I am sick and tired of groups that try to regulate morality.  It’s right up there with those people who want to tax fattening foods.  If I want to eat unhealthy that’s my own choice, not something the government needs to put their sticky little mitts all over.  The same goes for morality – and of course the top of that subject has always been homosexuality.  Apparently the American Family Association is upping the ante in intolerance and bigotry by calling for a boycott of all Pepsi products.  The reason for this?  Pepsi refuses to “remain neutral in the culture war”.  Culture war?  Really?  I didn’t realize the gays and straights had taken up arms to promote their agendas.  Because we know if there’s a gay in your neighborhood they are going to do everything possible to  subvert your heterosexuality.  Yes, these people are part of the nutbag coalition that is fracturing this country by polarizing political camps and creating the us versus them mentality.  No compromise.  Winner take all.

My favorite moment from their lunacy was this gem:

PepsiCo, while promoting the homosexual agenda, refuses to give one penny to help those trapped in this destructive and unhealthy lifestyle.

Personally i’ve always felt the destructive and unhealthy lifestyle is one where we preach hate and intolerance.  If you feel strongly about homosexuality that is certainly your right.  But to then try and force your will upon other people is just plain wrong.  We can disagree about things, but to believe in the absolute truth and rightness of your position, that there is no middle ground, well look over to the Middle East for a great example of where that will get you.  Centuries of intolerance have led to bloodshed and wholesale slaughter.  I’d like to think the average person of the 21st century is capable of raising themselves above such petty behavior.

So I say to everyone who reads this, when you’re finished, go out and buy a Pepsi.

I suppose the obvious feeling going through the online community is jubilation.  She’s that political whacko everyone (at least everyone who didn’t vote for her) has loved to hate since her nomination as a Vice Presidential candidate.  Alaska is one of those states we barely remember is there let alone can believe that they have some form of organized government up there.  Palin entering the headlines showed us we were all right – there’s nothing at all organized about it.  However the news out of Alaska has certainly kept us entertained the past year.

The majority of pundits on both sides of the fence seem to feel her leaving office is part of a program to begin rebuilding her image in preparation for a 2012 Presidential run.  It certainly makes a lot of sense.  While some camps still support her she certainly doesn’t have the public support to be a viable Presidential candidate at the moment.  She has plenty of time to begin a campaign towards creating an image with far more universal appeal.  It might be a hard sell after lining herself up with some serious conservative powers as well as coming off as one of the least intelligent women to ever enter the political arena.  It’ll take a lot of work to turn it around, so removing herself from active office may give her the time and focus it would take to start laying the ground work for 2012.

Other people have speculated that this stepping down is a pre-emptive move to help deal with a scandal that’s about to break.  It seems like a far classier move than I’d expect from her – to actually remove herself from office rather than continue on while embroiled in scandal.  It would have to be one hell of a scandal for that to happen.  I think we can probably discount this theory, though it does open all sorts of interesting possibilities if it is true.  It would certainly give the media plenty of new fodder for slow news days.

Finally I’ve heard that perhaps this is a move so she can spend more time with her family.  If this is true it seems more like its part of a publicity campaign that would support her working on her image.  I’m not saying she isn’t family oriented, nor am I saying that she doesn’t truly want more time with her family.  I’m just not sure she is the personality type who would step out of their political career in order to have more time with her family.  However it is a great way of making headlines, softening her image towards the more moderate crowd, and backing up her strong family value platform.

I guess in the coming months the truth will start to unfold – it’ll be good timing, Michael Jackson conspiracy theories will have started to lose their appeal by then.

The majority of his tax proposals would put the burden squarely on those families who are already facing tough times doing to the poor overall state of the economy.  Removing tax caps on gasoline, removing the tax restrictions on clothing, charging tax on items before applying coupn discounts – all these things are going to hit hard on working and low income families.  Patterson and his upper crust cronies aren’t going to feel the pinch.  When is the last time any of them clipped a coupon?  Those tiny savings add up over the course of the year, especially to people of limited financial means.  The removing of tax caps on gasoline, while trying to pass it off as helping the enviroment and lessening our reliance on oil, hurts a lot of Upstate families who live a significant distance from where they work.  Small towns don’t have access to reliable transportation, and while living in a more disperesed community even things like ride sharing aren’t feasible.  Creeping taxes on gasoline will take larger bites out of a paycheck that is already spread thin.

I also wanted to focus on the proposed tax increases on some things that I would agree fall more towards the catagory of luxury items.  One of Patterson’s tax proposals is an 18% tax on beer, wine, and cigars.  There is certainly no arguing that these are necessary items for the day-to-day survival of anyone.  While a higher tax on such items is unlikely to change the purchasing habit of more afluent citizens, it will reduce the middle income brackets abilities to enjoy such small luxuries.  Life is not about merely getting by with the bare neccesities from day to day.  A workforce made up of drones will at some point break with devastating results, history has shown this.  It’s these little luxury items, the types of things which help people to relax, enjoy themselves, and maybe on the rare occassion feel like they are part of a higher class bracket than they actually are is necessary for the mental well being of a populace.  While some may bring arguements of binge drinking and other drunken antics to the table, I would argue that these are the minority, and much like people who smoke higher taxes won’t curb their habits.  What it will do is once again force the every day working person to make tougher choices, have fewer luxuries in life, and spend more time merely existing rather than striving.  It may seem like a small thing, but the small pleasure that bring us joy also bring us hope and a belief that in this country it is still possible to make a better life for yourself.  We can also look at this from a business perspective, especially wine in a state like New York.  While internationally New York wines may still lack that level of “credibility” attributed to the California wines, it is still a thriving industry that brings a large amount of tourism dollars to the local economy.  This tax will hurt their bottom line, forcing them to seek alternative additional revenue streams, or even raising the price on their product.  This can hurt both tourism as well as local business.  Things that hurt small local business hurt the populace as well, and reduce the overall taxable base.  These types of taxes are short-sighted, much like putting a band-aid on a severed artery.  This burden will not be as high on the large box stores which can distribute increased costs across all their products, thus only having nominal price increases per item, as opposed to smaller stores where it hits hard at their bottom line.  Alienating local business, and making it hard for them to continue operating is not going to help New York long term economic and deficiet issues.

Finally the so-called “obsiety tax”, taxation on non-diet beverages, is at best assinine.  First and foremost I don’t believe it is the governments job to regulate whether someone choses to be healthy or not(while I do understand the arguements that this translates in to additional costs in our already burdened health system, I still find it hard to swallow that any such tax is designed with that in mind, rather its used a “sugar” coating to help people swallow yet another tax aimed at the middle class).  Secondly, even ignoring my first arguement, I would seriously argue against that soda is the primary cause of obsiety issues today.  Why not tax chips, fried foods, donuts, or any number of food as well.  If your only concern is the health and welfare of the populace why single out one small part of the problem?  There aren’t more sweeping taxes on such issues as it would become even harder to justify those and garner support for his 2010 election hopes.  He’s trying to push the line to get what money he can without being seen as a tyrant.  It’s only sad that he is so blind that he doesn’t realize he crossed that line 20 tax proposals ago.  The third part of my arguement is that if he truly is proposing this as an “obsiety tax” why does he want to tax health club memberships as well?  A little ironic, tax them for getting fat, tax them for trying to get thin.  Ignore the rhetoric, this man wants to squeeze the tax base dry.

These short-sighted measures, if passed, are going to hurt New York in the long run.  Higher taxes are going to cause more of the population to move out of state, which over the last several years has already been a difficult problem for New York.  A smaller, work force, being burdened by higher taxes is only going to create worsening economic divides and lead to a state in critical condition – one that would not survive without outside assistance.  Yes, the massive deficiet New York is facing does need to be addressed, but a financial war on the working families is not the way to achieve it.  I am faithful that the other elected officials of the state are smarter than the govenor gives them credit for, and that they will not stand in line to destroy New York families.  For anyone living in New York I urge you to conact your local state representitives and tell them emphatically to oppose our govenor and support measures to encourage new jobs to move to New York as well as helping exisiting small business to not only stay afloat, but to thrive.  We can’t allow this state’s highest office to break the back of the working class.

You have to love this kind of move.  It points out the awesomely stupid nature of the entire economic system in one swoop.  Our system is now so mired in credit, the action of companies from hundreds of different industries, and what our president had for lunch.  Seriously.  Our economy is not based on actual products, or anything of intrinsic value anymore.  It’s all a bunch of rich idiots trying to prop up other rich idiots who lost all their money but not having a lick of business sense.  The worst part is our government continues to bail these freeloading people out.  Once upon a time the people of true capitalism knew that the ventures they started were risks, and accepted the fact they could fall flat on their face.  They had business plans.  They worked long hard hours to create their empires.  Now they’ve handed those empires over to a bunch of spoiled cry-babies who have never actually had to earn their place in life.  And when things fail they blame everyone but themselves, flailing about and begging to be saved.  The only thing more despicable than that is the fact that our government enables that by continually propping them back up.  Maybe the thing we need is a major economic failure, one so deep we’re forced to reset the entire system.  I’m not sure there’s any foundation upon which to rebuild.  Pessimistic?  Sure.  But I’m still waiting to be proven wrong.

In the end I say give the money to the porn industry.  They’ll make a lot better use out of 5 billion dollars than GM will.

Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it’s “pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation” simply by looking at file names.

What would be obvious to even the slowest minded of criminals would be to change the file name to something innocuous. There’s also the fact that a growing portion of peer-to-peer traffic these days is encrypted, which would further foil his brilliant detection methodologies.

Let’s ignore the fact that a filename alone can be absolutely misleading. There’s still the misguided belief by lawmakers that you can tie IP addresses to a specific individual. Ask the RIAA how well that one has been going for them. The problem is the people making these laws refer to experts who have next to no credentials in the field. It’s as if saying “he made the blinking 12:00 on the VCR go away, he must be an expert in media technologies!” Sadly our lawmakers spend too many times at luncheons on the dime of lobbyists rather than actually attempting to grasp a basic understanding of the technologies they seek to regulate.

I think going after these people who trade in kiddie porn is a great idea. I think working to develop some way to trace back these files, and monitor their trade so that the people responsible for them can be apprehended is an absolutely noble idea. I just wish people would have a clue before they charge headlong in to the fray thinking that they have the miracle device that will save the world. Right now a system such as this that is bound to cause a fair portion of false positives will go a long way towards destroying the reputations of innocent people. Once the label child molester is put upon someone, even if they are later found to be innocent, it never goes away. Our system might not be perfect, but we don’t need to further degrade it by embracing technologies that are such an obvious failure.

Scooter Libby’s sentence is being commuted. A man who has been found guilty of all kinds of misuse of power is now being freed by the master of misused power. The only difference is Bush isn’t doing anything illegal, just really stupid. At this point I think his own political party might be the group that hates him the most as he is single handedly destroying the GOP’s chance of winning the next election. Between him and a vice president who can’t decide what branch of the government he wants to belong to this day there is no public support left for the GOP. If they have any chance of salvaging what is left of their party they need to be the ones to step up to the plate and pry the madman from his thrown.

With politics being all about the status quo these days we know that’s not going to happen. It’ll be business as usual, and I’ll just keep hoping that nothing else goes to hell in the next year and a half.

It might not seem like such a big deal now, but if given just an inch, next time they’ll take a foot.  Left unchecked it could lead to the censorship and banning of any group that could possibly offend any other member.  Where do you draw the line?  I’m sure I’ll continue to post to my LiveJournal account about the more mundane things, but it has lost its appeal as a place where I can express anything other than every day events such as letting people know about a get together.  I really hope that a public outcry by the massive LiveJournal user base will help them rethink their policies.  At the very least investigate claims, examine their merit before jumping the gun and banning people because of a potentially offensive keyword.  SixApart (the parent company of LiveJournal) could take this as a chance to stand up and buck the trend of ever increasing regulation of internet speech.  They could raise the banner of open dialog between peers and stand up to those who would oppress one of our most basic, and yet most unique of rights.

His real motivations, one would assume, are like that of most politicians these days: an attempt to justify their seat in office.  They can’t find ways to help battle unemployment, homelessness, rampant drug abuse, or violent crimes, so they rally around some stupidly short sighted and moronic piece of legislation while touting how they are going to help save lives.  The fact that our legislative body is going to waste its time over such legislation, taking away from any chance they might focus on an issue that really matters, is a crime against the citizenry of this state.  Perhaps the greater crime is we keep electing these officials in to office.  We don’t smack them on the wrists and tell them no like a grabby child in a candy store.  Instead we spoil them by letting them get away with such assinine measures.

As for the people who are walking in to traffic – again, if you don’t have the common sense that tells you walking in to a street without looking first isn’t a good idea then there are far deeper problems here than the fact you were gazing longingly at your phone waiting for that next text message.   While the loss of life is always tragic, I am constantly amazed how much could be prevented by common sense.  If someone is not self-aware enough topractice common safety measures then all the legislation in the world isn’t going to save them.

Hopefully this piece of legislation will never see the light of day – though in todays fear mongering climate I have no doubt it’ll find its way in to law.