What was The Journeying Progressive thinking today, politically, American-ly?
I have to tell you…it isn’t pretty…and the Tour action that got my blood flowing lead to a little bit of passion against one of my biggest pet peeves, in Stage 4 of our Tour de Progress:
Please forgive me. The creaks and moans and screams you hear are me reviving the memory and statistics from the 2008 Presidential Election.
Swing State Project has a great and very meticulous list of election results broken down by congressional district. I went through and tallied them all up, and wouldn’t you know it, we get the following nice little comparison:
ACTUAL Electoral Vote—Obama: 365, McCain: 173
Electoral Vote BY C.D.–Obama: 301, McCain: 237
That’s a net of 64 votes for McCain…still not enough to even come close to winning the election, but it reduces Obama’s victory threefold. And that’s not a small accomplishment.
A shameless plug, fellow moose friends…I hope you won’t mind:
Earlier last week, the world watched as the rogue Tamil Tigers group admitted total defeat in their thirty-year long conflict with the nation of Sri Lanka.
Or perhaps I should say, only a handful of interested people watched, while the rest of the world skimmed past that headline in search of the score of the Lakers-Magic game. Which isn’t all that surprising, considering that MSM outlets used the same language to describe the Lakers’ triumph over Orlando as they did the aforementioned Central Asian conflict.
So as the world shifts its attention to the latest of Lindsey Lohan’s antics, there is absolutely no reason to be interested in Sri Lanka. Case closed, conflict over, to the victor goes the spoils. Right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Ah, Arlen Specter. I figured I had to write about this one.
Kudos to our man Arlen, for violating that most sacred principle of American honor: jumping ship when the going gets tough. Let me just go through a few historical examples of how unbelievably selfish and ridiculous Specter’s “change of party” is:
I grew up in the country. I would not be exaggerating when I say that my entire family hunts…I actually just polished off some venison jerky that my grandfather sent me the other day. Being in touch with the land we live in–even if it means sitting in a tree stand for hours on end in the frigid cold–is a necessary part of life for many Americans, as it should be. Behind all the computers and fast food and highway systems is the land our forefathers first settled on and made a living off. We cannot forget that.
I am also a progressive, today. There’s obviously no secret to that–I am the young, journeying progressive, and I love it.
I used to read Newsweek magazine; I loved the illustrations on the cover, the journalism present within, and the witty, insightful commentary from its many writers. That is, until I laid eyes on their most recent cover:
I can’t say as though I’ll be picking up a copy of Newsweek again any time soon.
We reject, as a nation, the notion that we must mortgage off our futures and our standard of living simply to ensure the health of our loved ones.
Let’s examine a hypothetical, here: say Uncle Sam pays for the medical schooling of every doctor and health specialist in America, so that said doctors and specialists arrive to their first duty station free of any college debts. Would health care costs go down?
In response to the “public” outcry from some of my fellow left-leaning bloggers, I am now reporting on my extensive investigation of the Bush administration and their tactics from 2001-2009.
One of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain goes like this: “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
Twain was adept at pointing out societal ills and making light of them–but the ills he spoke of were no less serious as a result of such jest.
Today, a wicked sense of entitlement permeates the air around Capitol Hill and our respective state, county, and local seats of government. This entitlement has reached Wall Street and the corporate wonderworld, is broadcast through our television sets and has become a part of our popular culture. And we Americans are serving up ever-growing servings of this egomaniacal sentiment at the dinner table (does anyone ever eat there anymore, anyway?) like it’s a casserole.