Today I'm jam-packing this post with so many topics, your head might explode. (So that was a warning.  If you read the rest of this post your head might explode). In this blog post, I'm touching on politics, sports, gender-based double standards, and music. I'll also make a confession to anyone who has read one of my blog posts.

I'm going to kick it off with politics. This part was inspired by an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher I just watched, so if there are glaring similarities between my points and Maher's, it's because I was inspired by Bill himself. If you're a conservative, I could already see your eyes rolling at the thought of anything Maher's ever said, but hear me out (mostly because I, a liberal, still listen to your side no matter how ridiculous people look dressed up in Revolutionary War costumes).

Now, it's no secret that I'm not a big fan of the Tea Party protesters we've seen rise to fame lately, mostly because I think they have major holes in their arguments. Not tiny holes, I mean BIG holes. Those holes got bigger after I watched Maher's show earlier today.  Tea Party members want fewer taxes and reduction of the national debt, right? Simply put Tea Partiers, you can not have your cake and eat it too. (Trust me, I've watched many sitcoms, it's not realistic). If you want to lower our debt, your taxes will go up. If you want to pay Uncle Sam a little less come tax time, the debt will stay where it's at, or get even bigger. That's just the way it is. Listen, I'd like to be able to take two girls to the next school dance, but much like your wishes, it's not very realistic.

This brings me to my next point. If we want to cut the budget, we should cut defense spending. America spends more than every country in Europe (including Russia), Asia, Australia, and Latin America COMBINED on defense. This leaves me wondering, in defense of what? A terrorist organization that promises attack after attack, yet after 9/11 we've either stopped them or they haven't done anything? I know the counterargument is going to be: well, they haven't done anything because we've spent so much money on defense. Hundreds of billions of dollars on defense still seems like overkill to me, though, especially because most of that money over the past few years hasn't gone to stop terrorism, it's gone to invade countries we have absolutely no business being in (other than oil of course).  

Anyway, if we're spending this much on defense how come we haven't made light-sabres yet? Or jet-packs?

This will be my final point on the Tea Party members. These people might look like the Average Joes on television, but they are just the usual conservative foot soldiers who try to sell others on stuff that won't even benefit them. Meanwhile, the puppet masters reap the political benefits in the shadows (yeah, those same puppet masters who reaped the benefits during the Bush years).

Switching gears now, I want to talk about music. I'm a huge fan of Hip-Hop, I grew up with it here in New York City. Lately, there's been a bit of a renaissance in Hip-Hop. Many would call it just the natural flow of time, with older stars getting...well...older,  while new stars are being made. I am partial to a guy from Cleveland by the name of Kid Cudi. You might know him from his hit "Day N Nite" off his first album "Man On The Moon: The End Of Day". I really like Cudi mostly because he's not afraid to be different from other hip-hop artists. For example, he's not afraid to bare his soul on a song like "Soundtrack 2 My Life". He shows himself to be human and just like you, while many other rappers would rather portray themselves as superhuman. Simply put, I'm a big Kid Cudi fan.

Also, as you all found out in my last post, I'm a massive Green Day fan. Green Day just helped open up their own Broadway play based on their 2004 album "American Idiot". The play is the same title as the album and from what I've heard and read, it's fast, loud, and action-packed. Sounds like Green Day to me. So congrats to Green Day for having your own Broadway play, you continue to give those Gilman folks a reason to hate your guts.

On to sports. Baseball season just got started and I have very high hopes for my defending World Champion New York Yankees. I'm going to keep this short and sweet: we will win the East again. The Rays and Sox aren't nearly as good as us, and as usual I don't even have to mention the rest of the division. We've got the offense. As far as pitching is concerned, the only starter who really scares me is Javier Vasquez.  Yeah, I know he was 4th in the Cy Young Award voting last year, but New York isn't for everybody and Vazquez proved that it wasn't his cup of tea in 2004. Plus, he finished 4th in Cy Young voting in the National League, where the pitcher bats ninth and way more teams rely on small-ball than in the American League. The A.L. is just tougher, go ask Roy Halladay. On a final note, what's up with Andy Pettite's strong start? It's like he's trying to show everyone he's not washed up.

Finally, one long overdue political point that may be a bit blunt: if Scott Brown was a woman and had nude pictures in some magazine years ago, he wouldn't have won that Massachusetts Senate race. It's true that nothing was really showing in Brown's Cosmo photos, but if Brown was a woman the criticism would have been through the roof. It also drives me crazy that the right can use sex appeal way more effectively than the left.

Now my confession.  If you've read my older posts you'd know that I'm a politics nut, a huge Yankees fan, and a massive Green Day fan. Today you find out something new about me. I am (and have always been) a huge wrestling fan. I've loved professional wrestling for as long as I can remember. I was a huge W.C.W. fan in the 90s, even though I was about 5 when the Monday Night Wars got going, and to this day I am still a massive wrestling fan. I love talking watching it, talking about it, and reading about it. Boy, does that feel good.

Finally, if you like what I write here, you should read about my wacky real-life antics on Twitter. Follow me at twitter.com/iMgDuDe25. Signing off folks, I look forward to the next one.

Hey everybody. I don't know if you've heard but there's a "Tea Party" revolution going on in America. Driven by Fox News, Republicans, and Washington lobbyists...wait a minute, I'm being told that this is a grassroots movement started by the "Average Joe" who's worried about the Governments spending and taxing.

Give me a break. This week hundreds of people took to the streets on tax day to protest the Government's attempt to stimulate the economy. They called themselves Tea-Partiers. Let me repeat that for MSNBC: they called themselves Tea PARTIERS (innuendo is not funny when it's coming from people who call themselves serious journalists, unless it's off-camera). Now, protesters on tax day came as no surprise to me. I don't like paying taxes for anything, especially when a store tells you their price is something like $9.99 and they leave out the fact that you have to pay a little extra for Uncle Sam. But let's not act like this was the start of some wider conservative movement.  Taxes are the easiest issue to go after. No one likes to give away money.

Also, the idea that this was a spontaneous grassroots movement is incredibly disingenuous. This whole thing was as spontaneous and grassroots as the new Yankee Stadium tickets are cheap ($2,625 for a front-row seat? They better win TWO championships this year!). Another thing that annoyed me about the tea parties was FOX News's insistence that they were not sponsoring or advertising the tea parties. Hey FOX: when you have commercials about it, when you are talking about it all day, and when you send four of your top "reporters" (yes, the quotations imply that the FOXies aren't serious journalists), there's a small chance you're promoting this thing. The thing that surprised me was seeing Neil Cavuto at one of the tea parties. He was one of the FOXies that in my view had some credibility, but it appears he's just like the rest of them. It was no surprise to me to see Greta Van Susteren (she, like Ann Coulter, killed the streak I mentioned in my last post), Sean Hannity (who I had heard had an interesting, rational, conservative viewpoint, but I'm not seeing it) and Glenn Beck (who appears to be lowering the level of insanity in his show, but not by much). I had only one question: where was Bill O'Reilly? Has he suddenly become too good to join his conservative comrades in battle, or did he realize how weak conservatives are (more on that later)?  One final thing about FOX in general: when are they finally going to realize that they're a part of the media they malign so much on their network and that they're doing a far worse job with their "fair and balanced" news than any other network?

Something else that angered me about the tea parties was how many of the tea partyers were possibly misinformed or just ignorant. This was shown beautifully by a blogger named Jeff at a tea party in Pensacola. Here's how it happened:

Jeff: Cheer if you make less than $250,000 a year.
Just about the entire crowd cheers.
Jeff: Your taxes are going to be CUT under the current budget, congratulations!
You would think good news like this would make the tea partyers happy. However, Jeff was booed loudly by the tea partyers.

I'm still amazed that people actually fall for Republican tricks. The amazing thing is that these parties were organized by rich, upper-class conservatives who would are actually going to pay more taxes under the Obama plan. Yet it was mostly middle class conservatives who came out to protest a tax plan that would actually benefit them. Thinking about it leaves me at a loss for words.

I have two things to say about the name of these protests: first, for the people who decided to call the protests "tea partying", the Boston Tea Party was against an imperialist British monarchy who ruled us, yet gave us no voice in their government.  But we had eight years of conservative voices in power in this country, and just look where it got us. Second, it was amusing how easy it was to make jokes about the tea partying. As immature as the MSNBC jokes were, when David Shuster is making me laugh that's when you know you picked a bad name.

These tea parties prove just how politically weak and frustrated conservatives are. We're less than four months into the Obama administration and conservatives are already mounting huge protests. I wonder where we'll be by 2010.

Finally, these tea parties allowed me to get a look at how ugly this country can be. I got a chance to see some really hateful messages from the tea partyers, and it made me think maybe to some people this isn't about taxes, or even politics. Maybe it's the fact that we have a black president that made many of these Americans protest on tax day:

That's it for me, I hope no one reading this gets into trouble with the I. R. S. because that would be a huge downer. Thanks for reading.