In order to have politicians give a damn about you in this country, you ahve to be a hyphenated American. African-Americans, Korean-Americans, Arab-Americans, all those people get special consideration as groups. I, myself, have always considered myself and American-American. I could define myself as Jewish-American, but I don't like to define myself with such narrow verbiage. Besides, we all know that anti-Semitism is the last tolerable prejudice, so identifying myself that way is more likely to hurt than help me. I've decided to create a new hyphenated minority group. For evermore you can call me the vanguard of the Individual-Americans. I make my decisions based on my own views, opinions, and knowledge. I don't depend on others to pay my way through tax breaks, I don't depend on the government to get me a job or pay me for being unemployed. I don't vote the party line or do something merely because a group I associate with wants me to. I am an individual, and no one can take that away from me. The moment I feel I am unable to continue to call myself an individual is the moment that both sides of my hyphen go away. At some point there will be liberals in charge of our government, liberals who do their best to take away our individuality and define us by groups, liberals like Hillary Clinton, and at that point I fear that both individual and American will no longer be able to be used. At that point, to call yourself an American would be an insult to our forbears in this great country, the forbears who would be disgusted by the liberties our current government takes with the Constitution, the forebears who would probably listen to a speech by someone like Howard Dean, and consider them an enemy of the state.

Just so you don't think I'm too biased towards Mr. Bush's government, I feel I should put in my two cents on his domestic policies. First off, John Ashcroft and just about every policy associated with him. He's evil. The Patriot Act is evil. Although there are items in the Patriot Act that could be used for the purposes of good, the downside is just too horrible. This act gives the government the ability to invade our privacy in a way that should not ever have to conteplated in a free society. I understand the idea of giving up some liberties in order to be more secure, and I deny it. I'd rather feel slightly more vulnerable and at the same time be able to feel secure in my right to keep to myself. As it is, I feel vulnerable to terrorism, and I worry the government now has a file on me with a list of all the people I associate with and all the books I've checked out from the library. Why does the government need to know this?

Healthcare is another problem. What's up with this new Medicare prescription thing? If you're old and you've worked your whole life, why does that suddenly mean you no longer have to take responsibility for yourself? I always hear of the wisdom of the elderly. If they're so wise, then why didn't they save up enough money to pay their bills in their retirement age? Everything I read about medicare leads me to believe that the cost of this new program will almost immediately rise above current projections, and only continue to get larger and larger over time. Why pass a bill to pay for things that people should pay for themselves? This is not a welfare state, why is George Bush, ostensibly a Republican, a group that supposedly does not favor big government, pushing big government?

The "International Community" tells the United States that they will not help out in Iraq until we go to the U.N. for a mandate. At the same time, the same "International Community" heaps scorn upon the U.S. for not sending help to Liberia. Why is the U.N. so anxious to get in to Iraq, but tries to put responsibility for solving the problems in Liberia at the feet of the United States? It's very simple. They want influence over the oil of Iraq, and Liberia, unfortunately for it quickly shrinking population of live humans, has no oil to speak of. In other words, the U.N. and our own left wingers are practicing the same sort of pragmatic aid that they accused Bush of doing. Mainland Europe is screaming, "Show me the money!" It's all about the oil folks, and no one but George W. Bush seems to really have a care for the people.

I just read an article in which the reporter discussed and interviewed various people who were fed up with the United States and were planning to move to Canada. At first, I thought, "maybe they have some legitimate grievances." Then I read deeper and realized they're just idiots. One said, "In the United States you ahve to live in a certain area to go to a good school." That's true, and there are a lot of reasons why. It's a hard issue to discuss without being racist. I'll start by saying that when I was in middle school I had a lot of black friends right off the bat in 6th grade. As we traveled through thsoe 3 years at Sandy Springs Middle School, I began to notice that despite friendships, when it came to choosing classes, and place to sit during assemblies, things became very segregated. That's no one's fault, people just want to hang with people like they are. The problem is that, however much flak I might get for saying this, areas with high populations of black people tend to have worse schools. This is not because they are not funded as much, because I'm pretty damn sure the schools in south Fulton get just as much government funding per student as schools in north Fulton, but because the culture seems to encourage children to make fun of their peers that actually try to learn, unlike where I went to school and people thought my academic acheivements were nifty. Nerdy, but nifty. Without enogh community support, no school can possibly do well. It's a culture problem. The real problem with fixing this is that people are more interested in blaming those at good schools instead of trying to fix the root of the problem.

There are problems in the United States. People that run from problems instead of trying to solve problems are cowards, pure and simple. One thing I can tell you, however. If everyone with a grievence like this moves to Canada, Canada will fall apart due to the sudden influence of selfish, illogical cowards who do not understand what freedom really means, and the rest of us left in the United States will be very happy because we'll no longer have to pick up the slack in taxes and general productivity that these cowards cause.

One more thing. Forcing people who make lots of money to give their money to poor people in the form of tax refunds and credits is not freedom. It's the very opposite, and please mention that to anyone who says they want to move to Canada to be free.

I used to have some respect for Democrats. Hell, I used to consider myself one. The problem is none of the party leaders or their condidates for President ahve said a single substansive thing about the direction they want to take this country. Everything they do is in reaction to Bush. Bush leads, they go the other way. If they read The Fountainhead, they'd see that their behavior is allowing the Republican party to control their actions. I'm not going to change my vote because some random Democrat that has never done a thing for this country suddenly says, "Bush is a bad man. Bush is a liar. Bush said , and even though what he said was not a lie, if you cut out this word, it becomes a lie, so Bush is a liar." I don't worship at the altar of Bush, and I disagree wholeheartedly with him on many, maybe even most, domestic issues, but I feel he has been the type of leader we need right now in foreign issues. He's not afraid to stand up to the rest of the world and say, "This injustice must stop!" He's also not afraid to take Israel's side as a fellow victim of terrorism, instead of kowtowing the Arab world.

If the Democrats want a hope to win the next election, they need to stop attacking the right, and start making themselves look good. Show some leadership and conviction, make a campaign positive, not negative. The last thing the American people want to hear after 3 years of post-dot.com recession is more negatives. We want optimisim, strong leadership, and hope for the future. We don't want to hear, "Everything sucks, kill the Republicans."

I learned another valuable lesson in my recent reread of The Fountainhead. I had a friend who said something to me that really hurt me, and made me seriously dislike her. For almost a year I avoided her, and when her name was brought up in conversation, I made sure to relate the pain she caused me in order to turn others against her. I realized soon after it all began that trashing her to others made me just as bad, so I stopped that, but continued the avoidance. After reading The Fountainhead I realized that by disliking her and avoiding her, I was enslaving myself to her. I was letting her control my actions. I decided the proper course should be to just not give a damn about her. Why should I care positively or negatively about someone whom I no longer respect? I went out to play trivia the other night and she was there. I was friendly to her, though not overly so, and loyal to my own integrity. Instead of dwelling on her insult to me, I just do not think about her or it, because nothing she says or does matters to me anymore. She no longer has any control over me, and I feel the stronger for it.

I'm not sure if I have any loyal readers anymore since my one month hiatus, but if I do, they seem to share a lot fo my opinions. I haven't gotten any hate mail, at any rate (you can send those to benskott@hotmail.com). So to all those loyal readers, I give a reading recomendation: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, both monoliths of paper written by Ayn Rand, the inspiration behind Objectivism. Some call Ayn Rand naive and unrealisitic. Those people miss the point. She was never trying to depict the world, or people, as is. She was using the literary technique of hyperbole to make her point.

What was her point, you ask? Well there are several aspects to her philosophies, but the one I am most interested in discussing is the idea of the few being punished for the lapses of the many. More and more I see this sort of thing happening, and it really ticks me off! Start with taxes. Some people don't make much money and if they pay taxes, they cannot afford to feed their families. So Congress passes bills reducing their tax liability, and eventually even giving them more money on top of getting the entirety of their taxes refunded. Who pays for this? People who make decent money, who contribute to society and try to make their own way in the world. To those poor people who cannot feed their families because the government is not stealing enough money from the wealthy to give to the poor, I say, "If you cannot afford to have a family, don't!" Having a family is a priviledge and if you can't handle it then you shouldn't have one. You certainly shouldn't try to shift your burdens to hard working citizens who are able to support their own families. There are lower middle class families out there that struggle to survive and are ineligible for government help becase they make too much money. Then there are poor people who have crappy jobs or no jobs at all, and they are doing just fine thanks to the forced redistributing of income. This is the face of EVIL! We are teaching our citizens that to be lazy and unproductive is a good thing, and we are punishing citizens for hard work and productivity.

I heard another example on the Clark Howard show today. Some guy called in mad because his time share maintanence bills went up. I don't remember the exact numbers, so I will make some up to drive home the point. He was paying $100 for those annual maintanence bills. It seems some of the time share holders weren't cleaning up at all, and in some cases damaging the condo. This group was enough of a majority to win a vote and raise the annual fee to $200, so that they wouldn't have to pay as individuals for the problems they caused. So this guy does everything he is supposed to, but gets punished because of the laziness of others. The lazy people get to cause havoc in the condo and only have to pay an extra $100 a year instead of $200 extra for each transgression. This too is EVIL!

Our society tends to reward lazy people who whine a lot, and punish those that attempt to follow the "American Dream" of the self-made man. This disturbind trend will only end when we begin to look up to those who are successful instead of being jealous and resentful.

Why are we wasting so much time arguing about the infamous 16 words in Bush's STste of the Union address? It's self-evident he didn't lie. He said that British had evidence. He didn't say that evidence was 100% correct, he didn't say the CIA agreed with it, he just said the British had evidence that Iraq tried to buy uranium cakes in Africa. Personally, I much prefer yellow cake with butter cream icing. Uranium cakes tend to make my skin fall off.

There are much more important events going on in the world than a month's old speech. Anyone notice the sudden build-up in hostilities between the Koreas? Going into Iraq was not a war, it was a slap-down. A war with North Korea would be a REAL war, with a lot of people dying. Considering the dictator of North Korea has already threatened to use nukes against Australia if they block any of his shipping, I'm scared. Saddam was a bad, bad man, but in reality he kept most of his badness within his borders, excepting that brief foray into Kuwait a decade ago. The North Korea guy (I gotta find out his name so I can stop calling him North Korea guy) scares the living shit ouot of me. He seems perfectly willing to kill millions of people outside his country, the United States be damned.

How did we let things get this far? Simple. Partisan politics hog-tied anyone, Bush, Clinton, Big Bird, from taking any real action. Now if we take action we might no longer be the only country to ever use a nuclear bomb against people. I don't know what will happen, or what we should do. At this point all I know is that the potentials have me frightened for the future, a lot more than anything that has gone on in the middle east worries me.

Whew.... Things finally slowed down at work a bit, so now I have a few minutes here and there to write.

You know who the most ignorant, thoughtless people in America are? They are the people that vote the party line. The people that say things like, "My grandfather voted Republican, my father voted Republican, and dammit, I'm gonna vote Republican." Issues change, parties change platforms, people change, soemtimes people even change parties. To make your alligience to a party, live or die, is just dumb. People should make decisions based on the issues at hand, not based on who else supports an issue, or what your grandfather voted 60 years ago. I don't know what my grandfather voted for 60 years ago, but I do know that 60 years ago the Democratic party was worthy of respect, and has since become a sad mockery of its old glory.

I took a test at www.politicalcompass.org. It told me that my politics lean slightly right, and that I'm practically an anarchist. Good thing I have that cook book, right?

I'm changing the name of my blog. Since it has become my outlet for political indignation, I've changed it to something more descriptive. You are now reading, "The Liberated Conservative." What's a liberated conservative, you might ask? I don't know what the dictionary definition is, but I consider it to be someone who would like to be a conservative, but cannot justify their positions on individual liberty. A liberated conservative finds Ayn Rand to be fascinating, and wants to be an objectivist, but cannot believe that enough individuals are strong enough of will to make her utopia a reality. How does a liberated conservative differ from a libertarian? I have a great reason, I just cannot remember what it was. I'll get back to you on that.