From The Home Office

Four Years Late and Billions of Dollars Short

2012-01-26T18:41:00.001-05:00

Mass re-financing is in the news lately, a program where the federal government will guarantee the loans of homeowners who have established credit worthiness but have homes so far underwater no mortgage company will touch them. This is a radical concept for some, as it could put the government at risk for billions of dollars if people start defaulting. That alone will probably kill the bill, as the government is currently afraid to buy three-ply toilet paper if it will increase the debt.

The real problem is the whole idea is too late. This idea should have been crammed down the banks’ throats as a condition of TARP, with the banks accepting most of the risk. It’s not like the banks haven’t extended themselves in a similar manner before.

Remember when Donald Trump was bankrupt? The Donald certainly doesn’t. Trump has claimed various levels of bankruptcy four times and come out ahead each time. Why is that? It’s not because he’s smarter than everyone else; one look at his hair tells you that. No, The Donald got so far into the banks they couldn’t afford for him to go tits up, so he pretty much got to dictate terms. (Sound familiar?)

What the banks and government fail to recognize—or just don’t care about—is that we’ve been in the same situation for the past four years, with one exception: it’s not one guy who owes a massive amount of money, it’s a lot of people who owe a little. True, loans in the $100,000 to $300,000 range seem like a lot of money to us, but to these guys $100,000 is an office decorating expense. They’d rather throw thousands of people into the street than say, “Let’s find a win-win here. We won’t make quite as much, but we won’t have to sell a $250,000 home for $100,000, either.”

But they won’t. And no one will bring it up to them now, because government has no place telling banks how to run themselves. All government does is make sure they stay afloat when their Ponzi schemes fall apart on them.

Theology 101

2012-01-18T21:03:00.001-05:00

Last week I received—along with twenty or so others—the following e-mail from someone I have known as far back as I can remember:

Brilliant in its simplicity................
A. Back off and let those men who want to marry men, marry men.
B. Allow those women who want to marry women, marry women.
C. Allow those folks who want to abort their babies, abort their babies.
D. In three generations, there will be no Democrats.
Damn - I love it when a plan comes together
--
God Bless America

My reply (To all, of course; this is me we’re talking about):

I know well two gay couples who are married, one male, the other female. The men adopted an infant girl two years ago; the women each have a child from sperm donors. Those children are raised in loving, stable homes. If Rachel were of the proper age, I would not hesitate to let her stay with either couple.These are people who are hurt by the perpetuation of attitudes that convey them as somehow less worthy of the same consideration any of us would want or expect, not stereotypes standing in as straight lines for a joke.

Since we’re just kidding around and no offense should be inferred (right?), let’s talk about the inbred cousin fuckers who, left to their own devises, will constitute the core of Tea Party support in three generations.

Oh, wait. That’s been done already.

The sender of the original e-mail then replied with:

I am totally anti gay. You will never convince me that gay marriage is right or should be condoned. Thank god I live in a state where the governor thinks the same.

This leads me to several questions about Christians I have wondered about for years. I hope someone can enlighten me.

The dictionary definition of “Christian” as a noun is, “a person who believes in Jesus Christ; an adherent of Christianity,” and as “a person who exemplifies in his or her life the teachings of Christ.”

We all know I am no Bible scholar, but I’ve been around enough to know a little. Things like:
There are two books to the Bible: the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The New Testament covers the teachings of Christ.

Christ’s teachings include such sentiments as “love thy neighbor,” “hate the sin but love the sinner,” and, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

The Old Testament tells the tales of God before Christ’s time, when, to paraphrase Lewis Black, He was a Prick. Fire and brimstone, stoning, plagues, floods, slavery. The Old Testament sounds a lot like Mississippi in 1957.

If we accept that the Old Testament was written before the New Testament, and that the writers of the New Testament knew this, then it is reasonable to assume the New Testament is intended to supersede the Old. Where they differ, the New should take precedence.

Christians, believing as devoutly as they do in the teachings of Christ, should then look to the New Testament when determining courses of action with things they do not understand or agree with. Forgiveness and forbearance replace the Old Testament’s eye for an eye vengeance, and punishment such as was administered to Sodom and Gomorrah. More than any other religion, and regardless of whether they truly believe homosexuality is a sin, Christians should accept and forgive; that forgiveness is the bedrock of their religion. True Christians would not dream of denying anyone, straight or gay, the same rights and pursuit of happiness they themselves enjoy.

So here’s my question: Where are all the Christians we keep hearing about in this “Christian” nation? Christianity in America is strictly Old Testament, unless someone is asking for a little forbearance and charity for themselves. That’s not what Christ had in mind for his followers. He wanted them to forgive others, not expect it for themselves.

American Christians need to walk the walk if they’re going to talk the talk. Being a Christian is not just saying all the right things when you want them to apply to you and dragging out the Old Testament when someone does something you don’t like. It means treating those others as you would like to be treated. Even more, it means placing yourself in their position, and wondering what it would be like to be treated as “good Christians” treat them, knowing the only forgiveness you’ll find will come only after abject surrender to their way of thinking.

What would Jesus Do? Right.

Willard

2012-01-16T20:41:00.001-05:00

Mitt Romney is, and has been, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Yes, he could still be found with either a dead girl or a live boy and blow it, but given his “contenders” it might take both to derail him now.

Romney is a good choice for current Republicans, a man who will say anything if he thinks it will help him. No, I mean it. Not just the usual, “I’ll cut taxes and increase services for you personally while screwing everyone you don’t like” stuff all politicians say. I’m talking about simple stuff that points out what a clueless SOB he really is.

For example:

Comparing his current “unemployment” with Floridians who are currently unemployed. Mitt used the similarities in their situations in an attempt to bond with people he wants to vote for him. Of course, Romney is unemployed by choice, and can well afford it. He failed to notice the $200 million elephant shitting on the tablecloth.

His claim he knows what it’s like to worry about getting a pink slip. Romney was born into a wealthy family. He graduated from Harvard’s Law and Business schools with a law degree and an MBA. Even if Bain had seen fit to can him in the early days, Mitt’s family would be fed and his health taken care of, unlike someone who needs his job—and maybe a little more—to pay the rent and health insurance.

The man will lie about his own first name. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked the candidates to identify themselves with something along the lines of, “‘I'm Wolf Blitzer and yes, that's my real name,” Romney followed up with, “I'm Mitt Romney and yes, Wolf, that's also my first name.” Aside from being a pathetic attempt to seem like one of the guys, his comment ignores the fact that Romney’s first name is Willard.

A faux pas? Maybe. Taken together with other comments, this last (my personal favorite) shows a rich kid who so badly wants to included with the regular guys he’ll do anything—anything—to be accepted. He doesn’t see he’s not one of them, and he never will be.

Presidential candidates are asked how they’ll handle the 3:00 AM phone call, like Russian missiles are already over the North Pole. The 3:00 phone call most people are worried about these days is the one that wakes you up to tell you your kid has been in an accident or a parent has had a stroke and you need to get there right now except the kid had the family’s only car or your parents live in Arizona now and you don have anything like the money needed to get there in a timely manner, even if you could afford the time off from work. Romney has no clue what that’s like, and shows how far he is from getting one every time he makes one of those pathetic statements.

Then there’s the story about ~~letting~~ making the dog ride on top of the car for a family trip. His Harvard degrees and job at Bain didn’t allow him to spring for a kennel? Maybe they thought the dog would enjoy the family reunion on Lake Huron. Rent a bigger car. It’s not bad enough the man can’t be trusted to give a straight answer about his name; he’s cheap, too.

Another Voice, With More Clarity

2012-01-12T18:01:00.001-05:00

Jim Winter is a hell of a good writer, whose Road Rules made my highly-coveted (cough,cough) list of best reads for 2011. Jim’s an insightful gut and recently posted to his blog (Edged in Blue) something I wish I’d written. He says a lot of things I believe, and better than I have been able to.

He’s going to vote for Obama; I’m not. (I’m not going to vote for any of the current Republican crop, either. My vote is still ~~for sale~~ available.) That’s not to say he’s not disappointed; his list of Obama’s failures—and failings—matches mine quite well. I could go on for a while, but do yourself a favor and read it for yourself. I can’t do it justice.

(Jim also does periodic capsule biographies that are as good and concise as anything you’ll find. Well worth checking out.)

Sometimes a Great Nation

2012-01-11T08:32:00.001-05:00

It is not unreasonable to judge a republic, at least in part, by the quality of its leadership. No matter what anyone thinks of its leaders, the people voted for them; the credit—or discredit—goes to them.

What passes for leadership in the current Republican Party should put all notions of American Exceptionalism to rest. (The Democrats are in a sorry state themselves, but the levels to which Republicans will sink have been largely undiscovered until recently.) Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor are the party “leaders” of their respective houses. McConnell has been quoted as saying they could do what was best for the country, but their job was to unseat Barack Obama. Cantor is such a lying weasel his press secretary kept interrupting Leslie Stahl when Cantor found himself trapped by the fact that St. Ronald Reagan raised taxes a dozen times. Cantor maintained all the while Reagan had not. Speaker of the House John Boehner doesn’t wipe his ass until the Tea Party tells him which hand to use; they make up barely a quarter of his caucus.

This year’s crop of presidential candidates competes on a daily basis to see who can promote the most regressive, repressive, reactionary policies imaginable. Herman Cain is one step above a sexual predator. Michele Bachmann is, to be fair to her, bat shit crazy. Ron Paul has the virtue of sincerity. His policies would return the nation to the early days of the Industrial Revolution in some ways, farther back in others. Newt Gingrich never met a fact he couldn’t make up; Rick Perry never met a fact he could remember. Jon Huntsman comes across as putting the nation first, though should he receive closer scrutiny his policies aren’t much less regressive then his peers. Rick Santorum would return much social policy to feudal times.

Then there is the “presumptive” nominee, Mitt Romney, who won the New Hampshire primary last night. Romney likes to portray himself as the adult in the room, with policies that avoid the Tea Party extremes on the right as well as the nanny state on the left. He has the hair, the smile, and works overtime to project an aura of the guy you’d like to see in charge.

In fact, he’s a greedy, insensitive son of a bitch.

Now that the rug rats have pretty well burned themselves out amusing the media, our watchdogs have time to pay attention to Romney. What he’s showing them is not pretty:

Last week’s comment that he likes “being able to fire people who provide services to me,” was spoken in the context of health insurance. The initial uproar was inaccurate; more on that later. The issue here isn’t that it’s good to be able to get rid of a company that gives you substandard service; we all like doing that, as cable and cell phone companies are well aware. What damning here is that Romney doesn’t understand the average person doesn’t have the option to change health insurers.The vast majority of people in this country have health insurance provided by their employer on a take it or leave it basis; they have the option to stick with it or buy their own. Even if they’d like to opt out and get their own—assuming they can afford it—no one has issues with their health insurer unless they’re sick. At that point, no one else will pick you up because you have a pre-existing condition. Romney points to his experience as governor of Massachusetts to show his health care expertise; in fact, he lacks even basic knowledge of how it works.

He uses his experience at Bain Capital to show he can run a large organization. Paul Krugman puts to rest the myth of running government like a business pretty tidily here. In short, if a business lays off half its workers, it still has the rest of the world to sell its stuff to. Nations—even export-heavy nations—sell the majority of their good internally. Lay off too many of them ad no one has money to buy anything else.

Romney’s claims to have created 100,000 jobs while at Bain don’t hold water. He dared to look someone in the eye and talk about knowing what it’s like to worry about getting fired, seeing no distinction between being a “freshly-minted MBA” with an already wealthy father and someone who will lose his health insurance and house if he gets canned. He even had the chutzpah to claim to be unemployed himself.

Now he claims the “firing people” line was taken out of context. A recent Romney ad shows Barack Obama saying “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” What’s left out is the line immediately before that: Obama was quoting an aide to John McCain in 2008. Complaining about out of context quotes takes Romney to a new level of the Menendez Brothers Duplicity, killing one’s parents then begging for mercy as an orphan.

Great nations have great leaders. Take a look around at who’s in charge and who wants to be. Then look into a mirror and tell yourself they reflect a great nation. I dare you.

Random Thoughts After the Iowa Caucuses

2012-01-04T19:00:00.001-05:00

Mitt Romney “won” with 30,015 “votes,” or 24.6% of the total. In 2008 he lost with 30,021 votes and 25.2%. So this year he gets six fewer votes, and drops 0.6% of the total, and calls it progress. Definitely a Republican.

Rick Santorum lost by 8 votes. It’s only a matter of time before he claims he lost because at least ten aborted fetuses would have voted for him had they been allowed to be born. Of course, he won’t mention how many of those would not have lived long enough to vote if his other social policies were also in effect.

Romney and Santorum combined didn’t muster a majority. This confirms Romney’s status as the World’s Tallest Midget.

Ron Paul finished third. He wants to abolish the Department of Education and let the states take care of it. Paul is from Texas, where Rick Perry is governor, and a bunch of people thought he was the best man for the job twice. This is not a ringing endorsement of allowing states to run education.

Newt Gingrich won the second tier, finishing fourth. He’s now in the enviable position of being the oldest one at the kids’ table for Thanksgiving dinner, waiting for some adult to croak so he can move up. The attention Santorum will receive in New Hampshire may be just the thing.

There are three reasons Rick Perry couldn’t do better than fifth. Christians are discriminated against, there aren’t enough immigrants in Iowa. and

Michele Bachmann had a moment of unprecedented lucidity and suspended her campaign after attracting only 5% of the vote in a state that adjoins hers. Maybe Iowans knew her better than she thought.

Jon Huntsman skipped Iowa to focus on New Hampshire, where splitting the Mormon vote with Romney won’t hurt him as much.

Herman Cain got 0.05% of the vote because Iowans are racists who hate pizza.

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama edged out Randall Terry, Darcy Richardson, and Vermin Supreme with 98% of the votes. The losing candidates all claimed to be hurt by not bringing their birth certificates.

We’re Outnumbered 1 to 99.

2011-12-26T12:09:00.001-05:00

I was casting about for a blog topic. Then Peter Moskos pointed out an excellent topic on which to comment on his blog Cop in the Hood. After reading the article he referred to, I find Rolling Stone said everything I could think of.

As I commented on Peter’s blog, the more I learn of American history, the better I understand this is how America has functioned for well over a hundred years. Maybe from the start. The difference now is that the current one percenters, in addition to having a bigger piece of the pie than ever before, lack the civility, manners, class—call it what you want—to keep from flaunting it at every opportunity, then rubbing our noses in it if they don’t like the response.

I’m no communist. I looked up what true socialists believe in, and I’m not one of those, either. It’s still early. Jamie Dimon and his cohorts can still talk me into it.

More Christmas Wishes

2011-12-24T10:55:00.002-05:00

Tim Hallinan, friend and superior author, has also found the poetry muse this Christmas. His is topical, and more generally entertaining.

Happy Holidays From The Home Office

2011-12-21T18:26:00.001-05:00

Another pass around the sun

Is ending for us all

And I confess, the year that ebbs

Has held us all in thrall

With ups and downs and downs and ups,

Our heads we could but shake.

A hurricane was not enough;

We had our own earthquake.

The Sole Heir’s news is only good,

Her options she surveyed,

And changed her school from U of M

To down St. Mary’s way

At southern tip of Maryland,

A place she much prefers,

So strongly that, two hours away,

We still can hear her purr.

Her next year may be better still:

In May she’s off to France

Where studies medical will get

Their first prolonged glance.

She’ll stay six weeks in sunny Nice,

A Riviera clime,

She’ll learn, she’ll work, she’ll play, she’ll tour,

The time should be sublime.

The Spouse Beloved had a year

‘Twould rattle lesser souls

Her craft room’s devastation set

Her back on several goals.

The water of her discontent

Has seen its flow abate,

Its renovation’s tardiness

Is gone, no more she waits

For closet and for storage space,

More room to work her crafts,

It’s coming all together now

Despite some minor gaffes.

My year, it had a couple downs,

Though ups will far outlast,

Like surgery on both my eyes

Means they’re no longer glassed.

Twin cataracts their view had dimmed

Until both were removed,
Bionic lenses took their place;

My vision’s much improved.

A book has been produced, my first

To place in public view,

And though the sales have not been brisk,

I’ve good reviews in lieu.

Kind words from several writing peers

Describe success to me,

Wild Bill was first, two more next year,

How well they’ll do, we’ll see.

A lot of other stuff occurred

But, frankly, little good.

And mighty bored you all would be

If tell it all I would,

So I will pass, because we know

That bad times always fade

There’s no point to remember them,

To rest they should be laid.

Now once again a year will end

And all will celebrate

The winter solstice holidays

Of any faith you fete,

We hope you have a happy time,

Kick back or tie one on

That’s all for now, we’re signing off,

Till Twenty-Twelve is gone.

The Equality of American Justice

2011-12-19T08:24:00.001-05:00

Barry Bonds has been sentenced for the obstruction of justice conviction he received from his perjury trial, where he was accused to lying to a grand jury about his steroid use. Two years probation, thirty days home incarceration, and a $4,000 fine. This is what it costs to give evasive answers calculated to mislead prosecutors.

The only real reason to prosecute people for perjury and obstruction is to deter others. If people start getting the idea they can swear on the Bible and then tell a court whatever they feel like without fear of retribution, what little justice we have in this country won’t be worth even the pittance it has become.

How much will this sentence deter Bonds, should he find himself in another similar situation. Two years probation is nothing. It means only that the judge doesn’t want to see you in court again for a little while. Even a santorum like Bonds should be able to go forty years at a stretch before his arrogance becomes criminal again. He made it that far once; he knows how it works.

Thirty days house arrest? Please. Barry Bonds made over $100 million dollars playing baseball. It’s not like he’s trapped in some fifth-floor walkup in the South Bronx where the rats are afraid to go because of the number and attitude of the roaches. Barry’s toughest decision might be to decide which house to be stuck in for a month.

Then there is the fine, which is insulting to any member of the 99% who has ever run afoul of the criminal justice system. At his prime, Barry Bonds made about $30,000 every time he stepped to the plate. He wouldn’t put pine tar on his bat for four grand.

How is this calculated to make someone think twice before they get cute in court? Not only will this not deter Bonds and his ilk; it won’t deter me. I’d like nothing better than to be kept home for thirty days, and The Home Office is a little to the left of anyplace Bonds might stay on the Palatial Scale. Two years probation. I’ve never had any more serious brushes with law enforcement than a speeding ticket in fifty-five years; I can go two at a stretch if I have to.

Four thousand dollar fine? I’m not one of the 1% (though I am probably part of the 5%), and I was able to maintain a rainy day account adequate to write a stress-free check for my share of The Sole Heir’s car last summer, which, coincidentally, was $4,000. If I had to testify in court, I’d tell the truth because that’s how I roll, not because a penalty the likes of Bonds’s means anything to me.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t people for whom that would be a serious penalty. How about a guy who’s working on a landscaping crew, or a day laborer making minimum wage (if that) by the time you average in the days he doesn’t get work? Tie him to his house for thirty days and he doesn’t make his rent or feed himself. Of course, he wouldn’t get thirty days home incarceration, he’d get longer time in a real jail because he also doesn’t have the four grand to pay the fine.

This is American justice at its finest, proving its equality by punishing the rich the same as the poor, except to the rich it’s not punishment. It’s bragging rights, so they can chat up their buddies and show how the system works for them. In our case, justice isn’t just blind; it’s stupid.

Magic Dollars

2011-12-05T07:16:00.001-05:00

Okay, here's what I can't figure out: If government spending doesn't stimulate the economy, why will defense spending cuts hurt it? Is there something about defense spending dollars that circulate through the economy better than infrastructure spending dollars?
Republicans (and some Democrats) are lining up to find ways around the defense spending cuts that they themselves voted to implement should the Supercommittee fail, which it has. Funny, but I don't see the same ardor to preserve the domestic spending also set to be cut by the triggers. Is this because defense dollars are magic? Or is it because defense dollars have a different trickle-down effect: money goes into campaign coffers, then trickles down into defense contracts? Gee, I wonder where the money in the first half of that equation came from?
On a related note, why is it Republicans (and some Democrats) won't allow the payroll tax cut to be extended without offsetting spending cuts that will hurt a lot of the people who receive the payroll tax break? Could it be because this tax cut only affects those making $106,000 or less? I don't remember them being this aggressive about a tax cut being revenue neutral when the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy went into effect, or when they were extended last year.
Please correct me if I'm missing something.

Double or Nothing

2011-12-01T08:11:00.001-05:00

Among the primary arguments put forth for minimizing or doing away with corporate and/or capital gains taxes is the concept of double taxation. “That money is taxed twice,” proponents say. “Once at the corporate level, then again at the personal or capital gains level.”

We all know the word that describes this: bullshit.

First, money cannot be taxed. Money is inanimate and abstract. It has no inherent value aside from what we agree it’s worth. (This includes gold, by the way, so let’s not start that bogus Gold Standard argument unless we want to include the world is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, and dinosaurs co-existed with people. Oh, wait…maybe I shouldn’t include that last one.)

People are taxed. Therefore, since the Supreme Court and Mitt “The Twenty Percent Solution” Romney have declared corporations to be people, corporations should pay taxes. If they are to have all the rights of people, let them shoulder the same responsibilities. For now, whenever a conservative complains about how many people don’t pay any income tax at all, it should be understood they include General Electric in their condemnation.

The Ghost of Thanksgivings Yet to Come

2011-11-24T15:24:00.001-05:00

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States, so blogs, Facebook, and any other communications medium you can think of is full of people telling you what they’re thankful for. That’s great, and I’m thankful for quite a few things myself. Fortunately for you, most of them are none of your damn business, and I’ll express my gratitude directly to those who should receive it instead of boring you with stories of how much I love my wife/daughter/parents/brother’s family, appreciate my health, or enjoy the NHL’s Center Ice package. (That’s Centre Ice for our Canuckistan readers.) I do all of those things, and make regular and sincere expressions where they matter, to the people involved. (Or by paying the extra charge on my cable bill.) You’ll see enough of that today. You don’t need me piling on. (This provides the obligatory Thanksgiving football reference.)

What I’d like to do this Thanksgiving is to provide something you can all be thankful for in years to come, so people will know to be aware of it, thus increasing its likelihood. So here—courtesy of PolitiFact—is a list of things everyone can stop forwarding in emails and on Facebook because, frankly, they’re pissing me off.

The messages in question are usually easy to identify through their heavy reliance of exclamation points and CAPITAL LETTERS!!!! Emails are most often sent by conservatives; liberals are more likely to use Facebook. The medium is less important than the bullshit quotient. PolitiFact has evaluated over one hundred of the most “popular” messages. Over 80% were rated either “False” or “Pants on Fire.” Only four percent earned a “True.” (The PolitiFact scale runs like this: True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, Pants on Fire.)

Without further ado, here is a partial list of things I don’t ever want to see again. Senders will be subject to retribution.

Obama complained that the troops were whiners (Pants on Fire)
He refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance (False)
He wants soldiers to take a loyalty oath to him rather than the Constitution (Pants on Fire).
Because of "Obamacare," monthly Medicare premiums will more than double by 2014 (Pants on Fire)
Home sales will be taxed 3.8 percent (Pants on Fire) to pay for the new health care law
Obama's finance team is seeking a 1 percent tax on all financial transactions (Pants on Fire).
Members of Congress get full retirement pay after one term (Pants on Fire)
Congressional staffers and members don't have to repay their student loans (Pants on Fire).
The public option for health care coverage would have required everyone to be implanted with data-storing microchips (Pants on Fire)
Government had mandated everyone must get rid of their existing light bulbs (Pants on Fire)
You must list your guns on your tax return (Pants on Fire)
One percent of Americans are millionaires compared with 47 percent of House members and 56 percent of senators.( Half True)
Republicans in Congress have introduced dozens of bills on religion, marriage, abortion and gun control, but zero bills on job creation. (Pants on Fire.)

As PolitiFact points out, these messages have one thing in common: they’re spread by people who are passionate about their political beliefs. Here’s the key thing to remember: “passionate” should not equal “stupid.” The same Internet that has increased the speed of stupid to almost light speed also has easily found and highly respected resources that can tell you how much bullshit you’re spreading before you make an ass of yourself and bore/incite your audience. PolitiFact is one. Snopes and Truth or Fiction are just as good.

Everyone would be thankful, and the whole country would be better off, if our passionately held beliefs had a basis in fact. Let’s see what we can do to improve the level of civil discourse by promising to be more discerning in what we pass off as facts. Then at least I won’t be such a prick all the time.

(Thanks to the Show Tunes Correspondent for pointing this article out to me.)

Pay Attention, Conservatives

2011-11-22T08:22:00.001-05:00

Last Friday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders made the following statement in the Senate Budget Committee:

“This country does in fact have a serious deficit problem. But the reality is that the deficit was caused by two wars—unpaid for. It was caused by huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country. It was caused by a recession as result of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street. And if those are the causes of the deficit, I will be damned if we’re going to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the children, and the poor. That’s wrong.”

Sanders isn’t just right; he’s Right.

Something else to consider, seen after Occupy Wall Street was evicted from Zuccotti Park:

“If they enforced bank regulation like they do park rules, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”

And the head shot, seen periodically on the Internet:

“Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401ks, took trillions in taxpayer-funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?

Yeah, me neither…”

Yet those are the people—along with the previously mentioned elderly, children, sick, and poor—who are expected to make it right.

Lest Christian conservatives think their alleged moral high ground gives them special dispensation, here’s a quote attributed to Stephen Colbert, though its accuracy renders moot its source:

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”

It’s way past time to pull your heads out of your asses, conservatives. Your mother was right: do it for too long and it will grow that way.

Political Nihilists

2011-11-19T18:49:00.001-05:00

The Tea Party used to be a mildly sympathetic group, people short on facts who deserved empathy because everyone understands the frustrations of watching the country go down the shitter and feeling powerless to do anything about it. They brought an additional voice to the political debate in this country, one that was not parroting the same vague promises that brought us to the point where they felt the need to step up.

Their evolution has, however, been backward, moving back along the spectrum as though humans had devolved past monkeys toward more simple, mindless vertebrates. The Tea Party’s policy proposals have moved from conservative to reactionary to nihilistic.

What does the Tea Party propose to balance the budget? Eliminating the Department of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Housing; allowing opt-outs for Medicare and privatizing Social Security; letting people use gold-backed currency; and eliminating all federal student loans and farm subsidies.

These people aren’t stupid; they’re willfully stupid, reveling in the grotesqueness of their ignorance unlike anyone outside of Lyndon Larouche supporters. In a nation where upward mobility has fallen dramatically, they propose cuts bound to ensure things get even worse. They call themselves patriots, yet would erect barriers that can only make the pursuit of the vaunted American dream more difficult.

No compromise is permitted. Tea Party candidates negotiate only by backing off of their original positions to make them even more stringent. Democrats are complicit in their success rushing to meet them more than halfway, no matter where the halfway line has been moved.

Money has flowed to this “grassroots” movement like oil through a pipeline, much too fast, and in too large of chunks, to pass muster as a groundswell of support. The Tea Party exists now to harden the divisions that already exist, front line soldiers in maintaining the elements of the status quo that promise to reduce our stature even more than it has already. Their efforts to undermine the foundations of a developed society border on treason as they function as the shock troops of the 1%. It would be funny—many of their ardent supporters would be among the most to lose should their proposed reforms ever come to pass—if not for the fact they’ll take the rest of us down with them.

The Sole Heir Rides Again

2011-11-15T08:10:00.001-05:00

Few things are more boring than listening to someone else go on at length about how his kid won the refrigerator drawing contest at Millard Fillmore Elementary School for the fourth week in a row, a new third grade record. Unless he shows you photographs of all the drawings on his iPhone. With that in mind, I don’t spend a lot of time promoting The Sole Heir. She knows what I think of her. Frankly, it’s none of your business.

Once in a while, though, she does something that merits special attention. A junior at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, she has been accepted into a five-week undergraduate pre-med program in Nice, France. She’ll stay with a nice Nice family, attend classes, observe doctors, and generally build on the experience she gained from watching her father get his eyes sliced open. She gets to do this while spending the late spring in the south of France, less than an hour’s drive from Cannes while the film festival is underway. (That’s less than an hour in kilometers, so it’s even closer than it sounds.)

As far as we know, TSH is the first St. Mary’s student to be accepted into this program. (This opinion is based largely on the fact the interviewer had never heard of the school before reading TSH’s application.) She’s excited, and the entire family couldn’t be prouder of her.

She’s already thinking of what she’ll need there. I have told her, no matter how prepared she thinks she is, something will come up she hadn’t expected. For example, in the immortal words of the poet-philosopher Steven Martin, in France a street is a rue; a hat is a chapeau; a house is a maison.

Those French have a different word for everything.

Final Comment on JoePa

2011-11-14T10:38:00.001-05:00

This is from Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback column in Sports Illustrated.

I asked Emily Kaplan, a friend of mine from New Jersey, a Penn State junior, and a writer for the campus paper the Daily Collegian, to write something about how the campus was dealing with the Sandusky/Paterno crisis. Her report, filed Sunday night from State College, Pa.:

The origin of the iconic "We Are ... Penn State" chant, the school's signature slogan on and off the football field, is believed to have occurred the same year Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. In the pre-Paterno year of 1947, SMU didn't want to play Penn State because of PSU's two African-American players and wanted to negotiate a compromise. "We are Penn State," said captain Steve Suhey. "There will be no meetings."

So began the battle cry of unity, as all Penn Staters, to this day, consider ourselves part of a special family. Suhey's son Matt starred at Penn State in the 1970s, and Matt's son Joe played fullback for the Lions Saturday against Nebraska. Walk into a crowded room and shout, "We are ... " and any Penn Stater would know how to respond. The chant represents pride, respect and tradition.

Today, we are Penn State ... but we are ashamed. We are ashamed that our leaders who preach doing the right thing and "success with honor" dishonored all of us with their inaction over an alleged child-abuse scandal. We are embarrassed by the way we are being portrayed, as a football-centric school that would let a child molester walk if that meant our name would stay clean. We read the grand jury report and we are just as disgusted as anyone -- if not more. We are praying for the victims and hopeful they will find justice. We are heartbroken that this could happen here.

But as a Penn State junior, I can tell you this: We are going to be OK. We are not going to let an assistant football coach, apparently a very sick one, or a few university suits define us. For a moment, we lost our identity. We felt sorry for ourselves. We sulked that we were the victims of media scrutiny and that this scandal tarnished our school. But we are not the victims. The children are. So we will move on, working on repairing our school, while honoring those kids along the way.

Already the scandal's ramifications are swirling around campus. Four students apparently lost their spring internships because companies didn't want to be associated with Penn State. Corporate sponsors are supposedly pulling out of THON, Penn State's annual dance marathon, the largest student-run philanthropy in the world, which has raised more than $78 million for pediatric cancer. If all true, it's sad. If people don't want to wear their Penn State garb anymore, it's their decision. But this I know: We are a school with a glorious tradition, a school dedicated to doing things the right way. Our longtime father figure, Joe Paterno, taught us that.

Look, I'm no Penn State apologist. I can't condone the stupid tantrum some of my classmates threw Wednesday night after Paterno's dismissal. Nobody condones the arrogant decisions some of our leaders made. I've also heard the criticism against my school. Happy Valley is in a bubble. Penn State is too image-conscious. JoePa is too deified. The riots give some credence to that. So did the presence of 100 students at Joe Pa's modest off-campus home, many teary-eyed, waiting for him to come out Wednesday night so they could say goodbye and thank him. On the surface it seemed ridiculous. How could students still support this man who didn't do enough to help abused children?

Truth is, if not for Paterno's philanthropy and moral code (until his fatal lapse of judgment), I and thousands of others wouldn't be here right now. If not for Paterno and his grand experiment -- creating a national powerhouse football program with high academic standards -- Pennsylvania State might still be an agriculture school and State College might be lucky if there were a Wal-Mart within a 30-mile radius. Paterno made a huge mistake, but that doesn't mean he's not a good man. When he emerged from his house Wednesday night, I was there when he addressed the gathering. One of the first things he said was, "Go study."

So we will study at Paterno Library, a place Joe and his wife made happen, we will eat Peachy Paterno ice cream and we will remember the lessons he taught us about integrity and honor. We will also remember his mistake, and make sure we never repeat it.

We will fund raise harder than ever for THON, we will work harder than ever in the classroom. Our president, our athletic director, our football coach, will not be around anymore. But we will be, and we will start to rebuild our university's shattered image. Whoever our next football coach may be next season, we will stand behind him and our players. Because we are Penn State. And like the hundreds of thousands of alumni around the country, we always will be.

JoePa, Part 2

2011-11-12T18:16:00.001-05:00

Doug and Charlie are wearing me down; Paterno definitely should have done more. (See Charlie’s excellent piece on his blog, Temporary Knucksline.) What I'm still upset about is how institutions mete out justice today, in the interest of a politically correct vision of "fairness."

Right now there are five principals on the radar: Sandusky, Curley, Schultz, Paterno, and McQuery. (Fired President Spanier doesn't really enter into this part of the discussion.) Let’s see how things shake out with each of them.

At the risk of offending those who believe everyone is innocent until proven guilty, Sandusky is a piece of shit. Assuming he’s found guilty, put him in gen pop, make sure the rest of the cons know who he is, and let nature take its course.

McQuery was the only other person who could have done anything material. He not only failed to do so, he had to ask Daddy what he should do. I was willing to give him a pass because of his age at the time, until I remembered my own oft-spoken scorn for such arguments. We have men and women of the age McQuery was then making life and death decisions under fire on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a quarterback, he was trained in leadership skills. They didn’t take.

Paterno was summarily fired after 62 years of service that put Penn State on the map. This is not such a huge story if it happens at Coastal Carolina or Guilford. It’s a national sensation because it happened at Penn State, and Penn State is such a big deal because it’s one of the most successful programs in the country and graduates over 80% of its football players, with nary a hint of a recruiting violation. Why are all those things true? Joe Paterno. Penn State fired him for making the school look bad, when no one outside of State College would have cared about the school looking bad had not Paterno put it on the map in the first place.

Curley and Schultz had the same information as Paterno, and are under indictment for perjuring themselves before a grand jury that had no issue with Paterno’s testimony. Schultz was allowed to retire; Curley is on administrative leave while he defends himself against the charges. Should we assume he will get his old job back if he is found innocent? Let’s hope not. In that case, why not fire him now?

The reason that will rise immediately to the top is that you shouldn’t fire someone who has not been proven guilty. This is a bogus argument. Penn State has made it clear being under indictment is not a firing offense. Curley should be fired for the same reason Paterno was, for not doing more to stop Sandusky. His perjury is but a piece of that.

Now that I’ve had time to think about this, Paterno had to go. This happened on his watch. He as much as acknowledged that when he announced his retirement, effective at the end of the season. What still bothers me is how none of the good he’s done over the past 62 years seems to matter anymore.

Announcing his retirement after the season may have been a tactical error. He should have consulted with the Trustees first. Come to an agreement. At least then they would almost have to have had some kind of joint announcement of how and when he’d go. As it was, since he had already announced he’d leave, they were in a position where they had to show the media and PC Police they took this seriously. (Finally.) The result was a “don’t let the door hit you on the ass” firing.

Curley and Schultz—and even Sandusky—will get their days in court. Paterno—whose offense is not that he did too much wrong but not enough right—gets to fall on his sword. No one cares about his side of the story anymore. It is not a defense of child abuse to say that he deserves better.

JoePa

2011-11-10T22:36:00.001-05:00

Joe Paterno’s sixty-plus years at Penn State have come to an end. Like so many long tenures, it ended badly. Paterno, who has long resisted all attempts to retire him, announced he would leave at the end of this season and was not even allowed that, fired by the Board of Trustees last night.

Let us begin with what should be obvious: nothing that has happened, or will happen, to Paterno is in any way comparable to the damage that has been done to the young men molested by former assistant Jerry Sandusky. Assuming he is, in fact, guilty, there is no court with the authority to punish him severely enough. Athletic Director Tim Curley and University Vice President Gary Schultz have also earned their doses of infamy.

The preponderance of public invective has fallen on Paterno. Maybe that is as it should be; he is the leading public figure in this scandal. Still, the level of vitriol is surprising. Is it deserved? Unlike the vast majority of those who have heaped their scorn upon him via the internet today, I have actually read the grand jury report. I know using actual evidence violates the spirit of the web, but let’s give it a try.

Then graduate assistant (now assistant coach) Mike McQuery was in the Lasch Center (which houses the football offices) on a Friday evening to put new sneakers in his locker and pick up tapes for an upcoming game when he heard suspicious sounds coming from the shower. He took a look and saw former defensive coordinator Sandusky sodomizing a boy about ten years old. They saw each other, and everyone left.

McQuery, distraught, calls his father, then goes to his home, where his father tells him he has to tell Paterno. The next morning, McQuery goes to Paterno’s home and does so. Paterno said in his testimony McQuery was visibly upset. Paterno found his story credible enough to call Curley to his home Sunday morning and tell him what McQuery had seen. It also seems clear the language Paterno used was somewhat toned down from the description McQuery had given, though he definitely said Sandusky had been seen doing something of a sexual nature with a young boy. (Paterno at the time was in his mid-seventies. It is not surprising his language would not be as strong.)

Curley then contacted Schultz, under whose authority resided the university police force. They waited a week-and-a-half to speak to McQuery; Paterno was not present. Afterward they notified the police, but were apparently less than forthcoming. The grand jury summary says McQuery was “extremely credible.” Curley and Schultz were both described as “not credible.”

Could Paterno have done more? Absolutely. Should he have done more? Probably. Let’s look at what he did, and not what we’d all like to think we’d do in a similar situation.

McQuery played quarterback at Penn State, and obviously made enough of an impression on Paterno to be offered a graduate assistantship. He is entitled to a certain amount of credence. One Saturday morning, out of the blue, he tells Paterno he saw a man Paterno has worked closely with for over 30 years sodomizing a young boy. If I were Paterno, my first thought would be, “Kid, you’d better be pretty goddamned sure.” Paterno saw the McQuery was visibly upset, so he escalated it to his boss the next day. The grand jury finds no fault with this action.

The leading meme today has been, “Why didn’t Paterno call the police?” Let’s say he does. What does he tell them? “I have a grad student here who says he saw Jerry Sandusky buggering a small child.”

COP: Did you see anything?

JP: No.

COP: Send over the grad student.

They’re done with him. They need eyewitness testimony, and Paterno doesn’t have any.

The next argument I saw on a couple of comment threads was that Paterno should not only have gone to the police, he should have kept after them. These people watch too much television. I’ve made child abuse complaints twice, once when a woman shopping in a store where I worked refused to take her son for a free hospital exam after a nasty fall; the other occurred when child pornography appeared in my email. The police took my statement, got my contact information, and went on their way. They were clear that they’d call me if they needed me, but my role had ended. That’s what would have happened here. Police do not discuss open investigations with civilians. Period.

Another argument against insisting Paterno should have become a crusader for light and right is that State College PA is a small town. Its current population is listed at 39,898. Joe Paterno’s number is in the book. (Probably not anymore, but before this week it had always been.) Someone overhears on the police scanner that JoePa has called for cops, and what is still at that point an unsubstantiated claim is now public knowledge. He’s known Sandusky for a long time. He’s not likely to take the chance of ruining the guy’s life on one other person’s say so. What if it’s nothing? We know it wasn’t now, but Paterno wasn’t there when it happened; he didn’t see anything. He moved it up the chain, as he should have.

Put yourself in his position. You hear a similar story of a friend of thirty years. (For those who aren’t that old, think of a favorite uncle or mentor.) Is calling the police the first thing you do? Hasn’t that kind of relationship has earned the benefit of the doubt? Sure, you do something. Me, I’d urge the person who came to me to go to the police; he actually has evidence for them. If he’s afraid, then, yes, maybe I wander into the police station and make a statement. But maybe not, if I’m so high profile my appearance there–or the appearance of the police at my house–lets the toothpaste out of the tube.

I was then swatted with another argument, that the above statement only helps the guilty. We should go to the police with every such allegation we here. The presumption of innocence will protect against unfounded charges. Does anyone here remember Richard Jewell and the Atlanta Olympics? The Tawana Brawley case? McMartin pre-school? The toothpaste never quite gets put back into the tube, does it?

Maybe the worst thing I read today came from John Scalzi, a science fiction writer for whom I have had great respect. In the comment threads to his post demonizing Paterno, after a commenter said this:

“Meanwhile, all the rage at JoePa has taken the focus off the real monster.”

Scalzi’s reply:

“Alleged monster,” please. We should continue to remember that the alleged monster has yet to have his day in court.

Apparently for Paterno to get a fair hearing in the court of public opinion, he had not sinned enough; he needed to get himself indicted. Then a presumption of innocence would apply.

We all grieve for these children, and for Curley and Schultz to delay in their follow-up and then lie to the authorities is beneath contempt. What is disturbing is the levels of vitriol directed at someone who was not himself directly involved. It is true that all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing; that does not make them evil themselves, or cowards. It makes them human. Let’s please just tone down this casting of first stones.

The most valuable thing I learned today? How glad I am the readers of John Scalzi’s blog are not my friends.

Game 6 Postponed

2011-10-26T16:05:00.003-04:00

Brace yourselves. I'm about to say something nice about baseball commissioner Bud "Bud" Selig.Those who know me will appreciate this is not unlike me nominating Harry Reid for the Nobel Prize in Political Science, but fair is fair. (And I have said nice things about Reid, as well. Not too damned often, but I have.)

Selig has presided over many things I don't like about baseball: interleague play; second-place teams in the post-season and the resulting additional tier of playoffs; widening disparity in team payrolls; the Steroid Era, during which he placed his head in the sand deep enough to strike oil until the public and political outcry became so great he had to don his Crusader robe and take credit for both the outbreak of offense and stopping it; ever-lengthening games; a tied All-Star game, then changing the rules to make it "count." For a relative purist such as myself, who understands baseball is a business, but, Jesus Christ, enough already, Selig has been a train wreck looking for a crossing with a school bus of disabled kids on it.

Tonight Buddy gets his due. Game 6 of the World Series has been postponed well in advance. This was true of another playoff game in an earlier round, as well, even though the weather report for that game was incorrect and things cleared up nicely in time for the game. It was still the right thing to do, and the decision was made easier by another decision Selig made a few years ago: all post-season games will be played to their conclusion. If a game must be halted due to bad weather, it will resume from the place where it left off. Regular season rules concerning shortened or suspended games do not apply.

This is as it should be. I'm old enough to remember a 1978 National League Championship Series game between the Phillies and the Dodgers played in rain so heavy it was hard to see the pitched ball from the center field camera. Those conditions not only endanger the players, they risk making a travesty of the most important games of the season.

Trying to sneak the game in despite the forecast would have been a horrible idea for a potentially series-ending game, killing much of the sense of drama a Game 6 entails. Call the game now, tell FOX to calm the fuck down and reschedule their ads for the X Factor, and do it right.

For one day at least, this Bud's for all baseball fans.

How Can You Believe Anything These Guys Say?

2011-10-24T09:47:00.003-04:00

From today's Washington Post:

It was a notable political misstep for Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain: in a CNN interview, he remarked that abortion ought to be “a choice that the family or mother has to make.” Those comments forced Cain to spend last week attempting to shore up his anti-abortion credentials—an effort that included endorsing a Constitutional amendment to ban abortion.

A week ago he believed abortion was a "choice that the family or mother has to make." A little blowback and he wants a Constitutional amendment to ban it outright. It doesn't matter what your views are on abortion; this guy will say anything.That fact that this tendency doesn't make him special among the contenders, on either side is what is so disturbing

My Complaint to Management

2011-10-17T15:53:00.002-04:00

I sent this note to the White House today. There's not a soul in that building who gives a tenth of a shit what I think, but I did what I could. Maybe if enough of us do, it will matter.

I see by today's Washington Post online that the administration will stop implementing the CLASS Act, and that the Prevention and Public Health Fund may be in a tenuous position. Abandoning key provision of the ACA so quickly while extracting so little from its opponents in return doesn't say much for the administration's commitment to its own legislative "high points."

I was fooled in 2008; I'll not be fooled again next year.

Government Should Be Run More Like a Business

2011-09-25T16:14:00.000-04:00

Why the hell would anyone want that?

Hey, Ron Paul

2011-09-23T17:16:00.001-04:00

How’s that whole gold standard idea looking right now?

The Underpants School of Economics

2011-09-22T16:35:00.001-04:00

The Beloved Spouse has reminded me of one of our favorite South Park episodes. In it, the boys’ friend Tweak is unable to sleep at night because of the Underpants Gnomes, who creep into his drawers and steal his, well, drawers.

Stan and Kyle and Cartman follow the Underpants Gnomes to their secret lair. (I forget whether Kenny was dead yet.) After a brief discussion, the head gnome shares his plan for wealth with the boys:

1. Underpants

2. ???

3. Profit

This is eerily like how the Republicans want to get the economy running again:

1. Austerity

2. ???

3. Prosperity (at least for some)

The Beloved Spouse wondered what George Carlin would think of this. (What other blog delivers such a wealth of cultural references?) She thinks it might go something like this:

Scenario:

The Worker

Out-of-work man.

Unskilled, no formal training. Construction. Warehouse work.

Married. Four kids. Wife works at low end department store.

Does odd jobs to keep the family afloat.

Rents a house.

Our Government

Is in charge of big projects that benefit the entire country.

Has lots of infrastructure that needs repair or replacement.

Has lots of new projects that need doing.

The Idea

Government hires this man to work on a project.

Government pays him a decent wage.

The man now has money to pay his bills, and can now afford to buy more things for his family.

The family can go to the dentist, buy new shoes, have a vacation, buy a better car, buy a washing machine and dryer, go to the movies, etc.

Every time a dollar goes into this man's pocket, he probably spends all of it.

Every dollar that he spends goes to buy stuff or services.

That creates demand for stuff and services

Manufacturers make more stuff when there's demand for more stuff.

Service industries expand their services when there's more demand for services.

That means more jobs for folks in manufacturing, sales, services, etc.

Bonus! Our country now has safer roads, bridges, schools, etc.

The Outcome

Profit

This is such an elegant and obvious solution it’s hard to see how it can be argued with, except on the grounds of intellectual dishonesty (Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor) or severe mental impairment (Rick Perry, Michele Bachman). Trickle-Down economics hasn’t worked, and it’s not going to. Reagan’s economic Rasputin, David Stockman, knew it wouldn’t work when he implemented it, and admitted as much after he was safely out of government service. Trickle-Down economics is like standing a pyramid on its head; inherently unstable and unreliable.

What we need is Percolate Up economics. Give the above construction worker with four kids some money and he’ll spend it right now, on food or housing or car repairs. Give that money to someone in the highest earning one percent and he’ll either bank it, or, if he does buy something like a car, it will be a BMW. I’m all for free trade, but Germans have their economy better under control than we do. They’ll be fine.

Instead of giving a few people a lot of money through tax cuts, give a little money to each of a lot of people. Every dollar you give them will bring between 1.5 and two dollars back as it works its way through the economy after he buys a washing machine that allows Sears to order more, which allows whoever makes Kenmores (it’s not Sears, you know) to hire more washing machine builders n who can then fix their leaky roofs and basements, thus putting some construction guys to work. And on and on.

As for the alleged deficit hawks who think only government spending adds to the debt and tax cuts are somehow revenue neutral, look at your own finances. A dollar spent is no more damaging to the bottom line than a dollar not taken in.

I’ll talk about job creators another day.

The Home Office Hath No Fury…

2011-09-15T18:38:00.001-04:00

The Beloved Spouse was an early Obama adopter. Got on the bandwagon early and stuck with him through the first two years of his alleged presidency. So it was no surprise when she received a email from him yesterday.

Friend --
I'm writing to invite you to dinner.

Personally, I only invite people whose names I know to dinner, but this is politics. Maybe it’s different.

If that sounds familiar, it's because we've done this before. I've asked the campaign to organize small, five-person dinners with supporters like you as a regular thing.
These dinners are important to me. Not just because they help me stay connected to supporters like you who are doing the hard work of building this campaign, but because they set us apart.
No matter what our opponents do over the next 14 months, we have chosen to put people at the heart of our campaign -- and we're focused on building it one grassroots donation at a time.
I'm asking you to make one today.

Now I understand. He’s inviting her to buy dinner. If that’s not a politician, I don’t know what is.

Our focus on everyday Americans and their stories has always made our organization more than just a political campaign.
From the very beginning, we've set out to practice a different kind of politics -- proving that we don't need checks from Washington lobbyists or unlimited special-interest money to win an election.

He keeps talking about a different brand of politics. I never realized “different” is a synonym for “ineffective.”

This is all pretty lame, Barry doing his Audacity of Hope bit for Democrats who haven’t been paying attention. Well, The Beloved Spouse has been paying attention to him since before he won his first primary. Here is her reply (Used with her permission, of course):

NOPE.

I might donate later, after I see how long this fire in your belly for the American Jobs Act lasts. You're back on the campaign trail, so you're all fired up and ready to go. Where the heck have you been?

You, Barack, have disappointed me beyond words. You have shown no leadership, no spine, no determination, and no flippin' insight into what you are up against. You have underestimated your opponents time and time again. I am not a very happy Democrat at the moment.

You are going to get my vote. I'm pretty much resigned to that. But, honestly, if there was a viable Democratic challenger, I'd have to at least look at a choice.

Choice. Change. Pffft. Words.

Get serious, Barack. I don't want to live in the kind of world invisioned by Perry, Paul, Bachmann and Cain. I might be able to tolerate Romney or Huntsman, but only because they seem as weak-willed and spineless as you turned out to be.

Sorry. I had such high hopes for you, too.

Catch me later.

The Democrats had better get a handle on who their friends are damn quick. If they’ve lost TBS, they’re in big trouble.

There He Goes Again

2011-09-14T08:07:00.001-04:00

Barack Obama hit the campaign trail last week. He convened a joint session of Congress for an alleged speech about a jobs creation bill and used it as his kick-off speech. Symbolically, he gave it on the night the NFL season kicked off as well, though even his handlers knew he lacked the juice to compete with the game and moved an supposedly critical speech out of prime time to avoid getting trounced. (Green Bay beat New Orleans 42-34.)

Then Barry hit the campaign trail with a vengeance, traveling to three states (including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s home district) to taunt Republicans with his newly-discovered populist message. “Pass this bill!” is the sound bite. It will be about as effective as “Whip Inflation Now,” and “Just Say No,” but it sure did get the crowds fired up.

Where was this level of presidential involvement and emotion during the health care debate, when Tea Party savants taunted congressional town hall meetings with shouts of death squads? Barry spent most of that debate hunkered into the White House like Hitler in the Fuhrerbunker, making token appearances so people would know he was still alive. Same with financial reform. Pick any program he’d pledged to support and he was nowhere to be found.

Until now. Is it because people are hurting and jobs are still hard to come by? People were hurting and jobs were hard to come by during the stimulus debate, too. You didn’t see Air Force One zipping around the country so Barry could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people who could no longer make their mortgage payments.

The difference now has no more to do with unemployment or foreclosures than the fact unemployed and foreclosed people vote, and the Republican debates are grabbing all the political headlines. He also needs to look presidential enough to forestall any primary challenges from his left. He’s running for office again, which is the only job he appears to be suited for, since his record after winning elections is sparse.

It will probably work. The Republican candidates are racing to see who can stake out the most untenable positions for the general election, with the exception of Mitt Romney, who doesn’t believe in anything except that he wants Mitt Romney to be president. The 2012 campaign is shaping up early as the epitome of a South Park election: a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Our political race to the bottom will be complete.

The Perfect End to the Perfect Week

2011-09-09T21:07:00.001-04:00

The holiday was nice. I extended my weekend into Tuesday. That was nice.

Remember it. It won’t happen again.

Wednesday we had fourteen hours of more or less continuous violent thunderstorms. The power went out at 2:30 in the afternoon. Water started coming accumulating in the basement as 2:45. Your correspondent tried to hold back the tide with a sponge mop until I noticed whitecaps in the water. I gave up and waited for the power to come back on so the wet-vac would work.

At 7:30 our utility’s service line said our power would be restored by 9:00. By 9:15 the message had been changed to, “as soon as possible.” I dozed in a chair, ready to spring into action the instant the power came back on. At 12:15 I moved to the couch. The lights came on at 2:30. (Note the classical symmetry.)

By 2:32 I had the wet-vac humming. Done at 5:15, the only chore remaining to set up a floor fan that is usually kept upstairs to blow air across the mop-dry floor. Took off my Crocs (yes, I’m a 55-year-old man who wears Crocs in water-related emergencies) so I wouldn’t track wet footprints through the house. Slipped as I reached the bottom and drove my left big toe into a rack of shelves. Stomped around the basement doing my impersonation of George Carlin’s cat. (You get that joke or you don’t. ) Dragged the bloody stump upstairs to find the nail hanging on by individual atoms. All thoughts of a nap before work dead because, no matter how tired I was with ten functioning phalanges, I’m wide fucking awake with nine, so I signed in to work at 6:00. Worked until 4:30, when one of the broken toothpicks I’d been using to prop open my eyes slipped and embedded itself in my cheek. (This is the only exaggeration in the entire story. Swear to God.) Got something to eat and crashed on the couch until 8:00 this morning.

Today. Friday. Time to mellow out and ease into a weekend. A night of rest and elevation makes the toe look like it belongs to a human being, though not necessarily the human being it is attached to. Time for a little treat. I don’t drink worth mentioning. Don’t do drugs. Yo quiero Taco Bell.

One problem: they have a strict no zapatas, no camisa, no servicio policy. I slide a sock over the toe. Not too bad. Loosen the shoelaces as far as I can and it fits into a sneaker. Not happily, but it fits. I’m out the door.

I never realized how much your big toe is involved in working the clutch. (Note to aging people who remain clumsy: automatic transmissions are the way to go.) I coast through stop signs and never go above second gear all the way to the parking lot, where the pinnacle of my week awaits.

Taco Bell is on fire.

I shit you not. Nothing too dramatic. No flames shooting out of windows and telescoping ladders. At first all I saw was the emergency rescue vehicle and thought, “It’s Taco Bell. Maybe someone just got sick. No reason not to go in myself. The lines are probably non-existent.” Then I saw the five fire trucks from various jurisdictions, and people wearing Taco Bell jerseys walking away and figured maybe I should eat elsewhere.

Saturday can’t come soon enough.

The Relative Value of Labor

2011-09-05T16:04:00.001-04:00

Here’s a quote the Party of Lincoln might want to consider, since it was Lincoln who said it:
"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
(Credit to E.J. Dionne, via Carola Dunn.)

The Patriot Act: Keeping America Safe From Terrorism

2011-09-05T14:09:00.001-04:00

There's an interesting chart in New York Magazine that shows what the Patriot Act is used for.

Delayed-notice search warrants issued under the expanded powers of the Patriot Act, 2006–2009:
For drugs: 1,618
For fraud: 122
For Terrorism: 15

(Thanks to Peter Moskos’s excellent blog, Cop in the Hood.)

A Peek Behind the Republican Curtain

2011-09-05T10:11:00.001-04:00

This is a tad long, but Mike Lofgren, who worked as a Republican congressional staffer for thirty years, steps outside the tent and gives the inside scoop on Republican goals, motives, and strategy better than any fifty blog posts that could be written from the outside. Well worth the read.

(Thanks to Jon Loomis for pointing this out on Facebook.)

The Death of the Honest Businessman | Articles | Bill James Online

2011-09-04T13:53:00.000-04:00

Bill James made his bones as a pioneer in the field of sabremetrics, the analysis of baseball statistics that threatens to drown us all. James's gift was not in his analysis of the stats--which was, and is, formidable--but in how he wrote up the analysis. Always entertaining, James broke ground where no one has really followed, detailed analysis described by exceptional writing. Those who may be better number crunchers can't write half as well; those who can write at his level can't handle the level of statistical detail.

He has his own website now, full of baseball analysis, but with other stuff, too. He's written a true crime book that focuses on crimes that caught popular attention, that has been well received. (Full disclosure: I haven't got to it yet, but I will.) He also goes off on tangents, sometimes political, that are always worth reading. Today he posted an article on "The Death of the Honest Businessman" that shows the same logic that makes his baseball analysis worth reading.

The article also touches on a few political hot buttons, notably red light camera and closing small post office. All can be read at the link below, but what interests me most here is his juxtaposition of common rhetoric versus what actually happens.

James writes:

Also as many of you know, I’m prone to rant about red-light cameras. Here’s a link to an extremely good article on the subject:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/rolling-back-nanny-state_577297.html?nopager=1

Having endorsed the article enthusiastically—I think this may be the first time I have used this platform to link to somebody else’s article—I now need to back away from it a little bit in several directions. The article says that "governments initially justified them under the rubric of public safety—the cameras were supposed to make intersections safer. . .but the fig leaf of safety frittered away as study after study showed that the cameras made little difference and in some cases actually made intersections less safe. Drivers, knowing cameras were watching, tended to jam on their brakes suddenly at yellow lights, causing accidents." I would prefer to believe that that’s true, and intuitively I have known from the first moment I heard of a red light camera that businessmen would promote them by doing specious studies that heroically overstated the safety value of their product, but by the same rough skepticism, I know that people who write polemics very often say things like "study after study has shown" no matter how muddled the evidence actually is.

The more serious issue is that parts of the article are stated in right-wing cant that is likely to drive a wedge between Red-Light camera opponents and those who should be our strongest allies. The article talks about Red Light cameras as a further intrusion of the Nanny State into our daily lives, which is code to portray Red-Light cameras as being foisted on the population from the left. The reality is that it isbusinessmen who are selling these things, in league with avaricious local politicians. In the 1980s, when businesses got a toehold running private prisons on contract from the government, who was it that took the lead in opposing that? It was, of course, the left.

Well, this is the same thing, isn’t it? It’s turning over a police function to private business—and it should be opposed on those grounds; police powers cannot be delegated to people who could misuse them to generate income. There is too much opportunity for abuse, and businessmen are not universally ethical. The real problem with Red Light cameras is not that they don’t promote safety—for all I actually know, they may promote safety—it is that they create a profound confusion between the goals of public safety and the pursuit of wealth.

Also in the 1980s, there was a period in which it was a popular idea that police should seize items used in a crime and sell them to raise money for police departments. A more terrifying concept would be difficult to come up with—and who was it that took the lead in opposing this? It was, again, the left—and these policies were in due course prohibited by the courts as a threat to civil liberties.

Well, this is the same thing, isn’t it? It creates the same terrifying confusion between what is being done in the broad interests of the public and what is being done in the financial interests of the state, thus allowing the government to shake money out of your pockets on the pretense that they are legitimately punishing you for violating laws that you never had the slightest intention of violating.

Governments should be fanatically careful as to when they punish and who they punish. A wise father does not indiscriminately punish his children. Educated and sophisticated people know that punishments backfire frequently and at a high cost. This is careless and indiscriminate punishment. It is both stupid and immoral, and we need to put a definite stop to it.

Read the entire article here, or by using the link below. It's worth your time, no matter which side of the political fence you're on.

The Death of the Honest Businessman | Articles | Bill James Online

Deferring to my Betters

2011-09-03T15:11:00.001-04:00

I was going to write about Obama’s latest disappointment, but Paul Krugman has done it better that I could in his NYT Blog:

I’ve actually been avoiding thinking about the latest Obama cave-in, on ozone regulation; these repeated retreats are getting painful to watch. For what it’s worth, I think it’s bad politics. The Obama political people seem to think that their route to victory is to avoid doing anything that the GOP might attack — but the GOP will call Obama a socialist job-killer no matter what they do. Meanwhile, they just keep reinforcing the perception of mush from the wimp, of a president who doesn’t stand for anything.

Class Warfare. Again.

2011-08-23T12:44:00.002-04:00

Republicans have their kickers in knots because noted Socialist Warren Buffet has advocated raising taxes on the super-rich. “Class warfare!” is the rallying cry from Fox News and its ilk. (Is there any way for “ilk” to sound complimentary? Certainly not when used in conjunction with “Fox News” or “Tea Party” or “child molester.” Not saying Fox news and the Tea Party are child molesters. I just tried to think of the worst thing I could call someone, since “Fascist” lost all meaning when Obama was declared one by Lyndon Larouche’s acolytes.)

Apparently the Right believes class warfare can only happen by pitting one class against the rich. This is not true, though that is traditionally how it has been done, primarily because the poor do not have anything anyone else wants. Ah, but this is the Twenty-First Century, where Brave New World is as passé as “See Dick run” and Ayn Rand has replaced Thomas Jefferson as the paragon of rational political thought. Conservatives have found one thing the poor have that’s worth taking.

Money.

Taking money from people who don’t have any is not just hard to do, it’s hard to advocate. We’re not quite ready for the Al Swearengen approach of “hit them over the head, take their money, and throw their bodies in the creek,” though we’re headed down that slippery slope. No, for this we have to resort to a tried and true conservative meme: these people are screwing you, and we’re your only friend.

Conservatives have a revered tradition with this approach. For years blacks were the enemy, taking white jobs, sleeping with white women, and looking better with shaved heads than any white man. Immigrants had their day, but vilifying them has lost its sheen since the economy became so bad even Mexicans don’t want to come here anymore. Now it’s the poor’s turn, except no one can say “let’s take money from the poor” without invoking Dickensian images even from those who think a Dickensian is someone whose work pants aren’t Levis or Wranglers.

“How can we take money from the poor and get the middle class to think it’s a good idea?” Oh, how this must have tortured many a conservative soul late into many sleepless nights. Then some 60-watt bulb noticed that almost half of all Americans don’t pay income tax, and boom! Inspiration.

All real Americans hate freeloaders, and in tough times everyone (except the rich) are expected to contribute. Never mind that most of those non-taxpaying goldbricks are seniors living on Social Security who don’t draw enough benefits to pay tax. Most of the others either make so little money the standard deductions wipe out their Gross Adjusted Income, or programs like the Earned Income Credit or Child Tax Credit bring them under the line. (Note: Republicans repeatedly vote for these programs, and have expressed no interest in undoing them.)

While the poor don’t always pay income tax, they do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. (If they’re lucky enough to have jobs.) These are regressive taxes, especially Social Security, thanks to the cap, which means there are poor people in this country who pay no income tax, yet still pay a higher percentage of their wages in overall taxes than do the rich.

Conservatives have no sense of irony. They fail to realize a flaw that is implicit in their argument: we now live in a country where almost half the people don’t make enough money to pay income tax.

Does that bother anyone but me? Of course, I’m one of those who still thinks the banks and financial institutions were responsible for the current mess, and refuses to blame the public workers and unions because it was their unreasonable salary demands and lack of work ethic that caused mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps to lose their (perceived) value and become exposed for the Ponzi schemes they always were, thus precipitating the Great Recession of 2008. Silly me.

Top Ten Things That Were True the Last Time I Didn’t Have to Wear Glasses

2011-08-19T11:23:00.001-04:00

10. The Pirates played in Forbes Field.

9. The Steelers had never made the playoffs.

8. The only penguins in Pittsburgh were in the zoo.

7. John Boehner had human-colored skin.

6. The Beatles had never been to America.

5. Elvis was thin.

4. We only had “advisors” in Vietnam.

3. Mitch McConnell had a chin.

2. There was no such thing as Gatorade.

1. The United States could only put one man in space at a time. (Now we can’t put any.)

A Matched Set

2011-08-19T09:52:00.001-04:00

The cataract in my right eye was removed on Wednesday, with The Sole Heir once again in attendance. (No photo this time; just hold the previous one up to a mirror.) This nurse anesthetist was a little more heavy-handed than his predecessor, so I slept through most of this one, including snoring, much to the amusement of the doctor and TSH.

The first thing I noticed when I finished my three-hour afternoon nap was that my glasses, without which I had been lost for almost fifty years, were no longer of use to me. I couldn’t see anything through them. Yesterday’s follow-up exam showed my right eye better than my left—as expected—with my overall vision when using both eyes at 20.25. I only need glasses to read. (I’ve hung nothing off my ears or nose to type this.)

Having good vision after a lifetime of Magoo Syndrome requires some changes. I bought a cheap pair of readers and keep pushing them up my nose when I look up from making a note, only to realize I can’t read the screen through them; I have to look over. I ran a couple of errands yesterday with the vague feeling I was forgetting something, and was regularly surprised when I’d reach up to scratch my face and could do so unimpeded.

The best was last night. As I went to turn out the bathroom light on my way to bed I passed the dresser where I have always kept my glasses for easy retrieval first thing in the morning. Without thinking, my hand went up to remove my glasses. I laughed out loud.

To me, seeing well meant I had my glasses on. That was the only way it could happen. I was never vain about glasses. I’m not sure whether I look better with or without them, partly because my self-image is so closely associated with “with.” To me, it’s not how I look; it’s how I see.

It’s a liberating feeling. The Beloved Spouse found a crack in her glasses a couple of weeks ago, and had to resort to a pair of loaners while her progressive lenses were re-ground. Had I broken my glasses a month ago, I would not have been able to drive to Hour Eyes for a replacement. I break the readers, I just get my dead ass off the chair and go to Giant or CVS or Target and buy another pair.

What I notice most are things that never occurred to me when I thought about it before having the bionics implanted. An ability to shift focus without having to move my head to look through the proper area of the progressive lens. My peripheral vision is no wider, but there’s no blurry edge where my eye scans beyond the edge of my glasses. My vision is clear all day. No smudges or dust gets on the lens.

In a small way I almost feel disloyal. I’ve not been able to leave the house without glasses for as long as I can remember. Now they’re not only not helpful, they’re counterproductive. I couldn’t wear them if I wanted to, as my “corrected” vision is much worse than it ever was uncorrected.

I’ll get over it. Outdoor activities will be easier . I’m going to get myself to a batting cage in a couple of weeks to see how that goes, and might consider looking for a 55-and-over softball league next spring. Looking out the window, it’s startling to see the backyard in three dimensions, how far the limbs of the pine tree reach away from its trunk.

My most sincere thanks to Dr. John Grundy and everyone connected with his practice and with the Snowden River Surgery Center, where the procedures took place. As life-altering experiences go, only the birth of the Sole Heir and meeting The Beloved Spouse surpass the work these folks have done.

Another Example of American Exceptionalism

2011-08-10T13:35:00.000-04:00

Ezra Klein's blog refers to a new report from Building America’s Future, “Falling Apart and Falling Behind,” which details the sorry state of America's transportation infrastructure. Here is a salient point for those who still think America is the world leader in everything.

The United States, the report notes, now has the worst air-traffic congestion on the planet, with one-quarter of flights arriving more than 15 minutes late. One reason is that U.S. air-traffic control still relies on 1950s-era ground radar technology, even as the rest of the world has been shifting to satellite tracking (the FAA has begun the transition to a satellite-based system, though it’s moving slowly and future funding is a big question). According to recent World Economic Forum rankings, even Malaysia and Panama now boast better air infrastructure.

American exceptionalism used to refer to this country's willingness to do everything better. Now too many people think it means everything here is best just because it's American.

As anyone who has been paying attention already knows, this is a recipe for disaster.

Still on Silent Running

2011-08-10T08:56:00.000-04:00

Last night I tried to explain to a friend why I haven't been posting here much lately, except for fuzzy bunny cataract stories. (Eye Two gets done a week from today, after which I will likely be totally and irreversibly insufferable.)

The explanation I offered to my friend was, alas, unsuitably erudite for this forum. Fortunately for me (and you), John Scalzi has covered this exact topic in his excellent blog, Whatever.

The Doctor Will Soon Be In

2011-07-29T17:25:00.001-04:00

As if all this new seeing wasn’t good enough, another enjoyable aspect of cataract surgery was having The Sole Heir with me throughout. She’s a pre-med student, and Dr. Grundy and his staff were good enough to let her don scrubs and follow me all the way in and back.

I found out afterward she’d watched my vital signs on the electronic monitors and received a running commentary of what was happening from Brian, the nurse anesthetist, as they watched on the monitor. She said later she was less nervous than she would have been sitting alone in the waiting room. I know I was less nervous during the pre-surgical down time, as talking with her was a lot more entertaining than wondering what happens if the doctor sneezes at an inopportune moment.

The staff fell all over themselves making her (and me) feel comfortable, and I think she learned a lot about what’s involved in minor surgery. She had a knee scoped a few years ago, but I’m sure the focus is different when you can step back and watch instead of being the guest of honor.

She drove me home and we ate lunch and watched baseball and she was at least as much of a Nazi as The Beloved Spouse about enforcing the doctor’s “don’t do anything today” edict. Most people think of surgery as cutting something apart, but it should also tie things together.

Eyesight to the Blind

2011-07-28T18:59:00.001-04:00

I knew the eyesight in my left eye was bad. Had been for years. My right eye carried the load as best it could. I rarely noticed my left eye wasn’t stepping up until something would come between them—say, a beverage cup—and half the world became as out of focus as the Tea Party’s deficit plans.

I knew the top letter on eye chart was E because I’d seen it before; looking at it with just my left eye, I couldn’t tell which way it pointed. I learned last month the left lens in my eyeglasses was clear, as there is only so much difference in prescription your brain can handle before it goes permanently off-center and your sense of balance is destroyed so badly you can only walk in circles that gradually veer to the right. (All right. I made that last part up. It’s still bad.)

Last Wednesday I had surgery to remove a cataract in my left eye, which was, apparently, 90% occluded.

Holy shit.

I’ve spent most of the past week going around looking at stuff. Taking my glasses off, covering my right eye, which is now the weaker of the two. I can watch television, see clocks from across the room, almost drive. I’d guess my vision is about 20/40 without correction now.

There’s a whole world out there to my left I’d been missing. Seeing all those overtaking vehicles over there makes me wonder how I got to be this old. My left arm does not suffer from an undiagnosed necrotic disease that sometimes makes it difficult to tell where it ends. Things that are closer to me actually look closer, as in three-dimensional. Who knew?

The whole procedure took about five minutes. I was awake and on the most excellent drugs so I was not at all disturbed by the fact a relative stranger was slicing a hole in my eye, sucking out the lens, and sticking a hunk of plastic in there. Fine, whatever. Put a picture window into my brain while you’re up there. It’s all good with me.

Now I can hardly wait until August 17, when Dr. Grundy will fix the right eye. That won’t be as pronounced a difference, but it will be nice to have a matched set for the first time since—oh, I don’t know—ever. Then I can get glasses to even up that whole nearsighted/farsighted thing, and I’ll be one sighted motherfucker.

Better eyesight isn’t all cold beer and juicy steaks. I don’t know who lets that fat, unkempt asshole into my bathroom every morning, but it can stop any time now.

The Return of the Fox Follies

2011-07-13T19:46:00.001-04:00

I watch as little baseball on Fox as possible. Listening to Joe Buck slip ever deeper into his mind-numbing monotone as Tim McCarver’s brainless banalities suck the life from everything within a fifty-foot radius like some black hole for lucid comment is too painful. They’ve become so bad I sometimes wonder if MLB keeps the Fox contract just to drive people to the MLB.tv and Extra Innings packages, where you can watch just about any game you want.

Last night’s All-Star game was my first tentative step in Fox’s den of baseball iniquity, and the Mid-Summer Classic found them in mid-season form. I came late, not settling into the Official Recliner of The Home Office until the top of the fourth inning, as Boston’s Adrian Gonzalez stepped in to hit. Buck droned on about how the left-handed Gonzalez shortens his stroke with two strikes and hits the ball to left. In the next breath he commented about how Gonzalez, a career .290 hitter, is hitting over .330 this year, and how it showed how much easier it was to hit with the protection of the Boston lineup around him.

Baseball analysts have studied the concept of one hitter protecting another for years. To my knowledge they have found no evidence it’s true. What Buck left out of his expert commentary was the fact that Gonzalez has moved from the worst hitter’s park in baseball (Petco Field in San Diego) into one of the best (Fenway), and that Fenway’s unique configuration makes him virtually impossible to pitch to, given the close left field wall and Gonzalez’s already described penchant for hitting the ball to left field.

That might have been enough to get me to turn off a regular season game, or at least to mute the sound on a World Series game. Given the constant line-up changes in the All-Star Game, I took my chances and left it on last night, in the masochistic hope that McCarver, the Einstein of Inanity, would say something that met his usual standard of insipidness. The Memphis Moron did not disappoint.

After a passed ball by Baltimore catcher Matt Weiters, McCarver, a former catcher himself (clearly from the days before catchers wore helmets behind the plate) excused Weiters with this: “You have to remember, catchers are more used to hitting pitchers than catching them.”

I think I know what he meant, but that’s not real close to what he said. Maybe it bothers me more than it should because I’m still in shock over the worst in-game interview in history, between Mark Grace and Justin Timberlake. (Decorum and my blood pressure prohibit exploring that topic in more detail.)

At least I won’t have to watch a Fox game until well into the playoffs. It’s a sad day for a man who grew up listening to the likes of Bob Prince and Jack Buck when Chip Caray and Joe Simpson are the announcers of choice. To paraphrase the late, great, Lewis Grizzard, Skip Caray is dead, and I don’t feel so good, either.

Beat ‘em, Bucs.

Another Inconvenient Truth

2011-07-09T18:50:00.001-04:00

A little-quoted writing from Thomas Jefferson that seems to have slipped beneath the notice of those who claim to speak for what the Founding Fathers intended, especially along the lines of religious freedom:

"Whereas the preamble [of Virginia's Act for Establishing Religious Freedom] declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the words `Jesus Christ,' so that it should read, `a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;' the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."

(Lifted from Peter Rozovsky’s award-winning blog, Detectives Beyond Borders.)

So let’s knock off this “Christian nation” shit, okay?

A Family Resemblance

2011-07-05T16:31:00.001-04:00

Exxon has to be not just the worst oil company in the world, but the lousiest corporate citizen. It’s not enough they pay no taxes and despoil the environment (their two most egregious examples being the Exxon Valdez in Alaska and the current disgrace on the Yellowstone River), it turns out that at least some of their “independent dealers” are just as much miserable low-lifes as the mother company.

The Beloved Spouse and I are firmly convinced the finest fast-food sandwich made is the Blimpie Best. Unfortunately, there are no Blimpies along our normal routes of traverse. Today I decided to take advantage of having extended my July Fourth weekend to make a sojourn north of town to an Exxon station that has a Blimpies sign attached to it.

I drove to North Laurel Exxon at 15151 Sweitzer Lane and went inside, where I found no evidence of any Blimpies products. I asked the man behind the counter who I could see about a sandwich. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Who do I see about a sandwich?

He: We don’t sell those anymore. Look in the case. we make some already.

Me: Maybe you ought to take down the sign.

He: Yes, we should probably do that.

I realize you cannot hear his tone from this description, but I have serious doubts about his sincerity, or his intentions to do so.

I went elsewhere for our sandwiches. (Another Blimpies, farther away; it was worth it.) I also notified Mr. Blimpie in Arizona, and have called the Maryland Attorney General’s Consumer Complaint Hotline. I don’t get past there much, but when I do, I’m going to check the sign. When I se it has come down, I’m going to walk in and ask if they caught any hell from either Blimpie or the state, then I’m going to point to myself and say, “I did that, motherfucker.”

Don’t screw with my sandwiches.

Thank You, Sir. May I Have Another?

2011-06-12T18:19:00.004-04:00

The following letter appeared on the web site of the Gratiot (MI) County Herald on May 12, 2011 (Thanks to the Low Brass Correspondent for pointing it out to me):

Dear Governor Snyder,

In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren’t we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.

One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe Michigan wants to be on top of.

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!

Please provide for my students in my school district the same way we provide for a prisoner. It’s the least we can do to prepare our students for the future...by giving our schools the resources necessary to keep our students OUT of prison.

Respectfully submitted,
Nathan Bootz
Superintendent
Ithaca Public School

This is as well as I have seen the argument for education done, though I hesitated to post it, because I know some asshole is going to miss the point and say it’s a plea to make prisons harsher.
I will be happy to engage in that argument.

Adventures in Headline Writing

2011-06-04T17:47:00.001-04:00

From the Associated Press:

Acrobat, mom, reenact fatal Puerto Rico wire walk.

I’m assuming it was originally fatal for someone else.

Oops

2011-05-25T19:59:00.001-04:00

Sure was embarrassing to have the President talk over “God Save the Queen” at the state dinner the other night. While it’s easy to say it’s an honest mistake, there are a lot of people in this country who’d consider declaring war if someone stepped on “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sensitivity to other nations’ customs and patriotic symbols should one of the easier parts of his job. True, it wasn’t his fault the orchestra started playing when he was still talking, but he’s supposed to know—as anyone else would be expected to—that when the national anthem starts, that’s your cue to shut the fuck up. (Then again, when has any politician observed a cue to STFU?)

Embarrassing and (inadvertently) disrespectful, but at least he didn’t throw up on her, as did George H.W. Bush with the Prime Minister of Japan. Thinking of Forty-One barfing on the guy puts me in mind of what would have happened had the most recent Bush president had committed the same gaffe as Obama.

“Hey,” he’d say, “it wasn’t my fault the band started playing ‘My Country Tis of Thee’ right in the middle of my toast.”

A Good night at Castle Schadenfreude

2011-05-16T22:25:00.001-04:00

I watched the Pirates lose 4-2 to the Natinals tonight, but it wasn’t a total waste of time. Washington Capitals coach Bruce “Porky Pig” Boudreau was observed in the crowd behind home plate. I wondered what he was doing there, then realized he has time on his hands, now that the Caps have been swept four games to none by Tampa, eliminating them from the Stanley Cup playoffs in the second round.

At first I could find no connection between the Porkster and the Nats, but a after a little thought it was obvious:neither team has ever won a Stanley Cup.

Porky was not observed after the seventh inning, but that was not unexpected. It’s spring, and he thinks it only natural to pack it in while teams are still playing.

(Editor’s Note: “Natinals” is not a typo. A couple of years ago the team actually took the field for a game with two players wearing uniforms with the team name spelled that way. Washington DC, the Sports Capital of the Apocalypse.)

Can Someone Explain This to Me?

2011-05-16T18:20:00.001-04:00

Suppose a man—let’s call him a Republican so as not to defame anyone—has spent much of his life doing his level best to see to it that people who need help don’t get it. Wants to cut the WIC program and Head Start, argues tirelessly against Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance of any kind. Anyone willing to work doesn’t need unemployment benefits for more then thirteen weeks.

Now he gets laid off. He’s a hard worker, he’ll be back in harness again soon, which is good, because those COBRA payments are killers when you’re not working. Good thing the family can do without insurance for a few weeks while he finds a new job.

Then he finds out that pain in his kid’s gut is a tumor, and I look at this prick and I smile.

I wish the kid no ill will. It’s not his fault his father is a selfish, insensitive douche bag. This hypothetical tumor isn’t fatal. Hell, I don’t want it to be painful.

Just expensive.

I like the idea of Dad laying awake a few nights wondering how he’s going to pay for this. Can he pay the kid’s bills and still afford a house for him to live in? At what point will they cut him off, making what should be a scary inconvenience into a life-threatening drama?

To most people, this makes me a bastard, far worse than the fictional father described above. He’s willing to deny children a healthy diet, decent medical care to entire families, and a safety net over uncertain times to literally millions of people. All I want is for him to walk a mile in their shoes and have a few of the countless sleepless nights he’d inflict on others.

Yet I’d bet most people would say that makes me the lesser person of the two of us, and I just don’t see it.

Say Hey!

2011-05-06T16:32:00.001-04:00

Willie Mays is eighty years old.

Holy shit.

A Win for the Good Guys

2011-05-04T08:30:00.001-04:00

I meant to write this last week before the Osama bin Laden news overwhelmed the Internet, but I have a life, too, so it slipped. (Editor’s Note: No bin Laden comments will be forthcoming, either about his death, what comes next, or the celebrations that erupted when the news broke. These have already been overdone by people who weren’t right about 9/11/01 or any analysis or predictions since. He’s dead, it’s a victory, move on. It’s not like Sunday was VE or VJ Day; not much is going to change.)

Sometimes it seems there’s no good news. Allegedly responsible representatives are threatening a default by the federal government. (Most of these are people who would throw you out of your house for missing even a single mortgage payment. Et tu, assholes?) The economy refuses to pick up and there are rumblings that we may have to get used to a new definition of “full employment” that has twice as many people off work as the old.

In the midst of all this misery, comes a beacon of light from, of all places, Mississippi, where the Anti-Christian Spawn of Hell Westboro Baptist Church was finally foiled in an attempt to ruin a military funeral. Beating the snot out of one of their number while everyone in the vicinity saw nothing was nice; the local government’s response in blocking their vehicles into their motel parking lot was priceless. We must be careful not to encourage too much of government’s behavior, as its potential for abuse is too great. Here it was just right.

As for the unwitnessed beat down, you want to push the law and the Constitution to the breaking point, you invite others to do the same. I only hope I would have the courage to flatten some tires if offered the same opportunity. There are things that go so far beyond decency that decency in return is nothing more than enabling behavior. Maybe the next step should be harassing their church services, especially funerals. See how well that shoe fits.

Perseverance in the 21st Century

2011-04-27T18:17:00.003-04:00

Slate’s Jurisprudence page is the only part of the online magazine I keep on my site aggregator, and that’s so I can read dahlia Lithwick’s columns. Only NPR’s Nina Totenberg can breath life into descriptions of legal arguments as well as Ms. Lithwick, who consistently treads the fine line between objectivity and showing her political inclinations. (The Beloved Spouse has called her my intellectual mistress, and we refer to her by her first name around the house.) I stand second to no man in my admiration of her gifts and insight. (Her husband excluded, hopefully.)

She sure blew it today, though.

The question is not whether the Defense of Marriage Act deserves adequate and enthusiastic representation in court. of course it does, no matter how reprehensible I may find it. Flawed as it is, ardent advocacy is the best hope we have for our judicial system, be it for individuals, corporations, or laws like DOMA. (It would be nice if judges refrained from some of the advocacy, having supposedly left that behind when they ascended to the bench, but that’s a different post.)
The issue here is who’s at fault for King & Spalding’s refusal to provide that advocacy after agreeing to do so, after scathing attacks by a gay rights group. Ms. Lithwick blames the gay rights folks for going too far and placing King & Spalding in a position where keeping on with the DOMA case would cost them clients and money.

The gay rights group may have gone too far; that’s a different argument, too. The villains here are still King & Spalding, who folded under pressure. It’s not hard to see what kind of advocacy anyone could expect from them. They’ll support you so long as your fees bring in more money than they lose on those who disagree. Then you’re on your own. Quite the idealistic image for law students to aspire to.

I don’t suppose you’ll see many pictures of Thurgood Marshall or Morris Dees in those offices. You know, lawyers who’d take on a client and stand up for him, whether the firm agreed with his position or not.

I doubt the ACLU will be hiring these guys for anything in the near future. Kudos to Paul Clement for resigning.

My Fantasy

2011-04-05T19:48:00.001-04:00

No, it doesn’t involve Elle MacPherson.

My middle-aged adult male fantasy is to win the lottery.

Not for the money.

Well, yeah, for the money, but because the money would allow me to act on this fantasy. (It still doesn’t involve Elle MacPherson.)

I want to win enough money so I can write a check for a million dollars. (Picture Dr. Evil saying it. “One millllion dollars.”) Make it out to the Democratic National Committee. Get DNC Chairman Tim Kaine on the phone. (Damn right he’ll take that call.) I’ll ask for a meeting with him, Bob Menendez (Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman), and Chris Van Hollen (House Campaign Committee Chairman). They can name the time and place. They’re busy men, and I’ll be retired by then. (You think I’d work with a million dollars to throw around? Really?)

So the four of us are in the room and I take out the check. Show it to them. Certified check, the bank vouches for it. Lay it on the table between us and tell them they can leave with it, spend it how they want, on one condition:

Tell me why the fuck they deserve it. How they’re Democrats, not Republican Lite. And who they plan on running for president. If I don’t like the answers, the I’ll tear the check up and give the money to the likeliest primary challenger to Barack Obama, aka The Mole.

See Glenn Greenwald’s piece in Salon for detailed reasons.

Okay, Elle can come if she wants.

But They Probably Know Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location

2011-04-03T19:29:00.001-04:00

Fox News has a hard-earned reputation for faulty research and negligible fact checking. Now it appears their virtually invisible standards have moved into the sports department.

During Saturday’s Yankees-Tigers game, Tim McCarver—who needs no help from researchers to say something stupid—noted that Derek Jeter was close to becoming only the seventh player to get 3,000 hits for the same team. That didn’t sound right to me, so I did one Google search (3,000 hits same team) and took the first hit that came up.

Here’s the actual list:

Paul Waner, Honus Wagner, Roberto Clemente, Stan Musial, Carl Yastrzemski, Cal Ripken, Jr., George Brett, Robin Yount, Tony Gwynn, Al Kaline.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s ten.

(Note three Pirates on the list. Yes, Virginia, there was a time when Pittsburgh did baseball right.)

America in Microcosm

2011-04-03T10:07:00.001-04:00

The economic and political problems confronting this country are well summed up in this tale of two friends.

The State of the Nation

2011-03-22T12:40:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the Beloved Spouse for providing this link on income distribution, taxes, and trends in America. The comment section is available for any Tea partiers and "cut taxes but not any spending that will make a difference" conservatives.

I'm not counting on much of a response from those quarters.

Energy Policy

2011-03-15T07:59:00.001-04:00

Daylight Saving Time started over the weekend for most of the United States. For years it began the first weekend of April and ended at the end of October. Then the half-asses in Washington decided we needed an energy conservation policy, so they extended it a couple of weeks on either end, like that makes the sun shine longer each day. All it really accomplished is setting my wake-up time back into what looks like the middle of the night. It also sums up Congress’s efforts to create a sustainable energy policy, just in case you thought they were too busy bickering to get any serious business done.

They Made Me Do It

2011-03-14T08:26:00.001-04:00

I have a policy of not contributing to out-of-state political campaigns. I have a state to be politically active in, and I don’t much like others coming in from outside and telling us how to run things. If things are going to be screwed up in Maryland, they should be our screw-ups.

I’m going to make an exception for Wisconsin. Don’t misunderstand me. The ultimate blame for what’s going on there rests with the voters. They elected these bastards; a large part of me says they can live with them.

The problem is, Wisconsin’s Republicans are the tip of the spear. They get away with this here, their peers will be emboldened in Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, and probably Pennsylvania. Down this road lies the status of a second-rate nation, one that can’t—or won’t—care for those who can’t take care of themselves and is incapable of educating its population to do more than what they’re told.

Imagine a Japan-esque disaster in this country with Mike brown in charge of FEMA. We have continued to elect politicians who campaign on the platform that government is the problem, then make every effort to ensure government will be the problem once they’re in power. We then express astonishment and dismay when they do what anyone who looked closely at their record should have known they’d do.

The Republican response to “tax and spend” Democrats is to dismantle government, except for the pieces that directly benefit them. A line has to be drawn somewhere to show liberals aren’t, in the words of Peter Moskos, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” Wisconsin is as good a place as any to start.

The check goes in the mail today to help to recall the Republican senators and governor. Enough is enough.

Circling the Drain

2011-03-11T08:33:00.001-05:00

I have reached the age where thinking about the end game of life is more than an abstract concept. My health is fine, and I fully expect to be around at least another twenty-five years, but what were casual thoughts in my thirties are now concrete obstacles that must either be dealt with or maneuvered around. I’m hoping to get to retirement before the current political climate makes the working economy unendurable, with the idea that Social Security and Medicare will remain relatively intact for a while longer, as the ability of Republicans and the Tea Party to play groups against each other there is minimal. No one wants old people living under bridges, scrounging meals from Dumpsters. I hope.

What is most discouraging is that I see no way not to leave my daughter and grandchildren a worse country than I inherited. I have no delusions, there; the country I inherited had plenty of issues. I was born before meaningful civil rights legislation, during the Cold War (though, thankfully, no wars of the shooting variety), not too long after Joe McCarthy’s self-serving inquisition. It was also a time when working people could join the middle class and not have to live from paycheck to paycheck and could reasonably expect their children to go to college and improve themselves, attitudes that only increased in the Sixties.

What will I leave? A country where “every man for himself” has more significant meaning than any time since the Oklahoma land rush. No fiscal responsibility in government or the population that elects it. Fiscal responsibility? Hell, there’s no fiscal sanity. Political “leaders’ tell us we have to cut the deficit by trimming only programs that make up about 12% of the government; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are off-limits. Tax increases, even for those who have most benefitted by the frenzy of tax reduction in upper income strata, is unmentionable in civil discourse.

So cuts to “discretionary” spending it must be. You know what constitutes “discretionary” spending? Food safety inspections. Occupational safety. Prescription drug testing. Highways and infrastructure. Education. People in Pennsylvania can light their tap water with a match due to gases released from a coal-mining technique known as fracking, and the governor is working to make the regulations less stringent.

The salient purposes of government are to protect the population, to provide what individuals cannot provide for themselves, and to level the playing field at least enough to prevent the advantaged running roughshod over those with less power. Not here. Not anymore. Now it’s to pad the lives of those who can best afford to take advantage of the system. Corporations have more rights than people.

I hope my time doesn’t come for a while yet. There are things I want to do, and people I want to spend time with. But when it does come, I’m not going to miss this shit one bit. I’ll just feel badly I wasn’t able to think of anything productive to do about it.

Still Pretending He’s the Cavalry

2011-03-03T08:12:00.001-05:00

From today’s Wonkbook summary, by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein:

With the stopgap funding bill safely through Congress and the federal government given a two-week reprieve, the White House has decided to get in the game more directly: They've invited congressional leaders to sit down with Vice President Joe Biden, Chief of Staff William Daley, and budget director Jack Lew to hammer out a deal.

You could imagine a great beer commercial coming out of this: The wonks and legislators are deadlocked until someone brings in an ice-cold case of Miller Lite. Suddenly, it's all backslapping and "of course revenue should be on the table" and "you're right that government needs to spend less" and "sorry about that whole Planned Parenthood thing." And I haven't even mentioned the disco ball.

But can you imagine a great budget deal coming out of this? This is the same play the White House ran to resolve the tax debate: they waited till the last minute, when inaction was about to force unwelcome consequences, and then they gathered the players in a room with Tim Geithner and Jack Lew and had Joe Biden act as shuttle envoy to Mitch McConnell. Despite the skepticism of people like, well, me, it worked. Maybe it'll work again. But the downside here, much like the downside there, is that the White House has taken ownership over the process, and they will get much of the credit or much of th blame for whether it works and what it produces.

This is the same thing President Comfortable Shoes has done since Day One: wait until a situation hits crisis mode, then come in late, thus taking credit for what results. Health insurance reform, financial overhaul, taxes, and now this.

It’s not leadership’ it’s opportunism. Granted, he doesn’t have a lot of political capital to spend right now, having pissed much of it away doing what was described in the previous paragraph. Still, he thinks this is the way to go, consequences to the 99.9% of people who just want to get along with their lives be damned.

March 1

2011-03-01T10:50:00.000-05:00

March 1 is a special day at The Home Office. Because of March 1, the grass is greener and the sky is bluer. I am more often happy, and, when I'm not, the unhappiness is not as deep, nor does it last as long.

Thanks to March 1, I find humor in ordinary things. I am more patient, and less likely to assume malicious intent when things don't go my way. My health is better. Honest to God. I am a better friend and a better son and generally a better person to be around.

The Beloved Spouse and The Sole Heir both drew their first breaths on March 1.

Happy birthday, ladies.

Today’s Lesson

2011-02-28T17:54:00.001-05:00

The current politico-economic situation of the United States is clearly and accurately described in the following story, provided by the Show Tunes Correspondent.

A CEO, a union worker, and a Tea Party member are sitting around a table with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO takes 11 cookies, then turns to the Tea Party member and says,"Watch out for that union guy. He wants to take some of your cookie."

Paul Krugman can’t do it any better than that.

The Crux of the Problem

2011-02-25T08:30:00.001-05:00

This colorful little graphic shows what is the core of most of the trouble in the United States today.

The gist of what it means is simple. The top 20% of Americans control over 80% of the wealth. Most Americans don’t know this. They think—as the second graph shows—the top 20% controls almost 60% of the wealth, and they’re not real happy about that, as the third graph shows they think the top 20% should control about 30%. I’m not even going to discuss what the bottom 20% get. This is depressing enough. (For a set of graphs that explores this in more detail, see the article in Mother Jones.)

The rich have always controlled a disproportionate amount of the economy. That’s what makes them rich. There was a time when they had the smarts—or class—to keep it to themselves. Flaunting it in everyone else’s faces was considered to be poor form. We’ve all heard stories of families who had money during The Depression keeping their shades drawn much of the time so those less fortunate wouldn’t see the disparity. That could be hubris or sensitivity, depending on the family, but it’s not happening now.

People making $400,000 are distraught because they don’t make $600,000. They see their income figures and think they should be rich—and they are—then look at the guy across the way who makes a couple of million and feel deprived. Few look in the other direction and feel grateful for what they have.

And it’s still not enough. Tax cuts are proposed for the rich, though their rates have plummeted since the Eisenhower years. (See Mother Jones.) Union busting activity is worse than it’s ever been. True, there are armed confrontations, but now the government is actively against the unions. Witness Scott Walker’s power grab in Wisconsin, where he doesn’t just want to be the governor who busted the unions, he wants to be king. How else can you describe a governor who has promoted a bill that will allow him to sell off state property without soliciting bids, to whomever an official appointed by him deems worthy?

Public sector workers are being demonized to out of work private sector workers, when the people who are really hosing them make more in a year than any of them will make in their lives. The true enemy of an employed worker is not an employed government worker; it’s any unemployed worker, who is now competition for the job he needs.

This is bad, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better soon. Both parties share in the blame. Republicans for their ruthlessness, and Democrats for their fecklessness in ceding the battlefield. The real problem now is that, even if the pendulum swings back, it will take years to undo the damage that was done in a couple of elections, and there don’t appear to be enough people on the horizon willing to do much more than talk about it.

Unions

2011-02-21T14:24:00.002-05:00

A lot of people would have you believe the current financial crises many states find themselves in are the fault of unions. Wisconsin and New Jersey have been the most aggressive in taking action, but anecdotal evidence abounds of men in the street blaming unions for everything from deficits to health care reform.

They forget that states operated under the same union contracts three to five years ago as they do now, and were rolling in money. It’s the financial crisis that put the states’ budgets in jeopardy; the unions are in the process of being scapegoated into picking up much of the tab.

Make no mistake: unions have brought much of this on themselves. They too often devote their energies protecting the least deserving. It can be virtually impossible to fire some people, as union contracts can make every employee’s faults the employer’s responsibility: drugs, alcohol, or sometimes just plain laziness. (It can also be pointed out here that employers signed none of these contracts at gunpoint.)
Unions also have traditionally taken too much of an adversarial position. When common sense argued for creating partnerships with management so that risks and rewards could be more equitably shared, too many unions chose to suck every dime out of a contract. Times changed, and now they find themselves in situations where management careers and fortunes can be made by firing workers, and it’s too late to strike the kinds of deals that could have prevented it.

In the midst of all this bashing, let’s not forget why we have unions in the first place. Do a little research into what working conditions were like a hundred years ago. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire happened exactly one hundred years ago on March 25. One hundred forty-seven garment workers died in a few minutes because the company locked the doors to the sweatshop and they couldn’t get out.

I’m 55 years old and remember a lot of men my grandfather’s age—including my paternal grandfather—who were missing fingers, many of them from industrial accidents. That doesn’t happen so much anymore. We’re all shocked at the safety violations that were ignored in West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine last April, but I’ll bet miners before the time of the Molly Maguires would have thought they’d won the lottery to work in such conditions. Skyscrapers and bridges used to have “expected casualties” built into the plans and budgets. No more. We expect no one will die building something today.

Unions helped to make that so, along with stopping many arbitrary firing practices that could deny a worker the pensions he’d earned just before he was able to collect it.

Of course, most pensions are gone; we have 401 ( k ) plans and companies can’t understand why employees show so little loyalty. Break the unions now, and the chances for unskilled and semi-skilled labor to retain company-provided health insurance drop to nothing. In times of high unemployment and a potentially interchangeable work force, why provide any more benefits than necessary beyond the lowest wage you can get away with?

Unions are easy targets, but they’re straw men. No surer way exists to cripple the melding of the middle and working classes that made this country the force it became in the middle part of the 20th Century than to break them. Let’s not forget, the American Exceptionalism conservatives so loudly proclaim was not ordained by God. It was the by-product of hard work and the coming together of historic forces. We undue them at at our own risk.

The Hobgoblin of Small Minds

2011-02-04T18:52:00.001-05:00

Judgment and discretion are essential elements in any activity. Arbitrary limits and “zero tolerance” policies don’t accomplish anything except to give their perpetrators the appearance of toughness. Rarely is any good accomplished. rather, these policies are more often counterproductive.

Case in point: The King’s Speech and its R Rating by the Motion Picture Association of America for “some language.”

The language in question is the word “fuck,” as it almost always is. Part of the king’s therapy is to break down the reservations that cause his stammer, leading to an outburst of several “fucks” in a row, in two separate scenes. The effect is pitch perfect: the first instance shows Lionel Logue’s methods; the second shows the king’s gradual acceptance of them. That’s as racy or violent as the movie gets.

This is from the MPAA’s web site:

More than one such expletive requires an R rating, as must even one of those words used in a sexual context. The Rating Board nevertheless may rate such a motion picture PG-13 if, based on a special vote by a two-thirds majority, the Raters feel that most American parents would believe that a PG-13 rating is appropriate because of the context or manner in which the words are used or because the use of those words in the motion picture is inconspicuous.

Jesus Fucking Christ. Not only should children under the age of 13 not be discouraged from seeing the film, they should bring it into speech therapy classes for kids who stammer. It’s A Beautiful Mind for stammerers. Here, kids. Don’t be intimidated by your speech impediment. Even a king can stammer, and look how he overcame it. It’s not part of you; you can get past it.

The ever-vigilant MPAA doesn’t see it that way. In their zeal to protect these delicate psyches from the undue influence of dirty words, they have ensured that the kids who most need to see it will be barred. Enlightened parents will take these fucking outbursts in context, weigh their value, and take the kid, anyway. The children of less open-minded parents will not get the opportunity to hear such smut. They may be chided over their impediment as a way to toughen them up, which works approximately never.

Thanks to the MPAA, guardians of all that is decent and good, in their zeal to protect impressionable minds from “piss, shit, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.” Violence, cruelty, and dark content pass PG-13 muster (Spartacus, The Dark Knight, X-Men, Quantum of Solace, for examples), as well as the considerations involved in assisted suicide (Million Dollar Baby). They have no problem with unescorted minors in any of those movies.

Don’t cross the fuck threshold, though.

The Onion Rules

2011-01-12T19:45:00.002-05:00

I got your fair and balanced right here.

Happy Holidays

2010-12-24T08:05:00.002-05:00

Each year goes faster than before,

They’re past before you know it,

So now it’s time for me to rhyme

And prove that I’m no poet.

This year began, as winters do,

With cold and lots of snow,

I’ll not complain, but ‘twere snow rain,

We’d had to learn to row.

The holidays last year did bring

A guest to share our rooms,

‘Twas Kaitlyn, Corky’s grand-daughter,

We hope she’ll be back soon.

Then dormant lay us all till May

When action came exploding

With news and schmooze and trips to Stu’s

All fun, with no foreboding.

We started off in Wilmington,

(That’s in North Carolina)

For Kaitlyn’s mother’s birthday fete,

And few trips have been finah.

Then later in that very month

We flew to Colorado,

Niece Aspen graduated there,

Amid much broo-ha-ha-do.

And in between the two I had

A story writ in print,

An honest-to-Faulkner printed book

With my words dropped right in’t.

(In case you all are wondering,

The plot line dealt with crime,

As this note has made very clear,

I’ll ne’er be paid for rhyme.)

In June I went to Chicago

To celebrate with Stu

His birthday, yes, the Big Five-O

With sightseeing and blues.

The summer’s end saw Corky back

In Flint to see old friends

With Suzie Ovick Diebolt Kna-

pinski her time did spend.

With Eric and with Aaron, too

Some hours she did share,

‘Twas fun, but they were too quick passed,

She sees them both so rare.

With fall came yet another feat,

In Rachel’s sophomore term,

Distinguished scholarship award

Her hard work thus affirmed.

As you can see from in your mail,

Beloved Spouse has been

Creating individual cards,

This poem to put within.

Unique they are, yours and the rest,

None has a perfect twin,

Hand-made and summoned with much thought

The craft she placed herein.

For all these things—and many more—

Our anniversary

Was special, even one day late,

Because we’ve learned to see

How everything must fit its place,

All undue stress be barred,

With friends and family like you,

That’s really not too hard.

We all hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves

As much as we’ve this year,

Now Rachel, Corky, and your scribe

Extend our annual cheer.

To each and every one of you

To find some small delight

For every time you rise from bed

May all your days be bright.

The Airing of Grievances

2010-12-22T21:43:00.000-05:00

It's December 23, and Festivus is upon us again! Stop admiring your pole (hmm, that didn't come out right), digest the Feast, and build up a good head of resentment for the Feats of Strength. That's right, it's time for the Airing of Grievances.

My grievance list:

Politicians who allow others to do the heavy lifting, negotiate against themselves to accommodate the other side, then claim a momentous accomplishment. You know who you are, Fredo.

Not using the serial comma.

Selfishness without consideration of its consequences to others.

Allowing the top marginal rate to return to pre-2000 levels would not be income redistribution any more than what happened to the tax code from 1980 - 2000 was.

And, so what if it is. All taxes are income redistribution at some level, because some activities that pertain to the common good cannot, by their nature, be self-supporting.

The Designated Hitter.

The 24-hour news cycle, which has made the word "verification" as obsolete as latin.

The sun should be up before I am. Every day.

People who are belligerent about putting the "Christ" back into the pagan solstice festival they usurped back in the Middle Ages.

Glenn Beck.

Keith Olbermann.

Athletes and coaches who can't craft an intelligible English sentence who act like what they do is too complex to explain to an intelligent layman.

Using race as a way to keep the lower classes too busy distrusting each other to pay attention to the people who really are screwing them.

Ah, hell. Politicians in general.

Those of any political description who refuse to look more than one step down the road from any decision, thus allowing the entire nation to be governed by the law of Unintentional Consequences.

The Washington DC area's reaction to snow and cold weather.

Chainsaw Dan Snyder.

Now that you're convinced I'm an embittered, cynical, old bastard (note proper use of serial comma), stay tuned for tomorrow's post. You're not wrong about the Embittered, cynical, old bastard part, but we have our moments, too.

It's Not the Destination, It's the Ride

2010-12-09T18:14:00.000-05:00

I work at home most of the time now, thanks to a new assignment. It's a mixed blessing. The commute is great, and frees up over two hours a day for my personal life. The lack of other people around can make it hard to feel connected to the job, and it's easy to forget how long you've been staring at the screen before a headache and the knots in your shoulders remind you. Those little interruptions that can be so frustrating at work serve an under-appreciated purpose.

Among the better benefits of working at home is the ability to listen to whatever music I want. As a reformed musician, I have a large and varied collection of CDs and LPs, divided about evenly between classical and jazz, with some R&B and country thrown in. I don't have as much time as I used to for listening to the classical CDs. They tend to distract me when writing--when I need to apply my right brain elsewhere--but can be helpful in passing the time when working. I decided last week to re-acquaint myself with my classical collection by listening to two or three CDs a day, skipping through the racks so I wouldn't OD on some of my more popular composers.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony hit early on. My Music Literature teacher in college told us Beethoven 5 was often considered to be the most perfect piece of music ever written. The Ninth might be greater, but any change made to the Fifth diminished it.

I was lucky enough to get to perform Beethoven 5 twice during my musical days. It might seem corny to a non-musician, but it truly is an elevating experience, the kind of thing I experienced occasionally when playing in orchestras, and nowhere else. I found myself remembering what that was like while I listened the other day, waiting for what came next, hearing inner parts most listeners experience only as part of the texture but are clear as a bell to someone who has sat close to the instrument playing it. It was the most serene work day I have ever spent.

I spent almost twenty years--college, the Army, graduate school, and free-lance--trying to make a living as a musician. I'm not sorry for a second of it. Even if I set aside all the things I learned about life and myself, the people I met, became (and remain) friends with, the places I've gone, and experiences I've enjoyed that would never have been possible but for my musical life, it would have been worth it for that feeling.

Beethoven has been dead almost 200 years, but his music lives, and is important in people's lives. This is made possible by living musicians who have spent uncountable hours in poorly ventilated practice rooms perfecting their craft as much as their talents will allow, for the privilege of bringing such music into the present day. Most do it for little or no money, not even the hope of it. The reward of the performance is enough.

I was fortunate to enjoy such privileges for much of my adult life, and I do consider it a privilege to have been allowed to do so. I counsel young musicians against trying to make a living at it, as it can be hell on personal relationships and so few can ever make a decent living at it. Only those who reject my advice have a chance. Anyone who accepts it would have come up short sooner or later; they didn't want it badly enough.

As for me, I came up short later, rather than sooner. So it goes. I ended up in a far different place than where I set out for. Every second of that early musical detour was worth it, if only for the feeling I got when I listen to Beethoven 5 on my computer's speakers, knowing that twice in my life, for about 25 minutes each, others were able to hear it live, without any electronic intervention, in part through my participation. That's quite a legacy to be a part of.

A Brief History Lesson

2010-12-03T07:25:00.000-05:00

European history is a drag, right? All those small countries and shifting borders and allegiances and unpronounceable names. Impossible to keep anything straight. Fear not. The Home Office, in its never-ending quest to make this a better world for me to live in, can now show you how World War I was exactly like a bar fight, courtesy of The Economist and The Sole Heir.

The Line of the Day

2010-11-30T08:19:00.000-05:00

From Call Me Fishmeal, discussing current TSA policies:

If you hired a security guard to watch your house, and 10 years later your neighbors said, “Hey, several times now dudes have tried to steal your shit, but we came over and stopped them each time after your security guy let them through,” would you continue to employ him? Especially if every time you tried to enter your house, he grabbed your nuts and took naked pictures of your wife?

Parts of the post are a little unfair to TSA, but the general tone is apt, and that quote was dead on.

Thanks to the Search Engine Correspondent for pointing this out.

Who Pays?

2010-11-12T08:25:00.000-05:00

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles have made their initial recommendations on how to cut the deficit. The legislation that comes of this, if any, will look very much different, but what they presented may serve as a blueprint, especially for those areas where there is not a hard and fast constituency.

The way it looks now, I'll take a beating. They recommend eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction, and my employer-provided health benefits--which my employer has reduced each of the past few years--will become taxable. I don't like it, but I can live with it. This country rode the gravy train for too long, and even though i wasn't one of those who overextended himself and defaulted on a credit card or mortgage, I understand everyone will have to pitch in.

Just so long as everyone does.

I don't mind if my tax obligation increases twice as much as someone who makes half as much. Hell, I don't mind if it increases more than twice as much if that guy's still raising small children, with the million expenses kids accrue. I just want to make sure the guys who make twice what I make--or ten times, or a hundred times--get nicked, too.

Conservatives complain about the "redistribution of wealth" every time a new tax is proposed. What has been done since 1980 with every tax cut? Those, too, have been redistributions of wealth, though in the other direction, taking money away from those who didn't have as much and giving it to those who already had more.

I'll pay my extra share willingly, so long as those above me on the income ladder pay theirs. If not, then I'm going to get belligerent about this. Enough's enough.

How We Got Here

2010-11-08T08:25:00.000-05:00

As usual, The Onion nailed it. The greatest strength of a democracy such as ours is the potential to have the government we want. The greatest weakness is that we get the government we deserve.

Let’s leave aside how many people do or don’t vote. Voter levels aren’t really the problem. I’ll all for making it a little harder to register to vote in the first place, as someone too lazy to do even that probably isn’t going to extend himself when it comes time to have his say. Too many sheeple (as the Beloved Spouse calls them) on both sides of the aisle do this.

Disagree? That’s your right, but I dis-disagree back atcha. Consider health care reform, probably the most controversial law passed by the current Congress. The people are about evenly divided. About 47-48% are for it, and 47-48% are against it. (The other 5-6% don’t understand the question.) Here’s where it gets complicated. Individual components of the law are overwhelmingly popular, ebven with those who want to get rid of it.

Should your insurance provider be allowed to drop you because you actually got sick? No one wants that. How about doing away with lifetime caps? People like that, too. Allowing children to remain covered under their parents’ policies up to age 26 if the kids’ employers don’t pick them up? Sounds good to most folks. How about lowering health care costs by standardizing forms and lowering administrative overhead? No one complaining about that.

No one thinks kids should be denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition. People who are trying to eat healthier want to be able to see the nutritional information on what they’re considering at a restaurant. Despite overwhelming approval of these (and other) aspects of the law, the polling numbers show many of the people who like these things still want to repeal the law that provides them.

There are people today who are paying for, or reluctantly doing without, end-of-life planning, who know it’s a good thing, and yet screamed foul words at their congressman two summers ago because of the “death panels.” These folks didn’t realize the death panels they were so upset about were the same end-of-life care and advice they’re so worried about now. All they knew was that attention whore Sarah Palin told them these were bad. I don’t know what to say about those who became hysterical over the idea of the government running Medicare; Medicare is, and has always been, a government program, and, as the level of vitriol indicated, a highly popular one.

People argue there will be fraud. Of course there will; it can’t be helped. There has never been a large program, in either the public or the private sector, that didn’t have fraud. There’s Social Security fraud, and we know well how people feel about shutting down that government program. (Socialist government program, no less.) The trick is to weed it out as well as we can, while understanding you can’t eliminate it. No one is served if 99 people are hurt just so one guy can’t get over.

American voters aren’t bad people. They are short-sighted and gullible. Looking two steps down the road seems to be beyond most of them. They see Problem A and Glenn Beck proposes Solution B, and no one cares that it will not only not eradicate the problem it was intended to solve, but will also create Condition C, which is almost as bad as A, but just not to me personally.

Think, people. Others can advise you, but only you can do the actual thinking. And it’s way past time we got busy about it.

Truer Words Never Were Writ

2010-11-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

I'll have more to say on this later, but it seems appropriate to point to The Onion for the 500th post here. Thanks to both of you for reading.

Election Post Mortem

2010-11-05T08:40:00.000-04:00

The election is finally over. Wow, that sure was fun.

The Democrats, always suspect for their political acumen, passed three pieces of legislation more important than anything since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and still got their asses handed to them by the Republicans, whose entire platform was, “If they want it, we’re agin it.” Senate Minority Leader (And I use the word “leader” with trepidation, due to my respect for the English language) Mitch McConnell has publicly stated the Republicans’ sole policy goal is to get Barack Obama out of office. (More on McConnell later.) These were the cornerstones of an historic election reversal of fortune.

The Democrats’ errors were legion. Their presumed leader, the President, invested exactly none of the political capital he’d earned from the 2008 election. The stimulus? Enough (barely) to keep the ox from falling completely into the ditch, but not enough to turn things around. This was no secret, yet he acceded to the advice of political gurus like Rahm Emanuel, who told him a stimulus that was 2/3 of what had been recommended was all he could get votes for. It probably was. That’s not the point. Negotiating against yourself is always a bad idea. Obama should have come out asking for the $1.2 trillion, rolled it back as necessary to get passage (which might still have been more than he got), and showed the Republicans to be the obstructionists they were, wholly unconcerned with the fact that people were suffering. He then compounded the error by saying this was the package he’d always wanted—presumably so he wouldn’t appear to be weak for rolling over too easily—which made it impossible to go back for more when it proved to be inadequate.

He let Max Baucus and Harry Reid do all the heavy lifting on health care, then came in at the last minute to push it over the top, acting like this was the bill he’d wanted all along. Baucus got rolled by his alleged friend Chuck Grassley while Obama stood idly by, refusing to draw any lines. Again, the only interpretation that makes sense is that he didn’t want to appear weak by losing a battle. Instead, he proved he was weak, by exercising no leadership.

Political capital works much the same as financial capital: it has to be put to work to be worth anything. Obama’s unwillingness to invest any of his is akin to putting your life savings in a mattress. Sure, it looks like the same amount of money, but as inflation eats into it the real value grows smaller all the time. Obama became president in a time of spiraling political inflation; his mattress stash is about worthless. His efforts before the election to spin this into a failure of the voters, knowing he had so alienated his base they wouldn’t support him like they had two years ago, bankrupted him.

I said I’d get back to Mitch McConnell. He wins the Hypocrite of the Week award, no mean feat in an election week. On Wednesday, Mitch pointed to the election results and said his job now was to enforce the will of the American people, as expressed at the polls on Tuesday. His interpretation of this will matches exactly with what he has wanted to do since he got the job. (I’m sure this is entirely coincidental.) Funny, two years ago Mitch and his Republicans were on the other end of a not dissimilar butt whipping, and he had no such regard for the expressed wishes of his beloved American people.

Another Milestone

2010-11-02T17:56:00.002-04:00

The Sole Heir™ voted today for the first time. Texted me right after, and she was jazzed. I voted during my lunch break, more out of a sense of duty than enthusiasm. Until I got to the polling place, that is, when I got the same feeling as I have for the last 34 years. It’s just a cool thing, knowing the direction and future of a great nation—and, yes, I do think it’s great, no matter what I bitch about here—is determined wholly by tens of millions of individual decisions, all made in the privacy of a voting booth.

You don’t think so? You think money and big companies run the show? Sure they do, because we allow it. No matter how much money is available, or how distasteful the ads are, no one gets to be a senator, congressman, governor, president, alderman, councilman, delegate, whatever, unless more people vote for him—one at a time—than vote for the opponent.

It’s humbling to think about. I always feel great when I leave the polling place, no matter how I felt about the current situation or the voting choices I had. If you’re reading this on Election Day and haven’t voted yet, get your ass out there. You’ll be glad.

Yes, We're Pussies

2010-11-02T08:30:00.001-04:00

Weather.com has posted a severe weather alert for my area. We’re in danger of frost until 9:00 AM. That’s right, frost. Pretty soon they’ll start naming dew.

Maz

2010-10-13T16:30:00.000-04:00

Most people can tell you their first identifiable memory, distinct from the amorphous images that preceded it. They can tell what they did, or where they were, or what stood out. I’m lucky; I can place it distinctly in time.

Thursday, October 13, 1960. My father was driving my infant brother and me up Garver’s Ferry Hill toward the house my parents had bought just a week or so earlier. (They still live there.) At 3:35 PM Eastern time, Jim Woods announced as Bill Mazeroski hit a one ball, no strike pitch over the left field wall at Forbes Field to win the World Series. Fifty years ago today.

I had some help with the time. On the wall of The Home Office hangs a photograph taken from near the Pirates’ dugout. Mazeroski is in his follow-through, the ball is in the air, and Yogi Berra is turning to give chase to a ball he’ll never catch. The big Longines scoreboard clock is dead center.

It was announced last month that a full kinescope of the game was found in Bing Crosby’s basement, the only known video recording. MLB will broadcast it (announcers Bob Prince and Mel Allen) and make it available for sale to the public. All I’ve ever seen of one of the greatest games ever played (the final score of the back-and-forth game was 10-9) is the movie newsreels, part of which may well be stock crowd footage. Soon I’ll be able to watch it, and remember, whenever I want.

Sweet.

Fair and Balanced

2010-10-10T13:08:00.002-04:00

Lest you think I'm a lefty all the time, here's the most compelling evidence I've seen yet to Vote Republican!!

Danger is Where You Find It

2010-09-30T11:34:00.002-04:00

This is not from the Onion.

Thanks to J.D. Rhoades for bringing this to our attention.

Not Balls, Chutzpah

2010-09-28T08:52:00.001-04:00

So the real problem here is that Democratic voters aren’t loyal enough? This from the guy who let the stimulus, health care, and financial regulation bills get watered down because he was too concerned about offending any Republicans to get out in front on anything until the last minute?

Where was this scolding tone when Harry Reid postponed the debate and vote on extending the Bush tax cuts until after the November election? Where has he been on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or any number of things that would have rallied his supporters and could probably have been done with a mere stroke of a pen?

He says he’s met about 70% of his campaign promises, as though all campaign promises are created equal. How many were watered down, just so he could check the box? Does the Executive Order to prohibit texting while driving count the same as not doing anything about climate change?

Democrats have been accused in the past of taking their core constituency for granted, taking the attitude, “Who else are you going to vote for?” Well, in my case, not this arrogant prick. He’s already talked me into voting for only local candidates in November, and I’ll sign on for any primary challenger in 2012.

Not Enough Balls Among Them To Shoot Pool

2010-09-27T12:46:00.002-04:00

I should have known Harry Reid couldn't keep it up.

Republicans have handed Democrats what could be a key to maintaining control of the Senate and House in the upcoming election: their steadfast support for keeping all of the Bush tax cuts in effect, including those for people making over $250,000. Imagine the sound bites to be obtained by forcing these guys to give floor speeches to support this porition just a few weeks before the election, especially since many of those same Republicans are willing to let the cuts expire for the poorest American if they can't get their way.

All it would have taken was for Reid and the Senate leadership to stand up and call their bluff. As the title of this post implies, that was its downfall; Reid has postponed debate and the vote until after the election, which shows he's as stupid as he is cowardly.

The upcoming voting includes three elections to fill Senate seats that are currently interim positions. By law, whoever wins these elections on November 2 must be seated immediately, which could well cost Democrats three seats they may desperately need for the lame duck session.

Now watch these chickenshit bastards whine about voter turnout if they lose in November.

Two Gifts

2010-09-24T10:13:00.001-04:00

I got a phone call out of the blue from The Sole Heir last week. These are not unusual occurrences; she’s good about making The Old Man™ feel like he’s still at the party with random calls and appearances.

This particular call was prompted by her having to walk through the practice room wing of the music building to get to a professor’s office. Every room filled, different music in different keys on different instruments all filtering into the hall as she walked by; Charles Ives’s idea of heaven.

Her response? Call The Old Man™ to tell him what she’d done, and that it occurred to her, “This is what it must have been like for Dad every day.”

That’s Gift One; to have the thought and take the time. Not too many nineteen-year-olds would do either. Made my day.

Gift two? She got me to thinking about it, how it felt for that to be an everyday occurrence. How it was the most energized time of my life, waking up knowing I was going to learn things I didn’t even suspect at the time, and that everything I learned would make me aware of fifteen other things I needed to know and had better find out. It was intimidating and exhilarating at the same time, the intimidation overcome by the exhilaration and the mindless confidence of youth.

Then I got to thinking of how much better my life has been because I made one decision: to change majors from Medical Technology to Music Education. I would have made a nice living in Med Tech, and enjoyed it. Music allowed a working class boy from more or less rural Pennsylvania to be exposed to a lot of things he had no business expecting, contrasting life experiences a lot of people don’t get.

I’ve played with the Pittsburgh Symphony Chamber Orchestra and German beer bands. Played in Heinz Hall and Meyerhoff Hall and a corrugated metal building that housed a private school built so white kids wouldn’t have to school with Nigras. I’ve played the Fourth of July at Stone Mountain in front of 250,000 people and dedicated a tree. Attended receptions in homes worth several million dollars and eaten homemade Brunswick Stew off a paper plate while sitting under a tree. Played football games in sub-freezing temperatures and parades where I wrung the sweat out of my jacket afterward. Performed next to players now working in major orchestras and high school students now working at Popeye’s.

A lot of extremes I would not have had a chance to experience otherwise. The downside is that I rarely feel fully at home in most places. My blue collar upbringing meant I was never truly comfortable in the chi-chi settings, but my education and experience made it hard to listen to some of the conversations taking place in the American Legion when I went home. It forced me to think about things I likely would not have thought about, and to examine positions in a more detailed manner. It taught me the power of self-discipline and perseverance, and how to pick my battles and to know when to quit. Made me a better father than I would have been, and a better son than I had been.

What it didn’t make me was enough money to live on, so I moved on. No shame in that, and no time wasted. Learning to live a more fully examined life is never a waste of time, and it was nice to be reminded of that.

Thanks, Bink.

Rules of Engagement

2010-09-03T10:15:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading Lone Survivor, The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and The Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson. Luttrell earned the Navy Cross for his efforts in what was envisioned as a relatively risky—but not impossible—mission that turned into a cluster fuck of immense proportions, resulting in the deaths of not only Luttrell's three teammates, but their entire rescue team when the Taliban shot down their helicopter. ("Cluster fuck" is not meant as a pejorative; the best plans can fall apart due to an inopportune breeze.)

Despite Luttrell's repeated liberal bashing, this lefty finds it hard to believe anyone could fail to find the story of SEAL Team 10 unmoving. While Robinson is inclined toward purple prose in places (notably when describing Taliban, the "liberal media," or other "lefties"), the battle sequences are told in a straightforward way that makes them even more effective. The duty and honor displayed by everyone involved is humbling; all three NCOs won the Navy Cross, and their leader later was awarded the Medal of Honor. (It says something about the esprit de corps of SEALs that when displaying their awards, the Medal of Honor falls below their SEAL insignia.) Luttrell doesn't appear to have much regard for those who agree with me politically, but my respect for his courage, loyalty, and endurance is unbounded.

What he lacks is a sense of irony. The limiting effects of the Rules of Engagement is a constant thread throughout the book. His team had a chance encounter with three Afghan goatherds as they were settling into position on their mission. There was debate about whether to kill the supposed civilians to keep them from talking to the Taliban. They were allowed to live and sent on their way—according to Luttrell—so the SEALs wouldn't have worry about what the media would say if it ever rolled back on them. To him, there was no question the military situation called for their deaths.

Of course, the goatherds did tell the Taliban, and operation Redwing was a catastrophe from that point forward. Luttrell bitterly blames this on liberal politicians who set the ROEs. Let's think about that for a minute. The events in Lone Survivor took place in 2005. Rules of Engagement are presumably set by the Department of Defense, in coordination with the State Department, and, presumably, the White House. That would have made the three principal players Donald Rumsfeld, Condaleeza Rice, and George W. Bush. The Bush Administration was not well-known with suffering a lot of input from liberals. The Rules of Engagement were, for better or worse, Bush's responsibility.

But are the ROEs essentially wrong? Luttrell understandably sees them as responsible for the deaths of his team and their initial rescue force. He advocates turning the SEALS loose, and trusting them to make the right decisions. That would have sufficed in World War II, where the ROEs were, essentially, "engage and destroy the enemy." The Afghan War is more of a "hearts and minds" affair. Every civilian killed might spawn two more terrorists, who might—might—eventually kill more people than were lost in Redwing. It's impossible to say, but not unreasonable to assume that earning trust among the locals will be made considerably more difficult if they think you'll kill them if they become inconvenient.

The irony comes in because Luttrell actively undermines his own position. The Pashtun village that sheltered and cared for him for several days took him in under their custom of lokhay, which requires a village to defend to the death anyone given sanctuary. The elders placed their entire village under threat of death from the Taliban to protect Luttrell, not because he was an American, but because it was what they do. (Many in the village found themselves in this position in spite of the fact he was an American.)

The Taliban did not eliminate the town to take Luttrell, though he would have been quite a prize. As the author himself says, they couldn't afford to wipe out the whole village, as it would have denied them the support of other villages for miles around, support the Taliban could not do without. In essence, the Taliban's own Rules of Engagement were largely responsible for Luttrell's eventual rescue, as they could have taken him well before the Rangers got to him.

Make no mistake; I am not in any way equating the Taliban with our military. I am merely pointing out what Luttrell, and many conservatives, fails to grasp: winning a war is not just winning all the battles. It means creating a sustainable peace. In this case—to paraphrase Casey Stengle—it means keeping the 60% of the population who are on the fence from joining the 20% who will hate you no matter what. I mourn—as should we all—SEAL Team 10, and those who died trying to rescue them. We can ever repay that debt. The best we can do is to try to pay it forward, to ensure valor and sacrifice such as theirs is requested only when absolutely necessary.

From the Archives

2010-09-02T20:38:00.001-04:00

The idea of being an opinionated asshole didn't just jump into my head when I learned about blogs. I'd been doing pretty much the same thing via email to a select of people who used to be my friends for several years. A Facebook comment from a friend brought the following to mind, from July of 2003, titled "Location, Location, Location."

There has been a certain amount of culture shock since The Home Office relocated to the People's Republic of Maryland last March. On the plus side, traffic in Maryland, bad as it is, is better than in Virginia. The risk of being shot in a public library is also greatly diminished. (For those of you who are not local, the Virginia House of Delegates voted down a bill that would have made it illegal to carry a firearm into a public library. No point in being unprepared if you happen onto a terrorist reading the Koran.)

Living in Maryland has its down sides. Living in Prince George's County has even more. Here are a couple of indications, provided solely as a public service, should anyone consider moving to this area.

I recently took the Sole Heir Correspondent to a local Taco Bell for a cold drink in the midst of an errand-running expedition. Our order was taken by a young woman who I do not wish to unfairly disparage, so I will use her real name, since she is probably as incapable of reading this as she is unlikely to make the effort.

Nicole gave us the standard PG County fast food greeting, which consists of not quite making eye contact while silently waiting for me to decide she's ready to take my order. Taco Bell offers three drink sizes. I ordered a small and a medium. No flavor was required, all Nicole had to do was give us the cups; the soda dispensers are self-service.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: We'd like a small and a medium drink, please.

Nicole (still not looking at me): We ain't got small.

Me: You're out of small cups?

Nicole: Ain't no small.

A brief period of silence followed, broken by the Sole Heir telling me sotto voce, "Dad, I think they just have medium, large, and extra large."

Finally catching on, I told Nicole I want the smallest size, and the one in the middle. She handed me two identical cups, which Taco Bell describes as "large," and I would call "medium," seeing as how they were of the intermediate size of the three options. As she handed me the cups, she asked if the order was for here or to go.

Huh? Her entire contribution consisted of handing me two cups, one of them incorrect. I had to get the drinks, lids, and straws. What earthly difference could it have made to her, or to Mr. Bell, where I drank them? I was tempted to order one for here and one to go, but I was afraid we'd get into a discussion about which was to stay and which was to go, even though they were both the same size.

Prince George's County has the well-earned reputation of being the metropolitan Washington area's equivalent of a third world nation. Proof of that was found in a call to the cable company that same week.

The cable call was prompted by a promotion the company was running when I ordered my original service back in March. Comcast would provide free installation and three free months of every channel Showtime offers if I signed up for digital cable. If I didn't want to keep the Showtime, I could cancel after the third month. I had tried to cancel a couple of weeks earlier, but they wouldn't let me, saying it was too early to cancel, and that if I cancelled too soon they would have to charge me for the installation after all. When the valid cancellation window opened, hesitation would require paying for a month of Showtime I could live without, since I had watched it exactly zero times since moving in.

I called the number I saw on a televised ad the previous night and was immediately directed to a pleasant young man who looked high and low for my account information without finding it. It was finally determined that I had called the Montgomery County number, and he couldn't help me. He could, and did, transfer me to the Prince George's County number.

I didn't get a human right away on the PG County number. First I had to choose the language in which I wanted to transact my business. Fortunately, English was the first choice. Immediately after pressing "one" for English, I got to listen to a thirty-second spiel informing me of Comcast's Cable Amnesty Program. It was not thought to be necessary to inform Montgomery County residents of the illegality of cable theft. In PG County, it opens the conversation.

Welcome to Prince George's County, Maryland, where the showcase high school offers a course in Japanese to show its advanced and cosmopolitan makeup. All it really does is teach its illustrious graduates to ask "You want fries with that, motherfucker?" in a sushi restaurant.

A Growing Problem

2010-08-28T12:57:00.001-04:00

This just in, from the Music Education Correspondent, who found it on the Internet, which means it must be true.

The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The recent actions of the Tea Party are prompting an exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they'll soon be required to hunt, pray, and to agree with Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck.

Canadian border farmers say it's not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.

"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield , whose acreage borders North Dakota . The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?"

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields. "Not real effective," he said. "The liberals still got through and Rush annoyed the cows so much that they wouldn't give any milk."

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons and drive them across the border where they are simply left to fend for themselves.

"A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions," an Ontario border patrolman said. "I found one carload without a single bottle of imported drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet, though."

When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR races.

In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans in powdered wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior-citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the '50s. "If they can't identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age," an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and are renting all the Michael Moore movies. "I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can't support them," an Ottawa resident said. "How many art-history majors does one country need?"

In an effort to ease tensions between the United States and Canada , Vice President Biden met with the Canadian ambassador and pledged that the administration would take steps to reassure liberals. A source close to President Obama said, "We're going to have some Paul McCartney and Peter, Paul &Mary concerts. And we might even put some endangered species on postage stamps. The President is determined to reach out," he said.

The Problems in This Country Are Pretty Obvious

2010-08-19T11:22:00.003-04:00

From Ezra Klein's blog in today's Washington Post:

New jobless claims rose to 500,000 this week. Meanwhile:

Karin Wilzig has a hard time choosing a favorite color from among the 64 that she and her husband can use to illuminate the 14 1/2- foot, 450-gallon aquarium in their TriBeCa town house. The default is fuchsia, which turns the dozen koi a deep pink.
“Not pink,” said Mrs. Wilzig, 40, an artist and a mother of two small children. “Alan, go to the turquoise.”

Her husband, Alan Wilzig, 45, a former banker who collects motorcycles and prides himself on the orange tanning bed in his basement, goes to the James Bond-like control panel in the kitchen, where a touch of a button turns the fish — which are specially bred to be colorless — a vivid blue.

To be fair, it's actually good for rich people to buy fancy aquariums. Economic activity is economic activity. But it's odd to read these sorts of articles in a world where one of the two major political parties wants to borrow $700 billion for a tax cut for the rich but says we don't have enough money to offer further relief for the jobless and the struggling.

What I like about Ezra is that he's a lefty, but he's fair. He's spent a lot of time turning over Paul Ryan's economic proposals, examining the pros and cons, and interviewing Ryan himself. He's come out as saying most of Ryan's plan isn't workable, and Ryan's a bit (okay, a lot) disingenuous in his descriptions, but he's also out out enough information for his reader to come to a different conclusion if he's paying attention and thinking about it.

I have but one complaint with this post: "But it's odd to read these sorts of articles in a world where one of the two major political parties wants to borrow $700 billion for a tax cut for the rich but says we don't have enough money to offer further relief for the jobless and the struggling."

It's not odd; it's disgusting.

Time to Stop Digging

2010-07-29T13:46:00.003-04:00

President Obama commented yesterday on the Shirley Sherrod controversy. He didn't do himself any favors. He referred to the situation as an overreaction to a "bogus controversy," and said she "deserves better than what happened last week." She sure did, but his administration are the people she deserved better from.

Andrew Breitbart is a tool for editing her remarks the way he did, and Fox News--well, criticizing Fox News for broadcasting Breitbart's excerpt is like criticizing a stone for sinking on water. She worked for the Obama Administration--she was what would be referred in an anonymously sourced piece of journalism as "an administration official," or, "a USDA official." She deserved the benefit of doubt from you, above all.

Obama also said, "Rather than jump to conclusions, we should all look inward and try to examine what's in our own hearts." What he should have said was, "Rather than jump to conclusions, we should have looked inward and examined what was in our hearts before we took drastic action on a spurious report of the nature we've been decrying for three years now."

This deflecting the blame shit is too Republican for my taste. Honest to God, how dumb does he think we are?

Not as Smart as He Thinks; Hopefully Not as Dumb as He Acts

2010-07-22T12:24:00.004-04:00

For someone universally accepted as an intelligent man who has surrounded himself with intelligent people, the Barack Obama sure does a lot of stupid stuff. Not just things that can be reasonably debated by reasonable people; I'm talking serious dumbass.

This week's example is the forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod from USDA, after conservative muckraker Andrew Brietbart made public a video of her stating that, in her pre-USDA days, she had denied white farmers assistance because they were white. Such shameful behavior, even years ago, would certainly disqualify Ms. Sherrod from government service.

If it were true.

Turns out Breitbart cherry-picked a couple of key sentences from a speech Sherrod gave to make it sound like that's all we needed to know. Fox News picked it up and ran with it like a hyena with an antelope leg. (It should also be noted the esteemed Washington Post was happy to report this early version of the story on its web site, as well.)

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack immediately demanded Sherrod's resignation, apparently prompted by the president himself.; Sherrod complied. Then, in the immortal words of the late Paul Harvey, came the rest of the story.

The true facts came out within twenty-four hours, leaving the Obama Administration looking like idiots. Upon viewing the entire speech, Sherrod was describing something that crossed her mind in this instance twenty years ago, and rejected it. The white family not only got their help, but they credit her with saving the farm. Breitbart and Fox left those parts out (as did the Post, originally, nice work MSM), and the Obamites swallowed it hook, lie, and stinker. Vilsack apologized and offered Sherrod a new gig; she has yet to decide whether to take it. (Leaving him to twist in the wind is appropriate, according to the Book of Passive Aggression, Chapter 6, Verses 11-14.)

I wonder what kind of stimulus, health care, and financial regulation laws we might have now if Obama had been as willing to get out in front of the curve on those as he was to put his foot in it here? On legislation he waits until Congress does the heavy lifting and saves himself for a few key comments to push it over the edge so he can claim this was what he wanted all along; on something like this, he can't wait to run into the brier patch. For such a smart guy, he sure does a lot of dumb shit.

The Post's Greg Sargent wonders if Breitbart has damaged his credibility by his handling of this affair, and whether the media should take his assertions with a little less credulity. He might want to start by looking into the fact checking policies of his own paper. It's Breitbart who comes out of this smelling like a rose. His credibility has always been primarily on the right; anyone to the left of Lindsay Graham has had good reason to be skeptical. He punked the Obama Administration and make their reaction to his childish prank the story for several days. Who's the smart one here?

Hair in Iran

2010-07-20T11:13:00.003-04:00

No longer content to subject only women to their curious ideas about, well, just about everything, the Iranian government has issued a catalog of approved, "Islamic" haircuts for men. Flattops and Elvis-esque pompadours are fine; ponytails, spikes, mullets and Mohawks are right out.

Dogs are also taking a hit. Considered unclean by people who wipe their asses with their bare left hand, the rise in dog ownership in Iran has been noted, and the government is about to crack down on this infidel decadency. "Friendship with dogs is a blind imitation of the West," said Grand Ayatollah Naser Makerem Shirazi, according to Reuters. "There are lots of people in the West who love their dogs more than their wives and children."

As opposed to those family-loving Muslims who love their wives and daughters so much they will allow them to be gang raped or stoned to death for "shaming" the family.

Yesterday's Line of the Day

2010-07-14T14:04:00.002-04:00

ESPN's Bill Simmons, referring to LeBron James's self-adulating announcement he will sign with the Miami Heat:

"'I'm taking my talent to South Beach' is the new euphemism for masturbation."

Only in Bal'Mer...

2010-07-01T10:14:00.004-04:00

This falls into the "Shit You Can't Make Up" category.

From the Baltimore Sun:

Typically, prisoners who are on work release get to leave the inside of the jail to work outside the fence, and then must return.

David Newton, on home detention awaiting trial on drug and burglary charges, had an opposite course. He would leave his home to go to work inside the jail, and would then return to his house at the end of the day, as a condition of his pre-trial release.

So prison officials were perplexed Wednesday afternoon when they said the 19-year-old Newton, who was not cuffed or shackled, ran from correctional officers who were escorting him to the laundry room at the Baltimore City Detention Center.

Authorities said Newton scaled one fence and was climbing over a second along East Monument Street when a correctional officer shot him twice in the leg. He was only hours away from the end of his shift, at which point he would have climbed into a prison van and been driven home.

"He woke up in his own bed, and he could've gone back to his own bed tonight," said Rick Binetti, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

More can be found here.

Our Leadership At Work

2010-06-25T12:22:00.001-04:00

Two conjoined headlines from today's Washington Post:

Senate again blocks jobs aid

Move leaves more than 1.2 million people without support checks, millions more could lose benefits.

Congress votes to spare doctors Medicare cuts

Bastards.

McChrystal Clear

2010-06-23T14:55:00.002-04:00

This should have been easy. General mouths off publicly about the Commander-in-Chief, he goes. Only in Washington could this become a soap opera over the course of a couple of days.

Without getting too far into the weeds, McChrystal was wrong. The Uniform Code of Military Justice specifically forbids comments such as his. One of the first lessons recruits are taught is that they have given up some of their Constitutional rights by enlisting, key among which is freedom of speech. The debate about whether this is a good idea can be held another time. (I happen to think it is, on several levels.) Given the facts as they exist, McChrystal was out of line; the only relevant question is what to do with him?

He can't stay where he is. No Commander-in-Chief can have a subordinate commander in the field treat him with such open disrespect; I'm sure McChrystal wouldn't stand for it from one of his men. You can't transfer him, for the same reason.

So, McChrystal has to go. How to do it? There should be no need for Obama to fire him; McChrystal's service to the country has earned him the right to resign, which he should have done the minute the story broke, thus allowing the offended party (Obama) the opportunity to either accept it (as he has done), or to make a magnanimous (but misguided) gesture and allow him to stay. Letting it linger for a few days did nothing to enhance McChrystal's reputation.

As for Republicans who argue he can't be replaced at this juncture: grow up. The military is based on the idea that anyone might have to be replaced on a moment's notice. If McChrystal had died in the middle of giving an order, his second-in-command would be expected to step up and finish it. It's true everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the military: no one is indispensable.

It's a shame, though. No one gets to be a four star just because he's a master schmoozer; McChrystal had to be good, especially to make that rank with some of the blemishes he has on his record. So we lost a good warrior today, but we can't say we lost a good soldier, or he wouldn't have been in that situation to begin with.

Another MBA Sighting

2010-06-10T13:01:00.000-04:00

General Motors finally means business about turning the company around; employees have been requested no longer to refer to the Chevrolet Division as “Chevy.”

“We’d ask that whether you’re talking to a dealer, reviewing dealer advertising, or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet moving forward,” said the memo, which was signed by Alan Batey, vice president for Chevrolet sales and service, and Jim Campbell, the G.M. division’s vice president for marketing.

“When you look at the most recognized brands throughout the world, such as Coke or Apple for instance, one of the things they all focus on is the consistency of their branding,” the memo said. “Why is this consistency so important? The more consistent a brand becomes, the more prominent and recognizable it is with the consumer.”

Apparently neither Mr. Batey nor Mr. Campbell is aware that “Coke” is a nickname for Coca-Cola. Assuming it was the soft drink they were referring to, and not the substance that apparently fuels decision-making at GM.

Carly Fiorina Gets Serious

2010-06-10T12:55:00.001-04:00

The California senate campaign is getting nasty fast. Yesterday, Carly Fiorina made this comment about her opponent, Barbara Boxer:

“Laura saw Barbara Boxer briefly on television this morning and said what everyone said, ‘God what is that hair?” Sooooooooooooo yesterday,”

Yes, it was an unguarded comment, and she probably wasn’t aware the microphone was open. Later, CNN’s Great van Susteren gave Fiorina a chance to step back graciously.

VAN SUSTEREN: You said.. you're giving [Boxer] a little problem for her hair. You know, it's -- what do you got -- what do you have to say about that one, having -- all of us have suffered from the old bad hair...

FIORINA: Oh, you know, I was -- I was quoting a friend of mine. My goodness, my hair's been talked about by a million people, you know? It sort of goes with the territory.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, OK...

FIORINA: Especially when you don't have any. As you remember, I started out with none.

California politics, aka Mean Girls 2010.

Carly for CA

2010-06-10T12:46:00.001-04:00

It’s fashionable for contemporary Republicans candidates to tout their business acumen in tandem with the mantra of “government should be run like a business. The argument about whether government should be run like a business is for another time; it’s their credentials we’re concerned with here.

Carly Fiorina has one qualification as a candidate for public office: she was once the CEO of computer giant Hewlett-Packard. Since Republicans also believe the market is never wrong, here’s what it had to say about her tenure, from a CNN article in April, 2005:

Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, is leaving the troubled computer maker after being forced out by the company's board.

Shares of HP (Research) jumped 6.9 percent in heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday on the news. But at one point, the stock was up as much as 10.5 percent.

"The stock is up a bit on the fact that nobody liked Carly's leadership all that much," said Robert Cihra, an analyst with Fulcrum Global Partners. "The Street had lost all faith in her and the market's hope is that anyone will be better."

California Republicans elected her as their candidate in November’s senatorial election, to run against incumbent Barbara Boxer. Apparently the federal government isn’t going broke fast enough to suit them.

Lowering the Bar

2010-06-04T10:12:00.001-04:00

It’s not worrisome enough that people can “earn” a four-year college degree in two years, or work on their Bachelors and Masters at the same time, as some otherwise respectable schools claim. Now you can get college credit while working at Wal-Mart. I don’t mean by taking classes after work; I mean just doing your job.

Here’s my favorite:

Daniel Soto of Hardeeville, S.C., works full time at Wal-Mart as a zone manager supervisor, lending a hand in several departments. He had to give up college to work, but said he could see some of his duties translating to academia, such as the algebraic equations he uses to figure out how much merchandise will fit on a shelf or how much of a product to order.

"I do math all day at Wal-Mart," he said.

(I got that from the Washington Post, not The Onion.)

I’m not suggesting he’s anything but bright. Figuring shelf space is not what many would consider college-level math; this is ninth grade shit. Once it’s on his transcript, though, it might count for any number of degrees that could put him into a key decision-making position where someone actually does have to know college-level math.

The education bar gets lower every year in this country; pretty soon we’ll have to dig a trench for it. The Sole Heir attend the University of Maryland, not APU of one of the other for-profit “universities,” so her degree shouldn’t be cheapened much. What’s troubling is that these degrees will eventually become more commonly accepted, as people not well aware of educational standards just see “Bachelors Degree, XXX University” and think a university is a university.

You’re okay with for-profit colleges? Think about this. There are for-profit nursing schools out there, where the hands-on component of the education consists of watching someone else do it; everything else was online. These are accredited schools, mind you; the credentials of the accrediting agencies is open to conjecture. States, or groups of them, are okay with this standard of nursing, which is another argument for the nationalization of standards in some areas. Do you want to be passing through one of these states, have an accident, and find out your nurse has never actually inserted a catherter?

Well, Duh

2010-06-02T16:04:00.002-04:00

Online magazine Slate likes to position itself as a left-leaning, hiply intellectual voice. Like a lot of left-leaning thinkers they sometimes overthink things and articles get written that make "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" downright concrete. Witness this headline:

Why Are Indian Kids So Good At Spelling?

Have you seen their names? The defending National Spelling Bee champion is Kavya Shivashankar. You think she worries about spelling "hydrargyrum"? A twelve-year-old kid named Chidhambarathan can crank out "escritoire" with no more effort than some drk named Smith spells "kat."

I'm not saying this is bad. These kids are kick ass spellers; good on them. Wondering why they're such good spellers is like wondering why Shaquille O'Neal can dunk.

That Sinking Feeling

2010-06-01T15:43:00.003-04:00

The Show tunes correspondent showed me this article about the sinkhole that ate a three-story building in Guatemala, and might still be growing. He asked where something goes when it drops into a sinkhole.

My guess is Texas.

Conjuring the Fifth

2010-06-01T15:23:00.001-04:00

Most people consider me a social liberal. (“You’re saying that just to piss me off. No one’s really as liberal as you pretend to me,” can safely be described as coming down on that side.) I don’t believe in torture, and I think our Constitutional protections, and this country’s willingness to get out in front of the rest of the world in this regard, is a form of “American exceptionalism” we can be proud of. Still, common sense is in order, and the Supreme Court got one right today when it ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that a suspect must actually invoke his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination if he wishes to take advantage of it.

Here’s the gist of it: Van Chester Thompson was arrested for murder in 2001. Advised of his rights, he said he understood them. He then sat through about three hours of interrogation, occasionally answering “yes,” “no,” or “I don’t know.” When a cop asked if Thompson prayed for forgiveness for “shooting that boy down,” Thompson said, “yes.”

Oops.

That got him convicted, and I can see why. Thompson appealed, arguing the statement should be thrown out because he tacitly invoked Miranda by being uncommunicative. Please. All he had to do was to say, “I want a lawyer,” “I don’t want to answer any questions,” or “I’m taking the Fifth.” Anything along those lines would have compelled the cops to stop the interrogation, or this would be an entirely different case.

Invoking the Fifth Amendment is not a clever tool for cherry-picking answers. Grand jury witnesses who appear under grants of immunity must invoke their protection against self-incrimination with the first question. You’re not allowed to answer the questions you like, then dodge the ones that could get you into trouble. We can argue about whether that’s fair—I have my doubts—but it’s been established law for years.

As Chris Rock says in his priceless video essay, “How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police,” the best thing for someone in Thompson’s situation to do is to “Shut the fuck up.” But not till after you ask for a lawyer. It’s your right, you know.