39. Try very hard this election.

I am flabbergasted at this point to hear someone say none of the candidates are acceptable. I think this is people just being worn out by the horror of the last bunch of years… By the way the last two elections went down. By who got elected, if he got elected. By how all the huge businesses were allowed to just do whatever they wanted. By how people themselves weren’t controlled as to what size loans they took on. Or how much crap they bought on credit.

Duh.
Granted you could just pay attention and follow the little rule “If you don’t have the money don’t buy it”. I mean seriously nothing is owed to you.. You don’t need a huge house and 3 huge cars and a huge camper and a great trip each year.

Assumptions
Maybe we could say that it would be nice if everyone could afford getting care if they were sick and a decent roof over their heads. Clothing and food would be good. And an education. But again unless you are disabled, you should pretty much work to get these things.. Of course lately, as of the last 8 years pretty much the price of everything has gone up so radically, you pretty much cannot work a basic job to get these things. It is almost as if just working is not enough, if anything you may nearly be getting punished for being a hard worker and not just playing the system.

Random observations/opinions about the last 8 years
It is my opinion that deregulation at the top of the biggest companies is a really big problem. Bush’s first cabinet had ex-CEOs of a pharmaceutical company, a health insurance company, a tobacco company, an oil company, etc.. Deregulation also allowed the bad lending and the weird hiring for government style work which never got done. Like Katrina and Afghanistan.

Deregulation allows drugs to be abusively sold as a legal solution and at high rates. One friend was on about 5 antidepressants if not more. Each 30 day prescription was about 1000 dollars to the insurance company and I feel the drugs were dangerous and unhelpful. Funny how my health insurance rates have soared, the rates going up $100 dollars per month each of the last eight years while my coverage is basically to the point of catastrophe insurance.. My friend of course has no health coverage so this is being paid for by, I guess, our taxes.

So even if just the health insurance/drug company situation was the only thing going out of control this basically does trickle down and affect everything even the cost of milk.. Because either businesses need to cover their employees health care or a person needs to make enough money to cover it himself.. Which at this time is basically impossible…

But. All the big companies have been allowed to go wild. And when a big company runs itself out of business due to bad practices our government bails out the big guys.. The employees and shareholders lose but the people in charge who screwed it up get bailed out. This is not the point of capitalism. If you go under, you go under. If you are bad at business, you are bad at business…

So, our present government has built this gigantic debt from “not raising taxes” and putting us in a war we don’t believe in. Just because we don’t believe in what the government is doing doesn’t mean we don’t feel bad for or support the poor people having to go to war and all that crap. We can’t afford it..

Our schools are getting dumber because of the testing requirements and the homogenization of the teaching. We have wonderful teachers in our area who are being required to teach worse lessons than they used to. I actually don’t know but I believe none of the schools that were supposed to be helped by this were actually helped.

Health care. Although my family can afford it at this time, most people I know actually cannot afford buying health insurance unless their jobs make it available to them and many jobs can't.. A few years ago, we would never have been able to afford the insurance we have. We are highly aware of how lucky we are to be able to at this time.

Plus, the factory farming types of things that have been allowed in a deregulated type of atmosphere. The poisonous cruel farming that is allowed which if the businesses were required to care for the animal waste they were creating, would be driven out of business if they did business in a responsible way.

Bush made owning automatic weapons legal.

Ok so I live in a place in my mind that war is an outrageously archaic way of handling your disagreements. I don’t mind paying taxes for roads and schools and sick and old people. Please stop spending my money on things I don’t want to be spending it on…

Why NOT McCain.
So McCain says we will stay in this war until we win. Umm. How does one win a war on terror? There will always be terror. When McCain and Palin talk they talk of fear and panic and the horribleness of other people.

McCain wants to privatize health insurance and social security. If my small business health insurance is now $842 per month and my hospital deductible is 500 per visit and my drugs are now 15/50/50% and dr. visits are $25/$25, how is privatizing going to make that any cheaper? It is going to go up if noone stops it. We are unsure the cost is worth it now. And the idea that $5000 will cover a year of health insurance for a family is ludicrous! That is his plan! (He also wants to tax health insurance as income as part of his plan). I don’t know anything about social security but I would think privatized social security would end up that all old people are living on the streets.

Also educational vouchers is the same deal… People in a mess will only be in a worse mess…

The other thing is. McCain IS out of touch. I have a fourteen year old and when he was born, we did not have the internet… People are changed by this. We can’t be so isolated and naive. Kids are allowed to access anything and it changes them. We can’t be duped so easily because we can look anything up. McCain doesn’t use a computer.

Why not Obama?
I understand being downtrodden by politics. I never even wanted to care nor did I care because I never thought anyone could make such a difference as the Bush administration did. When I saw the bad things he was able to accomplish I realized it mattered.

I don’t understand not feeling that Barack would be the better choice. Is it like when you think you have found the guy/gal that you love, but you fear to love them in case they might hurt you? Because, I feel like what have we got to lose?

Barack says we need to regulate this stuff. To fix the tax breaks the big guys are getting. He says everyone should have health insurance. He hasn’t taken money for his campaign from people trying to sway his opinion. When he graduated from law school he chose a job that was not high paying but that was a helping job and his wife thought he was crazy.. He thinks we should get out of this war. Personally since I do not believe in war on any level, this is the side I stand on. He actually knows the cost of health insurance, milk, etc.. He can run computers and he has a presence on every internet style invention there is. Ok whatever, but this means to me that he surrounds himself with smart people. And he accepts that life is in a rapidly evolving state right now…

BUT never do I hear him talk about fear and panic. I hear him talk about let’s fix it. Let’s change this. Let’s be hopeful not screwed up and freaking out… That doesn’t mean to me that HE knows the answer on everything. What it means to me is that he will have these goals of fixing and to do that he will surround himself with the best people. I really believe he will. I feel that he is actually trying to beat McCain because he knows he is the only one willing to do this ugly job. Like when my mom saved 100s and 100s of cats. She wasn’t trying to be the queen of cats. She just knew she was the only one to do it.. I feel like that is the place Barack is in.. I was turned off by people saying he was a rock star. But I know rock stars. That is not what he is doing. We get excited when people can speak in sentences. Everyone says things “rock” these days. It’s just the lingo.

Try very hard
Seriously, look up the DNC bio video online. Listen to Barack speak. Make sure you have listened to him. He is not hard to understand. And he has real ideas that just may work. Maybe he will screw us over. But with him I feel like maybe he does give a crap and he seems really smart. Listen to McCain speak. With McCain and the ideas he has on what to do with our huge problems, I see only a horribleness that is going to go way beyond what has already happened in the last 8 years. It was very clear to me in 2004 and now I am just shivering with dread that people will not just listen to what the candidates are really saying and how they say it and think inside of themselves what they themselves feel is right. Pretend both candidates are telling the complete truth. Seriously what do you really want? We can only be hopeful and pay attention. Don't just give up.

-10/7/08