joestump.net

I’m sitting at the Burp Castle with Daniel Burka and Arne Fismen celebrating our new President, Barack Obama, after celebrating in Times Square with thousands of people. The Burp Castle has temporarily suspended their “Sush Rule” so that we can properly celebrate Barack’s acceptance speech.

Yes we can!

As I type this an African American is the President elect of the United States. Let that sink in a bit. The people of the United States have made a strong stand against the agents of intolerance. They’ve said with resounding thunder that religious zealots, war mongers and ignorant people have no place in our great nation. If you’re against gay rights, against a black President, in favor of endless war for oil, or against renewable energy we’ve risen up and clearly stated your ignorant and bigoted views of the world are not welcome.

I, for one, welcome change for the good.

There, I said it. As plainly as I can possibly state it. I’ve been reading a lot about Sarah Palin, watching interviews, and watching the debates. I’ve come to the conclusion that voting this woman into office would be irresponsible and, potentially, catastrophic. I’m going to list a number of absolute facts gleaned from interviews and public record. If, by the end of this list, you think this woman should be Vice President please post a comment detailing why, in the face of these facts, you feel she’s qualified for the second highest office in the free world.

• She transferred five times to four different colleges in five years before, finally, obtaining a Bachelor’s of Science in communication-journalism from the University of Idaho. Barack Obama graduated from Columbia University with a degree in political science with a specialization in international relations and went on to receive a law degree from Harvard University. Joe Biden has an undergraduate degree in history and political science from the University of Delaware along with a law degree from Syracuse University.
• She obtained her first passport in 2007 for a trip to Kuwait. Joe Biden has been on the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations for 35 years. Barack Obama has served on that same committee since joining the Senate along with serving on the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
• Before her recent meetings in New York this last month she’d never met a single head of state.
• She was the mayor of a city of 10,000 people and governor for a state 650,000 people. While an Illinois state Senator for Illinois’ 13th District, Barack Obama represented about 800,000 people.
• If a 15 year old was raped by her father, she would “counsel her to choose life”.
• She has given only three interviews (not including the debate) since being nominated for VP. Joe Biden has given over 100 interviews since he has been nominated for VP.

This woman, simply put, is unfit to be Vice President of the United States. Despite Senator McCain having relevant experience, he’s shown himself to be incapable of making critical decisions by the simple fact of choosing such an unqualified person for the second highest office in the free world. 

Please vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden on November 4th, 2008. 

About a week ago Barack Obama announced he’d selected Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate. To say the least, I was underwhelmed. I felt that Obama had a real chance to shoot the moon with a really progressive pick. My pick? Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City. Ask any New Yorker how much they love their mayor and you’ll get an idea of the type of operation Bloomberg runs. 

That being said, Biden does bring a few benefits to the table. First, and foremost, his son is serving in Iraq so there’s really no possible way you can say he doesn’t have any idea what’s going on over there. He’s a serious policy wonk with 35 years of Senate experience. He definitely fills the role of attack dog quite nicely and he’s an old white guy, which America seems to love when it comes to politicians. In other words, he was a perfectly reasonable and safe pick to be Obama’s running mate. He offsets many of Obama’s real and perceived weaknesses.

Then you have Sarah Palin, whom John McCain announced would be his running mate a few months ago. She has 20 months of experience as the governor of the 47th largest state by population and started her political career 13 years ago in her local PTA. She’s embroiled in an investigation in her home state about using her influence as governor to have her former brother-in-law fired. To top things off her 17-year-old unwed daughter is five months pregnant (a non-issue if she wasn’t a staunch supporter of abstinence and the removal of sex education from the classroom).

When your party is being embroiled in scandals left and right over abuse of power, considers itself the moral authority of the nation and taunts itself to be the leaders in foreign affairs, you’ve got to ask yourself what the hell John McCain was thinking. At the very least, Palin is a distraction. At the very worst, she’ll kill the entire campaign.So who would I have picked? I’d have thumbed my nose at the Christian conservatives (who else are they going to vote for? Obama?) and went with Tom Ridge or Joe Liberman. Both have solid credentials and would have been able and ready to step in as President if the 72-year-old cancer survivor has health issues. Palin, on the other hand, has arguably less administrative experience than 46 other governors and 16 major US cities (all have larger populations than the entire state of Alaska).

Pretty much no matter which way you slice this, objectively speaking, Palin was a horrible pick for a running mate. Karl Rove would have never let this happen if he were still involved heavily in campaigning.  

With McCain’s pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin we are staring at the most historic election in the history of the United States. In November the great people of our nation will go to the voting booths and have a choice between a half white, half black, child of a single mother and an immigrant father or a mother of 5. Let there be no doubt we’re living in historic times.That being said, I have a problem with both VP picks. Obama picked a lifelong politician to appease those who think he doesn’t have the experience to lead the nation. McCain picked a woman, frankly, to curry as much favor with women who voted for Hilary in the primaries just because Hilary was a woman. At their core, both choices are, at best, placating swing voters and, at worst, publicity stunts.Not that this really changes my mind. I’ll be voting for Obama this fall. In a two party system you’re stuck choosing the person who most closely represents your own feelings and interests and, for me, that person is Obama. Why?

• I’m an advocate for a woman’s right to choose what she does with her own body.
• I think the Iraq war was, and continues to be, a stain on the history of our great nation.
• I don’t think religion belongs anywhere near our government.
• I believe that we should be heavily investing in alternative energy. I believe in this so strongly that we should do so at the expense of heavier taxes and a decreased military budget. Make no mistake; the future of America’s economy heavily depends on affordable, renewable energy.
• I believe drugs and prostitution should be legalized, taxed and regulated. Australia has a brothel that’s a publicly traded company. The Netherlands has had legalized drugs for quite some time now. Both are respected members of the international community and neither of their societies have spiraled out of control into the pits of Hell.
• I believe that people making tons of money should pay more, not less, in taxes. If you’re making over $250,000 a year I really don’t want to hear you bitching about paying 10% more in taxes than a single mother making $25,000 a year. I wonder how you’ll “sustain” on “only” $150,000 a year in net income.

Given the above facts about my own personal beliefs the best candidate for me is Barack Obama. There’s no way in hell he’d propose legalizing drugs or prostitution and he’s a church going man, but he’ll get us the hell out of Iraq, put taxes on the rich back in place that Bush removed, invest heavily in alternative energy and fight for a woman’s choice. I can live with that. 

In what has to be the richest ironic twist I’ve seen in my life a CNN article titled “Army, Marines give wavers to more felons” it’s reported that both the Army and the Marines have decided to go ahead and let known and convicted terrorists join them while fighting their fellow terrorists.

Recruits were allowed to enlist after having been convicted of crimes including assault, burglary, drug possession and making terrorist threats.

From an article on Mother Jones titled “Am I a Torturer“:

In survey after survey, as many as two-thirds of Americans say torture is justified when it’s used to get information from terrorists. In an abc/Washington Post poll in the wake of the 2004 scandal, 60 percent of respondents classified what happened at Abu Ghraib as mere abuse, not torture. And as recently as last year, 68 percent of Americans told Pew Research pollsters that they consider torture an acceptable option when dealing with terrorists.

If standing someone up on a box, putting a hood on their head and then attaching electrodes to various parts of their body isn’t torture I sure as hell don’t know what is (Satar Jabar, by the way, was charged with car jacking and not terrorism).

There’s a troubling trend in America, in my not-so-humble opinion, and that’s that we’re in a sort of dark ages about what’s considered “liberal”. The following things will get you labeled, at best, as an idealistic hippie and, at worst, a terrorist sympathizer in this country.

• That everyone, everywhere should have access to clean air and clean water and, in order to guarantee such things, we should put heavy environmental restrictions on both corporations and the federal government (the worst polluter in the world by most standards). As a guy who heavily supported using environmentally friendly detergents once told me, “Republicans don’t want to regulate what corporations and the government puts into the water supply. Who the fuck doesn’t want clean water?” Indeed, who doesn’t?
• That war is bad. Since when did we go from being a neutral country to being the global bully willing to blow anyone and anybody up? I don’t disagree with war. I fully support what we did in Afghanistan and the recent strikes in Somalia. I just don’t see why everyone is so pumped up about war. It’s shitty and leads to us being perceived as total assholes.
• That everyone should have basic access to some sort of health care. Humans are exceptionally empathetic. We’re always willing to lend a hand to someone who’s sick, but Americans will be damned if we help those lazy welfare bastards stay healthy so they can just mooch more off of our hard earned money. Guess what? I know people who make “good money” ($40, 000 to $60,000) that can’t afford health care for themselves and their families. We also have about 8,000,000 uninsured children.
• That the death penalty is both hypocritical and inhumane. I, literally (and horribly), can’t wait for the first innocent person to be executed. Personally, I think it’s already happened and we just don’t know it yet. But, mark my words, in our (Gen X’ers) lifetime we’ll see a man or woman who has been killed (murdered?) by the government posthumously exonerated with DNA or other forensic evidence. I, personally, can’t stand the thought that my government might kill someone someday who was innocent. I’d much rather we just lock them up and throw away the key. Also, the death penalty cases cost us a bunch of money in comparison to just locking them away for life.
• That the War on Drugs isn’t helping. We spend about $19 billion a year on the War on Drugs (and untold more on prostitution). I say we legalize it, regulate it and tax the shit out of it. I’m a huge fan of vice taxes as we’re basically taxing the people who have the highest burden on state services. To put it another way; we spent just over half of that ($56 billion) on the entire Department of Education in 2006.
• That you don’t have a right to tell someone else what they can and can’t do with their body. This covers everything from who inserts what into whom, who has which procedures and what people put knowingly into their own body. Stay the hell away from my body. It’s not yours; it’s mine.

Call me a tree hugging, terrorist loving, dirty ass hippie if you want, but I believe the above and think it’s ludicrous that I’m a “dirty hippie” rather than a “a person with common sense”. So, how do we fix it? I think the following would be a pretty good start.

• Abolish the death penalty with a Constitutional amendment.
• Legalize drugs and prostitution. Once that’s done heavily regulate them in the same manner as tobacco and alcohol along with heavy taxes.
• Sign the Kyoto Protocol along with drastically increasing the EPA’s funding. Interesting side note is that the EPA was created by Richard Nixon (I use this little nugget to warp my fellow liberals’ minds).
• Drastically cut military funding. Use that money for medical, technical and environmental research. Or build some huge ass solar power plants in Nevada.
• Raise the emission standards on cars to 100mpg (phased in over, say, a decade). We have the technology now and this measure would create a little more pressure on those idiots at Ford and GM to get moving on that. VW is about to release a car that gets 70mpg so it’s plausible right now.
• Create a Constitutional amendment that secures the rights of one’s own body in all matters. I’d throw in something about not discriminating people based on sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
• Create a national health care system that covers children under the age of 18 for all medical costs. The coverage would be lowered to “simple” medical coverage for adults (e.g. You could get your broken arm fixed and medicine for your cold, but that $1,000,000 cancer treatment will require outside insurance). Australia and New Zealand have a two tier system like this and, according to one former US citizen in NZ told me, it works fine.

If that makes me a hippie then so be it.

No one has the right to take the life of another. No crime, no feeling of revenge, justifies that. Society has a right and a duty to isolate men and women who have caused harm, and may cause harm again, but to take their lives is unnecessary, unuseful and blasphemous. If you believe in God, life belongs to God. If you don’t believe in God, life belongs to oneself. It does not belong to the state.

More fan mail from my family and friends who keep sending me stuff that you’d think they wouldn’t forward their liberal, tree hugging, hippy relative who lives in the land of “The Gays” and doesn’t even own a car. Can you imagine? No car?! I mean, he rides a bike to work! The most recent is a letter written by Rick Mathes about his run-in with a Muslim imam at a prison workshop. The letter asserts:

1. The Muslim religion is the fastest growing religion per capita in the United States, especially amongst minorities.
2. That Muslims are assured a place in heaven by killing an infidel.

I’m really not even sure where to start, but I’ll give it a shot. So here are a few counterpoints to this letter. Feel free to pass them on to your own friends and family if and when you get this chain letter.

1. Actually, the fastest growing religious identity in the United States is “none”. In fact, the number of people describing themselves as having no religious identity has doubled since 1990.
2. The definition of infidel (a term originally coined by Christians to describe Muslims during the Crusades) is “a non-believer”. Most Muslims generally accept that Christians and Jews believe in God, which makes sense when you take into account that Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in the same God. The major sticking point is exactly who the messiah is; Jews don’t believe he/she has come yet, Christians believe it was Jesus and Muslims believe it was Muhammad. It should also be pointed out that the Old Testament is the Jewish Torah and that Muslims believe both the Torah and Bible to be the gospel of God.
3. Don’t miss the Snopes.com page, which includes a reversed version of the letter and refutes the claim the minister was talking to an actual imam.

A family member of mine sent me one of those ultra-patriotic/conservative mail forwards that was, essentially, a “Bill of Non-Rights” that included a bunch of “get off your lazy ass and get a job” language and two things, in particular, I find laughable.

This is an English speaking country. We don’t care where you are from, English is our language. Learn it or go back to wherever you came from!

I submit that this country, from the very beginning, was multi-lingual and multi-national. I know for a fact that my ancestors didn’t speak English when they arrived, rather they spoke German and French. America is not, nor has it ever been an English-only speaking country. In fact, about 28 million Americans over the age of 5 speak Spanish at home. There’s nothing wrong with being bilingual. In fact, that’s pretty cool if you ask me.

You do not have the right to change our country’s history or heritage. This country was founded on the belief in one true God. And yet, you are given the freedom to believe in any religion, any faith, or no faith at all; with no fear of persecution. The phrase IN GOD WE TRUST is part of our heritage and history, and if you are uncomfortable with it, TOUGH!

Where to start? How about with the fact that “In God We Trust” wasn’t added to coins in America until the Civil War. Also, there’s that pesky fact that “One nation … under God” wasn’t added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.

Now, please, let’s stop with the preposterous assertions that we’ve always been an English-only Christian nation. The truth is we’ve always been a multilingual multicolored nation and it’s only getting moreso. California, for instance, became the first state in the union in 2000 to be a minority-majority population (meaning there’s more of “them” than “us” if that’s how you think).

Maybe a better solution is to follow the Bill of Rights as they are, which guarantee the right to speak any language you want and practice any religion you want. And, guess what, it’s actually been like that from the beginning.

A new Pentagon report said some elements of the war in Iraq fit the definition of civil war, but the term “does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict.“

What I read from this is that the situation in Iraq is much worse than a simple civil war. In fact, with the meddling ways of Iran and Syria it probably is much worse than a simple civil war. Throw in a little religion and a thousand years of bikering and you’ve got yourself something that the term ‘civil war’ “does not adequately capture the complexity of …”.

The problem, of course, it’s that it’s our complex conflict. We’re the ones that messed everything up and we’ve got to at least try to fix the mess, which is why I don’t support an immediate troop pullout. What I do support:

1. Actively engage Syria and Iraq on all fronts.
2. Add strict deadlines to a phased reduction of forces so the Iraqis are forced to step up and start policing their own state.
3. If all else fails, bribe Turkey into letting us create three states out of Iraq. If you didn’t already know, Turkey is vehemently against an independent Kurdistan.