I found this article http://t.news.msn.com/politics/why-mitt-romney-lost and thought it was worth the read.

The GOP has completely lost it and while this hijacking has been slowly taking place over the last twenty years, it has reach a point of either turning back toward the middle and dumping radicals/tea party idiots.

There is no place that the GOP can survive unless they return to the middle. No matter how much money the Koch brothers invest, radicalism eventually leads to the destruction of the country and the people. If that is what they want, then they should be considered enemies of the state.

This is an appeal to those not planning on voting. Please vote! When polled those who claim they are not voting, if they had to vote would vote Obama 3:2. You (the non-voter) are the biggest voting block. Go to the polls non-voters! 

"I can't promise you that your life will get better, easier under Barack Obama. I do think he cares and I know for sure that if the other guy is sitting in the Oval Office, I can guarantee you that not only will your life not get better, it will get much, much worse. Don't take my word for it. Just ask your parents what life was like before a 30-year pillage by the Republicans of the middle class. Your parents bought a house and eventually owned it outright. They weren't in debt. College was free. They bought a new car every 3 or 4 years. They took vacations and were home for dinner by 5 or 6 PM. They had a savings account in the bank. They didn't live in fear of not knowing if they'd even have a job next year.

That's all gone. I don't know if we can get it back, but I do know that Mr. Romney would love the chance to complete the final elimination of the middle class and the American Dream. " - Michael Moore

Read the entire appeal from Michael Moore to urge you to vote Obama.

I've been a member of Khan Academy for about five months now. I occasionally log on and watch a few videos to see if I can further my awareness on subjects which I have never been exposed to; most of which seem to be things about finance.

If you have not yet been to Khan Academy then I suggest you visit it. It's free and you get to keep track of what you learn and test yourself with quizzes.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

What is amazing about this project is how it got started. You can read a bit here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy

But even more interesting is how much money we (as Americans) spend on education but are one of the worst countries in the world for learning.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/one-man-one-computer-10-million-students-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/

Have we given up on stopping spam?

I have family out in Colorado and they all want to vote for Obama; all the kids and the wife and my brother. See, my brother is in the research industry. He specializes in discovering new cures for viruses. He travels the world trying to find new compounds and has actually been a part of a team which found a medicine which almost completely stops AIDs dead in its tracks.

From what I was told, my brother said that during the Clinton era he and his team were doing very good. They had plenty of money from the government and they were making good results. Then when Bush took over, funding was slashed by 80%. My brother had to let go of almost his entire staff. Twenty two student researchers, fourteen full time staff and two lab techs. He also couldn't travel as much to go to conferences or meet with doctors from other countries. His research was nearly at a stand still.

Then when Obama came back in to office, it was a complete reversal. My brother said that he doubled his staff and was even able to bring on extra people so he didn't have to travel as much. He was able to make new advances with the medicines he was working on and pulled off the shelf several projects for other viruses. Things were good again.

He said that in Colorado the students know who to vote for and so do the parents of those kids. The staff know who to vote for and so do their families. The entire research community in Colorado know that Obama is the only choice.

(on a side note) - Colorado is one of those states where the people voted for medicinal marijuana.

2012 brings us an election of tipping points on issues from Afghanistan to Wall Street regulation. Whoever wins next week will likely have a profound impact on many aspects of Americans' lives, including their pocketbooks.

I originally posted this a few days ago, but there was an error with the post. Try, try again...

Speaking to a Christian person I find myself looking back to a time before I became awakened. For decades I had been asleep half believing a story which is centuries old. The story was that human life was created by a mythical being which also created the Universe. There was no other possibility and I was not allowed to question what I was being told.

I grew up during a time of war. There was war on the television each evening and back then we didn’t have the twenty four hour news networks. Normally, as a child I would get up, clean my room, eat breakfast, get dressed, go to school, come home, do my homework, play outside, watch only two hours of television and then go to bed after dinner.

Darden Restaurants has gotten involved in politics. They claim they're testing an idea to reduce the amount of full time employees so they can avoid giving benefits that are required under Obamacare to full timers. Not only is their test unnecessary, it is presenting a dishonest viewpoint of how Obamacare works.

The Democrats (as usual) have done a horrible job explaining the benefits of Obamacare and answering the objections. While Obamacare isn't far reaching enough, it is abundantly better than the abundantly more expensive ER plan that Mitt Romney claims to back (even though he created an Obamacare-like plan in his state as Governor).

For companies like Darden that hope to reduce the amount of full time employees in an attempt to avoid giving benefits to full timers, they will be subject to a penalty. I work at a business in which we should have 4 full time workers at my position, but my company has always had 6-8 part time workers at the position to avoid providing benefits. As a result all of us are less informed and aren't as productive at our job as we could be. Obamacare fines businesses "that have workers who are not full-time employees, where a combination of employees working 120 hours per month (around 30 hours per week) count as one employee. "

 David Siegel of Westgate Resorts doesn't need to wait for Romney to get elected to start laying people off, he can start now. Plenty of people will boycott Westgate Resorts as a result of his ridiculously stupid and improper email.  He's a billionaire who clearly is so self absorbed he cares little of his employees who he strikes fear into in an attempt to coerce them to voting for Romney.  

These are the resorts you can start boycotting now: http://westgateresorts.com/  No need for a timeshare with Westgate... why line this jerk-offs pockets?   

David Siegel's self indulgent actions follow after he took credit for earning 2,000 votes for Bush in the 2000 election...

I am sure that every Atheist that has heard this one at one time or another : "God can not reveal himself to us because to do so would interfere with our free will."

Free will, an issue that I had never really given a lot of thought to until a couple of years ago.

As a matter of fact, I had never given it much thought until I really started becoming more involved in debating people on the Web and in person.

Perhaps it was a hold over from all my days as a theist. Perhaps, it is just one of those popular memes that has been so ingrained into people that they never stop and give any thought to the reality that things could be any other way. But, I had always assumed that free will was just a given.

Now granted, there have been countless discussions on here about free will and morality, some threads very long and some threads very short, and I am not really going to touch upon the subject here in any other context other than the free will argument as it relates to the religious excuse for why god is hiding.

Like a lot of theists arguments that I have encountered that make excuses for god's absence in times of peril, it sounds good on the surface. Kind of like the theists that like to throw the : "God is probably testing you" argument at me when things are going bad. The reason I bring this up is because of the contradiction.