway lay 250 miles away. This is the Alaska where I spent half my life, and the only place that’s ever felt like home — the land of Eskimo villages, waves of migrating caribou and seemingly limitless space.

 

 

Though I was beyond the reach of the Internet and cellphones, and life was filled with rutting bull moose, incandescent autumn light and fresh grizzly tracks, I knew that thousands of miles to the south, the rest of the country was getting a crash course on our governor, Sarah Palin — someone who believes that climate change isn’t our fault; is dead set against a woman’s right to choose; has supported creationism in the schools; and was prayed over by a visiting minister at her church to shield her against witchcraft.

 

 

How was I to explain to all my lower 48 friends and writing colleagues how such a person could have been elected to lead our state — let alone been chosen to possibly become vice-president? Truth be told, I was as startled as anyone when I heard the news. At first I thought the McCain campaign’s announcement was some sort of bad joke.

 

 

In the broadest sense, Palin is a poseur. Alaska is too large and culturally diverse (it’s only a bit smaller than the entire lower 48 east of the Mississippi, and once was divided into four time zones) to be summed up by some abstract, romanticized notion. And even if it could be, it sure wouldn’t be symbolized by Palin. “The typical Alaskan? She couldn’t be farther from it,” says Alaska House Minority Leader Beth Kertulla.

 

 

Still, Palin is a genuine Alaskan — of a kind. The kind that flowed north in the wake of the ’70s oil boom, Bible Belt politics and attitudes under arm, and transformed this state from a free-thinking, independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes and an all-for-me mentality.

 

 

Palin’s Alaska is embodied in Wasilla, a blue-collar, sharp-elbowed town of burgeoning big box stores, suburban subdivisions, evangelical pocket churches and car dealerships morphing across the landscape, outward from Anchorage, the state’s urban epicenter. She has lived in Wasilla practically all her life, and even now resides there, the first Alaska executive to eschew the white-pillared mansion in Juneau, down on the Southeast Panhandle.

 

 

Folks in the Mat-Su Valley, as the area is known, overwhelmingly support their favorite daughter’s policies — including a state-sanctioned program where private pilots chase down and kill wolves from small aircraft, and another that favors oil drilling offshore in the arctic sea ice and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These same voters forage at McDonald’s and Safeway in their hunter camouflage, and make regular wilderness forays up and down the state’s limited highway grid with ATVs, snowmobiles and airboats in tow behind their oversize trucks. Sometimes I imagine I can hear the roar echoing across the state, all the way to the upper Kobuk, where easements for the highways of tomorrow are already staked out across the tundra.

 

 

Like many Alaskans, I resent Palin’s claims that she speaks for all of us, and cringe when she tosses off her stump speech line, “Well, up in Alaska, we….” Not only did I not vote for her, she represents the antithesis of the Alaska I love. As mayor, she helped shape Wasilla into the chaotic, poorly planned strip mall that it is; as governor, she’s promoted that same headlong drive toward development and despoilment on a grand scale, while paying lip service to her love of the place.

 

 

As for that frontierswoman shtick, take another look at that hairpiece-augmented beehive and those stiletto heels. Coming from a college-educated family, living in a half-million-dollar view home, basking in a net worth of $1.25 million, and having owned 40-some registered motorized vehicles in the past two decades (including 17 snowmobiles and a plane) hardly qualifies Palin and her clan as the quintessential Joe Six-Pack family unit — though the adulation from that quarter shows the Palins must be fulfilling some sort of role-model fantasy.

 

 

Palin can claim to know Alaska; the fact is, she’s seen only a minuscule fraction of it — and that doesn’t include Little Diomede Island, the one place in Alaska where you actually can see Russia. So she can ride an ATV and shoot guns. Set her down in the bush on her own and I bet we’d discover she’s about as adept at butchering a moose and building a fire at 40 below zero as she is at discussing Supreme Court decisions. And that mountain-woman act is only the tip of a hollow iceberg.

 

 

Palin, and by extension, the McCain campaign, has hijacked our state for political purposes, much to the chagrin of the tens of thousands of Alaskans who loathe what she stands for. Her much-touted popularity among residents has eroded over the past six weeks to somewhere in the mid-60s — not exactly what you’d expect in support of a home girl making a White House run.

 

 

There are no doubt a variety of reasons for this decline, but many Alaskans are embarrassed — not just by her, but for our state and for ourselves. What’s with the smug posturing, recently adopted fake Minnesota accent, and that gosh-darn-it hockey mom pitch? Maybe it plays well in Peoria (and presumably Duluth), but it’s all an act. “She’s definitely put on a new persona since she’s been a vice-presidential candidate,” says Kertulla, who has worked closely with Palin for the past 18 months. “I don’t even recognize her.”

 

 

Affectations aside, there’s plenty about Palin we Alaskans do recognize, and all too well. She’s already proven to us that her promises of transparent government, attendant to the will of the people, are bear pucky. We know about her private e-mail accounts and her systematic obstruction of the Alaska Legislature’s investigation of the so-called Troopergate scandal. But let’s turn to her environmental record, where a similar pattern of obfuscation continues.

 

 

First, Palin pushed hard, along with sport hunting and guiding interests, to help defeat a ballot initiative that would have stopped the state’s current aerial wolf control program, which had been criticized by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council for flawed science. Now her administration has pointedly refused to respond to repeated public information requests (I’m one of the petitioners, and a potential litigant), regarding the apparently illegal killing of 14 wolf pups at their dens on the Alaska Peninsula this spring by state personnel, including two high-level Department of Fish and Game administrators. A biologist at the scene admitted to an independent wolf scientist that the 6-week-old pups were held down and shot in the head, one by one. This inhumane practice, known as “denning,” has been illegal for 40 years. But a simple request for information on the details of this operation, including to what extent the governor was involved in the decision, has resulted in a typical Palinesque roadblock and a string of untruths.

 

 

Our I-love-Alaska governor was also instrumental in defeating a ballot initiative to stop development of a gargantuan open-pit mine incongruously known as Pebble near the headwaters of the most productive salmon watershed in the state, Bristol Bay. The current mine design calls for building the world’s largest earthen dam to hold back an enormous lake of toxic waste — this in a known earthquake zone. Crazy stuff, yet Palin openly opposed the initiative, in lock step with international mining corporations that invested millions of dollars in a misinformation campaign.

 

 

But Palin’s certified anti-environmental whopper is her lawsuit against the Bush administration (of all outfits) for listing polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. She claimed Alaska’s own experts had completed a review of the federal data and concluded that the listing was uncalled for. The truth was, state biologists had come to the opposite conclusion. But that report was never released, and her researchers had a gag clamped on them. Palin simply didn’t want anything to get in the way of offshore oil drilling in moving pack ice — where there is no way to contain, let alone clean up, catastrophic spills.

 

 

Whenever science or rules get in Palin’s way, she blows them off. Says homesteader Mark Richards, co-founder of the Alaska Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (a moderate conservation group), “Palin, like Governor Murkowski before her, is part and parcel of the good-ol-boy network that says, ‘Alaska is open for business.’”

 

 

Want to talk to Sarah? As governor, she has been accessible only on her carefully chosen terms, a trend we’re now witnessing on the national stage. And how about those Katie Couric moments when she drifts just a skosh off a well-rehearsed script? Are those a recent phenomenon, brought on by all this new information, pressure and the liberal-gotcha media? Nah. She’s been spouting “political gibberish” (to quote gubernatorial opponent Andrew Halcro) since she arrived on the Alaska scene. Yet somehow she continues to get away with it.

 

 

In the end, Palin’s attempt to cash in on the Eau d’Alaska mystique as she supports its destruction sickens those of us who do love this land, not for what it will be some day, after the roads and mines and pipelines and cities and malls are all in, but for what it is now. What we see before us is the soul of an ambitious, ruthless, Parks Highway hillbilly — a woman who represents the Alaska you probably never want to meet, and the one we wish never existed. That said, we’re all too willing to take her back. The alternative is just too damn frightening.

 

 

 

 

 

– By Nick Jans

One would think that some with such a celebrated military career, often flaunted, one would have a better understanding of the word honorable.  Part of Leadership is leading by example.  Because of his leadership example McCain has kicked off a wave of negativity that he is having to back peddle and quash before it gets out of control.  Here is a great post on the topic by Joan Walsh:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/05/politics/politico/main4502153.shtml

McCain can’t seem to come up with a viable plan for fixing the economy.  His idea of “robbing peter to pay paul” tax philosophy isn’t his strongest platform.  So instead, he’s going to focus his attacks on Obama’s character.  (See above link).  I’m tired of hearing he & his running mate go on that they’re going to “fix the economy” followed by a God Bless America warm fuzzy but never any real content.

Here’s the Latest from Obama’s campaign manager:

“Over the weekend, John McCain’s top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and “turn the page” to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama.

In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.

But it’s not just McCain’s role in the current crisis that they’re avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.

During the savings and loan crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s, McCain’s political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.

Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain’s Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts — and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain. “  BarackObama.com

Looking forward to Tuesday’s debate!

An article by a conservative writer

Palin Problem
She’s out of her league.

By Kathleen Parker

If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream — away from Sarah Palin. To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president — and possibly president — is to risk being labeled anti-woman.

Or, as I am guilty of charging her early critics, supporting only a certain kind of woman.

Some of the passionately feminist critics of Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick — what a difference a financial crisis makes — and a more complicated picture has emerged.

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

Yes, she recently met and turned several heads of state as the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York. She was gracious, charming and disarming. Men swooned. Pakistan’s president wanted to hug her. (Perhaps Osama bin Laden is dying to meet her?)

And, yes, she has common sense, something we value. And she’s had executive experience as a mayor and a governor, though of relatively small constituencies (about 6,000 and 680,000, respectively).

Finally, Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood — a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

What to do?

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

 

— Kathleen Parker is a nationally syndicated columnist.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDZiMDhjYTU1NmI5Y2MwZjg2MWNiMWMyYTUxZDkwNTE=

Palin said she supports the way President Bush has carried out the War on Terror, “I agree with the Bush administration that we take the fight to them.”

“I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation, again, because the mission is to take the fight over there.”

Palin was asked what she thought of the bailout package before Congress, “I don’t support that until the provisions that Senator McCain has offered are implemented in Paulson’s proposals.”

http://embeds.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/09/25/palin-holds-first-press-availability/

I think McCain shot himself in the foot this week.

Here’s a great article and a slew of comments.  It was just announced on local news that he will join Obama for the debate.

http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/25/is-mccain-playing-politics-with-the-nation%E2%80%99s-financial-crisis/