Putin, Chavez and Castro all endorse Obama for President in the US 2012 election….
Is there a better reason not to vote for him?
I don’t like Romney – he seems like a psychopath to me…and his belief in ‘magic underwear’ is just icing on the cake.
Obama’s religious beliefs are even more batshit-crazy than Romney’s. Remember, he himself says that it was the racist screechings preachings of Jeremiah Wright that converted him to Christianity – and, from his college days, he has worn a ring that affirms his faith in one God. He’s even used it as his wedding ring – even though he wore it for at least a decade before he got married…
I guess in a country where, in many places, it is still illegal for reasonable people (who don’t believe in a magical sky-daddy) to run for public office, you’re bound to end up with candidates who all hold batshit-crazy magical views.
Not a great third choice, but it does exist!
And while I don’t know Gary Johnson’s religious ideas (I would probably not like them – as per above), and I think his foreign policy is downright insane, I do like what he has accomplished to reduce the size of government while he was the governor of New Mexico.
It’s not much, but it’s something…
Yes, he has no chance to win – which makes casting a vote for him count to send a message of dissatisfaction with the two main parties. It’s a fundamentally different way of being heard. But, it is a valid way of being heard – and a way to make your vote count.
He wants to repeal the Patriot Act.
He wants to get rid of the insane Drug Wars.
He wants to get rid of Income Tax in favour of one single consumption tax.
He wants to create jobs by reducing corporate tax rates – to zero.
He wants balanced budgets – now!
Not much, perhaps, but better than voting for one of the two ‘status quo’ candidates and then being surprised things do not change.
Because, if a statistically significant percentage of ‘undeclared’ voters support these policies, the two main parties will have to consider them in the future in order to get sufficient votes to win.
Hard to believe, perhaps, but sometimes, voting for ‘the other’ candidate will have a greaer political impact than voting for a candidate from one of the two legacy parties.
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
November 5, 2012 at 23:34
I am voting in this election, with pride and conviction. A lot of people, knowing who I am, will be shocked by my choice, but for now I won’t tell anyone who it is.
Xanthippa says:
Based on how most (not all, but most) of your comments have shown a dramatic shift toward the hard-left, I think most people would be able to make an educated guess as to who has won your vote. (I don’t think you are part of the hard-left – just that you appear to be moving in that direction.)
However…
Voting is secret for a reason – to preclude coersion.
And that is a good thing.
If you are happy with your vote, cast it with pride – and don’t feel that you need to succumb to any pressure to reveal it, if you’d rather keep it private.
November 6, 2012 at 09:03
I looked at all my posts in the past few months thinking I would be surprised, but I don’t really see an overall pattern of me taking a dramatic shift to the left. I do see that I’ve been more willing to criticize the right-wing, as opposed to letting it go un-scrutinized, but I’ve been hard as I’ve always been on the tons of nonsense that the left-wing spews out.
November 7, 2012 at 00:23
Derek:
Well, the dialog in the West is now so strongly dominated by the left that many people, who think their positions are moderate, are actually so far left of centre that they would have been considered dangerous radicals not many years ago. In the USA, there are two major political parties: Left and Lefter. In Canada, there are three: Left, Lefter and Leftest.
I say this with my tongue in my cheek to some degree, because in truth the dichotomy of left and right is now a false dichotomy. China has a system of state capitalism, and the ruling party calls itself communist. Canada has a system of corporate socialism, and the ruling party calls itself conservative. There are differences, but not as many or as substantial as we are lead to believe.
Indeed, the differences between Washington, Moscow, Ottawa, Beijing, London, Tokyo, Berlin, and many other capitals are mainly cosmetic. In actual substance, they have very similar modes of operation.
Each is ruled by an incestuously intertwined nest of snakes, formed of the unnatural union of big government and big business.
The basic principle is everywhere the same:
privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
This is neither capitalism nor communism, and so the dialectic between left and right misses it entirely. It is, so far, a system without a name, and it was established by stealth while the people were distracted by the noisy clash between left and right.
This is the reality of the New World Order.
November 7, 2012 at 10:08
I do agree with all of that, but I’m still getting over the fact that you are decrying self-proclaimed moderates as leftists, yet you have called prices decided by the will of the free market as despicable, coercive and kicking people when they’re down.
Xanthippa says:
I think he explained that in his response: he was criticizing the high levels of regulation of the gas industry which prevented a fair market competition even before the disaster and crippled it after…
November 7, 2012 at 18:02
Derek:
First, given two positions, which are both left of centre, any position which is moderate between them must itself be left of centre. This is elementary.
Second, when I decry gouging, I am certainly not decrying the free market. Gouging is impossible in a free market, as I explained in my comment here.
We don’t have a free market for any commodity that matters.
We have state-mandated monopolies, we have oligopolies and we have “marketing boards,” which are essentially cartels. This enables “price fixing,” which is exactly the process I decried. A small number of sellers, which dominate the market, huddle together and set prices by fiat — often dramatically higher than they would if they faced honest competition in a free market.
This can only happen when the government fails to prosecute under anti-trust law.
But the iniquity goes further than that, because the government also enacts regulations that protect these monopolies, oligopolies and cartels. These regulations are disingenuously couched in terms of protecting the consumer, but they always benefit the entrenched players and create barriers to entry into the market by new contenders, all of which is to the detriment of the consumer.
This is a big part of what I mean when I call the system an incestuously intertwined nest of snakes, formed of the unnatural union of big government and big business.
Xanthippa says:
If I may, I would like to propose to augment your ‘the unnatural union of big government and big business’ to ‘the unnatural union of big government, big business, big unions and big religions’.
The ‘big unions’ bit is, I hope, self explanatory.
The ‘big religions’ refers to some of the largest and richest religious organizations ‘out there’, from the Catholic Church (which is the controlling partner in some of the largest corporations of our time) to the Muslim Brotherhood whose collusion with the American Government to impose Sharia-Compiant Finance on the world and Sharia-Compliant ‘everything’ through the back door of ‘UN treaties’ will be used to disarm and shut-up any resistance in the USA…