Thursday Political Thoughts

1) People complaining about gentrification of their neighborhoods seem to be missing the easiest solution. Fake a few muggings! Even get your friends in on it, so no one gets hurt. In fact, try to do it when the real estate agent is showing the house to the gentrifiers, and make it extra dramatic. The "victim" can shout about "oh no, the third time this week! What are the odds???" and the mugger can be like "I need money to buy drugs! Hurry up and pay me!"

2) Why do people complain about vote buying? We allow people to vote for politicians who promise to cut their taxes or increase their welfare payments. Isn't a direct payout simply cutting out the middleman?

3) When you're in the process of buying an ambassadorship, they should really put out a guide explaining how much each ambassadorship costs, and displaying an index of how nice the weather is in the country compared to how likely you and your embassy staff will be murdered by locals in one of their revolutions.

4) All State of the Union addresses should be done with guitar accompaniment. That way we can tell when the tension-filled parts of the speech are coming up.

5) Whenever you pull the lever in a voting booth, it should make a loud "flush" sound because it symbolizes how much we're flushing our country down the toilet. Am I right?

6) Every time there's an election, the media is able to project a winner with a tiny fraction of the votes counted--something like 3% of the returns being in, they can say for sure that they have a winner. Couldn't they do that with football, so that four minutes into the game they can say "well, Dallas made the first three completions, and got two first downs, we call them as the winner by an eventual score of 17-10." If they can't do that, is that a sign that political reporting is so good, or sports reporting is so bad?

7) I for one love hearing who my favorite celebrities endorse because if Kate Hudson or that guy from Supertramp think the president is doing a bad job, their years of expertise and accumulated wisdom should certainly trump mine.

8) I hear a lot of rich liberals talking about how much they don't need the tax cuts that the Republicans give to the rich, and a lot of rich conservatives talking about how social security should be means tested. But I dont' hear a lot of rich liberals paying the IRS more than they owe or rich conservatives returning social security checks that are mailed to them.

9) I read that the War of 1812 was a bit of a mess for the U.S. I wonder if that war inspired a lot of soul searching plays about the horrors of war, and how poorly we treated our 1812 veterans, or hippie protests (with whatever passed for hippies in those days) yelling about "no more 1812s!" Certainly the antiwar sentiment wasn't enough to keep us from invading Mexico, or fighting the Civil War later.

10) If I were president, and then retired and had a "Presidential Library" built for me, I'd totally stock it with Mad Libs books and Calvin and Hobbes collections. And if people were late in returning the books? We'd charge a lot more than a nickel for a late fee. I'd want a coffee shop put in there too.