Answers, the third! (The political ones)

Time to continue providing answers to the queries posed for Ask Me Anything!. A couple of politically-themed ones from Roger today. I'm surprised that, given an election year, there were only two political questions. I'm also glad that there were only two political questions.

These are beneath the fold...but just in case any of my readers on the other side of the aisle are thinking of reading my brief political thoughts, here's Bugs Bunny to distract you:


OK, just click away now!





What's your take on the whole Chick-Fil-A issue? Would you boycott it over its owner's anti-gay marriage sentiment, and more importantly, expenditures? PBS takes $$ for its children's programming; should they still accept it? And have you ever even eaten at Chick-Fil-A? (I haven't; there nearest ones are 2 hours away.)

I've never eaten at Chick-Fil-A, and to my knowledge, the nearest one to me is in Erie, PA, a place that has a lot of dining choices, even for fast food, that I would select instead. So it doesn't matter much to me as a real-world thing.

But, I'm pretty much all for boycotts, from either side. Hey, it's your money, and your choice of how to spend it. Now, I generally don't go out of my way to figure out which establishments are 'liberal' ones and which aren't and then spend accordingly, because frankly, I've got better things to do with my time than that. If some of my money ends up in a Republican's pocket when I spend it, well, them's the breaks. However, I do have a breaking point, and when someone decides that it's time to do some gay-bashing, that's when you stop getting my money. That issue is, for me, a serious deal-breaker. (Which is why I will never read another word Orson Scott Card writes. He is dead to me.)

I continue to be amused at the way the conservatives who flooded Chick-Fil-A restaurants that day claimed to be defending 'free speech'. Free speech was in no way threatened by any boycott. The Chick-Fil-A guy still has every right to spout his bigotry to his heart's content. He has a right to speak. He doesn't have a right to my money. Saying that this was a 'free speech' issue is patently stupid.

And the other question:

Who will be President January 20, 2013, and why?

Easy: At 12:01 am on January 20, 2013, the President will be Barack Obama.

But of course, Roger's asking for who will be President twelve hours after that, when the next Presidential term of office begins. I'm unwilling to offer a prediction at this point, but let me just say that I truly hope that it's still Barack Obama. I am well and truly horrified at the prospect of the current version of the Republican Party taking control of most, if not all, of the branches of government.

I could go into a long rant as to why...but my heart really isn't in it. I plan to vote and donate money to the President, but when it comes to political discussion, I'm simply not interested anymore. When the conservative element in this country is willing to admit that climate change/global warming is a serious problem, and that humans are the product of billions of years of biological evolution, and that tax cuts don't increase revenues, and that gays are people who are deserving of all rights afforded straight persons, and that women's health should be of equal importance to men's, and that the fetus isn't the single most important thing in the Universe, and that we're not irrevocably on the Road To Ruin when we take an approach to health care in this country that the entire rest of the frakking civilized world took decades ago with little ill effect, and that the free market just can't solve every ill, maybe then I'll be willing to listen to what they have to say. Until then, fuhgeddaboudit. I'm going to turn 41 in September, and at that point, I will have lived 25 of my 41 years under Republican policies. When I look around at the state of the country, well...color me unimpressed.

(By the way, no one asked, but overall, I'd give President Obama a B-minus thus far. I'm willing to grant that for most of his term he simply didn't have enough willing partners in Congress to enact a more liberal agenda, but it would have been nice to see him come far, far sooner to the conclusion that bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship is a fool's chase, especially when the other party has already gone on record any number of times that they have zero intention of cooperating with you on anything. But then, the Washington/US political media's standard definition of 'bipartisan' is 'Republicans get what they want', so what are you gonna do. I also wish that Obama had acted with more urgency when he briefly had that filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, just to get nominations -- judicial and otherwise -- through. I'm less than thrilled with Obama's failure to roll back some of the Bush-era excess with regard to Presidential power. I'm hoping for more effective governance in his second term, if it comes to pass. We'll see.)

OK, the next one will have more pleasant answers, believe me!