'08 - Who do you want?

[green 6]

Yeah, I agree with you about beige. But I'm not sure about Ecru. What about Ecru?? I'm feeling confused. What about shades of grey?

Green has just remembered that she hasn't answered BJean's questions concerning her platform. Nope, grey is just fine. It is a cool, elegant, crisp range of tones. Beige, however, always looks tired and dingey and tacky. It is a default colour used by the unimaginative and thus must be removed from this continent.

As for ecru, I would have to see some paint chips before I set a firm policy on this colour. Of course I have yet to determine who will be appointed my Secretary of Decor. I believe, though, that this individual will likely be gay and based in New York. I am also considering setting up an emergency task force, Queens without Borders, which will operate like Doctors without Borders only they will give emergency aid to those without any taste.

Marjon9, my running mate, has already announced our fiscal policy, that of raising cash by asking for change. I figure that this should cover much of the costs of this iniative and we will not have to raise taxes.

[marjon9 6]

Green has just remembered that she hasn't answered BJean's questions concerning her platform. Nope, grey is just fine. It is a cool, elegant, crisp range of tones. Beige, however, always looks tired and dingey and tacky. It is a default colour used by the unimaginative and thus must be removed from this continent.

As for ecru, I would have to see some paint chips before I set a firm policy on this colour. Of course I have yet to determine who will be appointed my Secretary of Decor. I believe, though, that this individual will likely be gay and based in New York. I am also considering setting up an emergency task force, Queens without Borders, which will operate like Doctors without Borders only they will give emergency aid to those without any taste.

Marjon9, my running mate, has already announced our fiscal policy, that of raising cash by asking for change. I figure that this should cover much of the costs of this iniative and we will not have to raise taxes.

Sure, green, I'll be your running mate. I'm just concerned because of all those breakfasts at various Diners. Are pancakes and sausage really compatible with the Bandster Lifestyle? We don't want all those embarrassing projectile PBs showing up on the evening news! But no one ever said it would be easy. I say we get out there and save the world.

[BJean 16]

Hey you two, I restate my whole hearted support of both of you.

You've made some really great points and Mark, I love your take on the potential for healing if either Hillary or Obama were to be elected. Wouldn't that be a grand thing for all Americans?

And as for the change theory and the collection thereof, I have some I'll be happy to toss your way. It tends to collect in the center console of my ride and don't ask me why I'm in a position to collect coins in my car. (Drive-thrus are the bane of Americans' existence. That's my campaign slogan, okay?)

green when you put your mind to it, you're hilarious and brilliant. marjon9 hell yes! I love reading everything you write.

And for your information green, I have never thought of you as an outsider. You're much more savvy on all things American (north and south of our shared border) than practically anyone I know. I have no doubt that you could live in either country and be loved and appreciated by all.

However at this point in my diatribe, as a frustrated wonderfully talented decorator living smack dab in the middle of Texas, I resent the implication that a gay New Yorker's taste is superior to mine. Do not tell me that you find giant rusty stars nailed on walls throughout one's home to be in poor taste. Humph! Don't mess with Texas, dudes.

[BJean 16]

Mark I have a friend (whom I no longer consider a real friend), gave me a fabulous Belgian waffle Iron for Christmas. Isn't that a dirty deed for a friend to commit?

[green 6]

Sure, green, I'll be your running mate. I'm just concerned because of all those breakfasts at various Diners. Are pancakes and sausage really compatible with the Bandster Lifestyle? We don't want all those embarrassing projectile PBs showing up on the evening news! But no one ever said it would be easy. I say we get out there and save the world.

Yep, the nosh could be a problem, and so could the fact that we are a pair of atheists, as could the fact that I am a foreign national with a sordid past, present, and, I hope, future! But, I am loaded with optimism and antidepressants and I say to you, Marjon9, let's do it! Let's go for that change! All the spare change that the good citizens can spare!

And I have never tasted real bar-b-que. Do ya think they will serve it to us at Breakfast? :tongue:

Together we can change the shape of the world. (We can make it more fat-friendly, eh. :smile:)

[green 6]

However at this point in my diatribe, as a frustrated wonderfully talented decorator living smack dab in the middle of Texas, I resent the implication that a gay New Yorker's taste is superior to mine. Do not tell me that you find giant rusty stars nailed on walls throughout one's home to be in poor taste. Humph! Don't mess with Texas, dudes.

Green says: Rust looks absolutely fab when contrasted against a grey background. Do nail them rusty stars up. The funky warmth and charm of oxidizing metal does look awful nice against the cool elegance of grey. In fact I cannot think of a better colour to use in order to properly display these items. (To tell you the truth, now I want a rusty star! How big are they? Maybe a trip to Texas is in order. Green is feeling kinda jealous, eh.)

Just don't hammer them stars up on a beige wall, sez Green.

[green 6]

And BJean, thanks for your support of our candidacy. We are honoured and we will make sure that you get a plum job, eh.

[DerickM 1]

Let's just get this fiasco of electing a president over with; than we can all party like it's 1999.

I propose we just come up with a test, and whoever scores the highest wins. Have some panel come up with like 1000 questions related to stuff a president should know; then throw in some bonus points for times through an obstacle course, just to make sure they're physically fit for office.

As far as their sanity goes, anybody who wants that job is messed up in the head anyway.

The only disqualifier we should attach is "lawyers need not apply."

and each side recruits bikini models to champion their cause in the oil wrestling pit...

[BJean 16]

green, the best ones have a span of about 5 feet across. It'll take you and a small Army to hang one properly. And be sure to seal that rust so that you don't smudge your strikingly sophisticated grey wall.

Derick makes some good points. Either way, let's party... although I will only endorse bikini clad chicks if physically superior, young, strapping, good looking lads in equal numbers to the chicks show up in their second-skin Speedos. Snort, drool.

[green 6]

Woo Hoo, bring those boys on, sez Green.

[transformer 1]

I think that "regular" people (like me!) should be able to run for president. I'm fiscally responsible (I can balance a budget!), I have good common sense, and I am able to control elementary pre-K through grade 5 school children successfully (I believe that all presidential candidates should possess strong skills in early childhood education. These abilities are necessary to control the lawmakers, the press, and other Washington "insiders"). Don't scoff--juggling multiple reading groups requires a certain "je ne sais quois" you know! Besides, everything you need to know about life you learned in kindergarten. Unfortunately, the idiots running for president have forgotten everything they learned way back then.

I'm sick of filthy rich people running for office touting how they are going to "help" the poor people. Right! Sure they are! It's no secret that their agenda is to prevent those very people from ever getting ahead so they can preserve their built-in constituency. Gimme freebies and I'll vote for you again. Make them dependent and keep them dependent to get re-elected. What a joke! Does anyone else think that John Edwards picked the wrong issue (economic status) to run on? How much money you want to bet that he doesn't have a clue how much a loaf of bread or gallon of milk costs?

Come on--our buddy Mr. Edwards gets $400 haircuts for God's sake, while the rest of us probably have to make do with a dorky "Flowbee" haircut we did ourselves using the gizmo we bought from As Seen on TV.com! Every time I look at Mitt Romney I think about a news anchor. I just want to mess up the guy's hair--what the hell does he put in it? I think it's molded solid like a Ken doll. Whenever he gives a speech I have frightening flashbacks of "Lurch" talking...I mean John Kerry (sorry for you youngsters who aren't familiar with the "Lurch" pop reference). I can't stand listening to that man! John McCain is a great hero and he seems like a good guy, but he's so frickin' old! Geez! He'd better have a really young VP...I'm just sayin'!

I'd like to have dinner with Ron Paul as long as the wine keeps flowing (I really don't drink, but I think a lengthy conversation with him would make my head hurt). He makes me have fond memories of Ross Perot. I swear that Ross Perot did more than anyone in recent memory to promote the use of graphs and little pointer sticks. I'm enjoying Fred Thompson's laid back ease. Even if he's quiet, I get the feeling he wouldn't hesitate to blast me if I ever crossed him. Gotta watch out for the quiet ones! Mike Huckabee amuses me. He's the only candidate who seems to act like a real human being. He seems like the type of person you could have over for dinner and you know, he might not steal your silverware or even make a pass at your teenage daughter.

I now amuse my son by "translating" the pompous speeches being made by the candidates. I basically make up my own script to describe what they're "really" saying. In my next translation, Hillary will soon be crying out, "I was born a poor black child!" at any moment with those handy crocodile tears in her eyes (just like Steve Martin in "The Jerk"). Although he is clean now, Obama will be going on about how he "never inhaled" during his good old drug use days (oh sorry, that was the oh-so-honorable Bill Clinton who never had "sexual relations" with that woman either)!

I think Billy-boy has early-onset Alzheimer's. He can't remember what drugs he did or who he screwed. Most men tend to remember those sorts of things and delight in rehashing the "good old days" of excessive partying when they get together. It beats talking about Viagra or "enlarging prostates" I suppose. In any case, does Hillary really want Bill on her side? What's with her staying with him anyway? I wonder what that says about her character. If it were me, I would have kicked his sorry butt to the curb years ago! I'm cool with having a woman president--just not THAT woman [shudder]! Pick me instead!

I haven't seen enough of Rudy lately to pick on him too much. Perhaps if I moved to Florida? Give it time, I'll think of something!

Needless to say, my son has been in stitches a lot lately. I am on a tear, baby! (And no, I'm not off my meds or anything--I've been sick as a dog and can't breathe. I don't think I have enough oxygen going to my brain)!

[BJean 16]

I guess we may as well have fun with this, huh? You're pretty funny Transformer - although you don't leave us wondering which party you're partial to.

I'm all for someone who is "regular" as opposed to someone who is all bound up, if you know what I mean. It can make you pretty grumpy. I have a feeling that Perot had a few problems along that line... "can I finish, can I finish, can I finish?"

But if you can't think of anything humorous about Guliani, you might have your blinders on, huh?

[green 6]

I have just finished reading a long article about Obama in one of our Canadian newspapers. This paper is a broadsheet and the article was spread over three pages.

His mother was a white woman from a modest mid-western family. His father, a foreign student from Kenya, abandoned his mother and himself when he was a toddler. For some years he lived with his maternal grandparents who had moved to Hawaii. While he was living with them he attended a private school as a scholarship student. It seems that is was there when he began to feel his sense of otherness; there are very few blacks, only 2% of the general population in fact, who live in Hawaii.

In his autobiography he is quite frank about the fact that during his teenage years he did go through a period of feeling alienation and anger and did get into drug abuse and boozing. This should not be surprising; most teens do feel rebellious, and this kid had been abandoned by his father, and then sent home to live with his grandparents by his mother who was by then living in Indonesia, an additional act of abandonment when viewed through the eyes of a child. Obama has been upfront about his teenage feelings of anomie and the result of this, a juvenile period in which he did abuse alcohol, and certain drugs.

Now, this is the point where I want to ask the following question: what is the big deal about juvenile experience in drug experimentation and alcohol abuse, eh? The simple truth is that most of the boomer generation who went to college smoked a little dope and many tried out the hallucinogenics. It was, after all, the flower power generation, was it not? And the truth was that snorting coke did become kind of a mainstream activity during the 1980s. Why, your mini-Bush himself admits to having had problems with alcohol and coke.

Obama acted out while he was a teenager. He then went on to successfuly obtain an undergraduate degree as a scholarship student. He then opted to work for a group of inner city churches, ones who ministered to a troubled and largely black community.

Still later he successfully completed Harvard Law, again as a scholarship student, and again opted to work with inner city communities - this, though he had been courted by Big Law. The woman whom he married is another Harvard Law grad, and she, too, comes from a working class background.

Obama is certainly not from a filthy rich background, and he has already been walking the walk, I believe. He has been actively engaging in grass roots activities; indeed he had made community work his career, not just his hobby.

While I have little* against Hillary Clinton, I suspect that Obama would be a much better choice as candidate. If you want to leave young Americans out of American politics and keep 'em feeling disaffected and out of the polling stations, then by all means let the Republicans and the Democrats choose two old warhorses as their candidates and let those who bother to get up off their arses in order to vote continue to be the middle-aged and elderly. In the eyes of the young the status quo will continue to rule. And the alienation will continue.

*As for Hillary, I do have uneasy feelings about her. She did do an about face on the invasion of Iraq, yet it is my understanding that she never did provide an acceptable explanation for this. This leads me to suspect that she may not be sufficiently adroit in understanding the complexities of foreign issues and the role which international diplomacy should and usually does play in global business.

As for trashing her with respect to her relationship with her husband, I do believe that this is a cheap and unfair shot. While it is a wide-spread belief in America that self-respecting women (and men) must immediately kick unfaithful mates to the curb this belief is not true of all cultures.

Europeans are more comfortable with the notion of physical infidelity, even when this concerns their elected leaders. They understand that marriages can be awfully complicated and that in some cases mates who are profoundly attached to each other will make accomodations for sexual practices which fall outside the one man-one woman rule. Indeed, as some of you are well aware, there are cultures in which a man is permitted to have more than one wife/concubines/mistresses.

While it is true that neither you or I may not wish to share our mates, it is certainly unfair to judge an individual's ability to function well in one arena, in this case as President of a world power, by her choice to continue on loving or at least liking her spouse. I would like to remind you that one of your very best presidents ever, the fabulous FDR, had a splendid wife and a mistress throughout his presidency.

Girls and boys do lead complicated lives. This is inevitable but most often largely irrelevant. You want to concern yourself with platform, political ability, and statecraft, and leadership - and, uh, that kind of thing - when chosing your country's leader for the next four years.

[BJean 16]

Great input, green. You didn't mention that Obama is a Baptist and has been for years. Which is contrary to that bit of tripe that is circulating on the 'net which states that he's a Muslim and insisted on using the Koran at his swearing in. (People can be such a-holes, can't they!)

I do not believe that Hillary's about face on the war in Iraq should be used against her. Many people did the same thing and did not draw criticism for it. I was very unhappy with her at the time as I was with everyone else who thought it was a good thing. I sat in front of my television in disbelief and cried my little American eyes out the night that Dubya rained down "shock and awe" on a country with whom we were not at war. I looked at the people in Congress as complete and utter fools for allowing such a thing.

Everyone wanted to retaliate against the atrocities of 9-11. A lot of people thought we should do it to prove to the rest of the world that we are not a nation to be messed with. Unfortunately we didn't even win at that game.

As far as Hillary "standing by her man" - I gotta ask you, since when is saving a marriage something to criticize? If I didn't respect Hillary for anything else, I would respect her for that. It was amazing how they got through that torment. Kicking someone to the curb may sound funny and empowering, but it also sounds cold, hard and selfish. When someone has affairs, especially the way Bill Clinton did, it is obvious that they have a personal problem. We aren't supposed to abandon our mates when they have problems, we're supposed to help them - remember? in sickness and in health?

I criticize Hillary because I believe that she may have sold out and jumped totally into the middle of the road on every issue just so that she can be elected. That infuriates me. But sadly, it is probably the only way anyone can eventually get elected to the presidency in this country.

I do not dislike Obama. I do have misgivings about his ability to handle the tremendous pressures of the presidency at this point in his political career. If he really could unite this country I'd be in his corner. But so far I know he gives good face and can belt out a great speech, I just don't know if he can actually DO the job.

When I heard that Dubya had been stopped for DUI, and had dabbled in cocaine, I thought the same thing that I think about anyone who may have been alcoholic or a drug abuser in the past. That is, if someone is fully recovered, there's a good chance they've learned a lot in the process. Their recent and current behavior is what I find of most importance. So I don't find fault with Dubya's dabbling in drugs and alcohol, I find fault with his recent and current behavior.

[green 6]

I believe that most if not all university educated individuals of my age or younger have had at least one youthful experience with the softer illegal drugs. This is just a question of demographics, not morality. To tell you the truth, I believe that those individuals who deny this are either lying and who wants to elect a liar or are telling the truth and this only indicates that the individual is a rule-bound and unadventurous sissy, and who needs who needs a pussy like this as the president of their country?

Obama does have working class roots, he is also an intellectual, and it seems that he is skilled at building concensus. Building consensus was something at which he was very skilled when he was involved in community work amongst the poor, disenfranchised, and angry folk; as we are all aware, it is a challenge to build consensus among people who have feelings of rage.

I guess I didn't bother to mention that Obama is a Baptist because the mindset concerning this bizness of religion is so completely different up here in Canada. The truth is that most Canadians really do consider that religion has no place in affairs of state and this is why we often have no idea as to what religious affiliations our politicos may have, if any, when they run for office. Our politicians usually opt to keep their religious biz private and our media complies with this. Truth is, religion is a non-issue and we generally don't find ourselves thinking about it when we are assessing the possible worth of our elected representatives.

There were a couple of individuals, however, who did become leaders of our fractured conservative party over the past couple of decades, individuals who hailed from our own little Bible Belt and who did make clear that they were also closely affiliated with fundamentalist churches. It was as much for this reason as any other that the right wing up here in Canada was kept wandering in the wilderness for almost two decades. Though many Canadians would like to see a fiscal shift to the right, few of us are comfortable with the socio-religious right wing movement. This interest in belief is very much an American thang.

This is why it simply did not occur to me to list Obama's religious street cred amongst his many charms, BJean. Such info is at best completely invisible to Canadians. But yah, for what is worth, Obama is also a Baptist. I have read that he always carries a Bible with him.

I will also mention that there has been an ugly and libellous email which has been making its rounds on the internet concerning Obama and his middle name. This email draws inferences on his belief system which are untrue. In brief, the email is part of a smear campaign.

Of course, there are many stupid allegations made on the internet about many things. This is why all internet fans should bookmark and regularly refer to Snopes.com. This is the site which will tell you which tales are true, which are not, and give you the history. I believe I provided you all with the exact site address earlier on in this thread. Go there, snoop around, learn, and enjoy. It is a fun site.:cool: