Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

I wouldn’t have believed it, unless I saw it with my own eyes, but I think I saw my first Cash for Clunk­ers scam. I’m not 100% sure if that’s what it is, but the cynic in me thinks so. Take a look for yourself.

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If you’ve been keep­ing up with the US Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary, you’ve prob­a­bly heard what a piss-poor job ABC did con­duct­ing the Penn­syl­va­nia debate. It some­times floors me that Jon Stewart et al. often give more cred­i­ble news and com­men­tary than the major news out­lets. One of the more both­er­some bits to come out of the debate was ABC hand­pick­ing Nash McCabe for a voter ques­tion. It wasn’t so much her obvi­ous bias that both­ered me; another voter could always be inter­viewed to pro­vide a coun­ter­point (not that ABC did). What both­ered me was that her vote comes down to whether or not a can­di­date is will­ing to wear a lapel pin of the Amer­i­can flag. Some may think big deal, until you real­ize that she’s prob­a­bly not alone in how she makes polit­i­cal deci­sions. That some­how one’s appear­ance is a reflec­tion of one’s per­for­mance. That one’s patri­o­tism is mea­sured by how often you’re will­ing to dis­play the flag. That some­how sym­bols are greater than words and actions. (A Digg com­menter aptly ref­er­enced the scene from Office Space where Joanna quits because her man­ager hounds her about wear­ing flair despite being a pro­duc­tive employee.) It’s really depress­ing to think that peo­ple do make impor­tant deci­sions based on such triv­ial cri­te­ria. Just another exam­ple of why the US edu­ca­tion sys­tem needs improvement.

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The cost of the Iraq War and Recon­struc­tion to the US is going to sur­pass $350,000,000,000. That’s $350 bil­lion dol­lars. A far cry from the orig­i­nal esti­mate of $50 bil­lion. This same admin­is­tra­tion in 2000 decided not to sign the Kyoto Pro­to­col cit­ing that its flawed (which I agree—the biggest flaw being the exemp­tion of both China and India) and that it’s too expen­sive. Expen­sive because the admin­is­tra­tion esti­mated the total cost would have been $325 bil­lion over decades and would’ve hurt the US econ­omy. This admin­is­tra­tion, by start­ing a war and try­ing to clean up after itself, has spent well in excess of that in just 3 years! I doubt any num­bers from Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion can really be trusted. (Remem­ber this is the most secre­tive admin­is­tra­tion in US his­tory.) So I’m sure the orig­i­nal cost esti­mate of becom­ing a more envi­ron­men­tally friendly coun­try is grossly over-estimated. Besides, never doubt the capa­bil­ity of com­pa­nies to inno­vate, reduce costs, and find loop­holes, even when faced with new reg­u­la­tions. The Kyoto Pro­to­col will detri­men­tally affect the US econ­omy? I doubt that. Not as dras­ti­cally as this par­tic­u­lar war has by divert­ing money bet­ter spent elsewhere.

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Novem­ber is rolling around once again for midterm elec­tions. 6 years of Repub­li­can “lead­er­ship” has really grated on my nerves. Is it too early to say, “I told you so?”

If there’s any­thing the last two pres­i­den­tial elec­tions have shown me, is that there’s a need for elec­tion reform because the cur­rent sys­tem does not result in a gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the vot­ing pub­lic. Crit­ics of alter­na­tive elec­toral sys­tems have stated that they’re too com­pli­cated to under­stand. They must really think peo­ple are stu­pid. Granted that may well be but not so much that they can’t under­stand other elec­toral sys­tems. So let me shed a lit­tle light.

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