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Part Two Of Vote For Karlos: The Moats Plan

Karlos 2040 Campaign Poster

Nota Bene: Please seeVote for Karlos: Part 1 for a more thorough look into the intricate mind of this insightful 2040 presidential candidate.

My friends, it is time to heal America. Washington is too dysfunctional, our feuds too petty and too numerous. We are a nation divided. Not only by the every-day cyborgs we see at Starbucks or the vegetarian versus omnivore debate we taste in kitchens. But by the very news we hear in TV rooms.

My friends, news stations are a business. They must deliver the news, but they must also deliver ratings. And so our news today is flavored, “super sized” and seasoned to our own tastes. FOX News is sour to many of us here tonight. MSNBC is our sugary-dessert, best consumed sparingly. CNN and NBC are slightly sweetened. And PBS serves up the starchy facts, arguably the best for you but a tad boring.

How Media Works In America

Criticize FOX News or MSNBC all you want, but the networks are only showing what viewers want to see. What we have, my friends, is a media Catch-22: to be better informed, Americans need high-quality, independent journalism; but if news organizations want to stay in business, they need more sophisticated viewers. Put another way, viewers wish FOX News would be more like PBS, but they do not watch PBS.

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VOTE FOR KARLOS IN 2040!

Karlos 2040 Poster

INTRO

To our likable enough [EDIT: Who let Barack near the teleprompter script again?] Chairman Chelsea Clinton and to all my 410 million fellow citizens across our 51 states, it is with profound gratitude and humility that I accept your nomination for the 2040 presidency of the United States of America.

Well, last night Senator Ben Affleck of the great state of Massachusetts showed us how a real nomination speech should be given. And made us all forget he once made the movie “Gigli” [That was Matt Damon.]

Now, as we all know, Senator Affleck rides the high-speed rail with a devotion that would do the late Vice President “Amtrak Joe” Biden proud. Thanks to the now-completed Northeast Corridor, Senator Affleck now makes it from Washington to his Boston home in just over three hours. After decades of watching China and Brazil out-build us, we finally have world-class high-speed rail of our own!

High Speed Rail

[Dramatic pause]I only wish we could say the same for Washington. My friends, I know it’s been tough these last four years. President Marco Rubio has been behind the wheel of our train, and he steered it off the rails and into a ditch.

The president derailed the train by failing to regulate the Virtual Telepathy speculative bubble of the 2030s. He derailed the train with tax breaks to the billionaires and lunar jet owners who needed them the least.

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The Illusion Of Free Choice

Illusion Of Choice

Both lead to the same miserable end.

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Santorum 101: He’s More Complex Than We Think

Santorum 101

While everyone knows that the world is a much different place now than in the Dole-Gingrich era of American politics, no one could have imagined the motley crew of candidates currently vying for the 2012 Republican nomination. Among the contenders are a Mormon, a libertarian, a father of a lesbian, and a Catholic with seven children.

Perhaps, in light of these rapidly changing political waters, that’s why staunchly conservative voters have chosen to support the least memorable candidate of the bunch: Rick Santorum. Although Santorum has not won as many delegates as Romney and may not win the party’s nomination, as a figurehead of a formidable conservative sect he is worthy of study.

Santorum has carried a respectable number of states in the 2012 Republican Primaries: Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and now Louisiana. In other words, Santorum owns middle America.

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The Obama Dilemma

The Obama Dilemma

It is time again for the quadrennial absurdity of the American presidential race. In reality, it began as far back as last summer as the slew of utterly risible “candidates” for the Republican nomination entered the fray. While the establishment media has myopically focused on the long slog of a horse race that is the primaries, it is often difficult to discover that there are other things going on in the world. The average broadcast on Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN ineluctably devotes the majority of its airtime to discussing the inequities and megalomania of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum’s sweater vests, or Mitt Romney’s automaton personality; often ignoring Ron Paul, the only principled, yet deeply flawed candidate. Now this coverage of the seemingly meaningless rigmarole of the Republican primary and the subsequent similar coverage of the presidential race may make Chuck Todd’s heart palpitate, it does a massive disservice to everyone else. We will be told over and over again, from the editorial pages of the New York Times to the primetime cable new shows, that this election is about the future of the country and presents two stark contrasts for the economic trajectory of America. Most informed Americans realize that our politics are a sham, in a sense they are outside of politics. What progressives and leftists must ask themselves this election is can we vote for President Obama in good conscience?

It is difficult to adequately decipher the causes of the manifest failure of the Obama administration to implement progressive initiatives. Are these failures endogenous to President Obama? In other words, is he really the milquetoast, bipartisan-craving centrist (even center-right) politician that we have seen over the past three years? Or has the obduracy of the Republicans in Congress and the pathetic, spineless Democrats presented an insurmountable stumbling block to the advancement of his agenda?

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