Spring Into Speculatron: Saturday Political Soap Box 103

It's a been a difficult time.  Losing a close friend.  Struggling to concentrate on the most difficult weeks of tax season.  Reaching my fill mark listening to the nattering negative nabobs dissing the progress this country has made, and deriding the most successful American President in my life time.

I've had it with dismissals of  global warming every time the ever changing increasingly unstable weather pattern brings a little chill.  To clear it up, we who believe, we need to stop using global warming and climate change as if they're interchangeable.  They're not.  Climate change is an EFFECT of global warming, not something independent of it.  Global temperatures are clearly rising, and yes, the cause is MAN MADE, and yes, it may be too late to do more than try to mitigate it, but that does not mean we shouldn't try.  I don't want to explain to my grandchildren and great grandchildren that we didn't even try.  Enough, Ozstriches, enough!

Speculatron on Global Warming:  It's real, it's rapidly becoming irreversible, and we will soon be confronted with getting out of our partisan boxes and dealing with it in a united and communitarian fashion, or descend into bitter, horrible resource wars that will rip civilization apart..

I've had it with attacks on Obamacare.  Yes, it's not perfect.  And you don't know how aggravating it is until you've tried to do a bunch of tax returns.  BUT all the solutions lie to the LEFT of the Affordable Care Act, not to the right.  I've had it up to HERE with all the people who complain and whine and don't seem to give two shakes about the uninsured, the under-insured, and those who will be left out and vulnerable if we go back to before.  And make no mistake.  The Republicans have NO solutions, and we plunge back into the abyss, worse than before.

Speculatron on Obamacare:  Soon, some states somewhere will move to what we really need...single payer universal health care.  It may be California.  It may be Vermont.  I pray that it happens soon.  And if the Supreme Court sides with the most without merit case they've ever been presented with, and destroy the foundations of the Affordable Care Act. then it will be the last major victory the right wing extremists ever have.  The backlash will create solid progressive majorities by 2020.  We will junk the remnants of Obamacare and adopt what every other civilized, industrialized nation on the face of the Earth has - universal health care.  Medicaid for all, forever and ever, AMEN!

I'm sick and tired of all the attacks on Civil Rights - whether it's pitifully moronic cries of reverse racism, treating gays as if they were sinners, chipping away more and more at basic voting rights, our double standered policing and justice system, and so much more.  I have seen up close and personal of what damage and harm limiting the rights of loving gay couples can do.  And as a devoted Christian, I firmly believe with all my heart and soul that it is now more anti-Christian and damaging to stand against gays (and the whole LGBT community) than it is to embrace it.  Can gays be sinners?  Like all of us, yes.  But being gay does NOT make you a sinner.  It...just...makes...you....gay.

Speculatron on Civil Rights:  You're losing this, my resistant, narrow-minded friends.  America is a melting pot, and it will soon melt all your bigotry away,  And if not, you will look more and more out of touch.  And for those clinging to homosexuality as a sin - reread the scriptures.  Stop looking at the TREES and look at the whole FOREST.  If you think the main theme of the Bible is hatred and exclusion and abominations and a whole bunch of arbitrary rules that make about as much sense as not stepping on cracks to avoid breaking your mother's back, than you really need to improve your reading skills.

Well, I could go on and on, but I will set aside all the feelings of exhaustion and slamming against the brick walls around here, and move onto what all the speculatrons get to, which is who will be the next President of the United States.

Speculatron Presidential Over-card:

Well, here it is.

Clinton vs. Bush

Sigh.

Good thing we rejected all that royalty stuff, eh?

A double dip of Clinton, or a triple dip of Bush.

All the big money is consolidating behind these two.  And in these post Citizen United days, money talks and democracy walks.  It is not what is inevitable, but it is what is most probable.

Events may effect this one way or another, but I think the odds favor Hilary Clinton.  We are way overdue for a female President, and she is pragmatic and qualified.

Their Veeps?  Hilary - closing my eyes and taking a stab I would say Virginia's Jim Webb, or Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown.  Jeb - oh, hell.  I don't know.  Republicans are...well, not always sane.  Push me to the wall, and I would guess Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.


Speculatron Presidential Under-card:

Republicans are actually easier, for some reason.  My under-card is Ohio Governor John Kasich as the Presidential nominee and New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte as Vice President.  I'll explain why in more detail in another post, but just remember, you heard it here first.

I'm less sure of what the Democrats will do if they do not run Hilary.  Joe Biden is by far the most qualified person on the planet to be President (with the possible exception of Al Gore), but he will not be the nominee.  So I'm just, for right now, gonna go for who I want most to be President of the United States.  And that's Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren.  I'm not sure who she would pick as Vice President.  Sherrod Brown and Jim Webb come to mind again.

There is a great possibility, under both over and under-card scenarios, that one or more factions will break away and run as third and even fourth parties.  That could be the Libertarians (led by Rand Paul and his Ayn Rand crazies), The Christian Dominionists (led by Huckabee and/or Ted Cruz), and less likely, my own club, the True Progressives (led by Bernie Sanders).

Sooo...

Kasich vs. Warren vs.  ???


So thanks for your patience.  I would like to say this helped and was a good cathartic release for me.

But I don't know.

I just don't know.

Ask me again in 2020.