TINY MINDS

Archive for the ‘Bloviating’ Category

We have double-digit unemployment, state deficits are at record levels, scandal and corruption plague our government, and we’re at war across the world.  I have an idea, let’s tell chefs they can’t put salt in restaurant food. Yeah, that’s what the people want our legislatures working on.

NEW YORK, March 11 (UPI) — A New York state assemblyman says restaurants throughout the state should not be allowed to use salt in the preparation of food.

This dude needs to get off the adderall and back on the downers. In this little diatribe, he is arguing to bring our troops home NOW, but he gets a little side-tracked by the media, and the Vietnam war — claiming that he heard things during that war very similar to this current war. Of course, he forgets that he was born in 1967, so the whole thing was over by the time he was eight. Sure, he has that great of a memory for things he heard, even after hundreds of gallons of hootch and cases of pills. Uh huh.

One of the most important things you must do, once you decide to run for office, is to get a clear idea of WHY you are running.

This is the most fundamental question you will be asked, and you will be asked it early and often, all the way through election day.

Many political experts say, and rightly so, that you need to have a 10-second speech, a 60-second speech, and a longer statement. The shortest is for elevators, or the line at the grocery store. The 60-second might be for a luncheon event or networking situation, or when encountering the press from time to time. And fundamentally, rather than going into details of issues, you need to know, and relate, why you are running for office.

Keep it simple. For example, “I’m running for the legislature because I believe that ordinary folks can do a better job of representing our interests than the politicians we have in office now.” Or “I’m running because we need to really find out and control what’s going on in the state capital.”

Think about why you are running — if it’s not something external to yourself, you may want to think again about running. Many of our current politicians ran (and continue to run) because they think of politics as a career, or the next stepping stone on their way up the political ladder. You know that’s not you — make sure you communicate that to your voters – and let “why” you are running permeate everything you do in your campaign.

Although I realize that tens of people stop by here each month, usually on accident, I’ve decided that I liked my old Lemmings theme better than the stark and dreary Gadsden bumblebee theme. Hopefully once we get past the 15th of October, I’ll be able to jump back into the bloviating with both feet.

It could be hard to type that way, but we’ll see.

Thank goodness the Democrats rarely listen to her. But in a recent article on Salon, she makes a slew of good points – and asks a couple of searching questions.

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. … It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

It was there for all to see. Those of us who are part of the mob, and helping drive the conversation online, could feel it in our bones. Too bad the Democrats, by and large, can’t seem to feel the populist anger that’s welling up all around them. Actually, it’s not too bad; the air has that 1994 smell to it, if you know what I mean.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

It’s easy — it hasn’t been about “people” in a long time, Camille. It’s about power. It’s about money. It’s about control. And it won’t end, ever, for them — because it’s all they know. The idealists of the 60′s are gone — either evolving into self-interested power-seekers, devolving into regular folks who just want to raise their families and make a living, or finally wised up and realized that the Republican or Libertarian Party is their true home.

I love the smell of 1994 in the morning. Smells like… victory. Some day, this regime is going to end.