I don’t have a ton of time — work pile up, etc — but this thought struck me and I had to go take a look. Since 1990 there have been somewhere around 40 documented instances of a sex scandal involving politicians. Perhaps unsurprisingly they are split almost smack dab in the middle between Republicans and Democrats. More interestingly (to me, at least), the Republicans — party of family values — sports no fewer than 7 scandals, or 35% of their total, involving homosexual activity.

• Larry Craig, looking for man-love in a bathroom stall.
• Richard Curtis, outed by a jilted “masseuse.”
• Glenn Murphy Jr., under investigation in a sexual assault of a sleeping man.
• Bob Allen, scared to death by the Big, Black Man in the public restroom so his cunning escape plan is to offer to pay him for the privilege of providing him oral satisfaction.
• Mark Foley, slinging naughty text messages to male congressional pages… but it was the alcohol talking.
• Ed Schrock, male seeking male ad.
• Jim West, accused of diddling boys in his office.

During the same time period, the rough and tumble, anything-goes liberal Democrats had a whopping 1 involving someone “playing for the other team.”

• Jim McGreevey, had a gay affair, came out of the closet, then resigned.

Strikes me funny.

I recently talked about how I had won cash money with Blingo. One of my buddies took me up on the offer to become a Blingo friend at that point and he wrote me today telling me how he had won a movie ticket meaning that I also won one. Yeehaw, win-win!

Then I went to perform a search via Blingo in my Firefox search box as I do a hundred times a day. But it looked a bit different this time.

Wherefore art thou, Google?

Part of the appeal of Blingo has always been that you get pretty much the same results that you’d have gotten had you went to Google… with the additional possibility of winning fat loot. Now you get some kind of bastardized, multiplexed result list from Microsoft’s Live Search, Yahoo search and Ask.com. Sorry, Blingo, I need relevant search results more than I need fat loot and Google has the upper hand in that department.

Switch back, Blingo, it’s not too late.

I’m curious about something. Why is it that I, as an American taxpayer, should be responsible for bailing out people and companies that, in essence, screwed themselves over with stupid decisions? Make no mistake, that’s what the Bear Stearns collapse and subsequent bailout is. They banked on — no pun intended — and likely precipitated the subprime mortgage phenomenon and then for all practical purposes got a margin call by everybody. Hey lookie! You’ve got no assets and astounding debt!

So, the Fed is possibly on the hook for $30 billion in buyout for that company which means that you and I are on the hook. Because they were dumb. I follow the reasoning: they’re bailing out this company to prevent a cascade effect since Bear Stearns had so many connections with other companies. I can’t help but be irked that I’m funding utter stupidity, though.

Similarly, the Democratic Presidential candidates both want to provide “assistance to those in mortgage crises” to the tune of another $10 to $30 billion dollars. This is a bailout for people who did the math on that $750,000 house on their $30,000 salary and said “we can swing it!” I can’t swing a 3/4 million dollar house and I make more than that. So I didn’t buy a 3/4 million dollar house. Why am I bailing out people who simply overspent and screwed themselves? I understand the desire to help the less fortunate and those who are truly in financial despair, but not those who brought it on themselves buying things that they had no possibility of ever really affording.

Wanted to save this off for posterity as Yahoo serves up the timely and relevant advertising. Hallelujah for content-sensitivity and utter context-insensitivity.