Politics - Do Your Research!

I was going to keep away from politics because I understand that it makes some people uncomfortable, but then I thought... this is my blog and, really, as a historian-in-training, I feel I would be amiss not to talk about something that is so important. Politics drive history and as someone who is going to spend their life's work teaching history, I want to talk about history-type things from time to time.

And presidential election? That's history in the making. I just can't ignore it. If there's anything worth talking about, shouldn't it be the future of your country? Someday, you might have a grandchild who wanted to know how you felt and what you thought about the Obama/Romney Election of 2012 and -

I digress.

The point of this post is not to tell you to vote for a specific candidate or anything like that. The point is to tell you that a) go vote, but b) INFORM YOURSELF IN THE ISSUES FIRST.

We have the internet. Use it and abuse it. Politico, MSNBC, CNN, Huffington Post, BBC (not American, but really helpful), and any variety of fact-checking websites. The majority of these are bipartisan or unaffiliated/unbiased and report FACTS not rhetoric. You should be choosing a candidate based on their policies and nothing more - don't trust debates, because candidates LIE.

I strongly suggest ISideWith.com.

This is a little test that provides you with a list issues and the stances of ALL the candidates (even the third party ones). You pick which stance you agree with most (it doesn't tell you which candidate/party supports which stance, so you won't be swayed that way). At the end, it gives you percentages of who you side most with (from Obama to Romney to third party candidates like Johnson). (THESE are my results - I'll admit that I didn't even know who some of the third party candidates were until I took this test, it was super informative and cool.)

Because at the end of the day, it shouldn't matter if someone is Republican or Democratic or Libertarian, or if they're Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, or Muslim. What matters is where they stand on the issues that affect this country and whether or not they stand where YOU stand on said issues.

I will confess that I identify most with Left-leaning parties, but I would never commit to being Democrat or whatever, because I might not always stand with a Democrat candidate. After all, the Democratic Party was originally founded by Andrew Jackson and we all know where he stood on certain issues.

So I hope I don't scare anyone away with my political ramblings. In my history classes, I've been in the 1960s-1970s for months and so I blame the need to post this on all the mojo coming off those decades. :]

AND to end on something totally random:

TODAY is my third anniversary with the BF. Yay! I made steak and it was delicious.