taking sides

That story was based on somebody I knew a little, a friend of Ruby Dew's.  She was a heavy doper, I think she spent some time in the slammer for hash oil.  She had been in Colorado but had to move back to Missouri.  I heard that once in Missouri she had sort of become part of a family, cooking meals and doing like domestic stuff.  It was the kind of move you wouldn't expect from her, but then if you looked at it another way it doesn't seem that unexpected.  I don't care so much about the content of my stories as I do about the wordplay.  I am most proud of talking about cool ranch Doritos and later Val says about showing up broke at your friend's house that it makes it cool at the ranch.

I guess she was in what you might call the drug life, but I consider drug life more to mean like crack and opiates and downers.  Marijuana is a hobby and those other drugs are a way of life.  I don't see where pot smokers would be down on gun owners and vice versa.  I guess there is a lefty tinge to smoking dope, but there is also a wild and crazy side, likewise there is a very conservative tinge to a lot of Second Amendmenteers, but also a wild and crazy side, and I'm guessing the wild and crazy sides of both issues are about equal to the lefty and righty sides.

I always thought it strange that pro-abortion people and death penalty people find themselves in two distinct groups.  Seems to me that there should be more crossover between them.  Well the more I think about that one the more complicated it becomes.  Maybe we could discuss that one on a rainy Institute day.

The thing about libertarianism is that on paper it sounds left and right neutral, but when it comes to the actual party they drop most of the lefty stuff and keep the righty stuff.  Especially the low taxes part.  Low taxes is probably the most appealing part of libertarianism so they run with that and rather neglect the other issues.  But then they become like regular right-wing republicans and why vote for some guy who belongs to a fringe party when you can vote for the GOP?

I've been wrong before but I don't see Bloomberg going anywhere.  He puts out the basic liberal agenda, but he does have that republican past, and dems don't take so easily to some rich guy buying an election.

Beagles makes a good point about republicans and fiscal responsibility.  I don't think the republicans have been fiscally responsible since Ike.  Bill Clinton was pretty responsible fiscally but probably some of that is due to his republican congress.  I think Obama would have been responsible except for digging us out of the hole that W put us in, but the causes of the hole lie in loosening regulations that took place during Clinton's administration.  The current boom is just an extension of the numbers Obama was getting when he got the economy going again.  The economy seems to have a mind of its own, I don't really understand it, but then I think neither does anybody else./