1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their color.

2. Do not ever even think of using people as private property or as owned or as slaves.

3. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.

4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.

5. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?

6. Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.

7. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

8. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.

9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions and terrible sexual repressions.

10. Be willing to renounce any god or any faith if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Today marks the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq. 5 years, 10 months, 19 days since Bush declared mission accomplished and and end to major combat operations in Iraq. 4258 confirmed U.S. deaths. 4577 total coalition deaths. An unknown, and probably never fully known, number of Iraqi deaths.
And the fact remains:
We went in there based on a lie.
It was a motherfucking lie and yet still I see people on television defending Bush and his crew for this shit. Every goddamned day.
Every fucking time I hear someone say that this war was a good idea I have the strongest urge to punch them directly in their motherfucking neck.
As the war continues to roll on and the bodies continue to pile up I can’t help but wonder what we can even do now. Can we safely pull out now? Would the government of Iraq be stable enough? The honest answer is: No one knows. But the fact remains that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Afghanistan? Fine. We should have gone there. It was grossly mishandled and then ignored in favor of Iraq but I still maintain that sending troops into Afghanistan was the proper course of action. Iraq? No. There was no link between the attack on the World Trade Center and Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. What there was is a U.S. president with the need to show up his daddy and make a name for himself and a vice president with a hunger for oil and the ability to lie until the populace is scared.
Think about how many people died because we were so easily scared.

Remember:
Even Cheney said back in 1994 that invading Iraq would be a bad idea.

We are finally here. It was a long and amusing process. There have been a lot of exciting moments and probably an equal amount of screaming-at-the-TV moments. All of those moments are inconsequential compared to the small moment you will have when you step inside that voting booth.
Now go. Vote. This post will still be here when you come back from doing your duty as a citizen of this great nation.

Back? Voted? Got your sticker and your free coffee from Starbucks?
Good.

Before I start spitting my anger and sarcasm I would like to take a moment out to thank Madelyn Payne Dunham, the grandmother of Barack Obama. Thank you for helping to shape Senator Obama into the man that will hopefully be our next president. She got the chance to vote for her grandson in the presidential election but she sadly will not have the chance to see him lead. My heart and wll wishes go out to her entire family. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86.

I’m going to be kind of sad once this is all over. I’ve never yelled at my television this much when I wasn’t watching hockey. This has been an exciting time for me. Nerve wracking, but exciting. I really enjoyed watching the McCain campaign venture into the inane with their bullshit attacks and fear mongering. For all the shit they threw at Obama, after all the times they tried to link him to terrorists, extremists, socialism, after all that the make an ad that ended with saying Obama wasn’t ready to be president… yet.
Yet.
The yet implies he will be ready eventually. But at the same time they want you to believe he is evil. How the hell are we supposed to take these fucksticks seriously if they refute themselves?
All the slander, all the lies, the fear mongering, the bullshit, the general douchebaggery coming out of the Republican mouthpieces to me feels frantic. And judging by the current numbers over at Pollster the American populace is ignoring it. Pollster has Obama at 291 electoral votes (273 strong, 18 lean), McCain at 142 (129 strong, 13 lean). 105 in the tossup. With that math McCain could take all of his strong states, all of his lean states, all of the toss up and, get this, all of the Obama lean states and would still lose. It would be close but he would still lose.
All that and I am still nervous. I think after the last two elections no democratic voter should feel comfortable.

One thing that does make me smile is the final Senate Score Card from fivethirtyeight.com:

That looks like good news doesn’t it?

I hope when this is over we can finally tell the Republican party what they deserve to hear:

Get the fuck out.

This is just an idea I have been kicking around for some time so bear with me as I flesh it out.
Pollsters do not call cellphones at all. How many voters are they missing due to that? Exit polls in ‘04 showed that only 7% of voters lived in cell phone only households so the impact would be small. Especially when broken down state by state. How much has that number changed in 4 years?
According to Pew Research the percentage of Americans between 18-24 that can only be reached by cell phones is 30.6. while the percentage of all adults that fit that bill is 14.5.
I really need more data to really make any significant predictions based on this, preferably something broken down state by state, but just going by this one set of numbers you can form a basic idea.
If 30.6% of 18-24 yearolds cannot be polled there is a good chuck of data the normal polling methods are missing. Now, we know not all of them are voters but we do see a trend in that age group to lean heavily toward Obama and a huge spike in voter registrations.

What can we infer from this? Whatever conclusion you come to doesn’t look good for McCain.

Watch Sarah Palin get destroyed by Senator Joe Biden!

I have been looking forward to this debate since Palin was announced for the job. Who else is excited to watch what I am predicting will be a glorious crash and burn?
Palin gave McCain a giant bump when she was chosen but one she started opening her mouth the poll number went directly into the tank. Last Gallup poll shows Obama at +5 nationally. FiveThirtyEight.com currently has Obama at +6 nationally. Things look even better when broken up state-by-state. Obama leads McCain 250 to 163 electoral votes with 125 still in the toss-up column. Out of those toss up states Obama has a slight lead in most of them, including Ohio and Florida, for another possible 79 electoral votes.

I predict that the debate tonight will only make the McCain campaign sink even further into this electoral vortex that seems to be directly caused by Palin.

In an attempt to pull fence sitting Clinton supporters, Christian extremists and the three electoral votes from Alaska to his side McCain has announced that Sarah Palin (Gov. Alaska) is his pick for VP. I wonder if she knows how many houses she owns?

Well, this should kill McCain’s experience based attacks on Obama. She has been Governor for less than two years and before that a stint as the part-time mayor of a village of 6,000. Her education consists of a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a minor in polisci. Oh, and former Ms. Alaska runner up! McCain is trying to tell me that she is ready to lead this county when he shuffles off to the underground old folks home but Obama isn’t?
From her extraordinarily short record all I can tell about her is that she is anti-choice (member of the anti-choice group called Feminists for Life.), anti-gay rights and all for drilling in ANWR.
Remember when McCain was shitting his bed over Obama only visiting Iraq once? Well, Palin has never been there. Not once. Good work on undermining your own attacks.
I really would like to see how this effects the polls in Alaska, a normally red state that is currently in the toss-up column with Obama leading by 3 points according to Pollster.com.
Did I mention she is currently under ethics investigation for abuse of power? Alaska seems to be a hotbed of this sort of shit.

With McCain answering every attack on him with his “Noun, verb, P.O.W.” bullshit I would like to see her follow suit and reply with “Noun, verb, beauty queen” because, lets be honest, they really both have the same weight when judging the ability to lead the country.

Stealth edit:
Larry Kudlow of CNBC’s “Kudlow & Co.” asked her about the possibility of becoming McCain ticket mate.
Palin replied: “[A]s for that V.P. talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the V.P. does every day? I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that V.P .slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here for the rest of the U.S., before I can even start addressing that question.”

I’m sure you have heard of this story by now but since new information has popped up I thought it would be good to go over it again for the class.

Davis Davis is the principle at a high school in Ponce De Leon, Florida. Heather Gillman was a student that went to him for help. Heather was being harassed by other students for being a lesbian and thought Davis could help her. Instead he went on what can only be described as a witch hunt, outing her to her parents, ordering her to stay away from children and suspending any of her friends that showed any support for her.
According to U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak “He went so far as to lift the shirts of female students to insure the letters ‘GP’ or the words ‘Gay Pride’ were not written on their bodies.”
What the fuck?
With the backing of the ACLU Gillman sued the school and won. Davis has since lost his gig as principle at the school but he remains a teacher there. What really caught my attention about this case was the response from the school board’s lawyer when asked if there was a policy against wearing clothing that supported gay rights in the school district.

As has clearly been shown at Ponce de Leon School in September of this year, the types of clothing and symbols your clients seek to wear to school will likely be disruptive and interfere with the educational process. Also, said symbols were used and can further be used by select students to show participation in an illegal organization as defined by the School Board

Again, what the fuck? An illegal organization?

During the trial Davis had to take the stand and some of his quotes will no doubt amuse you:

The principal went on to admit that while censoring rainbows and gay pride messages he allowed students to wear other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag.

Davis also testified that he believed rainbows were “sexually suggestive” and would make students unable to study because they’d be picturing gay sex acts in their mind.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

Now that the quick review is over let us jump forward to the more recent news.
This is the headline on Yahoo: Fla. town backs ex-principal in gay student case.

“We are a small, rural district in the Bible Belt with strong Christian beliefs and feel like homosexuality is wrong,” said Steve Griffin, Holmes County’s school superintendent, who keeps a Bible on his desk and framed Scriptures on his office walls.

I have no idea how there are still parts of the world that act like this, let alone in my own country.

On Monday Congress decided to ban phthalates from children’s toys and other products. Why? Well, phthalates have been linked to health issues including asthma, allergies, reduced sperm count and genital abnormalities in boys. This legislation would remove three types of phthalates from consumer products permanently and another three types pending further study. On top of that this legislation would ban lead from children’s toys and open up a consumer database of complaints or accident reports for goods.
Toys R Us/Babies R Us and Walmart have stated that they would stop selling toys containing phthalates starting January 2009. I want you to ask yourself something: How bad does a chemical have to be for Walmart to voluntarily ban them? This is Walmart for fucks sake.

As you may have guessed by the title of the post the Bush administration, voiced by spokesman Tony Fratto, responded by saying Bush opposes the ban.
Nice.

Exxon Mobil, who manufactures a large chuck of this shit, responded by claiming that this legislation would put children at even greater risk because manufacturers would have to replace the phthalates with something that could be worse.

Read that last bit again. That right there explains exactly what it wrong with our system. We don’t require chemical additives to be fully tested to see if there are any health concerns before releasing them into the wild. In Europe the safety of a chemical must be proven before it is allowed on the market, here it must be proven unsafe before it is removed.

A few days ago Ron Paul finally dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination. All the hippies and wackjobs that loved this man more then their own sanity are in a state of mourning. This is also a huge loss for me because, like Mike Gravel and Rudy “Noun, Verb, 9/11″ Giuliani, he was a constant source of easy comedy. Now I’ll actually have to focus my attacks on Old man McCain.
So here is to all the hippies who blindly supported him because he is pro-hemp and anti-war without a glance at the rest of his record.
And here is to you Ron Paul. Here is to the man that:

Who would have guessed that stoned college kids could be so easily misled?

Now that he is gone he leaves behind a nothing but cardboard signs and bumper stickers slapped up on telephone poles and mailboxes around my city. That is his legacy. Soggy, limp, useless hunks of cardboard flapping about aimlessly in the wind and old fading stickers barely clinging to rusty lamp posts. Fitting. Now who the fuck is going to clean up this mess now that his idiot fans have receded back to the paranoia of their 9/11 conspiracy forums?