Here and There

None other than the Orange County Register.

Thx: Bill Walsh.

I brushed off your endorsement when I got wind of it early in the day. But damn you, you made me watch your speech.

And now I copy the embed code with wet eyes. Yes we can!

Just got done taking a Zogby poll. Setting aside questions of the pollster’s reliability, I like taking these surveys from time to time.

Something I had been thinking about as I was wandering the streets near my work the other day came up on this poll. It comes up frequently on Zogby’s, as I’m sure it does on others. It’s where the poll asks you to name what issues are most important to you (choose only two), and there’s a list of things like Taxes, Education, Economy, Space Exploration.

It seems more than a meaningless exercise to me. Because no one can solve all problems, and it’s best to have your priorities at the ready, I thought I’d share what I told the pollsters.

If I were allowed to choose five issues important to this country, they would be, in this order: Environment, Economy, Diplomacy, Education, and yes, Defense (thanks to the mess we’ve inherited).

Environment gets top billing because we’ve simply got to start, really start, making an effort now. Environmental damage is the farthest reaching and most potentially intractable. The economy trends up and down over time. Left alone, our climate is headed toward a condition in which no of us could live here anymore.

Economy because, frankly, it sucks. It sucks bad. Taxes are too low on the top earners, and too high and complex for the rest of us. It’s been seven years of skew, and it’s time to recognize that the experiment failed and get back to something more fair and sensible. A subsection to this issue is jobs, which can be created in areas concerning the environment, from cleanup to renewable energy, etc. Health care is tied in here, too. It should get its own topic, but there’s no lack of good healthcare in this country. There is, on the other hand, a telling lack of affordable healthcare.

Which kinda sorta leads to diplomacy. We’ve simply got to get our good standing back. Not launching unilateral wars for falsified reasons is a good start, but we’ve got to go so much farther. Helping struggling peoples where we can, but staying out of sovereign nation’s affairs is a safe bet, too.

Education is fourth, sadly. It should be first. But the world is fucked right now, so those others get 1-3. We’ve simply got to clamp down on education, from pre-school to college. Quality education needs to be made available at all levels. And affordable college, with reasonable loans in place, needs to be there, too. It will take a dramatic shift of emphasis, because at the current rate of school and student failure, this country is headed down the drain.

Defense because there are people who want to fuck shit up. We should be ready to stop them, but a true effort in these other areas might also reduce the threat. It’s all so wonderfully intertwined.

Do not give a misbehaving child what (s)he wants.

And with that implicit analogy, this blog now turns its full attention toward taking down John McCain. Reader submissions are accepted.

The aim will be to expose John McCain for what he is — an old-school politician, beholden to special interests with deep pockets who play by their own rules. The arguments about approach to government are tired, but must be hashed out. The real question is who these candidates are, what they represent, and how they will lead and represent the United States of America at home and to the world.

Given these tenets, the choice should be pretty clear, methinks.

The union endorses Obama today.