Why I am Thankful for Thanksgiving

In honor of Thanksgiving, I've decided to do a bit of a different post. While many states in the U.S of A have decided to celebrate Thanksgiving like our ancestors by threatening to secede from the Union, that is not the case in the blue state of California (in case you are looking, you can find the Republicans in Orange County). Instead, most of us are getting our tans on while waiting for the gluten free stuffing and the vegan tofurkey to finish cooking in our solar powered ovens. This, my friends, is probably not what our ancestors had in mind when they decided to kill off all the Indians in order to give us this great holiday.

Thanksgiving is the greatest of holidays for a few different reasons. The reasons are as follows:

1) It isn't religious. There is no debates over the religious meanings behind it (shout out to the one atheist and three Jews in my family who make up the religious minority at every holiday dinner table!) No one is here telling me that Jesus wasn't actually born on December 25th or that it isn't plausible that the oil actually lasted 8 days. Instead, we get to just be together. Which brings me to my next point...

2) Its all about the food. It is the only time that my health conscious mother will ever admit to her affection for mashed potatoes or where it is appropriate to put marshmallows on yams. There may not be too many things that all of Americans agree on, but looking at the current obesity epidemic, I would say it is a safe bet that we all agree on our love of food.

3) Speaking of our love of food, it is the best holiday because it is the only time anyone ever let's me cook. Cooking on Christmas is out of the question as my parents have me scheduled at a different holiday event starting from the moment I wake up on Christmas Eve to the moment I go to bed on Christmas night. Gotta love the Italians and there obsessive celebration of anything having to do with anyone being born (celebrating my Grandpa's birthday requires me to put aside an entire week of my summer every year).

4) It also reminds me how much I do love my family. Since its the first holiday in the long season, I am more accepting of the chaos and ultimate hissy fit someone will throw at the table. It is also the only family dinner where we don't make pasta (although my grandma has unsuccessfully tried to work it into the menu every year) and that is more than enough to be thankful for.

5) No Thanksgiving would be complete without being thankful for my friends. We may have celebrated thanksgiving 2 weeks ago at scholarship dinner, or for some of you not at all, but I am way more thankful for you all than I may let on. I may instead decide to play the role of Dictator Peaches and not be Little Miss Sunshine any of the time, but thank you all for putting up with my sass and my near daily indecisiveness on life's smallest issues. You all have truly made USC my home away from home (and to my friends at home, thanks for continuing to make home feel like the home I left 3 years ago!)

Lastly, I must give credit where credit is due. Thanks to my BFF Hannah Gilden and her blog for inspiring me to write this post. I hope one day I can be half as sassy as you are.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you and good luck with any family dysfunction this holiday may bring!

The Gentleman's Code

David Petraeus is not the first man in power to cheat on his wife. For hundreds of years, we have seen Presidents and government officials alike have affair after affair. What is different now, however, is that these scandals get mass amounts of news coverage. Government officials caught in the immoral act of cheating feel they need to resign in order to weather the news storm that occurs from the scandal. As we can see through the current David Petraeus scandal, what used to be an issue between a husband and wife has now become an issue between husband, wife, the media and the public.

Since when did cheating on your wife require a press conference, front-page headlines and ultimately a resignation from public office? JFK cheated on Jackie multiple times but we never got a press conference regarding it. Clinton was President during one of the most prosperous economic times our country has seen, all while he was engaging in plenty of “extracurricular activities.” David Petraeus shouldn’t have resigned from his position as CIA director because of his affair but should only have resigned if he did something wrong in the capacity of his job.

What is interesting though is that David Petraeus did absolutely nothing wrong as CIA director. He did not pass on classified information, he was upfront about his affair when asked and he hasn’t had any failures within his position that would put this country in danger. If anything, he has been one of the most successful CIA directors that this country has seen, with the wisdom of 10+ years of combat experience to back up his decisions. Yet when the public found out he cheated on his wife, he quickly resigned and all of his credentials go out the window.

This isn’t the first time we have lost a good leader because of cheating. Two of the biggest sex scandals we saw in the past few years were from Elliot Spitzer (who got caught up participating in a high-priced prostitution ring) and Anthony Weiner (who sent lewd photos to some of his female Twitter followers). While Anthony Weiner tried to blame his indiscretions on his Twitter account being hacked and Elliot Spitzer just flat out denied his involvement with high priced prostitute until federal wiretapping proved otherwise, David Petraeus admitted to his indiscretions right away. These men did not resign because they were failing in their jobs, but instead because they were failing in their marriages. While infidelity is immoral and wrong, it isn’t something that should force you to resign from your position in public office. If a regular person wouldn’t resign from their job because of an affair, a government official shouldn’t either.

Another reason why Petraeus shouldn’t have resigned is because of how quickly the drama of the affair has come and gone. While it originally was splashed across the headlines on all major news sources, it has now died down to a small sidebar story on the websites and is nearly impossible to find in the hard copies of the newspaper. It wasn’t worth it for Petraeus to resign from position in the CIA just because he had one long week of scandalous, front-page news coverage.

Hopefully Petraeus will take his time off to work on the issues he has in his marriage. It is clear that he and his wife have some issues to either work out or dissolve completely. This scandal should be something that is only a scandal between him and his wife (and possibly Paula Broadwell- she seems very possessive of Petraeus). After all, we have seen plenty of government officials have affairs and not acknowledge them to the public, and they continued to do their job just fine. I don’t know at what point the public decided that they should stick their nose in everyone’s business, but it is time we stop. Lets leave these government officials to do their job, and stop worrying about their extracurriculars.  

Forward? More Like a Standstill

On Tuesday night, Barack Obama (unsurprisingly), won the election against Mitt Romney. Unlike most Republicans, I slowly breathed a sigh of relief because I realized that although the candidate I wanted didn't win, that the country would most likely stay in the same exact position as it was in before. While it certainly isn't perfect, Obama managed to keep the country afloat (alas, not moving forward) and not let us all implode. I took comfort in the fact that on Wednesday morning, I woke up to the election results and everything was exactly the same. We had elected the incumbent President, the Senate was still controlled by the Democrats and the House was still controlled by the Republicans. While Obama ran under a campaign slogan of “Forward," it appears that this round of elections set the government up to be at a complete standstill.

There is not much that Obama could have done in his campaign to change how the election for Congress turned out. But it seems that if one has any hope of trying to move forward, that something has to actually change. After all, you can’t keep trying the same thing over and over and expect to get a different answer. Now that the election is over, what can Barack Obama do to make this divided government move “forward”? 

The biggest problem with the election was not who actually won, but the fact that absolutely nothing changed. Yes, we will see some new faces in Congress. We will even see some new faces on Obama’s cabinet. Overall, however, the government is only as strong as its weakest link. And its “weakest link” is the divided Congress.

President Obama can argue for as much change as he wants, but there are only a limited amount of changes he can actually make without the consent of the House and Senate. One change he can make, though, is the way he works to bring these two polarized groups together. Obama needs to make working “across the aisle” one of his top priorities during his next term if he hopes to make an actual step forward.

What Obama needs to do  is to bring the two parties together, and not in the ideological way he tried in the beginning of his first term. By creating a formal plan (see my previous post on how to change the Presidency) to help the country move forward by enlisting the help of both parties will actually allow him to accomplish what he wants. He will need a solid Congress to back him up. Without his leadership in making the government more bipartisan, there is no way that this country will ever be able to move “forward.” 

Is Prison Refom the Answer to Our Budget Woes?

California, along with the entire nation, is undergoing serious issues with the deficit. Our prison system currently is allotted a budget of 7 billion dollars, but this year instead they spent 7.9 billion dollars. Having spent over 900 million dollars over budget, it is important that we look at the reasons behind this and what initiatives on ballot will help us cut this down to allow us to have a more balanced budget. The following two propositions give us opportunity to get the budget in check:

Proposition 36 would allow for an extra $100 million dollar by abolishing the 3 strikes law for non-violent crimes
http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/36/

Proposition 34 would essentially abolish the death penalty. California last executed someone in 2006 and only 13 people have been executed in the past decade. This would abolish the death penalty and allow us to save money on prisoners because it would put two prisoners to a room and also allow us to save money on the costly appeal process.
http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/34/

These two propositions will be extremely interesting to watch and to see what our liberal state decides to do with them.

The Anti-Feminist?

During the second presidential debate, Mitt Romney introduced citizens to a new crisis plaguing the nation: the challenge of finding women qualified enough to serve in government. The governor of Massachusetts had to enact a statewide search that culminated in him getting delivered “binders full of women” qualified for the job.

With comments like these, the “woman vote” has been increasingly difficult for Mitt Romney to find. With that being said, however, 41 percent of women voters are still voting for him. How is it that close to half of all women plan to vote for a candidate that is essentially against them?

As a member of the woman minority who voted for Romney, it is not a decision I take lightly. While I certainly would not have been in the streets burning my bra in the fight for woman’s rights, I do consider myself a progressive individual and I believe I should be entitled to equal rights. With these ideals, the decision to vote for Romney was something I wrestled with until my ballot was dropped in the mailbox. I was going to have to put either my social views or my fiscal views aside with whichever candidate I voted for. I am willing to take the risk of Romney’s social policies in exchange for the promise of a stronger economy and a cleaned up government. The way the economy and government is handled over the next few years will dictate our country’s future.

The United States has still not completely rebounded from the 2008 recession and if we do not focus on cutting our government spending and getting people back to work we risk possibly never recovering. Our country will face ramifications far into the future if we don't fix this problem soon. That is why it is important to vote for a president that believes more in cutting back on government funding than in creating social programs.

While Barack Obama has suggested creating social programs, Romney has vowed to keep government spending to a minimum. Although his insistence on cutting funding to programs such as PBS and Planned Parenthood will affect people, the government will save money and the private sector can easily replace those programs. While his declaration to repeal Obamacare is certainly not the most progressive view, it is the most practical view. Funding trillion-dollar government programs such as Obamacare while unemployment hovers around 9 percent and the national debt is $1.6 trillion is not the answer to our problems. Focus on getting people working again and creating a stabilized economy then there will then be the availability of funds to create a progressive program like that. Social programs mean more taxes, and citizens do not have the money to be shelling out on taxes to fund these programs since we still haven’t recovered fully from the recession.

All of these programs will mean nothing if we continue to spend ourselves into the ground and have to continually borrow money from China to fund our social programs. Obama was handed a destabilized economy upon taking office, but the progress he promised us has fallen short. In his 4 years as president, government spending peaked at 27 percent, whereas it peaked at 23 percent under Bush. Obama has continued to suggest expensive programs. The situation has gotten so bad that I am forced as a woman voter to choose the lesser of two evils. And I chose Romney.

It is time to stop having such a lush government willing to spend so much money, and have one that actually gets things done. It may seem backwards to cut social programs to help our country, but the future of this country relies on us getting out from under the mountain of debt we have accumulated over time. The thought of my kids having to deal with this mountain in the future and be increasingly dependent on other countries is much scarier of a prospect to me than having any of my rights taken away.

As bad as it sounds, in this year’s election, I care more about how our economic future will look than whether or not Romney wants to repeal Roe v. Wade or is uninterested in signing an equal pay bill. As a woman, I understand that my view is not “feminist” enough or that I am voting against myself. It’s not that I am voting against myself, it’s that I am voting for something that I believe is a larger investment in my future.