Gas prices are heading south, but I don’t hear anyone giving George Bush credit for that. After all, if people want to blame him when they go up, they should praise him when they go down. If that sounds retarded to you, it’s because it is.

As gas prices go down, I would like to point out that OPEC doesn’t like that. In an effort to make the price go back up they are cutting supply. Gasp! "You mean gas prices aren’t up to the Dick Cheney and all the evil Republicans?" I get sick and tired of the idiocy of the general public that attributes anything negative to the people in charge.

Aside from gas prices, the economy is another great example of how dumb people are. The ENTIRE time Bush has been in office I’ve had to listen to people complain that the economy is in a recession (when it’s not) and that everything sucks. I found an interesting poll over at Reuters that seems to contradict itself.

On October 18th, 47% of people think the job market is worse than three years ago, and 38% think it’s better. On October 16th, 76% thought the country was on the wrong track, and only 22% on the right track. Both of these make it sound like people think the country is in the toilet. The economy is worse, and everything is on the wrong track…right? Only 2 weeks earlier on October 2nd, 53% of people have a higher salary than 4 years ago, only 22% make less, and 25% make the same. Why doesn’t the fact that people individually are doing better translate into the economy doing better?

According to this poll, people that don’t like Bush are confused….

On your Household Financial Situation…among those saying they approve of the way Bush is handling his job, 99% say excellent, very good, or good. Among those saying they disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job, 53% say excellent, very good, or good and 46% say bad, very bad, or terrible.

-People that don’t like Bush think their personal financial situation is about 50 positive/50 negative.

On the National Economy…among those saying they approve of the way Bush is handling his job, 96% say excellent, very good, or good and 3% say bad, very bad, or terrible. Among those saying they disapprove of  the way Bush is handling his job, 89% say bad, very bad, or terrible and 10% say excellent, very good, or good.

-Whoa! People that don’t like Bush (who were 50/50 on their personal situation), almost 90% of them say the economy is bad!?!?

Yah statistics are boring, but they can sure tell a lot. Apparently to some, success in your own life has no effect on the economy. As long as George W. Bush is in charge the economy will suck. People, get your head out of the sand and stop blaming others.

Prop 83 - Sex Offenders. Sexually Violent Predators. Punishment, Residence Restrictions and Monitoring. Initiative Statute

My Summary: Sex offenders currently have to register with authorities and live between a quarter and a half-mile from a school. This law would expand the definition of some sexual offense felonies. Sexual offense felonies are more serious like rape and molestation, while a misdemeanor would be more like distributing lewd sexual materials. This law would require sex offenders guilty of a felony to wear a GPS tracking unit for the rest of their life and are barred from living within a minimum of 2000 ft of a school.

My Opinion: I have ZERO tolerance for law breakers. We don’t use the death penalty enough and we need to double the number of jails we have. That being said, the punishment against sex offenders couldn’t be strong enough. I think the living within a certain distance of a school is kinda lame, as if a person can’t walk to a school. The GPS costs are supposed to be offset by the criminal "if they are able to pay," haha. The added costs from keeping the scum of society away from the rest of us is well worth it.

Bottom Line: If you’re a pervert, say hello to an ankle bracelet.

I am voting YES on Prop 83.

2006 California Election Page

It’s almost election time here in California, and it was a lot of fun posting about and researching the propositions last time. I think Andrew started it last time, but I jumped on the bandwagon.

I’ll start by posting about the propositions, and if I have time, we’ll get to the people. Most of my information will be coming from the LA Times Proposition Summaries, the State Voter Guide, Tom McClintock’s Positions, and a letter the teacher’s union sent me.

To let you know where I stand (in case you’re thick as a brick and can’t tell), I’m very conservative. I’m technically a Republican, but I’m a conservative first and foremost (yes, there’s a difference). When it comes to propositions I will vote against them 99% of the time if they have ANYTHING to do with bonds and government bureacracy.

So I don’t have to explain it again, bonds are what bankrupted the state under Gray Davis. Instead of the state coming up with a budget they can live with, politicians like to put bonds on the ballot and run up our debt. The government should live within it’s means. It’s idiotic to pay for fundamental infrastructure with debt. Something that important to us as a state should be part of our yearly budget. Bonds also should only be used for projects that will still be around when it’s done being paid off. Nobody takes out a 30 year loan to buy a cell phone. You take out loans like that for a house that will still be around and useful in 30 years. Most proposition bonds though will be spent on day to day stuff that should be handled in a budget.

As for government bureacracy, most propositions do nothing more than make government bigger and more bloated. As a conservative, smaller government is something very important to me (see, there is a difference between Republicans and conservatives) . With these two key pieces of info to look for, on to the propositions!

Prop 1A – Transportation Funding Protection

My Summary: Taxes on gasoline are easily used for non-transportation projects. Under this proposition it would make borrowing money from this fund for non-transportation uses much more difficult.

My Opinion: I think taxes should have a specific purpose, and it makes sense that gas taxes should go to pay for transportation expenses. I don’t want some Senator with a pet project borrowing this money for something else I might not agree with. This prop probably won’t change much, but let’s use gas taxes to make the crowded roads better.

Bottom Line: Use gas taxes for the roads!

I am voting YES on Prop 1A.

Prop 1B – Highway Safety, Traffic Reduction, Air Quality, and Port Security Bond Act of 2006

My Summary: Roads are clogged, people don’t think the air is clean enough, and our ports need better security. This prop would sell almost $20 billion dollars in bonds to pay for stuff like better roads, upgrade school busses so they don’t stink, and make the ports safer.

My Opinion: I bet you can already guess my opinion because they used a four letter word….BOND! These bonds would end up costing the state another $20 billion dollars in interest ($40 billion total). This is why government is so ineffective. Instead of forcing state officials to make difficult choices about where money should go, tax payers just throw bond money at them, and then they don’t have to decide.

Bottom Line: Bonds are the devil.

I am voting NO on Prop 1B.

Prop 1C - Housing and Emergency Shelter Trust Fund Act of 2006

My Summary: I’ll cheat and give you the LA Times summary: "The measure would authorize $2.9 billion in bonds to build urban parks, provide low-interest loans and grants for affordable housing, farm-worker housing and homeless shelters."

My Opinion: I was getting nauseous reading this one. Not only are they bonds, but they’re for urban parks and farm worker housing. What the crap?! Who is wasting their time in Sacramento trying to find ways to spur farm worker housing? Stop screwing with the economy you (insert bad words here).

Bottom Line: Not only are bonds the devil, but also whichever moron wrote this prop.

I am voting NO on Prop 1C.

Prop 1D – Kindergarten – University Public Education Facilities Bond Act of 2006

My Summary: Bonds of $10 billion dollars would be sold to pay for various school related projects. Interest would cost another $10 billion dollars.

My Opinion: More bonds! Schools have waaaay too much money already. We pay for lunch for kids, we have millions of dollars earmarked for poor kids, and guess what? Our schools still suck. I don’t care if I had a bazillion dollars for my classroom, it wouldn’t matter. The students who receive no support at home, their parents are losers, or they don’t care about learning English…it won’t matter for them. It’s not about money! Stop throwing money at the education problem, it’s just making it worse.

Bottom Line: More money = less responsibility.

I am voting NO on Prop 1D.

Prop 1E - Disaster Preparedness and Flood Prevention Bond Act of 2006

My Summary: It sells $4 billion in bonds to help pay for levee improvements and flood control/prevention.

My Opinion: Tom McClintock said yes to this bond measure, so I really looked into it. While I’ll agree with him that it’s important to protect our water, it’s still ridiculous to pay for it with bonds. Some other stuff I read said there are 2,000 miles of levees to maintain, but this is only enough money for 25 miles.

Bottom Line: Again, if this is SO important, stop sending the morons next to my parents welfare checks and get on this important task of improving the levees.

I am voting NO on Prop 1E (Sorry Tom).

Sorry this post was so long, but I had to tackle all the "1" props or I’d never find the motivation again. I’m putting up a special 2006 California Election page to the right to keep track of all these posts. Bookmark it!

I just finished book 3 in the Dark Tower series. It’s a fun series so far with a lot of good sci-fi content but also some really great characters. I don’t want to say much about it because Kevin is also making his way through the series, but I think I’m ahead of him now. It’s interesting because book 1 was written in the 70′s, and book 3 was written in ’91. By the time I finish the series they will have spanned four different decades.

Before I move on to book 4 though I’ve checked out State of Emergency by Pat Buchanan. Hopefully this will be a good motivator for pre-election day postings. I’d also like to plug the local library where all these recent books have been checked out. The Dark Tower series might be worth buying, but I wasn’t about to spend $150+ on the hardbacks to find out. I’m hoping State of Emergency is also really good, but it’s probably not something I’ll go back and read in 10-20 years. The library is a great resource and money saver, and they even have a website!

The last week and a half I have been consumed with finding a better multimedia solution for us here at home. The previous setup consisted of an HDTV, an HD Tivo-like machine, and a DVD player capable of playing some Divx files. There were certain limitations and annoyances though that spurred me on to find a better setup. The HD recording box we have is cool, but it can only record one thing at a time. The DVD player was nice because it could play downloaded television shows encoded in Divx, but it could only play files that stuck to a specific standard, so it was a crapshoot. Add on to that I would have to run upstairs, make sure I had a blank dvd, burn it, and run back downstairs just to find out if it would play in the dvd player or not. All of those reasons made me start looking for a better solution.

At first I threw around the idea of making a media center type PC. Basically you make a computer, hook it up to your tv, and you can use it to watch stuff. A very flexible solution, but also very costly and technical. Instead of building something I decided to go for an inbetween solution called a media server. I ended up buying the Snazio Net Dvd Cinema HD player. This is a networked box that sits below my tv and plugs into my home network. I’m then able to browse files on my computer upstairs and playback videos, images, and mp3s straight over the network (no more running up and down stairs burning dvds). It also is much better at playing files than the old divx dvd player. Not only can it play a much wider range of files, but it can also play HD files (no more crap shooting).

In addition to this I bought a couple HDTV tuner cards and a large hard drive. I went with the Vbox DTA-150 because my brother is using one and I read some good reviews. With both of those cards in the PC upstairs I can record two additional HD programs (for a total of 3). Not only does that mean we don’t have to choose between shows, but I can also record shows I was previously downloading like Smallville (goodbye low quality divx rips, hello HD captures). Recording HD takes up a lot of hard drive space though, so I added another drive to accomodate. If you’re getting lost in the techie aspects of this post, this means I can record on the computer upstairs and watch on the TV downstairs. I’ll most likely be purchasing BeyondTV to do my recording and scheduling of programs. My brother really likes it, and it’s worked the best out of all the programs I’ve tried.

This solution ended up costing about $500, but that’s a far cry from the $1200 media pc I had priced out. A big thank you to Angelo, Andrew, and the.Rumor for their help. It feels good to tackle a problem and come up with a solution. The next problem I will surmount is that of world peace. Please give me a few days for a resolution to this problem.

And while I’m endangering the focus of this post, there is a new song by New Found Glory in the radio to the right. Enjoy.

Sorry for the absence of postings this week. They will return to normal very shortly.

Denise’s blog is broken. I think God got mad at her.

Heroes is so freaking cool. Here’s a website Angelo sent me that is also cool.

I’m planning on doing a proposition/voting guide series of posts pretty soon since we’ve only got a couple weeks to go, so look forward to that! Woo Hoo!

Hope everybody had a great weekend. Aside from seeing the Dodgers get swept, our weekend was pretty good. Just a couple words on the Dodgers to tide me over until the winter. The Mets are clearly a better team. From the bats in their lineup to the arms in their bullpen, they had us beat. The Dodgers should not resign Nomar next year, because James Loney is ready. The money saved from signing Nomar needs to be applied to a true home run bat either at third or the outfield. Drew is not a true homerun threat, and we really need someone that can hit 40 homeruns, not 20.

Most of my weekend was spent researching media players, which are little electronic devices you connect to your tv and they can playback media files like videos and mp3s. Unfortunately there are not very many options available, and of the ones there are, they all have problems. On Sunday I borrowed my Dad’s old Pentium 3-500 and I have it hooked up to the tv downstairs. It’s not powerful enough to playback HD quality video, but it will give me an idea if this is the route I want to go. This is called a HTPC (Home Theatre Personal Computer). You can hook up a remote, watch downloaded video files, record HDTV, play DVDs, and even upgrade it to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray in the future.

Today we have a student free day, which means us teachers are not free. We could be, but we’ve elected to go to work and get paid instead of stay at home and not get paid. Have a great Monday.

Free speech is alive and well here in America…as long as crazy liberal hippie douches don’t storm your stage and act like idiots. At Columbia University, Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist was forced off stage by a group of crazy college students storming the stage with physical violence and shouting that he was a racist. The guy at the end of the video makes a great point about how you never see conservatives doing this. Instead of running outside and punching the first liberal hippie douche that I see, instead I come on here and intellectually discuss my positions and use my brain. In case you are offended by my use of the phrase "liberal hippie douche," I’m just quoting a South Park episode (Angelo!). If you’ve never seen a liberal hippie douche, just watch this video.