Tomorrow is the single most important day of your life. You need to get off your lazy ass and vote. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote. If you think George has done a bang up job, then vote for him. If you think Kerry is a cool dude, then vote for him. Don’t forget that you have a few other options.

Don’t listen to the people on both “sides” saying that if you vote for a third party candidate you have wasted your vote. A vote that isn’t cast is a wasted vote. Just because your guy might not win doesn’t mean it’s wrong for believing in him – the best man doesn’t always win and nice guys usually finish last.

Now get out there and vote.

I found a great article titled 100 Facts and 1 Opinion about the Bush Administration [via]. It’s pretty damning, IMO. Read it over, if you still feel like voting for Bush … well … that confuses me.

The problem, of course, is that millions of Americans don’t care that the President has underfunded ports by 1 billion, spent 140 billion on a war of choice (that was a total sham), assigned five times as many agents to investigate a 50 year old embargo against Cuba as he did to investigate Osama bin Laden’s money trail, etc.

And I love you idiots out there saying “BUT HE LOWERED TAXES!”. Really? You got your $300 check FOUR YEARS AGO. And the followup was given to the top 1% of the country. To top it all off, your job is being exported to places like Mexico, India and Russia. Why? Because Bush has given tax breaks to companies that offshore jobs.

This is the funniest political news I’ve read in a long time. Evidently Ahhhhnahhhld got snubbed by his wife, who is a Democrat, after his convention speech.

“Well, there was no sex for 14 days,” Schwarzenegger told former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta in an on-stage conversation in front of 1,000 people.

“Everything comes with side effects,” he said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

…

“I don’t know why I watched the presidential debates,” he said. “If I want to watch a smart liberal Democrat and a Republican leader argue, all we have to do is go out to dinner. They were lucky. They only had to do it three times.”

I wish more politicians were less formal and more candid. Arnold, along with McCain, are two Republicans that are exactly what I would look for in a Republican: socially they are rather liberal, while being both for state’s rights and fiscally conservative (as much as a politician can be anyways). However, I am NOT for changing the Constitution to allow Arnold to run for President.

At any rate I hope someone else gets a good laugh out of this.

I’m not going to speak about this as a Bush hating, tree hugging, liberal, but rather as a concerned citizen who is afraid a few core values in the Bill of Rights no longer apply in the country that invented such radical ideas as equal protections and freedom of speech. At a recent speech given by the POTUS three teachers where thrown out for wearing t-shirts saying “Protect our civil liberties”. The irony here is so thick I’d need a fucking chainsaw to cut through it.

My first question is: Why do I need a fucking ticket to see the POTUS speak? We pay his wages, we (well a little less than half of us) voted him in, we probably paid for his flight to the speech, but we can’t watch him speak? When you combine this with the “designated protestor areas” that both sides are using and, as far as I can tell, the following clauses in the Bill of Rights no longer apply to either sides:

1. The right to freedom of assembly. Who the hell could ever think “designated protester areas” would be legal or acceptable? Well, they are. Both the Democrats and the Republicans used such devices at their conventions. The Democrats where especially offensive, literally fencing them in with barbed wire around the top.
2. The right to freedom of speech. Clearly this went out of style years ago. A majority of Americans believe that freedom of speech is too far reaching. At this recent Bush speech these teachers were not allowed to silently express their opinions.

Look, this is exactly why I keep saying both sides aren’t all that great. Both the Democrats and Republicans will do just about anything to keep their portion of the power structure, even if this includes treading on our rights.

I’ve had a few talks with friends and family lately about the fact that I’m going to be voting for a third party. Libertarian, to be specific. Their candidate this year is a man named Michael Badnarik. He recently did an interview at Slashdot.org. The friends and family I’ve talked to have all, without hesitation, asked me why I’m “throwing my vote away”. Badnarik put it best.

If the “wasted vote” argument ever held any water, it doesn’t any more. The two major parties have moved toward a weird, non-existent “center” for the last 50 years, to the point where it’s difficult to tell them apart.

We could argue all day about whether Bush or Kerry is the “lesser evil.” The fact is that they both support the war in Iraq. They both oppose gun rights. They both supported the PATRIOT Act. They both support the war on drugs. They both support confiscatory taxation. They both support ruinously high levels of spending, huge deficits and increasing debt.

It’s hard to tell them apart on the real issues. They spend their time scrapping over “swing votes” in the gray area of the “center” — which means, in practice, “how do I not make too many people too angry to vote for me?” That’s no way to do politics. Politics, in my view, should be as unimportant as possible — but where it’s important, it has to value freedom, remain rooted in principle and be forward-looking.

All I can tell the “lesser of two evils” folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they’ll keep getting evil. If you don’t like the way things are, how do you change it by voting for more of the same?

In all of the conversations with families they all agree that they’re voting for “the lesser of two evils”. If that’s the case then you’re going to keep getting evil. Both parties have crap candidates, vote for the person you believe in the most.

I feel good knowing that my vote is niether “lesser” or “evil”.