One of the basic and most fundamental rights of a US Citizen is their right to vote, but even today it still remains one of the most confusing issues. More people will simply not vote versus looking stupid and not being properly prepared at the voting booth.
Well, fear no more. Unlike the tactics of the past by the GOP to suppress the vote, Obama’s campaign brings tools like Vote for Change.com to the Internet to encourage the vote. This awesome tool will allow you to quickly see if you are registered and ready to vote in your community. And if you are not, tools are available to help you get registered.
Vote for real change. Vote for hope. Don’t let the fear tactics of the GOP keep you hiding in your house on vote night. Stand proud with your community, confident that your vote will be counted.
Please help spread the word. Please be active in your community. Make sure that all your friends, family, neighbors and co-workers are registered and ready to vote. Need help to spread the word? Here is a link to help send that email.
I dare anyone who may read this blog to say that the country is in better shape today then it was 8 years ago. Really, I dare you. That is unless you are part of the super-wealthy I guess.
The average American is really taking it in the ass and if the proof is not in the greatest stock market crash since the great depression, then what are you waiting for? Will it take a total economic failure around the world that will plunge us into certain world war as countries will fight to the death for what is left? Will it take the deaths of our children in masses to convenience you?
So, what will it take to get through to the common middle-class American? Look, I understand conservative values. I understand the concept of a smaller government role in business. I understand the grand old idea of being a fiscal conservative. But can you honestly tell me that the administration that is supposed to be the embodiment of those values are even coming close to upholding those ideals?
For over a half a century now, starting with Reagan, the vision of the GOP has been the ‘top down’ fiscal plan. Back in the old days, the super rich had it great! There were no personal rights. There were no worker rights. Unions were meet by gun fire and this was considered acceptable . But the rich got to greedy. They took advantage of the system and it all fell apart in their hands. Anyone stay awake long enough in high school to remember the Great Depression? The following is a slice out of Wikipedia.
Debt is seen as one of the causes of the Great Depression, particularly in the United States. Macroeconomists including Ben Bernanke, the current chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, have revived the debt-deflation view[citation needed] of the Great Depression originated by Arthur Cecil Pigou and Irving Fisher:[citation needed] in the 1920s, American consumers and businesses relied on cheap credit, the former to purchase consumer goods such as automobiles and furniture, and the latter for capital investment to increase production. This fueled strong short-term growth but created consumer and commercial debt. People and businesses who were deeply in debt when price deflation occurred or demand for their product decreased often risked default. Many drastically cut current spending to keep up time payments, thus lowering demand for new products. Businesses began to fail as construction work and factory orders plunged.
Does any of that sound familiar to anyone, huh? Ok, so we kind of know what was the cause of the greatest economic blunder in American history, so you would think that policies would be put in place to keep that from ever happening again, right? Well, sure. Enter the New Deal by President FDR. In short, again for those who slept through history, the New Deal was a series of economic packages set to regulate the market and provide resources and relief for the middle and lower classes.
These policies were key in the reconstruction of the American economic sanity. Now before I get flamed, I know all the ins and outs of the new deal and how many right wing conservatives considered the New Deal to be infiltrated by communists and fascists. I don’t care how you look at it, the New Deal aimed to regulate the free market so that unscrupulous big business wouldn’t put maximizing profits in-front of personal and social well being. You may also argue that the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression, but is sure as hell kept the ones who started it all from continuing to screw it up even more. Interesting thing the human race, the one who really crap it all up can’t ever see the error of their ways and continue to crap it up even more unless stopped by other forces.
And this my friends is called a segue. If you are still reading this, congratulations as I am finally getting to my point. Since the New Deal was created, right wing conservatives have been working really hard to unravel what has been created. Unions, bad. Social Security, bad. Welfare, bad. Government regulation of corporate America, BAD! Reagan, the king of all GOP members, was one of the leaders in de-regulation of the market which lead to some of the worst economic circumstances of the later 1980s. Remember Reagonomics? Well, out of that age, men like Senator Phil Gramm came to power.
Who is Senator Phil Gramm? Well, today he is one of Senator John McCain’s Economic advisors, and hailed as ‘economic guru’ by John McCain. What makes Senator Gramm significant and why I wrote all this amazing history is that Senator Grimm was the lead architect in the complete dismantlement of government oversight of the American Market. In an excerpt from motherjones.com, an article titles, “Foreclosure Phil”
… In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt’s requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec’s workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited—at one point, according to Levitt’s memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania.
But Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. … As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. “Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it,” says a congressional aide familiar with the bill’s history.
So there it is. A single man who masterminded a 262 page measure that was slipped into a $384 Billion dollar spending bill that many directly attribute to the Enron scandal and the house of cards, that is our economy, that continues to fall around us. And Mr. Gramm is the lead Economic Advisor for Senator McCain and rumored to be promoted to secretary of the Treasury of McCain is elected President.
So, call me an alarmist if you will, but I see a vote for McCain as a vote to end the world as we know it. If that is what you are looking for, well McCain is your man.
As a daily fighter in the paperless revolution, I am always on the lookout for new and exciting technologies that bring about the end of wasteful paper uses. You know, those endless copies of documents and reports that clutter up our desks, lives and landfills.
There are the common solutions that I stand behind, like using a desktop or laptop computer leveraging a wide range of desktop document management applications and supporting integration with tools like the iPhone. But, as good as these solutions are, there are drawbacks. What if you don’t use a computer all the time? That laptop can be a bear to carry around all the time. That 2 hours of battery life only gets you so far. The iPhone is a great way to manage portable documents, but it really only is a 3″ screen. Reviewing a document with a coleauge or client can be a challenge. Then, you can only read documents, not edit or mark-up.
Any Star Trek fans out there? Remember in the original series, some type of clerk would always bring Captain Kirk that digital clip board? Some have speculated that the realization of this device was the Tablet PC. I think not. I don’t believe that this device was a full out computer with a touch screen. That is overkill in the actual application of this idea. If the main application of this device is only to review and annotate documents, then why do I need a device as powerful as a full laptop?
What if there was a device that was more like reading a real document? Something that was light weight, portable and robust. A device that provides an application specific solution. What if there was a device that would allow me to upload hundreds of documents and take up no more room then a standard folder? Some of you may be saying, “What about Amazon’s Kindle?” Come on, the Kindle? Really?
Enter Plastic Logic. This one really blew me away. Not only are they bringing a concept to market, but they also created the supporting software and the actual product hardware. Take that Microsoft. These guys made an LCD device that is flexible, light weight and amazingly resilient. A device that is the size of a traditional document and is readable in almost any lighting situation, even bright sunlight. This reader even supports features like markup and has a touch keyboard for attaching notes.
Watch the video and see for yourself. Laptops, tablet PCs, future ideas for a MacTouch, all these ideas are great, but the idea of having a device that could contains multiple full manuals, technical documents, schematics, etc . . . all in a robust, damage proof, portable and light weight device. That is gold my friend. Gold.
Can you answer the following questions?