kiltboy's Political Friday Five

1. This year, are you voting for someone, or against someone?

Primarily against Bush, but more specifically, against Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Ridge, Rice, Michael Powell...and I'm not as big a fan of Colin Powell as I perhaps once was due to the fact that in spite of his general coolness, he too perpetuated the lie of WMD in Iraq and specifically was the force to bring Blair into it.  Fortunately, Blair's as slick as Slick Willie was and its not critically hurting him or his party in the UK at present, but I'm watching...

I don't trust Kerry's healthcare plan on face value (sounds too much like its leading to the Canadian plan which they'll be the first to tell you isn't working terribly well).  However, I do know that after the fiasco with the Medicare Prescription Plan, NO Congress will EVER support a presidential health care proposal on face value.  Compromise will work, but only when the moderates can get the extremists (both conservative AND liberal) to shut up for five minutes.

I'm against "cheap prescription drugs from Canada" because I know damn well those drugs are subsidized by Canadian taxpayers.  The issue of American drug companies selling the drugs to Canada on the cheap is the more important issue that Congress should be doing something about...but THIS congress is so pro-big business that it will never look at anything a corporation does as being wrong.  Note its only the courts who are actually doing something about the giant scandals.  Congress's legislation on that topic, after 3 months of hearings, doesn't even rate a slap on the wrist.

2. Why or why haven't you watched the Democratic National Convention?

I have watched probably most of it, at least the PBS coverage (which is far more than the networks bothered to give -- 3 cheers for television without ratings or advertisers).  Basically, I was looking for specifics and I was looking to see how successfully they might restore the country's serious economic problems as being important to the people in the South and in the Heartland, where they've all gone pro-Bush simply because economic problems don't even enter into their mindset anymore.

3. Do the negative ads on tv really affect your voting choices?

No.  They're mostly lies and half-truths and not even worth breaking apart or researching the real truth behind them.  Often they're founded on misquotes (like Al Gore's "Inventing the Internet" which was a misqoute that actually originated in a Republican Party document and was never said by Gore personally.  Gore was on the committee that turned ArpaNet into the Internet and approved the financing of that operation as part of the 1991 budget.) and I don't have time to look up the real quotes to see how they were distorted or taken out of context.

Many others are "ad hominem" attacks, pointing out items about the person that are irrelevant. Watch in the south and midwest for many attacks on Kerry being of the type "he's a massachusetts liberal, and you know what they're like...".  I expect a lot of picking on the fact that he missed a recent vote in congress for something he would have supported, and those who point this out will utterly avoid mentioning that it was a compromise act that should have had the support of a set of republicans too (making Kerry's presense at the vote unnecessary), only they backed out at the last second without telling anybody.

4. Can a politician ever really be trusted to do what he or she says they will do?

I watch not the promises, but the compromises.  I *know* Kerry can't get everything he wants or says he'll provide; no president ever does (not even Reagan, and I thank God for that!).  The trick is the checks and balances and how the system moves (or doesn't).  The truth is that Kerry is well aware of the power of a compromise, and like Clinton he knows its not "waffling".  Failure to compromise gets nothing done at all.

BushCo will not compromise on ANYTHING.  When it comes to an issue they care nothing about, they're more passive-aggressive than I am (and that's really saying something -- ask my wife).  They do nothing on it until its either in their face, or the other side's forgotten about the issue because something else came along and then they can silently go about what they really wanted to do in the first place.  This includes their behaviour on war and terrorism, much less domestic policies.

5. Is the modern political machine doomed to cynicism and apathy, or can people be inspired to get involved?

Well, there's me. I used to be one of the most politically apathetic people around. Now, I simply can't afford that luxury anymore. I have a wife, I want a family, and I can not afford to be in the situation I was in last fall.

I was unemployed through a series of events that can be traced directly to this President's decision to go to war in Iraq, following a plan that Rumsfeld had written in 1996.  My distrust of BushCo became very personal after that. The conservatives' approach to education is something my child will never see, even if that means moving to Canada or the UK, or at the very least, home-schooling or sticking the kid in my mother's private school.

Their attitude to science, ("Sound Science") is yet another passive-aggressive technique to make sure that they get their way: only act on the recomendations of a scientist when the evidence is so overwhelming that it can't be missed. In other words, after they destroy the environment, THEN the scientists are allowed to say "we were right".

For the sake of my income, for the sake of my future family, for the sake of my wife's medical issues and the costs of her prescriptions if our insurance stops covering them, for the sake of the lifestyle I want to lead, where I am allowed to watch what programs on TV I want to watch and can search for alternatives to the crap the networks (and their wholly-owned cable outlets) shove at us (under the direction of Mr. M Powell's "we know what Americans should be allowed to see" policy), for the sake of the national forests, for the sake of the rivers and oceans and the life in them we depend on...

...and for the sake of Peace...

I can not afford to not care anymore. And I can not afford to let George W. Bush be president anymore.

I have voted in every election since 1998, and will vote in every election until the conservatives win it all and take my vote away from me.  If that day comes, I'll show them what the second amendment really means.

Ok, Virginia politicos, a question:

If Warner has the "love" of the people of virginia because of how much military and military-support spending he brings to the state, how come he's not being blamed for the fact that the Navy is (or has) moving their HQ away from Crystal City & the Annex and into Southern Maryland?

For someone with so much supposed influence, how did he lose the Navy to Maryland?

or has that action been reversed and I missed it?

CNN knows EXACTLY what to cover...

Another news source picked up on CNN's wonderful coverage of BalloonMan :

CNN, often accused by conservatives and Republicans of being overly friendly to Democrats, did the Democrats no favor Thursday night when, following John Kerry's acceptance speech, it decided to switch to the voice of convention producer Don Mischer. Over pictures of the candidate and his wife waving, Mischer was heard becoming becoming increasingly frantic as he instructed, "Go balloons" but saw few of them fall. "I don't see anything happening," he shouted. "Jesus, we need more balloons. I want all balloons to go, goddamn. No confetti. No confetti. No confetti. I want more balloons. What's happening to the balloons?" In fact, viewers may have been unaware of any glitch at all except for Mischer's frenetic shouts. CNN's Judy Woodruff later apologized for Mischer's language. But Washington Post media critic Tom Shales commented in today's (Friday) Washington Post: "The failure of the balloons to fall was not nearly as big a fiasco as CNN foolishly fixating on them as if they were the story of the century and letting Mischer's shouting take up so much air time."

Gore the Comedian!

For those who missed, it, here's some excerpts from Gore's first attempt at a new career as a stand-up comic:

• I prefer to focus on the future because I know from my own experience that America is a land of opportunity, where every little boy and girl has a chance to grow up and win the popular vote.
• Let's make sure not only that the Supreme Court does not pick the next President, but also that this President is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court.
• By the way, I know about the bad economy. I was the first one laid off.

Yeah, he could probably use a little more, but he certainly came across as considerably less stiff than I was in 2000.