Year: 2008

No taxation without equal rights!

California, Arizona and Florida passed bans on gay marriage Tuesday. In California the vote was about 52% in favor, a number that would be even higher if you removed the percentage of gay voters from those against. Nationally the percentage of gay voters is estimated to be somewhere between 4% and 10%. The low end, 4%, is based on the number of people who answer affirmatively to exit poll questions about recent same-sex partners. A fairly limited definition, even if it weren’t subject to underreporting. It is analogous to asking people if they’ve had sex with a member of the opposite sex in the last year and assuming that everyone who answers, “No,” is gay. Ten percent is the generally accepted guess.

Personally I am pretty tired of paying into education, child welfare, and other family programs, from which a majority of heterosexuals feel gay persons should be excluded. They deny our families. Why should we support theirs? Most data indicates that the average income of a gay person is higher than the national average. That means we are contributing more than 4-10% to government budgets. How would education programs look without our money?

One of the reasons that eighteen year-olds have the right to vote in the U.S. is because older voters realized that if someone was old enough to die for their country they were old enough to vote. When are heterosexuals going to accept that if our money is good enough to support their family institutions we are good enough to participate in those institutions? Do we have to withhold taxes? Go on strike? All gay people refuse to work until our relationships are given equal recognition? How well would your community function if 4-10% of the teachers, police officers, fire fighters, emts, trash collectors, doctors, nurses, clerks, etc. stayed home?

Dog care versus cat care

Barack Obama has already made one very good decision, early in his term. He has chosen a puppy for his children instead of a cat.

Dog Care:

Open the door let the dog out. The dog does her business and you let her back in. If you live in a city it may be a little more complicated. Go outside with the dog, Dog pees, dog poops. You pick up the poop, throw it in the trash. Job done!

Sure most dogs shed. Vacuum the floor and your pet clean-up is done! It is not my fault if you didn’t train your dog to stay off the furniture. Even if you have dog sofas and chairs your clean up is pretty simple. You can vacuum those while you are doing the floor.

Unless the dog is very good and very lucky, it will get sick occasionally. Then you may find yourself spending a lot of time cleaning up dog messes on the floor, or vigilantly watching your dog hoping to swoop it outdoors to prevent the next mess. Usually though, dogs, even when they are sick, want to go outside. If the dog is old, or you are such a deep sleeper that she can’t wake you up, you may find yourself setting an alarm every few hours to let her out. Soon the sick phase will pass and you will be back to the easy life.

Cat Care:

If you have a dog and are considering a cat, rejoice that dog care requires so little of your time because you will spend hours a day cleaning up after your cat. Basically a cat is like a sick dog that never gets well. There are hairballs, and poop – when he just couldn’t be bothered to walk to his litter box to make a deposit. Of course with a cat it is not confined to the floor, the messes will be on your furniture, window sills and counters too! I am very sorry if your cat pees outside the box. I have not had that pleasure yet, but I’ve read that it is not uncommon, especially with male cats.

The litter box: Apparently most cats, unlike most dogs, cannot be trained to use bladder and bowel control so they need to have an accessible toilet at all times. Unless you enjoy having your house smell like cat waste, which is more odoriferous than an equal volume of dog waste, you will need to clean the litter box at least once a day. Of course this is more complicated and messy than picking up and disposing of dog waste and puts you in unprotected proximity to cat waste from which you can contract toxoplasmosis. It is likely if your house has more than one room, that you will have more than one litter box, so your cat will not feel he has to to walk “too far” to poop and pee.

You guessed it! Cats shed too…a lot!! Hope you don’t have hobbies because this is going to take ALL weekend. Vacuuming the floor is just the start. Actually, if you are smart you will vacuum at the end because you are likely to dump more cat hair on the floor while you are cleaning the counters, shelves, window sills, basically every nook and cranny in your home, some of which are inaccessible to humans without a ladder or moving furniture. I suggest you spend Sunday cleaning all horizontal surfaces and vacuuming because on Saturday you will want to pick cat hair off all the vertical surfaces your cat rubs on. The more difficult it is to clean, the more likely the cat will rub on it. Hopefully you will not also have to repair furniture and door moldings that have become his favorite scratching posts.

We can all be thankful that our next president is wise enough to choose a puppy rather than a kitten. He’ll need to devote all that extra clean-up time to trying to solve the country’s problems.

Finally!!

After eight years of regression and divisiveness, a little hope. George W. Bush, who probably never would have held the office had his brother not been Governor of Florida in 2000, leaves our country’s economy and our respect in the World community in a disgrace. His policies and his war have made our World much less safe. He has spent our money like an irresponsible frat boy running up his parents’ credit cards.

Barack Obama has a huge challenge ahead of him; I think rivaling that of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over the course of its history, the U.S. has had a few very bad presidents, and Bush #43, may well be the worst. It has also been lucky to have truly great presidents at critical times. Hopefully, for all our sakes, Obama will be one of those great presidents.

(And isn’t it nice to get to bed at a decent hour on election night, instead of staying up late counting chad!)

Election Day: At Least the Calls Will Stop

I think it is because I live in a swing state, but I have been getting an ungodly number of phone calls urging me to vote for Barack Obama. When I got home, my answering machine was filled with 5, yes just 5, political calls. (My answering machine usually holds around 20 real person messages.) I guess they think making them whopper long will give them more impact. I’ve gotten at least 5 calls a day since I have been home, already 3 4 this morning, so it probably only took a few hours for my machine to fill up. Anyway because of all the political calls real people couldn’t leave a message for me or the person who’d been staying at my house.

I would guess about 60-70% of the calls are robo calls. Do they really think people are going to be impressed by a recorded message from Barack Obama or Joe Biden? Give me a break. I don’t have time for it. I have been listening to politicians for well over a year AND I made up my mind a long time ago. I will vote; not for my first or second choice, but at this point my only choice.

I feel sorry for the volunteers. Well-meaning people who really want to do something important to help their candidate, and succeed mainly in boring people and pissing them off.

Oye! I have voted in every presidential election since I was 18. I really do not need 100’s of reminders to vote. If you have more money than you can spend, how about contributing it towards paying the national debt!