Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Why Hillary Clinton Needs To Get Out Publicly On This Issue

We have barely heard a single peep from the presumed nominee of the 2016 Democratic Presidential Nominee, the one, the only (with emphasis), Hillary Clinton. There is only one of you Hillary, and no amount of punditry is going to give us a better sense of you at this point.

I'm afraid your free publicity on TV has hit the point of diminishing returns. We are now being confronted with a STRONG case (especially to a tech savvy political youth) that Hillary isn't making the best efforts she can in every detail of her life. The problem is, with the highly cynical republican marketing machine, FOX, (not to mention the internet analogs like Breitbart and Glenn Beck... there is a place called the Breitbart mansion... chills.)

Hillary's pros do seem to outweigh the GROWING cons, however, one doesn't need as many eggs in the con basket, just one seed to plant in the mind of the public the image of a woman who is just not up to snuff in this current moment to be president.

Keep in context, though, that there is NO ONE on the GOP side that doesn't absolutely beat her in terms of TECH ISSUES. Jeb Bush is IMHO the "Mitt Romney of 2016", that is to say, Jeb Bush will absolutely be the nominee once political tools and characters like Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul are sifted out with their various scandals (and possible indictments).

For example, we can say with almost certainty that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted before 2016. We, however, cannot say the same for Christie or Walker (at the very least, Christie faces his top aides most certainly being indicted). Rick Perry is BEING indicted.

I'm not saying that Hillary won't swiftly move past all of these set backs. However, what I am saying is that I am increasingly annoyed with Hillary's holier than thou absence especially amidst the increased scrutiny. My solution:

GET PUBLIC ON THIS ISSUE HILLARY. 

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Why Scott Walker Will Not Be The Nominee in 2016

The latest issue of Time lays out the field for the 2015/2016 GOP primary scene and it, to say the least, should be very encouraging to Hillary Clinton. I thought I'd make a series of posts on why there is absolutely no chance ANY of the potential GOP contenders will be nominated president. If there didn't absolutely have to be a winner, I might suspect the GOP wouldn't have a nominee period.

I might as well start with the current "front runner." (Keep in mind that being the front runner is no indication of winning in the GOP primaries; Michele Bachmann was a front runner at one time.) Walker is loathed universally on the left, by Wisconsin universities, by unions,  and even "literally" by The Dropkick Murphys. He is also a male pattern baldness denier.

When he was running for re-election (a third time in four years - funny how that works), he told a Wisconsin cartoonist that his bald spot came from banging his head on a cabinet:

Walker went on to say he was fixing something in the kitchen — he doesn't say when — and hit his head on the cabinet. His wife, Tonette, repeatedly urged him to see a doctor, and when he finally did he was told his head would not be growing hair anymore in that area. He said Tonette cited this as proof that it's best to listen to your wife.
Aside from the fact that, if you know absolutely anything about balding, Walker's story is completely untrue, this was just frankly weird. This managed to garner Walker some of his worst press in the 2014 election. It's one thing to have such ripe, and easy to point to situations of Walker's absurd line of thinking, but Walker also has plenty of enemies who probably wouldn't mind letting the public know about.

Walker has cultivated a large and spirited following of detractors who will most likely not let us forget the highly contentious and publicized 2011 protests in the Wisconsin capital or the subsequent recall.

Walker has recently been seen boasting about winning the governorship three times in the last four years. While that might be true, let's not forget that the second time was due to a recall election of the governor. Walker tried to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights. Needless to say, Walker made plenty of enemies in the process.

He's got a target on his back the size of a football field.

Perhaps most ominous of all are the looming investigations and potential indictments. Regardless of whether or not there is actually ever an indictment, Walker's got some obvious skeletons in the closet. The investigation into whether his campaign for election in 2010 illegally coordinated with conservative groups was recently dealt a harsh judgment. However, even with that judgment, which prohibits the prosectors from investigating into some of Walker's campaign offenses related to advertising, Walker still has a ton of rumblings about illicit behavior.

Mitt Romney was plagued by his questionable ethics in 2012. He frequently flip-flopped, often appearing to change his positions (Before it was Obamacare, it was Romneycare) on the map. It's very arguable that ethics investigations would be much more haunting than a change in positions on things like abortion, stem-cell research, Ronald Reagen, etc. etc. etc. At least those flip flops appeared to fall easily in line with his party's base. As a matter of fact, Romney's questionable ethics when it came to his run at Bain Capital played quite well into the image that Romney was out of touch with Americans (he was attacked by former employees of company's purchased by Bain, who found themselves unemployed and without health insurance). Walker in this sense, has managed to anger a very similar sect, namely the middle class, of Wisconsin's population, making it easy to show a disconnect with Walker and the middle class.

Walker is visually nowhere near as appealing as someone like Barack Obama, and nowhere nearly as respected as someone like Hilary Clinton. As it stands, before the intense scrutiney that comes along with being a front runner, Clinton is crushing walker in every poll.



Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Moving On from MoveOn.Org


Dear todd schultz,You've been permanently unsubscribed from the MoveOn list -- if you take no more action, this'll be the last email you get from us. But please don't go!MoveOn gets its power from its members -- we're just 7 million people working together to change the world. But we know some folks are too busy to follow every last email.So, we've developed a once-weekly newsletter to keep those folks informed. We'll only send you the most critical messages, and we won't email you more than once a week in any case. Want to sign up? Just click here:http://www.moveon.org/subscrip/join_one.html?id=65331-20000974-0gqz58xAnd if you didn't mean to unsubscribe in the first place (we hope so!), you can re-join the full list at:http://www.moveon.org/subscrip/i.html?id=65331-20000974-0gqz58xThanks for everything you've done as part of MoveOn,--Justin Ruben and the MoveOn team.

Dear MoveOn.org, 

    Thank you for flooding my inbox with fake emails from some of Hollywood's biggest stars and D.C.'s biggest politicians. It's been a pleasure having you ask me for money two or three times a day for what has felt like years. I'm guess I should say sorry as I wasn't able to donate a single penny to you. No, in all that time you told me you needed my money to pay for the most pressing social issues in the country, I haven't been able to find a  job. I think you talked about unemployment once or twice? Hey, seeing as how you've got 7 million people that you're also spamming on two or three times a day, can you ask if they'll pay my overdue parking tickets? I could really use a kickstarter to pay off some of these doctor bills. And that credit card debt! Shit... I wish I could move on from that.

 But alas, MoveOn.org, it is you from whom I must move on from. (I'll bet you didn't see that one coming! lol jk jk) Anyway, if you could send me a few grand as a consolation, that would be much appreciated. 
So long,
Todd

5 Reasons Why People Hate Millenials

1) We write like we're gurus, experts, or know-it-all's - Truth be told, every blog out there, from the high-ranking to the low ranking - has a stench of "I know better than you" reeking from here to high heaven. I don't think millenials are alone in this. Linked In seemingly pays assbitches like Ariana Huffington to expound on her experiences... which will probably not be anything like yours... unless you marry a rich closet case and rip off writers...

Check out Penelope Trunk... Who's probably closer to Gen X/ Baby Boomer status. Her whole site is devoted to how awesome she is and how she knows best.

2) We call ourselves Gurus

Having a blog doesn't make you a guru. It makes you somebody with a blog.

3) We say inapporpriate things on Twitter and Facebook

When's the last time you tweeted something about your dinner? How about a curse word? How about your opinion of your parents? Or your boss?

They all hate you, by the way.

4) We don't finish what we start.

But who does?

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

If I Hear One More Baby Boomer Call Me Entitled...

To those of you in your forties, fifties, and anything older than that, I ask you once, politely, please consider what it means when you call an entire generation "entitled."

It's completely ironic to hear an older generation, a generation which invariably raised the next generations (that's kind of how it works), call millenials lazy, entitled brats. The fact is that the baby-boomers, many of whom were our parents, mentors, teachers, and existed elsewhere within the peripheries of our lives.

It was they who suggested we work hard in school. It was them who decided for us that we would attend a four-year school.

It was within the framework of these demands that we had to figure things out... However, what we figured out was that complete lack of forethought that was put into the demands placed on us. I can vividly remember thinking about the logistics of moving out on one's own. What was it like to pay all of your own bills? How much did it cost to live?

This is a picture of me just not getting it.
Growing up in the white-bread world of the San Fernando Valley, I couldn't shake the feeling that they were hiding something from us kids. Watching two adults fight over who pays the bill for dinner always confounded my childhood self. It's not to say that I haven't, in my own brief adulthood felt the urge to pay, but my question is: what is a kid supposd to think:

Obviously if I can't pay, someone will pay for me. Or, there's definitely enough to go around.

My, oh my, how the truth shocked me.

After the painful realization, sometime during college, that things didn't have to work themselves out. That my attention was required, I realized, too, that there was no beaten path. That the beaten path that existed was being crowded by the ever-increasing pool of applicants.

Still, during the mid 2000's, banks were encouraging debt like it was their job. You can pay it off slowly. Oh crap, the entire country is paying off their debt way too slowly turned to, they're not paying it off at all.

At some point, I realized there wasn't much difference between the older generations and the younger ones. Not anymore. Everyone seemed volatile... What seemed to buffer oneself was their contacts. I started seeing less qualified people form an army against the millenials. My sister who didn't go to college had a great job. Contacts. It's all about knowing people, and knowing how to know people.

It was the M.O. of the baby-boomer to hide these statistics. The stench of pride in themselves, of inherited pride, to varying degrees, makes me sick. The same generation who propagated the value of truth, and who told nothing of the sort.

It's up to our generation, Millenials, to not repeat the mistakes of the past. To those who millenials bold enough to be having children: Tell them the truth. A culture of lies, leads to a clueless culture. To those baby boomers, and Gen X'ers who have teenagers, tell them the truth about life. Tell them to start thinking about what they want to do. Tell them to pay attention to what they do. Make sure they take care of their health, and make sure they take care of their teeth (the dentist is a bitch and a half... tell them that!)

And if one more Baby Boomer calls me entitled, I'm going to ask them to clarify... definitely not the strong suit of the baby boomers... you know, that whole articulation thing.



Monday, April 1, 2013

The Word 'Evolved' Is Bull-Shit

Obama did it. Hillary did it, too. Rob Portman did it. Hell, practically every political figure in history has done it.

I'm talking about evolving.
Squirtle evolves into Wartotle.


Matt Salmon, a republican congressman from Arizona, says that is gay son has not "evolved" him to being in support for gay marriage.

“It doesn’t mean I don’t have respect, it doesn’t mean that I don’t sympathize with some of the issues. It just means I haven’t evolved to that station,” he said. “Rob Portman apparently has.”

What I don't get here is the usage of the word 'evolved'. Evolved implies that you've grown, become wiser, older... the word evolve, in other words, doesn't simply mean to change, but to grow, and move forward.

At least if you haven't yet evolved somewhere, the thought is that one day you will.

Let's just drop the word evolve in political discussions, especially around gay marriage. It's nothing but a silly cliche. Let's call it like we see it guys. No more evolving, politicians.

Is transparency in political office an absolute impossibility. Even Obama had to evolve backwards to say he didn't support same-sex marriage to win the 2008 election.

If Obama did it so successfully (Hillary also did it that year, though I'm not sure she's on the record saying she supported same-sex marriage as explicitly as Obama), then does that justify every Republican saying it?

Is this the fine line between acceptable truth and acceptable lies? Gay marriage? Really? People are so quick to throw minorities under the bus.