The fight over C and D really revealed the great philosophical divide between the “small government” folks and everyone else. I believe most Coloradoans saw TABOR as a means of forcing the government to be careful with our tax dollars. Now, most of us wonder whether, with TABOR in place, we can pay for schools and roads and important social programs.

The small government crowd didn’t and doesn’t want government involved in those things in the first place. The draconian effects of the “ratchet-down” mechanism that occurred because of our recession, though surprising to the rest of us, were not an oversight. They were part of an intentional strategy to achieve small-government policy objectives that would have been impossible to achieve directly.

Found an interesting blog: Flying Saucer 17.

October, though nearly over, is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It also happens to be National Gay & Lesbian History Month, Talk About Prescriptions Month, Celebrate Sun Dried Tomatoes Month, and Toilet Tank Repair Month. (At my house, it’s always Toilet Tank Repair Month.)

In fact, there are dozens of other noble (cough) causes of which you are supposed to be aware, right now: List. How does anyone sleep at night?

In the same spirit, I have a couple of additional causes you should be aware of, during November.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve entered the bathroom stall at work and found the seat of the toilet covered in coffee-laced urine. Now I’m not talking about some nasty, cracked, U-shaped piece of whitewashed plywood that’s connected by a rusty nail to a toilet bowl located in a shed behind a Kum ‘N’ Go in eastern Arizona. I’m talking about a toilet seat in an otherwise-immaculate corporate bathroom.

I don’t get it. It’s got !@$%! hinges for crying out loud. How hard is it for you to grab a piece of toilet paper and lift the seat? And if you do pee all over the seat, can’t you take a wad of toilet paper and wipe it up?

You know what? I don’t care how nice you are, or whether you adopt stray puppies by the dumpster-full. If you leave a mess on the toilet seat for next poor bastard to clean up or sit on, you are an evil person. You’re the sort of person who, if you were a corporate CEO, would dump toxic waste in a river. If you were the leader of a country, you’d invade Poland.

Therefore, I hereby declare November to be … drum roll, please … Don’t Leave Your Bodily Fluids On The Damn Toilet Seat Awareness Month. I’ve even designed a rubber bracelet for everyone to wear. It symbolizes how, if we band together, we can overcome. I hope you’ll choose to wear one. If I sell enough of them, I’ll buy a porta-potty for my cubicle.

But wait! There’s more!

I’m not a morning person. Somehow, Monday through Friday, my brain stem - the part of the brain which scientists say we inherited from our reptilian ancestors - drags my butt out of bed, drives to work, and gets me to the break room. If I get there, and there’s no coffee, it’s going to be a bad, bad day. It means that some selfish twit took the last few drops but thinks that his or her time is far too precious to make the next batch.

Ok. I’ll admit. I’ve done it once or twice. But both times I was being chased by corporate security, and I still grieve for what I was forced to do.

That’s why November is also Refill The Freakin’ Coffee Pot Month. You can show your support for this important cause by placing this ribbon on the back of your car, with pride.

It’s sad that we live in a world with evil. These causes may seem trivial, but they’re not. Remember that how a person behaves with the small things is how he or she will behave with the big things, only more so. Today it’s a dirty toilet seat, or an empty coffee pot. Tomorrow it may be your rivers, your country, even your life.

Thank you. And May God Bless America. I’ll be going, now.

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Trackback!

I’m sitting in bed with my wife, blogging. My cat is eating my ice cream, which is one of the reasons I have intestinal parasites.

Speaking of parasites, I’m very put out by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said this week that Israel should be wiped from the map.

I think we should all be encouraged by the unanimous and strong denunciations of this statement by the rest of the Islamic world, except that they haven’t said a damn thing.

Like most unpatriotic non-Republicans, I’m actually in favor of trying to get along with everyone, as long as they’re interested in doing the same. But this is over the top. The Muslim world is really starting to piss me off. Oh, I know, the Christian world has done many terrible thing over the years. But we’ve also done a lot of good, too. We’ve brought universities, hospitals and Brittany Spears to other parts of the world for hundreds of years. Name one good thing that Muslims have given the rest of the world. Other than our system of numbers. And harem pants.

All I know is that the blogging community won’t sit quietly. Oh no. We will blog about this. We will say many nasty things about Mr. Ahmadiwhatever and his stupid backwards country. And they will be very, very sorry.

if ($support_bush) { set SENSE_OF_HUMOR on }

According to a top-secret plan being developed by the Bush administration, high ranking White House staffers intend to infiltrate al Qaeda in the hopes of leaking Osama bin Laden’s precise location to the press… “After all, leaking is the one thing we’re really good at.”

Read more …

I’ve started searching for other blogs, to see what’s out there. It’s incredible, really. Everyone has a blog. There are blogs about everything, including blogging. As with everything else I do, I feel like I’ve arrived rather late to the game. I just hope there’s still some beer and peanuts left.

Here’s the funniest one I’ve found, so far: SamanthaBurns.

The majority seem to be right-wing political blogs. Why is that? Blogs, Talk Radio, Ham Radio …. Congress …. The White House …. uh oh ….