I’m living the hypocrisy so I can appreciate the tax benefits from being married… but I don’t understand why I deserve those tax benefits.  Regardless, not only taxes but health care, visitation, power of attorney, inheritance, citizenship… all of these are heavily influenced by your marital status.  The religious folks out there believe marriage is sacred… but it seems  but in the past month, I’ve had two friends reveal their marriage plans.  Neither was due to any dying desire to rush into marriage — it was simply for the health care.  A business transaction, nothing more.

It seems to me that if marriage is a sacred institution, which it should be, it should be removed from government supervision.  I’m not the only one who seems to think this way.  Replace it with a legally binding agreement unrelated to the religious ceremony known as marriage.  Marriage can then remain a bond between a husband and wife and the government can legislate w/o getting bogged down in the religious ramifications of laws.

Christina added “House” to our regular rotation of shows awhile back.  It’s pretty entertaining even though it tends to have the same general storyline every episode.   The show from this week was a bit different and seems to have been developed “on-the-fly”.   Kal Penn, aka Kumar, aka Taj, played Dr. Kutner in House up until this week when he unceremoniously shot himself.  No rhyme or reason as far as the plot of House goes but apparently the star of stoner movies has decided to take his talents elsewhere.   More specifically, to his new job as Associate Director in the Office of Public Liaison for the Obama administration.  I suppose it’s no weirder a job transition than Schwarzenegger’s path from body-builder to action star to Gubernator but it’s definitely odd.

In my opinion, House has struggled a bit recently.  The suicide episode from this week was almost completely devoid of any humor (fittingly, perhaps) but I don’t watch House for the drama; I watch it to catch House’s latest one-liners.  These have been few and far between recently and the removal of Kutner from House is not going to help.  Kutner was probably the most entertaining character other than House himself.

As far as elections go, I’ve never really understood how people can align themselves with a given party.  Or how one party is labeled as liberal and the other conservative when on many issues, the exact opposite seems to be true.  I think the Political Compass has it correct that the idea of “right” and “left” are much too broad and simplistic.

I don’t even know how to qualify myself and I definitely do not agree with any party on all issues.  Strategists from both parties repeatedly claim that most people who claim to be independents are not actually all that independent and tend to vote a given party most of the time anyway.  If that’s true, I suppose I’m the exception as I truly have no interest in rubber-stamping any party for any position in any election.

I have taken numerous tests to see how I line up with various candidates (such as glassbooth.org).  I think the most interesting thing about those tests is to see the issues I do NOT agree with for each candidate.  I really don’t see how anyone can find a candidate that they agree with on all issues.  Blind devotion to a given party just seems bizarre to me.

I live in northern Virginia (Nova), an extremely dense metro area outside of Washington DC.  Northern Virginia is heavily populated by basically two types of people: those who work for the government and those in the high tech industry.  Not surprisingly, as both of these typically Democrat-leaning groups have grown (quite dramatically), the area has become more and more Democrat-leaning in general.  Four of the counties in the Northern Virginia area have been in the top 15 fastest growing counties each year for the past 5-10 years.  Since the growth in this area greatly exceeds the growth in the rest of Virginia, the state in turn has also turned more and more Democratic.  Five of the last seven governors have been Democrats and Mark Warner, a former Governor looks set to beat another former Governor, Jim Gilmore, for the Senate seat.  That would put both Senate seats in the Democrats hands.

That said, even though Virginia still hasn’t gone Republican for so long in the presidential race, many pundits are predicting Virginia to go for Obama.  This is highly dependent on how strongly he wins in Northern Virginia.  From this, I decided to perform my highly scientific and foolproof research experiment: I would simply count the number of signs, bumper stickers, etc, on my way home from work today to pick up Christina at the VRE, on my way out to dinner, and finally on the way home.

I only had one rule:  A single home only counts as one vote, regardless of how many signs they have out front.  One person, one vote.  I had a few interesting observations: Neighbors seemed to clump together and support a certain candidate.   One corner would have all McCain, the next all Obama.  Do these people move around together?  In McCain’s favor, I came across a house that had signs for all Democratic candidates for the state positions but surprisingly, a McCain For President sign.  He’s obviously convinced one Democrat to vote for him.  More humorously, Obama has at least one support who decided their whole house needed to be decorated in Obamania.  Banners hung out of every window while signs littered the lawn — that’s the kind of enthusiasm Obama has to love.  And the neighbors probably hate.  

All in all, I was actually a bit surprised at the results.  With all the talk about how Obama looks set to “turn Virginia blue”, the signs favored him by only 45 to 35.  I’ll be curious to see how my results stack up with the actual results from the election.

We are borrowing money from China, to buy oil from the Middle East, so we can burn it in ways that destroys our future.

– Al Gore

I already mentioned that I can’t believe two nations could fight a modern conflict using the incredibly powerful weapons in use today.  Just as amazing, and probably stupid, are the journalists who cover these conflicts.  They sit in the middle of a war zone and assume their journalist credentials will protect them from bullets and bombs.  While we are given an unprecedented view of battles on TV that is disturbingly captivating, I simply can’t imagine what makes these journalists go through what they do.