It’s not what you have, but what you believe you can have that drives the American economy.

We should all understand that Republican fiscal ideology is focused on benefits for the wealthy. It costs the wealthy too much to help out those down on their luck, so we shouldn’t do it is the Republican mantra. However, in marketing this to the common man the Republicans normally drop “the wealthy” modifier and change “down on their luck” to “welfare cheating scum buckets” or some other derogatory adjective.

Religion is serious stuff.

Politics is also serious stuff.

Faith is the belief in something without having proof. Once you believe in what you can not see or hear or even imagine everything else becomes so much easier to ignore, deny or denounce.

I have a teenager who knows everything. You can ask her yourself, and she will tell you straight out that she knows everything. She gets A’s in all of her classes, and this reinforces her strong belief that she knows everything. She can tell you with great certainty everything that you need to know.

I have written before that in general conservatives operate on fear while liberals operate out of necessity.

Let me briefly review this idea. In general conservatives are the successful wealthy business people who fear losing what they have - money. Or, conservatives are the morally upright religious zealots who fear that society could go down the toilet at any moment. These two groups represent the majority of conservatives. Progressives however, feel that the world has already caved in all around them. Progress is anything that can help them dig out of this mess. Progressives are willing to try almost anything to fix the problems in society, while conservatives fear that anything new will lead to the downfall of everything they have come to love.

Many years ago the Catholic Church began to worry about evil. At the time the Catholic Church reasoned that Satan was an angel created by God. Satan had originally been called Lucifer, and he was a favorite of God’s many angels. One interesting thing was that the Catholic Church never questioned the idea that God might actually play favorites and actually have a favorite angel.

Tomorrow I get to vote. I actually get to vote in an election that actually may effect the outcome of the American political process.

I recently read a Mallard Fillmore comic strip that bothered me. If you don’t know Mallard Fillmore, he is a conservative duck that makes Rush Limbaugh type outrageous remarks on the comic pages of many newspapers.

The enemy of Corporate Capitalists is regulation. The freedom to do whatever needs to be done to make a buck is the most efficient way to make that buck. Regulations, by the very nature, put a roadblock into that process. On the other hand, the goal of regulation is to protect the weak that do not have the strength to fight someone who chooses an efficient way of making money that also damages the society. Regulation is by its very nature a method to prevent efficiency.

The current administration position is that waterboarding is not torture. Waterboarding is merely a method for extracting information from a terrorist. Am I the only person confused here?

Waterboarding is a method of making a suspect believe that he is about to die by drowning. The panic induced will apparently make a suspect give up everything he knows because he is afraid to die. Let me get this straight, a terrorist is a person who is prepared to strap a bomb on and blow himself up in a crowded market place or mall. Or a terrorist is a person who is willing to take control of a plane and fly it into building to kill thousands of people. So, somehow the fear of drowning will somehow make him give up all his secrets. What the Hell are they smoking over at the CIA? Or, maybe they are delving into the truth drugs that they are administering to their suspects.

I was listening to a lecture yesterday by an expert on teenagers. He concentrated on the dangers that teenagers face as the mature. He was telling the audience about the dangers of drugs and alcohol when he took a moment to explain why some people become addicted to drugs and alcohol more easily than others. Obviously some drugs manifest in physical addictions, while other drugs manifest in psychological additions. At one time I recall being told that some people are more susceptible to psychological additions, and these people were said to have addictive personalities. Yesterday, the speaker went into a little bit more detail about this addictive personality.

I was listening to a talk by John Dean the other day. John Dean is a Goldwater Republican and a member of the Nixon administration. He was also the person who helped to bring down the Nixon administration by his truthful testimony about the abuse of power in the Nixon administration. John Dean should be celebrated as an American hero at some future time.

As we take a moment from time to time to stop and look around at the situation we live in we often come to the conclusion that we understand the world. Well, actually most of us don’t take the time to actually pay attention to the details of the world around us. And, many of us don’t really understand what we do take the time to observe.

Greed is a very strong emotion. People want money, because they equate money with security. If you don’t feel safe, then you can use your money to buy protection. If you have enough money to buy a nice house in a nice neighborhood, then you will have a strong police force to protect you. How do I know? All of the people in this nice neighborhood pay high taxes to have the strong police force to protect their assets. Money is security.

What is it that motivates us to live our lives?

Obviously not everyone has the same motivation - or do they?