Today, after work I was on the treadmill huffing and puffing with a heavy stomach from a big lunch I had at a Japanese restaurant; Bento box with barbeque short ribs and assorted tempura. On one of the suspended flat screens, Bill O'Reilly was blabbering about the 2010 election results with George Stephanopuolos. I got to thinking.... what a mind boggling amount of effort and resources are wasted during election years. The two opposing forces spend quite a bit of time and money jousting, and much of the effort is unproductive and less about the issues that affect the general population, and more about mobilizing the armies of partisanship and advancing selfish agenda. The political air in the U.S. has been nasty, brutish and very polluted. If there is such a thing as an aggregate national energy, defined as the total amount of effort available by all U.S. residents to accomplish tasks during any given period, a good chunk of it is wasted on these political machinations that serve nobody's interests. These unproductive and often negative energies include all of the supposed news and commentary shows on T.V. with the red states and the blue states blablabla, and the processes to jockey for political gain such as "congressional redistricting". Are you kidding me? Such an activity is a part of our political process? Redistricting is sometimes manipulated to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and to minimize the effect of opponents' votes, generally to keep incumbents in power. You can read about this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting
By the way, I couldn't remember former Clinton press secretary, George Stephanopuolos' name for this blog. So when I visited Bill O'Reilly's page to look him up, I found the names of every guest before and after him on the O'Reilly show today, but not him! The title of today's show (November 3rd) was "What the heck happened in the election?", when it should have been more aptly stated as "What the heck happened to Stephanopoulos?"
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