The Surly Librarian

Our House Saga: The whole story, part 3

2011-12-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

Before settling on a price or signing any paperwork, it is necessary to have an inspection of the property. My guess is that smart/experienced people pay for their own inspector, or at least someone not affiliated with either the house or either of the agents involved. We, of course, did not, and took Fendy's recommendation of "her inspector." In retrospect one can see why this is a serious problem, but we assumed that anyone worth his/her license would be honest in an inspection. Duhhhh--why would anyone assume that, given that the inspector only gets paid when the house gets sold, or worse, is on retainer with the agent, since his/her fee is covered by the agent? Oops, yet again.
Our inspector found all of the flaws detailed in the last post, but his take was that "these were no big deal" or "these can be fixed easily" or "this should be taken care of by the seller" or "you're going to deal with this ASAP, right?" as if we were rolling in dough to pay for thousands upon thousands of dollars of repairs. And in one sense, we were, since Fendy assured us that in most cases, the seller ponies up cash to pay for serious infractions of the building code. Alas, that, too, was only partially correct. The most egregious problem was the electrical wiring in the house, which wasn't only not up to code, but was downright hazardous, and was going to cost upwards of $4000 to fix, according to the inspector. Fendy "haggled" with the seller's agent--and remember, this house was owned by a bank, so there was really nobody human on the other end of that "negotiation"--to get us that money, acting as if it was a really huge gift to us. In reality, of course, the bank would have had to pay for repairs anyway, given that the wiring represented a hazard making the house actually unlivable, and we were not supposed to be buying the house "as is."
An honest/truly third party inspector would, I think, have refused to sign off on the house in the first place without a total rewiring job and a fix for all the other code violations, but in our case, naturally, once his electrician (yes, we took his recommendation for the repairman as well, making for a neat trifecta for that tight circle of friends) assured him/them that he could do the work for the magical amount of money budgeted by the bank, the inspection was complete and he allowed the sale to go through.
Well, $4K doesn't go as far as one would have thought, if the goal was to finish rewiring the house completely to conform to the building code. Some of the job was impossible to complete because the previous work done to the house was so shoddy--our living room ceiling needed to be replaced in order for all of the violations to be rectified in that one room alone, and that just wasn't budgeted for. But since the inspector had signed off, we were stuck. A number of other electrical issues couldn't be dealt with, either, because the electrician had used up all the $4K doing what work he had completed. But hey, if we wanted that other work done, he'd be happy to do it--if we gave him more money. And of course, this was well after all the paperwork had been signed, so it was now our house, and our problem. As it was, we had to pay another electrician several hundred dollars to get some proper electricity sent to our garage so the door opener functioned properly (the most he could do was to get us one single outlet to work--otherwise, the whole garage would have had to been rewired!)
Next up: spending thousands of dollars to get that last 1/4 point reduction--can you guess how that ended up?

Our house saga: The whole story, pt. 2

2011-10-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about our agent--I'll call her Fendy Wurth--was her clear desire to be open to our suggestions. Or, no. My conversations with her would go something like this:
Me: Hi Fendy! I was looking on craigslist and saw this house listed. Can we take a look at it?
Fendy: You don't want that house.
Me: Huh?
Fendy: It's on a busy street/it's not a good neighborhood/it's got problems.
Me: Ok, but can we at least take a look at it?
Fendy: You don't want that house.
Me: Um, ok.
Annnnnnd, scene!
Now, it is eminently possible that Fendy was being honest about her assessments and judgments as to what was appropriate/good for us, but seeing as how we were first-time buyers, I was hoping she would cater to our inexperience--not by limiting our exposure to the wider world of real estate, but by showing us everything under the sun to let us in on what the full range of options looked like. Even after I would ask her to show us more than the 1 or 2 houses she would line up for us on our weekends (and it wasn't every weekend at that), she demurred. All of that would have been fine if she had been as adamant about the house we bought--which she didn't even find in the listings--and its drawbacks. A noisy street? Forget it--they could have been giving it away and it wouldn't make any difference to Fendy. But our house? Let me see . . .
1) Internal Wiring that was monumentally amateurish, and required thousands of dollars to fix?
No problem!
2) An electronic gate that was illegally wired and had to be disabled requiring $2K to replace or fix?
No problem!
3) Industrial/dentist office ceiling, ancient wood paneling (with no sheetrock or even insulation behind it!), weird and ugly built-ins, and glued-in recessed light fixtures in the main room?
No problem!
4) Plumbing not up to code in the kitchen and the master bathroom?
No problem!
5) The garage has a code-violating step down?
No problem!
6) No keys to any of the locks requiring hundreds of $ to secure the house?
No problem!
7) A kitchen that has only two electrical outlets, one of which is needed for the refrigerator and therefore inaccessible to use code-safe for anything else, and the other located on a wall above a 4-inch ledge that is clearly too shallow for any appliance larger than a toaster placed sideways?
No problem!
8) An alarm system for which we didn't have the code, forcing us to rip the master control panel off the wall so we wouldn't be forced to hear its incessant beeping and leaving an unsightly hole in the wall with wires hanging out?
No problem!
9) And the pièce de résistance, washer and dryer hookups built not inside the house (normal), and not in the detached garage (not optimal, but not unheard of), but on the outside of the house itself (wtf?)!
No problem!
To be fair, TBO and I knew we were buying a bank-owned fixer-upper, so it is eminently possible we would have pooh-poohed any negative comments from Fendy, but I do know that she wasn't even close to trying to dissuade us from this house as definitively as she had done for most of the others that she didn't like. In fact, what I do remember most saliently about our bid on this house was how Fendy told us that putting in an offer for anything less than the asking price--even a meager 10% discount due to some of the issues we knew about--would be "insulting", and she adamantly refused to do so.
Think about that for one second, and then pity us for being radically naïve. Who on earth would have been "insulted"? The bank owned this pile of crap, not some poor sap trying to get out from under through a short sale. Fendy told us there were other buyers, and that they were just as qualified as we were, and that to be sure we got this one we'd have to bid higher, blah blah blah. Let's face it, Fendy was looking to keep her paycheck as large as possible, and she snowed us, playing us for rubes (which we were.) On top of that, she was trying to get paid as soon as possible--we had always felt that she was giving us a bum's rush through the process at every point--so any corners that could be cut were cut. We bid the asking price, and to do so we had to borrow even more money from my family--who had been gracious and overly generous enough as it was to begin with--to make the loan feasible.
The next step? Inspection.

Al Davis, R.I.P.

2011-10-08T08:34:00.000-07:00

Football, and pro football specifically, was bred into my blood. My father's family had/have been die-hard Washington Redskins fans (he even played clarinet for the the band for a few years in the very dark days of the early 1950s), and my mother's family? Well, family legend has it that they bought season tickets when the 'Skins moved from Boston to DC in 1937, and regardless of when they started, has kept them every year since. (Anyone who knows realizes what precious commodities Redskins season tickets are--there is reportedly a multi-year (decade?) waiting list just to get the chance to buy them.)
Every Sunday in the fall was centered around football, for both sides of my family--everybody watched whatever games were televised, even as we gathered for family get-togethers/dinners. It was simply the thing to do. One particular Sunday, in mid-November 1968 (I was all of 6 years old!), the televised game featured my mom's brother's favorite team, the New York Jets, who were on their way to shocking the world by beating the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. In this game, however, they were fighting mightily against the team that had been in the previous year's AFL-NFL Championship Game (not yet called the "Super Bowl"), the Oakland Raiders. For some reason, and even at that early age, I decided to be contrarian and root against my uncle's Jets and for the Raiders. (Which is only rarely redundant. There are lots of teams that I can root against without caring one whit for the team playing them.) Something about their grit appealed to me, I suppose, but more probably I just liked teasing my uncle whenever the Raiders did something well.
There aren't too many mid-season games that become historic, no matter the sport. There are too many games in too many years for people to remember any but the final few in each season. This game, however, changed the course of television history. Football, like most games (and unlike baseball), relies on a set length of time for teams to win or lose. 60 minutes of game time tick away, and in that era, there was no such thing as "overtime" if the two teams were tied at the end of that hour. Consequently, a television network could fairly count on when the game would finish (for you neophytes, the game clock stops pretty regularly, but even so, most games took about 3 hours of real time, and few lasted too much longer back then.) This time, though, both teams were scoring often (which is the event that stops the game clock for the longest amount of real time), and as the end of the broadcast drew near (7:00 Eastern Standard Time), the game itself hadn't finished. The Jets had taken a 32-29 lead and kicked off with about a minute left in the game. NBC switched off the game to show their heavily-promoted broadcast of "Heidi", much to the horror of all football fans interested in this thriller, who consequently flooded NBC's switchboards to no avail.
My uncle and I were left hanging, although with only a minute to go, he was confident his Jets had won. I had to wait until the next morning--no post game highlight shows back then!--to find out that the Raiders had gone on to score not 1, but 2 touchdowns in that 1:01, to win the game 43-32. "My" team had won! (The furor over "The Heidi Game", by the way, led all networks to vow that never again would a live broadcast be cut short in similar fashion again.)
I became a rabid Raiders fan instantly, living and dying with every game (and for the next 7 years, every season ended badly, despite the Raiders possessing the most feared (and hated) team in pro football. They were great, but not good enough to win "the big one." A perfect time and the perfect team for a young boy who loves rooting for underdogs, because nothing cements a fan's devotion like not quite winning it all. (My baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, performed similarly over the same time span, winning their division regularly, and winning their league a few times, but never the World Series. Both teams managed to win it all in the greatest years ever for a Raiders/Reds fan 1975 [Reds] and 1976 [both!]) I immersed myself in the roster, learning all the names of these guys and reveling in their skill. Blanda, Otto, Lamonica, Biletnikoff, Hubbard, Stabler, Branch, Upshaw and Shell, van Eeghen, Villapiano, Sistrunk--even their names evoke the type of players they were, since almost by definition, the Raiders were a team of renegades and castoffs. Most of the stars on the Raiders did not come from the traditional college powers like Oklahoma, Nebraska, USC, Notre Dame, and Texas (although there were some)--heck, Otis Sistrunk didn't even go to college! It had to take a serious maverick to assemble this bunch and win.
And that's what Al Davis was. Davis loved football. Davis lived football, and once he was named head coach of the Oakland Raiders in 1963, he lived Raiders football. And he loved nothing other than Raiders football (his personal life was always kept private, but there is no doubt that he was an extraordinarily devoted family man.) Every move he made, whether as coach, general manager, or head of the American Football League for its last few years, was designed to help the Raiders, policies and protocol be damned. He fought with everyone to the betterment (as he saw it) of his team; anyone who disagreed with him was treated like an enemy combatant--which led to numerous feuds, lawsuits, and even the occasional self-inflicted damage if a team member crossed him. Al Davis prized loyalty, but he prized winning more, and his ruthlessness in achieving what he thought was best for the Raiders made him legendary and ahead of his time. Most of the other owners had created an elite, country club-type attitude that Davis disdained, which worked against him on many occasions, but served to endear him both to fans and players alike--if you were a Raider, that is. The Raiders cared nothing for the types of rules most teams enforced against their players--no dress codes, few curfews that couldn't be broken with impunity--except for one: if you didn't play your hardest on Sunday, there were no excuses. Whatever you did during the week, if you performed come gametime, you were accepted. During the late 1960s and 1970s, that single attitude made the Raiders the most highly prized family a player could join, and many wayward "square pegs" eventually found their way to the Raiders. Al Davis crafted a tight-knit organization that rewarded talent like no other--the freedom to be an individual during a time and in an occupation when individualism was actively discouraged and disciplined to eliminate. Many men were hired after their playing days were over for various jobs in the Raider organization, and by all accounts Davis loved and was loved with a fierce dedication by most who played and worked for him.
He led the Raiders for nearly 50 years; the league itself will not be the same without him. Love him or hate him (and there are multitudes in either camp), everyone will admit that his was a unique--and above all, respected--voice in American sport.
Say "hi" to Blanda, Dalby, Upshaw, and all the rest of the guys, Al. You know they'll be waiting.

Our house saga: The whole story, pt. 1

2011-10-06T07:41:00.000-07:00

Now that TBO and I are officially non-homeowners once again, I thought it might be instructive--or possibly just entertaining--to detail our experiences in real estate. On balance, our story is a disenchanting one mirroring the depressing state of our nation's economy as a whole. I know many people who have a very different story to tell in regard to their homeowning, but all that does for me is illustrate more acutely the declining faith I have in the permanence of the American Dream. In other words, things ain't what they used to be, and it's too late for many of us to partake.
I* started looking for houses to buy when the market began collapsing in the summer of 2007; before that, even given TBO and I having professional level jobs (if not salaries entirely commensurate), houses were priced well out of our affordable range anywhere in SoCal remotely close to where we worked. As late as the end of 2007, for example, the median price for a house in one of the cities for which we work was well over $700K! That reality forced me to look dozens of miles away for something we could possibly have afforded, and even at that, our choices were limited to fixer-uppers, tiny bungalows, or in neighborhoods where our chances of escaping criminal activity grew dim. Since we were in no hurry, I could take my time doing some research and poking around the market to find potential hidden gems before contacting an agent for serious entry. I spent about 6 months reading real estate blogs (to see what those intensely involved in the hitherto-unknown to me world of homeownership and real estate were saying about the collapse) in an effort to understand how far the market might drop and when the prime time to buy might occur, and also to discern what some "experts" were saying about interest rates as well. At the beginning of 2008, I became concerned that interest rates might have bottomed out--a reasonable conclusion based on the reality that they hadn't been so low in many years, if not decades--and if we did not jump in the market then, interest rates might be raised to a point where even if the home prices dropped further, our mortgage payments wouldn't get any lower, but the house we bought would be worth less.
So I contacted a friend of my mom's who was an agent to see if she had some advice, and also to see if she would represent us in our now-imminent search. I trusted her implicitly (and still do), but unfortunately she was unable to help us with our search, since she had no expertise in the locales in which we were hoping to live. And as far as any advice she had to give, there was little input she gave me that I hadn't discovered on my own; interest rates had never been this low, and could be raised at any time, prices probably won't drop much further, etc. She gave me Realtor Line #1:"This was a great time to buy."
RETROSPECTIVE LESSON ONE: If you ask a real estate agent, it is always a "great time to buy." Since they have no other answer, the one they give you is meaningless.
I asked my mom's friend for a referral, and even though she didn't know anyone personally who worked in our areas, she put us in touch with someone who did. (Again, I do not blame my mom's friend for what happened; she told me straight up that she didn't know the person with whom we started working.)
From the first moment "our" realtor drove up to meet us in her brand new, sparkling Corvette, I sensed that TBO and I might not be the kind of clients she was either used to or wanted to help. We were definitely looking at houses far lower on the value spectrum than she preferred, and when she instantly pooh-poohed the house with which we had chosen to start our hunt--she didn't even "let us" go inside it!--my feeling was confirmed. At the time, I thought it was actually a sincere effort on her part to guide us to some decent neighborhoods and values. Neither TBO nor I knew anything about the areas we were investigating, so we needed some guidance along those lines, to be sure. When she showed us the next house (which wasn't one we had seen advertised, and was the first one we had set foot in) and told us that we should snatch it up immediately, I was a little put off by her reaction to our desire to see more than one house before forking over tens of thousands of dollars and committing ourselves to hundreds of thousands more. She acted as if we were just being obstinate in wanting to, you know, "shop" for a place to live! Over the next few weeks, it became clearer and clearer to me that she wasn't really paying attention to what we wanted from, or more specifically, what we wanted to know about, the whole process. I asked her for her professional opinion on many occasions what she thought the market was doing, or whether she thought mortgage rates were going up or down, and at no point did she ever really answer my questions. Instead, she simply repeated realtor line # 1 ad nauseum. In turn, I began questioning her dedication to helping us.
RETROSPECTIVE LESSON TWO: Realtors don't care about you; you are merely a paycheck to them, and the sooner you buy, the sooner they get paid. Asking them to do work on your behalf beyond lining up places to see (and many times, even asking for that) is fruitless.
More later . . .
* To my everlasting sadness, I was the one who pushed TBO and I into this disaster. She remained and still remains blameless through all of it. : (

Obama finally coming to grips with the truth?

2011-09-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

This interview with David Axelrod reveals that perhaps now--finally--the Obama Administration realized the idiocy of working with Republicans. Unfortunately, this top advisor/insider (at least) doesn't seem to quite get what a lot of us wanted. “I don’t regret his making the effort because I think people elected him to get things done. They didn’t elect him to wage a partisan war . . ."
David, David, David. (And should I add: Barack, Barack, Barack?) How can I parse this complete whiff?
1) "People" never elect a President to "get things done." They elect a President to get what they want done. That you (two?) still believe this is just plain ignorant and has destroyed the best, last chance this country had of halting its decline into probable Third World status. The voters spoke in 2006 and 2008 to get rid of as many Republicans and all of their ideas, because after a quarter century of getting shafted by them, the majority of voters, at least, finally figured that out. By providing the Democrats their largest majorities in Congress and a Democratic President--one who was noticeably of color at that!!--in quite a few generations, our voters spoke in as loud a voice as it is possible in our political system for what we wanted, and it wasn't "bipartisanship" or "compromise" or "incrementalism" or whatever mealy-mouthed garbage you guys thought. It was, to not coin a phrase, for "hope and change." And the "change" part of that phrase meant change in direction and policy. Not change in tone or tenor of debate--who the fuckety-fuck-fuck-fuck cares about that? Jebus!
2) How in all the gods' names do you know that the 2008 voters didn't elect Obama to "wage a partisan war"? I doubt I was the only one to do so, given that the other side of this supposed "war" declared it against us starting in 1980? (I put "war" in quotation marks not because it isn't one, but because you can't have a war when one side--ours--never fights back.) In point of fact, I would argue that is indeed why most people voted for Obama; they finally came to understand that there was a war going on, and those in the bottom 99%ile were losing it and needed/wanted/desperately cried out for someone who would fight for them. Instead, we got you clowns. Since the other party stands rock solid for that top 1% in word and deed, the majority of voters put in power the other party everywhere they could. How and why was that so hard for you bozos to understand?
One could argue, if one were so inclined, that we now have a "better late than never" situation, but I think what we really have is a "too little, too late" instead. We lost the House in 2010, and the demographics and logistics of our system make the Senate likely to go Republican in 2012. So even if we take back the House, we're staring down the barrel of losing the Senate; even if we keep the Senate and retake the House, there is no way on earth we will have anything close to what we already had in 2008-2010! Perhaps this new attitude of Obama's (and the loss of many of the Blue Dogs/centrists from 2010 to now) will help, but unless we keep the Senate and retake the House and rewrite the filibuster rules for the new session of the Senate starting in 2013, we will be in a weaker position than we had back then. Color me doubtful.

Aging?

2011-09-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

Every day I wake up and I feel exhausted. One could think it's the cat waking me up anywhere between 1-3 every night to be fed (otherwise, her scratching at the door keeps me up for as long as I don't), but I think it's something more fundamental, because I can never seem to get enough sleep. Perhaps it's the long hangover after having a newborn, but you would think after 2 years of not having to wake up every two hours, I would have gotten back to some semblance of a normal restfulness. And perhaps it's some chemical imbalance that I plan on checking out by seeing an endocrinologist at some point. On the other hand, I'm also in pain a lot, but again, that could simply be the wear and tear of having a toddler jump on my stomach--"Yay, that's fun daddy!"--and me hoisting him in the air many times every day off I have.
Or is it simply a function of age? I just turned 49; is that too soon to have these kinds of physical ailments? I've never been 49 before, after all--maybe this is normal. I sure feel like it is not normal, because the reality is that ever since I had chemotherapy, I've felt this way--is it some kind of lingering and permanent after-effect of chemotherapy? Have I been prematurely aged beyond my years? Who can say with any surety? Certainly not the oncologist that I've talked to; her job was done once the cancer was eliminated (and I don't begrudge her for that, of course.) It does seem like nobody has looked into these kinds of things too much, although the newness of many of the chemo drugs makes long term research impossible for a while yet. (The "chemo brain" effect, the actuality of which I can attest, is just recently being studied and accepted as "real." Other after-effects must surely exist as well, one would have to assume at this point.) I have yet to do much research myself in gerontology, so I have to admit I know next to nothing about the aging process, but then again, who in the mid-late 40s thinks in those terms, really? It seems too early in life for me to feel this lousy all the time, but maybe I'm simply ignorant. I know plenty of people plenty older than me that don't have these issues, but then again, none of them have 2+ year-old kids, either.
Gaahh. It just goes round and round . . .

Taxes and the economy

2011-08-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

It seems that most people, when faced with the question of taxes, looks at it from a personal standpoint, and not really in the usual, rational, "what's in it for/against me?" way, either. What I mean is that people tend to forget some of the bigger picture items that have to do with the whole concept of taxation. Republican/conservative ideologues want less taxation because they want smaller government, but rather than actually arguing for smaller government (an argument they will lose every time--even with their own constituents, who really don't want smaller government. Depending on their sub-group identities, they want government redirected in various ways, either getting into people's bedrooms/sex lives/reproductive systems, getting into other countries militarily to overthrow hated enemies, getting into the school systems to program (or allowing/funding parents to program) children according to their beliefs, getting into the business world to bail out fiscal losers in the Wall Street casinos, etc.) they instead bloviate about how the rich pay more than their share of the tax revenue, or about how the government is stealing the money out of the pockets of hard-working men and women of blue collar America, or about what a tremendous burden taxes are on the poor, put-upon capitalist entrepreneurs. (Occasionally, the real argument sneaks out; the teabaggers are convinced, or are trying to convince others, that a smaller government is better because, well, because it, well, just because. They have had to sidestep the realities that taxes and the government depending on them do a whole lot of good things for everyone in the country, like provide roads and bridges and clean air/water. [Or they did before that kind of regulation and investment began to erode thanks to their very efforts over the last 3 decades.])
The end result, however, of concentrating everyone's attention on the individual's relationship to taxes, has been more than just the complete capitulation by politicians to even talk about raising taxes to stave off national bankruptcy or pay our debts, let alone spend that money on useful things that everyone wants, like healthcare or reliable transportation and infrastructure. The result is that our whole economy has suffered. By making the whole discussion about income taxes and their effects on everyone's wallets, people have let slide other arguments that have virtually eliminated the chances for American businesses to succeed or remain competitive while using American workers.
Before the income tax was created on a permanent basis in 1913, the main provider of government revenue were taxes on goods and services (really, just "goods" at that point in our history), called tariffs. Tariffs were used throughout our history before then for one of two reasons, mostly: 1) as mentioned, to raise revenue for the federal government; but more importantly, 2) to stimulate national businesses by providing an indirect price support for American goods. By having a tariff on imported goods, the prices for our own goods could compete, and usually beat, those of foreign countries' products in our markets, creating a beneficial demand for our own manufacturing concerns. Keeping demand for American products high, even at the expense of having prices higher than they could have been otherwise, helped all Americans, because high demand necessitated high production requiring high employment, which put more money into more pockets, etc. As long as these inflationary measures were outpacing the rise in prices for goods, everyone won.
The potential problem is obvious: inflation with a capital "I." And for most years since the end of WW2, inflation has been a concern. Since the 1980s, however, inflation of this sort has not been a problem, income stagnation and joblessness have been, in alternating doses. Alternating, that is, until now, when we have both declining salaries and high unemployment. And you know what solves those issues? Inflation! That's right, deflation (recession) and depression are cured by inflation, according to the only economic theory that has ever been proven to work in a capitalist economy, that of Keynesianism. It's so obvious it almost qualifies for a "duh." Yet because we have been so conditioned by decades of worry about inflation, we can't see that forest for that tree. Granted, we do have to worry about prices rising faster than incomes, but we've always had to worry about that. (And of course, the US hasn't been doing anything about that, either, so what's the real difference now anyway, right?)
We have to abandon the concept of free trade, because it has already killed US manufacturing and is currently finishing off what's left of the middle class's ability to earn a living. Raise that tax to stimulate the market for homegrown biz, raise taxes on the rich because they have yet to help create anything for anybody except themselves with the extra cash bonanza they've been getting since the 1980s, and maybe we can rejoin the industrialized nations once more.

Politics 101

2011-08-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

I may have mentioned this before, but I just finished responding to a Daily Kos comment that struck me as incredibly dense and thought I would expand on my thoughts here. That commenter (who was responding to an earlier comment of mine) asked me if I was actually a Republican (haw!), because I had said that what those of us to the left of Obama want was for the Democratic Party to propose decent legislation and then fight for it, rather than passing weakened bipartisan-ish garbage. Her/his response is typical of the whole "Obama can do nothing, but what he does is brilliant!" crowd. I paraphrase: "What? You'd rather have nothing done?" To which I answer, "You're goddamned right I'd rather have nothing done--if the alternative is going to be bad." I simply don't understand these people that insist that "stuff has to get done", but have no concerns about the quality of that "stuff." I agree that the government has to continue to function, but there comes a time when we're going to have to stare the Republican children down and say "no more!" and the sooner we do it, the sooner we can begin to recover our country's bearings. (It doesn't help at all that these people are taking their direction from the very top of our party. President Obama has done more to restore the good name of the Republican Party than anyone since LordGodKing Reagan himself, and in neither case has it helped the country.)
To all those who think crap legislation like the ACA (the health insurance "reform" bill) is better than anything we could have gotten, I say, "You're right. And since this was the best we could have gotten, we should have dumped it in the garbage where it belongs and proposed something worthwhile instead and get the votes on it." And since we actually already had a decent bill in the hopper, passed by Nancy Pelosi's House, it wouldn't have taken much time at all. What would that have done for us?
1) We wouldn't be on record as supporting tepid legislation that won't do anything to solve the real problem of health care costs and outcomes in this country.
2) We would have shown the country that the Democratic Party has some ideals.
3) We would have shown the country that the Democratic Party cares about things like health care costs and outcomes in favor of the patients instead of the insurers.
4) Lastly, and maybe most importantly for the long run, we would have had the Republicans on record as having opposed not only the good legislation, but also as having voted in favor of big business and against every single person in the country who ever has been, or ever will be, sick/injured/dying. (Everybody, that is.)
What these would have done for the Democrats is to have provided them one of the easiest platforms for running a political campaign in the history of the nation. Even a hard core libertarian would have had to swallow her/his vote for a Republican as a vote against her/his own health. (The teabaggers probably would not have been created--if you remember, the baggers formed in response to the health care legislation "debate", and it's quite possible that if the Dems had acted swiftly and aggressively in fighting for good legislation the funders wouldn't have had the time to react and build this "movement.") The campaign lit would have written itself, just about. "We voted to give you healthcare, and they voted against it." I mean, it's not that hard, is it? Instead, those of us who could see this and spoke out got told to shut up, stop whining, and to let the "adults in the room" handle it. Fast forward to post-2010 election day, and we're the ones getting blamed for undercutting the party and causing the historic losses.
This scenario could and should have been repeated for every single bill that was proposed. Eventually, even the densest Republican voter would have gotten it--gee, they really don't like me; they keep voting against what I want!
Yes, no (good) legislation would have made it past the filibuster in the Senate, but that's no different from what we have now, is it? And instead of having some clear distinctions between the two parties, we have a severely disaffected left wing that sees no distinctions between "D" and "R", and no matter how much scolding we receive--indeed, in inverse relation to the amount of denigration we get--we can still see the Emperor has no clothes.

What's wrong with Democratic pols?

2011-08-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Republicans may be crazy and/or stupid, but you always know where you stand with them. The Democratic pols we have now, on the other hand, are completely amorphous. I don't think a minute goes by on Daily Kos when there isn't a thread that doesn't devolve into a debate on what Obama really wants. We simply have no idea, really, what the putative leader of our party thinks about the issues of the day, let alone any solutions we need for the very real and sinister problems we face. And if he isn't the leader of the party, as his supporters claim--they say, with a smug expression, more times than not, that he's the President of the whole country, not just the majority of people who are on his political left--then who is, and what does s/he believe? We are bereft of leadership, and we are bereft of direction, and it is killing this country just as assuredly as the Republicans' policies are.
Ideas we have. Most Dems know what policies are popular, what policies would solve the various issues of the day, and what policies we would enact if given the chance. That part, as strange as it sounds, is easy, because all the problems we currently face have already been solved, either in this country (Keynesian spending will solve deflation and government job creation will solve unemployment, just like it did during the New Deal), or others (we are the only industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care, and we far outspend others per capita for what we do get from the private sphere--talk about a no-brainer!) The electorate, however, has failed to consistently support the one party that at one time or another, has supported those policies that the public supports with big majorities, judging by any poll taken. Why is this?
It is eminently possible that the majority of the voting populace is simply stupid and doesn't know what Republicans do when in power, but I think it's a little more complex than that, and at the same time simpler. People that vote, for some reason, seem to prefer politicians who stake out a position on a small number of policies, stick to them (even when shown those policies are abject failures, like with supply-side economics), and most importantly, fight for them when elected. The Republicans are seen to stand for something, even if it is evil and/or short-sighted, and because of that, they are attractive to the people who bother to vote. And Democrats are not. (And this is true even when they do try to push for a similar descriptive stance, due to too many years of mindless campaigns. Which one of the 3 major candidates for President in 2008 ran this kind of campaign? John Edwards, and he was laughed off the stage after one primary.)
This is not something that can be solved by one campaign or one individual, either. All Democrats running for office have to buy into the same theme somehow, and pursue it faithfully once in office, at least rhetorically, and it may not even matter what that theme is. If all Dems could unite under one banner, whether it's an analogue of Edwards's "Two Americas", which is becoming more and more true with each passing crisis, or something else equally as true, I think the policies we push for would make more sense to the voting public.
Let's take an example: What's the benefit of universal health care? There are a multitude, actually. Better outcomes, better cost containment, better (i.e., less) bureaucracy, better efficiency, less confusion for the patient, etc. Each of these could be used as a rationale for politician to support a bill, but when a handful of pols each choose a different one, which is what happens now, the voter is seemingly confused about what the party as a whole wants. Does the Democratic Party support universal healthcare because it does a better job at containing costs, or because it cares about patient's rights, or because it is interested in centralizing decision making? Who knows, and who can tell? The truth is, the Party as a whole doesn't support any one thing for any one reason at all, because it doesn't have a coherent message that would easily accommodate these disparate reasons. Once it decided on that overarching message, all of these various things, instead of pulling in different directions rhetorically, would pull toward that same goal. For example, if Democratic Party politicians all began saying variations of the same theme, say, "We are the party for the little guy against the impersonal and uncaring corporate monsters", all of the various reasons listed above fit nicely in that framework. Voters would then get what the pols who have the "D" next to their name are about, regardless of what that individual pol thinks specifically about any particular issue. And that's a good thing, because that means the voter doesn't have to pick and choose which of his/her issues is most important to him/her in deciding for whom to vote. A vote for a Dem would be a vote for the "little guy", full stop. It's not all about messaging, but crafting a coherent message certainly couldn't hurt; not having one is rather obviously hurting, at the very least. Fighting for that vision once in office is the next step, but even here, if Dems looked at every issue they face through the prism of their overall message, it becomes clearer how to vote on each bill, and even easier to explain those votes to one's constituency.
It doesn't look like this is going to happen any time soon, unfortunately, which is why I think this country is dying. Help me, Democrats! You're my only hope!

2012 Presidential election--meh.

2011-08-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

I'm almost literally of two minds on whether I want to vote for Obama or not in the general election. I am 100% sure he is not going to do anything in a second term differently than he has done so far in his first, especially given the very real possibility that the best Congress he will ever get to work with left the building after 2010. However, I am also 100% sure that any Republican will be worse. So, do I go with the concept of voting for "the lesser of 2 evils", or do I instead act on the truism that "the lesser of 2 evils is still evil" and not vote for one of the two major candidates at all? At this point, I really am torn. Some have tried to tell me that in this event, it's all about the Supreme Court and nominees thereto, but I don't think I have to consider that. I think that no rightwing justices will ever again retire during the Presidency of a non-Republican, so the odds of us steering the Court back to sanity are nil. Conversely, I think the "liberal" justices won't retire if the President is a Republican, either, if at all possible. None of the justices are going to be as old as Stevens was when he left after the next term is up, so here's how I see things. If Obama wins, maybe Ginsburg steps down, and Obama names another justice positioned where his first 2 nominees were. A wash, maybe, or even slightly worse? I don't see anybody else leaving voluntarily. If a Republican wins, maybe Kennedy steps down (I think Scalia will have to be dragged off the bench in a bag) and we get a showdown between a complacent Senate and a crazy President for his replacement, who will probably be a wash at best. So either way, the best we can hope for is a wash.
Of course, there is always the possibility that a judge will die in office unexpectedly, but other than Rehnquist, you have to go all the way back to the early 1950s to find another judge who did so, and Rehnquist had an active cancer. While Ginsburg has had both colon and pancreatic cancer, there are no known reports that either are still active. She recently had surgery for the pancreatic cancer, and the doctors have said that they caught the cancer "early." Unsurprisingly, nobody's talking beyond that. (There are no reports on Kennedy's, or Scalia's, health that I can find.)
I guess the questions about Ginsburg's health, and the possibility that Scalia or Kennedy, who are both going to be in their late 70s by the time of the election, could keel over suddenly, will push me to vote for Obama, but my reality is that I am relatively unconcerned about the Presidential race, for the most part. Retaking the House and keeping the Senate are by far more important to me than whether Obama gets 4 more years to disappoint and aggravate me.

R.I.P. The middle class, US. 1933-1980?

2011-08-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

Nothing dramatic happened over the weekend to prompt this entry, but I figured after my last two posts, I would detail the results of 30+ years of rightward drift in our government. For decades prior, the US had a vibrant (economically speaking) mass of people who were neither rich nor poor, and they were known to all as "the middle class" because of it. Living standards in the US improved greatly in the 20th century, mainly as a result of the accumulation of wealth by this middle class, spurred on by governmental spending on their behalf. (The remaining improvement can be seen in governmental spending for the "poorer" classes striving to enter the middle class. Think about rural electrification as an example of those efforts.) And it is easy to see why, as the distribution of wealth in this country began to resemble the old statistical standby, the bell curve. Better living for the middle of that curve meant better living for the vast majority of the country's populace. (Before that, wealth was much more highly concentrated at the leading edge of the curve, as the richest 10% owned far more than their 10% share of the wealth.)
As most historians and sociologists will tell you, though, the development of the concept of a "class" depends on more than just numbers in a chart or the shape of a graph. To have a fully realized class, the members of that class must share common goals or values, and by looking at what those were can we truly see that the middle class has indeed died. So what were "middle class values"? More pointedly, how did they spend their new found wealth (which is probably the best indicator, in a society where autonomy and individualism are prized)? I don't think any of these are all that controversial, so I'll simply list the kinds of things which the middle class seemed to value, admittedly based on nothing more than my own personal observations, and in no particular order:
1) home ownership
2) college education for their kids, if any
3) family vacations; time spent together with the family as a unit
4) purchase of other significant material possessions (cars, TVs)
5) stable retirement income, with more left over for children's inheritance
6) "nuclear" family structure
7) upward mobility, both in career and society--the idea that one can improve one's lot in life through hard work
There may be more, but I think those are the most widely shared values or aspirations held by the American middle class of the 20th century. The amazing thing in retrospect is that they held these values, and many were eventually able to achieve them, based on a single income! This last point is the most relevant when determining that the middle class actually died a long time ago, not in this last decade or some point more recent. People very quickly got used to having more than one income per family, because they rationalized their state by the values by which they still wished to live. If one income wasn't enough to do the kinds of things "middle class" people do, the middle class "allowed itself" to be defined differently--now analysts (and maybe more importantly, politicians) looked at "family income", rather than individual income, to see where the "middle class" lay on the graph, neatly obfuscating the fact that middle class incomes were failing to keep up with the cost of their value system, even though productivity measures shot through the roof over the course of the century.
And that was the big lie. The middle class had to double the number of incomes just to maintain its value system at the same level! Since most people were kept so busy working (Americans have always had the least number of vacation days per capita among all the industrialized nations, although Canada, it seems, has dipped below them currently, although most businesses in the US do not pay for holidays, so this chart is a little forgiving of the reality), and the erosion of buying power was so gradual, many people probably felt that they were simply adjusting to a "new normal"--a phrase we are once again hearing, and to which I will turn shortly. The Republican Party, though, whether through actual manipulation of the mechanism of wealth generation by its richer members, or simply through happenstance (I leave it to others to decide what they think!), grasped quite quickly that this ugly decline could be put to "good" (actually "evil", but I digress) use in the political realm by 1980.
Reagan's constant scapegoating, whether of the government itself (which is the only actor powerful enough to correct the decline via regulation, or wealthy enough to offset it via direct stimulus), or of demonized subgroups of the poorer classes (e.g., the mythical "welfare queen" who drove a Cadillac) led many middle class people to join in their own throat-slitting by electing Republicans, who as we have seen, have no interest in actually helping any groups but the rich and powerful. And for the last 30+ years, we have seen the resulting and rapid decay of the middle class, to the point where now even 2 incomes can't provide for the middle class "dreams" of yesteryear.
Occasionally on Daily Kos an argument over what constitutes "the middle class" erupts whereby some misguided people argue that $250K is really middle class in some parts of the country. (No, really!) Where they have gone wrong is in thinking that the middle class can still afford its values; and since in their parts of the world owning a house, paying for college, etc. can cost that much money, that the "middle class" can actually be defined to include people making 6 times the median personal income (which is well into the top 5% of income, if not much higher--this chart stops counting at $100K, which is already higher than 93.76% of incomes!) The reality is that the middle class long ago became unable to afford its own values--any of them--and the "new normal" we are hearing about now is the sound of the failure of the 2 income family to be able to afford them either. Only the rich are middle class now, it seems--and this has happened even before we lose what last shreds of a welfare system we still have. Wealth has once again been relegated to the top, as we have completed the dismantling of the redistribution of wealth the New Deal era accomplished. Indeed, we've gone so far in that direction that we're now worse off along those lines than at any time in the 20th century, and possibly at any time in our entire history. (Apparently, we only started measuring wealth distribution in the early 20th C; I can not locate a chart with complete historical data. I would be surprised if wealth was more highly concentrated at the top at any previous time than it was in pre-crash 1929, but it is possible.)
But
Ooooh, there's a scary black man in the White House!
or (and this is from a real patron in my library)
Does TMZ.com (no, I'm not linking to them!) have any articles about Marc Anthony and JLo getting back together?
or (a common retort from so-called centrists, even Democratic ones, referring to those of us complaining that Congress and the President are not helping)
Aww, you didn't get your pony? Stop whining and grow up!
*sigh*

Republican voters--evil, or stupid?

2011-08-11T08:54:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I looked at the Republican politicians themselves to see how they operate, and of course, it's not pretty. Today I want to think about why they keep getting elected, even after decades of evidence that doing so has only wrecked the country. What it comes down to, really, is that anyone who has voted R since about 1982 is either evil or stupid. Putting aside, for a moment, those who are in the top 1% of wealth in the country--in other words, the only people in the country who actually benefit in any way whatsoever from Republican "governance"--we have to explain why every other R voter has voted against his or her own material interests.
The first possibility is that the R voters are thinking about things other than material interests when they cast their ballot. What might those things be? Most Republican campaigns since the early 1980s have been run on something called "family values", and supposedly Republicans have them and Democrats don't. (The fact that the vast majority of politicians' violations of those "values" have come from Republicans has completely escaped the notice of the R voter, which is evidence of my second possibility below.) "Family values", it seems, is a coded phrase that really means, to put it baldly and accurately, "bigotry", and imho, bigotry is evil. Why else would Republicans, elected official or not, castigate non-WASPs as being deserving of less than equal treatment under the law? That's what bigots think. Whether you are Latino, African-American, GLBTQI, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, (and especially, according to polling data) atheist/agnostic, you have been slandered, libeled, and legislated against by Republicans for decades. And now finally, after having exhausted all ethno-religious groups, the less-than-rich are getting their turn in the stocks from the Republicans, as they set about eliminating all methods of preventing poverty and stripping the country of its wealth.
As each group has come under the noose of Republican rule, their only possible political response has been to join the Democrats in fighting off destruction, but until now, at least, Republicans have been able to keep the bigotry just attractive enough to their electorate to keep their winning streak going. But with the overt decimation of the economy that almost everyone sees was caused by Republican policies implemented since 2001, they may have finally reached the end of their run. (When you have dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Arlen Specter join your party, you know things must have gotten pretty bad across the aisle.) The teabagger nonsense of the last few years, I'm hoping, is their last gasp, but I also think that it represents their coup de grace, because I don't see the Democratic Party as strong enough to stop the economic slaughter any more.
And yet, as we just saw in Wisconsin, some people still vote Republican, despite 100% of the evidence showing that the economy is dying and that Republican policies are 100% to blame for it. Let's take a hypothetical here: even if I think everyone not white and Christian is Satanic and coming to get me, if I'm unemployed with no hope of getting another job, why would I choose to vote for someone who has overtly stated s/he is not interested in helping me get work or food or healthcare over someone who has? And the only reason I can think of would be sheer idiocy on my behalf. It is just plain stupid to vote for a Republican at this late hour; they have shown zero interest in doing anything your "family values" BS calls for. Even when they controlled every single branch of the government, did they repeal Roe v. Wade? No. Did they impose English as the only official language for the country? No. Did they deport every unpapered immigrant? No. Did they declare Christianity the state religion? No. What exactly have they given you, despite decades of your voting for them? Nothing. Zero. Face it, you all were played for chumps. Suckers. It's hard to hear, I know, but get used to it, because I have nothing but contempt for you, now that you've screwed the country over for good, and for what? The null set. (Anyone still voting for Republicans is beyond my contempt, because they are clearly "too stupid to live", as Rebecca Howe once said.)
Congratulations.

Republicans--why do we even try with them?

2011-08-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

I know, a lot of us don't. But there are those, and some who even hold high public office, who still think (I would call it delusionally so) that they can be reasoned with. Why is that? When have they shown the least inclination to bargain or argue faithfully, let alone for the good of the country? If we take a look at what they profess to believe--based on their actions over the last decade and 1/2--we can easily see that they are pursuing a singular goal, and compromising or bargaining have nothing to do with achieving that goal.
They want to destroy the New Deal and the Progressive era that preceded it, and return us to the apparently halcyon days of 1885. (I will leave it to others to argue that they actually are hardcore racists and want a return any earlier than that.) It should be obvious to all that this is the goal; what do they call for more than anything else? Lower taxes and less regulation. The income tax was established on a permanent basis in 1913, so we know they want to go back before that. Popular calls for governmental regulation of businesses stemmed mainly from the public health threats posed by pre-Pure Food and Drug Act immoral business behavior, so we know we have to date it before 1906. The Panic of 1893 created a public clamor for stronger regulation of the economy, so it has to be before that. (I put it at 1885, because one other main component of Republican ideology is the desire to completely eliminate unions, and the first union (the AFL) was formed in 1886. They've almost succeeded in that task already, so I felt it unnecessary to include it above.)
While this may just be a cute semantic exercise, I think it is instructive to see how truly radical the modern Republican Party has become. These are not conservatives trying to undo a few Administrations' worth of "missteps"--although since Republicans have controlled the White House for all but 14 of the last 42 years, I'm not sure how anyone would think that--these are revolutionaries seeking to change the foundations of the way we've lived in this country for 126 years! There is no amount of bargaining plausible that would enable one to reach that kind of goal, so it is no surprise that Republicans are totally uninterested in doing any.
No surprise, that is, except apparently for the Democrats we now have in "power." "Led" by President Obama, Democrats in Congress have repeatedly attempted to craft legislation that would garner Republican votes, only to be stymied time and time again, even for the weakest of weak sauces. Only when a bill furthers the Republican goal (like the bailout of GM and the banks, which used money directly from we the people)--or better yet, one that is in appearance anti-Republican, but in reality still works to funnel money to the business sector (like the health insurance reform act, which has done nothing to protect against rate hikes, but will mandate universal participation)--will they reluctantly allow passage. That Obama (especially) and other Dems would then praise their own efforts at "getting something done", or passing a "grand bargain", is simply too galling to stomach for long. Yet still it continues.
It seems clear to me, at least, that Obama is not stupid, nor does he appear naive (he would have to be both to have not learned how the Republicans operate this far into his tenure), so we have to conclude that either a) he has no ideology at all, and is only interested in the inside baseball of political wrangling and process regardless of outcome; or b) he has an ideology directly opposed to the Democratic Party platform, but knew he couldn't get elected/re-elected as a Republican or independent and wanted the job badly. I can't imagine that he truly feels like he is accomplishing anything but enabling the Republicans to achieve their goals at this point, unless a) is true and his only goal is to sign legislation he helped pilot through a contentious Congress. Why else would he continue to engage any Republicans in discussions of policy or legislative matters, given their stated desires to both destroy him and eliminate any vestige of governmental help for the less-than-overwhelmingly rich?
It is inconceivable to me that anyone not brain dead would deny the Republican intransigence and seek to work around it, but instead Obama and the other leading Dems (with the probable exception of the now-powerless House Minority Leader Pelosi) repeatedly include Republicans in their feeble attempts to govern. (The new "Super-Congress" is merely the latest, albeit the most ridiculous and almost certainly unConstitutional, effort to get Republicans to disregard their well-established motives.) It really is baffling, but only if one tries to square the circle of believing that Obama and his seeming lapdogs are actually trying to follow the Democratic Party platform. Once one drops that pretense and acknowledges that Obama has no desire to do so, for whatever reasons he has, one begins to understand how well and truly finished we are. So, let's ring in the New Year of 1885, now and forevermore!

I knew there was a good reason I like Russell Crowe

2010-05-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

During Q/A at Cannes for "Robin Hood", Crowe was asked what he thought Robin Hood might do in today's world. His response was both smart and pointed:
" . . . Crowe took a jab at the media, saying Robin Hood might have a whole new agenda if he were around today.
'Would he be political? Would he aim at certain figures and try to bring them down? Would his aim be economic? Would he be looking at Wall Street and the huge sums of money that people have been patting themselves on the back with, and the subprime mortgage collapse?' Crowe said.
'Or would he be looking at what you guys do for a living and realizing that the true wealth lies in the dissemination of information? And my theory would be, if Robin Hood was alive today, he would be looking at the monopolization of media as the greatest enemy.'"
Crowe clearly understands one of the main poisons destroying our society, I'm happy to say. Now, if we could only get our elected officials to figure this out, too . . .

Because it's too depressing

2010-05-10T10:19:00.001-07:00

I haven't written in a long while--the longest stretch since I started this blog, iirc--because almost every single piece of national news I've received has been bad. The health care bill passed, but is weak sauce and doesn't appear to be getting stronger anytime soon. Republicans are becoming increasingly crazy, which is saying a lot. The Republican Party is institutionalizing the craziness as well: at least in Maine, the official Party platform has been rewritten by the Teabaggers. Low points: 1) Eliminate voter registration at the DMV; 2) Eliminate the pension for Congresspersons, none of whom will serve more than 12 years anyway; 3) "Reassert the principle that 'Freedom of Religion' does not mean 'freedom from religion'" (iow, create an air of harassment, at least, for anyone not espousing a religious belief); 4) Promote family values by defining marriage as heterosexual; 5) Institutionalize forced pregnancy ideology; 6) "Return to the principles of Austrian Economics" (iow, allow for an utterly unregulated free market); 7) Remove governmental regulation of energy companies (in the face of the Gulf oil spill, no less!); and the most heartless one of all, 8) "Clarify that healthcare is not a right. It is a service. . . . Only market based solutions will solve the problems."
To repeat: this is in Maine, the home of the supposedly moderate Republicans Snowe and Collins. The lesson here is that Republicans of all stripes are bound and determined to not just overturn any progressive legislation passed by the most recent Congress and Presidency, but all such laws written since the Civil War (and some from before that!) If you are a registered Republican and do not believe in some of the stuff listed above or in the Maine platform, I suggest you rethink your registration status (while you still can). The Republican Party has shown a marked reluctance over the last 16 years to do anything but destroy this country, and if you don't see that you are blind. If at worst you support this kind of thing, you are either stupid or evil. To those pantywaists who would try to get me to tone down my rhetoric because I might offend someone and prevent some sort of epiphany from the deluded, I say this: I don't care about convincing Republicans to see things my way, or even the sane way, because I honestly doubt they are capable of caring about other people at all. I've grown weary of being subjected to the cold brutality of rightwing oppression that has been slowly taking over this country ever since I became old enough to vote. During my whole adult life I have never witnessed the passage or implementation of any progressive legislation--instead I have seen the withering away of all semblance of hope for its resurgence, as the forces of sociopathic conservative rule stymie resistance at every turn. Bit by bit and law by law, our country is being run into the ground by the rich and Republican, and there aren't any levers left for the rest of us to pull that can make it any better. We no longer own the media, we no longer have effective representation in our political bodies, and we no longer can afford to do anything but work (if we're lucky enough to have jobs, that is) until we die.
To those of you who have voted for any Republicans since 1994, and especially since 1999: Fuck You. Fuck You. Fuck You. You killed the US, and you're killing my dreams for my son to have any kind of decent future here. You chose to put yourselves above the good of anyone else alive on the planet, and if you didn't realize it, fuck you for being stupid, because there were plenty of ways you could have figured that out long before now. If you voted for any Republican in that time period and are now out of work? You deserve it, you stupid worthless moron. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps now, jackass. That's the kind of world you wanted, isn't it? Go die cold in the ditch outside somebody else's gated community, you scumbag, because those are the only people you helped with your vote, and I don't care how old you are, or how much money you donated to some cause, because you prevented millions more from getting the help they needed from the stripped-down helpless government you voted for. If you are a Republican officeholder at any level of government, I hope there is a heaven and a hell, because you will surely burn forever in a Lake of Fire for having screwed over as many people as you possibly could for as long as you possibly could for the sake of yourself and your cronies, which is the most un-Christian attitude there could possibly be. For those of you who think that Maine Republicans are just being extreme, and I'm being too harsh, it's too late for you to wake up, so enjoy your early onset retirement and death, because they've already come for you and there's already no one left to speak up.

Happy Birthday, Son!

2010-03-09T07:45:00.000-08:00

Well, in a little less than 7 hours, you will be exactly one year old, and I think the world is a better place for having you in it. I know mine is. I think the moment when I figured a lot of it out occurred just last night. Even after I've been frustrated beyond my limits by you (and I freely admit that has everything to do with me being incompetent and nothing at all to do with anything you have done) and come close to despair on plenty of times, you greeted me when I came home from work with upraised arms and your glorious "crinkly smile face"--you were actually happy just to see me! That sense of forgiveness and love helped me realize that maybe I can do this, because you aren't simply a blank slate for your mother and me (well, me) to screw up. I don't have to be perfect to raise you, which is a good thing because, as anybody who knows me will say, I am as far from perfect as it gets while still maintaining some sense of decency and decorum. That being said, I also realize that I have to do better; I have to be better than I have been--you've shown me you deserve better, that's for sure. So I'm going to take this occasion to vow to you that I will be better this year than I was last year, and I intend on making this vow anew every year at this time.
Things of which I'm proud that you did this year:
Smiled for the first time
Laughed for the first time
Sat up for the first time
Grew teeth for the first time
Crawled for the first time
Walked for the first time
Ate "real" food for the first time--and what a menu: hamburger, turkey burger, chicken, salmon, cod, apples, bananas, pears, black beans, peas, kidney beans, cheese, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, Goldfish crackers, spinach, strawberries, watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple, and a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting, I'm sure.
Played "peek-a-boo" for the first time
Spoke for the first time, although I'm waiting for further confirmation, much to the consternation of your mom
Whew! That's quite a list.
I love you,
Dad

The enemy, defined

2010-02-02T09:43:00.000-08:00

Daily Kos has produced a poll in which self-identified Republicans, of whom nothing more needs to be said at this point than they must truly be witless to remain so, responded to a whole host of questions about issues and President Obama. The answers are among the most depressing data points I've ever seen compiled in one document. Among the lowlights is this tidbit, surely the most ironic answer ever, given the outrageously "patriotic" noise these clowns make: 42% of the respondents either think their state should secede or aren't sure.
Simply put: yikes.
: (

The Presidency done right

2010-02-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

I've been highly critical of President Obama. I don't think he's really a liberal, let alone a *gasp* "Socialist" (I wish!), but I do think his heart and mind are in the right place. As evidence, please take a couple of breaks from your daily grind to watch him in action the way the President of the US is supposed to work.
His visit to the House Republicans late last week has already become the stuff of legend. Not because he blasted them all to smithereens with pointed rhetoric or angry vengeance--which would have been justly deserved and a balm to all sane people everywhere--but rather because he showed his abilities off to the greatest advantage. He placed himself in the lion's den, to be sure, and he more than held his own against some truly ignorant questions and wrongheaded attacks. The best thing about this, though, was that it was televised so everybody could see (and thanks to the internet, will always be freely able to see) the exchange. This interview wasn't about Obama talking to a bunch of neanderthal thugs, but instead about our President talking to us, the American people at large. That he was simultaneously able to fairly well embarrass some unthinking Republican Party hacks in Congress was the bonus that could very well pay off politically as well. This is how modern politics should work; this is how a President is supposed to communicate
A much less heralded (so far) interaction took place yesterday on YouTube, where President Obama showed even more adroitness in handling himself. Anyone could have foreseen what questions--or at least what kinds of questions--a Republican drone would ask him, but taking questions from the masses themselves? Talk about potential pitfalls! Granted, there were some editorial choices made by the YouTube host, but one truly gets the impression that there was nothing scripted about the exchanges.
A number of years ago I was thinking about how Democrats could circumvent the right wing's ownership of American mass media, and stuff like this was exactly what I thought they should be doing (to toot my own horn, of course!). Bypass the media in any way possible, and for someone like the President, it's as easy as this. For people as rich as any Senator, it would be just as simple as well; buying up airtime on the teevee worked for Ross Perot--I watched his infomercials in 1992, and so did millions of other people, because the concept of actually taking one's case to the public directly is so refreshing these days it has great appeal. It works, and I applaud the President for doing it. The fact that he's smart enough to be able to take on all comers in this fashion is enormously satisfying, especially after having endured 8 years of Smirky manipulating the public at every "managed" opportunity. The only question I have is: why didn't you start this last year, Mr. President?

HAHAHAHAHA! Democrats in Congress are not smart

2009-12-22T07:40:00.000-08:00

This report states, " . . . Democrats say the apparently unbridgeable health care divide has convinced them that Republicans are dedicated solely to blocking legislative proposals for political purposes. Several said they now realized that they would have to rely strictly on their own caucus . . ."
Gee, it only took them 15 years to figure that out! Too bad the country has been blown all to hell in the interim. Way to go, Dems!

Politics: Democrats, you're not doing it right

2009-12-17T09:13:00.000-08:00

So, let's say you're the Democratic Party. In control (by a large majority) of the House of Representatives. In control (by almost a filibuster-proof majority) of the Senate. In control of the White House. Passing your Party platform legislation should be easy. Instead, we have an escalation of the wars we inherited from Smirky and his pals, all legislation and/or Executive order regulations regarding LGBT rights have been shunted off to some nebulous future time, no investigations or prosecutions of felonious acts by the previous Administration have been initiated, and no serious legislation helping anyone other than bankers and other high end industrial or financial businesses has been passed.
What the fuck are you doing?
The ultimate cynic in me thinks: "Well, this is because the Democratic Party is either bought and paid for by lobbyists, or the Democratic Party has shifted so far to the right that they are getting exactly what its members actually want (or both)." But let's humor those who still think Obama and the rest of the Party honchos care about humans other than themselves for a minute and have instead been played by those political sharpies like Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, and even sociopathic subnormals like Tom Coburn or Mitch McConnell. How could the first year of this Administration have gone differently, to the benefit of the Party, as we head into the off-Presidential election year when, by all accounts, we are instead going to get slaughtered?
If politics is the art of the possible, the first thing an actual political leader must do is find out what that is. For example, let's deal with the elelphant in my post--Health Care Reform. A simple questionnaire could have been circulated the day after the election last November to all of the Democrats coming into office, asking them what kinds of things each of them wanted in any legislation having to do with health care reform. Nothing threatening, nothing too hard: just, "What do you think we should do to help our constituents on the matter of health care?" The Majority Whip, or more precisely, his/her aides could then compile all the answers and then provide those to whomever wanted to write the bill. The writer could then write that bill, the Majority Leader would then put it in the hopper, and then the Senate would then vote on it. No need for conferences, or CBO scoring, or anything.
Why no need? Because the Democrats are in the majority, that's why. They get to determine what gets voted on and when, and by what mechanism bills get created. If some weird rule that this procedure violates exists, take it out of the organizing resolution at the beginning of the session. Why would that be possible? Because the Democrats are in the majority, that's why. There are plenty of parliamentary procedures available to the majority to ensure the swift passage of these kinds of rule changes, even in the ponderous Senate.
With the Health Care bill, we wouldn't have a problem with cloture votes, for two reasons: 1) we've already included everything the Democratic Senators want in the bill in the first place; and 2) Republicans don't have enough votes to stop us anymore.
But let's say that a "Democrat" or 2 or 3 think to themselves, "Ah, ha! If I threaten to join the neanderthal Republicans, I can extort my own Party to get more stuff!" And then proceed to do exactly that, proving that they are indeed, not representing anyone or anything except themselves and their own egos (otherwise, their desires would have been accounted for already during the bill's creation). What can a principled and effective Party leader, whether s/he is named Obama, or Reid, or Emmanuel, do then? And it is here that it gets stickier, and where the real world Democratic chiefs are completely, blindly, and ridiculously stupid.
1st option: Tell the opportunist to get bent and threaten some internal punishments.
Strip him/her/them of chairmanships, deny them cracks at writing bills, take away opportunities to lard bills with pork, use executive power to close military bases, etc.
2nd option: Give the opportunist pie, but only on some other matter. "You scratch my health care back and I'll give you the sweet deal on this new state entitlement package." A classic.
3rd option: Tell the opportunist to get bent, make the extortion public knowledge, and hold vote after vote to show the world who stands where. This is the one that is not getting used at all by the current leadership. Joe Lieberman doesn't like something? Get his vote down on it--get him on record as denying people health care, or that he just voted to extend soldiers' stay in harm's way. This works especially nicely against Republicans, of course, since they are all about obstruction. They will consistently vote against anything that might help anyone other than themselves, so this should be a no-brainer. Create a bill that gives everyone ponies and ice cream, then let the Republicans and Lieberman (or whomever) vote against it. Then go on as many shows as possible--heck, buy ad time and do an infomercial, if the mainstream media won't give you airtime--and let the public know who is keeping you from getting your Shetlands and sundaes. Buy ad time on Fox News to tell the crazies that their favorite scumbag just denied them free healthcare. Place an ad during "American Idol" to let everyone know how and why they can't get a cushy government job--because all Republicans and Mary Landrieu voted the new New Deal down. This is so simple it hurts. And this is how politics is supposed to work. If someone takes a stand, s/he has to make it public, so everyone can see what s/he believes in. No secret holds, no silent filibusters. If someone blocks good legislation, make them pay for it by exposing their perfidy. Rinse and repeat. This is the only way to wash the filth out of the system at this point, and refusing to do so betokens massive corruption that will kill this country.
I only hope it isn't already too late. (I'm afraid it is.)

Health insurance: an idea whose time has passed

2009-10-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

With the unfortunate debate over how to reform our health care system devolved to whether to give insurance companies a little more money or boatloads more money, it is incumbent upon all caring humans to realize that health insurance companies exist solely to make money. They are not in the business of health care--they only stand between us and the care we need. There is no reason whatsoever for them to be a part of anyone's life decisions, whether indirectly (can I quit this job I hate and remain insured?) or directly (can I afford to go to the doctor for this pain/illness?) TBO and I are struggling to get our son a flu shot this season, ironically because we have insurance and a primary care physician. His office doesn't have any vaccine, but if we were without insurance, we'd be eligible to get him a free shot provided by the County. Oh, but government-run health care is eeeeevil. Anyone believing that is a moron, plain and simple. As if we need another story illustrating the depravity of the insurance business, there's this:
Christina Turner's night started out just fine; she was relaxing at a bar in Fort Lauderdale and (probably) happily accepted a drink bought for her by some guys. Happens every night at millions of places, and usually leads to nothing more harmless than either new friendships (sometimes even love!), or new stories of humor or woe. In Christina Turner's case, however, it has become a story of tragedy and sickening despair with lifelong consequences, because the a-holes spiked her drink with a date-rape drug. Turner woke up on some roadside with cuts and bruises indicating the possibility she was raped. Turner did the right thing by going to the hospital and following her doctor's regimen of anti-AIDS meds.
Months later, though, as Turner was shopping for a new insurer, she found out that her having taken the anti-AIDS drugs disqualified her from obtaining any coverage, even after she explained the circumstances (as if that should make any difference anyway)!
That's right, she was turned down for health insurance because she had been raped.
This is a sick-minded industry that needs to be completely wiped from the face of the country, and any upper managers who have taken any part, ever, in devising the policies that cause incidents like this to happen need to be sued into bankruptcy and homelessness, an end equal to that suffered by the millions of others due to the implementation of those policies.
And we, or more accurately, the weak-willed and spineless Democratic pols, are dithering over a "public option". Disgusting.

Whole Foods and NPR--together again, for the first time anywhere!

2009-08-19T16:32:00.000-07:00

I hope all of you have heard that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has written a Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing health care reform. I suspect at least some of you have joined in on the Whole Foods boycott, as I have. But to the clowns at NPR, the boycott must be the actions of a fringe group of leftist nutballs, apparently, because in their online article on the boycott and furor, they achieve the modern equivalent of "balanced reporting". They quote one of the "some" boycotting Whole Foods, who cogently and coherently states that: "he won't be shopping at the store 'as long as this person is in charge at Whole Foods and he maintains his opposition to appropriate health care payment. If this is their corporate philosophy, I cannot support that . . ." Then the writer quotes an opponent: "I wish the whole country would oppose it...And I think that you find now, at least what we hear, maybe not on NPR or Fox News, you hear that the majority of people are against it, but you have Obama sitting there trying to achieve something that people don't want."
Neatly tied up in a bow, isn't it? One for, one against. Except, of course, the first is clearly and simply one man's rationale for his actions, while the other is a diatribe filled with errors. Just like they do at all the right wing rags, NPR has provided "balance" without doing anything to provide the actual facts involved in the right wingers' claims, which are all inaccurate.
Well done once again, NPR!

What's wrong with America?

2009-08-05T10:13:00.001-07:00

TBO and I had a conversation last night--in the middle of the night, during one of our son's many awakenings--after which I couldn't sleep, so I began to think about the question she posed to me: What's wrong with America?
We were thinking specifically of the ongoing craziness surrounding the President's birth, but as I lay awake, I started cataloging all of the utter nonsense or just plain evil things that people in this country believe.
1) Topping the crazy list is the sad "birther" mess. For those of you not plugged in to the media, the right wing has decided to make President Obama's place of birth an issue--the "birthers" contend that Obama is not qualified to be President because, as they think, he was not really born in the US. And even though Obama authorized the release of his actual birth records, and had them vetted by all local authorities possible, and even though others seeking to put this lunacy to rest have corroborated all existing external aspects of his birth (scans of the Obamas' newspaper birth announcements, for example), there are some in the country who have chosen to continue believing that there is a grand conspiracy at work. And it's not just some lone whackos out on the fringe somewhere on the Web--powerful media voices such as Lou Dobbs and CNN are keeping this silliness alive, if not well. Republican Congressmen are at the very least reluctant to voice their disagreement with the conspiracy, and with people like this helping, recent polling shows that a majority of Republicans (and Southerners) in the country have been duped into doubting (at best) Obama's already proven citizenship.
My question becomes, in the face of these disturbing and pathetic polling results, is this a simple case of racism, or is it simple-mindedness instead? My guess is that it's a bit of both, which is somewhat redundant anyway, imho, since the way I look at it, racism is just a form of stupidity, willful ignorance, or plain laziness of thought. Why anyone might actively choose to be stupid is beyond me, but I guess it does make life easier.
2) While perhaps less crazy than ignorant and selfish are those who continue to buy into the Reagan-era line "Government is not the solution to the country's problems, it is the problem." TBO told me of a caller to Patt Morrison's NPR show who was railing against the "Cash for Clunkers" program. The caller ranted that she didn't want her tax dollars going to pay for someone else's benefit, clearly missing the obvious point that she benefits greatly from others' taxes any time she turns on her faucet, or flushes her toilet, or drives on anything other than dirt roads, etc., etc., etc.
It truly angers me that people have become so incredibly selfish as to think that they, and only they, pay into the system and that they do not see any rewards for having done so, buying into the libertarian/conservative canard that it's their money that they see deducted from their paychecks, and no one should touch it. It doesn't take but one single minute to think it through--if government didn't get that money and thereby were non-existent, all individuals would be paying out just as much to get all the public services they enjoy unthinkingly.
I would argue, actually, that without the non-profit government acting on their behalf, any of these services would cost them far, far more of their hard earned dollars. The current health insurance debate points to that very point. Aside from the ridiculous notion that there is some sort of desirable relationship between patients and their health insurance companies--as alluded to by the official (which we know is a joke, but still) spokesman of the Republican Party Michael Steele, although in the press release of that same speech, these lines were deleted. Shocker!--the fight over reforming our broken health care system revolves solely around the idea of government's role in our lives.
One would think health care would be considered a right in any civilized country (as it is in all other Western democracies), requiring governmental action in order to protect us all from the effects of ill health, and one would further think that no decent human being would think to deny that right to anyone else. One would be wrong, of course, but only pertaining to our country. Right wingers of all stripes--yes, even those with a "D" next to their name--are fighting mightily to prevent the federal government from interfering with the stranglehold private insurance companies have on access to health care. Their arguments run from the ridiculous, as noted above, to the purely ideological. Many conservatives are arguing both that a government-run (as if anyone, unfortunately, is pushing for that at this point!) health care system would be inefficient, and also that it would constitute an unfair threat to the private sector-run system in place now. Think about that for a mere second and you will get it: if the government is so inefficient in its operation, why would the private sector be threatened? Doesn't the free market trump all possible government-run systems? That the right wing is even trying to argue along these paradoxical lines makes it clear that this issue is the most troubling issue facing them, and that the conservatives/Republicans know that once a government system is put in place, it will quickly and irrevocably chase out the massively wasteful, immoral, and hugely profitable private one. They are throwing every single thing they've got ideologically against the country's wall, hoping something sticks and they can stop this reform in its tracks, and the argument with the most resonance with people like the caller to the Morrison show is based on the diseased belief that all government is bad, and paying any amount of taxes into it is worse. Which resolves into the sad sentiment that these jerks don't really believe that all people deserve to be treated for their illnesses or health conditions, and in fact, should be made to suffer instead. And that's not stupid, it's evil. Conservatives and liberals have points of contention that can honorably be fought out on our nation's governmental floors, but where is the honor in denying people the right to live without pain or even to live at all? There is none that I can see, and it sickens me to see and hear people arguing so on a daily basis.

Whole Foods is not your friend

2009-07-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of Whole Foods' attempts to gut the Employee Free Choice Act (which will make it easier to vote on, and establish, unions), they, or at least their CEO John Mackey, now also oppose the Democratic Party's attempts at health insurance reform. Faaaantastic! Way to spit on your workers and your clientele, Mr. Mackey!

Well, I 've been busy

2009-07-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

(Although maybe not if you asked TBO . . .)
; )
In any case, I thought I'd share a comment I wrote in response to some of the comments on this article in US News regarding the California budget crisis. When I looked at the comments, the top 3 all wrote, essentially, that California should slash its expenditures even further than the decimation already happening. I found that sad, disturbing, and 100% predictable:

(I wrote) I guess I shouldn't be too surprised to see some people urging even more cuts, but the plain fact is, California needs to raise taxes in order to survive as a governmental unit. I realize those advocating more cuts don't want California (or any) government to exist, but that attitude is sophomoric at best, and coldhearted and callous at worst. Do you all think you'd be better off in a world without government? Where do you think the money comes from to keep your streets paved, your sewers functioning, your fire and police departments operational, etc.? From the government's tax revenues, that's where. If any of you think private enterprises could do a better job, you are fools to think so. Do you really think you are wealthy enough to afford these private police/fire/public works yourselves? If governments didn't exist, only the extremely rich would be safe from all kinds of catastrophes, or has the devastation of New Orleans from federal neglect somehow slipped your mind?
Or maybe you are simply mean spirited enough to allow for taxing to pay for these kinds of agencies, but not those designed to help out those less fortunate? That kind of libertarianism is sickening to hear espoused by anyone older than a college freshman, because it truly betrays a naive and wholly solipsistic worldview. Do you think you (or someone you care about) will never need the help of a public agency? What if you have a child with developmental difficulties? Or even more simply, want to use a library's resources? I can guarantee you that you do not want to pay all the licensing fees required to access the materials any public library carries, let alone the books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, etc. they own.
But I suppose you don't want any of those kinds of things to be available to anyone either . . .

Guess what? The AMA doesn't care about you, either.

2009-06-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

Who knew the American Medical Association was in the business of denying medical care to people? We knew insurance companies were--anyone who has seen the first 30 minutes of "Sicko"--the least controversial part of the movie, btw--can tell you that. But now the AMA is showing its true colors, and they are all shades of green. The New York Times is reporting that that supposedly august group is going to actively oppose Congressional passage of a health care bill that contains a public option. For those of you not paying close attention, the "public option" would be a government-owned non-profit insurance plan not unlike a "Medicare for all" (in most iterations), in that everyone can opt in to it regardless of age or condition (other details are hugely debated). In other words, it would create a new choice for Americans' when procuring health insurance. (For a great many Americans, it would be their only option, of course, because they have been shut out by for-profit insurers.)
The AMA, however, believes that health services should be "provided through private markets"--as if insurance was somehow a "health service"! More ridiculously, the AMA statement released to the Senate actually states that this new "public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans." Get that? Giving 100% of Americans a new choice will restrict choice. As if that bit of Orwellian doublespeak wasn't enough, the statement concludes nonsensically, "the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers."
Let's put this all together. A public plan that is so inexpensive to maintain that it would drive out private insurance companies from competing will at the same time lead to an explosion of costs. Uh huh. Makes perfect sense--if you are a lying scumbag degenerate. The reality is that insurance companies realize they have been scamming us for decades, and they are now squeezing all of their contacts in and out of government so as to quash the equitable idea that health care is a right, not a privilege, and that all Americans deserve to have access to it. That 30% of Americans who don't have insurance presently? They are our physically infirm, poor, and young. Arguing, as the AMA is doing on behalf of the deeply amoral insurance business, for the status quo on health care to be maintained is the same thing as telling these people that they are somehow not deserving of basic human rights. That is what is sick.

Our baby is screwed

2009-06-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

California has shown its true colors yet again. Hot on the heels of the failure to eliminate the stain of regressive social values via the passing and sustaining of the hateful Prop. 8, we now have the governor's message of this past week, telling us of his proposed cuts to all kinds of social services, including a huge slash of the education budget. I commend Schwarzenegger for his speech, though, because he puts the blame for this mess squarely on the shoulders of those to blame--the Californian voters who consistently refuse to pass any measures that even remotely sound like actual taxation: "The voters sent a very clear message to Sacramento: Live within your means, cut spending, slash the size of government . . ."
California is not a liberal state, regardless of what the crazies of the right wing would have you believe, and this is yet more evidence--California is the leading libertarian state instead. Libertarians believe that government is only good for one thing--to protect the property rights of the individual (along with a minor role in the policing of violent crime), who assumes all the consequences of her/his own actions, even in the places where s/he has no power whatsoever. To that end, of course, the libertarians support all reductions in any governmental roles whatsoever, so news like this warms the cockles of their heartless bodies.
The problem with libertarianism comes to the fore when one considers all the ways government actually functions in a modern society. Let's put aside, for a moment, the libertarian faith in the absolutely free market, where governmental regulation is non-existent regardless of how many people die from being poisoned by cheap plastic goods and unclean water and air, or where businesses have no reason not to monopolistically price gouge the public into poverty, or where the banking and finance industry doesn't just make shit up to screw the public into bankruptcy, because in the libertarian's paradise, none of that stuff happens. (Why all of these are happening now cannot be explained by libertarians in any rational way; their claim that these events are occurring because of over-regulation is excruciatingly and laughably ignorant.) Let's instead look at how a true libertarian state would affect us on a daily basis. For those too poor to own a car, good luck getting to work--no subsidized bus, subway, or train systems exist, and the costs of buying the land, building, and operating any type of mass transit would make their fares so expensive as to prohibit their use by enough people to get to the critical mass necessary for an investor to see the profit of building them in the first place. And if you do have a car, there aren't any free roads or highways to drive on--toll roads, only, and even those would either be again, prohibitively expensive, or so poorly maintained that you would spend an equal amount of money just keeping your car operable. Assuming that you have indeed found a way to get to work, be prepared to work upwards of 14-16 hours a day since there are no work hour regulations or laws, and your boss has no reason to work you any less or let you unionize to bargain for better. Most likely, you would also be making far less money, too--no minimum wage laws exist to inflate the bottom rung of the libertarian working class income so that better jobs pay better.
You know what, I can't even continue along these lines--if you don't already see that libertarianism is worthless, just go visit their Party website: teh stupid is there in abundance. Suffice to say that destroying all social services via defunding is what they call for at this point, and it seems like a majority of voting Californians are listening. Arnold Schwarzenegger sees that. He's pointing it out to those who are asleep at the wheel and keep voting "no" on new taxes and those not voting at all, proving that even a Republican can be right once in a while.

Right wing madness taken to its sickest extreme--domestic division

2009-05-28T15:13:00.000-07:00

It is an ugly truth that the right wing contains some of the worst human beings on the planet. Aside from all the evidence that conservatives don't care about the welfare of others, there are little jolts of sickness from them that make it to the public eye. For example, the Warren Pennsylvania Times-Observer published a personal ad today that carries an incendiary message all too common to those demented jackasses:

For those of you unaware, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy are the 4 Presidents of the US who have been assassinated. Nicely done, you perverted, twisted loser. May your wish be granted upon your head instead.

NPR: Not what you think it is

2009-05-05T10:02:00.001-07:00

For decades, NPR has represented a supposedly liberal stance in their news reportage, and I have many liberal/progressive friends that listen to, and trust, it as the best source for news on the dial. Any look at their guest lists, however, let alone what those people are saying, will serve as a wake-up call belying that tradition and that reputation. Yesterday we heard yet more evidence of their capitulation to the forces of authoritarian right wing nuttery, during All Things Considered.
Host Alix Spiegel called upon Bryce Lefever to explain why he says the US torture of detainees is a good thing, and Lefever went even further--he said that the military psychologists employed to torture were patriots deserving praise. "I think the media ought to give us a big ol' thank you for our efforts on behalf of America," Lefever says. "There should be some recognition of the effort — the really extreme effort — that we've gone through to help."
That there are some freaks out there that believe this is not news, really. Republicans have been lauding torture in public for years now, from Smirky on down to Joe the Plumber. So why exactly would NPR sanction an interview like this one, given their reputation? The only answer I can come up with is that they are dropping even the pretense of being an objective news organization (which is itself a liberal construct) in favor of propagating right wing views at public expense. At no point during the interview, apparently, did Spiegel challenge or question Lefever's points, or qualifications, or even engage in any kind of dialogue whatsoever. This kind of stenography is the hallmark of right wing media as envisioned by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes when they launched Fox News Channel, initiating the final assault on objective news reportage.
NPR still contains wonderful niche programming--I love "Car Talk" and "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"--and I'm willing to entertain the idea that there are some personalities on NPR that haven't sold out completely, but I'm afraid anyone listening to NPR for "the news" is, and has been for awhile now, deceived into thinking that they are well-informed from a centrist, much less a liberal, perspective. That the people hosting and guesting on most of the news shows seem sane and measured in tone merely reinforces what nickname watchful leftists and progressives use for it: Nice Polite Republicans.

And you thought Arlen Specter was just a selfish pol looking for the easiest way to keep his seat . . .

2009-05-04T11:00:00.001-07:00

Well, he is, actually. But even so, on Face the Nation yesterday, he claimed "Jack Kemp would be alive today" had this country's federal government followed up on Richard Nixon's 1970 declaration of a "war on cancer". Seeing as how for most of those 38 years (26 of them, to be precise) Republicans were in charge of the White House--and even when Clinton was President, Republicans controlled Congress for 6 years--Specter's lamentation is a notable condemnation of his former party's venal lack of concern for our citizenry.
Way to go, Arlen?
Yikes!

Condi Rice: Frost/Nixon with a twist

2009-04-30T12:26:00.001-07:00

The fact that Condi Rice has a gig at Stanford is sickening, but at least some students there are paying attention. In what appears to be a relatively informal gathering, (see video here) she took a rather pointed question about the definition of waterboarding and her role in Smirky's Administration's approval of torture. Clearly, Condi is not destined to be a press secretary, because instead of dodging or redefining the question, or simply ignoring it, she dropped this bomb:
"The United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture." (emphasis added)
Now, I can't imagine anyone in Smirky's Administration did not see "Frost/Nixon", but if anyone did miss it, they had to have seen the ads for it, and if they managed to be so unaware as to miss those, too, they surely must be aware of the freaking Nuremburg Trials and their aftermath, right? Right!? Duhhhh.
Rice's "deft" admission to having committed war crimes is nothing less than the smoking gun needed to prosecute not just her (a gimmee, now), but also anyone remotely connected to this policy--"we were told", right?--especially Smirky and Dick, given that Rice specifically mentions presidential authorization.
"Paging Eric Holder, white courtesy telephone, please . . ."

Our hospital experience, pt 4

2009-04-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

The rest of our stay at VVR was filled with wonder--we wondered how quickly we could get away. The tragedy of communications continued with the people we thought were helping us the most. VVR has 3 lactation consultants on staff who seem to know what they are doing. The problem is that they don't seem to know what the others are doing or saying, and the nurses on staff seemingly don't care what these experts recommend, either. Every single person that "helped" TBO and I figure out a feeding schedule for Owen gave us different information. According to them, we should be feeding the boy: 1) any time he is hungry; 2) every 1 1/2 hours; 3) every 2 hours; 4) every 3 hours; or even 5) every 4 hours, depending on the time of day/night. Even among the consultants we got a different choice of those 5--and on the whiteboard in the room they had even written differing instructions to us, where you would think the others would have seen them! We left VVR not knowing anything at all about when we should be feeding our son (we had to pay a 4th lactation consultant $500 to come to our house and give us an outside opinion that we trusted, and only after one hellacious night of confusion and pain when we realized exactly how messed up VVR had left us).
The fun was not limited to breastfeeding travails, making it obvious to us that it wasn't simply that VVR doesn't have its act together in regards to that one aspect of infant care. On one of our fruitless visits to the NICU, we were virtually accosted by a nurse we hadn't seen before, who informed us grandly that she was available to show us how to bathe our baby, as we requested. I replied (1), "Well, we didn't request that, but it would be great to see a demo. Thanks!" Her response? "You requested the demonstration. Would you like me to show you?" TBO replied (2), "No, we actually didn't ask for it, but sure, please show us." Her response? "You did request it. Are you saying that you know everything there is about bathing a newborn?" (Yes, with the sarcastic attitude applied.) TBO replied (3), "We did not request any demonstration on how to bathe our child. I am a new parent, but I think I know how to give a sponge bath to our son. It would be nice to see your demonstration, though, so thank you."
And at that point, with a huff, she proceeded to give Owen the most insane sponge bath. Ever. Without a word to explain what she was doing, or any pauses to show us how she was holding him or why she maneuvered him in a certain way, she bathed Owen all over, including shampooing, in about 2 minutes total. As if brand new parents could have ever followed that bravura display of brutally cold efficiency (or would want to)! She stalked off without a word, iirc, leaving us stunned into silence as well.
Lest you think that only in NICU are the nurses at VVR radically insensitive, let me share another tidbit o' class with you. In order to facilitate breastfeeding, especially given the lack of time we had with Owen in person, TBO had been given a breast pump, to which she dutifully bound herself for 20 minutes every 2 hours or so. These contraptions require some attention, as well as the use of both arms while on the pump to hold the devices in place. There isn't much one can do while pumping except sit there motionless, hoping against hope to get some milk flowing. These are not silent machines, nor are they invisible, which makes what happened one day even more incomprehensible.
TBO had been getting her blood pressure checked regularly since her arrival at VVR; she was borderline hypertensive throughout her pregnancy, although in reality her stats rarely deviated. (I think some people just have a different baseline for their "normal" BP, but that's my non-professional judgment.) Nurses would pop in, day or night, to wake her up or interrupt whatever she was doing, to take her pressure, write it down, and leave, usually without saying anything. Let me stress that--whatever she was doing. That's right, one time, when TBO was using the breast pump, the nurse came in and informed TBO that she had to take her BP. Both TBO and I looked on incredulously as the nurse began to inartfully wrap TBO's arm up, even as she was using that arm to try and hold the suction cup in place. She then informed TBO that her BP was way up--shocker! Oddly enough, the next time her BP was taken, it had gone back to its normal level. Gee, you think maybe the fact that TBO was straining physically to pump her son's meals at the time you measured it might have had something to do with the high reading? You couldn't wait 10 minutes for her to finish? Jebus!
The final indignity came courtesy of the pediatrician, unsurprisingly. We had finished our time in the Gulag by Friday morning, and at 8:30AM, we had our son and were ready to get the hell out of VVR hospital. We were then informed that we would have to wait for the pediatrician to check us out, and that she would get there before lunch. The fact that this woman hadn't spent 5 minutes examining anybody involved in our stay before then apparently meant nothing to the bureaucracy at VVR, and we were forced to wait. And wait. And wait. Lunch came and went with no appearance by the High Priestess Pediatrician. We finally got the approval to leave at 2-freaking-30 in the afternoon! Our long national nightmare was over.
The main problem for me, other than the complete disingenuousness of VVR's bluster about how breastfeeding friendly they are, was that at almost no time did any of the nurses or lactation consultants seem to realize how messed up they had made us with their utter obliviousness to each others' advice. There is clearly no system-wide policy in place for any of the people there to follow, so everyone "helpfully" pitches in with their own hints and tips, not understanding the difference between personal knowledge/experience and medically recognized or sanctioned best practice. All of the people we interacted with at VVR, other than the pediatrician and the bathing freak nurse, were pleasant and friendly. They seemed to want to help as individuals, but that's the issue--we weren't paying for their individual help, we expected professional expertise, and never got it from anyone there, and the helplessness we learned from their contradictions, and especially the NICU's blatant disregard for our wishes, continues to haunt us weeks later. Instead of preparing us for the challenges of parenthood, VVR Hospital has made everything we face worse, to the point where imho neither of us feels at all competent. Owen deserved better.

Our hospital experience, pt 3

2009-04-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

Along with silliness like the milk of magnesia episode, there were serious breaches of communication as well, in addition to even more egregious errors of non-communication. Once Owen was placed in the NICU, all word of him disappeared from our room. The head of the NICU, who seemed to be competent (and may well be), came to talk to us just before Owen went upstairs, reassuring us that he would be well-tended and -cared for, and told us a little of what he had planned for Owen's testing. After that, however, we got nothing. We have yet to receive any official report on the results of his tests from 3 weeks ago, and it is only on faith that we know any were actually done to completion. (I'm sure the billing department will make sure we pay for them, but no one has ever given us a complete list of the tests run.)
Our visits to NICU were fraught with apprehension, as one might imagine--this is where the frailest of the frail are worked on, and hope is virtually the sole currency of emotion, at least for the parents. To all appearances, Owen had (and has) nothing wrong with him, and the few reports we did get from the nurses in NICU were positive (that is, the tests were negative). But "At VVR Hospital, nothing can be done completely correctly!" As mentioned before, TBO (and I) had wanted Owen to be breastfed as much as was healthy, and despite the bluing, the two of them had started off perfectly. We had seen all the signs declaiming VVR's support of breastfeeding, and had personal knowledge of others' past experiences along these lines. But alas, things run differently up at NICU. When we first went up to feed Owen, we found out he couldn't be disturbed because of the delicate nature of the sleep testing he was undergoing--including our feeding him. That should have been a big clue to us that all was not going to go well for our plan, because this was a 12-hour (or maybe even a 24-hour) long test, and newborn babies can not go that long without eating. Due to our (or at least my) lack of knowledge and sleep, however, we didn't say anything at that time. We had also placed our faith in VVR's crack team of physicians and nurses to know what was best, all evidence so far to the contrary. (Remember, this was only a day+ since he was born, so we didn't have much negative yet to go on.)
Over the next day or so, TBO and I made our regular pilgrimages to NICU to try and breastfeed Owen, to less and less success. The lactation consultants and nurses simply encouraged TBO to try harder and gave continual instruction on proper procedures each time. Unfortunately, we weren't told why Owen might have begun shying away from the breast when he had done so well previously. The result was that TBO began to doubt her body's abilities unnecessarily. On one occasion, we found out that during his whole stay in NICU, Owen had been getting formula fed to him via bottle, even though he had a cute little 3x5 card stuck to his crib saying, "I'm a breastfed baby!" Apparently, the mantra in NICU is, "Feed the babies by any means necessary", regardless of parental desires.
We found that out most strikingly when we ventured up one evening to find out he had just been fed. We asked when he was scheduled to eat next and was told "10:30", so we agreed that we would come up to breastfeed at that time. In fact, we planned to get up there 1/2 an hour early, just to be sure we could do so. 10:00 rolled around and we showed up promptly at NICU ready to go. We were met with, "Gee, I'm sorry, we just finished feeding him!" Um, what? "Oh, yeah, we feed on demand here."
I cannot tell you how pissed we were and are, because the effects of NICU's policy have overwhelmed our ability to speak. They had been bottle-feeding him formula for 1 1/2 days straight by that point--without telling us--meaning that he had been taken off our breastfeeding plan for about 12 or so consecutive feedings at the beginning of his life. It's certainly possible that Owen would not have taken to breastfeeding too well anyway, or that TBO's body might not have been able to do so, either, but VVR's NIC unit have pretty much killed any chance we had of finding out. It's not as if we were on the f&*^ing moon, either--all they had to do was call down 3 floors to our room whenever Owen needed feeding, and we would have come up in a flash. And for them to make us feel as if TBO wasn't trying hard enough? Unconscionable. Infuriating. Enraging.
Things pretty much spun out of control after that, with us noting more and more quirks of inconsistent behavior among the employees of VVR.
Next: VVR follies, a tragedy.

Our hospital experience, pt 2

2009-03-31T07:19:00.000-07:00

You would think that in the maternity ward, at least, a baby losing consciousness would bring some attention, but at ValleyValley Reminiscence Hospital, you need to go that extra mile to alert anyone of consequence. Our child, once resuscitated, was taken to the NICU for a check-up by the pediatrician, and returned to us in about 10 minutes. I don't know in what world anything thorough happens in 10 minutes, but I can damn sure tell you that checking out a baby's health should take a lot longer than that. A very shaken TBO and I spent the rest of the night and the next morning wondering what on earth was going on, but no one other than the nurses on the floor bothered to check up on us, and most of them had no idea anything had happened. No doctors, no specialists, nobody who knew anything. In fact, if we hadn't spoken up, I have no doubt that nothing else would have ever been done to make sure Owen was actually ok, or even to simply reassure us that he was currently fine.
Once a baby is delivered, for the most part, the OB/GYN's job is done, except for some follow-up check-ins with the mom (made more frequently for C-Section moms, of course). The newborn baby then becomes the pediatrician's patient, although in most cases, I assume the two doctors work fairly closely together, at least while the new mother and child are still in the hospital. During the next OB/GYN visit, we asked our doc if he knew what had happened to Owen and what we were supposed to do. He didn't have a clue what we were talking about--clearly no one had bothered to write anything down on TBO/Owen's chart, or even mention it to him in passing. He asked if the pediatrician had come to see us--which one would think might be advised when the baby has nearly died--and we told him no, we hadn't heard from anybody.
We will always be grateful to TBO's OB/GYN doc for what happened next, even though it put into motion some of the worst examples of VVR's incompetence. This doc obviously cared about us, and just as obviously had some pull at VVR, because not 15 minutes after he left our room, who should show up but the pediatrician? This doctor, on the other hand, was a useless piece of jet trash. She spent a grand total of 15 minutes with us in 3 separate visits over the course of the entire 5 days we spent at VVR, and even those 15 minutes were perfunctory at best. Her first action when she showed up was to ask for "our side" of Owen's going blue, replying, "Gee, that's not the story I got" by means of explaining her total lack of professional concern for our well being.
The deeper issue her statement revealed, though, was one of communications breaking down at VVR. Why did the ped doc get a "different story" than a recitation of what actually happened? I can think of one answer--the nurses were covering their asses. I'm sure a baby turning blue while they were actually present in the freaking room probably wouldn't look too good on their next performance evaluations, right? The other, more pernicious, possibility was that both the nurses and the ped doc were lying to each other and us, because, if you'll remember, the ped doc supposedly checked Owen out the night before in the NICU. So, did she actually check Owen out the night before, as was reported to us? Was she even notified at any point? What did the nurses say to her had happened if she was notified? Who knows? All we know is that it took us telling our OB/GYN that we were worried to get any kind of response, professional or otherwise, from either the ped doc or VVR at all. Owen was taken up to the NICU for an extended series of tests over the next few days after this.
During the first 18-24 hours Owen was with us in the room, TBO had no problem (as soon as we could escape the nurses insistence on TBO's using the dreaded side lying position, that is) feeding the boy from her breasts. He latched on properly (which apparently is the major issue with breastfeeding), sucked with vigor, and did everything well, as far as we could tell. When he was taken to the NICU, however, we no longer had control over his feeding, and even though we were relieved to get some actual oversight to his breathing and some tests run to see if there was a medical cause for his episode, this added another layer of potential miscommunication between us and our taking care of our new child. Not only did we have a large handful of nurses and lactation consultants on the regular ward to deal with, we now had the NICU director and the nurses upstairs to decode as well. (Oh yeah, we had a pediatrician supposedly in the mix also, but I think we can be forgiven for not counting her among the people interested in Owen's health.)
Over the next day or so, we were bombarded with examples of how poorly VVR's employees communicated with each other and with us. TBO was placed on a regimented diet after her surgery. At first, she was only allowed ice chips, and then, after some gastrointestinal activity could be proved, she moved on to clear liquids and finally real food after her digestive tract showed complete functionality. In TBO's case, these stages flew by--she was on solid food after a little more than a day, but you couldn't prove it by how some of the nurses behaved. Somewhere, somebody knew what was happening, and must have written something down on something, because when TBO passed each stage of digestive function, her next meal was correctly prepared and delivered. On the other hand, after TBO had moved on from perhaps needing help along those lines, at least one nurse was out of the loop, because for two days, one of them would ask TBO if she was still prescribed milk of magnesia. Helpful? No, infuriating--TBO had never been prescribed milk of magnesia, and she had moved past that stage anyway! While one instance of such behavior might be humorous, this was but the tip of the iceberg.
Next: The iceberg.

Our hospital experience, pt 1

2009-03-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

TBO had our baby 3 weeks ago, at a hospital I'll call ValleyValley Reminiscence. The first inkling we had that our stay at VVR would be, shall we say, less than ideal, came when we first arrived in the maternity ward, where TBO was about to be induced. The nurse on call, when told by TBO that she had wanted her childbirth to be as natural as possible, given the givens, spoke at length about how she had given birth 4 times naturally, and that it wasn't as bad as everybody makes it out to be. We had been instructed, on the other hand, that the drug used to induce labor creates contractions about 10x as intense/painful as normal, and that no one sane lives through them without taking the epidural, especially after the water breaks. No matter to this nurse, as she took every opportunity over the next 8 hours to let us know that she had given birth 4 times naturally. This kind of attitude went a long way to making TBO feel like a failure when, after enduring several hours of mindless agony, she asked for the epidural. Having witnessed her pain secondhand, I can assure everyone that in no way should any person think of her as anything less than heroic for enduring as long as she did.
The labor progressed fitfully after that, but at least TBO wasn't groaning at the top of her lungs every 2-3 minutes anymore. The boy (I'll call him Owen) descended rapidly--too rapidly, as it turned out, because TBO was only dilated 40-50% of the required way when Owen was actually in the physical position to emerge. This is not good, and poor Owen began to react negatively to TBO's contractions. His heartrate would plummet during her contractions, and after one protracted and dangerous slowdown, the docs called for an emergency Caesarian. Things moved with an alarming alacrity then, lemme tellya. Within a span of 5 minutes, TBO was laid out on an operating table and after another 5 minutes, Owen was in the world.
A Caesarian Section is, as the adage goes, akin to sausage and legislation--no one should witness their making. I was positioned at TBO's head, but only a 3 foot by 2 foot screen separated us from the action, and because I was off to one side, it took only a little tilt of my head to see what the docs were doing. I made that mistake just as they were pulling Owen out; for some this might have been a glorious moment, and I surprised many by taking it all in calmly. What happened next was what made this moment bizarre for me. The nurses immediately whisked Owen off to a side table, where they proceeded to pound the boy mercilessly about the back and stomach in attempts to get him to cough up whatever junk resided in his stomach and lungs. I was shocked by the ferocity of their attacks, wondering seriously whether they would break his ribs. At this point, one of the nurses cheerfully called out, "Daddy? This is a great time to take some pictures! Come on over!" I was stunned, but dumbly/numbly submitted to their demand and took a couple shots. While at the side table, I made the mistake of turning my head 90 degrees, just in time to see the doc stuffing TBO's innards back into her body. Lots of innards. I did not take a picture of that. I also didn't capture the doc's cauterizing her internal wounds, nor his masterful and incredibly fast suturing of her outer layers of skin.
After a short while where I was just kind of wandering around the room, the nurses gave up their quest to cause Owen to vomit, and instead sent tubes down his nose into his various internal cavities to suck out the fluids and solids remaining. These procedures lasted a few minutes after which both Owen and I were whisked off to TBO's bedroom, where another nurse was given the task to make the boy cry. No simple butt-slapping of longtime media tradition here; apparently the most effective manner in which to cause massive squealing is sharp slaps to the soles of the baby's feet. Repeatedly. Apparently, for up to the half hour this nurse took before she finally gave up. Owen was clearly having none of it, and refused to cry out in anguish in response to being beaten yet again. (He has since learned this skill on his own.) (The crying, that is, not the being beaten!) TBO spent a couple hours in recovery, after which the happy family was reunited.
At this point, I have to note that TBO spent a great deal of time and energy investing in learning all there is about breastfeeding, and defending her stance that she would breastfeed come hell or high water to those who questioned its value. I also must note that Valleyvalley Reminiscence makes a lot--I mean, a lot--of noise about being a breastfeeding supportive environment. Every wall in the maternity wing of VVR is plastered with posters declaiming the benefits of breastfeeding and stressing VVR's support of this aspect of mothering. This was one of the reasons TBO had decided on using VVR, even though it is not exactly around the corner from our house. We presumed all of this advertising meant that the employees of VVR were on board with breastfeeding as well, and were well versed in the techniques, struggles, and successful implementation of a breastfeeding regimen. We presumed wrong.
Upon arrival at the room, TBO was tasked with feeding the boy, which we knew was key to beginning a successful breastfed infancy. (The few hours delay due to the C-Section was unfortunate, but obviously couldn't be helped, and we all wanted to start ASAP.) Present in the room were 2 nurses, TBO, me, and her parents. The nurses, whom if you remember we presumed knew what the hell they were doing, insisted that TBO had to use a certain breastfeeding position, even though TBO objected due to its discomfort for her. This particular position has the baby placed next to the breast alongside the woman, with both mother and child laying on their sides. TBO was violently opposed because she felt she was smothering the boy, but the nurses overruled her intuitions, stating flatly that 1) babies are born with snub noses for this very reason--their nostrils are "out of the way"; and 2) Owen would push away from TBO if he were in any danger of suffocating. TBO capitulated--these were the f$%^ing experts, after all, weren't they?
Um, no. Owen stopped breathing and turned blue. The nurses? They weren't even paying attention. TBO had to cry out for them to return to the bedside of a first-time mother who had just been through an emergency C-Section as she attempted to breastfeed for the first time her 3 hour old baby. I ran out to the desk outside screaming, "We have a blue baby in here! Help!" The first nurse on the scene grabbed the boy and shook him violently, yelling, "Owen! Owen!" (If anyone reads that sentence and is not both appalled and horrified, you obviously never saw many legal or medical dramas growing up, because quite often any storyline concerning the death of a baby would revolve around Shaken Baby Syndrome. I won't even get into the absurdity of calling out the name of a newborn, as if he would respond!) I was aghast; this child is not asleep, you moron, he isn't breathing! Soon enough, people with brains larger than peanut-size arrived to resuscitate our child, but immediately thereafter and for the next day or so, the nurses continued to insist that TBO use that same breastfeeding position.
Next: It gets worse.

This is how you deal with right wing media stupidity

2009-02-18T13:16:00.001-08:00

The mayor of Lansing, Michigan absolutely pwns a Fox "News" host. Enjoy here. It's nice to see someone actually fight back with facts and righteous anger, isn't it?

Breaking news: Americans are ignorant!

2009-02-12T09:06:00.001-08:00

A Gallup Poll taken on the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth showed that a whopping 39% of Americans "believe in the theory of evolution". Yes, only 39%. While the "No"s only added up to 25% (sad enough to contemplate), another huge chunk of our populace--36%--have no opinion. I can't imagine how someone could have "no opinion" on such a basic tenet of human science inquiry, so I'm going to assume that most of those are actually "No" votes from people too bashful to proclaim their vast disregard for intelligent discourse. If that's true, then a landslide 61% of Americans don't believe in evolution. Utterly disgraceful.
There is good news, of sorts. Unmistakeably clear trends downward for ignorance show up when education increases (duh), but also when age is taken into account; the younger an American is, the more likely s/he is to believe in evolution, but for no age group does a majority emerge from the data. Majority belief in this fundamental truth of biology only occurs for those groups who have earned a Bachelor's degree or when their attendance at church is "seldom/never". The worst performing group were those who attend church weekly, where 76% placed their faith in "No" or "No opinion".
Thanks, Jesus!

The media--yes, it's still shilling

2009-02-03T06:49:00.000-08:00

I'm sure everyone out there has heard that Tom Daschle, nominated head of the Department of Health and Human Services, messed up on his tax returns to the tune of $100K+. I'm neither apologizing for him, nor giving him a pass--he screwed up. If you listen to or read the traditional media, however, you would think that Daschle had been convicted of boiling puppies while sodomizing 12-year old girls, calling into question both his, and more importantly, President Obama's characters for even presuming Daschle should hold office in the new Administration. But people, he paid his back taxes already, with penalties and interest. It's over. His offense hurt no one and wasn't even a misdemeanor, let alone a felony, but the right wing is outraged that such a person could conceivably still serve the public.
Do you see how this works now? For those of you not paying attention the last time there was a Democratic President, the media will blow any possible misstep by any Democrat anywhere into the worst scandal ever, providing cover for when a Republican is caught by making it seem like "business as usual". The public is then treated to the line that "both sides do it", leading to the question of why bother caring about who is in power, finally resulting in decreasing voter turnout and increasing apathy and cynicism toward government. This plays directly into Republican strategies designed to fool the public into thinking they even care about people, allowing them to loot the public treasury and rule without regard to oversight, as we have seen over the last 8 years baldly.
For the record, who can even name Bush's Director of Health and Human Services? Off the top of my head I sure can't*, but I can say that the former President himself skipped out on Vietnam and then didn't even bother to fulfill his minimal National Air Guard duty that was his alternative service. Isn't that just a wee bit more dishonest than what Daschle did? Or how about the Vice President, who retained millions of dollars of stock options in a company that would then receive billions of dollars of no-bid government contracts while he was in office? That suggests a tad more corruption than Daschle's misinterpretation of the tax code, even if it was willful, which has not been (and probably can not be) proven.
So let's try and think about/remember how these stories have been/were covered by the press. In Smirky's case, there were "smoking guns" of his disregard for duty all over the place--there is literally no evidence whatsoever of his presence on duty for the last 2 years of his Vietnam-avoiding military "career", other than the half-baked refreshed memory of one of Bush's friends. The NYTimes sat on the story for an entire freaking year, waiting until after the 2004 election to publish it, and even then nobody followed up on this court-martial level offense committed by the future Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. You'd have to hunt far and wide to find any coverage of Cheney's malfeasance--which is hundreds of times more venal, just going by the sheer numbers of dollars alone--in the traditional media, let alone the wall-to-wall 24/7 blitz Daschle is facing, and I don't recall anyone outside of those of us paying attention on the left calling for his censure, let alone his resignation.
I am absolutely talking apples to oranges here by comparing Daschle, who is a nominee for a fairly low-level Cabinet post, and his non-crime that he has already fixed, to a President and Vice President who committed far greater criminal and civil infractions, if not outright felonies, but this is what we're seeing: the press ignored, for the most part, those crimes committed by the highest Republicans in the land, but are exploding in outrage over Tom Daschle's tax returns. This is how right wing control of the media works, folks, and it's not going away unless we step in and regain legal mastery over the ownership of these licensees. Bring back the Fairness Doctrine for broadcast media, reestablish regulatory oversight of print, radio, and television outlets via a properly funded and supported FCC, and reinstitute and enforce the laws restricting monopolistic ownership of any kind, but most importantly the broadcast media. The airwaves are ours as a whole public; they do not belong to any one faction, corporation, company, or individual. It is time we took back control of our public assets to make sure this kind of slanted coverage is eradicated in favor of actual reportage of the truths we so desperately need to hear in order to function as a democracy.
* Bush had 2 HHS heads: 1) Tommy Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin and failed Presidential candidate; and 2) Michael Leavitt, former governor of Utah and head of the EPA. Non-cheeseheads and non-Mormons will be forgiven for not knowing who these men are, I would think . . .

Republican Party: hating the public since 1980!

2009-01-28T18:15:00.000-08:00

So, is there anyone out there who doesn't think our economy is in deep trouble? (If not, you might want to read a freaking book or even a newspaper first, then.) Whether we want to admit it or not, this is the kind of systemic disaster the New Deal, and the federal government in general, was/is designed to tackle. The path to recovery might not be a straight line, but without the government's help, we are doomed to a complete meltdown not seen since the Great Depression. And we haven't seen one since then because of the New Deal and its regulatory heritage. The Republicans have tried to sell us on the dismantling of the New Deal based on such canards and propagandistic slogans like, "It's your money", or "The government is the problem", etc. etc. etc. And you know what? They got their way for the last 28 years, pretty much (even Clinton helped them out with some deregulatory moves), and our present disaster is a perfectly direct result. Greedy pigs sucked the economy dry, whether they were bankers, accountants, enabling politicians, stock speculators, or "captains of industry", to the point where one crisis (in the mortgage biz) crashed the whole system so that we are all going to suffer for it.
Help is on the way, though, now that we have a President who knows what the hell is going on and most importantly, wants to fix it. Obama and the Democrats in Congress, however, are getting no help whatsoever from the Republican Party. The House today passed a stimulus bill by a vote of 244-188, but hidden in that number is one far more remarkable: not a single Republican voted for it. Not one. Every single Republican in the House is determined to withhold help from any sector of the American public, regardless of historical evidence, common sense, or even political expediency as motive to the contrary. Do we really need any more reasons to kill the Republican Party and vote its representatives out of office? They certainly don't care about us . . .

What today means

2009-01-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

I can't imagine what it is to be oppressed, or discriminated against, or reviled because of what I look like. Not really, even though I was ostracized as a child for having short hair (in the 1970s, this was a sure sign of being a dork and therefore someone no one wanted to associated with) and glasses (which was a sign of being non-athletic/wimpy, even though in my case that was untrue), and being puny (I was a year younger than everyone in my class, and matured physically later). I can't know what it is like, for the simple reason that I outgrew, eventually, all of those mischaracterizations and stigmas, and through hard work overcame (for the most part, at any rate) the psychological damage my schoolmates inflicted on me. For African-Americans and other people of color and ethnicity, however, there is no "outgrowing" one's looks, and in many parts of the country and for many people, skin color, or hair type, or speech patterns/languages, or some other obvious attribute still outweigh any individual personality or character traits in determining how a person is treated or thought of.
And this has been going on for centuries.
It is over half a millennium since Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Western Hemisphere, and not much less than a quarter of a millennium since this country was created, but only today will we as a country overcome part of this barrier and see the inauguration of a man of color to the Presidency.
Did William Lloyd Garrison foresee this event when he published the first issue of the Liberator in 1831? Could Abraham Lincoln know this might happen in 1862 and 1863 when he wrote and enforced the Emancipation Proclamation? When Justice John Marshall Harlan decided in 1896 to become the only dissenting voice in the Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" case, was he imagining a day like today? In 1947, did Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson think what could happen someday when they broke the color line in Major League Baseball? When the Plessy abomination was overturned by a unanimous Warren Court in Brown v. Board of Education, did those nine men envision what might transpire almost 55 years later? Did LBJ knowingly destroy the Democratic Party in 1964 and 1965 by ramming the Civil and Voting Rights Acts down the white majoritarian country's throats because he thought this would eventually come to pass?
I doubt it.
All of these men (and countless other men and women of all colors), though, knew what was right when they did these things, and acted upon that knowledge, paving the road to today's events. "History" can be made in a lot of different ways, and unfortunately, many of those are demonstrably wrong, and maybe even evil. Not today, though--not today. Let's all take at least one moment today, and pause to absorb the history that we are witnessing. For those of us who voted for Barack Obama, we can all take just a smidgeon of a place next to those great men of the past knowing that we, too, helped make today's history. For those of you who did not, even you get to share in the event, because today is all about overcoming prejudice, and bigotry, and exclusivity. Today is about uniting as a country and looking not still forward, but around, to that place and time where "all God's children" can join together, while also acknowledging that we have not finished the journey quite yet.
Because I know Martin Luther King saw this day coming . . .

Library post! Incredibly bad management at local library system

2009-01-13T18:26:00.000-08:00

TBO has been a library branch manager for a couple of years now, and has done a great job at her location, by any and all measurements. A couple weeks ago, she found out that she was being moved out of her branch and placed into a high stress situation at a smaller and less well-suited site. Sounds pretty much like a demotion or maybe just a stupid decision, doesn't it? (I won't even get into the fact that TBO is 7 months pregnant!) What was the reason for the change? Someone else--with less seniority, mind you--put in for a transfer to her occupied position. This librarian--I'll call him Dick--apparently was having a personality conflict with one of his subordinates, and instead of handling it like a manager and documenting insubordinate acts, counseling the subordinate, and otherwise doing his freaking job, held his bosses hostage by threatening to sue the city for God only knows what, because anyone with half a brain would realize he has absolutely no grounds for any kind of lawsuit. His bosses (who clearly lack even that minimal capacity of brain power) caved to Dick's craven demands, moving TBO (and a number of other people), causing her (and the others) to suffer needless dislocations of their lives and careers. TBO is massively upset by this, especially since the branch to which she is now assigned is a time bomb of unruly after-school occasional delinquents.
Dick now claims complete innocence in all of this, maintaining that, "Gee, all I did was submit a request. I didn't cause this!" Uh huh. Let's think about Dick's other options:
1) STFU. (I don't really blame him for not doing this, but it does have the benefit of screwing over the fewest number of people, and the correct person gets shafted.)
2) Request that the subordinate be moved, abdicating all managerial responsibility. (The fact that Dick didn't choose this option belies his innocent claim that he didn't specifically request to displace TBO, displaying for all the world to see both his disingenuity and his total lack of concern for his fellow co-workers. It also has the objective appeal that only one person is affected.)
3) Be an actual manager and handle your personal/personnel problem professionally. (Obviously Dick wasn't a good enough person or manager to do that.)
So, now all these fine innocents have to uproot their patterns and lives to accommodate one useless scumbag. Seems like the bosses would have thought about that before acquiescing to Dick's extortion, huh? I guess Dick isn't the only incompetent . . .

*I know this term can be offensive. This is why I'm using it. I am in no way making light of or denigrating penises. Except for Dick, that is.

Mormon atrocities--an insider tells his story

2009-01-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

Lest anyone out there think Mormonism is just another religion, albeit a little more wacky than the others, please read this. The author was sent to a Mormon boys' camp until he reached 18 years old, and the description of the camp is, quite frankly, horrifying to those of us who want to believe the US is a land free of systemic child abuse. That seems like a simple enough desire to fulfill, doesn't it?
Sick.

More uselessness from Google News

2008-12-29T10:18:00.000-08:00

Two "stories" from Google News's front page demand that I once again excoriate the aggregator's editorial choices:
1) Not from the sports section, even: A piece about Tom Brady (New England Patriots quarterback) not proposing to his girlfriend Giselle Bundchen.
2) Condoleezza Rice's "revelation" that she is not a Type A personality.
I know this week is a traditional dead zone for news, but this is beyond silly.

Movie review: "Frost/Nixon", and who is worse?

2008-12-23T06:42:00.000-08:00

A fascinating partial rehabilitation of Richard Nixon (the man, at least), "Frost/Nixon" will undoubtedly garner an impressive number of Oscar nominations and make most critics' "Best of 2008" lists, and for good reason. For a movie concerned only with a series of interviews (and the history of how they were organized), the 2 hours+ speeds by unnoticed in the least, because the portraits drawn of these two men and their business partners quickly draw you into their respective worlds, by turns humorous (yes, even Tricky Dick gets some funny lines) and pathetic. One gets the distinct impression that Ron Howard is working at the top of his game with this impressive material, and the performances he captures are riveting. This is a seamless movie from beginning to end--which one expects from Howard, a polished filmmaker for decades now--but more impressively, "Frost/Nixon" is an emotionally (again, expected of Howard) and intellectually (not often a Howard interest) engaging piece of work.
How bad a person was Richard Nixon? is the question with which one leaves the theatre, and it is a fair one--even from this movie the audience can see how bad a President he was. Most snobbish cinephiles will probably chalk up any sympathy one feels for Nixon to Howard's penchant for over-romanticizing his subjects, but I think in this case Howard gets it absolutely right. Nixon the man was intelligent and self-aware, and at heart loved his family, friends, and the country. He was a hateful politician, and as paranoid as the day is long, but in the end he was lost outside the political realm in which he relished living.
Nixon's story is a classic Greek tragedy, because his hubris earned both his rise to prominence and his downfall. We see glimpses of both in the one vignette presented to us in "Frost/Nixon", as Nixon's brains and ruthless tactics carry him to "victory" for most of the interviews, but by the end his inner near-pathological sense of his own worthlessness unravels him in dramatic fashion, finally, brutally, exposed under the lights of a television set. Nixon the President shows up only then in full, and our understanding of Nixon the man thereby grows a bit deeper.
Immediately upon leaving the theatre, my friends and I began discussing what so obviously attracted Howard and perhaps the other participants to "Frost/Nixon" this past year: how do Nixon and Bush compare? What are the parallels here? Some of the lines in the script seem pointed directly to the audience's desire to connect the two men most often cited by those ranking the very worst Presidents in our country's history. Part of the problem we have in finding parallels in the two is that Bush's story has yet to end, although the cynic in me believes not much is going to change after Smirky evacuates the White House on 1/20/09. What we do know, however, is that GWBush is hardly fit to carry Nixon's dog intellectually, and his evident lack of desire to carry out any of the duties of the President (shown most severely by accounts of meetings with his advisers, where even on subjects of grave importance, the word "briefing" carried its original meaning of a drastically shortened summary of a topic) contrasts starkly with Nixon's obsessive attention to the job he prized so highly.
I suppose the real answer, though, lies not in the psychological makeup of each man, but rather in what each man did to deserve his fate. And it is here, I think, that we can see far more easily that Bush has been vastly more sinister than Nixon ever wanted to be. Nixon's crimes, to be honest, were minor infractions of the law compounded hugely by the fact that it was the President of the United States who committed them. (As the script points out repeatedly in "Frost/Nixon", Nixon merely inherited the war in Vietnam, and even though he expanded it beyond that country's borders against Congress's legislative mandate, he also ended the conflict eventually.) While Nixon truly believed that the President was above the law, his actions founded on that belief were restricted to petty acts of revenge against individuals--nothing that J. Edgar Hoover hadn't been already doing for decades previous--or paranoid political gamesmanship--Watergate, naturally. (All Presidents since FDR have bombed countries [and/or authorized overthrows of legitimate governments] we haven't officially declared war against, so the expansion of the war into Cambodia or Laos can be seen as merely a continuation of 20 years of debased Presidential policy.)
The Bush/Cheney Administration, on the other hand, has committed so many un- or anti-Constitutional, let alone immoral (I would say "amoral") and illegal, acts it is mind-numbing to try and recount them all. To start at the top, bald-faced lying about both the reasons we went to war against Iraq and what we hoped to accomplish there, and the underlying "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive warmaking clearly establish this Administration as the most venal the country has yet seen. While the number of overall deaths might--I stress might--be less than were killed in southeast Asia, no one can argue about who started it and who has urged its continuation beyond all reasonable measures. Add to that the defiance of the Geneva Convention's regulations on torture, the refusal to adhere even to our own definitions of justice or law in how we capture and treat prisoners, the blatant disclosures of non-compliance with duly-passed legislation (signing statements), the attempts to bypass Constitutional restraints on Executive power (remember Dick's insistence that the Vice President is in neither the Executive nor the Legislative Branch?) in any capacity, the deterioration or simple elimination of regulatory oversight by such nominally benign agencies such as the FDA, FCC, OSHA, and even the National Science Foundation (remember how its head quit because he was asked to fudge statistics regarding global warming?), and the insistent attempts, since retroactively legalized, to wiretap the entire populace of the country without the Constitutional protection of the 4th Amendment--which I listed just off the top of my head!--and you can see just some of the outlines of the unprecedented destruction this Administration has caused this country, endangering its very existence as a democratic republic. I reviewed his book when it first came out, so I won't go any further but to say that a person as in-the-know as John Dean called it correctly: "Worse Than Watergate".

Prop. 8 and the lefty Obama backers

2008-12-22T14:09:00.000-08:00

For those of you who don't follow along with every perturbation on the left, there are a great number of bloggers and commenters on blogs such as Daily Kos who are telling the GLBT community to essentially "Shut up about Prop 8. We'll get to you later." Their attitude is one of desperation, at heart; they feel so distressed from 8 years (at least) of conservative oppression and so precarious in our victories lately that they don't want anybody to say anything negative about Obama or the current state of affairs for fear of losing what we are on the brink of getting. For them, the cries of pain and betrayal stemming from the passage of Prop 8 among those affected directly are hysterical, out-of-proportion to reality, and hypersensitive.
To all those who feel that way, I demand that you read this incredible diary, posted today. To any others, please read it also, as a reminder that we can never really know for sure how someone else feels, or why, and that taking the time to consider someone else's experiences before speaking, writing, or even voting, is the hallmark of decency and maturity. Be generous of spirit in those times when conflict arises; it rarely costs anything substantial, and far more often results in a better outcome. Fighting for what is just, right, or ethical is hard, and anyone choosing to do so deserves respect, at the very least.

Auto industry begins its collapse

2008-12-17T15:30:00.000-08:00

Of the Big 3, Chrysler has always been a poor sister, but I've also always had a soft spot in my heart (head?) for it as the underdog. My first car was a hand-me-down Plymouth Valiant (1972)--my dad only owned Plymouths for almost as long as I have been alive, and right up until he died. So it was with a pang of sadness that I read that they are shutting down all of their plants for a month solid starting after this Friday. (The same article tells us that GM is following suit for the plants that are making the Volt engines, so that's more bad news as well.)
While one has to admire the pluck of Chrysler believing that things will turn around after January 20th--as we all want to believe--no one can think that any of the workers there can survive losing a whole month of income without some severe ramifications. Most likely, this is just the first of the dominoes to fall due to the Republican Party's senators' intransigence in lending a helping hand to the final great American industry. Let's hope it's also the last.

Dancing with the Devil brings consequences? Gee . . .

2008-12-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

The LA Times has just put out a column by Steve Lopez in which Lopez bemoans the fate of one Margie Christofferson, manager of the LA restaurant El Coyote. You see, Christofferson donated to the Yes on 8 campaign and the restaurant was subsequently boycotted vociferously thereafter. Lopez tries to get us to sympathize with poor Margie by saying how upset she is that her life has been thrown into turmoil. (Lopez hastens to add, of course, that he opposed Prop. 8, I suppose lest we think that his article was derived from bigotry instead of idiocy.)
I'm sorry to tell you two clowns, but more lives were disturbed by Prop. 8's passing than ever could have been by its failure, in a far more profound way, and your article is outrageously patronizing, Steve. It may indeed be a shame that Christofferson's life has cracked, but the shame lies entirely within her soul. No one put a gun to her head forcing her to donate money--earned in large measure (apparently, based on the success of the boycott as mentioned in the article) from those opposed to legal bigotry--to the Yes on 8 cabal, and your feeble attempts to humanize the story beyond that are laughable. Christofferson was free to do so, just as we are now free to hold her accountable for her hate. Maybe she should have thought about the consequences of her actions before stabbing her gay patrons in the back as she was "schmoozing" them.
What gives the lie to her true feelings, and what makes this article reprehensible in and of itself, is that when given the chance to rectify her shortsighted bigotry, she chose not to donate a like sum (or more) to help those she has wronged, but instead simply "left in tears." Boo freaking hoo, Margie. And Steve? The story that you wrote is not really about Ms. Christofferson getting hurt, but instead concerns her whining about getting caught being a bigot. She offers no restitution or apology (which could have made for a relatively more humane story), and instead of calling her out on that, you take her side, making excuses for her that even she doesn't voice! Bravo, jackass.

Two kinds of "bailouts," two kinds of responses

2008-12-15T08:34:00.000-08:00

This may sound hypocritical of me, but while I excoriated the bailout for the finance "industry", I'm all in favor of helping out the auto makers. Three real world reasons: 1) The auto industry did not facilitate (or perhaps more accurately, cause) our economic meltdown, so they shouldn't necessarily be held accountable for its effects; 2) it is one of the last actually American industries left standing, employing hundreds of thousands of Americans earning decent wages; and 3) the amount of money involved is so miniscule comparatively that it doesn't engage my natural gag reflex. There are also a couple of political/ideological reasons: 1) The people who are against it are only interested in taking down the last truly strong union--the UAW--that represents workers (there are immensely strong unions in sports and entertainment, but by and large, the main beneficiaries of those unions are fairly wealthy already); and 2) the only people voting against it are Republicans, which these days automatically makes it something any good Democrat/liberal should fight for.
As with the bailout we were forced to swallow for the financiers, I support this only with a few serious reservations. The managers of the Big 3 need to be fired. How far down the decision-making apparati this "restructuring" needs to go depends entirely on how far down we can trace the responsibilities for being stupid. I realize selling SUVs, for a prime example, was a sound business move for an industry needing to hit quarterly revenue targets, but the only reason that's even of any importance is because these companies have become useless at taking any risks whatsoever that might affect the stock prices in the short term. (By the way--all American companies, with a vanishingly small number of exceptions, are useless in those terms. I digress.) We have known for quite a while that our oil-based energy system is in decline, and none of the Big 3 pushed for alternative fuel vehicles until Toyota (and to a lesser extent, Honda) showed them that yes, Virginia, hybrids will sell here in the USA, and in eye-catching volume, with little to no hard sales pitches at all. (When's the last time you can remember seeing a TV ad for a Prius? I can't recall ever seeing one . . .)
I have no problem giving the auto industry help, as long as we the people get something in return, which we are so obviously not getting from the financiers. Whether it be equity in the companies, interest on the loan, a say in how the companies are run, or something equally valuable--perhaps a meaningful restriction on executive salaries?--I don't much care, but we need something. Otherwise, even if we get the current bosses capped, we will run into a "meet the new boss/same as the old boss" syndrome here as well.
To sum up, the finance world may have been "too big" to fail (but even at that we can't figure out how to save it properly; don't get me started!), but the auto industry is definitely too important to fail. It has been the backbone of our workforce as a country for nearly a hundred years, and its salience in that regard has only increased given the evaporation of all our other homegrown manufacturing and knowledge-based businesses since the Reagan era began. We can save it, and we should. It's not that difficult a call, really.

Of course they are . . .

2008-12-10T16:35:00.001-08:00

Smirky and the gang are opposing a free national wireless internet plan. Naturally. The rationale? "The administration believes that the [airwaves] should be auctioned without price or product mandate." Of course, the reality is that "the airwaves" belong to all of us--the public--and shouldn't be auctioned off at all. Free internet access is exactly the kind of thing for which the airwaves should be used. The beat (of Smirky and the felons selling us down the river) goes on . . .

Smirky and the boys say: Poison's all right by us!

2008-12-06T14:27:00.000-08:00

I hope everybody out there already knows that the outgoing felons in the Administration are doing everything they can to destroy what's left of, well, everything they can. Regulations--those regulations that still exist after 28 years of gutting, that is--are being eliminated, standards for healthy living are being relaxed, and virtually any Executive branch oversight is getting cut. The latest on the chopping block--perchlorate, a toxin derived from rocket fuel (just in case you might think this is no big deal) that has found its way into the water of 35 states; over 150 public water systems are already known to contain it. Smirky has given the ok, though, to actually exempt restrictions on perchlorate. The EPA is set to stop testing our drinking water for it by the end of the year.
You might think that this disgrace, in addition to all the others, can be instantly corrected by the incoming Obama Administration, but you'd be wrong. To get a substance added to the list of things that the EPA monitors takes years, especially given the incredible legal and political resistance put up by the industrial polluters and their lobbyists. Unfortunately, it only takes a few strokes of a pen--and the complete disregard for human life that the Republican Party's leader in the Executive Branch has--to take them off.
Among other things, perchlorate reaches breast milk and therefore any babies that might be breastfeeding, and has been proven to negatively affect the thyroid gland. "It is known to lower thyroid hormone levels in women; it poses a particular threat to pregnant women and breast-feeding children, whose long-term neurological development can be stunted by youthful hormone imbalances." Water filters that include activated charcoal will remove perchlorate, so please make sure everyone you care about is filtering their tap water!

Privatization is not an option

2008-12-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

Halliburton and KBR, the contractors Dick Cheney runs, are the main beneficiaries--surprise!!--of unmitigated government largess in the military. (All those who don't already know this, please wake up.) We've heard many, many stories of pure greed and negligence (unarmored Hummvees, anyone?) regarding these two, but now there's a capper: a civilian CAD technician is suing the companies for any number of things most likely falling under the rubric of "breach of contract" stemming from the ghastly conditions they created in Iraq. Among the problems? Providing unsanitary water to the troops and contractors, to the extent that they shipped ice in "mortuary trucks that 'still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces.'" ZOMG! Un-freaking-believable. No, wait; completely freaking believable. Utterly disgraceful.

Not that AP is worth all that much anymore, but . . .

2008-11-19T09:50:00.000-08:00

They have called the Alaska Senate race for . . . Mark Begich, not Ted Stevens! Yay! One step closer to a filibuster proof Senate. Of course, that's if we keep all the Democratic cats in the herd, which won't happen, so this is truly meaningless, but still, it's nice to know that even Alaskans don't want convicted felons in the Senate. Now, about that at-large Congressional seat . . .

The Wall Street Journal--still written by jerkwads

2008-11-18T10:19:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine decided to rile me up some more this AM by sending me a link to one of the latest WSJ opinion pieces. In it, author Bret Stephens purports to pre-examine the first year of the Obama Presidency, claiming that now that there's a "real" liberal in the White House, liberal policies will now be implemented and they will finally be judged in the marketplace of ideas. What the article really contains, though, is a wealth of meaningless drivel. Apparently, the left has been living in a world of "what-ifs?" for more than 60 years, and Stephens spends fully 1/2 of his column describing these--and of course, no space whatsoever proving his assertion. (Shocker!) Some of his statements border on the absurd: according to Stephens, "liberal pundits now bemoan the passing of those great conservative ideas men" (who they might be Stephens does not tell us), "In Mr. Obama, liberals have a president who seems to have stepped out of the last episodes of the West Wing," "He has the Congress in his left pocket, the news media in his right pocket," and in referring to Obama's first year, "[a]fter that, it will become increasingly difficult to attribute whatever mistakes he makes to the legacy of his predecessor."
Let's take these in order. I don't know about who Bret Stephens hangs out with, but I have never heard anyone on the left cry out for the return of "conservative ideas men." I assume Stephens is referring to the notion that some of us on the left possess, wherein we wish the Republicans weren't completely insane. As it stands now, the Republican Party is entirely bereft of worth as an ideological opponent, so some Democrats think it likely that the Democratic Party might be left standing on its own in the halls of power with no external checks on its behavior. Personally, I think that fear is hogwash; we have enough trouble remonstrating our own recalcitrants (see Lieberman, Joe) to run roughshod over the remnants of the morons outside the party. The fact is, Stephens shows no effort to either define his terms or give any credit for his assertions, so who knows what he's talking about, really.
Only neophytes, fools, and right wingers (hmm, I guess I don't need that last descriptor, do I?) think Obama is an actual lefty--anyone with any brains saw that of the final three standing in the primaries, Edwards was the real leftist, and on most issues, Clinton's were more "liberal" than Obama's. We're all hoping that Obama belies his reputation, positions, and rhetoric to give us some truly liberal leadership, but I think a lot of us are holding our breath waiting. He is hardly the Jed Bartlet or Matt Santos we've been looking for.
Anyone who thinks Obama has either Congress or "the media" in his pockets is trying to fool you, if not himself. On one, herding cats called, they want to sue Congress for trademark infringement. On the other, "the media" is still owned and run by the same right wing felons and louts that savaged Clinton, Gore, Dean, Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, etc., and gave Smirky, Dick, and the entire gang of thugs passes on their multitudinous crimes every single time over the last 8 years. Raise your hands if you think that's going to change. Fools!
Let's see, Obama is only allowed a single year to fix the collapse of our entire system of economy and governance that has been in the works for at least 8, and in reality, 28 years before he can no longer blame his predecessors? Sounds fair. If you're a complete jackass, that is. It's going to take many years, if not decades, to undo the unbelievable amount of damage the Republicans (and the Republican-lite of Bill Clinton) have done to our country, and that's assuming the adults get to stay in power the whole time. It took Clinton 8 years to get to where he had budget surpluses, and he didn't even address the systemic rot began in the government by deregulation and in the press by consolidation and co-optation in the previous 12. And now there's been 8 more years, and far more drastic ones, of it. If Stephens really thinks this ship of state can be turned around in a single span of 1 year, he's a toolbag without any hammers. (It's far more likely that he's simply a disingenuous tool.)
The Wall Street Journal Op-ed page: it's not just for amoral moneymen anymore!

Newsweek shows its colors--crazy!

2008-11-17T09:34:00.000-08:00

An article in Newsweek's 11/24/08 issue, as seen online here, actually gives credence to those who think Barack Obama is . . .wait for it . . .wait for it . . .the Antichrist! Yes, The Antichrist. As in, the one who will usher in the end times. While the author herself doesn't seemingly subscribe to this insane notion (although see below for the money quote), she gives prominent ink to those who do. As a librarian, I am asked to evaluate sources to provide my patrons reliable facts and news. It is stuff like this that makes me no longer able to suggest to anyone, let alone kids who have yet to gain the ability to think critically, that even our most hallowed "objective" weeklies are useful sources of any information whatsoever. I have to ask: If the editors at Newsweek allowed this kind of absolutely evil inanity to find its way into print, what else are they doing over there?
And it's not as if the author doesn't show her true colors, although one does have to look all the way toward the end of the article to find out what she really thinks, and even there we have to be able to parse words a tad. After giving the religious nutbags their say and presenting their "evidence" (ZOMG! One of the winning lottery numbers in Illinois--Obama's home state!!!!--was 666!!!!!!!!!!!!!) about how they believe that Obama is the ultimate evil, Lisa Miller seemingly allows for the possibility that this response really is measured:
The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they're not nuts: "They are expressing a concern and a fear that is widely shared," [Mat Staver, dean of Liberty University's law school] says. (Emphasis added.)
If Miller were truly interested in practicing journalism, though, doncha think she might have produced a countervailing quote from someone, um, not from Jerry Falwell's school? (She doesn't, needless to add.) Perhaps she might have . . .

The swindling of America by Republicans, pt. 7843567843567834657836

2008-11-13T08:21:00.001-08:00

Smirky's Administration has done it (to us) again! Remember that $700 billion we gave them? Well, now, apparently, they aren't even going to do what they said they were going to do with it, even though that wasn't worth a damn to begin with. Treasury Secretary Paulson just announced that he wouldn't spend the money to buy up mortgage-backed securities as he was authorized, but would instead do, well, nothing, which completely undermines the purpose of strongarming Congress in order to gain their instant approval of this emergency measure.
To be fair, I guess I shouldn't say that Paulson's doing nothing, since he's willing to admit that he is going to "continue to devote bailout funds to restore liquidity to credit markets." What that means, however, is that our tax dollars are going straight into the pockets of the very same high rollers and financial scammers that have been instrumental in creating the mess in the first place--you know, the sociopaths that have been fleecing the country for 8 years, also known as Smirky's "base"? That's right, we are giving $700 billion to the same financial institutions (more likely, the CEOs of said institutions) that screwed us into this swamp.
It's the ultimate con job, and anyone with 1/2 a brain saw this one coming from miles away as soon as Paulson's 3-page plan was presented allowing for no oversight whatsoever. Unfortunately for us, though, this leaves out some of our Congresspeople. Jane Harman:
"My mouth is open," Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) told a television interviewer, comparing Paulson to a football team's quarterback changing the play at the line of scrimmage. "It was a very hard vote for many of us who voted for that package, and now all of a sudden we have an audible and we're spending it on something else." Read: I'm shocked, shocked! to hear a Bush appointee was misleading us. How unprecedented! Moron.
It is possible that Paulson's telling the truth when he says that he's just going to sit on the remainder of the money until Obama comes to town, but if he is, that would be the first time anyone associated with Smirky did so, and in any case, by doing so he gives the lie to that whole, "We need this done now or we're dooooomed!" speech he gave us, doesn't it? Well done, Hank. You can now join Colin Powell in the hall of Smirky's stooges who have sold their souls in order to deceive the American public into giving away everything they have. There won't be anything left by January 20 for Obama to do except turn off the lights on the United States of America's future . . .

Election recap--or, what's gone wrong with Arkansas?

2008-11-12T12:48:00.000-08:00

Here's a fun toy that shows how almost everywhere in the country--even in parts of the deep south--turned more Democratic in the election. Quite obviously, the Ozark Plateau and some of the southern Appalachians haven't gotten some messages over time. Is it that they're still rabid racists who haven't yet joined the 20th Century, let alone the 21st? Is it that they're still Rebels who haven't yet given up the fight against those damn Yankees? Is it that their backwoods religious dogma clouds their vision of how immensely Republicans have screwed us up?
Who can tell?

Book Review--The Age of American Unreason

2008-11-12T09:59:00.000-08:00

I am always interested in books purporting to tell me why and how we have lost our way, because I happen to agree with that sentiment. Since Ronald Reagan took office, we have been led down a path of ignorance and foolishness, with monumentally negative ramifications that we are seeing come home to roost in our crashing economy and plummeting international standing. The causes for our willingness to continue traveling this self-destructive path are seemingly long established and deep-rooted in many aspects of our culture and society, and many observers have attempted to detail them in order to raise an alarm. Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind was singularly curmudgeonly in its preeminence, although most of the writers covering American cultural/social decline show a similar disdain for modernity. In fact, almost all of the "genre" contain a virtually identical conservative theme: Things Were Better Back Then. All of the works I've read include many passages mooning over how when the author were young, s/he was exposed to classical writings or music by a hallowed teacher or professor--and bemoaning that the kids today are lacking that exposure.
Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason is no different, although I bet she would argue that she is not a conservative. Her own stance, though, becomes obvious whenever she stops arguing with the specter of Bloom's book and addresses popular culture or technology on her terms. For Jacoby, all modern conveniences (e-mail, the Internet, blogging, even television and rock music, but especially video games) are contributing to our intellectual vacuity, because Things Were Better before their inventions. She details all the ways we are becoming more unreasonable (by which she means we are becoming creatures less driven by intellect over time) wonderfully well, but her assertions of causation lack even a modicum of proof. Even when faced with opposing research, she merely asserts its obvious lack of sense instead of offering up evidence to the contrary. For example, she makes great hay of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You, calling it "self-referential codswallop" (pg. 16). Much like Bloom before her, however, Jacoby dismisses Johnson (and her other potential detractors) with many strokes of her pen but no substantive refutations of his thesis or research.
More fundamentally damaging to her attacks on modern media, though, and the one that betrays her center-right ideology, is that at no point does she even acknowledge the profound structural changes our media have undergone in the past several decades. In her haste to claim her centrist "pox on both your (left/right) houses" position, she fails to note that the right owns almost all the levers of power in the media, and they may have a very good reason (pun intended) to keep/make us illiterate and without the capacity to reason.
All of which is unfortunate, because I think she actually has many valid points and worthy targets otherwise. She shows a great grasp of how poisonous fundamentalist religion has been to our country's political landscape, and ties that in to our increasing science illiteracy as well. She writes wittily and well, and as a thought piece The Age of American Unreason is provocative. If this is meant to be an extended essay (which by definition would have required no research but rather sets out possible avenues for research), it holds together quite nicely, but if that is the case, her specific attacks on Johnson's and others' work are out of place.

Keith Olbermann on Prop 8

2008-11-11T12:30:00.001-08:00

Whether you think KO is great or cheesy, I would hope you have to admit that his passions run deep. I think he's terrific; I've liked him ever since he was a sportscaster here in LA. Something about him told me, "Here's a guy who's smart, geeky, funny, and has his heart in the right place." Kinda like what I hope I am, to be honest. For those reasons, I have always paid attention to what he has to say. Even if I don't watch him every day, I know he's on air somewhere telling it like it is, against all odds. (And those odds seem to finally be going our way. Phil Donahue lost his MSNBC show years back for being "liberal", his top ratings notwithstanding. Olbermann, on the other hand, just got his contract renewed. Happy day!)
Last night, he gave a special comment on Proposition 8. As usual, Keith was eloquent and fiery. Even more than that, though, he showed an unusual amount of emotion (other than righteous anger, which is his norm); more than once he nearly choked up in tears. It's a powerful piece--please watch and listen.
(Hat tip to transcendence for the notice.)

Supreme Court filibusters--IOKIYAR

2008-11-08T13:51:00.000-08:00

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona sure didn't take too much time reminding the country why the Republican Party needs to be destroyed. It hasn't even been a whole week since the election and Kyl is on record as threatening filibusters of any Obama Supreme Court nominees that he deems "too liberal." He is from the same Party that threatened to change the rules of the Senate to eliminate filibusters in order to get Bush Court nominees passed, because it was unfair of them not to get "an up or down" vote. Remember that? As we all know now, however, IOKIYAR.
(It's Ok If You Are a Republican, if you don't know.) Be prepared to see a lot of this kind of intellectual and ethical dishonesty for as long as there are any Republicans still alive.

Nice image sniff

2008-11-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

Obama's "Team of Rivals"

2008-11-06T07:23:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of pundit talk about whether President-elect Obama (sounds pretty good, eh?) will include any Republicans in his Cabinet. Personally, I think he'd be stupid to do so--why would you want to include anyone who still wants to affiliate him/herself with a massively discredited political entity that stands for nothing if not partisanship before country? Most who take the line that Obama will do so anyway make much of his apparent liking for Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals, which covers Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet.
Lincoln stunned insiders when he chose his most hardened political foes (if not outright enemies) for prominent positions in his Administration. But here's the thing: all of them were from his own party--they were still all Republicans (when they were the good guys)! He did not give any offices to Stephen Douglas, or John Bell, or Horatio Seymour, or anybody who wasn't a Republican already. The modern equivalent would be for Obama to give Cabinet positions to Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, and Tom Vilsack, not Chuck Hagel or Paul O'Neill (although in O'Neill's case, he seems to have gone off that reservation), or even Colin Powell, despite his endorsement.
It is certainly possible Powell might be tabbed, given his supposedly centrist/moderate attitudes, but remember, this is the guy who lied his a$$ off to the UN for Smirky's war. That alone should disqualify him from holding any federal office ever again. Ever. He might be a good candidate to be a witness for the prosecution in the war crimes trials, but that's as far as I'm willing to go. Powell's a disgrace to his uniform. Chuck Hagel's only--and I mean only--stance that has him even under consideration for anything but scorn from a Democratic President is that he became a vocal opponent of Smirky's war, but only after he had decided to retire, and after a long career of enabling Republican crimes. Thanks, but no thanks, Chuck.
I hope Obama's claims of wanting unity mean that he wants to convince Republican voters of his overall concern for their well-being, which I believe is quite sincere. I hope his claims of wanting bipartisanship means that he wants to convince Republicans that if they stand in the way of Democratic platform-derived legislation, they are thwarting the will of the country unpatriotically, and for their own good they should support those bills if they want to remain employed. We already know what Republican policies have done; there is no reason we should ask for their input in crafting anything.
The Republicans have earned their downfall; let them bask in its fetid glow . . .

Citizens strike back against bigotry

2008-11-05T10:23:00.000-08:00

Not 24 hours after the seeming passage of Proposition 8, the first lawsuit to challenge its validity has been filed, with another charging its unconstitutionality hot on its heels. The San Francisco City Attorney's office will immediately petition the California Supreme Court to invalidate the Proposition, while Gloria Allred, who represents the first gay couple to wed in LA County after the ban was lifted back in July, said she will file her lawsuit soon.
Fingers crossed yet? They should be . . .

The cloud to that silver lining

2008-11-05T00:27:00.000-08:00

A number of good people and ideas lost--and some lost big--this time, showing us how far we really need to travel. In the Senate, Scott Kleeb got blown away in Nebraska, and three of the most reprehensible Republicans (Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and John Cornyn of Texas) won handily. In addition, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, probably the most despicable Senator currently serving, (judging by his campaign strategy 6 years ago, wherein he portrayed his war-scarred triple-amputee opponent as a traitor), will most likely secure his reelection either later today or via runoff. Even felon Ted Stevens leads in Alaska by 3000 votes with over 95% of the precincts counted.
In the House, Gary Trauner lost his bid in Wyoming (and it wasn't close), Bob Lord of Arizona, who sought to take down one of the leading lights of the Republican Party John Shadegg, got crushed, Jean Schmidt of Ohio, who has made quite a name for herself as a shrieking imbecile, won easily, and Nixon lover Don Young of Alaska leads widely as well.
The biggest disappointment--make that, crushing blow--is right here in California, where the Yes on 8 bigots have a larger than 400K vote lead with only 4% of the precincts left to be counted. 2 similar pieces of crap were passed elsewhere in the country last night also, but one expects that kind of diseased behavior from Florida and Arizona citizens.
Update: 3 pieces of crap. Arkansas did, too. Vastly predictable, given that the bulk of Arkansas is becoming more red even as the vast bulk of the country is turning blue. (Hat tip to neurotranscendence for pointing this out.)
If ever we needed more evidence that we are just beginning to turn this mess around, these should make that point readily and sickeningly. So, congratulations to us for electing the first African-American to the highest office in the land and extending the Democratic Party's lead in both the House and Senate, but I, for one, still weep tears of shame for the moral rot we continue to show the world.

Call me sentimental . . .

2008-11-04T07:39:00.000-08:00

Today's the day, people. Just thinking about what could happen--the sheer relief, the possibility of regaining a future for our country--is choking me up. I'm sitting here counting the minutes before I can go home and watch history happen, and I'm nearly bawling. Reading the comments on Daily Kos detailing stories of voters who have faith that what they're doing, what we're about to do, will help our country get back on track. Or even non-voters, like this person:

Come on guys, make history
The world is watching you in awe.
Paris France

The amount of crap we have had to endure, the sheer magnitude of evil we have been exposed to over the last 8 (or 28, for those of us taking the longer view) years, and even the simple mechanical barriers erected against fairness we are still trying to tear down, have all combined to create the air of desperate hope in me that demands release.
This isn't the end, though, folks--this is only the end of the beginning. Turning our ship of state around will take a monumental amount of work, and the Republicans are just as adamant in their determination to block our path as they have ever been. Overcoming their resistance will take a resolute heart and an agile mind working as one to solve the massive failure that has been their rule. One election can only do so much, after all.
But oh, what an election!
If . . .

Tomorrow

2008-11-03T07:05:00.000-08:00

There have been 3 elections in my adult life that have been super important--1980, 2000, and now. 1980 ushered in the era of Republican Party rejection of our country's struggle to improve our general economic well-being while paying heed to the environment, instead focusing on robbing the nation of both our natural resources (remember James Watt?) and selling off our assets. Lowering taxes on the rich led to us going from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor in a matter of months while increasing the disparity between rich and poor for the first time since the Great Depression. 2000 resulted in finishing us off as a viable world power economically; we no longer "control our own destiny", to borrow a sports phrase. Not only has our debt risen to such heights that it threatens our very ability to pay it off properly, but the open greed and rapacity of the conservative movement has also diminished our standing in the company of nations. We are not envied or admired any more, we are despised throughout the entire world. The litany of lies and deceptions the Smirky Administration has perpetrated on us has reverberated around the world, making the United States of America the first superpower in history to be so reviled. (Other empires were feared or resented, but mostly they were grudgingly respected for a century or more until they could be overthrown by the locals wanting self-government. We didn't even last 60 years before becoming so hated as to encourage an attack on our own soil that was cheered on by many.)
The difference between the election tomorrow and those two was that this time, we know how high the stakes truly are. Ronald Reagan was seen as a joke by most people, even after he became the Republican nominee, except for the people of California, who had had to endure his term as governor--they knew what was coming. And Bush was even more of a joke; his only success in his entire life was in being elected governor of a state where the governor has no real power. The true horror of both those presidencies came in retrospect. What Reagan's presidency initiated, and Bush's finished, has been the almost complete dismantling of our system of governance.
Taxes, which are the primary method by which our government pays for what it does, have become so disdained that politicians fear to even say the word out loud, even when it is obvious that our fiscal standing is precipitously poised to collapse.
Trust in government at any level has eroded to the point that the Bush Administration, which by any measure is the most corrupt and venal in the history of the country, can do anything it wants without most people even noticing. Approve the torture of US citizens? Oh, gee, Clinton was worse. (Somehow.) Make up "facts" to convince Congress and the public to assent to make war on a country that did not attack us? Who cares. Launch a countrywide assault on the mechanics of elections themselves in order to cheat the actual will of the people? Wait, is that Paris Hilton over there?
The vaunted power of the press to curb any excesses of the three branches of our government has been either neutered or co-opted, first by the Reagan-era elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which allowed for the creation of TV and radio stations which have no desire to even fake objectivity, and secondly by the similar neutering of any oversight bodies, which allowed for an egregious consolidation of media outlets. We no longer have much of a press, let alone a free press, in the US; less than a handful of companies own the vast majority of newspapers, and ownership of our broadcast media is even more concentrated. And all of these media are owned primarily by conservatives singularly uninterested in anything but the bottom line.
We may have already lost the battle to save our country, but one thing is for sure: if John McCain is elected, it is entirely possible we will have lost the last chance to do anything about it. This election, we know what is at stake. Does anyone truly believe that if McCain is at the helm, China and the other countries that own the paper--literally--on our country won't simply call in their loans, devastating us financially? Why wouldn't they, given McCain's unstable character and hawkish tendencies? They could do so simply as a means of protecting themselves from military attack! Does anyone truly believe that if McCain is elected, the crimes of the Bush Administration won't be erased even more completely than they have been already? Does anyone truly believe that if McCain is elected, the machinery of governance will not come grinding to a halt as a Congress that has just enough obstruction-minded conservatives left in it becomes unable to pass any worthwhile bill whatsoever that has a chance of being signed into law? (Since 2006, we've already seen how that will look.)
More loftily, though, this election is about the mindset of our country. The contrast between the two candidates could not be more stark. Barack Obama, to all but the most cynical or deluded, really does operate from a worldview driven by hope and pragmatism, while John McCain, to all, sees only scary things in the world that need to be suppressed. Do we want to continue on the same path that gave us Iran-Contra, Fox News Channel, Florida 2000, 9/11, the "War on Terror", the Terri Schiavo mess, waterboarding and Abu Ghraib, the mortgage bubble/collapse and our current economic meltdown, and Sarah Palin? (I know, I know, Bill Clinton had oral sex. The Horror!) Or do we instead want to try and fix some of the things that Republicans have done to us? I don't know if it's at all possible for Barack Obama to "change" much in the time he may have, but I damn sure know that McCain isn't going to do anything I want done.
Hope v. Fear: that is the storyline here. I hope that Obama can help, and I am deathly afraid of John McCain.

They grow 'em crazy up there in Alaska . . .

2008-10-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

First on the radar for the general public this fall: Sarah Palin and her severely stunted brainpower. Next came Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who was just convicted on 7 counts of felony graft (in short). Now we hear from their sole representative to the House, Don Young, in reaction to Stevens' conviction:
"'I can remember Richard Nixon, you know, his years of service, what he’s done, and everybody [was] ridiculing him, and he ended up being the greatest president in the history of our century. ... The Senator will be re-elected. He will appeal it. When he does go, he will win it because there’s no way this is a jury of his peers,'Young told the Anchorage Daily News."
The "greatest president in the history of our century" was Richard Nixon? And this comparison is meant to be encouraging to Stevens?
Not needing mention:
All 3 are Republicans.
Worth mentioning:
Both Stevens and Young are trailing--in Young's case, quite badly--in their respective polls to Democratic challengers.
It is to laugh.

Are Lutherans bigots?

2008-10-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

Signs point to "Yes"--literally. Our local Lutheran Church has some "Yes on Proposition 8" signs posted prominently on their lawn. These signs are clearly church-erected, because they flank the large concrete and brick structure that shows the name of the church itself, located behind an iron fence that surrounds the church's plot. While support for ballot initiatives does not violate a church's non-profit status, unfortunately, signs like these do highlight their political stances, heinous as they are in this case. One more strike against organized religions . . .
Vote "No" on 8!

Nebraska Democratic Senator?

2008-10-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

Scott Kleeb is a longshot to take the Senate election in Nebraska, but it's not for lack of trying or a lack of skill. He's a wonderfully articulate and charismatic speaker, and he would be a great addition to our ranks. And oh, yeah, he's real smart, too. Watch how he takes a hostile crowd--I mean, it's a Kiwanis lodge in Nebraska!--to a new level of discourse in this short video. Whatever you might think of his take on the issue the determined audience member pressed him on, his response was well thought out and spot on (for a Nebraska Senate candidate; we're hardly likely to get a full-blown radical elected there, after all!). He would be our 61st Democratic Senator, most likely, if . . .

Generations

2008-10-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

There's a new "generation" term floating out there attempting to capture a particular cohort's mindset: Generation Jones. Interestingly, it is not a term for a set of people younger than those groups already "defined" ("Baby Boomers", "Generation Xers" "Millenials", etc.), but rather one that encompasses the latter part of the Baby Boomers' era--my age group. Generation Jones is that group of people born between the years of 1954 and 1965 (to which both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin belong, by the way) who have heretofore been fairly lost in the more traditional generational descriptions.
I never felt in tune with the descriptions of the Baby Boomers I have read: I was too young to have participated in any of the seminal events Boomers are normally linked with. I was 1 year and 3 months old when JFK was shot, 4-5 years old during the Summer of Love, 7 years old when the Beatles broke up, and still only 11 when Nixon resigned. How on earth was I supposed to identify with people who not only lived through these events, but actively observed or participated in some of them? In just a single sense, my take on Baby Boomers is that they protested and voted against (or, much more rarely, for) Nixon; I can barely remember him, especially since my parents were not all that political. I left for college in 1979, by which time many Boomers were already thirtysomething home owners and parents of their own school-aged children--what did I have in common with them?
I felt much more akin psychologically and socially to the Generation following me-the Gen Xers. I, too, felt misanthropic and cynical in my 20s (I still do!), as I tried somehow to carve out some sort of career in a job market flooded with Boomers who were more educated and more experienced than I was, and I was drawn to more aggressive and angry musical styles reflecting that angst. On the other hand, I was old enough to have seen (and more importantly, understand what I was seeing) Devo, Patti Smith, and Elvis Costello on their original Saturday Night Live broadcasts; I saw the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü live in "over 21" clubs myself (legally). I was old enough to know that Ronald Reagan portended disaster (as we have seen in the '00s, as his policies finally came to fruition via his political progeny), not "Morning in America", as the stereotypical Gen Xer theoretically believes. So I didn't fit in wholly with them, either.
So now I have my own moniker, and apparently this is our bellwether election, as some pundits believe we will be the deciding demographic factor between Obama and McCain. Of course, the pundits shown in that YouTube video are almost all right wing dupes trying their hardest to convince anyone they can that this won't be a total landslide in Obama's favor, which most objective observers are beginning to recognize. Once again, it therefore seems, my generation's salience will be obscured by others acting in concert. Or maybe instead, everyone else has finally figured out that Generation Jones actually contains all the smart people (Sarah Palin notwithstanding) and are following our lead! Yay!

Ethics and the crazy patron

2008-10-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

A co-worker told me last week that he believed the proportion of patrons we help at our library has shifted perceptibly toward the less-than-stable by a wide margin over the last few years. Since he has been in the field a lot longer than I have, I trust his judgment, which confirms my own feeling that the majority of people I "help" on any given day are using us for purposes other than our stated goals of providing avenues for serious research or entertainment to our communities.
There are three elements to this: 1) These patrons are not getting the help they truly need, which is psychological; 2) It is not always immediately apparent that the person with whom we are engaged is "out where the buses don't run"; and 3) In theory, neither 1) or 2) are supposed to matter to a professional librarian--our ethical code is such that we are supposed to treat every question and every questioner as having equal merit deserving the same considerate response. The problem is that because of our ethics, librarians are duty bound to interact with (apparently) more and more unstable members of our society, both in terms of quantity and quality, and for me, at any rate, that is becoming less and less tolerable. I derive no satisfaction from delivering reference service to some patrons, simply because I know for a fact that they are out of their freaking minds. It's really not all that difficult to tell once we begin our reference interviews, because the nature of their questions becomes demonstrably irrational or nonsensical.
For example, I was once asked to provide the "contact information for japanese jazz." I was told that "years ago, [we] had featured a magazine article about japanese jazz" and that now this patron wanted to contact "japanese jazz." At first I was stumped--what was this person really asking for? Their question, on the surface, makes no sense, right? By training and ethic, librarians are forced to delve under that surface to tease out the "real information need", so I proceeded to ask this patron some questions. Did she need to locate that original magazine article (which would have been difficult enough, considering that at no time in any past did our library "feature" articles/magazines for display purposes or anything else one would associate with that term)? No. Did she want contact information for a particular performer/producer of "japanese jazz"? No. Did she want contact information for a record label known for distributing "japanese jazz"? No. With each question I asked, she was getting audibly more angry with me. (This is a common reaction to reference interviews, in my experience, because the patrons can't seem to understand that since we aren't in their heads, we have to ask these kinds of questions to figure out what the hell they are talking about. The more questions we ask, the worse their reactions become, because they seemingly assume that we are actively trying to keep them away from their goal, even if we reassure them that we are simply trying to ascertain exactly what it is they want.) As she got angrier, I became more defensive and frustrated, because it was dawning on me that she wasn't misspeaking at all, she was simply crazy.
I asked her point blank: "Are you asking me for contact information for the style of music 'japanese jazz'"? Yes! "You want me to get you the address and phone number for a kind of music?" Yes! "You don't want names of people or organizations. Is that right?" Yes! I tried reasoning with her, even in the face of this insanity. "I'm sorry, ma'am, this question makes no sense to me, and I don't believe I can help you. There are organizations and people associated with styles and genres of music, but you cannot contact the music itself." Whereupon she began berating me for my unhelpfulness and bad attitude, because what she needed was so obviously simple: we had featured an article several years ago on "japanese jazz", and she just needed the contact information for it." (As she had told me repeatedly already, of course.) She finally told me to "just type 'japanese jazz producer' on your computer and tell me what you get." (This is a request that immediately causes me frustration and resentment, because the person clearly has absolutely no clue what a computer, or the internet, is. People with this attitude think that the box on the counter is magical, and that all we need to do is type their words exactly as they speak them, and the magic box will deliver them exactly what they need. Any attempt at explanation is met with either disbelief or immediate claims of proud ignorance, combined with the exasperation attendant with my clearly deliberate stonewalling their quest.)
I complied with her demand, and told her that there were over 175,000 results. She demanded, with smug satisfaction that she had defeated my intransigence, that I "read what was on the screen" and "give me the names" even though she had, less than 5 minutes prior, told me that she was most definitely not interested in getting the names of people or musicians associated with "japanese jazz." I told her that what I was seeing were just some random names of musicians from various and sundry websites that may or may not have anything to do with "japanese jazz", but in her triumph all she wanted me to do was give her whatever names came out of the box--even though not one of them had an address or phone number attached to it.
This kind of interaction occurs daily, and I am getting very, very tired of the struggle to maintain any attitude of helpfulness. The impossibility of knowing whether the next phone call or person walking up to the desk will result in a person literally screaming at me or abusing me with disdain, simply because I am doing my job appropriately, has created instead an air of dread surrounding my time on the reference desk. That the odds of this happening are increasing, as confirmed by my coworker's observation, is a depressing and discouraging thought. The other possibility, to which I am hardly unaware, is that I am simply a bad librarian, and am causing these negative interactions through my carelessness, thoughtlessness, and ignorance. That would be comforting, wouldn't it?

From the sickening "Is this even news anymore?" file

2008-10-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

The Smirky Administration approved the use of torture! The Washington Post is reporting that the White House gave explicit support to at least 2 CIA requests for approval of interrogation techniques that have been classified as torture, including waterboarding. Yes, most of the sane world already knew this. Yes, most of the sane world also knows that everyone in the Administration denied knowing about this, let alone approved it. We didn't believe them then, and now there's unadulterated proof that we were right.
Let's see if any of the insane, unpatriotic, or stupid worlds (read: those who still vote for Republicans) finally get that these people are simply evil and have been lying to us for the entire time they've been in the public eye. I'll be over here holding my breath . . .

California politics = massive failure

2008-10-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

I have a long history of disliking things here in the Golden State. Traffic, air quality, cost of living, my ex-wife--all of these have raised my blood pressure at one time or always. Our political system, though, that one deserves special mention this election season. Without getting too detailed on the history or mechanics of California governance, I want to focus on one particular, incredibly bad idea implemented here: the referendum. Every year, Californians are asked to vote "yes" or "no" on a bewildering set of ballot measures because the bar for getting these on the ballot is set incredibly low. This means that at any given time, just about any legislative idea must be voted on by the citizens of the state, and many times, two competing--or actually opposing--measures can be present on the same (or worse, consecutive) ballot. More tragically, some truly crackpot, dangerous, and clearly unconstitutional ideas that would never have passed out of any state legislative committee get placed on the ballot, troubling and confusing voters who are already struggling to attain civic literacy. Sometimes the proposition itself is written in such a way as to lose its meaning, but more often than not, the various proponents and opponents wage vicious and misleading ad campaigns designed to sway voters.
Case in point: this year's Proposition 8, which has really brought out teh stupid in people. This is a straightforward and hopelessly diseased measure designed to deny a civil right to a single group of citizens. The first thought most people should have had is: How could anybody in their right mind vote in favor of such a thing? And indeed, polling on Prop 8 revealed a fairly negative reaction from the time it was introduced. The latest polls, however, have shown a marked shift in attitude in favor of passing this execrable abomination. What happened? Well, the Mormon church happened. The Mormons, in their infinite evil, have decided to throw their considerable financial and persuasive resources into the movement to pass Prop 8, leading to a wave of pro-8 media ads filled with lies, and the poor saps among us unable to separate lies from fact are being convinced that all Hell, literally, will break loose if Prop 8 passes. The battle isn't even over gay marriage--which is the only thing Prop 8 covers--anymore, because the religious bigot supporters discovered that only a small minority really care about interfering with other people's rights, regardless of who those people are. The ads instead make all kinds of outrageous and wholly deceptive claims for what Prop 8 will do. My favorite is that if passed, Prop 8 will require children to be taught in school about gay marriage. Erp? Here's a direct quote from some apparently brainwashed blogger: "Legalizing same-sex marriage immediately mandates changes to all California public school curriculum to teach that same-sex marriage is the same as traditional marriage."
Ok, kids, here's where you get to play spot-the-incorrect-assumption. I'm going to show you the entire text of Proposition 8, and you get to tell me how the blogger above reached his/her conclusion. Ready?

ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME–SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

Changes the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.
Provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California

Well? Do you see anything in there about anything other than the marriage rights of same-sex couples? No? That's because Proposition 8 doesn't do anything but eliminate that right. Of course, deceit comes second nature to Mormons, whose entire religious doctrine is based on the notion that some guy (Joseph Smith) in upstate New York in the late 1820s found some holy golden plates written on in a coded language and a magic hat with which he decoded them, all of which he refused to let anyone see and all of which also somehow disappeared before anyone else could see any of it. Seriously. Upstate New York, golden plates, and a magic hat. These are not people in whom I would rely upon to tell me the truth about anything, because they clearly are not people who value rationality. Proposition 8 is simply wrong. Mormon support proves it.

Customer service gone wrong

2008-10-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

So, TBO and I pay many of our bills automatically, or online, as I'm sure more and more people throughout the country are doing. Saves us the cost of envelopes, stamps, checks, and time, and saves trees as well. The potential problem, though, is that I, at least, don't bother to look at my statements as scrupulously as I should, especially for loan payments. This weekend I decided to open up the envelope containing a car loan that I have with my employee credit union. On our latest statement appeared a $5.oo charge for a "Failure to notify change of address fee." I was peeved, because I think that is a completely bogus thing to ding me on, since we do all our business with them electronically. Who cares where I live, just so long as they get their money on time? I thought I could get this matter settled with a quick call this morning. You see, my understanding has always been that credit unions are supposed to be the local alternatives to large, monolithic/monopolistic, and uncaring national banks, but I now have serious doubts.
The response I got from the rep was, "I don't know what you expect me to do about it. We can't call every person who we get returned mail from. You wouldn't believe all of it we get!" Her attitude was one of a laughing (!) incredulity toward my concern and a steadfast refusal to even engage me in a reasonable discussion of the propriety of such a fee, let alone a gratuitous waiver of the fee in question. When I finally allowed her to "win" the argument (since I was getting absolutely nowhere except angertown), I asked if I could now change the address they have on file, to be told that they couldn't do that over the phone--as if someone would go through that verbal harassment in order to thereupon fraudulently change someone else's address! She "graciously" allowed me to do so by fax, but made sure to tell me that this was a huge favor she was granting me, because they normally only allow changes to be made in person.
Here's the message I sent:
To whom it concerns,
Please note my change of address to:
bryduck's address
Please also note my dissatisfaction with the lack of customer service this charge (and the total lack of responsiveness with which I was met by your agent) implies. You are collecting interest on this loan far in excess of the cost of a few pieces of returned mail--and infinitely more than the cost of a single courtesy phone call informing me of this problem--so I reject that "explanation" for the purpose of this fee. The credit union will no longer be on the list of institutions I will consider when doing any further financial business, and be assured I will take my loan elsewhere as soon as is practical.
Was that worth the $5.00 you've taken from me now?
Sincerely,
bryduck
All this over $5? Not really; if the initial conversation had been handled with more--or any--sympathy on the CSR's part, I would have quickly let it slide from memory, given my already near-total lack of goodwill toward most of the financial world; this kind of thing is expected. I also expected some smarmy half-assed apology and a quick greasing of my wheel squeak, and when I didn't get that, things got ugly.
After the fax went through, I received a phone call from a manager, presumably, of the credit union. I let it go to voice mail, because I have no intention of ever dealing with anyone there again. She's lucky I did, because her first statement was, "I was really displeased with the way you expressed yourself in your fax to us." I hope she was simply mispeaking, because that bit of offensiveness would have inspired some truly epic choice return phrases from me, to be sure, along with an instant transfer out of the loan in question, APR be damned.
It's all about fun here in [name of town deleted to protect the guilty]!

Palin: So evil that even a Republican is calling her on it

2008-10-11T12:35:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin's speeches have been so hate-filled (and both Palin and McCain have allowed the most vile epithets to be yelled at their rallies without garnering rebukes) since her debate that even a Republican Representative has asked her to stop. Granted, he's from Obama's home state Illinois, and he's retiring, so he has nothing to lose by being human. But still . . .

McCain shooting craps

2008-10-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

Most people who know me know I love to hear the phrase, "Do you know who I am?" come from self-important celebrities trying to get out of something (or get something they don't deserve). It's a classically bad form of arrogance and entitlement, and I love hearing stories where it gets used and fails. Well, here's one about our buddy John "I'm unhinged and losing it" McCain. The beauty of this one is that it involves my favorite table game craps, and one of my least favorite people in the world behaving like a total freak. I especially like the part where the pit boss had to get involved (which only happens when something questionable is occurring, and their word in a casino is pretty much the final word you will hear before being tossed out in the street); McCain throws the line in his face as well, unsurprisingly.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Jerk.

It's a boy!

2008-10-07T17:00:00.001-07:00

TBO wanted me to show the pic where it is exceedingly obvious that we have a boy on the way, but I thought he might take a dim view of that years hence, so I demurred.
Got any name suggestions for us?

Sarah Palin: Can't. Turn. Away.

2008-10-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

"Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. If our country wasn't so thoroughly messed up, thanks to your party and all the beliefs you hold, I would derive tremendous pleasure in your complete uselessness. I mean, the one time the McCain/Palin campaign allows you to be interviewed in the last couple of weeks (to Katie Couric, who, let's face it, is not someone we would ordinarily think of in the same terms as Mike Wallace or Bill Moyers for incisive or threatening questions), you pretty much destroy any hope the Republicans have of convincing people you aren't radically incapable. It's seems clear that CBS has tried to mitigate the damage you inflicted on yourself by releasing only bits and pieces of this historic interview out to the 'net, but the sheer magnitude of your trainwreck commands respect."

Dear readers, go here to listen, or read the transcript below:

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —

COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.

PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

COURIC: Can you name any of them?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.

The surreality grows with each passing moment, doesn't it?

McCain: I can't compete, so I'll do this instead

2008-09-24T16:16:00.000-07:00

McCain's latest stunt--and that's what it is, folks, I assure you--is to "suspend" his campaign because "it's time for both parties to come together to solve this problem". That would be an admirable stance, except for the fact that every major economist on record, and a majority of both parties (at least) seem less than convinced by Treasury Secretary Paulsen's panic attack on us that the sky really is falling. McCain has missed the most votes of any Senator in the current session, so one has to wonder why this problem, and why now?
Could it be that his numbers are plummeting, his campaign is starved for cash, his previous stunt of naming Sarah Palin as his running mate has run its course (at best--she's now acting primarily as an anchor, from what some polls [here, here, and here] are showing), and he has a debate coming up on Friday? Mmmmmm?
Clearly, the man is either a) incapable of doing more than one thing at a time, or b) disingenuously using this occasion to try and avoid making even more of a fool of himself and his party. So why should anyone trust someone like that to be President, exactly?
UPDATE: Ok, there is another possibility. McCain is: c) trying to get the Biden/Palin debate canceled entirely--I'm sorry, "rescheduled for a date yet to be determined"--so as to prevent his running mate from displaying her complete and utter incompetence in front of the entire nation!

White House says bailout is simply a money grab by financiers--or even more sinister

2008-09-23T12:53:00.000-07:00

In a press conference today, White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto inadvertently (or with the ultimate in stupid hubris--you make the call!) let us all know that this bailout is really about giving away even more of the taxpayers' money to the financial industry. The money quote:
"You have to remember, these are not all weak or troubled firms that own mortgage-backed securities. A lot of them are very successful banks and investment houses that have done very well, have been responsible, are holding performing assets that have value."
Um, Tony? Why on earth would we need to bail out firms that aren't "weak or troubled" or that have "done very well"? Clearly necessity is not the main criteria under consideration, is it? Perhaps it is instead the final Smirky Administration payoff to the rich?
Even more likely is that the felons are attempting to rig the economy (even worse than they have already, that is) to go 100% in the tank just in time for the Obama Administration to take over. Once again, Democrats will be left with cleaning up Republican disasters, only this time with little or no money to do so without cutting spending on valuable services. Grover Norquist, who famously declared that his goal was to shrink government to the size where he could drown it in a bathtub, would get to have his dream come true; Smirky and the gang are merely creating the new twist of further enriching the wealthy as it dies.
Twisted indeed.

Emails sent to Congresspeople

2008-09-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

I sent the following to my Senators and Congressman:

Please take extra care that even with the Dodd (or Frank) amendment attached, this bailout does not screw the American public yet again. I have no problem keeping our financial system in place, but there is no reason whatsoever to enable those who have profited from their malfeasance to continue to live in the manner to which they've become accustomed. If jailtime is an impossible dream, certainly we can attach 100% of their assets in an effort to defray the costs of this bailout. All CEOs, high-ranking officials, and large shareholders of all businesses affected, past and present, should have their lives affected as much as the least of us has been.
I feel morally justified in wishing homelessness on those who have helped create homelessness in others, and bankruptcy on those who have engineered bankruptcy in others. And, given the execrable bankruptcy law passed a couple years ago, that should allow an enjoyably painful existence for years to come for those who truly deserve it.
Thank you,
bryduck
Public Librarian

Bailout = Outrageous socialism for the rich + sickening lack of oversight

2008-09-22T09:02:00.000-07:00

It must be a Smirky Administration idea, because the proposed bailout includes absolutely no oversight of the Treasury Department's actions, designed to pump the markets full of publicly-funded cash in return for, well, nothing of value. All of the bad loans all of the financial institutions have ever made could be purchased by the federal government--which means the taxpayers will be paying for them--with no upside participation for the new owners, us. That's right, we would be buying assets from the rankest of wealthy speculators at their highest price with no ability to recoup our investments, as planned! There are no, zero, people on board with this travesty of a proposal, as detailed in this Daily Kos diary. None.
This is the modern Republican dream bill, in other words. The rich get richer, and the poor end up holding a worthless bag of beans in exchange. (And lest you think you are one of the rich, ask yourself some questions: Are you a CEO or top executive in the financial markets? Or do you own an investment portfolio dependent on purchased mortgages for its value? Or are you a member of Congress with your hand out for a bribe? If you can't answer "yes" to any of those, then you are one of the millions of Americans who will pay dearly to someone who can.) Clearly they see that their ride on the gravy train is ending, so they now seek to make one final, massive money grab to see them through the "tough" times ahead. You can be sure that a lot of that $700 billion will find its way back to any Congresspeople that vote in favor of it, probably in the form of post-Congressional employment in the financial sector.
This is the ultimate in socialism for the rich, which has been the Republican mantra since Reagan: privatize the profits and force the public to eat the losses in any market transaction. Remember the S&L scandal from the mid-1980s? You know, the one Neal Bush and John McCain were involved so deeply in? This is literally double the pain and hypocrisy. When you or I lose a bet in Vegas or Wall Street, we have to pony up immediately. Why should the rich get to play by different rules, especially those who were so complicit in destroying our economy as a whole? I don't have a problem with saving the institutions themselves, as long as anyone who has profited personally in any way has to pay back everything they earned by screwing the public. They have lived well of the fat of the land. Now it's time for those who made out like the bandits they are to pay the piper. Not to mix metaphors or anything . . .
UPDATE: Here is an article seeking to ameliorate your discomfort. And by "ameliorate", I mean, "ignore and demean". Gee, what a surprise that someone whose livelihood (writing for CNN/Money.com) depends on the financial sector would write something in favor of its bailout! He makes a half-assed attempt at sounding sincere when he allows us to feel outrage, but his article is essentially telling us to "get over it", which is both insincere and condescending. The main thrust of his essay is that there are just too many people employed in the sector to allow it to collapse, but this is possibly the height of disingenuity, given the apathy the financial world greeted every single other business that the US has let disappear from our shores. How many jobs have been outsourced or simply lost due to greedy or shortsighted policies since 1981? I don't know, but I do know that no other industry's workers as a whole have ever benefited from this kind of welfare.
Why I should care about this group more than any other in the entirety of US history goes unexplained by this author . . . The plain fact is that the American worker has been screwed over for nearly 30 years by conservative policies and Republican politics benefiting the wealthy financiers, but only when their own playground falls victim to their same greed are we supposed to lend a hand? Give me a break.

McCain, foreign relations "expert": Spain = Mexico. No, seriously.

2008-09-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

A new day, a new "Oh. My. God." moment. John McCain, in an interview with a Spanish--from Spain, is that confusing?--reporter, repeatedly answered questions by referring to Latin America and Mexico. Spain, which is in Europe and is not Mexico, for those of you not paying attention, must be wondering what on earth is going on (or not) inside anyone's head who thinks this guy isn't either senile or massively ignorant. Well, to be honest, so am I . . .

McCain's healthcare advisor: Emergency rooms = insurance!

2008-09-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

Oh. My. God. John Goodman, who "helped craft" John McCain's health care "policy", is whacked. He seemingly honestly believes that because people can go to any ER and get treated, they have health care insurance. (Um, Mr. Goodman, what, exactly, can an ER do for someone who has cancer? Or cataracts? Or diabetes? Or any other systemic problem that needs ongoing or preventative treatment?) His ignorance and/or apathy to the plight of anyone human, though, goes far beyond that bit of stupidity. In a statement given to the Dallas Morning News, Goodman goes on to explain how we can eliminate the problem of the "uninsured"--this is real, folks:
"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.
"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."
This is the attitude of the Republican Party, guys and gals, in regards to all your troubles. It's just a rarity that anyone is actually bold, er, classless enough to state it for the record.
Grrrr.

McCain: "fundamentals of our economy are strong"

2008-09-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

I kid you not; he said that today--Monday, September 15, 2008. How many foreclosures, how many bank failures, how many other financial institutions need to fail, John? Indeed, this is exactly the kind of thing Herbert Hoover was saying after the Wall Street Crash! The point is that the economy is working well--for some. The rich have never had it better, and as we all know, John McCain is in that class. How many houses do you own again, John?
For the rest of us, though, we are heading for some extremely rough waters. The majority of adjustable rate mortgages have yet to reset (meaning that their low teaser rate periods are expiring to be reset at true market value, causing many more people to lose the homes they really can't afford), which will cause another wave of failures to come crashing down on our already beleaguered financial system. Even more catastrophically, Washington Mutual is swiftly collapsing towards bankruptcy, and there are some who question whether the FDIC can afford to cover those losses. This is the nation's 6th largest bank in the US, people!
Thanks to 28 years of vicious conservative leadership--from Reagan to Bush to yes, Clinton, to Smirky, and in cahoots with conservative philosophers/economists/politicians, both in and outside of DC, we are now faced with the near total collapse of our economy. Deregulation of the financial markets, the insistence on "free" trade, the reduction of all of our manufacturing in favor of concentrating on the service and fiscal "industries"--in short, our complete reliance on the Republican canard of "trickle-down economics" has brought us to the brink of disaster unimaginable after the fixes put in place during and after the Great Depression.
And McCain has the gall to claim that we're doing just fine? That is one delusional crank. How on earth can 1/2 the people in the country really believe that he even cares about them, let alone knows how to solve their problems? He doesn't even think that there are any! Scary times.

Obama hitting the right notes

2008-09-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago, a cousin of mine forwarded me the latest Obama smear email. After pointing out the flaws and lies in the original, I asked the whole email group: is this the kind of dialogue we want during this election? Do we really want to spend our precious time and energy discussing Obama's hand placement during a rendition of the national anthem, when our country is teetering on the brink of failure?
Well, this latest round of silliness (google "lipstick on a pig" to see what I'm talking about) provoked Obama's reaction in Virginia, and it's a good one. Please watch it here.
Best line: "I don't care what they say about me, but I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift Boat politics."
Abso-freaking-lutely!

McCain's daughter says no one else understands war

2008-09-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

Speaking to Meredith Vieira, Meghan McCain proves herself either a) a solipsistic, narrow-minded braggart; or b) a bubble-headed twit. You make the call by viewing the clip here. The full quote, which should outrage any person--and anyone who has ever been related to a person--who has ever served in the military, is: "No one knows what war is like other than my family. Period." I don't blame her for being a moron, because she is clearly a product of her parents' lack of skills. Now, which of his wives' daughters is she?

Barracuda!

2008-09-08T09:24:00.001-07:00

Many, many years ago (you do the research, pally!), I was in high school when the group Heart first came out, and my friends and I were big fans. In suburban (DC) Maryland, we were a bit ahead of the curve on these Pacific Northwest rockers, but by the time their second album Little Queen arrived, they were big everywhere. It's nice to hear that they have their heads in the right places, too. The Wilson sisters have asked the McCain/Palin campaign to cease and desist using their song "Barracuda" in their public appearances--Palin was known as "Sarah the Barracuda" in high school--but unfortunately, they no longer have the rights to enforce that request. So instead, at least one of the songwriters, Roger Fisher, will be sending checks to the Obama/Biden campaign in response. In effect, as Fisher says, "...the Republicans are now supporting Obama"!
Kick It Out!

Joe Biden on fire

2008-09-08T08:13:00.001-07:00

Joe Biden is a good guy to have on your team, that's for sure. He may not vote for the little guy all the time; he voted for the execrable bankruptcy bill a while back. (I almost excuse him for that, because he was at least doing the bidding of his constituents in Delaware, the state which contains the corporate offices of the vast majority of banks and other financial institutions that profited by that legislation. The real problem back in 2005 when this came up was all the Republicans who supported it who didn't represent anyone positively affected by it in their home states, which is to say nearly all of them.) On almost every issue, though, he's not only a good Democrat, he's a fighting Democrat, which is unfortunately a rarity these days.
Check out this video of him speaking to a group in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. I especially like the lines, starting about 2:16 in, referring to the shocking lack of content in the entire Republican National Convention: "What do you talk about when you have nothing to say? What do you talk about when you cannot explain the last 8 years of failure?"

In a family way, pt. 2

2008-09-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

Here is the latest baby pic. It is obvious we are going to be the parents of the smartest child on the planet, isn't it?
(His/her hand is what is surrounded by the dotted circle, but I know I didn't have to tell anyone that . . .)

Zogby online is worthless

2008-08-13T10:32:00.002-07:00

I've been answering Zogby online polls for many months now, hoping against hope I was adding some sense to all the noise out there. The latest one, though, was simply ridiculous. I think it was trying to ascertain my opinion regarding free trade, but instead of using that well-known term--one that has meaning, in that it refers to the elimination of tariffs and other barriers to international US trade--it used the term "overseas" trade. Huh? All trade is "overseas", guys, unless you are trying to distinguish between our trade with Canada/Mexico and the rest of the world, and if you are, you are the first people in the history of the country that are. They also tried to figure out whether I think "overseas" trade has affected our jobs here, and whether I think good or bad things have happened because of it. (Do you begin to see the problem?)
For example, one of the questions was: Do you think overseas trade has helped or hurt our status as an economic leader? I mean, what does that even mean? First off, we aren't an economic leader anymore, and second, even if we assume they are really talking about free trade and further assume that the conservatives (and this includes you, Bill Clinton) hadn't already destroyed our economy over the last 30 years or so, by what means of measuring are they asking me to ascertain "our status"?
The final straw prompting me to write today, though, was their electoral map on display prominently on their home page. If you click through to the map itself, you can get some of the polling numbers for each--well, almost each--state to see who's leading and by how much.
At first glance, the map looks relatively favorable to Obama--he leads 273 to 146 (and he only needs 270 to win election), with 119 from states too close to call. This in itself would call into serious question the media narrative that the election is close, because if you split those 119 50/50 between the candidates, Obama wins in a blowout. Looking closer, though, you can see that even these numbers are downplaying Obama's overall strength. Let's compare just two states: Virginia and Kentucky. In Virginia, which Zogby says is too close to call, Obama leads by 5%. In Kentucky, McCain leads by, you guessed it, 5%, but Zogby has that in McCain's column. Huh?
It gets worse, of course: in North Carolina (another "too close to call" state), Obama is leading by 9%, making one wonder what Obama has to do to take a state here! Lest you think it's all one-sided, though, Obama's lead in New Hampshire (an "Obama state"), is only 3%. On the other hand, he also leads Arizona by 3%, yet that state is given to McCain!
I gave up after that.
One might be forgiven for thinking that Zogby has its collective head up its butt . . .

Olympics, kind of

2008-08-11T08:32:00.001-07:00

I like the Olympics. I like seeing people striving to better themselves, and I love watching unknowns or underdogs do well and occasionally even surprise with a victory. I loved the opening ceremonies--I thought it was the best I've ever seen, to be honest (although the Barcelona arrow shot to light the flame surpassed this one). I like the concept of having some arena, somewhere, where at least on the field, the geopolitical world takes a backseat to something else. Something close (or closer, at any rate) to pure.
Naturally, Smirky (with Doll's Eyes) has come along to ruin some of the Olympics games for me. Every event he attends, the director is compelled (ordered?) to show him grinning idiotically and waving to somebody, clearly oblivious to the pain and deaths he has caused so many people. It offends me to see him so happy, so carefree, and so relaxed. The announcers must acknowledge his presence in reverential tones, athletes are summoned for a jocular affixing of nicknames or an attaboy, and we have even been subjected to an in-studio interview with Bob Costas. Even at the Olympics, NBC seems to be in the tank for its Republican masters, regardless of approval ratings (Smirky has been sub-30% for months, marking an unprecedented tenure of dissatisfaction from the country).
To top it all off, if watching live, we are forced to watch the abomination of John McCain's misleading and completely negative ads slurring Barack Obama. I wonder how much of a deal Ol' Wrinkly got from NBC, because his $6 million ad buy is stretching a heck of lot further than Obama's $5 mill, even though Obama bought earlier. For those who are unfamiliar with the process of ad buying, usually the early money gets more bang for the buck, as the growing scarcity of available time causes the rates per minute to rise even though the choice time slots are often taken. From what I've seen, though, McCain's ads have been running at least twice as often as Obama's so far, and I saw only McCain ads during the opening ceremonies, which are the most universally watched part of the Games. (Granted, I missed about 45 minutes, so maybe all of Obama's ads ran from 9:45-10:30. Uh huh.)
Luckily, most of the time the other NBC channels are running events concurrently, so I can switch back and forth to avoid Smirky and Ol' Wrinkly as much as possible. But TBO is not a fan of boxing (which has taken up a lot of MSNBC's airtime in the evenings) or my relentless channel surfing during unpleasantness, so I risk alienating the mother of my child as well.
Grrr.

In a family way

2008-08-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

TBO has been sick as a dog for weeks now, but it's for a good cause: she's "with child"! We're excited and scared, as most usually are, I suppose. It looks like an early March date. Here's the first ever pic:

Clearly, this will be the cutest baby ever.

Condi shows she's as petty as the rest of the gang

2008-07-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

Condoleezza Rice sent a cable (forgive the secondhand link, but I refuse to link to the Washington Times if I can help it) to the relevant US embassies on the eve of Barack Obama's swing through the middle east detailing how "additional restrictions should be placed" on the services these sitting Congressmen receive from the staff, telling them for example, "[i]f the campaign staff wants to rent a bus for press, tell them where they can rent a bus". Rice attempted to sound less like a 3 year old by stating that, "It is imperative that, in implementing these various requirements, we treat both major presidential candidates evenhandedly" which sounds grandly fair. Fair, though, only in the sense FoxNews is fair, which is to say, not at all. You see, Rice did not send out the same notice when John McCain went on his mideast tour 4 months ago! These restrictions have apparently not hurt the Obama tour much, probably because the Democrats on the trip presumably are capable of renting a bus all on their own.
Nice job, Ms. Secretary! I'm sure Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Daniel Webster, and George Marshall are so pleased to have you among the long list of respectable Sec's of State we have had.

sigh Why didn't he run again?

2008-07-17T11:43:00.000-07:00

Al Gore has given another rousing speech on the need to change our energy policy. In it, he explicitly made reference to JFK's famous entreaty for the US to land a man on the moon (and bring him back safely) in 10 years, by asking for us to make the same kind of political commitment toward renewable and non-polluting energy. Even though Obama has endorsed it, he didn't make it, which is yet another reason I'm lukewarm for Obama and would have been ecstatic for Gore. Please do yourself a favor and read the whole speech.

FISA postscript

2008-07-10T07:29:00.000-07:00

I can't put it any more plainly than this. The American way of justice and governance suffered an incalculable blow yesterday. Here's a great take on the "very darkest day of a very dark decade" . . .

Yet another pathetic day for America

2008-07-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

The Senate is in the process of passing the new FISA bill, including all the heinous immunity clauses intact. What we have here, folks, is the gutting of the 4th Amendment, the enshrinement of a royal presidency, and the loss of checks and balances in our system of government. Think I'm being overdramatic? This bill enables anyone in the executive branch to compel private citizens and businesses to secretly spy on anyone without triggering any of the legal safeguards our Constitution provides for us. Every single phone call, email, text, letter, and conversation you have, any TV program you watch, any radio station you listen to, and virtually anything else you do, can now be recorded by the government and used by them to do anything it wants. Lest you be one of the shortsighted ignoramuses who are saying, "If you have nothing to hide, why should it bother you?", think about this the next time you apply for a loan, or are going through a divorce, or are applying for a job, or are arrested, or have to appear in court, or any other freaking thing having to do with anything other than breathing: there's nothing you've ever done that can't have been recorded (without you knowing about it), and held against you (without you knowing what it was), and you don't get any chance to fight it, because no one has to reveal any of it--to you, or your attorney, or the judge trying your case. Legally. Unless, of course, the Supreme Court rightfully rejects it as unconstitutional. I'm sure Scalia, Roberts, and the rest of those tools will save us, right? Uh huh.
All in the name of national security. What a horrible, sad day. You win again, right wing scumbags. I hope you all die painfully and soon, and may you rot in hell for all eternity. Record that, motherfuckers.

Some times, it's just too ridiculous to think about

2008-07-08T15:22:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody! There's a new poll out that has McCain in the lead!
The media is clearly reallllllllly reaching to serve this load of crap up: AP-Yahoo!News funded a poll to garner some simple data on the political scene, and the best they could come up with for their guy (because why else would they use this, unless McCain is their guy?) was that pet owners support McCain by 42-37 percent. Yep; there's even a whole article about it--to the exclusion of the rest of the entire poll!
Among the unreported results:
Over 75% of those polled say "things" are on the wrong track.
Twice as many polled have a "very favorable" impression of Obama v. McCain.
Obama actually outpolled McCain overall, but really, it's even.
On 13 out of 18 issues, those polled trusted Obama to handle them better, and on a 14th, Obama was only 1 point behind.
And this was a self-defined conservative (35% v. 21% liberal) and southern (37% of total, 14 pts. higher than next highest geographic region) group!

The self-reflexivity is mind-boggling

2008-07-07T18:06:00.000-07:00

In Denver, a 61-year old librarian was cited for trespassing the "open to the public" McCain town hall meeting. Confused? Why should you be? See, she was holding a sign that read, and I quote in full, "McCain=Bush". That's it. McCain's security forces called in the Denver PD to escort Carol Kreck off the premises, and thereby cemented his equivalence to Smirky, or at least his lack of tolerance for dissent.
Irony? Self-fulfilling idiocy? You make the call . . .

It's not just the politicians

2008-07-05T12:33:00.000-07:00

People who vote for republicans are simply sick, and there's no way around it. At best, they are merely delusional, but the base? Read this and explain how I can think anything else . . .
Choice quote: "'Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get.' She squints at the sun and smiles. 'Then things'll change.'"

Book review: Just How Stupid Are We?

2008-07-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

There are a few shibboleths in American politics, mostly created by politicians fearful of electoral retribution. Probably the most salient these days is being, or more accurately, being seen as soft on "national security". Another is raising taxes, no matter how vital taxation is to our national economic well-being. Rick Shenkman, in this relatively extended essay, takes aim at one he asserts underlies them all: the stupidity of the American voter. (Shenkman conflates the two descriptions of ignorance and true stupidity, but in effect, there is no difference, so this is a minor quibble.) That Americans are plainly ignorant of civics and history, let alone the more sophisticated study of political science, almost goes without saying. Poll after poll demonstrates our citizenry's unrelenting decline in the awareness of the world around them and its context. Shenkman rightfully devotes just a few pages specifically to proving this charge; the book is more concerned with the effects of this stupidity, which have almost destroyed our capacity for keeping our republic alive.
While Shenkman points to the role crafty political strategists (Karl Rove et al), our failing educational system, and our mass media have played in this phenomenon, he makes the argument that these are all merely reflective of the underlying willingness of the public to be fooled by crass appeals. We are unable to see through these charades and elect wise leaders because we aren't bright enough to know any better, and we aren't able/willing to put in the time and effort to educate ourselves any further. The portrait Shenkman paints of the public is a bleak one, but unfortunately, election after election is proving him right.
On the night of November 7, 2000, I stayed up all night waiting for the final result (which would obviously not come), finally giving up around 3AM. I had seen enough to know, however, that regardless of who won, the fact that such an idiot as Smirky could have gotten that close was an incredibly dispiriting sign. I was in the first quarter of library school, and one of my classes (covering the larger civic and political responsibility librarians have in the "information age") had a listserv to which we could all post messages. I wrote a long, impassioned screed about whether I had chosen the correct career, because if 1/2 the populace could conceivably vote for that clown, there was a serious lack of care about knowledge in the country. (At the time, remember, the most popularly stated reason for voting for Smirky was that he was the candidate "you wanted to have a beer with.") What was the point, therefore, of becoming an "information professional", when so few people even bother to become informed? So, I've been predisposed to agree with Shenkman's analysis all along.
The main issue for Shenkman isn't necessarily that people are stupid, however, it's that no one is talking about it. Politicians and pundits on both sides fall all over themselves trying not to upset "The People", currying favor with "The People", and pretending that "The People" are the sole wise, just, and correct arbiters of how the country should be run; arresting the slide to tyranny and the destruction of our way of life--let alone the whole world we are antagonizing--has become nearly impossible. How can we address this problem coherently if no one is willing to even state that there is one? Shenkman argues forcefully for a return to civics education for all as the primary means of recreating political and social awareness, and it is here that I think his book runs into problems.
Shenkman places an unhealthy trust in the same media he acknowledges has been failing us to help us. His argument that schools should require civics classes is a good one, but from whom do we get our information? He wants everyone to read newspapers to access the current events of the day, but critical assessment of almost every major newspaper reveals severe and increasing right wing bias, so how will that help? The right wing has been the political beneficiary of the "dumbing down" of the populace; they have zero motivation to arrest it. Current events testing in elementary, secondary, and collegiate education levels is a decent enough proposal, but who decides which events to cover, and whose analysis of them would we rely upon to give us insight? Shenkman blithely suggests that we can use "other sources" to augment newspapers to provide the raw materials for study, but which "other sources"? The Drudge Report? Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity? (Of course, I would argue that Daily Kos provides an actual fair and balanced look at political, science, and some economic topics, but my guess is that it would be an impossible sell to any governing board of education, unfortunately.)
I don't have the answer, either, so it looks like we may have the makings of an underpants gnomes crisis. For those of you wondering what the heck I'm talking about, one South Park episode showed a group of gnomes whose business plan read:
1. Collect underpants
2. ?
3. Profit

In this case, it would be:
1. Idea: teach civics
2. ?
3. Informed electorate

(Ok, it's not as elegant as the original, and way less funny . . .)