Official Platform Of The Liberepublidemo Party

By now it should be clear to all that our major political parties are huge fans of Seinfeld. Why else would you spend such vast sums of money creating campaigns about nothing?  A googolplex of money spent on TV ads that don’t actually address anything but still manage to incite neighbors to declare fatwa’s on each other. I mean seriously, did you not see that ad/speech/article/political roundtable/web site/townhall/bus tour? If you still think the way you do, then you are way out of touch with the mainstream.  May a pox be placed upon your goats for the next thousand years!! (apologies to any of my friends who’s heritage may or may not be anyplace that remotely sounds Islamo-muslim-ish.  That was clearly insensitive on my part.)

Since my political party is obviously better than yours, I thought it only fair to lay out the non-party platform:

Voter Rights     Unless you’re a crankster/meth-head or a 95 year old living in a single-wide somewhere in the Appalachian mountains, you’ve had to show some form of Id virtually every day of your life.  Please child, I know you weren’t showing your electric bill to buy that malt-40 at the liquor store when you were younger.  It’s the 21st century (I think? That Mayan calender thing gets me confused).  In this day and age if you can’t figure out how to get an Id, then I don’t want you voting.

National Security     Our national debt is $16 and a truckload of zeros.  I often nod off when counting all those decimal places it’s such a large number.  Given that amount of debt, we have no business being anyplace that isn’t a clear threat to us.  We currently have troops in 150+ countries. Why?  There are a lot of bad people out there and quite a few that don’t like us (Yes, I’m looking at you France… better mind your P’s & Q’s).  I simply don’t care what they think.  There are about 196 countries in existence.  Let someone else deal with (and pay for) the rest of the worlds mess for a while.  Oh, but if you do decide to do something that directly impacts me… I’m gonna drop a crap-load of MOAB’s on your ass and continue that until you’re no longer an issue.  Then I’m going to get the hell out, go home and buy that new iPhone 10 with the my pretty pony ® protective case.

Education     Yup, gotta go get you some of that.  Or not.  We spend more than the gross national product of most countries on education, and yet virtually every impoverished immigrant who comes to this country kicks our ass academically. We rule in dodgeball however. USA! USA! USA!  Get the federal government and unions out of our schools and let states, counties, and teachers figure out how to teach.  Not everyone will be a valedictorian.  It doesn’t have to be equitable… everyone just has to have a fair shot.  Somehow we manged to have latin be a required high school class in the 1950’s – and we managed to do it without the iSchool custom media center (with Tacto-sensor learning!!).  Teach some facts.  Give a test on it.  Pass it and move on.  Fail and… would you like some fries with that?

Same Sex Marriage     Really?  This is an issue that somehow impacts you?  Marry whomever and however many you want, I could care less.  As long as it doesn’t affect my ability to go to Hooters for the really good hot wings or read Playboy for the excellent articles, it makes no difference to me what people do.

National Economy     Our government subscribes to the MC Hammer school of economics – as long as there are checks left in the checkbook, keep on spending baby!  We need to cut the budget of every federal department by 10% across the board.  And then do it again next year and the year after that…  Trust me, the meat puppets in Washington will find a way to “continue to invest in our future” no matter what we do.  Old people, puppies, and Gary Coleman will not be starving to death in gutters despite what the unions, I mean the “working men and women” of this country tell you.  I’m pretty sure we’re not going to turn into Uganda if we stop spending on the “Neon Boneyard Park and Museum” of Las Vegas.  Or we can just keep doing what we do.  It’s not real money anyway.  As long as my 401k keeps going up it’s all good by me.

Everything Else     Generally speaking, Americans have a fairly short attention span so I suspect detailing anything more than five things is more than we can pay attention to.  Especially if it impacts watching Dancing With the Stars.  Bottom-line, if we all just do as the Dude says and “Just take it easy man” most things will work themselves out without guidance from PAC-appointed meat puppets.  Life is too short to get worked up about politics.  If you think your parties politicians actually care about you, then you’re a tool.  Don’t be a tool!  Hey, that could be a t-shirt…

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BSU Football

Went to the Boise State vs. BYU game. Took a couple of photos from the stands.

Politics And P.T. Barnum

Let me be clear – I am NOT a republican. Let me be clear – I am NOT a democrat. Yes, there are parts of both ideas (note I did not say “parties”) that I like. There are aspects of both that I abhor.  I got to thinking about politics while watching the first of this years political party conventions. (neither American Idol or Fear Factor were on) I was struck by how carefully manufactured the “message” is. Because I’m a dork of huge proportions, I found a replay (late night CSPAN, yay!) of Obama’s ’08 nomination acceptance speech. I was curious if that was as carefully crafted as this years. The answer is yes, but what really jumped out at me was a single statement he made in his speech.

What he said was “I’m going to hire a gazillion teachers and pay them a decent wage”. Note that “a gazillion” is an entirely made-up word and not a factual representation of his actual speech. Please don’t sue me. Ok, what he actually said was “I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries”. Either way, what stood out for me was that the president doesn’t have the constitutional power to hire, recruit, or pay teachers. Why would he say something that he couldn’t do even if he wanted to? Why? Because there was a tremendous roar from the crowd. When the camera panned into the cheering mass there were people with tears streaming down their face.

Tears, seriously? Is your life so shallow and lacking something that a completely manufactured meat puppet like this moves you to tears? Frightening. And as Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “There’s a sucker born every minute”. And for all you Obama-maniacs, don’t get your panties all in a bunch. I’m not picking on him exclusively – it just happened to be something that jumped out at me. All you birthers out there can stand down. You too Mr. Trump.

Back to the question – why would he say such a thing? Because it’s a manufactured statement designed specifically to energize the base. Why is this important? Politics and elections are NOT about convincing people to vote for you. Elections are about scaring your base enough to turn out more than the other guy’s base. Let me say that again – an election is all about convincing you that the other guy is going to pluck babies from the arms of single mothers and grind them into sausage and pay for it by borrowing a googolplex of dollars from Elbonia. Politicians need to motivate that last, small segment of their base who probably wouldn’t show up at the polls to put off going to Starbucks for an hour and go vote. You don’t do that by telling them you’ll cut down on misuse of office supplies in the west wing.

Now, don’t let the crushing cynicism and hopelessness of that statement ruin your day. I have the answer. It came to me as I was watching Judge Judy re-runs and eating Doritos. As a society we’re willing to let a randomly selected group of people decide our fate in the courtroom. If we’ll let some random guy off the street, regardless of education or experience, literally make life and death decisions about someone’s fate why not do the same for political positions?

Just like jury duty, we send out notices indicating you’ve been selected to serve as your districts next state representative. Set up requirements for each position. Anyone, including potted plants, lawyers, and hamsters can receive local and state notices. Governors and senators must have a certain amount of education and experience, bla, bla, bla. You get the picture. Instantly gone is the influence, money, empty promises, and scare tactics. The added bonus is that cable news might have to go back to reporting, well, news. Gone would be the babbling chimpanzees from both parties battling it out in 30 second “discussion panels”.

Seriously, it could work. You’re willing to trust a jury of random people to decide if you owe your life savings to someone who tripped on your sidewalk while walking and drunk-texting and is suing you for more money than they’d ever earn in their lifetime. How much worse could it be to have a random group of people serving for a few years in government? And yes, I have been to the Wal-Mart. I’m already convinced some of those creatures might actually be high level government officials, out in the wild, without make-up, teleprompters, or advisors. As Miller from Repo Man said, “think about it for a minute”.