Pet Peeves Friday and the 2012 Election

The 2012 United States Presidential Election

As much as I like politics, with still three long months to go until the election, I’m already disgusted with the negative campaign ads (including the most recent one by the Obama super PAC suggesting Governor Romney caused a woman’s death from cancer. Come on, Democrats, we’re better than that, aren’t we?) so I suggest we put a stop to all campaign ads once and for all.

Not only will this lower my blood pressure, but it will also mean candidates don’t have to raise money to run for office because their campaigns will be held right on network television and be paid for by ad revenue. Not having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to run for office might actually allow for a viable 3rd party candidate to run for office, but even more important, imagine where all those millions of dollars raised by the candidates ($100 million by Romney and $75 million by Obama just in the month of July alone!) can go. Close your eyes and see us actually feeding the poor, and housing the homeless, and creating jobs for the unemployed. Radical thoughts, I know, but cool thoughts nonetheless. 

So what’s going to take the place of the campaign ads? I’ve got the answer! Since Americans are so obsessed with reality TV shows, what we do is we turn the entire campaign into a reality TV show. Once a week both candidates will appear on a live 2-hour TV show where they will make campaign speeches, debate each other on issues specific to that week, and field questions from the audience as well as various social media outlets, and they do all of this while wearing a lie detector. Phone lines open after the show for two hours and the country calls in and votes on a number of questions (don’t worry Capitalists, the phone calls to vote will cost money) relative to the show. The next night on the special 30-minute results show, the country sees the lie detector results, along with their voting results.

I know, an argument can be made that polygraph tests are unreliable and if anyone is cool and enough to control their stress and body reactions and beat a lie detector its probably professional politicians, but I still like the concept.

Now I just need to think of a good host. I like Jeff Probst but he’s busy with Survivor and his new talk show. Who’s out there . . . Too bad Bill Cullen and Allen Ludden are gone. How about Anne Robinson of The Weakest Link or maybe Kathy Griffin?

Pet Peeves Friday

Pet Peeves Friday is back. It hadn’t really gone anywhere, I had just forgotten about it because it’s so . . .  <yawn> . . .  excuse me, exciting. Here’s how it works: If you have a Pet Peeve you’d like to share, blog about it and then come back here and share the link back to your blog so we can go and read it. Or, you can just share it in the comments below.

Today’s pet peeve is drivers who don’t know how to park at a parking meter. They don’t pull forward enough, or back enough, to align their front or rear bumper with the parking meter they’re parking at so they effectively take up two spaces.