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The myth Republicans want you to buy into is that the idea of ‘big government’ is still all about taxes and your concealed weapon. Today though, it’s more about equal rights, privacy and most importantly the distribution of federal funds in a way that benefits the people. The Bush version of big government is all about, who in our society has to work their tails off for theirs, and who doesn’t. At the end of the day, who among us got to pick something off of the fancy desert cart when we really didn’t deserve it?

In one of my last articles LINK I pointed out a clear example of this. Boeing is a corporation that has been plagued by scandal involving the sale of flawed products, influence-pedaling and ultimately fleecing the taxpayers. The Pentagon restricted them from being rewarded further contracts based on their past indiscretions and what happens? Big government drops a sweet missile sale in their lap to the country currently housing Osama Bin Laden.

In 1995 the amount of pork barrel spending signed off on by President Bill Clinton was $10 billion. That number rose to $14.5 billion in 1997, but in his last year the number was $12 billion. In President Bush’s first year in office, that number jumped to $17.7 billion and has risen steadily each year and in 2004 equaled $22.9 billion. The current year’s budget allows for $27.3 billion. This equals a 227.5% increase since Bush’s first year in office. He has yet to veto a single bill as president.

This is Bush’s version of big government. Collect less in taxes, run up debt to cover the pork and bribes, then ensure there’s nothing left for the people. Starve the states and as many social programs as possible. His partners in the House and Senate get their pet projects approved and in turn comply with every request the White House makes along the way. It’s a dishonest way of doing business, a system based on bribes and subsequent compliance. In DC the game is to keep your hand extended long enough, and regardless of the sins you may have committed, the terrorists you house, the money you’ve stolen – in the end everyone gets fed but the taxpayer.

We’re all spun now in this never ending he said/she said battle, while being fed rations of gossip-ridden gumbo every day by the talking heads and print media.  We’re urged to base the depth of our political knowledge not on the social and economical impact of the decisions made by our leaders, but instead on the depth of our capacity for bickering amongst one another over who’s more of a scumbag, who lied more, and whether an attack should be condoned or vilified. Who threw the first punch? Who was justified in lashing out because of what? Who’s taking the high road? Who approved the funding needed to build the high road? Who’s hiding what, and why are they justified or not justified in doing so? Continue reading →

In the American political process these two words are mostly irrelevant in terms of what’s passed into law. Republicans are anything but conservative in any sort of a fiscal sense, and Democrats are not universally liberals.  With this said, the labels are damning to our survival in the long run as they’re used like all labels are – to divide people who are more alike than they are different.

Admittedly I’d only listened to Rush Limbaugh on a handful of occasions before tuning in after being laid off. His time slot isn’t friendly to the workers of America…perhaps that’s the best thing about his contribution to the EIB network (‘excellence in babbling’ as a blogger so aptly named it) is that it captures the attention of those who don’t have anywhere to be on a weekday afternoon.

His diatribes are lengthly, and at every turn he categorizes all who oppose a Republican’s idea as a ‘liberal’. Count the times he utters the word ‘liberal’ in a given broadcast and you can understand the genius behind what he does. The word ‘liberal’ can mean just about anything, but most often he uses it to describe opinions in opposition of the GOP. His success lies in the fact that the trick worked. Countless numbers of ‘conservative’ radio people have popped up in recent years, mimicking his format and drawing an arbitrary line in the sand with conservative equaling Republican and liberal equaling Democrat. I’ve got a number of friends who couldn’t name a single bill passed in Congress over the past twenty years, but know full well that they don’t want to be considered a ‘liberal’. A liberal eats fetus sandwiches, engages in gay orgies and believes in money for nothing while a conservative believes in God and hard work. Continue reading →

I was thinking today about the multitude of topics my mind has been consumed by lately. Now that I’ve banished cable news from my life, it’s like I’m finally able to change the channel in my head. Removal of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News has left more time for reading the paper and listening to talk radio. The difference I’m experiencing is startling. Aside from being thankfully less aware of the whatever juicy crime tale the media has anointed worthy of a Hollywood juicing, hearing the term ‘expert analysis’ no longer makes me feel like I’m being taken advantage of at a carnival.

The one on one debate with moderator format acts now as a disguise for what folks used to call a ‘clip joint’. To understand the meaning of this old-timey reference, envision having paid two bits to see the world’s tallest man, only to sit down and discover that the performer is on stilts. In very much the same way, the studio set has created an economy for any person who now or at one time – any time – held a title pertaining at all to the script for that day. Military officers who in the past were on the ground themselves groaning over the way the ‘news’ pertaining to their efforts was cold-filtered before it hit the public, are now selling out quite readily upon retirement. No longer is it necessary to win an election to gain influence, as the more convenient route via agent and stylist simply eliminates the middleman.

A marketing ploy used by salesmen of all ages, the ability to eliminate the middleman has always been the perfect hook. Brilliantly this word has shifted in the case of news coverage from meaning ‘government’ to ‘John Q. Public’ ever since the first war with Iraq during the Bush Sr. years. CNN validated the idea of 24-hour news in spite of the fabled ten-minute American attention span. As the market has evolved over the years, the ten-minute attention span has dictated whether the game was to report the news or turn it into theater. Just as anything else in our culture, the successful medium was packed with bells, whistles and ‘experts’ aimed to mesmerize, while prospectors dug around in the back for every possible pocket of profitability that existed.

These ‘experts’ continue to cash in on the public’s affinity for conflict. The amount of times where this dynamic is milked within the media has skyrocketed in recent years. Any consumer who takes in at least an hour of reality TV per week will attest to the fact that the point of the show often comes second to the conflict that comes out of forcing the contestants to co-exist. Oddly enough, the idea behind MTV’s ‘The Real World’ acts as a porthole towards understanding why people are tuning in to cable news every night in lieu of reading a newspaper. The easy, yet wrong, assumption often made is that laziness dictates whether someone chooses to ingest their news intravenously or with knife and fork.

The desire to feel qualified or informed on what’s happening in the world isn’t determined by motivation as much as it is a sense of duty. Some of us have had it instilled within us that we must be interested in what’s going on in the world, for the sake of anything from being responsible for the country to expressing gratitude for having been born here in the first place. The desire to choose one form of information over another is due to our nature as human beings and the thrill that conflict naturally stirs up within us. After days where the grind has beaten the average American worker down, the promise of conflict to watch on TV provides a release for those of us who would most likely get fired if we let people know how we really felt about them. Reality TV and cable news shows provide us the release we long for, even if the person getting ‘served’ is someone we’ll never even meet.

I call this the, ‘Oh Yea? Well Screw You!’ demographic. It’s alive, well and swelling within our society. The urge to satisfy this hunger has engulfed what we used to refer to as news. As news is no longer what happened where and why, but instead what two or more opposing shills were able to quibble about over it. The medium provides a cushion for those in charge of the country, as regardless of who was responsible for something bad happening, from the moment the story breaks we’re provided with an ‘expert’ pointing the finger and the other saying ‘nuh-uh’ before the ink dries. Well paid talking heads read off a prompter, what the money has decided to anoint as news. With human nature being such an understood and exploitable science, we all appear to the money as credit lines on the open range begging to be pandered into comas.

The antidote for me was to kill my television. Parents can block out what channels they don’t want their children to see, and since having done that very thing to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, I’ve been hanging with a better crowd. I’m no longer spending my time with bad influences, those people mom warned you about who’d turn you into a thug if you weren’t careful. Cable news is the equivalent of what we were told as children to stay away from, be it booze, drugs or loose women. All of these things provide a momentary sense of happiness and relief, dangerous in that unless careful, over time, any of them could end up turning you into something you’re not.

In the end it’s all too clear that I’m just not one of the ‘cool kids’. Peer pressure to just drink the kool-aid and shut up has it’s way of making sense all too often, but nothing will ever convince me of the absurd notion that money will sacrifice itself for the sake of doing the right thing. Cable news is in the business of convincing us otherwise.

The magical mystery jar of Vietnam history now has four hands grasping for the contents inside, with respective campaign riffraff of both the guilty fiends howling indictments at one another for stealing the classified cookies and exploiting their deliciousness for political gain.  In terms of legitimate behavior of powerful men and women in this country, the campaign Mafioso, talking heads and the fiends themselves have managed to inspire dictionary publishers all over the world to engage in heated debate over the need for a completely new word to describe it. Scholars, writers and satirists are in a state of panic as these past few weeks of buffoonery have raised the bar, and many fear that old time favorites such as ‘farce’, ‘mockery’ and ‘ludicrous’ just won’t get the job done anymore.

There is no rioting, mass panic or spontaneous combustion to report from all of this just yet, but experts predict that a few more baseless statements and they may have to raise the nation’s irrationality alert level to red for the first time in nearly four years. State governors were notified of the potential crisis and some immediately instructed public access stations to roll continuous emergency broadcast episodes of ‘Mr. Wizard’ and ‘3-2-1 Contact’ in hopes that the swelling would go down.

Many of them attempted to even put their National Guard units on alert, unfortunately, of the soldiers within those units that weren’t already deployed, the rest had schedules booked solid already with grand jury testimony by day, and intense drugging sessions administered by Pentagon officials at night. Who, by the way, have ‘gone off the reservation’ in fingering our royal family as well as the CIA to answer as to why so many prisoners were sodomized with night-sticks instead of glow-sticks as the memos instructed. For the past three years it seems that all of our government agencies in the ‘kicking-ass’ business have been desperately trying to out-scoundrel one another for the president’s affection. We’re all riddled with anticipation over which agency he’s going to hand the rose to, and the latest news concerning coverage is that NBC is offering 50 billion to cover the finale.

So is this the end of the world that ‘Ghostbusters’ warned us about? Has the pendulum swung once more to the days when we burned witches because they failed to drown when thrown into a lake? In prisons across the country young men and women are locked up due to various circumstances such as possession of marijuana, wrongful imprisonment, false accusation and lack of representation. Meanwhile a prerequisite in most universities offering political science degrees now require up to 3 additional requisite courses, the names of some include ‘Introduction to Inaccurate Script Writing Theory’, ‘Bamboozle 101’ and ‘Three Card Monty of the Political Mind’. Basically, dishonesty has become interpretive truth, and dumb luck has become crime. If you’re born with the four-leaf clover in your soul and a silver spoon in your mouth, the world is your pincushion. Otherwise, the government would appreciate it if you could protect the country, work hard, turn sixty-five and then die as soon as possible. Continue reading →

We’re all spun now in this never ending he said/she said battle, while being fed rations of gossip-ridden gumbo every day by the talking heads and print media.  We’re urged to base the depth of our political knowledge not on the social and economical impact of the decisions made by our leaders, but instead on the depth of our capacity for bickering amongst one another over who’s more of a scumbag, who lied more, and whether an attack should be condoned or vilified. Who threw the first punch? Who was justified in lashing out because of what? Who’s taking the high road? Who approved the funding needed to build the high road? Who’s hiding what, and why are they justified or not justified in doing so?

We’re allowing the media to deviate from relaying facts and instead reside in the realm of arbitrary for as long as people are interested in bickering over a certain thing. When a particular derision has been squeezed of all its bile, there’s always another one on its way down the conveyor belt that can easily be spun into an ‘us vs. them’ saga. As it’s apparently the paramount goal of the media of our generation to now divert attention from facts and reality and instead turn the entire process, one that affects each and every one of us in specific ways, into a never ending episode of ‘Melrose Place’.

On some days, all you see posted in internet blogs are rants about the fluff, inciting an arena for people, under the protection of cyber-anonymity, to clutter each others’ minds in a supposedly intellectual way by throwing feces at one another. Through this, our brains are repeatedly beaten into submission and taken in to slavery. The presidential race is no longer ours, nor does it belong to the candidates. Instead it belongs to the influential talking heads and agenda driven print pundits who are too easily able to crack the whip and turn our slave minds into washing machines. We launder the spin and allow them to turn it into the story, rather than it being a method of telling the story. We voluntarily legitimize their version of reality, then attempt to peck each others’ eyeballs out, all the while ingesting talking point after talking point aimed at accomplishing nothing more than to encourage self mutilation of ourselves from the brain down.

The spin, and our addiction to it on both sides, has allowed the press to become the story. It’s allowed the realities of policy decisions and ideas on what to do to make the country better to take a permanent back seat to whatever the press tells us we should be arguing about on a given day. In fact the real stuff isn’t even on the back seat; it’s tied up and gagged in the trunk. The real stuff is kept safely away so as not to divert our attention from the fluff to what our tax dollars are actually facilitating behind the curtain.

I read pieces written by people that state facts and arguable points of view concerning the science involved in making America a better place, but these are generally overlooked in lieu of the gossip that we naturally flock to. Our lives are impacted by the actions of politicians every day, but these actions are covered minimally, while the drama is dissected in every imaginable way. How many people on average understand how our economy works? How much of an impact does consumer spending have? What is GDP and what does it mean when it’s reduced? If you judged by the spun up drivel we’re fed everyday in the form of ‘political news’, those things wouldn’t appear to be important at all.

Why? Because it’s all about making money, it’s about catering to a market who’ll stick with you because they like how you describe things, how you apply your particular spin style, or how viciously you insult and berate those on the opposing side. Diverting attention from reality is paramount because, unfortunately for the talking heads and print media, facts do and always will exist whether any of them care to admit it or not. Facts aren’t biased, nor are facts partisan or arbitrary in nature. Drive-thru news outlets would anger their customers if they focused too much on the facts. So they keep our heads chained inside cages with unlocked doors for specific a purpose. To ensure their profitability and survival remains in tact, at the expense of objectivity and the necessary accountability of our leaders. By pushing our buttons in a precise way, while always pointing out that the door to the cage is open, we’re lulled into a deep and blissful state where nothing is what it seems and all of us are always right.

We’re mental slaves to this chicanery. The political media in America has now taken over the role of enslaving minds from government and religion, and the proof surrounds us. We’re not different than our neighbor now because we pray to a different God, as that would be prejudiced and wrong. Now we’re different than our neighbors based on what version of spin we chose to allow into the laundry room of our minds. Bias has become the story, and in this extended battle of bias vs. bias, the only losers are you and I.