(Long Island, NY) At the same time the U.S. military was trying to prove to China just how wonderful our missile technology is (under the guise of protecting us from chemicals), Japan was doing something far more interesting; the launch of the WINDS satellite. This is the one that promises super-fast internet connectivity–up to more than a gigabyte per second! Amazing. The plan is, if the satellite works, subscribers can connect with a dish and start blazing away. Download an entire movie in a flash! Upload your entire collection of family reunion photos! Even the ones where you can’t tell who’s who because the photographer was a ham-fisted dork with no concept of focus.

If the technology does indeed deliver. It will be a revolution and everybody will instantly reap the benefits, even if you can’t afford to subscribe.

Of course, the word benefits should be used advisedly. In fact, for most of us there won’t be any benefits, only a major pain in the arse. Don’t put me down as a naysayer of new technology, or as a Luddite; instead you can herald me as the soothsayer of things to come. In the same way I told you that Ron Paul could in no way be the Republican contender for President, I tell you now that the first subscribers to this wonderfully lightning-speed service (if it happens at all) will be spammers.

Just like with dirty movies and video technology, the spammers are the first ones to leap on any bandwagon that allows them to cram more unwanted e-mail in your inbox. Except now they’ll probably find a way to clog up the regular-speed Internet. See, spammers aren’t the smartest people on earth. In fact, most of them are so painfully dull that you could safely call them potatoes without stretching the truth too much.

These geniuses will see now they have the capability to upload massive video attachments, cleverly designed (by someone else) HTML e-mails displaying big, annoying flashy graphics and animations similar to those irksome MySpace pages. They will assume that because they now have the capability to upload such things at the speed of light, that they SHOULD. For about half a year, everyone will be bombarded with huge e-mails that are mostly non-functional or horribly slow. Not that you’d want to see them anyway. But there you’ll be, with twenty-five e-mails an hour with broken animated .gifs and flash movies that hog your bandwidth trying to load and play.

Isn’t technology great?

Then again, after the spammers give up, Netflix will move in. I won’t complain about THAT, the idea that you could download an obscure French surrealist movie complete with subtitles with HD quality fairly quickly is rather tempting. I’d quickly set about filling in the holes of my DVD library with downloads of Godard, Melville, Truffaut. And also all those goofy Italian zombie movies. What can I say? I like both ends of the spectrum.

In the domino chain of Internet technological evolution it seems to go like this–it starts with the Nerds, winds up in the hands of the Spammers, then settles down into a business model for consumers. At the end of the chain the new technology finally ends up in the hands of the Nerds again,albeit at the end of the consumer chain rather than the innovation process. And its different nerds, too. Movie geeks, Trekkies, MP3-heads, Buffy The Vampire Slayer fanatics, you name it. The nerds always win in the end.

Lest you think I’m placing myself above the nerds here, don’t forget all those movie directors I rattled off a moment ago. I have my own place in the nerd food chain, I just wear a leather jacket and expensive jeans. I hide it well. I may write like some kind of hipster, but in my mind it’s more Beck than David Beckham.

Beck’s still a nerd, right?

Back to the WINDS satellite, nobody knows yet whether this groovy new thing will even work. American press is still too obsessed with the shoot-down of that top secret satellite to give some launch in Japan much notice. We’re patting ourselves on the back for having prevented a satellite fuel tank full of toxic crap from crashing back to earth. My question on all that is this:

What the hell were we doing sending all that toxic material up through the atmosphere to begin with? What happens if one of those missions fails disastrously and the rocket explodes in our atmosphere? Who’s authorizing this potential risk to the planet and why aren’t we informed? This is YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK, folks. Don’t you think you should be asking a few pertinent questions?

(Long Island, NY) Whenever I go to the gym, I always wind up on the cross trainer machine next to guys watching the financial reports on the gym TV system. I finally got curious to see what was holding the attention of sweaty dudes with determined looks on their faces, so I switched over one day and wound up being sucked into a mini-obsession with stocks.

I don’t know how it happened, and I’m not sure why NOW was the time for me to suddenly develop an interest in learning how to play the game. All I hear is gloom and doom from Wall Street, and the economy certainly does seem to be in the toilet. So why would I bother looking into this?

It had a LOT to do with a book called “Invest Like a Shark” by James DePorre. His book makes it seem almost easy to get into the buying and selling game. He claims that a strategy with little corporate research but a lot of reliance on past indicators of activity is a viable way to invest. Naturally, his approach involves a complete disregard for the traditional “buy and hold” strategy most people like me would associate with investing.

It’s SO tempting! Get in on a stock that seems to be on the rise, bail out when the price looks like it’s topped out, rinse, lather and repeat. A newbie like me is all ready to leap right in after reading a few chapters.

Fortunately for me, I actually LISTENED to the little voice in my head telling me to finish the book before I started on a stock-buying adventure. Especially in a bear market and an economy about to stop being in denial about our recession.

The little voice told me that I didn’t know something really important, and that I should keep reading. It also told me that people who invest money after reading a few books on investments were potential suckers with empty
bank account potential.

That little voice was dead right.

By the time I got to the end of “Invest Like a Shark” I learned that you not only have to watch the 52-week averages of a fast moving stock and try to calculate the way the market will behave, but you also have to look at
a little tricky (for me) calculation called a Price to Earnings Ratio and compare THAT with the amount of money the stock is EXPECTED to do over the next year, two years, etc.

Then you can start to assemble a vaguely coherent idea of what kind of risk you’re getting into by hopping on board a fast-moving stock and trying to ride it like a damn surfboard. A very vague idea.

Next, I read Jim Cramer’s “Confessions of a Street Addict”. Cramer is the guy on TV screaming, using the crazy sound effects, and telling people what he thinks is the next hottest thing. Cramer is a hero to the newbie
stock head, and I am certainly drawn in by his charisma and hubris when he stands firm on an opinion.

But “Street Addict” showed me a second and third dimension that “Invest Like a Shark” didn’t reveal. The smart stock people are information junkies. They look at a wide range of information and base their risk-taking on what the military would call good intel. You have to develop an insane, Cramer-like obsession for this stuff if you want to make any substantial money at it by making your own decisions.

You have to get a bigger picture. The experienced investment guys say this stuff is easy. And for THEM, it is. Because they’ve made all their early mistakes, suffered all their setbacks that happened out of ignorance of the REAL market game, the one that doesn’t make itself apparent until you’ve screwed up in precisely the ways they have. Some investors never recover from these screwups. Some bounce back right away. Some jump out of high-rises.

I came to the conclusion that I could probably hop in and play the game and make a few bucks. But I also decided that I had a lot more magazines to subscribe to, a lot more information to gather, and a big nasty bear market to pay attention to before I could invest dime one.

My initial excitement over the books I’ve read has mellowed into a wait-and-see attitude with the notion that I am definitely GOING to sink some money into the game and give it a whack. What I am NOT going to do is be one of those people that the entire investment book industry SEEMS to be made to lure. I’m talking about the excited amateur who is thrilled at the idea that because Stock Alpha is currently slumping at 19 dollars a share, but has performed at 40 dollars a share when times were good. That is precisely what lured me to the market in the first place…but that surface impression does NOT tell the whole story, and very few of these investment books that I’ve seen (in my limited but fervent page-flipping of a variety of volumes aside from the two I’ve mentioned) tell it either.

These books lure the newbie trader into the game, and they help the pros because the newcomers fit into a specific part of the food chain. As in, “a fool and his money are soon parted”. That’s where us newcomers are SUPPOSED to go until we learn from mistakes that we haven’t made yet. So when you get all excited over the markets and think you should start throwing money at E-Trade.com to make some buys, remember that no matter how much you’ve read, you’ve got a severe lack of real experience to draw on to know when to make the right moves. Pretty sobering, eh? It is for me, at least. I headed to market at some point. Just not this second.

I’ve obviously got some more reading to do. I’ll keep you posted.

(Long Island, NY) I told myself that my first screed for 2008 would NOT be about politics. It’s too flimsy to be considered a New Year’s resolution, so I didn’t worry too much about breaking my promise by writing about that Huckabee guy. The one running for office with God as his Vice Presidential running mate. (For you too-literal folks, this is SARCASM here.)

I have to repeat for the millionth time; I am NOT a political writer. I’m just a guy who watches the candidates make boffins out themselves on television. I don’t know MORE than you, I just know what looks like a home run, what looks like a foul ball, and what looks like bottom of the 9th, runners on First and Third, two outs, and strike two.

When I saw that Huckabee was actually gaining ground in Iowa, for any length of time ahead for ANYTHING besides the race for dogcatcher, I absolutely could not believe my eyes. The notion that we are taking this guy seriously for any reason at all makes me want to seriously think about Quebec. I’m taking French lessons online now, wondering if I can learn to love snails.

For starters, the religious issue is completely out of hand. We had this nonsense back in the 80s, remember? Have people gotten a brain wipe since the insufferable waste of our tax dollars that was those Senate hearings on rock music lyrics? The one that Tipper Gore helped push into the mainstream media?

That’s just one example, naturally, but you’re a smart reader and you know where this is going. The fact that we had to put up with a religious debate between Huckabee and Mitt Romney boggles the mind. Oh, for our founding fathers, who are creating quite a gust of wind spinning in their graves. I yearn for Abe Lincoln who was bold enough to have said “The Bible is not my book, Christianity is not my religion…”. Today, that would probably be the kiss of political death. Imagine, a candidate who decided to actually speak their mind! Nope, the White House race could never sustain somebody who spoke what they REALLY felt.

Even better would be a candidate who said, “Hey, believe whatever you want. But MY beliefs are private. I can assure you that they don’t include declaring holy war on anybody, and the Golden Rule is pretty nifty too. But otherwise, what I do in the privacy of my own mind is NoneYa.” As in, “None of your business.”

But we don’t have candidates with this kind of moral fiber. We have candidates who are willing to pander to any group that ponies up the votes. That could be one reason why Frank Zappa described the race to the White House as “The Olympics of Banality”. The shoe certainly fits.

Of course, my disgust with Huckabee vs. Romney with The Bible as referee will doubtless be misinterpreted by some narrow minded jackasses as coming from an atheist stance. Far from it. I have my own beliefs, thank you very much. But they are, as the candidates refuse to say, NoneYa.

What I would like to see (what will NEVER happen) is for the candidates to stick to the issues. They can’t help themselves, though. People with no real platform, no concrete plans for change, no earthly idea how to create
and enforce policies that can benefit the electorate will ALWAYS cloud the issues by dragging God kicking and screaming into the debate. “Now we don’t HAVE to talk about the plans I don’t have, because we have to argue
about Mister God.”

Explain to me WHY we should even be TALKING about THE BIBLE in Presidential debates where there are soldiers being blow to pieces on a daily basis in Iraq. Where does the Bible fit into that equation again? Last time I checked, the guys who wrote that one are ALL DEAD, and they aren’t contributing much to the foreign policy debate.

If you believe in God, can you imagine how utterly BORED he/she/it must be with this whole thing? Every election, every candidate stands on the side of the Almighty, the champion for truth, justice, and that other thing. Too bad none of these people with all the power and the glory on their side can do a bloody bit of good for that homeless guy who keeps bugging you for change, to keep another poor kid from falling into the gap on the LIRR, to keep another family from being kicked out of their home thanks to predatory lending practices.

I’ll take Huckabee and Romney seriously AFTER they trot out some concrete PLANS on how to keep the soldiers from getting killed in Afghanistan and Iraq on such a regular basis that we have DAILY OBITUARIES. What’s that? We’re AT WAR? We should EXPECT casualties? True enough. So where’s the rationing? Where’s the sacrifice at home for the troops over there? The victory gardens and the war bonds?

Don’t get me started on all that. I’m too busy boning up on my French and reading snail recipies. If we have to deal with the notion of a guy like Huckabee as a serious Presidential candidate, I may as well just buy season tickets for the hockey games up north NOW. Because we’ve lost all our marbles here. We may as well elect Pat Robertson and be done with it. Let’s announce to the entire world with a ticker tape parade and skywriters that we LIKE the kind of place America will be with a President Huckabee at the helm.

OK, that’s me all screed-ed out. Have fun at the ballot box, folks. I can assure you that this race isn’t over by a long shot, but it’s going to be a very scary run all the way up to November.

(Long Island, NY) After the huge outpouring of e-mail over my last column about Ron Paul, I tried an experiment. I deliberately stayed away from actively researching Paul’s campaign. I wanted to play Joe American and see if perhaps my earlier views of Paul as a presidential no-hope were wrong.

“What the hell,” I said to myself, “There could be a shift from grass-roots to mainstream curiosity about this guy. Maybe he’s NOT the Ross Perot of 2008, and really does stand a chance.”

My idea was to see if Paul surged into the national consciousness of the campaign, for lack of a better phrase. Would I suddenly find the Sunday morning pundits asking the hard questions about Ron Paul the way they are currently grilling Mitt Romney? Or Fred Thompson?

Weeks went by. I’d tune into CNN, NPR, even that bastion of careful journalistic integrity, the Drudge Report. What did I get?

Hillary Clinton playing dragon lady, Romney’s Mormonism vs. JFK’s Catholicism, Fred Thompson-the barely there campaigner, and some nonsense about christian fundamentalists endorsing Guiliani. Yeah, whatever. The day the average citizen seriously cares about what Pat Robertson has to say about anything at all is the day I apply for Canadian citizenship.

In all my casual, nonscientific observation, Ron Paul did NOT rise into my field of political vision, as it were. Except for a few cries of foul over some apparent censorship or cold-shouldering of Paul as a serious
candidate, there was nothing.

Sure, I could have missed plenty. I was going about my business, trying to earn a living as a professional writer (you didn’t think writing one column pays the bills, did you? Hah!) and being a recent convert to 30 Rock as one of the funniest shows on TV.

But my observations don’t seem to be TOTAL bunk. The 12/8/07 count from USAElectionPolls.com has Paul at pitiful three percent. He’s behind the non-campaigner Fred Thompson, and Mitt “Mormon Question” Romney. Paul, the poor guy, is in single digits in EVERY STATE with a poll result on USAElectionPolls.com. Not that this particular website should be considered a crystal ball, it’s just a random tool I plucked out of the air to see if I need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows. (Thanks, Bob Dylan. Don’t sue me.)

Fred Thompson, a presidential no-hoper if there ever was one, at least has double digit results to his name. Yes, it’s still early, but in my view unless Ron Paul suddenly sprouts an extra head that talks exclusively about foreign policy while Paul’s “control head” is busy campaigning for the blue collar worker here at home, he’s going to fade as a serious Republican contender when it’s time for the primaries. The appeal of a two-headed Prez trumps anything these other bozos have to offer.

After all, Fred Thompson is the Law And Order guy, he’s had so much free publicity that Andy Warhol may have to come back from the grave to revise his fifteen minutes of fame estimation. If Ron Paul can’t hold his own
against Mr. Law And Order, how’s he going to edge out Giuiliani, who is still remembered for his handling of 9/11?

The real burning question on my mind is this: Will Paul try to run a Quixotic independent presidential campaign after he washes out of the primaries? Or will he throw his support to someone else? Who would that be? I am dying to know who Ron Paul would tell his supporters to vote for when he gives up the ghost on the campaign trail. Call it morbid curiosity. Or maybe I’ve got a bookie giving me odds and I want to hedge.

All that aside, unless something radical happens between now and crunch time at the polls, I can think of a UK saying that applies to Ron Paul: he’s got two kinds of hope. Bob Hope, and No Hope.

Let the hate mail commence.

(Long Island, NY) I am still reeling from the news footage of the army of zombies, I mean shoppers, who invaded those shopping malls on Black Friday. It looked exactly like Dawn Of The Dead and felt like a reality show advert gone horribly wrong.

I remember the line from this old song by the Smiths, where pouty old Morrissey sings about how he’d “love to kick with the fray”. It seemed quite appropriate here, except I’d rather do anything but.

Don’t worry, this is not going to turn into a screed about commercialized holidays or any of that nonsense. Face it, America NEEDS Black Friday at this stage. It’s coming down to that for some retailers. No, what I am on about is the utterly bizarre actions of people willing to stay outside all night (in some cases starting at 2PM on Turkey Day) in order to save a hundred lousy bucks. It’s creepy. It’s bizarre. It’s a mindset I don’t understand at all.

Well, that’s how I felt until today. I got one of those lovely “Dear John” emails that freelance writers often get, the ones that say “Hey, we love you and all and you’re as brilliant as Oscar Wilde with half the calories. But we’re downsizing our budget and we gotta let you go.”

In other words, the economy is crap, finances are being squeezed, and we gotta squeeze you out or else get rid of the free coffee for our REAL employees.

Naturally I had to do some downsizing of my own in light of the wonder news that I’d be X amount of dollars short at the end of next month when all the holiday shopping bills come due. Is this how people with everyday jobs feel when the pink slips start coming out? The writing life is a strange one, and after you’ve been at it long enough you start to lose touch with the workaday world. You live in a freakish twilight zone where 8 hour days are a luxury and your weekends are your safety net against Monday’s deadlines.

So now I am starting to be a bit more sympathetic to the people so eager to save a hundred bucks that they would wait in line all night. But that video of the hundreds of people storming that mall we saw on the news all day and all night on Black Friday haunts me. Even with my anxiousness about saving money and earning enough to buy the requisite holiday madness gifts, I can’t see myself standing in the middle of that throng of people. One moment of hesitation and you are being run over, crushed quite possibly to death by a bunch of people with only one desire; to get their hands on the new PlayStation 3 shoot-em up or Tickle Me Elmo. Or some toy made in China coated in layer after layer of toxic lead paint.

I just can’t imagine being trampled to death for Chinese lead.

I mean REALLY. Haven’t these people heard of the INTERNET? That’s where I am doing ALL my holiday shopping. If enough of us could give up the in-person shopping ritual, we could cut down on emissions, end the crowds, and forget about whether or not we can find the car after it’s all said and done. Folks, PLEASE shop online. There’s no sales tax and you can get it pre-wrapped. Stop the insanity, to quote that nice fitness lady with
the Annie Lennox hairdo. Remember, there’s free shipping (in some cases) and you can do the whole transaction in your underwear. Try doing that at the mall, they’ll throw you in jail.

OK, this column has to end now, I gotta start thrashing around for a new writing gig to replace the one that dropped dead today. And I’ve got orders to place on Amazon.com. My holiday wishes for each of you:

• May all your shopping be discounted
• and done entirely online
• forget paying sales tax
• give the crowds the ax
• I didn’t mean to make that last bit rhyme

Carl Sandburg, I ain’t. Good luck, happy hunting, and start early. You’ll thank yourself later.

(Long Island, NY) When I read about the controversey over the new Nas album, charmingly titled “Nigger,” I went in six directions at once. My first instinct was to rant and rave about double standards. When I haven’t had my first cup of coffee yet, my feeling is that you can’t have it both ways. Either “nigger” is a word that is used to disparage an entire group of people, or it’s. . . just another word. Like “bastard”. Or “ass”.

Once I’ve had a few cups of coffee, I mellow out, and remember that once upon a time, Richard Pryor released two very funny albums. One was called “Bicentennial Nigger” and the other was “That Nigger’s Crazy”. Richard Pryor had a point to make, however lopsided his approach may have seemed in hindsight, and he was breaking new ground when those records came out.

Not that Pryor was the first, but he was definitely one of the rising stars of his day, rubbing shoulders with Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders. Ever see the film Wattstax? A young Pryor had a prominent part of this musical documentary on the black experience in America. It seems on the face of it to be a film about a concert ala Woodstock, but when the whole thing is over you realize it’s about much more. See it if you can, it’s a great time capsule of the 70s through one very particular point of view. But I digress.

Let’s go back to the title of the new album by Nas. “Nigger”. According to MTV.com, many contemporaries of Nas are in full support of the title. It’s controversial, it angers and shocks. but why? It’s a word that has been on rap albums since the very beginning. Why are people so freaked out over this now? The N-word is EVERYWHERE, and now it’s on this goofy record by Nas. Why should anybody act shocked? You’d think Hillary Clinton had sponsored a bill to bring back seperate drinking fountains.

Of course, another Nas CD title was “Hip Hop Is Dead” and knowing that is the key to getting to the bottom of the new CD. Yes, it’s a calculated attempt to get some more attention, stirring up a ton of free press before the record drops. After all, hip hop IS dead. It’s a carbon copy of a cartoon of itself, having become a shamelessly “me-too” genre that hasn’t spawned a new idea since. . .when?

I’ve been saying this since forever; the most exciting thing to come from this genre happened ages ago with OutKast, who did a fabulous job of writing their own music, staying away from sampling cliches, and putting
danceable, funky grooves on the albums. They basically make music you can listen to without hearing the same 16 bars (or samples of somebody else’s work) over and over again.

I remember hearing “Hey Ya” for the first time, marveling that somebody had made a hip hop record–the first in ages–that sounded like people were actually trying hard to play their instruments. I could name others before and since, but OutKast is a great example of what could turn the genre around. How many hip hop records can you listen to sporting some guy’s monotone voice droning on and on over a excessively minimal and repetitive backing track slapped together on a computer? Attitude is everything, they say, but on CD you need a bit more than a few boasts and a bunch of expletives to tie a record together.

So Nas needs a new gimmick, and he goes for the most obvious play in the book. 2007 had the summer of the “N-word”, let’s not forget, with everybody coming out against the word “nigger” and trying to get it
banned. We now see just how effective THAT campaign was.

What “white” people (I’m part Native American and part Scot, so I suppose I’m white more or less, but whatever) tend to forget is that there is no unified voice in ANY culture. In spite of the efforts of some activists in any group to tell you otherwise, no group of gay people, white people, black people, Asians, Polish, Iranian, or any other group has any sort of single voice or opinion. On ANYTHING. Some people in the summer of 2007 tried to unify against the N-word, lending a small amount of weight to the illusion that there is a unified feeling against the word. In spite of the move to stamp it out, the word “nigger” is here to stay. People are afraid of it, shocked by it, offended by it.

While I have a very bad taste in my mouth regarding the word itself, I always remember something that I saw as a kid in one of those old William Shatner episodes of Star Trek. The gist being that in the future, people learned not to be afraid of words. A word, even the word “nigger”, is still just a word. Yes, that particular word is used to erect a barrier between people of different groups in one form or another. But until society as a whole can take a lesson from Star Trek, publicity-hungry guys like Nas will be able to use this word to draw attention to a tired old genre of music that’s run out of ideas, is creatively bankrupt, and desperately in need of a blast of fresh new creativity. Until then, I guess “Nigger” the CD will have to do.

(Long Island, NY) I have never gotten the kind of overwhelming response on anything I’ve ever written here at LI Exchange the way I did regarding my post on Republican Presidential long shot candidate Ron Paul. My inbox has been clogged with responses, too many to reply to. Warning: Rambling screed ahead. May contain inherent contradictions, unclear writing, and a bit of froth around the mouth area.

For starters, let me admit to a major error in fact by calling Paul a Libertarian candidate. My research was faulty, guilty as charged. No excuses there, and many thanks to everyone who wrote in to correct me. Of course, the title of the article was “Who The Heck Is Ron Paul” which is a subtle hint as to my complete ignorance of anybody but the frontrunners in this 2008 thing.

Paul’s status as a Republican candidate changes nothing in my estimation of him being the Howard Dean of this election. He’s still not going to make it as President this time around. If Ron Paul were running as a Democrat, I might have a revised opinion of his chances. Americans will be voting for regime change this time, folks. If you can’t see that at present, don’t worry. You will.

The thing that really disturbed me about the quality of many of the e-mails I got in response to my first article was the “true believer” tone many of those missives had. People took issue with me for saying Paul doesn’t have a chance, others took issue because I said Paul doesn’t have any hope of succeeding on the strength of doing away with income tax. I’ll paraphrase a few of the messages. “We NEED to get rid of income tax. It’s not FAIR!”

I completely agree that our tax system is ridiculously flawed. I’d love nothing more than to have it deep-sixed. Let me explain. I am a writer for many different publications, blogs, how-to guides, I’m even working on a little book. Because I have the audacity to work at home, for myself, I wind up being taxed about 30% (at the minimum, near as I can tell.) Here’s the sick part. I could probably just break even every year if I could just find a way to spend the same amount of money on my business as I owe in taxes. If I owed 10K (and I will) at the end of the year, I could spend 10K on business travel, computer software, and other stuff. At least, I think that is how it works based on two short conversations with a financial advisor. (Can’t afford any more, but she tells me I can write her off on my taxes.)

If me voting for Ron Paul would change that bizarre situation into something a bit more equitable (how about everybody pays the same moderate tax?) I would vote for him in a heartbeat. But I won’t be voting for Ron
Paul because you can’t just eliminate the income tax, you have to replace it with something. It’s too complex an issue to simply say “We’ll fix it, don’t worry.”

Some people assumed that because I predict Obama will be president, that I am in favor of that. I find this amusing, because nowhere in the article do you get MY opinions on who would be a GOOD president. I have no idea what Obama stands for. I already know what Hillary Clinton stands for. I don’t care for her bait-n-switch politics any more than I can stand for George Bush’s bait-n-switch tactics. If you ask me, the real problem with these people is NOT political affiliation. The TACTICS are the same, regardless. Liberal, conservative, these labels matter not a bit. The strategies, the pandering to the lowest common denominator, these are the things politicians have in common. ALL politicians.

Ron Paul as the exact same chance to get into the White House that George McGovern had back in the day. Sure, he’s got some great ideas about eminent domain and Social Security. Sure, he’s got an unfortunate set of beliefs regarding abortion. (Come ON folks, take an anthropology class and you will soon learn that our conception and life definitions are CULTURAL and not based on science or ‘ultimate truth’.) But he just…won’t…make it.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news here. But I’ll make you this promise: If I wake up some day after the election to find that my income tax problems are gone, that we’ve fixed Social Security, and have more secure borders, I will assume that for the first time in history that we have a candidate that has not only honored his pre-election rhetoric, but that it actually has a chance of working somehow. I’ll take it all back in this column, right here. I’ll also eat my hat.

Too bad it never works out that way. National Health Care, No New Taxes, you name it. Americans have the biggest case of collective amnesia in the history of the world. We still believe these dorks will live up to the hype, and every time we get more of the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Besides, how many Americans bother to actually VOTE? If we get the government we deserve, we must be pretty rotten as a society to have to deal with 8 years of George Bush’s ham-fisted leadership. He’s got all the charm and grace of Britney Spears, with the subtlety of Caligula. Whoever takes his place–Ron Paul, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani an overflowing bucket of spanish moss–will surely have a herculean task ahead, digging us out of the muck we’re currently in. Good luck!

(Long Island, NY) Ron Paul has been getting what the kids would call mad traffic. His currency as a political candidate is getting stronger, and the attention he gets online would make Obama green with envy. But who is this Ron Paul? Everybody’s talking about him, but I must confess, I’d paid him absolutely no mind whatsoever until somebody asked me, “So what do you think of Ron Paul?”

I hate to brag here, folks, but I have successfully called every election since Jimmy Carter. Don’t ask me how I do it. I just see these people perform on TV, and at some point it seems obvious who is moving away from the pack and into the Oval Office. I can’t do the same thing with the primaries-that is a complete mystery to me, at least until the very end when it’s clear who is kicking ass and who isn’t.

Last election, for example, when Howard Dean’s “scream controversy” surfaced, I knew he was doomed. Around that time it was painfully obvious to me that John Kerry would never, ever be president of the local yacht
club,let alone the USA. Ditto for guys like Ross Perot, Bob Dole, and Jesse Jackson. None of these contenders ever had a chance.

Now comes Ron Paul. After a bit of research and digging, I come up with some very surprising finds. Paul is a registered Republican, running as a Libertarian (correction).

This is strike one against Paul on the Electo-Meter with yours truly. Libertarians are on the outside, and the American public tends to look at outsiders in the political game as being kooky, oddball. Why can’t they pick one of the acceptable sides? That’s not MY view, mind you, that’s just how I see the public reacting.

Ron Paul has an excellent set of views on balancing the budget, on non-interventionist foreign policy, and on taxes he is top notch. He wants to eliminate the income tax and move towards something a bit saner.

Strike two.

I don’t see Americans voting in the majority for someone who proposes such a radical alteration to “the way things are”. It just requires too much thinking time for the average American to get their head around. And let’s face it, folks, the average American does NOT want to think too much about the Presidential race. That new Playstation game is on the shelves, property taxes are going up again and we can’t sell the house because of the slump, and 50 Cent is telling everybody to go see some new movie where he will pull a baby out of a holster instead of a gun. Now here’s Ron Paul saying he wants to change…well, everything. At least that’s how it looks on the surface with that income tax thing. If Paul gets elected, are we gonna have to file with the IRS in 2009 or what?

See what I mean? Nobody will vote for this guy in great numbers because he brings too many questions that nobody has answers for. Joe Six-Pack doesn’t LIKE that. He wants simple, neat solutions for everything. Terrorists dropped the Twin Towers? Let’s bomb the hell out of something. Illegal aliens are flooding the country in numbers adding up to millions instead of thousands? Let’s build a big-ass fence.

Simple. As in, simple-minded.

Strike three against Ron Paul is an age-old issue. Paul is staunchly anti-abortion. He believes in states controlling the abortion issue for themselves. He wants to go backwards. We already have a system in place that says people have the right to decide for themselves, and it is my own personal belief that we should leave this well enough alone. Hear this, Ron Paul and anyone else: Turning back the clock equals political cyanide.

Abortion is a non-issue, folks. It is legal and if you don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one. But candidates continue to make this non-issue a big smokescreen in campaigns, as if the fate of our country depends on whether someone who terminates a pregnancy has to do it in some filthy back alley or a surgically sterile environment where the patient might live to tell somebody about it. Yeah, folks. Let’s turn back the clock and bring back the illegal, dangerous, and unregulated procedures that kill people. And while we’re at it, let’s bring back prohibition, seperate drinking fountains, and religious intolerance.

Ron Paul is popular, knows how to use viral marketing, and is a charismatic presence. But he is NOT going to be President. He’s got too many strikes against him, too many questions that need answering. I believe at this stage that Obama is likely to be the next president for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that he has a very JFK-like presence. He has the same charisma, the same presence. It’s downright eerie at times. I can’t see Hillary Clinton beating him in a race for dog catcher, let alone the primaries. She’s too dragon lady-esque, especially side-by-side with Obama.

With regards to Ron Paul, I believe he’s the Ross Perot of this election–the spoiler, the underdog who will tip the scales towards somebody else. Just my own opinion here, time will tell whether my political radar is working this year or if I’m just getting high on the fumes from my laser printer.

Either way, if you would like to make up your own mind on what all the buzz is about with Ron Paul visit the 2008 presidential campaign web site at www.RonPaul2008.com

Have you seen the reports that 60 Minutes will air a story including details that Ramzi Yousef, “the mastermind of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, claims he converted from Islam to Christianity”. That news comes courtesy of drudgereport.com, that bastion of “report first, fact-check later” journalism.

On two occasions I wrote Meester Drudge to correct a couple of glaring errors in fact with regards to stories on the U.S. Military (I’m a 13-year Air Force veteran and former reporter for Air Force News and, more indirectly, the Pentagon Channel). My corrections were ignored, so I dismissed Matt Drudge for what he seems to be; an Internet schlub hungry for clicks, just like the rest of us. (As oppposed to an actual journalist.) But I digress.

The Drudge story, complete with headline in flaming red text, claims that Ramzi Yousef is no longer an Islamic fundamentalist. Now, he’s a Christian fundamentalist. If Yousef ever escapes from prison, he’ll blow up abortion clinics in the name of Jesus instead of blowing up skyscrapers in the name of radical Islam. I bet Randall Terry (remember him? Operation Rescue?

Prepare to die for right-to-life issues? Yeah.) is wetting himself with glee.

Too bad nobody will speak up about what happens in prison. See, when you are locked down with nothing at all to do be stew in your own juices day in and out, you begin looking for any kind of entertainment to pass the time. I know one writer who found a prison pen pal who sent pictures of a beautiful woman, saying “that’s me, I’m down on my luck and I wrote a lot of bad checks. They caught me and I’m really sorry.”

The model-pretty inmate turned out to be some hairy boffin type of man serving time for god knows what. Ever seen any of the Hannibal Lecter movies? In them, the insane cannibal doctor always finds a way to contact someone from the outside world, giving them advice or instructions on carrying out heinous deeds. The Lecter character is doing this for his own amusement, and while that is a work of fiction, it’s a classic example of what some prisoners get up to out of sheer boredom.

Yousef is undoubtedly playing the same sort of games. Converting from Islam to Christianity? So what? He’s still locked down in Supermax as one of the most dangerous ding-dongs we’ve ever had running around loose. What I fail to understand is why anyone is allowing this guy press from the inside of the prison. How do these people manage to waste our time with their behind-bars media circus acts? Why does Manson still get news coverage every time there is a parole hearing?

I keep coming back to the Hannibal Lecter movies, where Anthony Hopkins utters a line that makes so much sense I can hardly stand it. “A sane society would either kill me, or put me to some use.” Too true. Why do we let Yousef continue to suck wind? I personally don’t believe in the death penalty, but I do wonder why we don’t make some kind of use of these people in a non-slave-labor sort of way.

There are no good answers. Kill ’em does no good, they are gone and don’t have anything more to worry about. Making them slaves is just as bad because the very idea is primitive and a poor substitute for justice. But why keep someone alive so you can make them pace in a 5×8 cell for 23 hours a day? Can’t we have them folding the world’s laundry or deboning salmon or something? What about making them erase all the idiotic graffiti that appears overnight, everywhere? Something?

So Yousef converted to a different kind of belief. So what? The sad part of all this is, he’s even got ME commenting about it, giving him more press. Being part of the problem. To answer this, I can’t offer anything remotely adult, intelligent, or helpful. The best I can do is offer my humble curse:

I hope he catches poison oak on his man parts.

(Long Island, NY) If you’ve written to me in the last two weeks, I probably never saw it. My inbox has been absolutely clogged with spam emails, with a volume that could be described as “ferocious“.

Spam is annoying, but this spam has an edge to it I’ve not seen before. Bizarre, twisted names of confused lineages pour into my inbox. I get messages hailing me as a long-lost friend day in and day out, but I don’t know ANYBODY with a name like Dierdre Bonhoffer-Chang, or Sally-Anne Chou En-Lai.

Even more bewildering — I’m getting dirty subject lines that you’d expect from porno spam. I know people who have been swamped with this after visiting, ahem, after-hours websites, but now it’s happening to everybody I know.

“To: JWallace@address-deleted.com

From: Billy-Bob-Bunratty Chopin
Subject: “My Boyfriend’s Wanger Keeps Falling Out”

What the HELL? Who are these spammers? What makes these idiots think for a second that I’d open something with a subject line like “Bus Route Sex For Under $29.99!” or “Experience Sexual Ecstassy With Black And Decker SandBlaster”.

The “We are ready to lend you some cash” emails are plentiful enough, and I’ve had so many Bank Of America account suspended in the last week that I think maybe I should switch TO Bank Of America just so I can see what all the fuss is about.

I’ve come to terms with the porno spam, but I wonder what’s next. When will the excessively religious spam begin? I can see it now.

“You are going to hell. Stop the painful craving for more salvation”

or perhaps “Jesus called you today, but you left your answering machine on. Tired of being the sinner on the block?”

Election-year spam is another possibility. In 2008, I fully expect to see massive piles of “George Bush Keeps Falling Out Of Office” and “Red hot voting booth webcam action for only $19.99”. What in the world are we to do about all of this? I think maybe an email randomizer that sends your email to a real central address that you keep secret is the best answer, but I am too lazy to look into such a

thing. I have too much deleting to do on an hourly basis to stop and explore it.

One day we’ll get some kind of anti-spam version of caller ID and then we can really let these idiots have it. I’m working on my own funky names and subject lines:

“To: John Q. Spammer
From: Oprah Wang-Chung
Subject: You May As Well Change Your Email Address Now, Because Ten
Million Of These Emails Are coming Your Way”