nation and world

• Since 1990, more than 300,000 people have been murdered in the U.S.
• More than 50 million babies have been aborted since Roe v.Wade.
• 50–60% of married couples admit to adultery, and 5 million unwed couples live together.
• 75–80% have had premarital sex by the age of 19.
• One-third of births are out of wedlock.
• 1 in 4 teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease.
• Americans spend up to 13 billion annually on pornography.
• We have over 2,200,000 people in prison - the highest number in the world.
• Surveys suggest that 91% of Americans lie regularly.

Here's an explanation via Mustard Street of a progressive tax system using a simple forumula: Ten buddies drinking beer.

The Tax System - Explained With Beer

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20." Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

Read the whole thing.

Hard right Republicans can dismiss Colin Powell as a RINO and thereby, at least in their own minds, discredit Powell's endorsement of Obama, but what about Ken Adelman?

Adelman's GOP roots go back to Goldwater. He seved in the Nixon and Reagan administrations.  He was a chief proponent of the Iraq invasion and an advisor to Donald Rumsfeld.

He's voting for Obama.

Primarily for two reasons, those of temperament and of judgment.

When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

McCain's ping-pong approach to campaign tactics and his appalling lack of judgment in the decision to select Palin should cause all thinking conservatives to question supporting Arizona's absentee Senator.

In her interview with Katie Couric, Gov. Sarah Palin said he opposed Roe v. Wade because the abortion decision should belong to the states.  She called herself a "Federalist in that sense."

Here's a video of Palin saying the U.S. Constitution should be amended, thereby taking away the states' ability to decide this issue for themselves, banning gay marriage.

I don't care what your position is on abortion or gay rights, Palin's intellectual contradiction is appalling. Either you support giving more power to the states to make their own decisions on big issues or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose what issues to make a "Federalist" issue or not.

Of course, I'm not convinced Palin even knows what a Federalist is, or how the term has evolved in meaning over the course of the past 200 years.

Here's the video:

Voter registration, we hear, is on the rise, and much of it is driven by first-time voters, young voters signing up for the first time.

Consensus thinking seems to be, this benefits Obama.

Don't count on it.  A GateHouse News Service story suggests that young voters shy away from strong party affiliation.

“There are so many things wrong with the Republicans and Democrats that, picking a party, I couldn’t even fathom picking a party,” said Chad Stenberg, a 24-year-old teacher from Rockford.

That was the overwhelming message heard during a two-day tour last week of three Illinois cities — Rockford, DeKalb and Normal — to find out what’s important to young voters and why.

I'm not watching TV news programming until after Jan 20th, 2009.  Colin Powell, who I always thought was a Democrat in Republican clothing, endorses Obama.  He feels Obama is the best person to be ready to take on the Presidency.  The news broadcasts report on "war chests".  The volume of monies raised for the sole purpose of campaigning is astounding leading me to believe that one can buy their way into the history books.  The premise that "the player with the most marbles wins".  And then I watch a national news report on the number of homeless families in the state of Michigan forced from their residences because their landlords defaulted on home mortgages.  Who was most affected?  The children who now live in shelters with their families, their worlds and sense of security challenged.  Michigan is still responsible for providing educations to these homeless children who are transported into the school districts each day creating a challenge to everyone involved.

So let me see if I have this right--we can buy our way out of Wall Street with Golden Parachutes, we can buy our way into the White House with golden dollars, but this great country of ours still can't provide food, shelter, and an education to its forgotten citizens.

As a registered Democrat, I'll be in the voting booth in 16 days.  I'll pull levers for local and state candidates that I believe will serve us well, but I can't in good conscience pull any lever along those top two rows.

Some great zingers from McCain in this speech at an NYC charity event with Barack Obama, and he says nice things about Barack at the end of his routine, as well.

Christopher Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley, the icon of conservative intellectuals for more than 50 years and founder of National Review, had the gall to endorse Barack Obama.

This led to a deluge of angry e-mail to NO, where the endorsement did not even appear, and for C. Buckley to resign his position there. 

In a follow up post for The Daily Beast, he writes:

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

The Republicans and conservatives parted ways many moons ago, it's just that far too many conservatives have been loath to recognize it. Kudos to Buckley for standing on principle.  McCain is certainly no conservative, and that is an important fact to recognize.

This is pretty wild -- a New York woman wanted to send a message about racial characterizations of Barack Obama, so she made a Halloween display that has McCain in KKK sheets chasing the Democratic candidate.

Havens is quick to point out he is a liberal and a big supporter of Obama, and that the scene is meant to provoke thought about the way he believes Obama has been unfairly treated by the McCain campaign.

"I figured it would be equally offensive to everyone. It's just for shock value," Havens said. "McCain has been rabble-rousing, calling Obama a terrorist and a Muslim. The McCain campaign has gotten so ugly. That's what the message is. I can see how people could take this the wrong way. I'm not advocating anything. It's sarcasm."

It's really too bad that in 2008 race is an issue at all.