Dad

My Dad is 59 years old. He works as an air conditioning mechanic. He's probably the smartest person I know. In 1979 he fell 4 stories off a building hhe was doing structural iron work on, which was the precipitant event for us to move to Miami. Last year he had surgery to replace a bad hip. As a boy, the nuns at St. Vincent de Paul brow-beat him to the point where he's unconvinced of his own intelligence. At 18, he did the right thing and answered the post card ordering him to report for basic training. He spent the next several years driving a supply truck through Vietnam, and was at a base in Khe San when the Tet Offensive began.

He's working today, and to my knowlege he's never taken had the second Friday in November off in his working life. Neither have any of his brethren. This dawned on me as I walked through the aisles at my local HomeDepot, and I wondered how many of their hourly employees are veterans, though the on duty employees seemed too young to have done active duty in Vietnam. I wonder how many of the people driving deliveries and laboring were duty bound in service to thieir country at one time or another, who are hard at work today. Too bad I get the day off and they have to work. No one's ever shot at me.

Happy Veterans Day, Dad.

Ok... Now what?

So you won the House of Representatives and have better than a near perfect split in the Senate, assuming the independents Jeffords continues voting progressively and former-DINO Lieberman starts. Now what? Do you attack the man or his policies?

I say it has to happen in this order (if not simultaneously)
1) Eliminate the friggin patriot act so we can have our first amendment back
2) Leave "No Child Left Behind" behind. Stop punishing education and fund it.
3) Examine the present tax system to find a medium where we are actually being tax-and-spend, rather than borrow-and-spend.
4) Go back to the drawing board on election reform and force municipalities to have verifiable voting.
4) eliminate the 80K cap on Social Security. That will make it permanently solvent.
5) Re-fix Medicare again... This time for real.
Do all of this while holding oversight hearings and seeking clear evidence of high-crimes and misdemeanors.
Do all this while maintaining a delicate balance and not overreaching your power, cause '08 is coming and we need the White House back so we can finish undoing the last 6 years for real.
Good luck.

Heffelumps and Donkeys

I admit it. I've spent time in my life blaming the wrong people for the anger, fear, and discomfort I felt towards myself, leading to intolerance when it was still cool to be intolerant. I cannot say that I've ever had anything in common with the belief system of the GOP. I was lucky enough to live and meet people who've done the same, and I learned that I was more afraid of myself than I was of anything that my disturbing and misshapen understanding of gay people represented. My backlash to my intolerance was to throw myself into a complete state of accepting... that everything that people do in pursuit of the BIG 3 (life, liberty, happiness...) was copecetic.

That's not to say that I've never been a registered Republican. Back in the early days of the MotorVoter, the young lady behind the counter at the DOT in North Miami asked me if I wanted to update my voter registration while changing the address on my license. She neglected to ask me my party affiliation and assumed me to be a GOP kind of guy (maybe it was the way I was dressed?) This led to an interesting position though, with Florida's closed primary system: I hold the distinct pleasure of voting against W and Jeb a combined total of 5 times, 3 times as a Republican. Counting tonight and 1992, I've been voting against the GOP for 14 years. A lot of good it's done me in this pathetic state.

I realize that the thing that the Dems are doing wrong is appealing to working people, like my wife and I. We are flat broke, and can scarcely afford to donate to the "feed-a-starving-teacher-and-his-college-student-wife fund," much less any candidate or party. The nice phone fund raiser from the DNC got a chuckle out of this and asked me to consider putting money on my credit cards, but I'm pretty sure I'm still paying off money given to the DNC and to Kerry in '04.

If Charlie Crist wins tonight, the sun will still shine tomorrow, albeit with a nasty grey haze about it. We will continue on business as usual, giving 3rd graders a test that will effect the rest of their educational lives, giving schools grades, and giving schools a pittance-like bonus that shatters the harmony of schools. Additionally, we, the idiot voters of Florida will be giving Crist the ability to revoke the class size amendment by removing majority rule, a fact we won't fully realize until we try to muster the votes necessary to revoke this amendment 3 (requiring a super-majority of at least 1 million votes to change the state constitution). Our state congress will continue to rubber stamp all of the governor's stupid policies and follow the president blindly into oblivion. We as Floridians will continue to support the wealthy corporations at the expense of ourselves. Insurance companies will run roughshod over us, raising their rates further into cost-prohibitive levels and will up and leave when the payouts get too close to their CEO's bonus thresholds.

I'm glad to be supporting the Donkey, even if I sometimes feel like a loser in the process. I'm not glad to be poor, but I'm proud to be a little guy standing up for myself.

Enough complaining. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to counting my money.

Gee. That was quick.