‘Tis the Season

Tumbleweed season. Right in time for Halloween, the wind is blowing and sand and tumbleweeds are reinstalling themselves against the garage we removed them from yesterday. When I was growing up in Denver, Halloween always seemed to bring the first heavy snow, so Cinderella and princess costumes were covered up with hats, parkas and boots for trick-or-treating. If the outfit your mom bought you at the grocery store came with a mask, you could console yourself that you still had a bit of costume on.

Stupid snow hadn’t ruined everything. Until you get home and see that most of what was in your pillowcase collection of candy were Bit-o-Honeys and those stupid Smartees. (Back in my day, chocolate was a rarity). Smartees were tart and if you licked them long enough they made your tongue bleed.  Smartees were what you put in the family candy bowl, and they sat there until Christmas, untouched. Or you could bring them to school and give them to that one weird kid that loved them. You know that kid, the asthmatic who also ate paste.

Tumbleweed season also brings us voting season, and I am getting carpal thumb from hitting the mute button every six minutes to avoid the campaign ads and, as a side effect, my head exploding. Attack ads aren’t that annoying if you are pointing out the opponents proven record on voting, or a position he espouses. When you take a YouTube video out of context, you are lying. As the campaign season progresses, the ads become a jumble of mindless jargon and keywords designed to get the ‘hell, nobody knows what the truth is” vote. (Note again to Ken FBuck: nobody is talking about repealing the 2nd Amendment).

See, all a Republicon needs to do to win is throw out phrases that will get your vote. If you fall for the ‘tax-and-spend Liberals’, ‘Big government take-over’, ‘failed stimulus’  etc. you are falling for rich white guys funded by corporations that want to tax you but not themselves. Under the Bush tax cuts, the top 1% of the wealthiest people in this country pay no tax at all. That’s cost us a lot. If we let the tax cuts expire, people making over $250,000 a year will go from 36% back to 39%, what the rate was before Bush.

If you are like 95% of Americans, you got a tax cut. You did. I almost missed it on my taxes last year until my preparer pointed out the ‘Making Work Pay’ deduction was mine to take and courtesy of the islamofacistmuslim in the White House.

Big business creates jobs? Really? Like the big international tax firm I recently worked for that outsourced jobs to India for the tax break they got under Bush and later laid off workers en masse? The big businesses that right now are sitting on more cash than ever before, and still not hiring? Here’s some fun facts: the largest employer in the U.S. is the government, including the armed forces. The second largest employer are small businesses. Under Bush, they gutted the coffers of the Small Business Administration and gave the money to ….wait for it…Citibank.

The Republicon party is not for you, the little guy. They have stated that their goals are to: keep tax breaks for big business, the very wealthy and keep over 450 multi-national corporations tax free; dismantle the Department of Education; privatize Social Security; gut Medicare (like they started under Bush with Medicaid Part D and voted to refuse Medicaid the right to bargain with Big Pharma) do away with the government student loan program; repeal “Obamacare”. And on that last one, think about this: they want let a health insurance company deny coverage to your sick child. These companies now have to spend 80% of their income on your care, not bonuses for their executives. Repubs want to stop that. Repubs want you to pay all your premiums and deductibles and still get denied coverage for a pre-existing condition because you forgot to tell them you were treated for acne as a teenager.

Oh, the horror! The health insurance industry is the only industry not subject to anti-trust laws. And they are certainly enjoying that status.

So stop being concerned that some undeserving brown person might game the system to get a Medicare dollar (most fraud occurs by thieves stealing the social security number of a deceased person, as happened in my family) and look at what theft is planned for you, little frog in warm water.

So vote on Tuesday, You don’t make a statement by not voting. Don’t vote based on who’s wearing a flag pin, or who screams ‘Freedom' the loudest, or who you’d most like to have a beer with.  Don’t vote against your own best interests. It will make your tongue bleed.