Politically Charged

Being an election year, I think politics has got me all up in arms a little more than usual lately. It’s the only thing in the news and every day has some new ridiculous thing that I can’t believe we’re actually debating about. It gets me fired up, and even though I wish it wasn’t all that I talked about, I find it dominating a lot more of my creative time than I would honestly prefer.

So I thought I’d try something a little different to try and purge the political poison from my system so that every single post that you read on this blog isn’t all about politics! 🙂 Rather than writing individual posts on every single one of them, here’s just a brief summary of my position on a lot of the topics that have been circling the news bin lately.

No say as to exactly how long this will tide me over, but here’s to hoping my next few posts can be about goofy YouTube videos and weird things found while I’m walking the dog instead of more stupidity belched out by the far right…  😯

Universal Healthcare is Very Important
Right now the Supreme Court is debating whether the government can force citizens to buy health insurance. Whether you like the proposed plan or not, it’s irrefutable that something needs to be done and at least the Affordable Healthcare Act was something, whereas at our current rate otherwise 10 years from now we’d still be bickering over details with no relief in sight. People are dying every year because they can’t afford to go to the doctor, and if we want to continue to call ourselves a society, then we need to take care of each other as such.P.S. Anyone who still refutes universal healthcare as socialism needs to go live somewhere else that doesn’t have roads, plumbing, police and fire protection, neighbors, and pretty much everything else around us – how can people be so arrogant to be blatantly against helping those in need?! It especially frightens me that it’s a lot of our parents and grandparents, which is weird because I certainly don’t remember them raising us to only take care of ourselves and let the next guy fend for himself…

Old, White Men Have No Business Regulating Women’s Health
This whole hubbub about abortion and now also contraception is just ridiculous because it sounds like half the men trying to regulate contraception don’t really understand how the concept even works. Women use contraception for lots of other health needs than just preventing pregnancy, and even if not, who cares?! Isn’t preventing pregnancy with the pill still better than having an abortion if one has an unwanted pregnancy??? It all comes down to these men wanting to control women’s lives because they don’t think people should be having sex outside of marriage.

Fuck you. Stay out of our women’s vaginas!

Your Employer vs. Mandated Contraception
One final note on this – it wouldn’t even be an issue if we were adopting actual universal healthcare instead of just mandating insurance. The new plan is still a step better than nothing, but ideally your employer shouldn’t even be involved because healthcare should be managed by taxes paid to the government – that way the church wouldn’t have this conflict about funding medicines that they don’t believe in because they wouldn’t even be a part of that puzzle in the first place.

Of course, that was the original plan for universal healthcare, but it got shot down because people cried socialism…

Rick Santorum is a Frightening Idiot
See his support of all of the above, and also just the other day, apparently this nutjob wants to outlaw pornography, too!

He’s entertaining because just when you think he can’t get any crazier, he opens his mouth again and it just comes streaming out, but at the end of this circus I don’t think that even the GOP is crazy enough to give him the nomination because he’s far to controversial to last in the Presidential election. Obama is still going to win either way, but he’d literally mop the floor with Santorum because the guy wants to return us to the god-fearing days of the 12th century and as much as his own people are eating it up now, his toxicity won’t persist when he has to attract the other party’s voters as well.

The Republican Party is Crazy
For anyone who still aligns themselves with the GOP … how do you even sleep at night, with those FOX News headlines still lying in the background?!

I can’t even take the party at large seriously anymore – they contradict themselves in nearly everything they say, they want to get rid of big government, except when it comes to things like giving breaks to billionaires and regulating vaginas, and it seems like they have no desire to actually function as a society that looks out for one another anymore. It’s easy to bitch that all of our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, but nobody ever admits that the reason we’re screwed now is that we keep gutting our own education system so half our population isn’t smart enough to embrace the Information Age now that we’ve outsourced the Industrial Age overseas.

The Republican party instead wants to live in the past, thinking that if they can just repeal everything that the black guy in office has done so far, it’ll all go back to normal, gas prices will plummet, and we’ll all be able to live happily ever after. But that’s not reality, and we need individuals in office who are willing to accept that times are changing and the things that worked for them and their parents just aren’t good enough for future generations whose lives don’t consist of 70 hour workweeks on the farm and the occasional milkshake at the malt shop downtown…

Racism is Alive and Well
Anyone who claims that they’re “tired of people playing the race card” needs to take a good look around and face the fact that as much as they’d like to deny it, racism is still very much a problem in America – from discontent with our President to subconscious motivations behind Trayvon Martin’s murder to even something as inoccuous as the casting of black actors in The Hunger Games. Racism is ugly and it’s embarrassing to us as a society, but we can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist as long as segments of our population continue to think this way.

The President Has No Control Over Gas Prices
He didn’t when President Bush was up for re-election, and he still doesn’t now that the other guy is up for re-election. And yet Misleading Gingrich wants to stand up there and cite that if Obama would quit standing in the way of the Keystone Pipeline – you know, that tariff-free oil expressway that is basically an easy route for Canada to export oil overseas while avoiding all of the environmental transport impacts themselves?!

Four years ago, we were told that the way to lower gas prices was through fuel efficiency and reduction in demand. Or, you know, we could forget all of that logic and just try for some more empty promises – because those have always worked out so well for us in the past…

War
This is a simple one – we need to stop. America can’t continue to be the world police when there’s so much disarray already back at home. We could fix so many problems around our country with the money that we currently dump into defense. Some people are going to fight forever, and we can’t provide the solution to every single problem around the globe … shouldn’t we work a little harder at getting our own house in order before criticizing how other countries manage theirs?

Did I get ’em all?!  😮