We The People

Look, I don't get political here very often. But I've really reached the breaking point on this one. If you haven't been following the story about our great new nominee for Treasury Secretary who has this teeny little "innocent" problem with tax evasion, check out the latest twist in this disgrace.

People, this is our freakin' country. I have had it. Yep, they'll probably go ahead and confirm this loser, but our Congressional leaders are dang sure gonna know that I know that this is a total load of crap. We may be going down the tubes as a country, but I for one am sure as heck gonna go down fighting.

If you want to join the fight, it's easy to do. Email your senators and remind them that they work for us. If you need help finding your senators, go here. And, I'll make it even easier for you. Below you'll find the text of my emails to both Missouri senators. Feel free to take it verbatim or add in your own flourish - just send them something. Put them on notice. Let them know we're not asleep out here in the heartland. We're watching, and we're ticked.

I am writing to vehemently protest the confirmation of Timothy Geithner as the next U.S. Treasury Secretary. Not only has it come to light that Mr. Geithner failed to pay income taxes for a number of years, it has now been revealed that Mr. Geithner actually received reimbursement for this unpaid income tax while at the IMF.

If this was simply an "innocent mistake," Mr. Geithner is clearly unable to perform the duties of Treasury Secretary as he is apparently unable to accurately figure his income taxes. If it was not, he should be prosecuted for tax evasion - which is what would happen to me or any other average citizen if I had failed to pay my taxes even after being told of the supposed "error" in 2006. If it was an "innocent mistake," why did Mr. Geithner wait until late 2008 to pay the taxes? (For more information on this issue, which is quickly becoming common knowledge that will not be swept under the rug, please follow this link: http://tinyurl.com/7sm78w).

It appears that many of our leaders in Washington have forgotten that, rather than playing with Monopoly money, we are talking about dollars that belong to the people - the people of Missouri and of the United States. It also appears that many of our leaders have forgotten that they work for us - "We the People" are the employers of our senators and representatives.

Please do not be one of the leaders who has forgotten his responsibility to represent the people. Please do not play politics. Please do not trade favors. Please do not sell out my future and the future of my precious little girls for short-term gain inside the Beltway. Please do your job and vote against the confirmation of Timothy Geithner.

All I Ask Is That You Think

This is not a political blog, it's a slightly crazed mommy/sort-of-professional chick blog that's supposed to be entertaining, fun to read, and reflective of my occasionally skewed sense of humor (my favorite movies include this, that and definitely this - and this guy is one of my all-time favorite comedians. Told ya - smidge skewed. Possibly even closing in on sick puppy status.)

To that end, all I'm going to say about the upcoming election - other than "Lawd have mercy, please make it end soon" - is think.

Think for yourself. Do your own research. Don't be spoon-fed. Be skeptical. Don't take exhaustively-media-trained candidates at their scripted and practiced word. Actively search for the truth. Search your brain and your heart to find out what's most important to you, then make a decision about all the candidates and issues at every level based on what you learn about the candidates/issues and yourself.

To help with your research, here are a few factual, nonpartisan Web sites - toss the drivel both parties are churning out and check these out:

• VoteHelp, where you answer questions about your thoughts on big issues as well as their importance to you, and the results show you which presidential candidate most closely aligns with your positions.
• Election Taxes, where you can enter your personal 2008 tax information and get an estimate of your 2009-12 taxes under each presidential candidate's proposed tax plan
• the Library of Congress, where you can easily check the bills sponsored by, as well as the roll call votes, of both presidential candidates along with your state's senators and representatives. You can also review the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. You've probably spent years listening to what others tell you is in these documents. Isn't it about time you read for yourself the documents that comprise the very foundation of our country?

Once election day rolls around, Tweet about your experience at the voting booth, especially line length, wait times and any problems, to the Twitter Vote Report.

Whatever you do, just vote. Please vote. Many good people died to give you the right to vote. Many more people around the world are living in countries where this fundamental freedom is nonexistent. And many others are fighting and dying right now to gain the right we shrug off so casually. Respect their sacrifices, respect this country, and respect your freedom enough to vote on Nov. 4.

We Better Hope We Can Fix Stupid

I'm angry. Really angry.

I just watched an amazing National Geographic Channel ("Nat Geo" for the cool people) documentary called "Nazi Scrapbooks From Hell." One scrapbook featured - the personal photo album of a Nazi officer while he was adjutant at Auschwitz - was found by an anonymous Allied soldier after the war and was eventually mailed to the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Another scrapbook - called the Auschwitz Album - contains the only surviving photo evidence of the selection and preparation of Jews for the gas chambers. It was found by a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz as she was recovering from typhoid after the liberation. Housed in a former SS bunkhouse that had been turned into a hospital, she opened a drawer one night in the hopes of finding a blanket and instead found the photo album. In that album, scattered in shots of the crowds piling off the trains, were photos of her family - including brothers, aunts and grandparents -arriving at Auschwitz. She was the only member of her family selected to work instead of go straight to the gas chambers that night, and the SS officer's scrapbook contained the only surviving photos of her family. It is now in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.

So why am I so angry (other than the fact that six million men, women and children were treated worse than animals and demonically slaughtered)? According to the latest study of the basic history knowledge of 17-year-old American high school students, nearly 25 percent don't know who Adolf Hitler was. Half of them have no idea what the Renaissance was - probably the same half that also can't identify the correct half-century of the Civil War.

Given that there are about 3 million U.S. high school seniors, that means 1.5 million people who are about to vote in the next presidential election don't have a basic understanding of U.S. or world history. And, about 750,000 have no idea who one of the most evil men ever to walk the Earth was (yeah, I know Stalin killed 20 million, but if they don't know Hitler, how many of them do you think actually know who Stalin is? That's just hoping for too much.)

I seriously feel sick. What in the heck are we teaching our children? I bet 99 freakin' percent of them could identify Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. I bet they could tell you the latest plotline for "Gossip Girl" or what the hottest new Wii game is or who won the last season of "American Idol," but they can't tell you basic facts about our country or our history or even our most notable lapses in humanity.

This is not going to end well, people. George Santayana was right (about this, anyway) - those who cannot remember history are indeed doomed to repeat it. Normally I'm a pretty optimistic person, but my optimism is being replaced with a growing sadness that we as a people have lost our way - we've lost that drive for excellence, that desire to learn and the respect for common sense that defined us as a nation and made us the envy of the world...and I don't think we even care to fix it anymore. I don't think our enemy is a terrorist organization or rogue country attacking us, I think we're doing a damn good job destroying ourselves, and our enemies are just sitting back waiting for it all to fall apart.

Finally, Honesty In Politics

Want a refreshing change to the drivel that passes for "communication" being pumped out by all the presidential candidates? Next time, let's nominate the guy who wrote this.

Thoughts On New Hampshire

--Barack Obama is a great orator, but not unlike many of the best, he really likes to hear himself talk. Someone should remind him that most of the world's greatest speeches were not written with the thought "this should make the top 10 all-time greatest speeches" list in mind. Dude, chill.

--About dang time Hillary Clinton dropped the fembot routine - and congrats to the person who gave her the "tonight, I found my voice" quip (I suspect Chelsea). Now if someone could just help the lady out with her wardrobe. Women of a certain age can dress professionally without looking frumpy - she's wandering dangerously close to Queen Elizabeth II territory here.

--We get it, Mitt Romney. You saved the Salt Lake Olympics (which I immensely enjoyed in person until my hero, Michelle Kwan, bit it). Enough with relating medal colors to primary placement. You're gonna lose count by Super Tuesday, and then what happens if you finish - as they say in figure skating - off the podium in one of the races - oh, the humiliation. And someone please go cut that guy's hair - it's really starting to creep me out.

--Points to John Edwards for putting a (male) hottie from "Desperate Housewives" up on stage with him. Made the Edwards speech soooo much more enjoyable. :-)

--I'll give John McCain this - he knows what separates him from the crowd of candidates (namely his military service - and God bless him for it and for the sacrifices he made serving his country) and he knows how to whip a crowd into a frenzy about it. Unfortunately, other than that, he's a big blah - and I blame his communications team. English, people, speak in plain English - what do you stand for, what do you want to do and why. Period. End of story. Everything else, especially when the field is so crowded, is just noise.

--Mike Huckabee's a funny guy. Funny as in funny ha ha, not funny he's talking to himself again. Of course, not sure if the North Koreans or the Taliban have a sense of humor, but hey, at least the American people would be entertained for four years. Don't knock it - it's an improvement.

--As John Edwards said, "Two down, 48 to go." And it's only January - oy vey.

It's Good To Be An Iowan

I am soooo jealous of Missouri's neighbors right now. Did you see how cool the Iowa caucuses were? I really paid attention to exactly what a caucus was and how they worked for the first time (either I'm finally growing up or I've descended so far into geekdom I'm hopeless) - and it looked like so much fun!

(If you need a primer, like I did, on the whole caucus process, check out this video from the John Edwards campaign. This is in no way an endorsement of Edwards - I just think his campaign explained the process in a really clever way.)

Before 2012, I'm moving to a caucus state - I wanna be in a room actively campaigning for the candidate of my choice and battling it out for that "under 15%" group. That kind of passionate grassroots political involvement is probably just what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they created our political system.

Fred Thompson for President

... just because my father-in-law's name is also Fred Thompson, and how many times do you get to say you voted for a relative for president? :-P

Hey, it's as good a reason as any to choose a candidate this time around - they all appear to be at least one of the following:

A) focus-grouped and media trained into message-regurgitating robots - seriously, do these people say anything they haven't practiced for a week and polled with potential voters yet?! Do they ever relax or do they take their shtick home with them? Can't you just hear this exchange happening in the Obama household?

Barack: "Honey, did you know 67 percent of men agest 35-54 said they regularly forget to take out the trash? Maybe we should offer an economic incentive package for proactive wastebasket dumping."

Michelle: "Here's your economic incentive package, you weenie. I don't care what you're running for, if you let the bathroom trash overflow one more time, I'm going to dump the entire contents of your personal checking account (yep, the one you think I don't know about) in the nearest Neiman Marcus shoe department."

B) just a few bricks shy of a load, i.e. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Hey, at least Ron Paul's earned the stripper endorsement - he'll probably walk away from this believing it wasn't a total waste just for that alone.

C) heretofore unknown for anything. Don't even pretend you know who Mike Gravel is. I added his link just because I feel sorry for him.

Anyway, if good old Fred can avoid playing footsie in public restrooms, check for any outstanding warrants on big donors and lose the Gucci loafers (Fred, I know you've got a pair of battered old cowboy boots in the back of your closet - dig 'em out!), he might just pull this one out ... or at least increase his asking price for his next movie.