The stock market has sure been twitchy lately, hasn’t it? But that’s not all. What with the economic turmoil in Europe, the perennial threat of our own government being shut down by further gridlock in Congress, relentlessly radical statements and completely insane “plans” coming from various presidential candidates, it’s easy to see why people are just scared shitless. I know I am.

But enough of that negativity. If we’re going to move forward and heal, we need a potential future to focus on, something besides imagining ourselves running screaming into the night. Let’s see what the art of Tarot has to offer in the way of guidance. Here is my latest reading.

1 Present: The Moon
Things may not be as they seem, and we all know they probably aren’t. But that doesn’t stop us from howling at the moon about it.

2 Crossing: 6 of Swords
A long journey — not a fun one. We’re stuck on this trip until it’s over, friend.

3 Goal: 5 of Swords
We want to totally kick the ass of this recession. Hopefully it works like that. Apparently, that is how we’re approaching this problem.

4 Distant past: King of Wands
Oh remember when we all thought we could just elect the right guy president and we’d have a perfect future? Wealth, productivity, and an honest, hardworking government working for our best interest? This card does.

5 Recent past: 7 of Cups
Dude, we’ve been living a fantasy. We thought we’d get all our wildest dreams just like *poosh* but it didn’t happen, did it?

6 Future influence: 6 of Cups
Yeah, we’re pretty much stuck on our childhood fantasies about the American dream — and that’s what’s going to have the biggest influence on this year’s election.

7 Questioner: 4 of Pentacles
We want our damn money. If we already have any, we’re holding on to it for dear life. If we’re looking for money, watch out, because we think we’re pretty hardcore.

8 Environment: 7 of Wands
People are freaking out, you guys. People are ready to kick some ass and start some shit. It’s like that.

9 Hopes: The Star
What do we want? Apparently we want, more than anything, hope. We want an answer to our prayers. A light to shine in the darkness. And that’s a big deal.

10 Outcome: The Tower
What’s to come of all this? Well it’s not going to be sunshine and roses right away. Shit’s going to get real. But the only possible solution is a do-over — destroy what we know, and create anew. Not at all a small thing.

It has been noted that this is no ordinary economic downturn. One of the reasons it seems unlikely that the American economy will emerge from current conditions anytime soon is that there are no sure bets for growth. Some would suggest that we can magically repair the damage by reducing the deficit; not a bad idea, but this will have a negligible impact on, say, jobs — especially in the short-to-medium term. How did we get here? An almost religious conviction in systems that should have been recognized as unsustainable.

This has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale. The bad news is, when a collapse of this size occurs, recovery doesn’t happen overnight. Just ask the music industry, which has been trying to go back to its heyday of control and collusion for more than a decade. The problem is, the more they cling to their old systems, the worse it is for the actual creators. Just like the more policymakers attempt to peg progress to Wall Street’s whims, the more American workers are imperiled.

Had anyone made the connection, the music industry’s response to its paradigm shift could have told us a lot about how to deal with the financial meltdown. The root causes are more similar than not: a misguided belief in the ability to engineer permanent growth. In fact, Peak Music was a part of the very same Wall Street philosophy that pushed us to the brink of disaster.

The record industry in the 1990s was rapidly consolidating, with large multinational corporations getting into music as a portfolio-enhancing diversification. From there, executives sought new ways to produce shareholder growth. The music business became like the movie business, but instead of s’plodey movies with big opening weekends, you had spendy boy bands with huge debut Tuesdays. Manufacturing consumer consent was fairly easy, especially with distribution locked down and broadcast media owned by just a handful of companies. You could practically plot a year’s returns with just a handful of guys in a room.

With radio a hyper-concentrated market dominated by payola and retail under the thumb of the major labels, the consumer became trained to accept what was spoon fed to them. $18.98 a CD with a single good song on it? No problem!

Then the unexpected happened. The Internet came along.

The recorded music industry, like Wall Street following the banking crisis, had no clue how to respond. Most kids, when they find out that there is no Santa Claus, go through a period of grief and disaffection, but then they get over it. The music industry has been trying to find a new Saint Nick for more than a decade. I worry that our policymakers will do the same with the American economy.

The old ideas won’t work. That’s the nature of paradigm shift. You can’t build anything lasting according to the previous blueprint. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much money you throw at the problem (or at policymakers), any edifice constructed using the old engineering will not stand. Sure, you can prop it up for a little while, or set to rebuilding over and over and over, but the exercise is ultimately fruitless. Eventually, the way forward will reveal itself, but the will be little continuity between the old and the new, other than the fact that the replacement construct will eventually fail, too.

Repeat after me: you cannot engineer away failure.

But you can prolong the mighty crash by accepting the natural rhythms of growth and contraction. Had the Wizards of Wall Street not entered the dangerous game of financial derivatives, we surely would have experienced recession-like events, but there’s would have been far less danger of a total systems collapse. Had the music industry focused on offering the best product in a reasonably open marketplace, they may have been able to retain some consumer loyalty when the internet came along (their response to the technology itself is its own separate topic).

At the end of the day, the true tragedy is who bears the brunt of these traumas. In the music business, it’s largely the creators (though I do know for a fact that a lot of good people in the industry lost out, too). With the overall American economy, it’s the majority of the public.

None of this was an inevitability. Something for the next generation of wizards to consider.

With the risk to America’s working class due to union busting, it’s easy to overlook economic exploitation abroad. Exhibit A: the sacking of Bangladeshi (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Muhammad Yunus from Grameen Bank, a pioneering institution which he founded, and which has provided millions of dollars in aid to the poor. Yunus was fired last week on the grounds that he was past retirement age, and had been wrongly appointed in 2000.

There are those who say Yunus’ firing was politically motivated: not only has he spoken out against the Bangladeshi government, Yunus tried to form his own political party in 2007. However, the Prime Minister has accused Grameen of charging high rates of interest and exploiting the poor.

In a telling interview for Deutsche Welle, Badruddin Umar, a Dhaka-based activist and author of “The Poverty Trade of Dr Yunus,” states that the higher ups at Grameen Bank were afraid of the praise and admiration Yunus received, and of the people who viewed him as a “demigod.” Yet the poor are unafraid to critique him. As Umar puts it, “The common man does not think that criticizing Yunus will bring international shame. When you go to the countryside, most people will say that he is sucking people’s blood… now more news reports are emerging that people have had to sell their land, utensils and domestic animals to repay the loans, and being unable to repay the loans people have committed suicide.”

Although Yunus himself has questioned why people who are badly affected by loans borrow money from Grameen, Umar states that microcredit finance agencies fill the “credit gap” that banks cannot. “Lending to the poor is nothing new,” Umar says. “It is similar to old times when the same social relations and circumstances forced people to go to the old feudal moneylenders.”

Unfortunately, other microcredit agencies are no better than Grameen Bank. Women are hit especially hard by loans, as they are the principal borrowers. James Melik tells the story of Joba Rani, a formerly self-sufficient farmer left unable to repay her loans after floods in her village of Jamlabaj. Badruddin Umar is not the first critic of microfinance: Dr. Qazi Kholiluzzaman Ahmad of PSKF, which monitors microfinance, describes microfinance in such damning terms as a “death trap” for the poor, who frequently borrow without thinking of the consequences; furthermore, 60 percent of people borrow from multiple sources. According to Dr. Ahmad, “There is no understanding that it might take 10 or 20 years to repay their loan.”

As for Joba Rani, she was forced to sell three of her six cows at half market price in order to repay her loan in what Ahmad and Badruddin might describe as an all too familiar story.

The Deutsche Welle interview casts a damning light on a man named one of Bust magazine’s A Few Good Men in 2010, who then said of his project, “We had male opposition, and it was translated into religious opposition. People said we were destroying their culture; that women needed to be kept at home because they weren’t supposed to have or handle money. I said, ‘You keep your culture; I am creating a counterculture.”

Sadly, he has not.

You’ve probably heard that another federal judge has ruled that the health care reform law is unconstitutional.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Two Democrat-appointed judges have interpreted the law as constitutional, while two Republican-appointed judges have ruled the opposite. This is the perfect recipe for Supreme Court review, which now seems guaranteed. While it can be fun to try to predict the Will of the Nine, it’s perhaps more instructive to get back to the constitutionality issue and whether the administration and the former Democratic majority might have taken a different approach to reform.

One major caveat: I am neither a lawyer, nor a constitutional scholar. But I’m still right about everything, so there.

When people on the left of the political spectrum defend the mandate portion of the policy, they often bring up car insurance, which you’re obligated to purchase in the private marketplace. That is, if you *choose* to own a car, which is an important distinction. “Being alive” is not a matter of choice, at least not in the eyes of the law. A friendly note to progressives: do not make this a cornerstone of your argument, because your opposition has a ready-made (and shockingly fact-based!) counter.

Another argument you’ll hear is that, by the Florida and Virgina courts’ logic, Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional. While it’s true that some conservatives believe this, further legal hair-splitting indicates a difference between the aforementioned entitlements and Obamacare. (We’ll get to that in a minute.)

In Florida, Judge Vinton struck down the entirety of the law (pending appeal) based on the fact that the element he found unconstitutional — the insurance mandate — is functionally inseparable from the rest of the statute. “There are simply too many moving parts … for me to try and dissect out … the able-to-stand-alone from the unable-to-stand alone,” he wrote in his opinion. (He also gave a sweet shout out to the Tea Party!)

In Vinton’s reading, the constitutionality of the health insurance mandate rests on the commerce clause provisions in the Constitution (read ‘em here; Section 8). Here’s the key clause:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

The health care law compels people to engage in commerce, which may or may not be considered a “tax to provide for the general welfare.” (We know what Vinton thinks.) Invoking the commerce clause as a means to strip away progressive policies is hardly a novel strategy; it was successfully done with a key component of the New Deal.

To summarize: it is judge Vinton’s view that the law would give the fed the power to regulate commerce by requiring individuals to purchase insurance from the private marketplace — something beyond the Constitutional powers of Congress. This is different than auto insurance, because of the whole “choosing to buy a car” thing. It is also different than Medicare, which states (and individuals) can opt out of. Lastly, it is different than Social Security, which is wholly government-run.

Kinda neat that the conservative argument against the health care law is predicated on the fact that it compels private market activity!

Another amazing thing to consider is that the thing that conservatives hate and fear the most — a single payer system run by the government — is likely more constitutionally sound, in that it falls under taxation for “general welfare” (one of the enumerated powers).

By putting forth a compromise bill, the Democratic Congress and the President may have doomed a key policy initiative to Supreme Court interpretation. The smart money is on a 5-4 SCOTUS decision. Which way that decision goes is anybody’s guess. If the constitutionality is upheld, there is no way in hell that the law can be successfully challenged going forward, and what looks today like incremental policy may become the cornerstone of a broad new entitlement. If it goes the other way, this type of hybrid market reform is deader than a doornail for at least several generations.

If I was the Obama DOJ, I’d be very nervous right now. (Maybe the Rational Basis Review would apply? What say you, lawyers?)

A subsequent generation of Americans may or may not conclude that “limited  federal government” also has limited impact on the –gasp!– general welfare, and will call for further amendments to the Constitution. By then, we’ll be snug in our cryogenic chamber waiting to be reawakened when the country has a sane health care policy.

Or, America will simply end up a gun-toting, paranoid corporatocracy that keeps falling further behind the rest of the industrialized world. In which case, keep us frozen.

Fresh on the heels of the defeat of Proposition 19, California’s latest attempt to legalize and regulate marijuana — which advocates posit would have raised billions for the debt-weary state — officials in Sacramento have a new strategy: Kickstarter.com.

Following in the footsteps of indie musicians who can no longer depend on major-label dollars to bankroll their recording costs, the State of California has opted to work with the cutting-edge fundraising website in hopes of lifting itself out of bankruptcy.

“California has always been the capital of the creative arts so, inspired by our artistic community, we have decided to become a fan-funded state,” said Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for people all over the world who are fans of California to chip in and save the state they love… everyone from graduate students in New England writing their doctoral thesis on Perez Hilton, to the middle-aged men in the UK who make up a staggering 90 percent of the world’s die-hard Neil Young fans, to homosexuals all over the Islamic world who dream of someday moving to San Francisco’s Castro district.”

“We all want California to be here for future generations to enjoy,” said the Governor, loudly dropping a barbell to make his point. “Even our enemies in fundamentalist sects from Alabama to Indonesia depend on us as a living example of Sodom & Gomorrah to point to and condemn, even as they secretly envy us.”

To publicize the launch of the campaign, officials in Sacramento have self-produced their own DIY video using nothing but an iPhone 4, a ukulele and some crude animation hand-drawn on State of California letterhead. “TAXES ARE SOOO 20TH-CENTURY!!” says an emblematic cartoon bear, doing a kickflip off his familiar place on the state flag, “It’s time to jam this shit econo.” The video goes on to colorfully enumerate a number of rad improvements the state has planned, like “paying state employee pensions, bee-yotch!!! LOL!!”

So far the video has 7 views on YouTube, and no official word has been released yet on the financial gains of the new campaign. Rumors are already flying however, that should the Kickstarter plan fail, there are plans in place to initiate rolling blackouts of all surf gear, awards shows, dry red wines and Lindsay Lohan nipslips to make way for worldwide pledge drives.

In case you didn’t know, I live in Washington, D.C., and work in the policy space, specifically the so-called “public interest.”

The nature of my work is communications, which takes on many forms. At the end of the day, however, it’s all messaging, and it’s all political. Typically, I’m tasked with analyzing/describing/translating issue-specific concerns, but I also try to hold in my mind the larger issues that thwart favorable outcomes.

The public interest is difficult to define, particularly in terms of the government’s responsibility to recognize/protect it. The basic idea is this: people should not be exploited by industry or find their liberties impinged on just because there exists the potential for financial gain. The public interest could be everything from making sure that the toothpaste we import from China isn’t toxic to defending free speech to maintaining automobile safety standards.

You don’t have to be a flaming lefty to understand that some things are plainly in the public interest. Yet our side is continually forced to make this case to policymakers, industry, funders and even the very public whose “interests” we’ve chosen to advance and protect.

I’ve distilled the myriad difficulties we encounter every day down to a single conceptual problem. I am officially outsourcing the solution to anyone who feels like taking a crack at it. There is no “right” or “wrong” (nor is there right or left) — this is merely a thought exercise that happens to have real-world implications.

PROBLEM 1: The government doesn’t want to do hard work. There’s a million reasons to serve the public interest: controlling costs; retaining a competitive advantage globally; driving innovation; creating opportunities; promoting market competition; furthering democracy and civic participation. But the issues are complex, intertwined and evolving. The bureaucracy is impossibly slow and resistant to change. Even where government recognizes that a job needs to be done, there’s no incentive for them to do it well. Profit is a far better motivator, and the private sector has all the motivation it needs to make things happen. At least that’s the theory.

PROBLEM 2: The markets simply will not embark on work — however necessary it might be — unless there’s a path to profit. And some things that desperately need doing are not ripe with earnings potential. Even where private industry can be cajoled (typically through tax breaks, kickbacks and horse trades), it often fails to serve the needs of the public. The pursuit of cost-cutting efficiencies inevitably trends towards monopoly and consolidation. Although free market champions consistently tout consumer choice as a naturally-occurring benefit, it’s largely a myth. So is their belief in the energizing effects of competition. Industry hates competition and will do everything in its power to eliminate it. This, of course, takes the form of influencing policy, usually with money. And the more money floods the system, the less the policymakers are inclined to work (see problem #1).

SOLUTION?

Thanks to Shane of the Government for the second pic.

Education reform would appear to be the next Obama administration effort to clean up another Bush-league mess — in this case, the educator-and-student-detested “No Child Left Behind” program. Susan Engel‘s New York Times Op-Ed outlines priorities in curriculum, namely the core skills a person needs to help them learn rather than the regurgitation of mandated facts. This portion jumped out at me:

During the school day, there should be extended time for play. Research has shown unequivocally that children learn best when they are interested in the material or activity they are learning(…) A classroom like this would provide lots of time for children to learn to collaborate with one another, a skill easily as important as math or reading. It takes time and guidance to learn how to get along, to listen to one another and to cooperate. These skills cannot be picked up casually at the corners of the day.

An organization called Peace First aims to arm children with the skills to create peaceful communities and efficient group relationships. They foster the kind of personal empowerment that can only come from helping and collaborating with others. From their website:

Peace First has taught over 40,000 students critical conflict resolution skills; created over 2,500 peacemaker projects that improved communities and instilled a sense of civic engagement in students; recruited over 4,000 volunteers who provided 400,000 hours of volunteer teaching service; and trained 2,500 teachers in conflict resolution and classroom management skills. We have seen remarkable results in each of our schools: a 60 percent reduction in violence, but more importantly, a 70-80 percent increase in instances of children breaking up fights, including others and helping one another—resulting in better schools and better potential for each child in that school.

One hopes that their model of success will be recognized and applied to all grade schools as part of core curriculum. Right now, their methods benefit just four schools in New York and a number of others in Boston and Los Angeles.

In her Op-Ed, Engel also suggests the following criteria for thriving learning environments:

In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.

Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them — stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.

The idea of fostering enthusiasm for learning by including materials that “have actual meaning for them” is vitally important. Media literacy must take precedence in a cultural environment flooded with information. My first day teaching in an early childhood learning center, I noticed immediately that most of the children’s clothing and even diapers had licensed cartoon characters on them. I found that children as young as 14 months had distinct awareness of media commodities such as Mickey Mouse and Big Bird. However, many of the adults around had never considered the powerful subliminal associations formed through such deeply integrated visual stimuli.

In recent years, media and access to information has become omnipresent, and the ability to directly participate seemingly effortless. The use and distribution of images has become as important as verbal literacy skills. Yet the ability to assess and critique media, much less understand the legal implications of distributing content via new media, has not advanced at the same rate. A fine example of this is (at the time of this writing) 1,031 people’s willingness to participate in American Apparel’s “Search for the Best Bottom in the World.”

Organizations dedicated to the self-empowerment of girls, which aim to foster a healthy sense of self-image, such as Hardy Girls Healthy Women, make the following claim in their letter-writing protest of American Apparel’s “model” search:

American Apparel is directly and unconscionably undermining girls’ healthy development by equating confidence with looking sexy, winning with being judged on their appearance, and personal value with 15 seconds of fame.

So let’s talk about fame — either the kind that lasts 15 seconds, or the kind that gets people quoting that very phrase for eternity. Andy Warhol himself landed on Forbes‘ yearly list of top earning dead celebrities, which itemizes the amount earned in life and in death, typically on intellectual property but also on their own image. For example, James Dean, who commonly makes the list, acted in a mere three films during his life, yet his profile is ubiquitous. And licensed carefully by a crack team of copyright attorneys, I’m sure.

For years, feminists have complained that the female body has been commodified and exploited, associating a woman’s sexualized body (and in the American Apparel case, which is a pretty standard one, sexualized body parts), with something which can or cannot be owned according to the affordability of the product it represents. The argument is that when free access to a desired commodity is denied, the price inflates and violence is used to gain or deny access. This structure is commonly seen in the illegal drug trade, for example. A precedent of the correlation between women in media and pathological violence is described in Eldridge Cleaver‘s autobiography Soul On Ice.

Clearly, the motivation to enter these kinds of contests is not monetary (the top ten rated receive a grab bag worth $300 of American Apparel items! Whee!). The grand prize winner wins a flight and three-day stay in Los Angeles, where they will be required to participate in a panties-themed photo shoot, presumably to be used in advertisements for the company doling out the “prize.” All images submitted by any contestant become property of the company (again, that’s more than 3000 people). All monetary value remains firmly in the hands of the advertiser. They make millions and you might get a bag of panties.

I believe the key motivation here is inclusion, participation, a chance to be assessed favorably in a collective environment. Without the opportunity to participate in a cooperative group in school, and the alternative of having their use of sexuality condemned by a progressively prudish feminist “left,” young women seek a chance to prove that their physical, intellectual, and emotional property is theirs to control without mitigation from political interests. Yet where ideologies enforce codes of morality, businesses literally offer incorporation — albeit in a very, very bum deal.

My point is, if a cartoon of you is going to end wrapped around someone else’s bum, be sure you’re getting royalties. Your ass is worth it.

Polish that monocle, ye virtuous Captain of Industry, and step lively, for today is Ayn Rand‘s birthday!

I gotta admit, this information caught me off guard. I’d love to have had something pithy prepared, maybe another entry in our world-famous “The Contrarian vs. Objectivism” series. Alas, I fear that the Black Queen of Capitalism has me dead to rights, and I’m out of ammo.

So, I give in. The white flag is waving. Time to set my sights on noble activities like undermining the public sphere and complaining about how the “moochers” are sapping the productivity of America’s great men and women. Maybe I’ll arrange for a little “rape-fantasy roleplaying” for later — Ayn would certainly approve!

The following is a little experiment. I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be fun to post occasional rants from a “real live conservative” to counter the ever-present librul/socialist/commie/fascist slant on these digital pages.

Certainly, it could foster discussion and spark a lively debate. Still, I gotta tell you that as an editor, it’s really hard to read an oppositional argument and not want to discredit it, line by line, as I tidy the text for publication. But that’s what the comments section is for. I encourage you to use it. (I know I will!)

Today’s post comes from our friend Chris Stecher, a feisty, freedom-loving conservative whose arguments on Facebook I have the enjoyment of regularly invalidating. Even though he’s dead wrong on a whole spate of stuff — from media rules to the myth of the free market’s “invisible hand” — he’s got heart and a great sense of humor. So let’s give him his due as he talks out his ass about Super Bowl ad buys, abortion, homosexuality and the Supreme Court.

His bio follows the post.

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Let’s Talk Super Bowl. Or more specifically Super Bowl commercials, a subject about which I can speak with some authority, having spent most of my adult life (such as it is) working in advertising and marketing.

In my biz, the Super Bowl is the Holiest of Holies. The prime rib. The most treasured of ad buys. The white whale of product marketing. In recent years, a 30-second slot during gametime would run you upwards of four million bucks. And, economic downturn aside, you’d currently have to shell out two million and change for a spot.

This year, CBS has been getting a lot of heat running a pro-life advertisement during the Super Bowl. (Some might say that negative press is still good press, and I’m inclined to agree.) The ad features Tim Tebow, a Heisman trophy-winning quarterback for the Florida Gators. As the story goes, Tebow’s mother had been faced with a difficult pregnancy and was advised to have an abortion. To which she said (my words not hers), “fuck you.” A good decision, as it turned out. Because despite the “expert opinion” on her pregnancy, Tim not only survived, but flourished. I see it as another example of the left wing, pro-abortion sect getting it wrong. I have other examples of this, but we’ll have to save them for another time. [Ed's note: the Tebow story is highly suspect; read more here.]

Of course, there are other ads that oddly enough will not be seen at this year’s Super Bowl. I’m gonna come right out and say that one of them is, well, gay. Not SUPER gay, mind you. More like the guy down the hall from your office gay. He doesn’t flaunt his orientation, but you know because at that last after-work party he showed up with a guy named Doug — both dressed immaculately — and talked about vacationing at Fire Island. So, yeah, that level of gay.

I had the opportunity to see all the ads that got axed by the NFL. As a conservative, I was prepared to have the ManCrunch.com ad piss me off. I’d braced myself for some crazy, in-your-face, dude-on-dude session. This would have given me the opportunity to grill all my gay friends about how they put their lifestyle in our faces, and therefore should expect a certain level of indignation.

I saw none of that. What I did see was an ad that should not, on any level, piss anyone off. I saw gay camp (as in “campy” camp, not a place with rentable canoes). I saw a poorly produced spot. I did not see an ad that CBS said no to for absolutely stupid reasons. Bottom line: this commercial should never have been refused if said advertisers were able to pony up the cash. Period.

Now, lets go look at the law for a second. The Supreme Court recently rendered a decision on campaign financing, with its rationale for overturning restrictions based in the First Amendment right to speech. Or in this case, a corporation’s right to “speak” using cash as its vocal cords. Now, I happen to believe that if you or your corporation have money, then you should be free to make whatever contributions you want to the candidate or campaign of your choosing.

I look at it this way: if you like a candidate and you want to help out, you can spend your time doing so. (Maybe if you are unemployed you don’t have this time, but whatever.)

Maybe you’re a business. Or maybe you’re rich but you don’t have the sort of time needed to volunteer or otherwise offer your services. But you still want your voice heard. So you offer what you do have: money. In place of boots-on-the ground or phone bank work, cash is what you have to give. This helps the people on your side (well, paid people, anyway) speak for you.

But I digress. We were talking about advertising. Which, is, interestingly enough, almost the same conversation. In the upcoming off-year elections advertising is going to (as it always does) come into play. And I, for one, love it! Part of it is the fact that I am not only an advertising junkie, but a political one as well. Where others might bemoan the ceaseless (and some would say mindless) chatter that is radio, TV and print buys, I eat it up.

Why? Because, this my friends, is AMERICA. We have a neat, democratic style of government. We get to, from time to time, vote! This is a gift we have! Yet sadly, a majority of American citizens during major elections treat this gift like a holiday fruitcake your aunt gave you for Christmas. Let me put it more plainly: they shit on the gift.

There are men and women, putting their lives on the line in foreign theaters for the simple right to be able to choose the leaders of your town, county, state and country… yet you CANT BE BOTHERED to VOTE?

Again, I digress. Back to the Bowl: if my side gets to put an ad on the air that’s anti-abortion (which I support), then the left should be free can air an ad promoting gay sex, or whatever the hell they want. (I would’ve thought they’d prefer an anti-fur or a pro-abortion spot, but whatever.)

It is free fucking speech. That’s our country. Its what we fight for, and its why, when we wake up in the morning, we can drink our coffee, look at the news and appreciate what we have.

Chris Stecher has worked most of his “adult” life working in the field of advertising and marketing, when he wasn’t doing other odd jobs such as executive chef, craps player, taxi driver, and professional grifter. All of this with only two years of college in Hawaii. He now enjoys a life of semi-retirement, working for a small-town newspaper in a rural ski mountain village, and living with his 3 birds. Interested parties can seek him out to hear him tell his tales for the cost of a Mr. James Daniels on the rocks.