I’m sitting here doing my normal morning ritual of checking email while I sip on a hot cup of tea. The tv is on in the other room and I can hear it, but I’m not listening. Something catches my attention and I look over and focus. “Obama and his liberal congress are spending $1 billion an hour of YOUR MONEY!”, it’s yelling at me. If I can find the vid, I’ll edit and embed it here so you can enjoy this glorious commercial.
ok. edit.. here is the vid..

This guy has been president for a couple days past 2 months. ALL the republicans have done since the day he was elected is bad mouth this guy. They don’t like his ideas, the directions he’s taking the country and all they do is act like a couple of spoiled children who just experienced their first spanking.

You guys had 8 years to screw things up so incredibly bad, but when the country finally gets fed up and gives control to the other side, in the hopes that they can unscrew us, you all throw a fit.. the likes of which I’ve never seen anyone over the age of 3 partake in!

Instead of attacking the other side, while offering no viable alternatives of your own, why don’t you guys go circle the wagons, hire some new PR firms and figure out where you lost touch with the people you go to washington to serve.

Americans want you to follow the constitution, not shred it at every turn. They want the right to free speech. Period. No strings attached. “I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!”

Crying heart liberals aside, we want the right to bear arms. There is NO reason why a guy who enjoys taking his sons into the woods to hunt, should be denied that pleasure. There should be no limitations placed on his ability to obtain hunting rifles and the ammunition for them. His ability to obtain a machine gun, I’m not so much behind because if you need a machine gun, to hunt… sorry buddy, you ain’t much of a hunter! But, the fact remains, that even if you ban Joe Q public’s access to buying a machine gun, the people who want to use them for nefarious reasons will find a way to obtain them anyway.

Well, anyway. I’m not going to map out a new plan for you. I’ll let you guys do that all by yourselves. Just sit down and take a look around. The US isn’t super left or super right. We are centrist.

We want a balance of things. Not all one side or the other. All we want is to raise a family, make a good living and live a good life. It’s really not asking for much, but lately, It has felt like that’s not what our gov’t wants for us.

I’ll let you in on a little hint, We know things are bad. None of us want to sit and watch anti-president commercials all day long on top of wondering where the mortgage payment is coming from. There won’t be another election for 4 years, so sit down and zip it. Your guy lost. It’s just sour grapes now and it’s making you look bad.

Get your act together and find a real leader for your party. Not Sarah Palin, Not Bobbi Jindal. These people are not going to fire up your base. You need someone with charisma to bring your message to the people and you need a message that makes sense. Hate doesn’t work.

With spring comes many things. Warmer temperatures, flowers, birds, oh yeah and spring flooding in the mid west.

Year after year I’m bombarded with images of homes submerged in water to their roof. People filling sandbags and crying on tv about how horrible this is.

Ok. Call me heartless here, but if I got flooded out even once. I’d be packing up and moving. There is NO WAY I’d be dealing with this year after year. Why there are so many people who still live so close to these rivers that flood like clock work, I just will never be able to wrap my head around.

Obviously I feel bad that they have their lives disrupted in this way, but if every time you walk through a door way, you hit your head on the jam, wouldn’t you learn to duck? Come on people. Use the brains god gave you! MOVE!

So anyway… a couple days back I wrote about how prison labor will be the new, cheap way to get things done. Imagine my surprise when I’m watching an associated press clip about the flooding and I see how they are using prisoners to help fill sand bags and protect towns from the rising river.

I guess I’m more in tune with what’s coming than I realized!

Today it’s sandbags and tomorrow it will be the toys your kids play with!

My significant other’s grandmother died last week. This meant attending a wake and funeral filled with his relatives. This isn’t a bad thing mind you, it just exposed me to some different people.  One of them is a correctional officer. That’s just a fancy way of saying she works in a prison.

When I asked her why she chose that line of work, I was told,”I’m a high school graduate and it pays $20 an hr. Where else am I going to work where I will make that kind of money?”

At first, I began thinking about how we have several prisons in this general area. They are a huge employer and whenever there’s any talk of a new one opening everyone in the area gets their panties tingling with excitement.

I personally could never figure this out. Think about it this way. Yes. Now there are jobs, BUT, we live in a quiet town in the middle of Pennsylvania. The majority of the crime we had was a drunk guy beating his wife, a guy in front of a bar, or passing out on the sidewalk.

In the last 10 yrs it’s gone from that to where we actually had a gang fight a few towns over on saturday. The paper claimed they were in the “bloods”. Now, why the hell would the “bloods” be out in redneckville? Oooooooooooooh yeah! They got put in jail out here. They brought out the wife and little childrens and realized, hey, it’s cheaper to live. It’s easy to get on public assistance, get a decent HUD home, ect. When I get out, I can deal drugs through my old connections and make a killing. If that doesn’t work out, I can just rob all these old people who don’t even lock there doors! This must be eutopia!

I see bad things for this area in 10 yrs it’s going to be a war zone out there. From mayberry to the inner city.

There used to be lots of industry around. Dress shops, factories, small businesses… but they’ve all closed. The dress shops are in india now, the factories are in china or mexico, walmart squashed the small businesses.  So all that’s left is prisons..

It also got me thinking about how I keep hearing how the US has the highest percentage of it’s people incarcerated. Something like 1 in 100 people are currently behind bars.  2.3 million people were in our prison system at the end of 2007.

It’s nothing new for non-violent prisoners to be used to do unpleasant tasks such as cleaning up the trash on the side of the road. In NJ as well as PA I’ve driven past the guys in the orange jumpsuits with gloves and a trash bag. It’s really awesome that someone who the tax payers are paying to house, clothe and feed can do something like tidy up the back roads and the highways. Right? For whatever reason, people are slobs and think the world is their garbage can. But that’s a blog for another day.

This brings me to the fact that the countries we’ve exploited for their cheap labor over the past few yrs, aren’t as cheap anymore. With our tanking dollar and the worldwide recession, it doesn’t save a company as much money to use outsourced labor as it used to.

Well, where else will you find people who are just sitting around idle to work cheap for you? Oh wait! I know where there are 2.3 million!

Our growing budget deficits will have people screaming about how we spend way to much money on housing prisoners and that they need to start “giving back”.

Unemployment brings more crime, so there will be even more people going to jail. Police will be screaming that they need better funding, more officers to deal with the growing crime problem. The people around here are mostly older. Living on SSI or whatever pensions they might happen to have. They can barely afford to pay all the taxes they pay now. There’s only so far you can stretch a rubber band before it snaps.

A new form of revenue must be found! Wait.. what about Corporate Prison Sponsorship??

Can you picture it? “Sneaker” correctional institution, “Pear” Penitentiary.. they’ll all wear orange jumpsuits with a company logo on it, sleep in a prison cell and during the day they’ll make cheap products for corporations that they’ll sell to rich and middle class people in china and india.

The entire thing will be subsidized by the corporate sponsor. They supply the money, you supply the labor and finished products. Correctional officers become your new “masters” and you become the new “slave”.

You BETTER make 50 pairs of shoes today!

How many tv specials have you seen about how “good” prisoners have it? They just sit around lifting weights, eating, reading and sleeping. It’s like a vacation for them on our dime! Now they can make your next gucci purse. Your new shower curtain!

Instead of made in china, everything you buy is going to say.. Made In Prison!