They don't want the government involved in anything but just the essentials, like deciding who you should marry, how you should have sex, and how you sing a song:
Oh, say can you . . . sing?
And, more importantly, can you sing it the "right" way -- the way one Indiana lawmaker thinks the national anthem should be sung?
Sen. Vaneta Becker, R-Evansville, has introduced a bill that would set specific "performance standards" for singing and playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at any event sponsored by public schools and state universities. ...
The bill calls for schools to maintain audio recordings of all performances for two years and develop a procedure for dealing with complaints if a musician is alleged to have strayed from the approved lyrical or melodic guidelines.
This really is a "culture war" issue, I guess. But we can't just let people sing any way they want, can we? :)
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Bill, I wish you could find out just how many Americans would like a smaller government. I know the conservatives have a major hard on to make the federal government small, but is that something the American people want?
I wish I could find some statistics to see how many people actually want the things conservatives claim they want.
Jim, if you ask Americans whether they want "smaller government," I suspect that most will say yes. But it's a little different if you ask them what they actually want cut.
In general, they support where we actually spend the money (Social Security, Medicare, the military, roads, etc.). And polls show that we Americans have the most ridiculous ideas about how much we spend elsewhere, like on foreign aid (which is a tiny part of the federal budget).
This video clip by The Young Turks shows something very similar. In polls, Americans claim to be conservative (and they identify Barack Obama as being liberal). But when you ask us about specific issues, we Americans actually hold liberal opinions - more liberal than the leadership of the Democratic Party, in fact.
It's just that we've been taught, through the steady drumbeat of right-wing propaganda, that "big government" is bad, that "conservative" is good, that "liberal" is very bad,... all of these about labels, not about issues.
We Americans don't really want smaller government, since we value the things we get from government, but we think we do. And we say that we're "conservative," but we don't agree with today's conservatives about most issues.
Well, that's why the right-wing uses the tactics it does, because it knows that it doesn't have the American people behind it, not really.
I'll let George Carlin do the talking for me on this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6O3rKQfCF0
Go to 2:30 of the clip.
Yeah, Carlin is always pretty funny, Jeff. He gets almost as worked up as I do. :)
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