"You're Gonna Love the Way You Look."

Today I wanted to voice in about things that might seem to look good on the surface, but probably aren't that good for you at all.  For the last several years both the G.O.P. and the sister Tea Party have been propping up and pushing through candidates who want us to believe they are against government waste, and for traditional family values.

Yet time and again when it comes to making the decisions that need to be made in Congress, they personify government waste by sitting on their asses, hedging their bets, filibustering endlessly, wasting the legislative sessions holding votes repeatedly on bills that have already been defeated in the other cameral house or vetoed by the president.

There are only two types of  legislation that is being pushed through, both on the national and the state level.  The first, is legislation for the super-pacs and multi-national corporations that put them in office.  It is a long standing rule in state and national politics in this country as well as many others.  You have to dance with the ones that brought you there.  This leads to legislation like the Monsanto Protection Act, recently snuck through into federal law; which protects Monsanto from being sued due to any negative effects of their products.  Interestingly, this law went into effect just a week or two before Monsanto's genetically modified wheat scandal became public knowledge.  I am sure the two incidents are completely unrelated.

The second kind of legislation that keeps getting forced through is morals governing Sharia laws which have become very popular in this present legislative cycle.  Laws like the recent law in Indiana making it illegal for a member of the clergy to marry a homosexual couple. 

These laws promise to be the height of waste as we pour millions of dollars in the state and federal services trying to enforce these laws.  Laws that are so unconstitutional they will most likely be overthrown as soon as the first person indicted by them appeals to the state or national Supreme Court.  I am not sure who's family values these hateful exclusionary edicts are supposed to promote.  Instead, these laws seem tailor made as measures to segregate the citizens of the United States by race, religion, sex, and socio-economic status.   That's not the kind of values I was taught as a child.  Certainly not what my teachers indicated our United States were aspiring toward.

These are certainly not the values that were instilled in us by our parents.  Perhaps they are the values our great grandparents instilled in our grandparents.  But in my case my grandparents fell into the "Greatest Generation".  They faught fascism in Europe and defeated it, then devoted a larger percentage of their budget than ever before to educating and feeding their children and making sure that a larger percentage of the population had access to medicine than ever before in history.  They educated their children so they'd be able to think for themselves.

They hoped that this way, something like fascism would never seem to be an attractive option to an educated people.  They also started a "War on Poverty". No, not the war on the impoverished many state and federal law makers are waging now, trying to claim that the poor are the reason our nation erodes from within.  It was a measure meant to end poverty once and for all. 

Maybe it was overly idealistic to think that could be achieved.  However they continued to try through various social welfare programs until the impetus finally petered out some time in the 1980's, when we decided that greed was good and "Me" was all that was important.  Now the current crop of right-wing politicians would have you believe they were socialists and communists.  If my grandfather were still alive I am sure he'd have something to say about that.

Wow; this is getting to a long post.  I had a bunch to say about the founding fathers separating church and state for a reason. They didn't want to see the civil unrest, violence, and killing that was the history of western Europe since the Protestant Reformation to bog down the politics of this new nation as well.

I'll wrap it up and say that perhaps a shiny new suit made out of a tissue of lies and half-truths is not what you need to keep you warm in the harsh environment of this world or any other.

Thank you for your time and good night.