I was watching Larry King Live tonight and Penn Jillette made the claim that you should vote for the person whose ideas and policies match yours the best. I was ok with that. Until he emphasized that competency shouldn’t come into it.

I don’t know if Penn supports McCain or Obama, or if perhaps he’s going to write in Ron Paul to assuage his Libertarian leanings, but his comment on voting from ideals implies to me that he’s going for McCain/Palin and the only way to intellectually justify that was for him to say “vote for ideals, not capability.” (Of course, if that was his rationalization, he probably should have also looked at the extreme religious views of Palin, which would likely disqualify her in his mind)

I respect Penn Jillette, because Penn and Teller: Bullshit is a great show. I don’t agree with everything they say on their show, but on the balance it’s a public service that they talk about these things that tend to go unnoticed or unchallenged. That said, I think that voting exclusively from ideals is lunacy.

Now obviously policies matter. If you’re a strict Libertarian, you’ll probably never vote for someone who wants to increase the size of government or introduce anything remotely socialistic, but that doesn’t mean you should vote for the incompetent guy just because he wants to give you a tax cut. I’m just saying, let’s not be idealogues about this. There are numerous things that should factor into any decision you make, and the decision as to who will lead your nation for the next four years especially should not be so oversimplified.

There are better sites out there talking politics right now, so I’d go to those, but here’s a quick little analysis of what I saw. To me Obama won that debate handily. McCain was doing very well for the first half hour or so but by the end Obama had run away with it. CNN (well the Republicans over at CNN) is saying that John McCain won because he was on the offensive. But that fact is that McCain’s offense was easily swatted away by Obama. Every attack McCain threw at him, Obama handled with poise and nuance.

Beyond that, most of McCain’s policies were overly simplified or left unmentioned. And the few that were mentioned, such as the spending freeze, wlater had holes poked in them by Obama and McCain never rebutted. Every time McCain criticized a policy, Obama responded with a clarification of McCain’s lies and disinformation.

This debate was won by Obama, and in my opinion by a greater margin than any of the previous debates. Not only was Obama a more persuasive debater, but his policies align with my own personal opinions better than most politicians. Obviously, that skews me towards him, but I’d be willing to admit if McCain made valid points that made me question my preference. But he didn’t. Obama won. Hands down.

And Joe the Plumber is now officially a celebrity. Probably only for a week, but he’ll have a wikipedia article, gosh darn it, you betcha.

I don’t talk politics all that much on this site, but the fact that McCain is gaining ground on Obama despite being the poorer choice for every rational metric is driving me crazy. The image above is one of the most telling images about the disparity between McCain’s and Obama’s campaigns.

At first glance, McCain’s seems better because he just drops all taxes across the board. But you will then quickly notice that not all taxes are equal: the rich get huge tax breaks, and the poor get hardly any. Meanwhile Obama taxes the top 1% richest people more and gives the poorest much bigger tax breaks. 60% of tax paying citizens, the bottom three tax brackets, save anywhere from 3 to 50 times more money under Obama’s plan.

So the super-rich lose more of their income, but retain their super-richness, and the poor and middle class families get a tax break, all while losing less money overall allowing for the massive country deficit to be recovered faster. How is anyone still supporting McCain?

Digg is linking to a DailyMail article about McCain’s divorce. They emphasize that he ostensibly divorced her because she was in a car accident that left her overweight and with a limp. He divorced her for a younger prettier women. So what? Divorce exists to allow people who don’t want to be married anymore to stop being married. Did he divorce for bad reasons? Maybe, it was years after he returned to his wife, so it’s hard to tell. Is he superficial? Seems like. Would I do that to the woman I loved? I doubt it. But are any of those attacks on his policies and what his plans are to improve America? Not in the least. There are so many real issues where McCain is vastly inferior to his opponents, that sinking to this level and attacking him because he got a divorce is really unnecessary.