As the April 15th tax filing deadline looms, many gay couples are facing higher tax bills because they do not get the federal tax benefits that accompany marriage. The same is true for heterosexual couples who chose not to get married. Do you think this is fair?

Of course it's fair.  Marriage is a child-bearing union of two people who commit to raise up more little taxpayers.  Or, from another perspective, it is a sacramental union of two souls before God, geared towards the production of more lives.  The government has a vested interest in promoting stable taxpaying individuals, and is well within its rights to offer tax benefits to married people.  God has a vested interest in the human race, and for whatever reason has decided we are worth the effort to love. 
In the case of gay couples there is no moral or biological ability to be married as both participants are the same sex.  This is just a fundamental concept here, but marriage produces children and homosexuals cannot reproduce unless they perform extreme measures to do so.  Marriage, true marriage, is closed to them.  Imitations can and have been made, but they lack the essential aspects of true marriage.
In the case of unwed couples, there is no real commitment to hold them together should things get tough.  Bill wants to continue playing guitar at college parties, Jane wants to settle down.  Poof, the relationship is over.  Any kids get shuttled between the parents, or not, and grow up completely unaware of the benefits of a traditional family system.  This not only damages children, causing increased juvenile delinquency and increasing the likelihood that they never have a successful marriage, but it also damages the two adults.  Bitter feelings are the norm, and that is never good.  The good news is that if they live together long enough they become common-law spouses.  Why is that?  Because the state recognizes that marriage is between a man, a woman, and God...perhaps?  I don't know the tax benefits of being a common-law spouse, but all you people living together better watch out!
Homosexuals and unwed couples should not be afforded the benefits of marriage, because marriage is more than just a legal status.  It's a moral action, a lifelong commitment.  It's more than the state can offer us, and people lose sight of that.
From a practical standpoint, if the benefits of marriage were available to basically anybody regardless of their marital status they would simply lower the tax benefits of marriage.  Get real, folks.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  What's your strongest memory or impression of King's contributions?

The disillusionment I felt when I learned that King the man was not King the news footage. 

Most people aren't really their public image, of course.  I myself am a big phony most of the time.  But King was in all my textbooks growing up, and was practically sainted.  It was one of those things you took for granted.  Questions about his academic achievements and his personal character were all whitewashed over by the good folks at Houghton Mifflin.  He has been named a saint by some notable mainline Protestant denominations...which is especially painful to consider.

In the years since his death the man has been lauded for his advocacy of civil rights, his image untarnished.  I suppose this is alright.  But a fair appraisal of his legacy must include the documented personal vices and failings inherent to him.  The man had the capacity to be unethical, and evidence indicates he also had the tendency. 

Is criticism of King's ethics tantamount to casting aspersions on the whole process of the Civil Rights Movement?  I contend it is not.

Does the man deserve a federal holiday?  I think that he does not.  Had I my druthers, I would keep the holiday, but rename it "Civil Rights Day" or some other appropriate title to commemorate his work. 

Dispense with the cult of personality and focus on the issues--that will be the measure of the man's impact.

How do you usually react when people start talking politics?

My ears perk up and I immediately begin trying to guess how they vote.  It's not hard these days.  I'll try to maintain a neutral tone and get them to reveal as much as they can about their views.  Sometimes I don't even share my own.
To be honest, I'm usually the one who brings it up.  Most of the people in my life don't have time to consider politics.  That includes me, but I still manage. 

Have you ever done anything out of pure spite?  What did you do? 
Submitted by Hydranokaori.

Since I began working at a retail store...every day.

Telling the kids the video games are broken when I really just flipped the circuit breaker, for instance.

Retail is bad for the soul.

What was your reaction to the results of the Iowa caucuses?  

Oh, completely overdone.  Huckabee's speech sounded like he'd won the whole shebang.  Edwards is crowing about beating Clinton. 

It's moronic.  We've been watching these people campaign for the last several months.  It's been long enough that people got sick of the frontrunners and started putting forward a whack job like Edwards or a pleasant foreign policy naif like Mike Huckabee. 

Let's just call this what it is, people.  The first in a series of upcoming primaries, and not the most important.  We don't know anything more than we did a week ago.  I'm holding out hope that Fred Thompson will outlast the rest, and that he'll go up against John Edwards or Hillary Clinton.  Barring Fred Thompson, I'm moving towards Romney more and more.  I just don't know about McCain...

Is This Any Way to Pick a President? Madison's Nightmare

Ronald A. Cass Thu Jan 3, 3:15 PM ET

By tonight all the political news will be about who won the Iowa caucuses, who lost, and what it means. Candidates will be fighting for air time to explain why their finishing position matters or doesn't. Those who staked their campaigns on victory in the earliest tests of strength, looking for a bandwagon to roll over opponents, have to hope for a high finish. Those who decided to save their powder for later contests have to hope that voters elsewhere will want to think for themselves, not simply rubber stamp the earliest results. And the rest of us will be asking how we came to place our future in the hands of so strange a process.

The current system for picking a nominee is the product of accident rather than design, more like the result of small children scrambling to use up their Lego blocks than a master architect's plan. Depending on how things play out, this nominating process could look like James Madison's nightmare, the antithesis of the system of government that he and his fellow Founders devised.

Madison and his colleagues understood that individuals naturally seek individual benefits even while wishing for the collective good and worried about giving public power to small groups. Madison wrote in Federalist 10 of the concern over faction, over the actions of particularly intensely interested groups, and in Federalist 51 he explained that the whole structure of our government was designed "to control the abuses of the government" while enabling the government to control the governed, a system of divided and dispersed power that limited the influence of any individual or group and that reduced the prospect for precipitous decisions.

That system has stood the test of time. But the current process for nominating our President - the chief symbol and, in important respects, the primary custodian of that system - looks like it stands Madisonian principles on its head. In Madison's time, of course, presidential nominees were picked by small, elite groups. But those groups generally were representative of their parties, and nominees were selected for both their appeal across the party and their prospects for electoral success. And the selection was self-consciously designed to create a different constituency for the President than for the collateral branches of government.

The current nominating process threatens to replace one set of elite voters with another, but with less prospect of securing the benefits of Madison's time.

**********

The nominating system starts in Iowa, not just with an unrepresentative state but with unrepresentative voters as well. On the Democrat side in particular, this is coupled with deeply flawed voting methods that resemble a political game of musical chairs. And for both sides, the game is played in small venues replete with public pressure, both from those who have intense interests in particular issues and from those who profit directly from the process. Iowa's caucus system empowers the most insular of special interests, political junkies, and folks with little better to do on a cold night in winter. Iowans are wedded to their caucus system, but no political scientist trying to design a representative voting method reflecting national consensus would have thought up this peculiar arrangement.

The next stop is New Hampshire, with about 4/10th of one percent of the nation's population. The New Hampshire primary plays by ordinary primary rules, but it has its share of quirky ideas and preferences. Over the years, New Hampshire has voted for more than a few candidates who've gone on to victory, but its primary voters also endorsed Harold Stassen, Ed Muskie, Henry Cabot Lodge, Paul Tsongas, and Gary Hart, a collection of local favorites, neighbors, and soon-to-implode wannabes.

Iowa and New Hampshire are, to be sure, part of America, but they aren't all of America or a microcosm of America by any stretch of the imagination. The conceit among a group of cognoscenti over the years - and, in truth, not over very many years by historical standards (1968 for New Hampshire and 1972 for Iowa, really) - is that the rest of the nation can pretty well take the leaders selected by these states on faith, trusting that they've done the hard work of looking the candidates over and selecting the best. But "best" for one isn't best for all, and there is plenty of evidence that Iowans and New Hampshirites can favor people the rest of us might not like nearly so much.

Look, for example, at the Republican side of these tests. Few Americans care so much as Iowa's Republican caucus-goers who's closer to the fundamentalist position on a set of quasi-religious issues. While many Republicans want to keep taxes low, few have made a fetish of this the way New Hampshire's GOP has. Most Republicans across the nation place greater emphasis on selecting someone who has demonstrated he can be trusted in a crisis, who has sound values on what government can do well and on what individuals and private enterprises should be left to do, who understands the importance of protecting our safety and our freedom, and who can distinguish what courts must do from what activists want them to do.

The candidates who have invested their time and energy in Iowa and New Hampshire want to start the bandwagon rolling by showing that they can win when actual votes are cast. Before buying into that, the rest of us should ask whether winning there means something to us, whether the winners stand for what we want, and whether the winners there are going to have broad appeal in the general election - where no Republican or Democrat can win without support beyond their own party's base.

**********

Voters in every state understand this instinctively. That's why they've moved to push forward their own primaries, trying to cast votes when there's still a meaningful contest - even in the face of threats and penalties from the leadership in both political parties seeking to protect their embedded selection rules. And that is the hope for salvaging the best of a bad system.

Although some candidates believe that tightly compressed timing will boost the value of the first victories, the new timetable could instead reduce the impact of the earliest contests. With so many states voting in close proximity, including many states where voters differ markedly from their peers in Iowa and New Hampshire, this electoral season the wagons may not pick up many band members or travel very far.

Certainly, voters should hope that this is how things work this year, since the eventual nominee of either party will be the result of a strenuous decision-making process. That means a decision based on more scrutiny from more different angles from people who have diverse preferences. It means a decision that doesn't give extra weight to the opinions of voters in early primary or caucus states and less weight to the opinions of voters in other states. In other words, it means a system like Madison favored - one that reduces the power of any specially positioned group, rather than magnifying it.

Who do you want to be caught under the mistletoe with this holiday season?
Submitted by An Ebony Epicurean.  

My wife!  It's our first Christmas together.  So far, so good!

But she doesn't go for all the mushy stuff.

Polling groups like to track the approval rating of politicians.  What's your approval rating for President George W. Bush?  

I give him 50%.  It should be beyond obvious that he's not the most astute or worldly politician, and he's made some blunders that have damaged conservative prospects in the country.  But making the commitment to fight radical Islam took balls, and he's stuck to it despite the massive backlash because he believes (as do I) that it is right.  

What do you think of Stephen Colbert's satirical bid for the U.S. Presidency?  

I think he's a Democrat, and I'm not familiar with his positions.  I enjoyed his maneuvering to maintain his corporate sponsorship. 

Were I a registered voter in South Carolina, I would vote for him in order to lessen the impact of a Hillary Clinton victory.  Were I registered.

Do people do that?  Register for the opposing party and vote for the weaker candidate?  I bet they do.

What song do you wish would never show up on a karaoke list?

"Respect" by Aretha Franklin.  You can't do it, girl.  Neither can you, fella.  It's not funny. 

You have $100 to spend online in the next hour.  How are you going to spend it?

Go to eBay and buy some video games.  It's not like I'm wasting the money, right?