Honestly!

I would love to see a female in politics that did not make me roll my eyes in embarrassment for my gender. It's either pant suits or dingbats or, horribly enough, a combination of the two.

What I meant was...

"Yes we can! But..."

That would have been a hell of a campaign slogan, huh? I also heard this morning through my pre-coffee fog things like, 'historic finance reform' and 'historic health care reform'. It seems that tacking the word 'historic' onto any bit of legislative malfeasance justifies it. It seems that this group of legislators is more concerned about being perceived as 'historic' than being good legislators. Two decades from now children will be sat in large auditoriums, row after row, clad in gray jumpsuit uniforms, while images of the members of this 'historic' congress and this 'historic' president are shown, accompanied by audio sound bytes from 'historic' speeches are boomed from the ether. Can't you just see the 'historic' black president and his 'historic' aging hippie Speaker, and the rest of the 'historic' anti-Capitalist ex-hippie culture Majority tucked safely in their beds while visions of accolades dance in their heads?

As disconnected as politicians are, in general, from the rest of the working world, and as evident as it always is that this is so, I cannot think of a time in my life that I have seen and heard such condescension from any one or group of Politicians. I could never have fathomed such an arrogant, self-indulgent, self-important, over-estimated 'leader of the free world'. His attempts to connect with the 'common folk' by peppering his unscripted speeches with pseudo-Ebonics and vulgar Pop and Hip-Hop Culture references is an embarrassment. Efforts at communicating his destructive and delusional ideals to The People have degraded to very thinly veiled suggestions that The People are simply too stupid to understand what he's trying to do. Obama gets frustrated and angry if you watch him when he is confronted with opposition of any kind. It is all he can do to remain diplomatic. In his defense, though, I will say that it is hard to be diplomatic when you have no logical arguments in defense of your ideals.

But then, if what you are doing is 'historic', it needs no logical defense. Does it?

The Holocaust is historic, Hiroshima is historic, The Depression is historic, Rome was historic, Hurricane Katrina was historic. The election of Barack Hussein Obama is historic...

Ya just gotta wonder...

What would happen if a white president told the predominantly black opposing political party, with reference to the Political Bus, "They can ride in the back." I am sure that Detroit, L.A., Chicago, and Atlanta would erupt into riots.

If a Christian talk-show host called a Jewish Liberal politician a bitch and basically called her out, too. All of New York and Hollywood would be aghast with shouts of bigotry. (And people would be storming off of their own talk shows in protest. The irony in this one is pretty fucking thick, huh?)

I am still a little behind the curve on events this week, but these are two examples of the rampant double standards set by the media at present. As if the media should be setting standards of any kind! Even my one-beloved Fox News, my island, my rock, is generally clogged to the brim with inane gossip and celebrity worship. Or, the guests are so decidedly Ultra-Conservative that you can take them no more seriously than the idiots in power now with their Socialist, P.C. bullshit.

The government should exist to protect its people from Foreign and Domestic threats to Personal Liberty. The media should exist to inform the people with unbiased factual reporting. Am I an idealist? Clearly.

The current state of governance and media is nothing more than an inseparable quagmire of bilious rhetoric; bids for personal power; self-aggrandizing, self-absorbed reporting; self-aggrandizing, self-absorbed, politically correct, delusional declarations from Hollywood actors and directors (which is very often inseparable from reporting in media)...Politico-Social Vomit.

Shove it!

If only the voters could commit to the sentiment and tell all of our 'leaders' to "Shove it, really."

At the risk of abusing metaphor ad nauseam, I will say that voting is a way to rock the Boat (government). All of the Passengers in that Boat (politicians, regardless of party or office) are out for the same end: Keep the Boat from sinking! They will do whatever they have to to keep afloat, including throwing each other overboard and plucking different Passengers from the water who will better fit the goal of keeping the Boat afloat.

Every so often, the Boat is beset by Waves (votes/voters) that set the Boat to rolling. Problem is that the Waves are normally too small or of too short a duration to really affect change in the Boat. Sometimes, the Waves actively work in different directions and serve to negate each others' force. The passengers all pull together to right a ship that also has an inherent tendency to right itself. The Waves pass, the Boat is right.

What needs to happen is a long strong succession of ever-increasing Waves that serve to capsize the Boat and set all of the Passengers adrift among the Waves...

Out of the loop.

Spent the weekend wrapped up in and recovering from orientating and training for a job that I officially hate after having gotten a taste of it, so I am out of the loop on Politics for the last few days. I am just going to have to trust that all is status quo. I keep thinking about the fact that I would not have to pull a part-time job to supplement our income here if we did not have the tax burden that we have. Were we to be Fair Taxed, meaning paying a 23% Federal Sales Tax on what we SPEND, versus being taxed on every dime that we make no matter what we plan to do with it, I would be able to stay home and raise the kids that we have without walking a financial tightrope. If my husband could bring home the $15,000 that goes out in taxes of one form or the other, it would more than make up for what I would bring home.

I am going to go catch the last 90 minutes of Boortz and get my dose of Government Outrage. That aught to wake me up.

Oh! Oh! I know!

Let's focus on "The Rent's Too Damn High!" Party candidate for Governor of New York. Or Aqua Buddha. Or Deanna Favre. Or Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg stomping off their own TV show...And, please, let's not forget to worry about The Bad Girls' Club, The Kardashians, The Housewives...(I think I'm going to be sick!)

Where are all of the forums where our illustrious members of the media take these political candidates and grill them on HOW they are going to affect these changes they propose to make? Oh! I forgot. No one wants to watch something like that, because the Housewives are so much more interesting than the bullshit spewing forth from the mouths of the people that hold power over our lives. No ratings in Political debate! Unless, of course, the political ramblings come from some uber-Liberal actor who feels that his opinion is somehow more enlightened than that of some work-a-day Joe from the Midwest because said actor is, well, an actor!

To be fair, the candidates rarely subject themselves to unmoderated debate or questions from unscreened constituents anyway. The system is set up from top to bottom to protect the candidates and office-holders from real interrogation or critique from the people that put them into office. Makes one wonder why we would vote for someone we can't access.

I guess that we vote because we should. Because we are still ALLOWED to vote. However, I find myself, more often than not, voting for what I perceive to be the lesser of two evils. I will vote Party line if in any doubt, and I never vote for a candidate for any office that is running uncontested. And how many times do you get into a voting booth and see candidates you've never heard of running for races you didn't know were contested or were even subject to vote? I get that every time, even though in this age of the internet I can go to the Board of Elections websites and see what is going to be on the ballot. I can go to news sites and follow the candidates. I can dig as much as I choose to in order to find what these people REALLY stand for. You can find out how they vote on issues, which is where their priorities are laid bare.

The problem is that we are busy and we are lazy with whatever free time we have. And who really wants to spend time researching our candidates and office-holders? Who really wants to get out of bed and go to work? No one. But we get out of bed and go to work because we have to. We need to have this same attitude towards our governments from the locality to the Federal level. The people that we do not care to research and take to task are the ones voting for Bills that effect the wage we make, the age we can retire, the amount of money that comes home on our check, how much of that money we will ever have access to, how much of what we are allowed to keep is paid out in sales tax, property tax, embedded tax. These people that we cannot bother to research are determining whether or not we can work for our Health Care or if it will be provided by the Government, funded by more money that will come out of our paychecks.

As to the Health Care...Anyone ever been in a VA hospital? A Public Health Clinic? They are the medical equivalents of The Projects. The Projects are a Government-run program...Anyone clamoring for an apartment in The Projects? No. Anyone ever had to fight the government to get SSI after a career ending injury or illness after having paid into that system all of your working life? Try it sometime. There is a (as of 12 months ago) a 26-month wait to even get a hearing. Just think...Waiting for more than 2 years to get into 'The Projects" to get a mammogram, a prostate exam, a Pap smear, a basic physical, immunizations (all of which will be a requirement before you can be eligible for care if you actually get sick, by the looks of things). And what happens when you do get sick? A cold? The Flu? A car accident? Cancer? Think about this: Your child gets Leukemia. But wait...There is a 26-month backlog in hearings to see if the child does indeed have Leukemia and is eligible for treatment. Say you have the money to pay for his treatment, but you are not allowed to by Federal Law. You can't find a doctor who will treat him for fear of losing his medical license for accepting private payment...

Now, your child might have died no matter what anyone tried to do, but the reality is that your child died waiting in line for the Imperial Federal Government Health Care Service to decide he was worthy of treatment.

But our government would never do that...Right?

Now we're rolling!

The value of my property has gone into the toilet. Two years ago, when the free fall started, the County came in and revalued my property for tax purposes so that I can fund the school district. Did the value of my property go down? Of course not. It went up. Way up. So much so that I pay taxes on a property that is worth less than 2/3 of what it is being taxed at. My property taxes DOUBLED at a time when I would have to PAY someone to buy this house.

Enter the insurance company. A company I have been with for more than a decade and never filed a claim with. I carry 4 different policies with this company. We have made minor improvements in the basement of this house in the last three years. After an external inspection of the home and a brief phone questionnaire, the replacement value of the home alone is proposed to go up by 50%, raising the premium by about 65%.

There is now talk of seizure of 401k's and Roth's, because it is apparently not enough to steal straight from our paychecks anymore. In looking into getting OUR money out of a retirement plan--not even the company match, just the money my husband's EARNED-- the Imperial Federal Government has mandated that 20% be taken off the top, 10% penalty for getting OUR money out, with the possibility of MORE tax liability at filing time!

We are paying Social Security Tax, Federal Income Tax, Medicare Tax, State Income Tax, Local Income Tax, County Property Tax, County Sales Tax...These are just the big ones that I can think of off the top of my head! There are embedded Taxes on fuel, alcohol, tobacco, and sugar, and truthfully in everything that we buy. The manufacturer is taxed heavily by the Imperial Federal Government as punishment for being Capitalist and trying to make 8% profit on what they sell. That heavy taxation is passed on to the consumer in the price of the item so that the company can make its 8%, reinvest it in the process of production, and continue making said product.

And then the money we have left over to save, if there is any, is taxed if we earn too much interest on it! It is taxed if we try to actually gain access to it when we need it, to the tune of no less than 30%!

Wake the hell up, people! LOOK at your paycheck! Look at your receipts! Look at your bills with all of the hidden taxes. Look at the taxes and fees on your cell phone bill, your ISP bill, you cable/satellite bill! We are being robbed BLIND because we are too lazy to do anything about it. We are so used to our ideals and creature comforts and this ridiculous notion that OUR government would NEVER act like YOUR government. Like parents that are completely blind to the horrendous behavior of their OWN children while condemning other parents, we have refused to come out from behind our privacy fences and security systems and really stand up to the criminals that we are forever electing to office.

-$7,000,000,000,000.00!!! Look at that number, people. That's a negative. That's a debt. That's a deficit. That number is only getting bigger. Where do you think that money came from?! Government DOES NOT MAKE MONEY! It "BORROWS" money. From the People and from other Governments! What happens when these other Governments try to collect? What happens if WE try to collect? Our Government is spending our money before it even steals it from us in the form of taxes. Where do you think that 7 trillion dollars our government doesn't have is going to come from? (Look at your check stub again...)

This isn't about Party, people. This is about a corrupt Government that has us all in financial chains. It all needs to be brought down. The tax system, social security, WELFARE (not Entitlement Programs or Public Services!), the two-party system, career politicians, term limits or the lack thereof, non-Citizens and non-taxpayer voting, career students voting...None of it is working any more!