so pissed off right now

i have been following the republican convention and they are such a bunch of phonies. do any of them even remember that george w. bush has been president of the united states for the last 8 years and has pretty much ruined our country? do they realize that he deregulated everything and this led to subprime mortgages causing big problems for our economy? do they realize the iraq war was a huge mistake and that saddam hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 or al qaeda? do they realize that we are having major problems in the war in afghanistan and have failed to capture the leader of al qaeda, osama bin laden, as well as the leader of the taliban, mullah omar? what planet are they on? do they realize that one of the main reasons small businesses have problems is they have to pay so much for healthcare, and that universal healthcare provided by the government would relieve this burden and be good for business as well as for the people who need healthcare? do they realize the main beneficiary of the war in iraq is the nation of iran, our sworn enemy? do they realize that barack obama would cut taxes, not raise them, for the vast majority of americans, and only the super-rich would have tax increases, and the vast majority of americans would pay less taxes under obama’s plan than under mccain’s plan? do they realize that john mccain’s policies, especially his neoconservative foreign policy and his oil-industry-driven energy policy, are pretty much carbon copies of the current policies of president george w. bush? do they realize that most americans are pro-choice, not anti-choice, and support abortion rights, and also support embryonic stem cell research to cure debilitating diseases? do they realize the american people disagree with them on virtually every issue, with just a few exceptions like drilling for oil off our coastlines? do the republicans realize how out of touch with reality and out of touch with america they are?

and besides being out of touch and wrong on almost all the issues, the republicans have some major examples of hypocrisy. both john mccain and sarah palin are touted as fighting corruption within their own party, i.e., within the republican party. in other words, the republicans freely admit that their political party is a deeply corrupt institution, and are not ashamed at all to admit this fact. it was sarah palin’s big night tonight. sarah palin, who was against the “bridge to nowhere” after becoming governor of alaska, but supported it when she was running for that office. sarah palin, former member of the secessionist alaskan independence party, a rebel like those in the confederacy of the 1860s, not an american patriot who believes in the united states of america. sarah palin, who is a right-wing fundamentalist christian and wants creationism taught in schools, but does not want any sex education taught except abstinence-only. abstinence-only sex education: what sarah palin taught to her 17-year-old daughter bristol palin, who has somehow become pregnant despite being taught to be abstinent until marriage. abstinence-only sex education does not work and this is just one of many examples of that fact. sarah palin may have decided to fight the corruption of alaska senator ted stevens, who is currently on trial for being one of the most corrupt politicians ever, but she first rose to prominence in her political career when she ran the political action committee of that same corrupt senator, ted stevens. sarah palin, who has her own troopergate scandal up in alaska, just like our own ex-governor here in new york, eliot spitzer. eliot spitzer turned out to be guilty of what his opponents were accusing him of doing... i wonder if the same is true of sarah palin. she did a pretty good job of reading a speech tonight... a speech that was mostly written by a former speechwriter for president george w. bush. now THAT is change we can believe in... NOT. she praised hillary clinton and geraldine ferraro when john mccain first introduced her as his vice presidential pick, even mentioning hillary’s phrase “18 million holes in the glass ceiling”, in an obvious attempt at pandering to democrats who supported hillary clinton. just a few months earlier, the same sarah palin was making fun of hillary clinton and called her a “whiner”.

and sarah palin gave birth to a baby with down’s syndrome, a horrible disease that the baby will have to suffer with the rest of its life, all through childhood and adulthood; that baby will never be able to live independently and will always be a burden on other people, and will probably be severely retarded and have problems with some of the organs in his body. that is almost as bad as deliberately giving birth to a baby with aids or some other horrible disease. she knew about that early enough in the pregnancy to abort but she didn’t. you know why? she is “pro-life”, meaning she opposes abortion. she completely opposes all abortion, in fact, even in cases of rape or incest. but does “pro-life” mean opposition to having the government execute people, or launching massive preemptive unilateral military strikes on defenseless nations that pose no threat to us? no. if you are “pro-life” you are fine with killing people. does it mean she wants embryonic stem-cell research to help cure diseases and save people’s lives? no. “pro-life” people oppose embryonic stem cell research and are opposed to using it to cure diseases and save the lives of people who have actually been born, even though the embryos that would be used in such research already exist and are made by in-vitro fertilization clinics all the time, and are going to get thrown in the garbage if they are not used for research. so really, opposing embryonic stem cell research does not save the life of a single embryo, since those embryos will be thrown away anyway. and what do “pro-life” people think of hunting, and animals, and gun control laws? they love to go around hunting and killing innocent animals, even though we humans are animals too, and they oppose gun control laws, even common-sense ones to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and lunatics, and to keep the most dangerous machine guns out of the hands of all civilians, machine guns that are not needed for hunting purposes anyway, and would literally be overkill. “pro-life” people want more babies born to parents who are not ready to raise them, parents who do not want children because they are completely unprepared, who often do a bad job raising the kids and they end up in gangs, becoming criminals, drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, rapists, and murderers. and usually these unwanted babies are born to single mothers because the fathers likewise do not want the babies, so they get the hell outta there since they want absolutely nothing to do with the babies they created by having sex. more babies born into a world already overpopulated with too many humans, to parents who do not want them, who do not love them, who wish they never had them. and some of the mothers who want abortions but are not allowed to have them end up dying during childbirth, leaving the kids as orphans to go through the foster care system and likely end up with mental illness and live on the streets as gang members or prostitutes or homeless beggars. that is what “pro-life” means. it also means that if someone is dying of a horrible illness and is in horrible pain and just wants the sweet release of death to escape from the hell that is their life, they are not allowed to commit suicide and nobody is allowed to help them. people who are “pro-life” are so compassionate... NOT. you know, a main reason women are becoming more and more equal to men in society today is that women enjoy a number of rights that they never historically had, such as being allowed to vote, being allowed to own property, not being considered property, and of course, the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy so that they do not become mothers against their own will. sarah palin opposes the right to an abortion, and also opposes the right of women to have equal pay for equal work. she is no feminist, no supporter of women’s rights. she is reaping the rewards of the feminist movement and pandering to them while at the same time supporting policies that completely go against everything feminists stand for. barack obama and joe biden both support women’s rights very strongly, including the right to an abortion as well as an important right women do not yet legally have in the united states: equal pay for equal work. they are the true supporters of women’s rights. in fact, joe biden wrote the violence against women act, to crack down against domestic violence done by men against women. has sarah palin ever done anything for her fellow women? no. does she support doing anything to help out women and give them more rights? no, she wants women to have less rights. the first woman the republicans nominate to be vice president is a traitor to her own gender.

and now for john mccain, the man running for president as a republican. where to start with his hypocrisy? the clearest case of this is on the issue of torture. john mccain was tortured in vietnam quite horribly. however, under the definition of torture put forth by our current bush administration under people like alberto gonzales, what the vietnamese did to him is not actually torture. so, if you go by the bush administration definition of torture, john mccain was not tortured, and the united states does not torture prisoners, either. but of course, the bush administration definition of torture is ridiculous. we torture prisoners all the time; it is very well documented. and john mccain was tortured quite badly; that is also very well documented. john mccain has always said he opposes torture. so, when it came time for him to vote on a measure that would ban the u.s. military from using the torture technique known as “waterboarding” on enemy prisoners, john mccain voted against the ban on this torture technique, which is actually a worse torture technique than anything that was done to him. when it came time for him to vote in the senate, john mccain voted against banning a very bad kind of torture, so he was basically voting in favor of torture. in other words, john mccain supports having the united states torture prisoners we capture, but was opposed to having the vietnamese torture him when they captured him as a prisoner. he wants a double standard: one standard for the united states and our allies, and another standard for the enemies we fight. we get to torture, they do not. this is tortured logic. you would think that in his years in the hanoi hilton being tortured, john mccain would learn the lesson that torture is morally wrong and reprehensible and should never be allowed under any circumstances. he claims to have learned that lesson, and when he speaks about that issue, he claims to be opposed to torture. but when he had to vote on it in the senate, he supported torture.

john mccain also changed his mind on a number of other things. john mccain used to be a prime example of corruption in washington, d.c., back when he was involved in the keating 5 scandal. after being personally involved in corruption, he decided to rehabilitate his image by publicly launching a crusade against corruption in washington, d.c. he worked together with the most liberal democrat in the senate, russ feingold of wisconsin, to pass the mccain-feingold campaign finance reform bill. and now, his campaign is violating that same bill that he and russ feingold wrote together, that president bush signed into law. for the record, george w. bush was strongly opposed to the law and said he would veto it, but then changed his mind after it passed and signed it into law anyway, along with a signing statement that said that he would not enforce it because he thought it was unconstitutional. typical george w. bush: signing a bill into law along with a signing statement that says you will not enforce the law and that it is unconstitutional. anyway, back to john mccain. he voted against the bush tax cuts, saying that they were reckless and would increase the deficit, and of course he was 100% correct then. since that time he has changed his mind, and wants even more tax cuts than the ones bush passed, which would lead to even bigger deficits and an even bigger national debt. john mccain has no credible plan to decrease government spending enough so that the deficit is gone and there is either a balanced budget or a surplus. still, he is pledging that he will balance the budget, despite the fact that tax cuts will make the deficits bigger and our national debt bigger, and he has no real plan to reduce spending enough to balance it. he is promising something he can clearly not deliver. john mccain is also promising that if we drill for oil now off our coastlines, it will result in immediate drops in the price of gasoline and help us become energy-independent. that is totally not true at all. if we start building new oil-drilling platforms off our coastlines, it will take 10 years before they start delivering us any oil, since all sorts of exploration and building of infrastructure has to take place first before we can really do the drilling, and we will need pipelines and refineries and all sorts of other stuff too. plus, we have already used up most of the oil reserves in the united states, so there is not much left now. instead of making dishonest promises about drilling for oil here to make us energy independent and have lower gas prices, john mccain should be honest about things and stop making false promises about what his policies would do. for real energy independence, we need to rely on solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and other renewable sources of energy, and create plug-in hybrid cars that run on cleanly-produced electricity, not gasoline made from petroleum from hostile nations like venezuela, russia, or iran. john mccain and his republican groupies at the convention keep saying that the democrats would just bring the same old liberal policies of the past but that republicans like him are full of new ideas to fix everything. sorry, but i’m not buying it. the republicans are full of shit. they ran both houses of congress from the beginning of 1995 to the beginning of 2007, and have run the white house from the beginning of 2001 until at least the beginning of next year. since the democrats took control of both houses of congress in the beginning of 2007, they have held a very slim majority, by 1 seat, relying on the john mccain-supporting neoconservative independent senator joe lieberman from connecticut as part of their caucus to make them the majority, and vice president dick cheney is still the president of the senate who gets to make tiebreaking votes. also, 60 votes are needed to pass any legislation, and anything with less than that gets filibustered by the republicans, of which there are 49 out of the 100 total senators. even worse, any legislation that does manage to pass both the house and the senate has to be signed into law by president bush, or else its only chance is to override a veto by having a 2/3 majority in both the house and the senate. overriding a veto is almost impossible in today’s polarized political environment, since almost all the republicans are staunch supporters of president bush and are afraid to go against him, and the democrats have nowhere near enough votes. now, back when the republicans controlled both houses of congress, it was easy for them to pass any legislation they wanted: bush never vetoed anything they passed, so all they needed was a simple majority in the house and the senate, except the rare occasions when democrats tried to filibuster. but the democrats hardly ever had the 41 necessary votes to filibuster, because many senate democrats are actually conservative/moderate democrats who often voted with the republicans. so for these reasons, the congress was able to get a lot more legislation passed and signed into law when it was controlled by the same party as president bush: the republican party. the democratic congress has been a dismal failure so far because they are almost completely powerless until they have a president from the same party as them: barack obama. if john mccain is the next president, he will have congress at his mercy, and will be able to block progress on important issues like universal healthcare, plus he will be able to pack the supreme court with more far-right-wing judges (4 out of the 9 on it now are far-right-wingers, so just 1 more would completely ruin everything for us liberals). anyway, my point is, senate majority leader harry reid was insulted today for leading a “do-nothing senate”. believe me, harry reid has been trying hard to pass through legislation. the republicans are the ones blocking anything from getting done. the only way to stop them is to defeat enough of them in the elections so the democrats have a filibuster-proof majority. the democrats don’t really need to get all the way to 60 because there is a small number of moderate republicans who are sometimes willing to cooperate instead of being obstructionists. 58 or 59 senate democrats would probably be a working majority. but currently there are 50 plus joe lieberman, which is not a working majority, not even close.

anyway, i am irate to see the very people responsible for all the problems our nation is suffering right now, the people who have been in charge of everything for the last 8 years, pretending like none of the bad stuff is their fault and like we should give them another chance, pretending they actually have good ideas to fix things, when they just have the same stale old ideas they have been using the last 8 years that have failed our nation so miserably, and been proven not to work through all these years of practice. the republicans want us to give them another chance, and say that this time they will not completely screw everything up. i say they are full of it, they have no new ideas, just the same ones that have been failing us for all this time and ruining our once great nation, and they certainly do not deserve a second chance, especially not at a time like this when our nation is in an economic crisis that needs to be solved. this is like choosing between re-electing herbert hoover or electing franklin delano roosevelt. we cannot trust the free market, deregulation, and low taxes to magically solve our economic problems. you know how george w. bush said “you are either with us or against us”? well, the government is either with us or against us. if the government is misruling us and is doing nothing to help out ordinary people, it is against us, and we need to stop it from acting that way, get someone else in charge, and have them fix everything so the government is actually on our side, the way it should have been in the first place. the republicans do not deserve to rule the united states; this nation is too good for people who are so bad at governing. the republicans know how to destroy but not how to create. we are having a debt crisis: the federal government is in debt, state governments are in debt, local governments are in debt, a large percentage of the population is in debt, and lots of companies are even going into debt. debt is caused by spending more than you earn. republicans create debt for the government with their endless tax cuts while they continue to increase spending. it is absolutely insane policy. anyone who governs in such a way ought to be removed from office and never allowed to run anything ever again. and through deregulation and lack of government oversight, the financial sector gave out way too many mortgages, credit cards, and loans to people who were not capable or reliable enough to pay back what they owed. these people all went into debt, of course, and when they couldn’t pay, the financial institutions they owed money to also went into debt, and started needing government bailouts. now that the debt has been transferred from people to the financial institutions to the government, taxpayers must pay the bills. it is absolutely insane. everyone needs to learn how to manage money. democrats are the ones who can manage money. for years, the gap between the rich and the poor has been getting wider and wider in the united states, and now it is as big as in many third-world countries. a simple solution to the government’s financial difficulties would be to tax the people who actually have enough money to afford to pay the tax, namely, people who are incredibly wealthy. taxing corporations themselves is also a good idea, because although almost everything we buy is from corporations and most of our jobs are working for corporations, a lot of corporations buy or sell things overseas and have workers overseas, as well as lots of wealthy stockholders overseas. this means that if we tax the corporations, some of this tax burden will fall on foreigners, not americans. the more of our tax burden falls on foreigners, the better our economy will do here in america, since we americans will pay less of our own tax burden. one way to directly tax foreigners is a type of tax called a tariff, which taxes imports. tariffs would be a simple way to help out domestic industry by protecting it from foreign competition, keeping jobs here in the united states, and they would raise plenty of money for our government, money that would be paid by the companies importing things into the united states. this would be a nice simple way to eliminate the problem of our trade deficit. our trade deficit means how much more we import than we export, and also represents how much wealth is being transferred from the united states to other nations. tariffs could eliminate this transfer of wealth out of our country, thus making our country wealthier. there would be more manufacturing jobs in our country, more wealth in our country, and less unemployment, plus we would be less dependent on imports from hostile nations. tariffs are a win-win situation for the united states. the republicans staunchly oppose tariffs, and advocate “free trade”, which means we will let other countries drain away all our wealth and put our entire nation into debt. democrats like barack obama support “fair trade”, which has tariffs against nations that do not have labor and environmental standards, but does not have tariffs against nations that do have labor and environmental standards. fair trade is an excellent way to encourage other nations to treat their workers well and to treat our planet well, having safety standards for workers, minimum wages, bans on child labor, protection of endangered and threatened species, and protection against pollution of the environment. fair trade helps prevent the “race to the bottom” whereby companies move jobs overseas to countries with no labor or environmental standards, and child laborers work in unsafe sweatshops for pennies a day while polluting the environment with toxic waste. republicans, of course, oppose fair trade, and fully support letting american companies ship jobs overseas to sweatshops that do not observe any standards. but then once americans have lost all our jobs making things, the only jobs left are the service sector, which means we are just doing things for other americans, not actually making any physical stuff. and our imbalance of making physical stuff with other nations is making our nation lose its wealth to other nations. in a way this is good... it is good for the other countries, since they get more wealth out of it. but who is really making all the money? the ceos and top executives and big investors in the big corporations. the ceos and top executives set their own salaries and are answerable to nobody. if they ruin their companies, they get “golden parachutes” and can easily find work as executives with other companies if they want. there is only one way to separate these titans of industry from the great fortunes they have amassed: taxation. by taxing the rich, we can make the gap between the rich and poor get smaller, not bigger. this has the added benefit of reducing poverty and crime, and instead of being unemployed or becoming criminals or homeless people, poor people will be able to be educated or trained in various trades, so they can find gainful employment legally and help contribute to our economy, and maybe have some chance of reaching the american dream. that is what america is all about.

in closing, the republicans have managed to ruin many of the things about the united states of america that were once great. they have not yet succeeded in ruining our country completely, however, due to their own incompetence and their inefficiency in implementing all their utterly ridiculous policies, and all of the successful resistance to their efforts by democrats and others opposed to the republican misrule of our nation. many republicans from the south still harbor confederate sympathies, and we have seen that some republicans from alaska also have sympathies for those who want to secede from the union. this is ironic for the party of abraham lincoln to become a haven for those with secessionist leanings, given the fact that he was the first republican president and led a war against the confederate secessionists to bring them back into the union, and later added a second purpose to the civil war: to liberate the blacks of our nation from slavery. it is also ironic that the republican party has morphed into the opposite of what it once was. the party that freed the slaves is now almost all white people and has become a haven to racists, especially now that barack obama is the democratic presidential nominee and racists want to keep that black man out of the white house just because he is black. sure, racists are a small minority of people in this country, and a minority of republicans, but they still exist, and there may very well be more racists than black people. of course, there are also sexists in the united states, and some of them may actually support obama because they do not want a female vice president, so it goes both ways. but we have seen with strom thurmond and how trent lott praised him a few years ago that racism is alive and well in the republican party. rush limbaugh also regularly makes racist comments, as do many other republican radio talk show hosts. of course, these people are also sexists too. my point is this: the republicans do not have any positive agenda at all. all they have is hate and division and old failed policies of the past, policies we have been living under throughout the administration of george w. bush, policies that clearly do not work at all. we cannot allow them to continue this any longer. we are lucky that the republicans still hold elections and allow us to win sometimes, because otherwise, we would be completely screwed, just like people living under the totalitarian regimes in nations like china and saudi arabia. elections and our democratic process are the only way we can solve the problem we have and get ourselves out of the mess we are in. if we end the war in iraq, we will save enough money to have universal healthcare. 2 birds killed with one stone. if we are able to accomplish that much, we will already be accomplishing great things and definitely be going in the right direction, for the first time in a long time. but if we fail in this endeavor and john mccain is the next president, we must do everything we can to support our democrats in congress and the senate and help give them the courage and backbone to stand up for what is right and not let him do any further damage to this nation of ours, a nation that was once great and will probably regain its greatness again soon if we play our cards right. barack obama is who we need as president, not because of who he is, but quite simply because he is a democrat. the personal biographies of the candidates are not what matters. what matters are the issues, and the fact that democrats are right and republicans are wrong on all the most important issues facing our nation, coupled with the fact that republicans have ruined this nation for the last 8 years and we really do need a change from that, and another 4 years of republican misrule would be more of the same. we simply cannot afford that at this point. several times as many americans call themselves “conservatives” as “liberals”, but these labels have become rather meaningless, because the vast majority of americans agree with liberal democrats on almost every issue. most people are liberals but don’t even know it, because of all the conservative republican propaganda that people have been subjected to for so many years, and because all the politicians are afraid of calling themselves liberal because it is considered bad, while lots of them call themselves conservative because it is the popular thing to do. i say throw all the conservative bums out, whether they are conservative republicans or conservative democrats. first we get rid of the republicans, then we clean house in our own party and replace the conservatives with true liberals, just as the republicans have already done over the years by replacing almost all their moderates and all of their liberals with conservatives. and as for racists that were in the democratic party, those “dixiecrats” were all conservatives, not liberals, and they all switched to the republican party once the liberal democrats made it clear that racist conservative dixiecrats were no longer welcome in the democratic party. liberal republicans used to exist, too, before their party purged them to become ideologically pure as a conservative party. and it was the liberals in both parties who supported equal rights for women, racial minorities, people with disabilities, and homosexuals. without liberalism, sarah palin would never have been allowed to pursue a career in politics, since we would still live in a completely patriarchal society; similarly, barack obama would not be able to achieve anything either. liberalism is what made this country great, and conservatism is what has taken away its greatness, hopefully only temporarily. we will win this nation back, no matter what it takes. our future depends on us getting this right, so we have no choice but to do it, to save our country from eventually deteriorating into a third-world totalitarian hellhole. this year we have a rare opportunity to actually win an election for once, and we must not waste this opportunity, but seize it instead. if we do not, who knows how many years we will have republican presidents after dubya leaves office? 4? 8? 12? 16? 20? forever??? it is quite the scary thought, to think how much more our nation could deteriorate if we let that happen. if they rule long enough, they may end up making christian fundamentalism mandatory for everyone, and making blasphemy a crime punishable by death... we could end up like an islamic fundamentalist nation, except christian instead. if they keep ruling us, the gap between the rich and poor will continue to widen, and the middle class will cease to exist as they all fall into poverty. is that what we want as a nation? to gradually turn into a third-world totalitarian hellhole over the course of many years? if not... you know what to do. vote party-line democrat. the republicans do not deserve a single vote from anyone, and voting for a third-party or independent candidate is just a pointless protest vote that does nothing to stop the republicans from winning again. if the republicans want people to vote for them again, they need to earn it, by changing their policies, abandoning their outdated belief systems and coming up with fresh new ideas and solutions that will work in the real world and make things better for everyone. this has not happened yet, and i do not anticipate it happening for years to come. until they shape up, i will vote party-line democrat in every single election, and i really really hope everyone else does too. and people like sarah palin who support seceding from the union ought to have their u.s. citizenship revoked and have to go through the entire immigration process of becoming new citizens if they want to stay here, because there are plenty of foreigners who would love to live in this country who do not want to support misguided secessionist movements. and those foreigners are more american than sarah palin is, because at least they love this country more than some stupid state like alaska. i propose we get rid of alaska by giving it to canada and letting them annex it, and all the citizens of alaska will lose their u.s. citizenship and become canadian citizens. then, to cancel this out so we still have 50 states, we should annex all of canada and make it the 50th state, with alaska just part of the giant state of canada. that would really put those uppity alaskans in their place. or you know what would be even better? sell alaska back to russia. it used to be part of russia. just see how they enjoy living under the dictatorship of vladimir putin. all i am saying is, sarah palin really pisses me off. if john mccain is elected president, he will undoubtedly die from being so ridiculously old, quite soon after taking office, and then a crazy ultra-right-wing christian fundamentalist woman with virtually no qualifications will be president, a woman who is currently governor of alaska and once wanted to have alaska secede from the union and be an independent nation. does she still believe that? who knows. but i do not trust her one bit, as she has already shown herself to be a lying, two-faced, completely untrustworthy politician, in less than a week of national media exposure. and since alaska was once part of russia, doesn't that mean she is russian too? the last thing we need is some soviet russian communist as president. seriously though, i can’t stand her one bit, or any of the other republicans at the convention. they piss me off sooooooooooooooooooooooo much it is ridiculous. i am embarrassed to be a member of the same species as those clowns, much less living in the same country as them, on the same planet. i just wish they would all publicly apologize for all of their misdeeds as politicians and their misrule of the united states, and formally disband the republican party and all resign from office and never seek any political office ever again. then instead of competing against republicans, we democrats could compete against more credible political parties, like the libertarian party and the green party. at least people in those parties have some good ideas i actually agree with. then maybe if the democrats screw things up badly enough, we could disband and give the greens and libertarians a chance to run everything, and let some new political parties with even newer ideas form, and continue this process. we have had other major parties that ceased to exist in the united states: first the federalists and then the whigs. why not continue this proud tradition? it worked great then and it can work even better now.