This is a repost of something I wrote at SendKenToCollege.com

I am going to sidetrack here for  a minute and state a few opinions and observations on politics since 48 hours from now we should have a pretty good idea of the congressional makeup and the president that we will be living under for the next few years.

My major annoyance is the campaign ads that tout candiate x will raise taxes and candidate y will take away tax cuts for small businesses …uh, no, they won’t.  Candidate x and candidate y aren’t going to be making any laws.  That is not the president’s job.  Constitutionally Congress makes the laws, the executive branch enforces laws.  The candidates aren’t going to do anything without 535 other people chiming in on it.

If you think a candidate may be leaning a certain way, now is the time to start barking at your congressional delegation and making enough noise that they figure it will not be a smart thing to vote for whatever atrocity has your undies bunched.  If the bill never gets to the president, it can’t be signed and doesn’t become law.

It is my belief that there are a lot of people that would do well to stop by their local high school and chat with a civics teacher, or take some type of intro to government class at their local community college, or maybe just read something other than a menu at McDonalds and a TV Guide instead of working up a little righteous indignation every 4 years or so.  They also need to keep in mind that there are congressional elections every 2 years, not just every 4, so if your congress people are not behaving in a way that you agree with, exercise that indignation at the ballot box.  Midterm elections generally have a far smaller turnout than presidential elections.  Why?  Are they less important elections?  Not in my not so humble opinion. 

If you want to get righteously indignant, try going to CNN.com or USAToday.com and reading the ignorant tripe that follows many of the news stories.  These people making the stupid comments are your fellow Americans.  If ignorance is bliss, some of these commentors have to be the most blissful crowd that I have ever seen.

Now, for a few thoughts on the Republican ticket.  Sarah Palin, not a smart choice.  John McCain did not prove to be very smart in his choice of a candidate.  You do not pick a VP candidate with even the slightest hint of scandal hanging over them, especially when you have to fight the negative opinions of the current administration that about 70% of American holds.  Whether Governor Palin did anything scandalous in Troopergate, I don’t know.  The fact that Troppergate exists casts a negative shadows on the entire campaign.

The thought has crossed my mind that the GOP may realize just how damaging president Bush’s time has been so instead of fielding a viable choice to run, they simply put up a puppet, knowing full well he/she would never be elected.  This way they can sit on the side for the next 4 years and hope that Americans forget the last 8 years and then make a real run in 2012.  The party pundits have probably figured out they not only don’t stand a real chance of the white house but not much of a chance to get a decent foothold in Congress either, where they are already a minority.

I spent the better part of my young adult life voting straight republican tickets starting with Reagan in 1984 right up through 2000 when I voted for Bush.   I view Bush as brainless and I see Cheney as the real danger here.  I suspect Cheney’s hand in a lot of the underhanded stuff that has taken place. Bush/Cheney have pretty much assured that I will be voting Democratic for the next couple of elections barring any major screw ups by the Dems.  It is only Dems because we do not offer any viable 3rd party candidates.

I have already voted and Barrack Obama was my choice.

Once you start looking at those numbers and do a little math to find out that Exxon Mobil has turned over $26 billion in profit over the last two quarters and then stop and think what you have been paying for gas over the last two quarters.

Keep in mind that Exxon Mobil is only 1 of the 4 or 5 major oil companies out there.

To give the Phillies their due, since they are like the most losingest team in pro sports, they probably deserved to finally win one.  Why I am sad is that the Rays lost.  I am a Yankees fan and have been for about a bajillion years.  The Rays and Yankees both live in the American League East.  If the Yankees didn’t make it to the series, I have to root for the team that does if they are from the AL east…and yes, That does include the Boston Red Sox.

If any AL East team can get by the Yankees and into the big show, then they are my team for the duration of the season.  If no AL east team makes it, then whoever the American League Champ is, they are my team.

The Rays did themselves proud after years of losing.  I just hope they never lose over 10,000 games like the Phillies. 

I have been a bit busy since the new semester started at school.  I have 3 tyrannical instructors who demand humongous volumes of work.  I will try to keep my reading public up to date with all of my assorted antics.

I will be genuinely surprised if some hardcore blogger does not pick this up and run with it as it looks like W is staring straight at Kerri’s rather impressive, and somewhat thinly clad, posterior.    I am betting the W is wishing that he was about 30 years younger and one heck of a lot smarter and unmarried.

I waffle on this topic frequently.  At this time I am leaning towards life being predestined.  I am someplace where I do not like being right now.  If I buy into predestiny then I can at least hope that eventually I will not be where I am for much longer.  The one advantage is that at least I am here with someone I do like.

The question is do I sit and wait for things to change as predestiny would indicate or do I go work my ass of trying to get there?  It sure would be nice to win the lottery.

This got me thinking back through my history with computers.  I think back to my first internet access which was circa 1992 and consisted of dialing up the local university and logging into their AIX system.  In those days the WWW was just getting started and one browsed webpages using Lynx, a text only web browser.

All this thinking made me somewhat nostalgic.  So much so that I popped in ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’ .  The one memorable part of this movie was how much of dumbass Steve Ballmer is protrayed as.  He seems to have more interested in Playboy and partying than anything else.  The scary thing is that now he is the big dog of Microsoft since Bill Gates stepped down last week.

Now that I think back, Bill Gates really started making his money about 1980.  In those days I was learning BASIC on a TRS-80 Model II.  If only I had been the one with $50,000 and Bill had been in 9th grade at Washington Junior High in Ottumwa, IA.

I don’t know if it is the whacky way that they present cases from today’s headlines or the balcony discussions between Alan and Denny at the end of every episode.  I generally pay little attention to current events and I find it interesting the Boston Legal uses current cases as the basis of their stories.  One example was the episode where Alan argues before the Supreme Court in the death row case of the Louisiana man convicted of raping a child.  This was a case I wasn’t even aware of and just this past week I read that the court struck down the death penalty in this situation.

In the episode Mr. Shore took the court to task on their various political leanings using language that would normally get us smacked with a contempt of court citation in real life.  I wonder how many members of the court watched themselves being lambasted on TV.

I really did look forward to the debates on the balcony every episode and it was interesting to watch Denny Crane over time.  In the beginning he was an unapologetic Republican.  All hail the great and might G Dub, the NRA, and wealth.  In this past season even the hard core republican in him clearly soften to show, like many fellow republicans, that the Bush tenure was really starting to wear on a little too long.

I wasn’t exactly fond of the rotating cast but in later seasons the other cast members clearly took a back seat to Spader, Shatner and Bergen.  It was almost as if the show was spending its cast budget on the big three.

All in all the show was an offbeat look at current events, one which satified my twisted sense of humor.  I am not really looking forward to the 5th season since I know it is coming to an end but I am used to seeing networks chop shows that don’t have stellar ratings in as little as two episodes.  Boston Legal never had stellar ratings so how it made it this far I will never know.  I am just happy that it did.

    The first season was was enjoyable right up through the airliner crash finale.  When season two started I was in no way expecting what I got when we found out that Andrea actually died in the crash of the airliner.  At the end of the episode where Melinda is talking to Andrea’s brother…all I could say was “WOW!”.  I sat there shaking my head for about ten minutes.  There was also the appearance of the ‘wide brimmed hat man’.  I thought long last we would be finding out something interesting.  The story behind the story so to speak.

    Unfortunately Andrea’s replacement turned out to be Delia, played by Camryn Manheim.  My guess is the ratings tanked when Manheim appeared and that was the reason that Melinda suddenly started with the excessive cleavage baring.  Don’t get me wrong, I like boobs as much as any straight man but given the crappy storylines I can only assume the show was targetting the hormone laden teen set.

   Through the last half of season two and most of season three there have been a few flashes of returning to the story but they keep getting sidetracked with the dumb crap.  Things like the city beneath the city that Melinda finds underneath Grandview, which also can be accessed via the hole in the wall in her basement.  Have you seen the remains of the city?  It looks like the city is in a cave.  Do you know how deep that cave would have to be in order for buildings to still be standing and to not have the present day Grandview collapse into a big hole and crush it?  The fact that noone remembers there was ever a previous city is just ridiculous.  This isn’t biblical times for heaven sake.

   We have learned that Melinda, her mother and her grandmother all had this power to see the dead.  Now we know Melinda has a brother as well a a many times great-grandmother that can also see the dead.  My question is how does the brother have the power if this came through the maternal line and the brother has a different mother?

I do not expect my TV shows to be reality but for mercy sake try to have some continuity and maybe work out storyline bugs before you begin shooting.  I will watch the start of next season but I suspect that if the cheesiness doesn’t subside I will not bother to finish the season.

Anyone else see anything wrong with this? Oil companies are showing huge profits, like $120 billion last year. That is only for the top five companies… Just the day before reading the president’s words I was reading about one of the oil companies reporting their quarterly profit in excess of $10 billion, and yet they were below their profit expectations.

I don’t know about you but to me spending all my extra money on gas, this is NOT stimulating the economy. As it is this summer I will not be traveling and therefore will not be spending money in the locations where I would normally have travelled. I am certain there are many other people who also will be spending as little money as possible due to ungodly gas prices, which in turn raises the cost of everything such as food and clothing. Still not much economic stimulus going on.

Of course our congressional reps are a bunch of chickens that are too afraid to tax oil companies on their huge profits, all because the oil companies whine that in order to make up the decrease in profits they will have to raise gas prices. All I can say is BULL!

Our congress people are not listening to us so we need to find another way of being heard. How about we start with local gas stations? Stop purchasing anything but gas. As we know gas stations do not make a very large profit on gas. They rely on all of the beer, soda, chips and lottery tickets they sale inside. If people refuse to purchase the higher profit items, and they make it known why, then maybe gas stations will begin putting pressure on the oil companies, gas wholesalers and anyone else that they need to in order to win back their customers.

Do these people realize what they could do with that money? There are numerous charitable organizations out there that would love to get a little piece of the money we extravagantly blow each year. Places like libraries, humane shelter for animals, soup kitchens and food banks. All far more worthy of the money than C.O.A.C.H. or any of the other vendors that put this crap out.

In some instances I have answered questions from customers who then tell me they have to call back to actually order when their check arrives. One does not have to be a genius to figure out these people probably have far better things the money could be spent on. It is probably a pretty safe bet that these same folks probably need to give up the status and start saving some of this money for old age.

My question is how much would you pay for a watch, handbag or other accessory and why would you pay it? If you have too much money, we can easily arrange a transfer of funds from your bank account to mine. Maybe then I can live in high style too!

Things change and as I grow older I find that I get bored more easily so I have to find new things to amuse myself with.  I now have a blog, a MySpace and Facebook page.  I don’t do much with them but they are out there.

Stayed tuned as you never know what Dribble Drabble I will come up with next.