Murder, He Wrote!

Remember when I posted on Propaganda? Remember those shadowy figures somewhere who want to influence you "behind your back?" Well, they were out in force on both sides recently, and I'd be remiss if I didn't run down some facts vs. what was released in the press, and see how much of that malarkey we all fell for.

Character assassination is one of the most prominent tools for a propagandist. If you can't influence your audience with simple truth, appeal to them on a more visceral level.

Take for instance the latest hoo-ha from Texas about voter identification:

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/texas-republicans-find-a-way-to-disenfranchise-women-voters/news/2013/10/17/77023#.UmQb1RCeUYU

Just start with that headline. It seems to infer that all Texas Republicans want to keep women from voting. For one thing, that's one of the most asinine assumptions an honest person could make.

The point of the report assumes that because women tend to vote liberal (assuming more liberals are Democrats than Republicans), and women tend not to update their photo ID's after marriage, that any requirement for a person to present a photo ID in order to vote is an attempt to prevent women from voting.

How stupid can you be and still breathe? For one thing, the writer of this article is assuming that women are too stupid to have a valid photo ID. For another thing, the writer assumes more married women would vote for liberal (or democratic) candidates, if given the opportunity (you know, because their Republican/conservative husbands keep them barefoot and pregnant, and take away their opportunity to vote). Actually, the opposite is true. Married women tend to vote more on the conservative side. So if anything, Texas Republicans are trying to get more women to vote, not less. I still say there's a reason someone wants non-citizens to vote. But that's just me.

Ladies, get a valid photo ID and keep it up to date, already! Show those evil conservatives who has the power of the American ballot box! (Pssst!--how about we make sure first that they're Americans?)

Now, that's out of the way. Let's look at the political murder that Congress has been committing at the federal level.

When one side offered a funding bill that had one program defunded, the other side said, "NO! All or nothing!" Now, the House of Representatives is supposed to have the power of the purse string. The bill would have funded the entire government, except for one law that will triple our national debt and handcuff us with more than 80 new federal agencies. It's no secret that I don't support that law, and I have a boatload of reasons for that.

But aside from that, the recent shutdown was blamed squarely on one party in the press, the very party that offered many, many bills to fund the government. The other side, who demanded the "all or nothing" approach, was just as guilty, was it not? But that's not how the press reported it.

What waved the first red flag for me was how the shutdown was handled. It seemed like the government agencies and programs that ground to a halt were deliberately the ones who would have hurt or inconvenienced a maximum number of people. The WWII Memorial in DC was barricaded, even though no staff tend to the thing to begin with. Likewise, across the nation, national parks and lakeshores were shut down or closed off, regardless of whether staff was actually required to keep them open. Take our own Sleeping Bear Dunes. In most of these cases, citizens simply moved the barricades and opened the parks and monuments anyway. I mean, how far do you really have to go to prove a point, Mr. and Mrs. Congressman?

Aside from parks and monuments, benefit programs like Social Security, Military pay, and military widow's benefits were withheld. You know, I'm sure we could have done without studies on the flow rate of ketchup, or personal airports in Pennsylvania, before these critical programs were shut down. But no. Maybe if they'd stuck with programs we really didn't need to begin with, maybe the public would realize how badly we've been getting fleeced all these years.

We've been getting played, people. By both sides in the "Republican/Democratic" war. And in the end, we lose anyway.

At least we still have a ballot box. Isn't it about time we showed the Washington Pharisees and Sadducees where the real power in America resides? This is supposed to be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." But it seems it's become "of the professional politicians, by powermongers, and for the special interests." They keep leveling accusations at each other across the aisle, and we get caught in the middle under the thumb of more regulation, more taxes, more oppression, more intrusion, and less freedom. Less of what made this country the greatest on the face of the planet.

I don't now about you, but I'm getting fed up with both "parties."

That's not to say there aren't some decent folks trying to change things. They just need some more support from those of us who actually study the issues and vote based on facts, not on character assassination.

Let's get ready, because the Mid-Terms are coming. Vote for freedom, folks. Before we lose it all.