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Universal is a big word.  

Government at it's best, interferes with my life as little as it can. It uses my taxes to fund protection of my right to live my life, earn a respectable living, protect it's citizens from outside harm and mediate disputes with a standard that everyone can use.

Is there a Universal human right to shelter?  

There are universal Human rights:

The right to live your life

The right to learn all that you can.

The right to make a living honestly without defrauding anyone

The right to give to charity or not without being forced.

The right to live for yourself and not someone else.

When you are forced to give what you have earned to someone else without your consent you setup a system where someone can force you to support the homeless, the hungry, the sick or the just plain lazy. Guess what you give up the real universal human right: To be free.

Joe Welsh

Do you have an issue with childless couples paying property taxes that go to schools? Or can you acknowledge that even those taxes don't directly benefit those families, there is a societal benefit with public education by reducing crime and providing for an educated workforce?

If you have an issue with this, then you should be in support of universal health care, because this is the status quo that Republicans have been trying to uphold. Medical costs are driven up by the uninsured who don't receive preventive care and end up in the emergency room. These costs are passed on to the insured.

I've ruminated on this particular line for several days.  I've let it sink in, digested it and ultimately feel like I'm ready to shat out that I think it's utter bullshit.

Yeah.  I said it.  

You've called me out, personally, for both electing and then reelecting Obama.  And I'm fine with that.  Whatever.  Different strokes. What I'm decidedly not fine with is calling me "vapid" for doing so, as if it was just on a whim that I did what I did with no further thought as to what it actually meant because you, Joseph Gauthier, know more about the cosmos than I could possibly imagine.  

I'm somehow blind, ignorant and vapid.   That if I'd only open my mind in the way that you have that I'd understand how wrong I am.  

It's just that obvious, right?

Only...it's not.

I happen to believe that Obama has been a really good president. I actually believe he'll rest somewhere in the middle among all the presidents we've had but certainly won't be the Right's boogyman two weeks after he's stepped down.  With Nixon and Harding leading the charge (there's HISTORY for ya) Obama will end up being a fine leader who led this country through more trying times than many a president before him. He had to clean up the Bush mess in Iraq, deal with a housing crisis he neither began nor propagated and, as a result, had to handle the worst financial crisis we, as Americans, have seen since the Great Depression.  How did he do?  Pretty fucking great given the circumstances.  You may not like how he got where he was going, but we're better off now than we were in 2008.  

Period.

I hope you'll excuse the hyperbole, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm not only proud that I was "vapid" enough to vote for Obama (TWICE!), but that I think he's done a ton for the American people while also realizing that much of it won't see fruition until well after he's out of office. 

This was a long post, but I felt your insane assumption about why I voted the way I did deserved something more than a simple one-sentence reply.

Hear, hear!!  Well said, Mr. Reed.  President Obama is the first of my generation to hold the office, and I am an unabashed fan of his priorities, his public statements, and his ability to ride some of the most nonsensical attacks with grace and dignity.