Hey OBAMA, put your chess set away..

.. 'cos they're playing poker! Actually I think that the President knows this fine.

Trouble with poker is that you don't need to be the sharpest pencil in the box to play, and losing one hand means nothing. Using this analogy the right have the 'God card' and by default the Pro-life card, which most people can agree with 'in principle', just so long as it's not themselves.

The problem with Pro-life it seems to me is the difference between 'just' as in authoritative and 'just' as in fair. They say that it's not fair to the fetus AND that God is commanding us not to commit unjustified homicide, which is the standard taking both sides of the issue.

But 'we', I mean pro-choicers and non-religious, see the fairness issue as fair to the woman and of course there is no reason to browse 'sacred' books for guidance.

It makes no difference that neither God in the Old Testament said anything specific about abortion nor Jesus in the New Testament, I know that they just assume the fetus IS a person then God/Jesus must be talking about fetuses when they talk about all people and such.

This would be a great argument if the state was forcing women to have abortions, by the way.

Back to the 'poker cards' analogy. One card that everyone seems to fall for is the notion that the richest Americans should not be expected to pay to support the poorest. This is all very well if you want your country to resemble a Banana Republic where the infrastructure is left to rot because the rich can all afford helicopters and don't have to look at the poor. Also this plays into the hands of the deeply religious who imagine that non-believers and backsliders ought to live in a kind of Hell and only 'good Christians' ought to be educated tools of the rich or ministering the poor on how, we can see that if they only believed, the Church would provide charity and education to allow people to be, basically, party members, and accept their lot in life as minions.

I'm starting to feel lucky that I lived in the time I did. A generation or two earlier and we'd be at war for this freedom that wasn't available to most before that, and a generation or two later, it's back to oligarchs and robber-baron time because the free enterprise crowd together with the believers killed the socialist dream of casting out the worst of the greedy and the controlling religious.

I can't help thinking how easily the American people are duped by the wealthy into changing their votes though. After Bush, the people who would change their votes were going to vote for the Democrats. The wealthy created the Tea Party to resplit the voters 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3. Trouble is that 2 of those 3 thirds are for the GOP no matter if they vote 'straight' Republican or Tea Party!

It was a typical con of the 'con'-servatives. It's absolutely brilliant! The Tea Party claimed and are still claiming the opposite of what they really are, supposedly a 'populist movement' against 'big government', but not one of them votes against any right-wing 'security' move that lets government intrude on their privacy, thinks their personal welfare check or pension or other entitlement is at risk from their own supposed worldview.

I mean, what a bunch of simpletons! Not the Tea Partiers, likely YOU! All they needed to do was start the shenanegins, a few total nutbars, Sarah Palin, Sharon Angle, Christine O'Donnell and the so-called main-stream media's 'narrative' being written for them, and the wealthy get their way.

No one pointed out that whether the nutbars got in or not, the GOP were going to come out on top. The 'loony left' were so busy laughing at these few cartoonish characters, some of whom even got voted IN, that everyone was surprised that the narrative, that they might be crazy, but the left are all godless(or at least not Christian), totalitarian assholes to be feared, stuck like shit to a blanket.

"But Obama is such a good 'statesman'." you might say? He's still being forced to push the 'center' further and further right to try to please everyone, even the libertarians who now look a lot less fucked up than the Tea Partiers.

But the libertarians are the ones who think that they can leave which 'big government' that ought not to exist until the next disaster then say, "Oh, that one I wouldn't have touched, we can see that we need that one."

Fuck them.