Wednesday - March 10, 2010

Around 50% of those who would potentially read this blog are democrats. The other 50% are republicans. Now that's just a loose estimate, the numbers would probably be more like 45% on both sides with a few independents. My own personal political opinions really don't matter in either case, but there are at least a few things I've come to realize about politics.

1.) Social conservatives don't necessarily have the best morals. Now I'm not saying that social conservatives don't have morals. I'm saying that just because you are a social conservative doesn't guarantee that you are going to be a moral person. The media eats it up when a conservative turns out to be some thing estranged from the social conservative norm. For instance, a religious conservative minister who is also a pedophile or a republican senator who's extremely outspoken against gay marriage but turns out to be a homosexual.

2.) Fiscal conservatives aren't necessarily fiscally conservative. I've found that many of today's "fiscal conservatives" are only conservative in certain aspects of budgeting. They are more than willing to spend tax dollars. The difference seems to be the usefulness of what they spend money on. That is entirely your opinion, but as a fiscal conservative, I feel that if we ARE going to spend money, it should be in areas of science and research. We should not be involved in expensive wars. This isn't to say that we need to avoid wars or that we should be complete pacifists. We should go in, get the job done, and get out. We are coming up on 10 years of the war on terror. We've had the war on drugs for something like 30 years. I used to work in a drug rehab clinic. I think a better use of that "war on drugs" money would have been to use it to get people out of debt and help the poor. Because the truth of the matter is, there are tons of poor people who are depressed and use drugs as an escape or a way to make some extra cash. The war isn't working, it's time to try something else.

3.) Republicans generally don't believe in climate change. Science isn't right about everything, but the beautiful part of science is that it's peer reviewed and it is self-correcting. There is bad science, but the majority of it is actually tried and true. Climate change is much of a debate. Sure, it may not be as bad as some make it out to be, but the point to it all is raising global awareness. There are plenty of companies that stand to lose lots of money if new controls and regulations are put into place. Of course they are going to try everything in their power to curve these things. American conservatives need to stop letting corporations run this country.

4.) There's a lot of crazy coming from the right these days, which is disappointing because I'd love to be a republican. I'd love to be a conservative, because I'm rooted in rural life and simple living. I don't consider myself a liberal but I want nothing to do with the republican party.

5.) The parties just don't make much sense. The democratic are a party made up of people trying to make the government help the little guy, but they do so by creating a larger government that regulates its citizens more. They try to help the poor people, and a good portion of poor people are republicans. Then there's the republican party, made up of extremely rich businessmen and poor people. The party does everything it can to help the rich become more rich and the poor become more poor. If you don't think that's true, let's take a broad look at our economy.

Our economy is zero sum. In order for you to make it big in our country, someone else would have to lose. That's fine and dandy if you are poor and you take a small percentage of some rich guys wealth. At least now you don't have to resort to selling drugs, going to jail, and eating for free on taxpayer money. Our government is set up to make it easy for a poor person to better themselves. For the most part it still works. That is until these two parties get a hold of the system. The system has been changed back and forth over the years so much that it's working against itself.

It's hard to make money if you don't have it, but it's not impossible. Our system promotes individuals to strive for the American dream. This makes our citizens try real hard, with the promise that hard work will pay out in the end. The democrats and the republicans are both for bailing out large financial institutions and companies but neither have done the same thing for the little guy. Sure the republicans gave out $300 tax relief a couple of times, but thats not helping anyone. They could have given out much more than that just by using the money they used for the corporate bailouts.

It's a bit of a mess. Most citizens were against the bank bailouts, and yet both parties voted that through. That wasn't just the democrats. It was the republicans as well. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Even though the majority of people were against the bailouts, a demanding few called their representatives complaining about the chance of losing their entire retirement. No doubt, a part of this was orchestrated by the companies who were to receive the bailout.

So the representatives changed their votes and passed the bailout. Most of us were wondering what happened. Well we got screwed, that's what happened. Let's run through this a bit. We borrowed money from the Federal Reserve, at interest, to bailout these companies. That's taxpayer money that taxpayers have to pay back in interest. Well, we have to pay the interest to the Federal Reserve anyway. If the companies pay back the money, how do you think they will do so? That's right, extra cost to their customer. Their customers are taxpayers, who already have to pay for the bailout one time. The tax payer pays for this bailout twice.

Anyway, that's enough of my soapbox. Watching Jon Stewart does that to me. His show is a comedy show on Comedy Central called "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart", and his guests treat it like it's an actual news show. Though, to be honest, it has the best news coverage on TV in my book. This latest video I watched was Jon interviewing Marc Thiessen, the former speech writer for President Bush, about his new book.

What amazes me about the whole interview is just how weird some of Marc's opinions are to me. I'd be conservative if conservatives were fiscal conservatives and if they would lose some of the "crazy", because the republican party is getting more and more crazy lately. Sorry to offend any republicans out there, but the majority of you don't think about some of the ideas the party tries to sell to you through the media. It's scary for most rational thinking individuals who understand the concepts by which this country was founded. I disagree with much of the ideas from both parties, but the democrats don't seem as scary for some reason. Even with all the socialist and communist scare tactics from the 80's being used today.

Here is the video, uncut: http://videos.mediaite.com/video/Jon-Stewart-HEATED-Marc-Thiesse