Who's driving the Debt Truck?

Who's driving the Debt Truck? Dean Scontras is.

Well, not literally, but the Debt Truck is more than just a metaphorical reference to the filthy huge debt that the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress have been amassing.

And before you whining Liberal clowns cry that the debt rose while Boooosh was in office, face some reasonable facts...

The budget for fiscal year 2007, which was the last one passed by a Republican Congress and Bush, had a deficit of $161 billion. The next year, under Democrat control the deficit was $459 billion. Yes, this is the budget created before the recession began, and yes, this was the Pelosi Congress. In 2009 it was $1.4 trillion. The last Bush budget produced a budget deficit of $161 billion, and yet they're out there trying to say that all of this is the Republicans' fault, and by Republicans, they mean Evil Boooosh.

Yeah, the Obama Budget Plans would:

• Permanently expand the federal government by nearly 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) over 2007 pre-recession levels;
• Borrow 42 cents for each dollar spent in 2010;
• Leave permanent deficits that top $1 trillion in as late as 2020;

Y’know, even I’m willing to admit that the debt went down just a tiny bit in the Clinton years, and while yes, it climbed during the Bush years it didn’t explode like this. The current Democrat controlled Congress just prints new money worth less than the paper it’s printed on. Besides, the Republicans controlled Congress during those “milk & honey” Clinton years, unlike the majority of the Reagan/Bush/Bush terms when the Democrats ran Congress.

Enter The Debt Truck.

Dean Scontras is an old friend of mine. We went to high school together, and walked that aisle to receive our diplomas a couple minutes apart from each other. Today my friend is a candidate for Congress in the State of Maine’s First Congressional District. He’s working closely with the campaign of fellow conservative Republican Jason Levesque, who is running in the Second District, which includes Bar Harbor, where the First Family is enjoying yet another holiday while the economy teeters on the brink.

Dean is making the rounds of the First District (which includes not only his home in Portland but also the town of Kittery where we went to school) with his Debt Truck. What is this Debt Truck I keep rambling on about? It’s a cleverly painted panel truck that depicts the growing national debt in glaring clarity. The concept is brilliant in its simplicity. Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I’ll let the truck itself say the rest.

While I no longer live in Maine, I urge Mainers to support both Jason Levesque and Dean Scontras. Neither of them asked me to write this. In fact, neither knows I'm doing it. But, if I didn't believe they were the right guys to fix the state where I spent a total of 11 years of my 41, I wouldn't be doing it. It's still your state, Mainers; take it back and get it fixed.

Maine votes on gay marriage

Most people say they’re for equality, so long as everyone conforms to what they believe in…

Well, whattaya’ know? It’s Election Day. Perhaps the Republicans will score a few victories today and begin the march towards 2012. I know that’ll sit pretty poorly with my liberal friends, but hey, most everyone knows I’m a conservative. If not, they do now.

Up in my former home state of Maine, voters are today deciding on whether to overturn their law allowing same-sex marriages. I sincerely hope that Maine’s voters vote “No” on ballot question 1 and keep marriage equality for all Mainers. I’m sure that’ll sit poorly with my conservative friends, but hey, everyone knows I’m okay with gay marriage.

In fact, I’ve written about gay marriage, or at least mentioned it, a few times in the past:
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2009/06/didja-know-june-was-gay-pride-month.html
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/just-legalize-gay-weddings-already.html
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-hear-that-train-comin-its-comin-down.html
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2007/05/some-stupidness-from-news.html

and my two posts for National Coming Out Day:
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2008/10/happy-national-coming-out-day.html
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2009/10/happy-coming-out-day-2009.html

Does this make me gay? Not hardly. I’m a devout heterosexual who happens to have gay friends and supports those same friends. You don’t catch the Gay Cooties, and hanging out with homosexual friends doesn’t turn you gay. That’s absurd. Just because a cat has kittens in the oven, that don’t make ‘em biscuits.

Does this make me Anti-Marriage? Not at all. That’s also absurd. I’m such a fan of marriage that I’ve done it twice. Didn’t quite get it right the first time, but I’m rather enjoying it the second time around.

Does this make me Anti-Family? No. I have a family, so how can I be against families?
Does this make me Anti-Christian? Possibly. I’m not gonna start stoning you in the street or beheading you on streaming internet though. I would prefer to say I’m more along the lines of Anti-Forcing-Your-Religious-Views-On-Everyone-By-Saying-God-Will-Send-You-To-Hell.

Face it, good Christians; with one face you espouse this notion of forging a personal relationship with God and that this Christian God is loving and forgiving and understanding and all-knowing and infallible, and with the other face you tell people that God hates them and they’re going to Hell.

Mmmm’kay…did the Lord whisper this in your ear via a burning bush that these people were hated? I mean sure, you interpret that from the book you like to thump about at your convenience, but hey, aren’t there verses in there too that could be interpreted as promoting slavery, too?

If God created these gay people, why wouldn’t He love His creations? Why would God hate something He created? Seems silly to create something you know you’ll hate, no?
And about that “personal relationship with God”? If homosexuality is so sinful that it earns you a ticket to Hell, then really shouldn’t that be between God and the gays themselves? Why do YOU have to mediate? Their salvation or lack thereof is between them and their chosen deity. You, as a mere mortal human, cannot bestow salvation or damnation upon anyone’s soul so stay out of it. To think otherwise, to think that you have the right to keep two consenting adults from declaring their love and receiving the same rights, privileges, and burdens that heterosexuals enjoy by mere virtue DNA programming, is folly. One could even argue that it is sinful, in that in your own prideful conceit you have the right to judge and thus withhold from another the right to marry.

Here’s a clue: they’ll still be gay whether you let them marry or not. Next you’ll be establishing Gay Gulags for forced hetero reprogramming or extermination should they fail to be what you want them to be.

And, to summarize, here’s a paraphrase of something my friend Wil wrote today on Facebook:
“A man who is notorious for cheating on his wife was featured on TV in front of a Catholic church (rallying) to Protect Marriage. Check your closet for skeletons before making such a stand. Marriage involves a lot more than just two people being married. It involves love, honor, compassion, equality & trust. That's grounds for ex-communication from the Catholic Church as well. And as a former Catholic, I can promise that Jesus Christ would never condone the use of his words or his Father's words as a way to judge, belittle, and/or segregate people. Shame on you! All you need is love!”

Cold enough for ya'?

Since Jack Frost has been nipping at our noses the past couple days, as well as a couple weeks ago, I thought I’d chime in.

Few words can illicit a knee-jerk response in the way that this one simple phrase will:

“Cold enough for ya’?”

Those four asinine words are enough to incite many people to violence. Even the Dalai Lama would have to clench his teeth and count to five to avoid cuffing the speaker across the brow. Like we’re gonna answer back with “Golly, no, it’s not cold enough. I hope it drops another 40 degrees or so and all the pipes in my house burst.’, or perhaps, “Why, yes, it is cold enough for me. That damned pleasant weather was getting downright tedious.”

I myself detest being cold. I always have. As a kid growing up in the Maryland suburbs, we saw temperatures routinely in the high 20’s/low 30’s throughout the winter. We’d get snow a few times a year and like all kids we’d beg for snow days. A one or two hour delay to classes was no fun; that was just a teaser.

However, I learned what cold really was when I moved to Maine.

There was a whole new level of cold that I experienced during my four years of high school living in Kittery, a small coastal town at the very southern tip of Maine on the border with New Hampshire. Things that would close schools in Maryland might get a 2-hour delay in Maine, and stuff that delayed schools in the DC area would just get laughed at Up North. Walking to school over a 2-inch layer of ice in 8 inches of snow, the temperature hovering at a crisp 10°, was what some people might call a “character builder”. I just called it Frikkin’ Cold.

My character was further developed by my 4 years in the Army, most specifically by my two years at Fort Riley, Kansas, where I learned the true meaning of “wind chill”, but also by one particular earlier field training exercise in Germany. Headquarters thought they were doing us a favor by letting us set up our cots in an empty and gutted former barracks building on an abandoned missile base we were using for our mock prisoner-of-war camp. But with no windows and no electricity, those walls weren’t doing much to stave off the very damp below-freezing December temps as the sun went down. Thankfully there were lots of plywood sheets around, which were duct-taped over windows to block the wind, and after lighting about 7 huge hurricane candles and igniting a few Tri-Oxane heat tabs in some scavenged soda cans, I soon had my little space warm enough to have condensation running down the walls. But that was nothing compared to my Kansas Christmas of 1990…

See, Kansas is just a bit flat. There was nothing between me and Denver, Colorado but about 400 miles of open prairie, and that wind coming out of the Rockies struck full force on the first solid object over 4 feet tall standing in its way. Often, that object was me. I had the honor of working the front gate of our little sub-section of the base that Christmas morning, and with the heater in the gate shack running full blast it was a balmy 35° inside, compared to outside, which was (I kid you not) a soul-crushing -35° with the wind chill factored in. So every time I had to go wave a vehicle in, I endured a temperature drop of SEVENTY DEGREES. At one point I looked outside at an approaching car and, recognizing it, just stuck my gloved hand out the door and waved him through. Character, indeed.

After the Army I eventually ended up living in Bangor, Maine, where additional misery & suffering was liberally dished upon my plate by days where you found yourself praying for the temps to rise up to zero. Yeah, it’s pretty bad when you hope for zero, or maybe even a positive number. That’s the kind of cold where it hurts to breathe, the cold air burning your lungs and freezing your nose hairs. When the ambient air temperature is -35°, without any wind chill, your character is so over-developed that you wish you didn’t have so much of it. When it’s cold enough to freeze salt water in a tidal river thick enough to be able to walk across that river from one town to another, it’s time to move South. And I did…

I’ve never regretted moving away from Old Man Winter to a better climate. And on days when it gets a bit bitter and raw here in South Carolina, I cope and deal with it secure in the knowledge that it will soon pass and I’m in no danger of having to snow-blow my driveway as ice crystals form in my eyelashes. At least until someone says “Hey, you’re from up north. You should like this stuff”, and I have to remind them that if I liked freezing my butt off for 7-8 months of the year, I’d have stayed there instead of leaving it in my rear-view mirror seven years ago. These days, the closest I get to snow and ice is walking through the giant milk cooler at the dairy, and my Stingrays hockey games.

And that suits me just fine…