If you would like to see my brother doing standup, here it is:

(If the embedding doesn’t work, try this link here.)

Apparently 105 million dollars.

In tonight’s overhyped, but better than usual, debate, a lesbian couple asked the candidates if they support gay marriage. The only candidate who had the correct answer was Dennis Kucinich. Bill Richardson was close by saying he thought he could realistically achieve civil unions, but not gay marriage. Christopher Dodd and John Edwards flubbed by by saying they didn’t support gay marriage but support civil unions.

Also, a reverend asked why it was okay to use to use religion to deny people their civil rights. John Edwards blew the question with a mostly idiotic answer about his own personal problems with *gasp* the though of a same sex couple being treated any old married couple under the law. If he can’t get past such bigotry, I suggest he drop out of the race and go back to guilt tripping juries into giving him huge sums of cash.

As a party, the Democrats are pretty pathetic when it comes to the issue of gay marriage. Most of them claim to support gay rights, but only with a “separate but equal” policy. Why do they push this antiquated concept? Either they are too weak to stand up to “Big Religion” in this country, or they have been permanently tainted by religious bigotry.

The issue is simple: Marriage in a church, civil unions under the law. That’s it. That’s how it should be. We shouldn’t have two different kinds of state contracts depending on your sexual orientation. That’s blatantly bigoted. If you want to get “married” and have it blessed by Jesus, Ganesh, or some pagan tree god, go for it. Knock yourself out. Just leave everyone else alone.

To all you anti-gay marriage crusaders out there, stop pushing your conservative, outdated, Abrahamic beliefs in the family structure on every else. Oh, and to the rest of the Democratic party, stop raising my taxes.

From “The Duck of Minerva” -

Zorn and Gill report evidence that baseball fans are far more likely to embrace the designated hitter (DH) if they are Democrats:

Most important, and consistent with our expectations, we find that self-identified Democratic Party members are more likely to support the DH rule than are either independents or Republicans; the odds ratio of 1.90 suggests that, on average, Democrats are 90 percent more likely to support the rule than are independents. This implies (we think) that the values that draw the respondents to the Democrats are linked to those associated with supporting the rule. At the same time, the reverse is not true: Republicans are no more or less likely to support the DH rule than are political independents.

I have to ask the question because I’m finding myself agreeing with Dennis Kucinich on an issue. Actually, that’s kind of an exaggeration. While I disagree with most of Kucinich’s platform, he is right on abortion and mostly right when it comes to the drug war. His positions on civil liberties are also mostly right. Where I disagree with him is his economic and foreign policies. I find them to be unworkable and extremely unrealistic. Not sure we need a “Department of Peace” either, when we already have the State department with the capacity for peaceful diplomacy.

But I digress.

What I agree with Kucinich this time, is his outrage at John Edwards and Hillary Clinton for their comments after an appearance at the NAACP. Kucinich has all the details here. (By the way, more props to Kucinich for using Drupal to power his campaign website.).

If Kucinich is being marginalized within his own party, and a major one at that, imagine how hard it is for third party candidates to get national recognition. In 2004, the Libertarian Party had their candidate on 48 of the 50 state ballots for the Presidential election, but were left out of any national debates. The Green Party was also left out, and was actively attacked by the Democrat Party and removed off of some state ballots. The two parties have locked up the system making it very hard for third parties to get any national exposure.

Do I think the Libertarian or Green party candidates had a shot at actually winning? No, I don’t. However, they did have the power to influence the other parties, and they clearly have wide ranging appeal. They should have been allowed in the presidential debates in 2004.

Now, I realize that we can’t let every presidential candidate in on the debates. There must be some objective criteria, like being on the ballot in a certain number of states or receiving a certain percentage of the vote in the last election. Otherwise, we would have Gary Coleman and Gallagher in the debates. I’m not sure yet what the criteria should be, but what we have now is ridiculous.

This might be the first and last post where I write how I agree with Dennis Kucinich, but on an issue like this, it’s easy.

A recent Gallup Poll shows Ron Paul carrying 0% support. I realize in the blogosphere, Ron Paul is the best candidate since Howard Dean. Apparently, Digg users and bloggers love an economically conservative, gay hating, sexist, godbagging Republican. Oh, yeah, I forgot, he’s against the Iraq war, and that trumps all his bigotry. My bad.

I know it gets talked about a lot, but I wonder if Ron Paul is really affecting the “debate”, whatever that means. After all, Republicans have always tried to ban abortion, discriminate against gays, and push their religious beliefs onto others. That’s not something new that Ron Paul brought to the debate. No Republican is adopting his other platform of tearing apart the federal government. So he’s not had an effect there either. As for the Iraq War, please. Republicans are running away from the President because they want to get re-elected, not because of Ron Paul. Does anyone really think Republicans looking to be re-elected would support the war if not for Ron Paul?

So, I see little influence from the Ron Paul campaign. Yeah, he’s big on Digg and YouTube, but come on, big deal. He’s not getting votes, he’s not influencing campaigns. He’s just a gay bashing, woman hating, religious pushing white male from Texas. Um, don’t we already have enough of those?

I found this article yesterday titled “Some in Silicon Valley begin to sour on India“. The theme of the article is that the pay of Indian engineers is getting closer to what engineers are paid in America. When you factor in the overhead associated with outsourcing, the costs savings have dramatically shrunk. Two years ago Robert X. Cringely wrote an article that said pretty much the same thing. The overhead of managing outsourcing is bound to make the cost savings a wash.

To me this illustrates how powerful and fast the market is. While our politicians are blathering on in Washington about the “evils” of outsourcing cheap labor, the market, at least in the high tech sectors, is already solving the problem. Silicon Valley has been creating wealth and jobs in this country with outsourced labor, and India, a poor country for the most part, has a new and growing 40 billion dollar industry. Everybody wins.

I was gonna write a post about this, but I think my original IM’s to my wife Kelly do a better job. She posted already about it, so here they are:

On KellyGarbato.com

On easyVegan.info