Ranting And Raving

To everyone on both sides of the aisle:

The reason the stakes are so high this election is because we've got government in every facet and aspect of our lives.  It matters who's in control of the strings, because those strings are connected to everything we do.

We've got, essentially, a third party candidate running on the Republican ticket because a lot of people finally recognized that neither party is at all interested in cutting some of any those strings and leaving us alone.

Both parties have long forgotten that we're supposed to have a bottom-up government rather than a top-down one.

Not really that long ago the phrase, "don't make a federal case out of it," was an ironic joke.  Because the federal government was minuscule.  Strongly contained in its Constitutionally defined cage.

We have a press that's chosen sides.  How can you tell?  Just look at what they complain about when the wrong person is president and check to see if the right person still does those things.  Did the complaining stop?

I'm sick of watching the media proclaiming the Republicans are the most evil of all evil by doing X, then ignoring that Democrats do it too.  I am sick of the media dismissing outrage at a Democrat's behavior as if what they'd done was nothing while screaming to the rafters that the same behavior from a Republican is substantial and important.

I am sick of "they did it first" being a positive defense for one side and not the other.  It shouldn't be a defense at all!

If it's wrong for me, it's wrong for you too.

Each party wants different things, but they both need the government to be bigger and more intrusive to get them, so choosing R or D isn't really much of a choice.  Either way you get less control of your own life.

Both sides are lying through their teeth about just about everything too.  Well, except this time I think Trump is being honest.  I will not say if I think he's right or wrong but I don't think he's being dishonest.  That honesty is fucking scary, ain't it?  He's not mouthing the reassuring platitudes we've become accustomed to hearing, is he?

He's the very antithesis of "more of the same" and if the prospect of real change scares you, guess what?  You actually want more of the same.

Good news for you and bad news for people who're honestly supporting him.  The likelihood that he'll actually be able to affect any changes is about zero.  Because while he's effectively a third party candidate, Congress will still be run by the two main parties.  If you want to see how this works just look at what Gov. Ventura managed to leave as a legacy, and note he was a single term Governor.

I know I'm getting old, but I can remember when the FBI was famously apolitical.  They'd chase criminal politicians, regardless of party affiliation, wherever they found them.  I watched that change sharply from 1992 through 2000.  I also watched the Republicans do nothing to undo that change from 2000-2008.

The economy is often a trailing indicator of Government.  We act like the president has a magic fix-the-economy wand and is, for some reason, not using it.

The dirty little secret is the government can do very little actively to make an economy flourish.  Government is damned good, however, at throttling economy.

Innumerable taxes and regulations (literally impossible to count now rather than merely figuratively very difficult to count) choke businesses from every angle and only the very largest can endure the millions of gnat bites and afford some form of protection from it.

Laws, regulations and rules about every aspect of hiring, firing and paying someone move jobs outside our borders.

While we talk about illegal aliens entering the country and doing jobs that Americans won't we often forget they are also doing the jobs extralegally.  Their employer is skipping all of those laws, regulations and rules about hiring, firing and paying.  They're typically not paying bad wages to their illegal workers, but save so much by skipping the government overhead they can pay decent wages.

They don't hire Americans because an American can't risk not telling the IRS where they work or have their bank lock their account because they can't come up with a "legitimate" source for their income.

It's a bipartisan problem and it will take bipartisanship to fix.  The problem is neither party is particularly interested in fixing things for the people they're supposed to, by constitutional decree, be working for.