Quiet Times Ahead

Now that the Phillies had lost the World Series, Philadelphians can feel relax about not having a riot on the streets. No excuse to loot for extra income in this down time, no flipping of cars or better yet buses to express the general public's anger towards the unreasonable strike. I think the drivers might not be really looking for a raise or benefits as much as getting the benefit of having a few days off during World Series and maybe a few extra for a mini-vacation. Maybe things will go back to normal. I wonder how the streets of New York would fare.

Since the election is over, there's no need for nasty political TV ads. There's not much voting going on in Pennsylvania but New Jersey being so close to us, we constantly get ads from Chris Christie and Jon Corzine. According to Corzine, Christie caters to pharmaceuticals and insurance company, he's corrupt, disingenuous and fat, while according to Christie, Corzine is a liar, incompetent with a bad political record and bald. I wonder after all this bad publicity, how they expect people to feel good about electing either of them. It's sad that they don't want to get elected base on their views and direction but base on who sounds less horrible. No matter, it's not my state and I'm just glad not having to seat through another slew of smear campaigns for another 7 months or so.

It's interesting that one year after electing Obama, now republicans are gaining grounds. Sure the economy is pretty bad and people are stressed and unhappy but they don't see the roots of their problems are started from republicans. At least that's how I feel. On the other hand, we haven't seen big progress from the Democrats side. We still don't have equal rights, we still don't have universal health care, we are still at war in the middle east and we are back teaching kids to abstain from having sex. There are no wide strokes of brilliance, no bullheadedness to counter the one way downfall of the previous administration. Like the public option on universal health care, I believe you can't argue with the stupids. The best way to have it done is just go for it, instead of slicing and dicing a brilliant idea into something trivial and unrecognizable. At the same time, there are politicians at both sides that receive huge amount of lobbying and campaign money and wouldn't vote for it. Although they would pretend to support it just so they can make the insurance companies squirm and gain more profit from them. It's all a terrible act and that's the reason I hate politics.

Gay marriage is now repealed in Maine, which is a huge bummer. It seems like whenever we are making progress for equal rights, we are always kicked back two steps. I still don't understand why they are still using the Proposition 8 formula when saying Yes actually means No. There seems to be a formula used on the opposition side to get what they want. Get funding by anti-gay religious groups, collect signatures by the means of fraud, scary commercials and the yes means no voting scheme. At the very least we can still tell ourselves that the margin turns out to be quite small and maybe next time, we'll win it back. I just don't understand why the majority gets to decide the fate of a minority group.