http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/30/rnc.protest/index.html
police temporarily detained and photographed at least 50 people who were inside the building.
St. Paul Police spokesman Tom Walsh said they were executing a search warrant.
"The cause for the search warrant is not public at this time," Walsh said.
As many as 30 police officers entered with guns drawn, according to witnesses in the building
What young people stand for is generally ill-informed, misguided and meaningless in these affairs, yet no greater threat to our freedom exists than telling them they are not allowed to stand for it.
Freedom of speech used to be real in the United States. It is just a campaign metaphor now, a faded dream of misty plateaus with one horned rainbow goats and Ronald Reagan standing fifty feet tall. Secret terror raid? Guns up, against teenage dissenters?
For freedom to be real, the young must be able to throw the odd egg or two, break a window, yell across the street and then run back home to rejoin their more timid young peers. Indeed, that egg is the vessel in which we deliver liberty to our descendants. When we bar the egg, we trumpet for the musket...
Those peers are the ones who will eventually be judges and scholars, and Reagan-esque leaders. They will know in their maturity, that freedom can only ever be guided by people who have worn an egg on their lapel. Those leaders will never admit how much it empowered their future, when they saw that the geeky little Jones boy, from the back of the class, had a carton of eggs hidden in his locker. And one was missing.
Democracy is born anew, and only sees light during that dangerous, adrenaline-surged moment when the egg cannot be recalled to the hand; when the smoke bomb sizzles; when the miss-spelled banner unfurls before live cameras. Speeches are just poems about freedom - freedom itself is the electric moment when a trembling young man watches as the crates of tea turn, and roll and drift slowly out on the pre-dawn tide.
Ride for the High Country
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Friday, August 29, 2008
The Cowboy Gets One Right!
Your humble ex-Cowboy blasts his analytical six-guns across the political landscape many times each day, without piercing the beer can so to speak. So when he even nicks a target he is tempted to exaggerate the accomplishment:
There is one prominent idea that has been repeated over and over in these articles for the past two years. This is the analysis that that the candidate who wins the next election will probably have a Western, Red State, Moderate or conservative, Female Governor on the ticket in order to prevail.
McCain has one now. Obama does not. It's a lot less of a gamble than the first wave of punditronic reaction is suggesting it is. It is really one of the most calculated decisions either side has yet made.
Ride for the High Country
There is one prominent idea that has been repeated over and over in these articles for the past two years. This is the analysis that that the candidate who wins the next election will probably have a Western, Red State, Moderate or conservative, Female Governor on the ticket in order to prevail.
McCain has one now. Obama does not. It's a lot less of a gamble than the first wave of punditronic reaction is suggesting it is. It is really one of the most calculated decisions either side has yet made.
Ride for the High Country
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The Cowboy Moved
Your Humble (ex) Cowboy moved to Elect-O-Rama for the 2008 general election season//
http://www.electorama.blogspot.com/
Ride for the High Country
http://www.electorama.blogspot.com/
Ride for the High Country
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
The Platform You Wish You Could Vote for
Let's face it tough guy, partisan America is no intellect's wet dream for human freedom. On the one hand, The average Republican wouldn't cross party lines even if Hitler was their candidate (and he may have been recently.) On the other hand, Organizing Democrats is like using landfill trash to build a skyscraper: All the material is there, and for half the price, but you'll never bring it together into anything that actually works.
Everybody talks about sacrifice, but nobody shows up early with an empty backpack to haul rocks. Here is a platform that won't please everyone, but everyone will see that it builds something better for America's future. Are you so patriotic that you want to prove it with a gun? Maybe you should prove it with a compromise instead...
The Ten Essentials of True American non-partisan value-Voting.
1) Let's Stop The Killing and Stop Killing.
Let's ban public support for abortion AND the death penalty and get on with anything else that matters. They are both a kill job. And no, sorry, but it is NOT more complicated than that (for now). Texas will become overpopulated from both ends in nine months but so what? Catholics can live by their sword, so to speak, for a change and everyone else can go to Canada or Mexico until we elect a female President. The later event sure to be in the next cycle, since American elections will no longer be enslaved by the 5% of the country and 1% of the voters who actually care about this "hot button" issue.
2) Let's Save the Planet AND Drill for Oil.
We'll Mandate a 100% smokestack scrubbing and pollution filtering implementation on EVERY coal and Fossil Fuel burning power plant in America AND allow drilling in the arctic, or the sands of Yuma, or under the Fresh Kills landfill or anywhere else T. Boone Pickens can get a derrick built.
We are a few busloads of crying indian chiefs * past saving the caribou at this point, kids. It's come down to saving the humans (and maybe some soylent green for food.) Scrubbing our coal fired generating stations' carbon and sulphur and nitrogen etc... exhaust will deliver the most significant reversal of the GCC causing pollution possible from America. The scrubbing requirement will also raise the price of energy so much that we won't be able to afford to buy gas. This will eliminate the demand for arctic oil anyways.
Maybe we can move on this before moderates, like your humble (ex)-Cowboy, start eyeing the pitchfork and torches and wondering at what point George Washington would want to change greenpeace to greenwar if he were alive today.
3)Let's run destructive lenders out of town on a rail.
We'll cap credit card and all other legal lending charges, interest and fees combined, at 4 times the Federal Rate (apr) for the total duration of the loan.
There's no trade-off here. What could you trade for ending the most institutionally corrupt and destabilizing blanket that Wall Street (and Ohio) has ever pulled over America's eyes? Predacious loan charges cost consumers more money than three hurricane Katrinas a year. We borrow from the bank, the bank borrows from the fed and the fed borrows from China and Suadi Arabia. Do you think American foreign policy might be affected by the fact that Saudi Arabia is our 4th largest debtor? We owe them one Katrina a year, just in interest.
4) Let's ban deviance and allow love.
We'll ban internet pornography and allow gay marriage. Internet Sex is a hell of a lot more deviant than Gay Love. There's no forced morality conflict with employer benefits, either; because of number 8 below.
State supported interstate infrastructure carries the internet, so we can regulate it just like we can tv, trucking and whiskey. We don't allow sewage in our tax funded drinking water lines - let's ban the display of erect penises, and Hot Milf Action on the little screens we replaced tv with. Then we can all go back to work and get some @!$%# done in America. Not to mention we will stop creating sex addicts who commit savage crimes of depravity every other day or so. If we can ban smoking in the workplace we can ban Beating-Off there as well. And if it makes Ellen funny again, like she used to be, that'll just be a bonus.
5) Let's defeat the illiterate savages AND teach our own kids how to read.
Let's institute a 6 year Military Draft in exchange for allowing parents to deduct ALL of their kid's college tuition and fees from their taxes. And if the CEO, or corporation in number 8 wants a tax break - they can write off 100% of their tuition paying grant (not loan) contributions. But let's roll this out yesterday, 'cause the savagery is already dire.
We need the draft. It sucks but we do. It's a simple priority. The Russians will be in Damascus by next Easter unless we get another quarter-million Kill Generation boys onto the playground. Right now, an entirely new and additional, Marine Division (Heavy) is more important for our security than making sure that no one sneaks a pocket knife on a Jet Blue flight to Kingston, Jamaica.
Look at it this way: We are all gonna die sometime. A few of us when an over-worked Air Marshal shoots out a window at 29,000 feet over Nebraska, a few of us crouched behind an Army-rejected Humvee on the road to Khandahar. Let's "Embrace the Suck".
If we really want Freedom itself to live on after us, we need more guys who can pierce a foot-mobile target from 250 yards, off-hand, while wearing 75 pounds of combat schwag and getting yelled at through the earpiece by a limp-dicked college-boy Lieutenant.
Being the strongest tribe is meaningless if you are also the smallest one. We need more shooters in the game, and, since we also could use more American born employees who can learn to program in Fortran or that " C++" gibberish, or even, god forbid HTML, this is what we have to do.
We can pay for these two activities, and then some, by reducing the Air Force budget by 25%. The entire Marine Corps costs the same as a single wing of Joint Tactical Fighters. Guess which one is actually fighting the war on terror? The swing-state Air National Guards from Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan can probably defend us against a simultaneous attack by every foreign tactical aviation threat that currently exits. it is a chance worth taking - because only a Marine division can pacify Fallujha.
6) Let's lower corporate tax rates AND collect more corporate taxes.
A five year moratorium on ALL Corporate tax breaks in exchange for a reduction to a 12% flat rate for all companies of any size. Really, this idea cannot possibly be worse than the criminally disfunctional corporate-industrial-congressional love fest of fiscal corruption we have now inside our failed GDP.
Let's try it for a few fiscal years and see what happens. My guess - more real money for Congress to waste, less accounting costs for tax evasion and an end to one of the "thousand points of @!$%#e" of corrupted congressional tax-break gridlock. It will cost Wall Street far less to pay the massively simplified and reduced, one page, flat-rate than what they currently spend to lobby, lie, cheat and steal their way through the existing five thousand page corporate tax code.
7) Let's eat better AND exercise more.
We'll Place a 5 cent per-serving non-negotiable tax on anything containing partially hydrogenated oil OR high fructose corn syrup AND use the proceeds exclusively to fund a reinstatement of public school Physical Education programs. We are stupidly fat and it is embarrassing. We eat food made in refineries. Do you enjoy knowing in your teens that you will definitely have cancer in your forties? The prisoners of Russia's gulag were provided healthier food than middle class America is, (and they exercised more.)
8) Let's pay higher wages and spend less on payroll.
Raise the Minimum Wage 4 dollars in exchange for terminating all mandated benefits that employers are required to provide. While we are beating down corporations, let's do allow them a fighting chance to create some new jobs where it matters - in small and mid sized entrepreneurial companies.
Let's make payroll taxes flat rate, payable quarterly and, allow companies to pay more in real wages instead of having to manage complicated benefit, pension and other commie bull-crap safety nets for their employees. Most pension and benefit money is eaten by corrupt unions, ponzi-scheme brokerage houses and management expenses before we retire anyways.
You wanna a good retirement plan? Stop betting on rigged American sports every weekend, or buying Internet-order shoes if you are woman. Get an E-trade account, set up an automatic 100 dollar a month deposit into a index fund. You'll be a millionaire in 25 years.
Unless you are a coal miner, a cop or a lettuce picker, your union is a macro-economic wrench in the gears of American productivity. Stop whining, buy a coffee can and a shovel to manage your own benefits plan, and go back to work. And you corporate big shots - you want to get paid in stock options? Fine but the company has to expense them and you have to pay that same 14% tax every year, no exceptions.
9) That planet thing. Again.
Lets save the planet AND re-build our lost global power AND create a new, generation-long economic expansion. The currrent plan to spend 10 % of our (borrowed) national budget to go back to the moon is the dumbest public science alchemy in the entire history of knowing stuff. Climate change is real, and if you don't believe fossil fuel use is bad for us, you can spend an hour in your garage with the engine running and call us back. Let's get off the dime on this thing in a way we all know we are good at, and that we all know will be good for the economy.
Let's subsidize the biggest pork-barrel jelly roll in American history, in order to save the Planet!
We will re-name NASA the National Aerospace and Science Administration. Put them in charge of all the public science agencies and task them with "Ensuring the highest probability of habitable environmental stability for the next 5 generations of the Human Race". Let's order up an economic stimulus that drives technology, capital wealth, national security and international status on the scale of the Marshall Plan. But this one's for us, baby!
Even Dick Cheney can understand that seizing technological control of the planet's entire oxygen supply will go a long way towards returning our lost great power status. We can even make Haliburton the prime contractor.
10) That's it, actually.
We need to do more with less and our platform is no exception. We need to stop paying for ten things when we only need nine.
*someone please say you remember the crying indian commercials...: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1QQWJK_OUk
Everybody talks about sacrifice, but nobody shows up early with an empty backpack to haul rocks. Here is a platform that won't please everyone, but everyone will see that it builds something better for America's future. Are you so patriotic that you want to prove it with a gun? Maybe you should prove it with a compromise instead...
The Ten Essentials of True American non-partisan value-Voting.
1) Let's Stop The Killing and Stop Killing.
Let's ban public support for abortion AND the death penalty and get on with anything else that matters. They are both a kill job. And no, sorry, but it is NOT more complicated than that (for now). Texas will become overpopulated from both ends in nine months but so what? Catholics can live by their sword, so to speak, for a change and everyone else can go to Canada or Mexico until we elect a female President. The later event sure to be in the next cycle, since American elections will no longer be enslaved by the 5% of the country and 1% of the voters who actually care about this "hot button" issue.
2) Let's Save the Planet AND Drill for Oil.
We'll Mandate a 100% smokestack scrubbing and pollution filtering implementation on EVERY coal and Fossil Fuel burning power plant in America AND allow drilling in the arctic, or the sands of Yuma, or under the Fresh Kills landfill or anywhere else T. Boone Pickens can get a derrick built.
We are a few busloads of crying indian chiefs * past saving the caribou at this point, kids. It's come down to saving the humans (and maybe some soylent green for food.) Scrubbing our coal fired generating stations' carbon and sulphur and nitrogen etc... exhaust will deliver the most significant reversal of the GCC causing pollution possible from America. The scrubbing requirement will also raise the price of energy so much that we won't be able to afford to buy gas. This will eliminate the demand for arctic oil anyways.
Maybe we can move on this before moderates, like your humble (ex)-Cowboy, start eyeing the pitchfork and torches and wondering at what point George Washington would want to change greenpeace to greenwar if he were alive today.
3)Let's run destructive lenders out of town on a rail.
We'll cap credit card and all other legal lending charges, interest and fees combined, at 4 times the Federal Rate (apr) for the total duration of the loan.
There's no trade-off here. What could you trade for ending the most institutionally corrupt and destabilizing blanket that Wall Street (and Ohio) has ever pulled over America's eyes? Predacious loan charges cost consumers more money than three hurricane Katrinas a year. We borrow from the bank, the bank borrows from the fed and the fed borrows from China and Suadi Arabia. Do you think American foreign policy might be affected by the fact that Saudi Arabia is our 4th largest debtor? We owe them one Katrina a year, just in interest.
4) Let's ban deviance and allow love.
We'll ban internet pornography and allow gay marriage. Internet Sex is a hell of a lot more deviant than Gay Love. There's no forced morality conflict with employer benefits, either; because of number 8 below.
State supported interstate infrastructure carries the internet, so we can regulate it just like we can tv, trucking and whiskey. We don't allow sewage in our tax funded drinking water lines - let's ban the display of erect penises, and Hot Milf Action on the little screens we replaced tv with. Then we can all go back to work and get some @!$%# done in America. Not to mention we will stop creating sex addicts who commit savage crimes of depravity every other day or so. If we can ban smoking in the workplace we can ban Beating-Off there as well. And if it makes Ellen funny again, like she used to be, that'll just be a bonus.
5) Let's defeat the illiterate savages AND teach our own kids how to read.
Let's institute a 6 year Military Draft in exchange for allowing parents to deduct ALL of their kid's college tuition and fees from their taxes. And if the CEO, or corporation in number 8 wants a tax break - they can write off 100% of their tuition paying grant (not loan) contributions. But let's roll this out yesterday, 'cause the savagery is already dire.
We need the draft. It sucks but we do. It's a simple priority. The Russians will be in Damascus by next Easter unless we get another quarter-million Kill Generation boys onto the playground. Right now, an entirely new and additional, Marine Division (Heavy) is more important for our security than making sure that no one sneaks a pocket knife on a Jet Blue flight to Kingston, Jamaica.
Look at it this way: We are all gonna die sometime. A few of us when an over-worked Air Marshal shoots out a window at 29,000 feet over Nebraska, a few of us crouched behind an Army-rejected Humvee on the road to Khandahar. Let's "Embrace the Suck".
If we really want Freedom itself to live on after us, we need more guys who can pierce a foot-mobile target from 250 yards, off-hand, while wearing 75 pounds of combat schwag and getting yelled at through the earpiece by a limp-dicked college-boy Lieutenant.
Being the strongest tribe is meaningless if you are also the smallest one. We need more shooters in the game, and, since we also could use more American born employees who can learn to program in Fortran or that " C++" gibberish, or even, god forbid HTML, this is what we have to do.
We can pay for these two activities, and then some, by reducing the Air Force budget by 25%. The entire Marine Corps costs the same as a single wing of Joint Tactical Fighters. Guess which one is actually fighting the war on terror? The swing-state Air National Guards from Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan can probably defend us against a simultaneous attack by every foreign tactical aviation threat that currently exits. it is a chance worth taking - because only a Marine division can pacify Fallujha.
6) Let's lower corporate tax rates AND collect more corporate taxes.
A five year moratorium on ALL Corporate tax breaks in exchange for a reduction to a 12% flat rate for all companies of any size. Really, this idea cannot possibly be worse than the criminally disfunctional corporate-industrial-congressional love fest of fiscal corruption we have now inside our failed GDP.
Let's try it for a few fiscal years and see what happens. My guess - more real money for Congress to waste, less accounting costs for tax evasion and an end to one of the "thousand points of @!$%#e" of corrupted congressional tax-break gridlock. It will cost Wall Street far less to pay the massively simplified and reduced, one page, flat-rate than what they currently spend to lobby, lie, cheat and steal their way through the existing five thousand page corporate tax code.
7) Let's eat better AND exercise more.
We'll Place a 5 cent per-serving non-negotiable tax on anything containing partially hydrogenated oil OR high fructose corn syrup AND use the proceeds exclusively to fund a reinstatement of public school Physical Education programs. We are stupidly fat and it is embarrassing. We eat food made in refineries. Do you enjoy knowing in your teens that you will definitely have cancer in your forties? The prisoners of Russia's gulag were provided healthier food than middle class America is, (and they exercised more.)
8) Let's pay higher wages and spend less on payroll.
Raise the Minimum Wage 4 dollars in exchange for terminating all mandated benefits that employers are required to provide. While we are beating down corporations, let's do allow them a fighting chance to create some new jobs where it matters - in small and mid sized entrepreneurial companies.
Let's make payroll taxes flat rate, payable quarterly and, allow companies to pay more in real wages instead of having to manage complicated benefit, pension and other commie bull-crap safety nets for their employees. Most pension and benefit money is eaten by corrupt unions, ponzi-scheme brokerage houses and management expenses before we retire anyways.
You wanna a good retirement plan? Stop betting on rigged American sports every weekend, or buying Internet-order shoes if you are woman. Get an E-trade account, set up an automatic 100 dollar a month deposit into a index fund. You'll be a millionaire in 25 years.
Unless you are a coal miner, a cop or a lettuce picker, your union is a macro-economic wrench in the gears of American productivity. Stop whining, buy a coffee can and a shovel to manage your own benefits plan, and go back to work. And you corporate big shots - you want to get paid in stock options? Fine but the company has to expense them and you have to pay that same 14% tax every year, no exceptions.
9) That planet thing. Again.
Lets save the planet AND re-build our lost global power AND create a new, generation-long economic expansion. The currrent plan to spend 10 % of our (borrowed) national budget to go back to the moon is the dumbest public science alchemy in the entire history of knowing stuff. Climate change is real, and if you don't believe fossil fuel use is bad for us, you can spend an hour in your garage with the engine running and call us back. Let's get off the dime on this thing in a way we all know we are good at, and that we all know will be good for the economy.
Let's subsidize the biggest pork-barrel jelly roll in American history, in order to save the Planet!
We will re-name NASA the National Aerospace and Science Administration. Put them in charge of all the public science agencies and task them with "Ensuring the highest probability of habitable environmental stability for the next 5 generations of the Human Race". Let's order up an economic stimulus that drives technology, capital wealth, national security and international status on the scale of the Marshall Plan. But this one's for us, baby!
Even Dick Cheney can understand that seizing technological control of the planet's entire oxygen supply will go a long way towards returning our lost great power status. We can even make Haliburton the prime contractor.
10) That's it, actually.
We need to do more with less and our platform is no exception. We need to stop paying for ten things when we only need nine.
*someone please say you remember the crying indian commercials...: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1QQWJK_OUk
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