So much stupidity. So little time.
The Commute
Easily the most stressful part of my day. Twice daily I am angered and frustrated by the number of people who are driving with their head up their ass, or driving with their phone glued to their ear, which amounts to the same thing.
From a behaviorist perspective, people need immediate feedback that this behavior is unacceptable. George Carlin once proposed everyone have a gun that shoots those suction cup darts. Whenever someone drives ignorantly, you shoot them with a dart. Police would know that someone driving around with multiple darts on their car needs to be pulled over and ticketed for driving while stupid.
My fantasy is the ability to teleport them to the top of a large building or put them in a big tree. This would accomplish two things. First, it would immediately remove them from the milieu and allow the rest of us to get home without further hassle. Two: It would horribly inconvenience them and introduce immediate, severe financial penalties for not paying attention while on the road. The other part of the fantasy is they wouldn't be able to just teleport themselves down. They'd have to hire a crane to retrieve their vehicle. OK, three: I would feel a whole lot better.
You want to see the photos? Really?
People demanding that photos of the deceased bin Laden be released are up to one of two things.
Either—They are either questioning the integrity of the Obama administration. I must admit that was my first thought, mostly because after 10 years it seemed such an outrageous claim. It only took about two seconds of reflection to realize that would a pretty untennable lie to perpetrate. All it would take would be one video of Osama doing the jihadist version of "neener neener," and there wouldn't be enough Comet on the planet to get the egg off of Obama's face.
Or—It's some sort of obsession with the macabre; some way of personally gloating over the corpse of an enemy.
Either way, Obama is absolutely correct to not release the photos. He's absolutely correct that this is a somber time for reflection and not a time for gloating or celebration. I realize that's contrary to Christian principles of turning the other...oh, wait. It's time for his critics to STFU and get back to the economic mess we're in.
Captain Whackadoodle strikes again.
Yesterday on the radio Orrin Hatch was talking about some statistic that says around 50% of American's paid no taxes or even got a refund last year. I can only assume with a refund on the table, we're talking about whether or not you had to write a check on April 15th. Hatch was blithering on about more people needing to pull their weight. Was he talking about the wealthy? Of course not. Was he talking about the poor? Oh, no. Even Hatch is smart enough to know that talk of raising taxes on the poor is political suicide. He was talking about the middle class.
Let's just set aside for a moment any kind of demographic sanity check on the income levels of these supposed slackers and take a moment to give Hatch a lesson on how taxes work. Obviouly Hatch has never had any experience actually doing his own taxes and/or lives in a fantasy world that has no bearing on reality.
As a citizen of the United States, you have two options: either you are self-employed or you are W-2. People who are self-employed are required to make quarterly tax payments. The rest of us working sods have taxes automatically withdrawn from every paycheck. So no matter what, we are paying taxes. If we get a refund, it's a return on an overpayment of taxes. No one ever gets a check from the government if they haven't paid taxes in the first place. And no one gets interest on the money the government borrowed from us for that year either.
There's no charity here you idiot.
The King is dead. Long live the King.
That phrase always struck me as odd when I was a kid. Seems rather contradictory on the surface of it. It wasn't until I was older and saw the phrase acted out in a movie that I understood what it meant. In the movie a crowd learns their king has died in battle. His successor, who had delivered the news, is immediately proclaimed king with this statement.
This statement demonstrates two things to my mind. First, it's not about the individual who is the king, who is ultimately expendable. It's about the office of king. Second, it demonstrates the fickle nature of those who are accustomed to being led. The successor turned out to be a despot and a tyrant, but no one was asking for character references or a job history before pronouncing him king.
Some of you may already see where this is going. Osama bin Laden is dead. I thought I would feel more about this news than I do. I mean, hasn't that been the goal all along? How many times has a sentence been ended with, "...but we still haven't caught bin Laden?" So we caught him, and what, exactly, has changed? Not one damn thing. In fact, some whackadoodle is likely to feel honor bound to avenge this death, and so the cycle starts all over again.
I'm sure those who lost family and friends on 9/11 and those living in New York may feel some sort of recompense at the news, but the celebrations I've been hearing about seem wrong somehow. One man was killed, but his office, his ideas, his ideology lives on. I'm just having a hard time getting worked up about this.
Here are a few more random thoughts on the subject.
- It doesn't surprise me that he was discovered in a multi-million dollar compound and not holed up in some mountain cave. Asceticism is reserved for monks, prophets (who are usually reviled) and the mentally deranged. Men who stand at the head of religious movements rarely see asceticism as a requirement of their office. In fact they usually point to their vast fortunes as signs of God's favor. Convenient that. While some my try and draw the distinction that it is not their personal fortune, it certainly doesn't stop them from rivaling the ridiculously wealthy in their way of life. Can you say Prada? I'd be surprised if Thomas Monson (or any one else in the upper echelons of the LDS church) goes to Mr. Mac for his suits.
- On the news they said Osama was buried at sea to avoid the creation of a shrine for his followers. Probably not a bad idea, but 1. you don't need a shrine to have a martyr and 2. the devout will find a way to honor his resting place regardless. Watch for vigils on ocean shores the world over.
- Osama wasn't an idiot, nor was he a spring chicken. He had to know his days were numbered, whether it was the US or Father Time who eventually brought the curtains down. It's very likely he had already primed his organization to accept a successor in the event of his demise.
- If you think this means we're pulling out of Afghanistan, think again.
And the list goes on…
So Utah's proposed budget cuts would force 13 liquor stores to be closed and 150 jobs to be lost. Liquor stores in Utah are owned an operated by the state, in case you were wondering. You still think Republican's really give a damn about fiscal responsibility or about anyone in the working class? Set aside all the hand wringing by Utah's alcohol consumers. I thought the Republican mantra was "jobs, jobs, jobs." They certainly say the word in every sound bite possible, even when the topic at hand has nothing to do with the unemployed. "We need more kids graduating from college so we can create more jobs." Huh? Have they been paying attention to the Middle East at all? Who started these revolutions? College graduates who can't find work. Idiots. But I digress. So how do you explain a move that will eliminate jobs? Answer: Republican's don't care about low wage, part-time jobs or the people who need them to survive.
I'm trying to understand how an operation that is generating $18 million in profits needs to have its budget cut. Sounds like it's more than paying for itself. Kinda have to wonder where that money is going. I guess that's why legislatures make poor boards of directors: it never really is about the bottom line. It's about ideology. Mormons don't want to drink alcohol. They just want to control (and sell) it.
You want a cost saving measure? Cut the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control loose. Let it run as a private company and eliminate it from the budget altogether.
God, people. Wake up.
Sarah “Cannon Fodder” Palin?
Taking a look at the current state of affairs in the U.S. and also looking at how Sarah Palin & Co. have gone Jerry Springer on us, I'm really starting to wonder if the Republicans picked Palin knowing it would throw the election. I mean, seriously, who would want to be in charge right now? Not only that, but they are now in a position to ram their pro-corporation, pro-upper class ideology through Congress—wrapping it in the guise of fiscal responsibility to make it more palatable to the population at large. If you look at the actions that are being taken, they have absolutely nothing to do with fiscal responsibility as much as pushing an ideological agenda and improving the economic climate for corporate big wigs.
NPR & Planned Parenthood: I haven't heard numbers for Planned Parenthood, but recently on NPR they stated that Federal money was only 2% of their budget. So if it goes away, they may have to make some adjustments, but it's not catastrophic. Even so, NPR and Planned Parenthood together can't make up much more than .01% of the Federal budget. That's like canceling your magazine subscription to Time when you're coming up $1000 short at the end of every month and pretending the interest on your $25,000 credit card balance doesn't contribute to your budget woes.
Union Busting: This is absolutely unnecessary. My recollection of reporting on the mess in Wisconsin is that unions had signaled their willingness to address some of the concerns raised by Governor Walker. But Walker's move wasn't about compromise. It wasn't about balancing the budget. It was about undermining the political power of the middle class.
Tax Cuts for the Wealthy: So Republicans are cutting funding for all kinds of government services that serve (what's left of) the middle class and below, at the same time cutting taxes for people who least need economic relief. So it's obviously not the top 2% of American's who need to tighten their belts like everyone else. Apparently the American public suffers from the delusion that they are anywhere near the top 2%.
I don't understand why it is so hard for the American public to see that Republicans do not have their best interests at heart. Does anyone remember that it was 12 years of Republican leadership that preceded the Great Depression? Obviously not. Hell, people seem to have a hard time remembering it was eight years of Republican leadership that put us in the current mess we're in. The lack of government oversight in the mortgage industry and the lack of any kind of morality beyond self-interest—both planks of Repulican policy; both in direct contradiction to the Christian ideals they claim to uphold—led directly to the current economic crisis. It was Republicans who took a budget surplus and turned it into a monstrous deficit and now they've maneuvered themselves into a position where they can lob rotten eggs at the Obama administration for "not doing enough to fix the(ir) problem." Never mind that the economy is starting to recover after two years because of policies enacted by the Obama administration. Never mind the Republican solution to the problem was to give their policies more time to work...because they were working out so well so far.
Repeal Obamacare? (in parts)
So life is still pretty hectic. I find I still don't have a lot of time or energy to blog, but I really want to try and post with some regularity. Why? Because I think I need it. Do millions of people read my words? Hardly. Will anything I say here actually sway public opinion? Not likely. Will my thoughts make it to Capitol Hill and change opinion there? Yeah, right. What it does do is give me an outlet, one that requires more thought than cursing at the radio. So here we go...
I recently installed an NPR app on my phone. I felt the urge to become more informed and do something more productive with my commute than listen to music. The local NPR station doesn't always have programming I want to hear when I'm in the car, so the idea was with the app, I could load up a program I'm interested in and play it on my way home. Great idea in theory, but the app crashes a lot. I have yet to listen to a complete broadcast. Here's hoping they update it soon.
The first program I wanted to listen to was an Oxford style debate on whether or not the Affordable Care Act should be repealed, moderated by John Donvan, correspondent for ABC News' Nightline. The plan is to take quotes from the broadcast that stand out to me and share my thoughts.
Before I get started on the words of the participants, let me start by saying that stating the premise in derogatory terms, "Obamacare," was not a terribly professional or neutral way to start the debate. They should have used the correct name of the bill, the Affordable Care Act. On the other hand, from where I sit, it doesn't seem the bill does much about making health care affordable. Yes, it does insure millions who were previously uninsured, but I haven't heard a whole lot of discussion about middle class folks like me whose premiums go up every year, while coverage goes down. Maybe that will come up during the debate. We'll see.
The first gentleman to speak was former AZ congressman, John Shadegg, who was arguing in favor of the proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Donvan: ...a reference to the Obama reform program as Soviet-style, gulag health care. I want to say, "Come now." Do you stand by that?
Shadegg: No. I think it is a part of the dialog that you try to get attention. That was an attempt to gather attention.
I'm calling bullshit on that. Getting attention isn't part of any genuine dialog. Getting attention in this way—using inflammatory terms calculated to exploit the fears of the ignorant—is all about shutting down real dialog. I'm starting to think the secret Republican agenda is to underfund education because an educated populace is not their friend.
Shadegg: [Obamacare] will drive up your premiums.
I think he's right about this. Even if there is a way for insurance companies to provide additional coverage without raising costs, they won't take it. It's too easy to justify raising rates for additional coverage. I've already bumped into this when trying to get individual coverage again. The insurance company was willing to offer coverage, but only if I was willing to exclude a preexisting condition for a minimum of two years. I was offered a preexisting condition plan. What do you suppose the premium on that would have been? I didn't even bother to find out since I don't see my preexisting condition as causing me undo trouble in the near future.
Shadegg: [Obamacare] moves health care decision making away from employers and the insurance companies they hire, but it doesn't give those decisions to you and me it gives them to the government.
Am I missing something? I don't remember federally mandated health care ever being a part of the dialog. Even when the public option was still on the table, it was just that: an option. Insurance companies have been dictating which doctor I can choose for years. Even if this statement is true, one thing I've never understood is the basic assumption by Republicans that corporate bureaucrats are intrinsically better than government bureaucrats.
Perhaps he's talking about the mandate that everyone has to have health insurance. Again, I don't understand why this is such an issue for people. We mandate auto insurance so that someone else isn't left holding the bag if you cause an accident and don't have the financial resources to compensate your victims. Why is health insurance really all that different? One of the things that is driving up health care costs is the people who cannot pay their bills, and people who use the emergency room for treatment because they can't afford a doctor and an emergency room cannot, by law, refuse treatment. If you don't think you need coverage, get one of these minimal "consumer driven health care" plans, bank most of your money, accept the fact that living in a complex modern society requires that you make some concessions to the group as a whole, and stop whining.
Shadegg: The president told us ... if you like your plan you can keep it. Not true. He said if you like your doctor you can keep it. Not ture. And he said Obamacare would bend the cost curve down. None of those promises, as we examine the plan, turn out to be true.
How does he figure? The only entity forcing me to change my plan is my employer (or lack thereof) as they struggle to reduce costs and change plans on a nearly annual basis. The only entity who forces me to change my doctor is my insurance company if they do not do business with my doctor. Even then, as many times as I've had to change insurance plans over the years, I've never had to change my doctor. That probably has more to do with my doctor being willing to accept any kind of insurance.
As for the cost curve, I can't really speak to that. The health care bill addresses lots of Medicare spending concerns, but doesn't talk a whole lot about private insurance costs. There is one provision that states companies need to spend more on health care and less on administrative costs. Who knows how effective that will be. Sounds like a bit of fluff to me.
Still clueless
I recently read how Adobe is pushing it's digital book format as the new standard for digital publishing "to allow copyright holders to manage access rights blah blah blah." I'd give you a link to the article, but the "blah blah blah" ought to tell you how much of an impact it had on me. I don't remember where I saw it.
Have you ever heard the phrase "Stop throwing effort after foolishness?" Apparently corporate American doesn't have anything better to do with their money. I don't know how to make this any more simple for corporate wonks who are supposedly well educated. There are two reasons DRM is a losing battle.
- It. Does. Not. Work. No matter how complex the scheme, how new and fancy the technology a crack is going to be posted to the net within a few months. That's just reality. Like it or not.
- The only thing manufacturers succeed in doing is pissing off legitimate customers.
I get that people want and need to protect their revenue stream. However, until you can find a way to make the process invisible to your customers, it is doomed to fail.
Handbasket 666 Now Departing
So the Republican won in MA. Sad. I'm really starting to lose faith in the people of this country. If I had a dime for every politician who decried "business as usual" on the campaign trail, I'd have a lot more money to my name than is currently the case. Why aren't the American people saying, "Yeah. Yeah. Heard that before. What else ya got?"
Everyone's talking about The Nebraska Health Care Deal. Business as usual, blah, blah, blah. Folks, that is the business of politics. It's never going to change. If you think congressmen are there to do what's "right," think again. They are there to broker influence and votes to get money for themselves and their campaign contributors.* The "good" politicians are actually working for their constituency, you know, like getting them a sweet deal on something that really matters to them. It is the favored tactic of the minority party—regardless of which one it is—to cry foul when "business as usual" doesn't work in their favor. Just wait until the shoe is on the other foot.
Mitt "I don't have anything meaningful to say" Romney is crowing about the repudiation of liberal arrogance. Who is he kidding? Anyone remember the Bridge To Nowhere? You going to tell me Coburn's little stunt and subsequent fall wasn't hubris? Get real. Eight years of Republican non-leadership got us into the mess we're in. One of the primary planks of the Republican party is "Leave big business alone to do whatever it feels like and let the market decide." Well the market has decided and is correcting itself. Everyone happy now?
From the day Obama took office Republicans have done nothing but whine "we need to keep doing what we've been doing." And apparently the American people are buying it. They are freaking out about spending money on health care, but have no problem shoveling cash into the money pit that is the Middle East. We have spent billions in the middle east since 9/11. We are no safer than we ever were. The Middle East is no more stable than it ever was. I don't know if being shredded by a car bomb is better than torture at the hands of a despot. You'd have to ask an Iraqi about that. Even if we somehow manage to off Bin Laden, do you really think Al-Qaeda will just shrivel up and die? Puhleeze. But we keep shoveling. Isn't that what's called a bad investment?
Business as usual indeed.
*I like Jay Leno's suggestion that congressmen should have to wear their sponsors on their suits just like Nascar drivers.
Quote of the Day
There’s no reason that the government should prevent homosexuals from entering civil marriages because some religions object to the concept, any more than the government should ban atheism because some religions object to it.
Lisa Pampuch
I don't know who Lisa Pampuch is. There are dozens of her on the Net. I couldn't find the original source of the quote either, but it's everywhere. I'm thinking it has something to do with how eminently reasonable it is. Of course, as this Lisa Pampuch points out, reason has little to do with the religious experience.
When asked what he would do if Camping* is wrong again, Rick LaCasse, who witnessed Camping’s 1994 failure, said: “I can’t even think like that. Everything is too positive right now. There’s too little time to think like that.”
UPDATE:This Lisa Pampuch, cited above, is the Lisa Pampuch who has thoughtfully provided links to the original article in the comments. Thanks, Lisa.
*Camping is currently predicting the rapture will occur on May 21, 2011. Obviously, it wasn't 1994.
Seen on a bumper sticker
Frodo failed. Bush has the ring.
Not exactly timely, but still funny.
It would be funny, but. . .
. . .I think he's serious.
Hatch asserted that the health bills, which he believes represent a "step-by-step approach to socialized medicine," will lead to Americans' dependence on Democrats for their health and other issues. "And if they get there, of course, you're going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody's going to say, 'All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party,' " Hatch said. . . .(TheHill.com)
It boggles the mind that he can say that with a straight face. If I had time, I'll bet I could find at least a dozen similar quotes regarding the New Deal. Well, 70 years later we're still not a socialist state and we still have a two-party system. True to conservative form, if facts aren't on your side, try hysteria.