Which of your gay family members would prefer equality over employment and a growing standard of living?

This is obviously a false dichotomy but to say that you are postponing equality until prosperity is also. In the Bay Area (and probably in much of the religious south), Congressional and Presidential voting seems to focus on one issue group (gun control, abortion, gay marriage), everything else be damned.

And what I am saying is that gun control, abortion, gay marriage, immigration, healthcare, drug legalization and a whole array of other issues today are secondary --have to be secondary-- to being 200% focused on regaining economic prosperity.

We are on a solid path to $20 trillion dollars in national debt in four years. Look at Greece. That's where we are going. Unless things change. All of the above issues start to move under a different lens when you suddenly find yourself on the road to insolvent third-world-nation status.

I have lived in a country where distraught groups took to the streets, destroyed businesses and property, took over airports and blocked roads with big piles of burning tires. Can't happen here? I hope. We are not that special. People --mobs-- can become really irrational when economic opportunity isn't available.

That's why I said that the number one priority is to focus all of our efforts --every one of us-- on regaining our economic standing. This effort had to start four years ago, not now. We wasted four years and made the job exponentially harder.

I really hope that Obama focuses on what's important and doesn't waste our time.

On another post someone said that the country isn't going to be destroyed by another four years. Of course not, if what that means is that we are not going to have our cities look like favelas in Brazil. What will happen --and what, to a certain extent has already happened-- is that our country is being destroyed from the inside and outside in terms of economic and industrial capability.

I don't know where the tipping point is. But this isn't a game you can keep playing forever. I've done the math, and it's ugly. Just fire-up your favorite spreadsheet and try to figure out what you have to do to pay off the national debt in, say, 25 years. It is a sobering exercise because you realize how futile (and dumb) ideas like "tax the rich" really are. The couple of models I've played with indicate that if, and only if, we get dead-serious about cutting our spending to the bone and having a balanced budget we can pay off the debt in about 50 years with some moderate restructuring of income taxes that will affect everyone, not just the "rich".

Think about that for a moment: Fifty years. Fifty. That means living in near economic stagnation for a very long time while you pay off your debts and achieve balance. Even if the goal was to cut the national debt in half, it'd still take 25 to 30 years. In other words, under nearly all scenarios you, I and the next generation will be saddled with this problem.

I care about social issues. Of course I do. I also care about having a good environment within which to address them. That's why I say that nothing, absolutely nothing today has a higher priority than getting us back to a strong economic standing. If we don't focus on that we are fucked. We are on a slippery slope. And we are accelerating down that slope. Stopping becomes exponentially harder as we focus on solving the wrong problems.

This is basic in business: You have to have a solid balance sheet before you can engage in R&D and grow. If your business is constantly bleeding money you, all of a sudden, find yourself in a situation where you just can't innovate, compete and grow. A solid balance sheet allows you to do nice things for your employees and your community. You can engage in philanthropy and buy everyone pizza on Fridays. If you are up to your eyeballs in debt and bleeding money you are not going to be donating time and money to your local community and your employees better pack their own lunch. Basic.

Please, don't go off on a tangent. Nobody is talking about rolling back freedoms or rights. Cool it.

This is exactly why I hate the choices we have. With the electoral college an independent candidate has exactly zero chances. You put your finger to the two things that I can't support on the "standard" Republican ticket.

I am far closer to a Libertarian, which means that I think people ought to be left alone. I am also an atheist, which means that I have no issues with gays or lesbians at all. And by no means am I behind foreign aid to buy friends or fighting wars anywhere at all.

Given that, who do you vote for? A vote for a Libertarian candidate (or any other party for that matter) is a wasted vote due to, among other things, the electoral college. I will never happen. You'd have to have the earth's poles shift for a Libertarian to have a chance to appear in the radar with this system. So, I have no choice but to ignore some of the things I don't like with both the Republican and Democratic parties and choose based on what I can get behind. Lesser evil, if you will.

I chose to support Romney because I felt he is better equipped to deal with the financial disaster we are navigating. To me, looking ahead 25 to 50 years, nothing else matters. I say this because I know full-well how fucked-up a society can become if the economic framework that surrounds it is compromised. I have lived in countries that suffered from exactly that problem.

I did not vote for Obama because (a) I still don't think he knows what he is doing on financial/economic matters and (b) I really don't like how the democratic party blatantly resorts to buying votes though handouts and benefits being given to large numbers of unionized workers. Our entire welfare state votes democrat because they need it to keep going. And you end-up with generations of people wasting their lives away. Politicians don't care.

I lived in Argentina for about ten years and was witness to how ugly (and effective) these populist manipulation methods can be. Obama KNEW that he was buying millions of votes when he threw your and my money at the auto companies. Somehow that has become acceptable in our country.

Anyhow, Obama won. We'll see what we are in for. I am hoping that he does the right thing and genuinely works towards addressing the real problems we have on the table. After all, this being his second term he doesn't need to pander any more.