There will be 14 candidates for President on the ballot in Florida. In addition to Obama and McCain, we can choose from the following:

• Gene Amondson: Prohibition Party.  Now I, for one, had no idea that this party even existed.  Didn’t we learn our lesson a few decades ago about this?  Their candidate is a landscape painter.
• Chuck Baldwin: Constitution Party.  I don’t know much about him except that he used to be pretty wired into the Republican party.  And I’m too lazy to look into it.
• Bob Barr: Libertarian Party.  A turncoat, a fraud, or someone who has seen the light, depending on how you look at it.  I’m a Libertarian, but Barr was a monumental social conservative for a long time.  His running mate is a douche.
• James Harris: Socialist Workers Party. Oh please.
• Charles Jay: Boston Tea Party.  Another libertarian party, and a play on words too!  Also a pain in the ass to find on the web, due to their name.  Fully 500 members. Their site is here, if you’re interested.
• Alan Keyes: American Independent Party. Line one of their website: “We Acknowledge the Creator’s Gracious Gifts.” And so on….
• Gloria La Riva: Party of Socialism and Liberation. Because if there’s one thing history has told us, it’s that socialism leads to liberation.  Morons. Their site is now enhanced with 30% more Che!
• Cynthia McKinney: Green Party.  Yawn.  I’ve done my green rants.  Boring.
• Brian Moore: Socialist Party.  As opposed to the Socialist Workers Party and the Party of Socialism and Liberation.
• Ralph Nader: Ecology Party.  You already know how I feel about this stupidhead.
• Thomas Robert Stevens: Objectivist Party.  These guys built their entire party around the writings of Ayn Rand.  What next, the Lion Witch and Wardrobe Pary?
• Gary Nettles (qualified as write-in).  Who cares?

My point being, well, nothing really.  Except that apaprently anyone can get on the ballot here, which actually isn’t such a bad thing (I wonder if they’ll let me nominate my colon.)  As for me, I’m still in the undecided column (I believe it’s too late to get my colon on the ballot) though leaning (again)  towards voting Libertarian.

Look, I want to like Obama, I really do.   He’s a likeable guy.  I think he genuinely cares about doing the right thing.  He’s smart.  I like his ideas about pork (the money kind, not the pig kind – I don’t know how he feels about bacon.) And he might just shake things up in a good way.  And maybe, just maybe the Dems won’t completely fuck everything up in four years.

I don't care how you feel about the guy, this photo looks like a Sears photo gallery shot from 1972. Or like someting you'd find in my high scool year book, taken when we all went to the "No Nukes" concert at Battery Park in 1981. Awful. Even so, he's just so damn LIKEABLE. Plus, his daughter Sasha (in his lap) is WAY cute.

But then I think about his windfall profit tax idea, and his “save jobs from being shipped overseas” rhetoric, and his pro-Mexico/US-wall position, his failure to stand up and say something truthful about the economy right now while encouraging the $700 billion package, and Joe Biden’s creepy metamorphosis into Carrottop, and I think “well, maybe they can.”  Fuck things up I mean.

Not that there aren’t plenty of good things about him too.  But you can figure those things out for yourself.  Try starting with his website.

And while I’m not a huge fan of Barr’s and I actively dislike Root (that’d be Wayne Allyn Root, Barr’s running mate who, as Doug Stanhope points out, spells his middle name like he’s in an 80’s hair band), they aren’t going to win.  So I’m back to thinking that a vote for the Libertarian party is the only way to be heard at all when I say that the government has it’s head up its own ass.  Really far, too.  Like, inhumanly far.

In the end it’s a moot point.  Neither candidate will listen to libertarian ideas, Obama will probably win, and that’ll be that.  But I will say that I’m open to being completely wrong about his policies.  I really hope that he’s everything that the Starbucks baristas, trustafarians and leftist women everywhere believe he will be, by which I mean I hope he makes useful, meaningful changes in Washington, gets our servicemen out of Iraq, starts to restore our International Street Cred (ISC) and gets people interested in the political process again.

If we can just keep him away from gun legislation, protectionist trade policies, windfall profit taxes and the complete socialization of banks and corporations this might not be so bad.  I’m not holding my breath though.

This is a post from: Bradford Schmidt's blog, Bone In The Fan.

The Lesser of 14 Evils

Well, for one wrong reaon at least.  I got an email from the Libertarian Party today that provided a bullet point list of reasons to be critical of Joe Biden.  This in addition to the obvious fact that he’s a career politician, which is a major strike against as far as I’m concerned.

Some of the reasons are totally valid: he voted for hate crimes legislation, voted for the economic stimulus plan (which, while I was perfectly content to deposit my check, was nevertheless a dopey idea,) voted to increase minimum wage… and plenty of more reasons.

But also in the list is that he voted AGAINST making English the official language of the United States. Um, hello?  Is the LP really suggesting we adopt an “official” language?  One only hopes that this email contained a typo or that an overzealous and misguided intern compiled the list and that Andrew Davis, who “signed” it, failed to pick up on it.  Which in itself is bad, but not as bad as the purported “party of principal” endorsing an official language.

Shit like this is what makes me turn from the two big parties in disgust, and it worries me. It worries be because this is another reason to seriously question what the hell is going on in the LP.  Barr certainly doesn’t entirely fit with what I would consider Libertarain, though I chose to take the position that perhaps his name recognition would help build some momentum for the LP and begin to chip away at the two party power structure.  But then some serious questions about his positions and his campagn’s actions began coming up. And of course there was the lawsuit his campaign filed to force a church to include him in a debate (using the horrible McCain/Feingold campaing finance reform law as a basis no less.)  So even if the two party structure is weakened, if it’s at the cost of behaving like the rest of the pandering douche bags and doing something as anti-Libertarian as trying to use a federal court to force a church open their doors to Bob Barr, then fuck it, I’m outa here.

I’ll watch carefully over the coming months to see what the LP and Barr do next, but between this disheartening series of events and my experience in the tiny race I’m entered in (Warwick, the incumbent who has been sitting on the board unchallenged for quite a while I’m told, has already contacted Palm Beach County to investigate if I’m in compliance with election laws – presumably to get me tossed off the ballot,) I’m seriously losing any belief that the entire political process is something that matters any more.  Or at least something I’m interested in spending time and energy on, which frankly sucks.  And whatever happens in the future, I’m certainly not drinking the Libertarian kool-aid on any of the stuff I mentioned in this post.

If you want to read a few more opinions on it, Classically Liberal and the Independent Political Report both have discussions going on about it.

This is a post from: Bradford Schmidt's blog, Bone In The Fan.

Libertarian Party For “Official Language” In United States?

The San Francisco board of supervisors is retarded.  There.  I’ve said it.  Starting this fall, you can’t buy smokes at a drugstore because according to the mayors office:

“A pharmacy should be a place you go to get better, not a place you go to get cancer.”

Riddle me this: Where the fuck do they get off telling people where they should or shouldn’t get their cancer? All this is going to do is force residents to stop at the drugstore for their prescriptions, then make another trip to 7/11 to buy their porno and cancer, which not only unfairly discriminates against people who want equal access to cancer, but means more miles logged in their cars and therefore more CO2 emissions, which I thought they didn’t like in Cali.

This whole micromanagement of behavior, not to mention telling a business which legal products and diseases they can and can’t sell makes me highly agitated. So I’ll take the words of my ancestor (or so my mom tells me) Horace Greeley to heart and “go west young man.” If by “go” he meant “poop,” and by “young” he meant 45-year-old.

This is a post from: Bradford Schmidt's blog, Bone In The Fan.

On Wednesday, I Poop On The San Francisco Drugstore Tobacco Ban

This morning I saw the tape of Senators Obama and Clinton in front of a sign that said “Unite For Change” while they spoke at a rally in Unity, NH (get it?) The way the two major US parties operate though, a rally in Youpeoplewillfuckingbelieveanythingwontyou, NH would have been more apropos.  Full disclosure: I’m not a member of nor will I associate myself with either major party (as if you couldn’t guess.)  No, I’m not a member of the ripe-for-the-exploiting Green party, but since you didn’t ask I’ll just tell you anyway that I’m a Libertarian.  And while I believe in most of the Libertarian plank (and think that a lot more people are in agreement with Libertarian philosophy than realize it: go check out the  the worlds smallest political quiz if you’re curious about where you fall – takes about 15 seconds), even if I wasn’t a member of the party you can bet your ass I wouldn’t join the Republicans or Democrats. Just can’t lend my voice to that chorus anymore.

I won’t list all the deception, twists and misleading statements those two gangs pull off, because it would take pages and pages and pages and pages and pages.  Nor will I dwell on the instances of feigned outrage that each party exhibits every time the other says or does something that they can pretend meant something they bloody well know it didn’t (did that make sense?  read it again if it didn’t – no time to edit). Those are irritants meant to win the soundbite contest and gain favor with that part of the electorate in posession of a particularly short attention span and little desire to go beyond the black/white, up/down answer provided them by their party’s candidate (they also provide plenty of topics for Hannity or Huffington to get their knickers in a twist over.)

The problem is that despite the corruption, lies and power mongering in the two major parties, without the support of one or the other you have about the same chance of getting elected President (or winning pretty much any national race) as a donut has of surviving a night on Kirstie Alley’s beside table (that was such a layup of a joke – I’m a total hack.)  Parties that wield that much power can, and do, force politicians to toe the party line regardless of their actual personal beliefs.  It is, in simple terms, a fucking disaster.

Consider: the two major party candidates this year both started out at least pretending to be “outsiders” or “mavericks” (though I’ve seen Top Gun, and John McCain is no Tom Cruise) but since becoming viable candidates in their respective primaries, one, the other, or both have “moderated” their positions on almost every key issue including: FISA, immigration, the second amendment, Iraq, NAFTA, public campaign financing, meetings with foreign leaders, hardcore evangelicals, tax cuts, oil drilling, and torture to name but a few.  In some cases they’ve moved in directions I like, in others not so much, but that is of course irrelevant; it’s the shape-shifting to get elected that’s relevant.

What it isn’t of course, is surprising. Not when both candidates are part of the same mess of a system run by the same arrogant elitists. To add insult to injury, both of the parties are claiming to be agents, or parties, or men, or women of change.  Which is like the old joke about sleep-away camp, where the counselors come into the bunk house and say: “O.K. everyone, it’s Monday and you know what that means: It’s time to change your underwear.  Now this week, Jimmy you’ll be changing with Tom.  Will, you change with Gunter.  Fred, you change with Wilma.”  And that’s the only change we’ll get with either of these guys, soaring rhetoric notwithstanding. Anyway, the government isn’t designed to change overnight.  It’s not like a company that hires a new CEO who marches in and shitcans every under-performing loser in the place. That shit’s for military dictators; our government is designed to keep that kind of clout out of the hands of one guy and to change over time.

Point being, if you want to see some change in the political landscape, then the landscape itself needs to change. Voting for the lesser of two evils has to stop being acceptable.  People that say what they mean and do what they say have to become electable.  The two party system must change. So I’m voting for Bob Barr (the Libertarian candidate) this year.  I’m aware that people (some of my friends) believe that voting for Barr is the same as throwing my vote away; I say bullshit. I’m throwing away my vote if I use it to keep supporting the system that’s given us every douchebag Congressman, every lying President, every two-faced bottom-dweller that’s been elected to office in the last hundred years. I’m throwing my vote away if I keep voting for a one of the two major candidates and believe I’ll see the kind of change that matters to me.

Look, I don’t love Bob Barr – he’s off base in some areas was an arch conservative asshole in the past (though everyone has an opportunity to change and he claims to be right in line with most of the Libertarian platform),  but if he can grab five to ten percent of the vote, then maybe people will start to believe that they may someday get to vote for the person they actually want to win. Maybe all the young people that are just now getting involved (with Dean in ‘04, and with Obama in ‘08) in politics will stop to think about what’s going on behind the curtain. Maybe they’ll take the time to learn something about the Constitution, about what the government is supposed to be doing, and about what it has been doing. Maybe they’ll realize that they guys they’re working and rooting for aren’t the guys that will bring the kind of change they’re hoping for (I like to believe that if most young people that are politically active in this election cycle stopped to think about issues, look at history and learn about the platform, they’d join the Libertarian party in a heartbeat. I also like to believe I’m sexier than Colin Farrell. I’ll take one out of two.)

Of course, maybe none of that will happen. I’ll take my shot though: from here on in, I vote for getting to pick my own goddamn underwear.

This is a post from: Bradford Schmidt's blog, Bone In The Fan.

Unite For Change? OK. Vote Libertarian.