The Economist: America not quite at its best

NOTE - The Economist is not known to be a left-wing, liberal, publication...and still, even they recognize that McCain is slinging mud.


America not quite at its best

Sep 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The election has taken a nasty turn. This is mainly the Republicans’ fault

Reuters

AS RECENTLY as a few months ago, it seemed possible to hope that this year’s presidential election would be a civilised affair. Barack Obama and John McCain both represent much that is best about their respective parties. Mr Obama is intelligent, inspiring and appears by instinct to be a consensus-seeking pragmatist. John McCain has always stood for limited, principled government, and has distanced himself throughout his career from the religious ideologues that have warped Republicanism. An intelligent debate about issues of the utmost importance—how America should rebuild its standing in the world, how more Americans could share in the proceeds of growth—seemed an attainable proposition.

It doesn’t seem so now. In the past two weeks, while banks have tottered and markets reeled, the contending Democrats and Republicans have squabbled and lied rather than debated. Mr McCain’s team has been nastier, accusing Mr Obama of sexism for calling the Republican vice-presidential candidate a pig, when he clearly did no such thing. Much nastier has been the assertion that Mr Obama once backed a bill that would give kindergarten children comprehensive sex education. Again, this was a distortion: the bill Mr Obama backed provided for age-appropriate sex education, and was intended to protect children from sex offenders.

These kinds of slurs seem much more personal, and therefore unpleasant, than the more routine distortions seen on both sides. Team McCain accuses Mr Obama of planning to raise taxes for middle-income Americans (in fact, the Democrat’s plan raises them only for those earning more than $250,000); Mr Obama claims Mr McCain wants to fight in Iraq for 100 years (when the Republican merely agreed that he would gladly keep bases there for that long to help preserve the peace, as in Germany) and caricatures him far too readily as a Bush toady (when Mr McCain’s record as an independent senator has been anything but that).

An issue of life and life

The decision to descend into tactics such as the kindergarten slur shows that America is back in the territory of the “culture wars”, where the battle will be less about policy than about values and moral character. That is partly because Mr Obama’s campaign, perhaps foolishly, chose to make such a big deal of the virtues of their candidate’s character. Most people are more concerned about the alarming state of the economy than anything else; yet the Democrats spent far more time in Denver talking about Mr Obama’s family than his economic policy. The Republicans leapt in, partly because they have a candidate with a still more heroic life story; partly because economics is not Mr McCain’s strongest suit and his fiscal plan is pretty similar to Mr Bush’s; but mostly because painting Mr Obama as an arrogant, elitist, east-coast liberal is an easy way of revving up the Republican Party’s base and what Richard Nixon called the “silent majority” (see article).

The decision to play this election, like that of 2004, as a fresh instalment of the culture wars is disappointing to those who thought Mr McCain was more principled than that. By choosing Sarah Palin as his running-mate he made a cynical tryst with a party base that he has never much liked and that has never much liked him. Mr McCain’s whole candidacy rests on his assertion that these are perilous times that require a strong and experienced commander-in-chief; but he has chosen, as the person who may be a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency, someone who demonstrably knows very little about international affairs or the economy.

What Mrs Palin does do, as a committed pro-lifer, is to ensure that the evangelical wing of the Republican party will turn out in their multitudes. Mr McCain has thus placed abortion, the most divisive cultural issue in America, at the centre of his campaign. His defenders claim that it is too big an issue to be ignored, that he has always opposed abortion, that culture wars are an inevitable part of American elections, and that it was only when he appointed Mrs Palin that the American public started to listen to him. All this is true: but the old Mr McCain, who derided the religious right as “agents of intolerance”, would not have stooped to that.

Women...I'm confused

I know I'm not supposed to understand women, but some things are just downright perplexing.

I don't believe in PMS. A woman's crabby-ness derives from simple choices that she makes without regard for it's cumulative impact. Layman's explanation goes as follows:

In a slightly different way from women judging men by their shoes, I look at a girl's feet to scale where she would rank in the bitch-o-meter. Every notch higher in fashion usually indicates a sacrifice in comfort. And the less comfortable her shoes, the crabbier she will become as the day progresses. She's snappy because she loves to keep her tootsies in a vise with diamonds. There's no chemical imbalance. It's simply pain that radiates upward from her toes to her head, and then eventually formalizes itself into degrading remarks about the size of a man's penis and sudden onsets of bedtime headaches. Cute without comfort can turn ugly fast.

I don't understand why some women wait for a guy's suggestions on a date. Women seem to make guys choose the restaurant for the date, and some even go so far as to have the guy order for them. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot. Because when the relationship turns serious, it'll be the last decisions he ever gets to make. We guys don't even find out until we're near marriage town that we won't even get to decide what we want to eat ourselves. "You can't have that...you have high blood pressure," she says. "Why do you always have to eat three chili dogs and seven beers when you know your cholesterol is high," she nags. The relation "ship" sets sail with men as the captain, but it isn't until we hit high water that we find out our wheel ain't connected to the rudder. Geez...it's no wonder why the captain chooses to go down with the ship.

As a single guy, I keep my home empty. It would only make sense that women be more attracted to the bareness of a bachelor's pad. When I get married, it's all of my stuff that's going to get thrown out anyway. I might as well live light now and intentionally leave her the closet. Yet, experience proves the contrary. I just don't get it. Somehow, this message gets lost in translation.

I guess I could be way off base with my assumptions. Its just that...it seems like women get more turned on with each discovery of possessions she can throw out the deeper she enters a man's life. Like, her life isn't fulfilled until she has completely surrounded a man with her decisions - material or not. Women pick away at men until the hole is big enough to be filled with her love. Is that what mothers teach their daughters before the wedding? Do mothers say, "Jane...you know you were a good wife if you can look back and not see a trace of the man from before this day." I guess I'll never know.

What do women do on a girls' night? Do women get together and brag about who threw away more of their man's stuff? Does the crown go to the one that can get the most pink on their guy? These are just a few of the weird questions that find their way in my head.

You can always tell the state of a relationship by the distance of a guy's sports stuff to the TV. If he's got lawn chairs and USC beer mugs in front of the TV, he's single. If the lawn chairs are outside but the remote is next to his beer on top of a Maxim, dating. If a football phone got hurled out into on-coming traffic, it's a committed relationship. And when there's a yard sale of old magazines and jerseys, someone just got married.

But all and all, it is true that a man is only as happy as his wife. Start your week right by making someone happy. And remember, if you had to eat a row of frogs, you don't start with the smallest one. =)

"We're the upscale bums."

some easy heart-filled reading...

Homeless 90210: Slumming time and the livin's easy

By CHRISTINA HOAG
Associated Press Writer

Being homeless in this upper crust enclave is not exactly like living on the street in other places. There are handouts of $2,000 and bottles of Dom Perignon, lucky finds of Gucci shoes and diamond-encrusted bracelets, a chance to rub shoulders with rich and famous locals such as Mark Wahlberg and Master P, even empty houses to live in.

"This is the finest place you can be," said Isaac Young, an affable 59-year-old with a wide grin and a smooth baritone voice who has been homeless in Beverly Hills since 1992.

In this manicured community of 35,000, Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis glide around city streets, movie stars live in gated mansions and Rodeo Drive price tags provoke gasps from tourists.

But the city also features about 30 rather scruffy residents who live in parks, bus shelters and alleyways.

They're an incongruous sight amid the shows of superfluous wealth, underscoring the pervasiveness of the huge homeless population in Los Angeles County. Some 74,000 people live on the streets or in shelters, making the county the nation's capital of homelessness.

"Homelessness is just all over, even Beverly Hills," said John Joel Roberts, chief executive of Path Partners, which provides street outreach services.

But the homeless in Beverly Hills have direct access to something most street dwellers do not: rich people, who can afford to be pretty generous. They pull up in Porsches and SUVs offering trays of cooked food, designer clothing still in dry-cleaner plastic and odd jobs.

"They have a sympathetic thing for us and we're grateful for it," said a man with grizzled hair pulling a train of wheeled suitcases, an office chair and a stroller piled high with a motley bunch of items found in the trash. He would only identify himself as "Bond."

Sometimes life even imitates the 1986 movie "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," in which a homeless man (Nick Nolte) is taken in by a hoity-toity couple (Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler).

At a park where homeless people congregate next to the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, Young found a benefactor who is allowing him to live free for a year in an empty house in swanky Benedict Canyon.

"He said 'Here's your second chance,'" said Young, who has lived in the TWA lounge at Los Angeles International Airport and on the streets of Hollywood, where he got wrapped up in drugs and alcohol. "I couldn't believe it."

A well-off couple from Manhattan Beach who also befriended Young gave him furniture, he said.

Young, who cannot read or write but composes poetry in his head and performs it, has six more months in his Benedict Canyon abode. He still panhandles to pay for expenses — actor Wahlberg gave him new clothes — but after a lifetime as a compulsive gambler and spender, he's finally learning to save money and wants to get an apartment.

He has a good incentive. His eyes mist as he looks toward a stone park bench where he slept for a decade and promises himself it won't be another 10 years.

Those lucky breaks are one reason why George, who would not give his last name, has lived in Beverly Hills for the past 16 years. "You never know what you're going to meet," he said, noting he once got $10 from Rod Stewart.

George, a lanky man who pedals a bicycle around town and sleeps on a building roof, said paparazzi and parking valets can be a problem when he panhandles outside celebrity haunts. But being close to wealth can lead to $100 handouts, or finds such as gold jewelry, video cameras and an Armani suit.

He was so thrilled with the suit that he wore it panhandling until he noticed he wasn't doing too well.

"You have to have a certain look to get sympathy — dirty, kind of stupid, not aware," he said.

He also knows an opportunity when he sees one. For a couple months, he hung out in a vacant house, lounging by the pool drinking up the liquor he found in a cabinet until the owner walked in on him. He managed to flee.

"I was just using the facilities," George said. "I wasn't robbing no one."

That's a typical scenario, said Beverly Hills police Lt. Tony Lee, but for the most part, the homeless don't cause problems. They occasionally get arrested for petty theft or aggressive panhandling. They're usually held for 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation and fined and released if deemed harmless.

Many are mentally ill but pose no threat. The city tries to refer them to counselors, shelters or drug rehabs, but they prefer street life, city spokeswoman Cheryl Burnett said.

Bond said some homeless avoid Beverly Hills because they're turned off by the uberwealthy, who require a certain amount of deference.

"A lot of homeless don't want to be with snooty, rich people," he said. "You have to be respectful and not act like an idiot. If you're a derelict, they're going to call the cops on you. We're the upscale bums."

10 Things Millionaires Won't Tell You

i really enjoyed this article and thought that it was worth sharing. item 5 is a great note.

10 Things Millionaires Won't Tell You

By Daren Fonda
August 19, 2008
from SmartMoney.com

1. "You may think I'm rich, but I don't."

A million dollars may sound like a fortune to most people, and folks with that much cash can't complain — they're richer than 90 percent of U.S. households and earn $366,000 a year, on average, putting them in the top 1 percent of taxpayers. But the club isn't so exclusive anymore. Some 10 million households have a net worth above $1 million, excluding home equity, almost double the number in 2002. Moreover, a recent survey by Fidelity found just 8 percent of millionaires think they're "very" or "extremely" wealthy, while 19 percent don't feel rich at all. "They're worried about health care, retirement and how they'll sustain their lifestyle," says Gail Graham, a wealth-management executive at Fidelity.

Indeed, many millionaires still don't have enough for exclusive luxuries, like membership at an elite golf club, which can top $300,000 a year. While $1 million was a tidy sum three decades ago, you'd need $3.6 million for the same purchasing power today. And half of all millionaires have a net worth of $2.5 million or less, according to research firm TNS. So what does it take to feel truly rich? The magic number is $23 million, according to Fidelity.

2. "I shop at Wal-Mart..."

They may not buy the 99-cent paper towels, but millionaires know what it is to be frugal. About 80 percent say they spend with a middle-class mind-set, according to a 2007 survey of high-net-worth individuals, published by American Express Publishing and the Harrison Group. That means buying luxury items on sale, hunting for bargains — even clipping coupons.

Don Crane, a small-business owner in Santa Rosa, Calif., certainly sees the value of everyday saving. "We can afford just about anything," he says, adding that his net worth is over $1 million. But he and his wife both grew up on farms in the Midwest — where nothing was wasted — and his wife clips coupons to this day. In fact, most millionaires come from middle-class households, and roughly 70 percent have been wealthy for less than 15 years, according to the AmEx/Harrison survey. That said, there are plenty of millionaires who never check a price tag. "I've always wanted to live above my means because it inspired me to work harder," says Robert Kiyosaki, author of the 1997 best seller Rich Dad, Poor Dad. An entrepreneur worth millions, Kiyosaki says he doesn't even know what his house would go for today.

3. "...but I didn't get rich by skimping on lattes."

So how do you join the millionaires' club? You could buy stocks or real estate, play the slots in Vegas — or take the most common path: running your own business. That's how half of all millionaires made their money, according to the AmEx/Harrison survey. About a third had a professional practice or worked in the corporate world; only 3 percent inherited their wealth.

Regardless of how they built their nest egg, virtually all millionaires "make judicious use of debt," says Russ Alan Prince, coauthor of "The Middle-Class Millionaire." They'll take out loans to build their business, avoid high-interest credit card debt and leverage their home equity to finance purchases if their cash flow doesn't cut it. Nor is their wealth tied up in their homes. Home equity represents just 11 percent of millionaires' total assets, according to TNS. "People who are serious about building wealth always want to have a mortgage," says Jim Bell, president of Bell Investment Advisors. His home is probably worth $1.5 million, he adds, but he owes $900,000 on it. "I'm in no hurry to pay it off," he says. "It's one of the few tax deductions I get."

4. "I have a concierge for everything."

That hot restaurant may be booked for months — at least when Joe Nobody calls to make reservations. But many top eateries set aside tables for celebrities and A-list clientele, and that's where the personal concierge comes in. Working for retainers that range anywhere from $25 an hour to six figures a year, these modern-day butlers have the inside track on chic restaurants, spa reservations, even an early tee time at the golf club. And good concierges will scour the planet for whatever their clients want — whether it's holy water blessed personally by the Pope, rare Mexican tequila or artisanal sausages found only in northern Spain. "For some people, the cost doesn't matter," says Yamileth Delgado, who runs Marquise Concierge and who once found those sausages for a client — 40 pounds of chorizo that went for $1,000.

Concierge services now extend to medical attention as well. At the high end: For roughly $2,000 to $4,000 a month, clients can get 24-hour access to a primary-care physician who makes house calls and can facilitate admission to a hospital "without long waits in the emergency room," as one New York City service puts it.

5. "You don't get rich by being nice."

John D. Rockefeller threatened rivals with bankruptcy if they didn't sell out to his company, Standard Oil. Bill Gates was ruthless in building Microsoft into the world's largest software firm (remember Netscape?). Indeed, many millionaires privately admit they're "bastards in business," says Prince. "They aren't nice guys." Of course, the wealthy don't exactly look in the mirror and see Gordon Gekko either. Most millionaires share the values of their moderate-income parents, says Lewis Schiff, a private wealth consultant and Prince's coauthor: "Spending time with family really matters to them." Just 12 percent say that what they want most to be remembered for is their legacy in business, according to the AmEx/Harrison study.

Millionaires are also seemingly undaunted by failure. Crane, for example, now runs a successful company that screens tenants for landlords. But his first business venture, a real estate partnership, went bankrupt, costing him $20,000 — more than his house was worth at the time. "It was the most depressing time in my life, but it was the best lesson I ever learned," he says.

6. "Taxes are for little people."

Most millionaires do pay taxes. In fact, the top 1 percent of earners paid nearly 40 percent of federal income taxes in 2005 — a whopping $368 billion — according to the Internal Revenue Service. That said, the wealthy tend to derive a higher portion of their income from dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at lower rates than wages (15 percent for long-term capital gains versus 25 percent for middle-class wages). Also, high-income earners pay Social Security tax only on their first $97,500 of income.

But the big savings come from owning a business and deducting everything related to it. Landlords can also depreciate their commercial properties and expenses like mortgage interest. And that's without doing any creative accounting. Then there are the tax shelters, trusts and other mechanisms the superrich use to shield their wealth. An estimated 2 million Americans have unreported accounts offshore, and income from foreign tax shelters costs the U.S. $20 billion to$40 billion a year, according to the IRS. Indeed, "an increasing number of people want to establish an offshore fund," says Vernon Jacobs, a certified public accountant in Kansas who specializes in legal foreign accounts.

7. "I was a B student."

Mom was right when she said good grades were the key to success — just not necessarily a big bank account. According to the book "The Millionaire Mind," the median college grade point average for millionaires is 2.9, and the average SAT score is 1190 — hardly Harvard material. In fact, 59 percent of millionaires attended a state college or university, according to AmEx/Harrison.

When asked to list the keys to their success, millionaires rank hard work first, followed by education, determination and "treating others with respect." They also say that what they absorbed in class was less important than learning how to study and stay disciplined, says Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the Harrison Group. Granted, 48 percent of millionaires hold an advanced degree, and elite colleges do open doors to careers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley (not to mention social connections that grease the wheels). But for every Ph.D. millionaire, there are many more who squeaked through school. Kiyosaki, for one, says the only way he survived college calculus was by "sitting near" the smart kids in class — "we cheated like crazy," he says.

8. "Like my Ferrari? It's a rental."

Why spend $3,000 on a Versace bag that'll be out of style as soon as next season when you can rent it for $175 a month? For that matter, why blow $250,000 on a Ferrari when for $25,000 it can be yours for a few weekends a year? Clubs that offer "fractional ownership" of jets have been popular for some time, and now the concept has extended to other high-end luxuries like exotic cars and fine art. How hot is the trend? More than 50 percent of millionaires say they plan to rent luxury goods within the next 12 months, according to a survey by Prince & Associates. Handbags topped the list, followed by cars, jewelry, watches and art. Online companies like Bag Borrow or Steal, for example, cater to customers who always want new designer accessories and jewelry, for prices starting at $15 a week.

For Suzanne Garner, a millionaire software engineer in Santa Clara, Calif., owning a $100,000 car didn't make financial sense (she drives a Mazda Miata). Instead, Garner pays up to $30,000 in annual membership fees to Club Sportiva, a fractional-ownership car club in San Francisco that lets her take out Ferraris, Lamborghinis and other exotic vehicles on weekends. "I'm all about the car," she says. And so are other people, it seems. While stopped at a light in a Ferrari recently, Garner received a marriage proposal from a guy in a pickup truck. (She declined the offer.)

9. "Turns out money can buy happiness."

It may not be comforting to folks who aren't minting cash, but the rich really are different. "There's no group in America that's happier than the wealthy," says Taylor, of the Harrison Group. Roughly 70 percent of millionaires say that money"created" more happiness for them,he notes. Higher income also correlates with higher ratings in life satisfaction, according to a new study by economists at the Wharton School of Business. But it's not necessarily the Bentley or Manolo Blahniks that lead to bliss. "It's the freedom that money buys," says Betsey Stevenson, coauthor of the Wharton study.

Concomitantly, rates of depression are lower among the wealthy, according to the Wharton study, and the rich tend to have better health than the rest of the population, says James Smith, senior labor economist at the Rand Corporation. (In fact, health and happiness are as closely correlated as wealth and happiness, Smith says.) The wealthy even seem to smile and laugh more often, according to the Wharton study, to say nothing of getting treated with more respect and eating better food. "People experience their day very differently when they have a lot of money," Stevenson says.

10. "You worry about the Joneses — I worry about keeping up with the Trumps."

Wealth may go a long way toward creating happiness, but the middle-class rich still can't afford the life of the billionaire next door — the guy who writes charity checks for $100,000 and retreats to his own private island. "What makes people happy isn't how much they're making," says Glenn Firebaugh, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University. "It's how much they're making relative to their peers."

Indeed, for all their riches, some 40 percent of millionaires fear that their standard of living will decline in retirement and that their money will run out before they die, according to Fidelity. Of course, it may not help if their lifestyle is so lavish that they're barely squeaking by on $400,000 a year. "You can always be happier with more money," says Stevenson. "There's no satiation point." But that's the trouble with keeping up with the Trumps. "Millionaires are always looking up," says Schiff, "and think it's better up there."

The Lies of the McCain Campaign

"Blizzard of Lies"

by Paul Krugman (NYTimes)

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Dinner Bills and Bathrooms

Dating can be a horrible experience. All seems to go well in the beginning. Conversations start a bit awkward, but smooth out with each passing cocktail. Then the bill comes, and *poof*, she does a ninja vanish to the bathroom. Sometimes it makes me want to walk out of the restaurant and stiff the wildebeest with the tab. Lucky for her, I was raised better.

Women need to stop reading girly magazines and cease watching chick-flicks. Those piles of crap advertise a shallow and false perception about the male species. It overgeneralizes the importance of a woman's looks and undervalues the quality of her actions. The size of a woman's breasts are not that important. Sometimes the only reason men gawk is because we're laughing at the freak show that are the titanic implants surgically sunken in her mammaries.

Huge breasts and a round ass are traits I look for in a stripper, and I don't take strippers to dinner. Make me laugh. If my jokes fail, laughingly tell me I'm not funny. For God's sake, just show a little spark of personality. Ask me a question. Criticize the bimbo in the corner. Give me something, anything, to work with. I'd rather shovel out belly lint with a rusty spoon than continue with one-sided conversations. I break bread for the company.

The stereotypes are getting out of hand. Men are not THAT shallow. Boobs, ass, and toned abs are mere bonuses. We care about those features just about as much as we care about sunroofs and seat warmers in a new car. Although some perks can be attractive, it all becomes meaningless if your engine runs weak in personality. The fun runs short while sitting in a car that doesn't go anywhere. There's just way too many refurbished singles in the market. And you can't patch a personality with Prada.

Us men like women that look good...NOT expensive. Looking good is a walk; It's a smile; It's a sincere giggle after I do something clumsy. Who are these people teaching women the false belief that expensive is what looks good? Err! Wrong! One rule of thumb is "the bigger a girl's sunglasses, the higher the maintenance." Paris Hilton is NOT hot...she's expensive. Correct your values ladies. Learn a joke or two. Don't sell yourself short, thereby becoming the victim of another person's insecurities. And stop fucking going to the bathroom whenever the bill comes. Ugh, dating is like finding a parking spot - all the good ones are taken, and the only ones left are handicapped.

Jon Stewart Exposes Self-Contradicting Douchebaggery