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Monday, September 17, 2012

Mitt Romney's Take on 47% of Americans: Screw Them





Wow....just wow there's really no other way to express the ...wow...

"[My role]is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." ~ Mitt Romney (runner up 2012 presidential election)

So basically if you're voting for Obama, OR you're receiving any federal or state assistance you are not only devoid of taking personal responsibility for your own life (which you don't care for), you are also beyond being convinced too. 

Romney does realize he's trying to run an election right? 




Why Occupy Wall Street Failed


America hates biotches. It’s in our blood I think. We don’t like to see whiney kids, we hate that guy in front of us complaining because he was shorted 2 pennies, we cringe when Kobe goes up and comes down sobbing about someone breathing on his neck, when our kids get hurt we tell them to rub some dirt on it (or leaves when it’s in the eye region)…the bottom line is that by and large we don’t like people complaining, crying or biotching. We are a nation of “doers” and go getters.

Watch this, Quick test.
You see a guy on the side of the street, he’s asking for money. He’s just standing there. Next to him there’s a guy asking for money, he has a bottle of windex and a squeegee…which guy are you giving your buck to?

Most are going to help the guy trying to work. That’s us.

Now with those “work-colored” eyes let talk about Occupy Wall Street. It’s been about a year since they first steam rolled into a political capital near you. At first with the noble cause of representing 99%  in a place where only the 1% was being heard. SO wtf happened then? Where are they now and why does it look like the 1% is still the only group being heard?

I have a couple of theories.

Why Occupy Wall Street Failed Theory 1…
As it turns out you can’t just biotch about your problems, see the first sentence of this post, and if the 99% did nothing at all they biotched a good heap. The sad thing is they were actually biotching over important things and as it turns out their message (I’m going to go high level hear and stick with “things are fukked up and need to change”) is 100% valid and was representative of what most people felt and still feel…”things are fukked up and need to change.”

Why Occupy Wall Street Failed Theory 2

THIS IS NOT YOU
.









Nor is this











Or this.










Or is it?

Imagine you’re at work. Your boss comes in calls a meeting of your department and tells you that your whole department is having a salary reduction of 50%, you’ll be required to work weekends and you’ll not be paid overtime. You’re most likely pissed, as is everyone in your department, but hey, you have a mortgage to pay and kids to feed. You grin and bear it, you don’t say shyt. You know who doesn’t grin and bear it? The pink haired new guy with the way to tight jeans and gaping holes in his ears. He speaks up. In fact he’s pissed. He says something.  You don’t say shyt. You think it. You silently nod, but you don’t say shyt. He starts to try to organize a meeting, you don’t say shyt. He posts meeting times in the break room, you don’t say shyt. He meets with the boss, then gets fired... You don’t say shyt.

Why, because he didn’t look like you? Forget the fact that you agreed with him 100% he didn’t look like you so when it came time to join up you couldn’t because he wasn’t you…or so you though. Truth is he’s EXACTLY you (minus the hair, jeans and holes). He has a family, he has a mortgage, he even shared the same job as you. The difference was he wasn’t a biotch, re-read the first sentence of this post again. Now you may be asking, “if he wasn’t a bitoch and America doesn’t like biotches, AND he still failed then what’s the problem?”

The answer: “you’re a little biotch”. The problem wasn’t him, he did the right thing. The problem was you. YOU. YOU saw what was going on, YOU had every opportunity to help change things, YOU didn’t…because you’re a biotch...

Now multiply this on a national level and well it turns out America is full of biotches, approximately 98%.
1% - A group of go getters viciously screwing over the other 99%
1% - A group of go getters trying to fight that other 1%
98% - A group of biotches.


I have another theory but seriously theory 2 has me thinking that it’s more or less the right theory, Occupy Wall Street didn’t fail, Americans failed.

I mean just look at our country, literally 1% owns damn near everything. And the rest sit idly by and we, yes we, don’t do or say a damn thing.

Your goal then should NOT be to become a 99%er, the majority of that group is full of  biotches, you should aspire to be a 1%er.

To recap.
-        Occupy Wall Street was/is a good cause
-        It represented you
-        You’re a biotch.

I suggest changing that last one.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Gay Marriage - The compromise


Wedge Issues

I had an interesting discussion with a few of my boys over lunch the other day regarding everyone’s favorite wedge issue…Gay marriage.

Keep in mind these two friends are staunch republicans and Christians, needless to say the phrase, “I’m really not opposed, nor do I care, too much about a lot of the issues, but what gets me is their [Romney and Obama] stance on gay marriage.”

For a little background information both my friends are between 26-30 years of age, one Hispanic and one Caucasian, one has 2 children, the other has non and both are married.  Both are college educated professionals and both have voted republican since age 18.

The discussion took what I’ve learned to be the normal course for this topic, that’s to say we hit the following topics:
1. The sanctity of marriage
2. The country was founded on Christian principles which do not support gay marriage.
3. God wanted it to be man and woman (Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve).
4. I just don’t understand it.
5. Are you gay?

I normally counter these arguments by outlining the distinction between laws and religion. For me this has always been at the heart of the matter and really what I wanted to talk about and ultimate what I was able to show at least two people over the course of about an hour.

First let me say it’s scary as all hell to think that there are people who almost BLINDLY vote a particular way based on issues that have NOTHING to do with law, but rather religious opinion, I’d also point out that I’m a Christian, and while I personally don’t believe in gay marriage, I also understand that it’s really not my place to try to enforce laws on grown adults when they harm no one, but also deny them rights afforded to other citizens.

 Let’s get on with outlining the distinction between religion and law and how things apply when one discusses “gay marriage”.

The concept of marriage is a funny one. On one hand we have the religious institution, I say religious because almost ALL religious have some form of marriage. On the other hand we have the “legal” term of marriage, which is when two people state that they’d like the law to recognize the “couple” as one. There are a myriad of LEGAL (re: LAW) “benefits” people get for being married; taxes, social security benefits for their spouse, housing classifications (family only), estate planning benefits, FMLA, death benefits, medical benefits, etc, etc, etc…the list goes on and on. (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/marriage-rights-benefits-30190.html - here is a good site that quickly points out some of the benefits). The list of benefits received from RELIGIOUS marriage really depend on the religion, some include fulfillment of a commandment, a “oneness” with your spouse…aside from that I really can’t think of any to be honest with you, outside of the “rules” that apply to marriage the benefits really don’t amount to much, after all priests don’t get married so we can’t really say it’s “required” by god. To be more accurate we could say IF you decided to marry, God asks that you do XYZ.

The issue with applying the “RELIGIOUS” version of marriage to everyone is pretty self-evident…for those of you who missed the boat NOT EVERYONE IS RELIGIOUS. As Americans we’ve established that people can practice whatever religion they want, even NO religion, I think most people would agree this is a GREAT IDEA. In fact the few places that FORCE religion on their people are places we typically blow up from time to time. If we cannot really apply “religion” to everyone fairly and equally then we really have only one way to look at marriage FOR EVERYONE and that’s through a legal lens.

In order to look at marriage in a purely legal sense we have to remove ALL religious connotations from the discussion, so for that I’m going to replace “Marriage” (as seen in the eyes of the law) with the term “legal union”.  In America we believe in freedoms applied equally to everyone (even if we don’t always practice this,  I’m working the angle that we WANT this to happen and we want to practice it). Give that we WANT freedom and the laws applied equally to everyone when you start talking about legal unions and NOT allowing certain people equal rights you start to run headlong into the problem with NOT allowing homosexuals access to “legal unions.” The truth of the matter is that if you want to prevent someone from having access to legal unions you are denying them a basic rights that everyone else has access to and you’re doing it based on a religious belief. The problem with this is that your religious belief, like it or not, are NOT to be applied to laws. (consider also that not all religions share the same beliefs so who’s beliefs do we apply to the law? (Muslim, Christian, Sikhs, Buddhists???)

Shoving religion into a legal institution such as a legal union would be the same thing as saying muslims can’t get driver’s licenses because they are muslims. Or Mormons can’t get married because they don’t believe what you believe. When you start to pump religion into civil rights you start limiting who has access to those rights and that is the exact opposite of what America stands for.

THE COMPROMISE
Back to the conversation with my two friends.
What I was able to eventually arrive at was that the marriage of two men offended their religious sensibilities, more to the point they thought that the TERM Marriage should not lose it’s Man and a woman status but they had no problem with the term “legal union/civil union” which would allow gays to marry through the government (they agreed that to apply the laws fairy you had to grant the same legal protections to everyone). They held steadfast to their guns saying marriage was between a man and a woman, but agreed that a legal union was only fair for everyone.

The point I’m making with what I was able to get at with my friends is simple. I believe the argument of marriage is a semantic one. It’s a word game. What I think would work best for everyone involved is if we completely removed the legal term MARRIAGE from the law books and replaced it with the more accurate term (legal union). Marriage would still have its place, that place would be in the walls of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Ironically enough my two friends agreed…they’ll still vote Romney, though they don’t know why now… *shrug*

Here’s my questions to you.
1. Do you belive marriage to be between a man and woman only.
2. Do you find “THE COMPROMISE” suiting to your wishes
3. Why or why not?