This thread is sure to get locked.................but, here goes!
Flirting with Politics:
"I like what Ron Paul says about healthcare, breaking it up so it's affordable for everyone. Now I'm an independent contractor, it can be quite expensive to find good health insurance," Brooke Taylor explains, as she waits in her workplace lounge a few miles east of the Nevada state capital of Carson City for a new client to arrive. "He's for bringing the troops home. Those are my peers. I want them home. These men and women are experiencing things nobody should have to. I like what he has to say about education."
Sounds like standard Republican, airhead talk; except for where she's working:
Just your everyday political discussion in the run-up to the Nevada caucus this Saturday. Except for the fact that Brooke, Max, and the dozens of other young women milling around the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, at the end of a road with a historical marker for the old Pony Express and a ramshackle car repair shop, in various degrees of lingerie are prostitutes. They are working in an upscale brothel in the only state in the union with legalized prostitution.
Yeah, Ron Paul is a little embarrassed at where some of his support is coming from. But, the interesting part of this op-ed is the writer's comments about the possibility of a new progressive era and a new social contract:
That new social compact will ultimately be a creature of the American West - not of Dennis Hof's weird vision, but of a West that has a live-and-let-live attitude on social issues combined with a progressive approach to the environment, to healthcare, to the minimum wage and other big-picture economic issues. It will give much power to the states and cities to create experimental policies around expanded health care, environmental clean-up, anti-global warming strategies, and ways of integrating millions of illegal immigrants into the broader society, but it will be backed up by a more regulation-minded federal system.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sasha_abramsky/2008/01/flirting_with_politics.html