Publicus Proventus

Do you want to woo hoo? (Thursday Scramble)

2012-01-26T18:15:00.000-08:00

On Thursday Scramble, I take an old post from one of my blogs -- my blogs currently make up 24.8% of the entire Internet -- and repost it to all my OTHER blogs. This post appeared in 2008 on my blog "Thinking The Lions." Thinking The Lions focuses on funny stories about me, and the things I do with my family, and the things I do when I'm supposed to be working, and the things I do when I'm supposed to be doing the things I do. Also, I post poems there on Fridays.

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Always carry the pooping toddler behind you, not in front of you.

That way, when the pooping toddler poops, it will not fall directly into your path, causing you to step in it, which will cause you to think oh my god this is possibly the grossest but most hilarious emergency I've ever been a part of, and which will also cause you to stop, take that sock off, and then continue on your way to the potty chair, which you have left upstairs, and upstairs is an awful long ways away when you are carrying a naked, pooping, and now upset toddler at arm's length.

That's what I learned last night, as I was helping to clean up the kitchen after tacos and smoothies made in the new blender using the high-end "Whole Foods" fruit we had, both of which we had because Sweetie got them for St. Nick's Day.

I'm not sure why "St. Nick's Day" exists, or even if it does exist outside of my family. I always wondered if it existed outside of my family when I was a kid, too, when we would, in the beginning of December, get candy in our stockings. Never presents or anything, just candy, which always included one of those giant, straight-up-and-down candy canes, the kind that would splinter when you bit them, so that if you sat on the brown couch eating them and watching channel 18 -- channel 18 was the only channel worth watching most of the time back then, because it was the only non-network channel, so it showed reruns of shows and cartoons in the afternoon, as opposed to showing "Phil Donahue," a show that by my memories was on at least 17 hours a day on all three networks in the late 70s and early 80s-- if you sat on the brown couch eating your candy cane and watching Channel 18, you would have parts splinter off and fall on your chest and be covered with sweater-fuzz, making them inedible. You would also get little tiny peppermint shards sprinkled down your chest and stomach, giving you a minty smell and a crackly feel the rest of the day.

No other kids ever seemed to get stuff for St. Nick's Day, which was why I thought maybe it only existed in our family, but, then again, I was the kind of kid who never really knew what was going on, either, so maybe everyone was getting St. Nick's presents, and I just didn't know it because I spent most of my time in fourth grade reading the "Emil" books and playing one-on-one football on recesses with Kevin Donnerbauer, the kid with only one thumb, and what time I didn't spend doing that I spent drawing "vipers" from Battlestar Galactica and getting beat up by Dean Larsen. None of which really lead one to conversations about whether or not the other kid celebrates "St. Nick's Day."

When I married Sweetie, I learned that she, too, celebrated St. Nick's Day, and that she celebrated it through presents, which seems odd, since Sweetie is always telling me how poor she was growing up, stories about poverty that make me feel even more guilty than I do most of the time about my relatively-privileged background. I, as a kid, generally got presents like the Millenium Falcon with Actual Cargo Bays for hiding Han Solo, or my "official" Dallas Cowboys helmet, or the Lego set that let me build an actual Lunar Landing Module (which I still remember was called the "LEM," even though I don't remember why it was called the "LEM") or any of the the 1000 other toys and junk my parents got us for Christmas, and that still wasn't enough, as most years there were plenty of junky things we didn't get. Realizing that, that I was so spoiled and privileged and didn't appreciate it, serves the valuable purpose today of making me feel guilty, guilt that I channel into areas that society desperately needs, like "working hard" and "giving to charity" and "telling my own kids how lucky they are that they have so much stuff, compared to how little stuff I had," which is only true comparatively speaking, because I had a lot of stuff, but my kids have more stuff, and they, too, do not think they have enough. Yes, The Boy has a great big TV in his room and a DVD player and a Playstation 3, but he still pines away for an Internet connection that would let him play Playstation online against other players, even though the other player he would mostly play against is his friend, who lives next door, and who would probably come over to play anyway, bringing his own TV and Playstation 3, so that they could harness the awesome power of the Internet to play a game against each other sitting two feet apart.

So the guilt I carry around lets me lay some guilt on The Boy and his sisters for having so much stuff, something that I do to relieve my own guilt and also to make sure that they have guilt when they grow up, so that they will work hard and give to charity and be good people and guilt-trip their own kids, and the Circle of Guilt will continue.

I don't guilt-trip the Babies! yet, because they're too little to feel guilty about anything, and also because they don't really want anything. We have not yet bought them that many toys -- all of their toys except the slide and their car fit into a laundry basket -- but we have bought them toys, and they generally ignore those toys and play with anything else.

Mr Bunches, for example, carries around a small red practice golf ball that Middle gave him. It's made of foam rubber and he has it with him at all times. I've never known anyone to have a "Security Golf Ball" but he does, and he gets upset if he can't find it. He got so upset the last time it was lost (we found it behind the Only Surviving Plant in the house) that Sweetie took precautions and found a second one, a Spare Emergency Golf Ball that is kept carefully hidden in the Babies!'s room. We all also make sure, at all times, that we are aware of the Red Ball: "Where's his red ball?" we ask each other, when moving Mr Bunches from one room or level of the house to the next.

He can't be fooled, either -- give him a different color practice golf ball and he'll throw it aside. Give him a different kind of red ball and he'll squeeze it to test it out, and if it doesn't give a little like The Red Ball, he'll toss that aside, too.

Losing his Red Ball is one of the few things that upsets Mr Bunches. He's pretty easygoing. The only other things I've seen upset him are when someone leaves the room he's in, and being whisked away to poop on the potty chair rather than on the living room floor, where he thought it was okay to poop because, after all, he was naked.

Mr Bunches was only naked because I felt sorry for him and also because I needed both hands free to clean up the smoothie mess that I'd created making smoothies on the blender I'd given Sweetie for St. Nick's Day, a blender that was big and expensive and more big and expensive than a St. Nick's Day present should be, but I tend to give Sweetie big and expensive presents because, like I said, I feel guilty about my privileged background and Sweetie manages to dredge up more guilt by telling me stories about her own unprivileged background.

I might tell a story, for example, of how I had all these Star Wars action figures and I used to set them up in elaborate scenarios in my room in which the dresser with its four shelves was the Death Star, because the books on the bottom shelf could be the trash compactor, and then I might say that I wished I'd kept those Star Wars figures because maybe they'd be worth money, and then Sweetie will say something like this, a story she actually told us:

"I didn't have action figures or dolls when I was a little girl. We couldn't afford them. I had marbles, though, that my grandma gave me. I used to pretend the marbles were people and play with them and make them go shopping."

Imagine hearing that on the heels of your story about having an actual Boba Fett that shot missiles. Then imagine yourself standing in the department store thinking "Should I get her that blender she asked for even though it's very expensive?" and as you think that, you remember that Sweetie, as a kid, had to have her marbles have adventures, things she couldn't even dress up or fix the hair of or whatever it is that girls do with their dolls and toys.

And then imagine standing in that department store, pushing your Babies! in their stroller, and feeling terribly guilty about having been so privileged, and deciding that yes, you will buy her the blender, and you'll also get her some other stuff because she deserves it, but then you get distracted and think How would a marble be a person? And did they have names? Were they, like "Judy The Marble?" Did she make them walk, or just roll them to the Marble Shopping Mall? And then before you can get the blender or answer those questions, Mr F leans over and starts trying to knock over the pile of Christmas dinner plates you're stuck in front of.

Mr F got to try to knock over a lot of things last week, as we finished up the shopping for Sweetie's St. Nick's Day present. Her entire present was that blender that she asked for, and a bunch of high-quality fruit from Whole Foods, and a Whole Foods $10 gift card (which I threw in to top it off, but which is useless because $10 at Whole Foods will get you one grape) and a book of smoothie recipes that had lots of recipes for smoothies made without yogurt, because Sweetie likes smoothies but hates yogurt. Or I should say, Sweetie wants to like smoothies, something she tells us all the time:

"I want to like smoothies," she'll say, "But I just don't like that yogurt."

When I ask why it's so important that she like smoothies, she answers: "Because they're cool."

Finding the blender was the easy part -- the department store had blenders, lots of them, some of them as high-priced as $159. I did not get guilt-tripped into buying that. Marble People or not, I don't buy $159 kitchen appliances. I settled on a tough-looking red blender that had an "Ice Crusher" feature. That sounded good (if not very romantic or Christmas-y) to me. Getting the fruit was also easy. It was the book that was tough, because I had Mr Bunches and Mr F with me in their stroller, and I had to go to three different bookstores to find just the right book of smoothie recipes, which meant three different nights of pushing the Babies! through bookstores, bookstores with shelves that were very close together and packed with books that were ripe for the plucking, so that as we walked down the aisles Mr F and Mr Bunches would reach out and grab books and toss them on the floor, and I would quickly scoop the books up and put them back more or less in the region they came from, hopefully also getting all of the "Teddy Graham" crumbs and smudges off of them. So if you are shopping for a book at any of those stores, the odds are that the book you want is about five feet further down the aisle, and you'll want to wipe it off a little before buying it.

I also could not stop the stroller, because they'd get really antsy then, and start arching their backs or taking off their socks and shoes and throwing them, and if there's anything that gets you judged to be a bad parent, it's having barefoot kids out in a store in December in Wisconsin. Plus, people don't think it's so cute the third time a shoe gets flung at them.

Most of the shopping, then, was done with me handing them "Teddy Grahams" and trying to calm them down and distract them by talking to them and singing Mr F's favorite song ("All I Want Is You" from the "Juno" Soundtrack) quietly as we walked through the aisles, and when that didn't work, I'd try to quickly scan the books as we walked by. When I'd see a book I thought would be good, I'd scoop it up and keep pushing the stroller, checking out the book with one hand and pushing the stroller with the other hand, eventually looping back to drop the book off more or less where I'd gotten it (I could tell by the trail of "Teddy Grahams.")

I had to do that because in public, I'll do anything to keep the Babies! happy, and also because I'm a pushover. I think I'm a tough dad, but I'm not, and I just give in to the Babies! demands no matter what the cost to me personally is. I will let them, for example, out of the cart while we're at the drugstore picking up cold medicine, even though I know that it will be physically impossible for me to hold both of their hands and get out my wallet to pay. I let them out of the cart and hold their hands and then, when it comes time to pull out my wallet, I let go of Mr Bunches' hand for just one second I hope and pull out the $20 Sweetie gave me, but it's no use: Mr Bunches has taken off towards the back of the store, laughing, and I have to scoop up Mr F and tell the lady behind the counter "put the change in the bag" and then I carry Mr F with me while I chase Mr Bunches around the rack of cold medicines in the back of the store, twice, before grabbing him and going up front carrying both boys to grab the bag, which hopefully has my change in it, and head outside.

Even then, I'm such a pushover that I feel bad for Mr F, who didn't get to run around the pharmacy, and I wonder if I should give him a chance, too. But Mr F gets his own special treatment, like when I keep playing The Tackle Game with him even though I'm afraid that he's given me a concussion.

The Tackle Game is Mr F's favorite. He invented it, and as you'd expect of a game invented by a two-year-old, it's pretty simple and also violent. In The Tackle Game, I sit cross-legged on the floor, and Mr F goes into the other room and then comes running at me while I say "No no no no no" in a scared voice (note: I'm not acting) and he then plows into me and we fall over backwards and I tell him he's very strong and how'd he get so strong? Then we do it all again, for about an hour. And I keep playing The Tackle Game under the most adverse conditions, like when Mr F the other night caught me just behind the temple with his forehead, causing him to momentarily cry until I calmed him down by tossing him in the air a few times. He was fine. I, though, was seeing stars and had a splitting headache, one that instantly set in and spread down to my jaw and my neck, and one that I still kind of have, two days later. But I kept playing The Tackle Game, and didn't let on to Mr F that I thought maybe I had a concussion.

That pushoveriness is how Mr F and Mr Bunches ended up running around buck naked on St. Nick's Eve, or the night of St. Nick's Day, or whatever. We'd eaten dinner, which was tacos and chips and non-yogurt-containing smoothies that I'd made using Sweetie's new St. Nick's blender, and I was helping clean up before taking the Babies! upstairs for their bath, and Mr F started getting into the wedding cabinet, which is the only thing in our house anymore that both contains glass and is in arm's reach. It's a curio cabinet with glass doors that's filled with wedding mementos and champagne glasses and pictures from our wedding and things like that, and we'd move it, but it's really heavy and it wouldn't be right to put it in the garage, anyway, so we guard the wedding cabinet using the high-tech method of taking the piano bench and the round table and laying them down in front of it, a giant barricade that completely fails to slow down Mr F, who likes to open and close doors, hard, to hear the bang! they make. Mr F frequently gets into the wedding cabinet doors, which make a satisfying glassy sound. He hasn't yet noticed that every single thing inside that cabinet is breakable, but it's only a matter of time.

While I was cleaning up last night, Mr F got into the wedding cabinet, and I got him out and tried to distract him from that by dropping him on the couch. That's "The Treatment," a game he and Mr Bunches like. In "The Treatment," I hold them and swing them back and forth and say "1... 2... Treatment!" and then drop them on the couch.

And, yes, "The Treatment" is a lot like "Cloverfield," but there are subtle differences that experts will note. Differences like: In "Cloverfield," I'm a monster, who walks around roaring Cloverfield! and then picking them up and dropping them on the couch, while in The Treatment, I am just Daddy, or sometimes Dr Slider, and I do not roar, but I do count. Cloverfield The Monster would never count. He's a monster.

"The Treatment" did not work on Mr F, who headed back to the wedding cabinet, so I took the next most logical step, which was to strip him down to his diaper. You would have to live in our house for a while to understand why that was the next most logical step, but it was. And it worked: soon, Mr F was down to his diaper and we were hollering, as he ran by, "Woo-hoo!" which is what we do when nearly-naked two-year-olds run around our house. (We even call it "Woo-hooing." "Do you want to woo-hoo?" we'll ask the Babies!, who will answer with "guck.")

Then, Mr Bunches wanted in on the Woo-Hooing, so he came over to me and I stripped him down to his diaper, too, but that wasn't enough: he wanted the diaper off.

So I put my foot down. As he pulled at his diaper and looked up at me and made pleading noises that were kind of like words but not really, I said: "No. You've got to leave the diaper on."

He pulled at it more and pulled at my leg.

"No," I said, firmly. "The diaper stays on."

He whined a little, looked sad, and pulled at his diaper, forlornly. So I caved in and said "Fine," and stripped the diaper off, which Sweetie might have objected to but it was my day to be in charge, so she didn't say anything other than that I sure am a pushover, and I then stripped off Mr F's diaper, too, letting them run around naked while we continued cleaning. I figured, they'll get some naked woo-hooing in before their bath, and I can get this cleaned up so that we can just relax," and I went back to cleaning the blender, but within about two minutes, I heard Sweetie yelling that Mr Bunches was pooping, and I rushed out there to see Mr Bunches by the Only Surviving Plant, with Sweetie holding a magazine under his butt.

I picked up Mr Bunches, who looked surprised, and held him at arm's length as we went through the kitchen, where he dropped part of the load and I stepped in it, forcing me to stop and hold Mr Bunches in one arm while I took off the now-needed-to-be-burned sock, at which point Mr Bunches got terribly upset and started crying, so I got the sock off, and got him upstairs into his room and sitting on the potty chair.

By then, Mr Bunches was thoroughly upset and was bawling, and I didn't want him to form some kind of permanent negative pooping attitude -- what if he ended up always being constipated because he was worried that if he pooped he'd get scooped up and whisked around? What if he went crazy because he was so scared of pooping? How would that affect my plans to have him and Mr F star in their own show on Disney so that I can retire? -- so to fix that, I told him it was okay, and then when that didn't work, I cheered.

"Yay!" I said, and started clapping. He looked surprised, but stopped crying and looked at me. "Yay!" I said again, and cheered some more. "What a good boy! Yay! Hooray! Good job!" and I kept clapping while he sniffled and then cheered up and then he gave me a hug.

We cleaned him up and then, still naked, I took him back downstairs to clean up the mess. I forewarned Sweetie and Middle to cheer for him, too, so Mr Bunches walked, naked, into the kitchen, to a standing ovation of Mommy and his sister clapping and cheering, while Mr F looked a little jealous, like he was wondering if he should poop, too.

With a lot of bleach, we got the floor clean, and we got the Babies! up to their bath and got them dressed, and spent the rest of St. Nick's Night playing The Tackle Game and watching their new movies they'd gotten for St. Nick's Day, and I had learned a valuable lesson, which was this:

Next time, put more ice cream into the smoothie.

Airlines can no longer lie to you, but you'll still be pretty ignorant.

2012-01-26T06:55:00.004-08:00

Airlines, effective today and unlike almost every other business in the entire world, now have to tell you not just what they will charge you to do business with them, but what the government is charging you... to do business with airlines.

At issue are "teaser fares," or the price airlines tell you on a commercial you'll pay to fly from (as one example put it) "Los Angeles to Fargo, North Dakota." (Seriously: Has anyone ever made that flight?) Airlines, effective today, must include the not just the price, but all fees and taxes -- which, properly understood, should read "but all taxes and other taxes," because a fee, when imposed by government, is a tax --

While total ticket costs won’t change, airlines and travel agencies now must show an all-in number that combines the base fare with all required taxes and fees, according to the U.S. Transportation Department. Airline charges for optional services such as checked bags or in-flight Wi-Fi aren’t covered.

Gone will be the “teaser fares” promoting trans-Atlantic flights for as little as $150, which can surprise fliers when they discover the total with all charges is closer to $800, said Charlie Leocha, a founder of passenger-rights group Consumer Travel Alliance in Springfield, Virginia.

“This is about truth in advertising, and it won’t be as deceptive anymore,” Leocha said. “They will have to show you the prices you can actually buy a ticket for. There’s no such thing as a ticket to Europe for $150 total.”

(Source.) As usual, like everything government does, the Trilateral Commission is behind this and trying to pry your guns from your cold, dead fingers, or something:

“If the government can hide taxes in your airfares, then they can carry out their hidden agenda and quietly increase their taxes,” Miramar, Florida-based Spirit says on www.keepmyfareslow.org. The website includes links to members of Congress.

(Same source.) While some media are reporting (accurately) that almost no other business must tell you the price+taxes (the grocery store that lists a candy bar at a whopping $0.99 doesn't have to tell you that the actual cost is $1.06 after taxes), other media are happily misinterpreting the data to make airlines look awful, as that same article does:

AMR Corp.’s American was promoting a “travel deals” flight from Nashville, Tennessee, to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for $286 one way on its website. With the return leg and taxes and fees, the total cost was $641.40.

See, the thing is, that source (Bloomberg Businessweek) just compared an apple to some weird tropical fruit we'd never buy in a million years unless a celebrity endorsed it. AMR advertised a one way ticket, and to prove how deceptive that is, Bloomberg Businessweek, acting as propagandist for the new rules, compared it to a round-trip ticket.

The new rules will not, so far as I can tell, require airlines to only advertise round-trip fares.

What's interesting is not just that people who fly are too stupid to know there are taxes, and too weak to then decide not to buy a ticket once the "full cost" is disclosed, but that also this regulation comes from "conservative" Republicans, who are (on paper, and at debates where their supporters jeer US soldiers) against regulation.

The regulation in question, issued by the Department of Transportation, has been under consideration since 2006 -- when, as I recall, there was a Republican in charge of the White House. The DOT being an executive branch department, Worst President Ever was at the helm when Transportation began mulling regulating airlines more heavily, imposing higher costs on them to disclose full prices by changing their advertising routines and how they display fares on their websites.

What problem was being addressed by this new regulation? According to an amicus brief filed in a lawsuit challenging the rule,

it took a consumer over 20 minutes to conduct one incomplete apples-to-apples comparison of flight and fee offerings on a single city pair search using airline websites.

OVER 20 MINUTES!

That brief is fascinating reading: The DOT took fifty pages for its rule and preamble. (The brief in support of the rule took only 38 pages, about 1/5 of that being used for mandatory court-ruled disclosures.)

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast that seems to have not yet made it to the DOT or other government officials. In "What do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have In Common?" the Freakonomics folks pointed out that doctors, who should know better, have in many cases a lower rate of hand-washing on the job than many other people (at one hospital, only 9% of doctors washed their hands when they should.) Extrapolating that out, the Freakonomics people asked whether financial literacy -- teaching people about finances -- works to help people make smarter decisions.

The alternative to teaching people smarter decisions was a thought balloon from one law professor suggesting that instead of requiring everyone to know everything about finance -- we all already have not just our day jobs but our secondary job as tech support for our computers and phones and tablets -- we should encourage the growth of a "cadre" of financial advisors who would not have any particular interest -- life insurance salesmen and stock brokers are not financial advisors, they're salespeople -- but who would, for a fee, give people advise and help them make decisions.

THAT is a wonderful idea, and one we already do in a great many areas: we have doctors to provide health advice, mechanics to provide car advice, lawyers to provide legal advice, and so on. In any area where problems can become complex and dramatic, we have disinterested fiduciaries who can be consulted to provide information.

Except finance.

The answer to finance is to teach people, but that may not work. I meet plenty of smart people who don't understand financial questions and who don't read the billions of pages of disclosures we all get every day. South Park has made fun of the fact that nobody reads that "I agree" statement before clicking it, but the other day, I saw a lawyer sign an agreement concerning a royalty without bothering to read it.

A lawyer.

Which, I'll admit, I do, too.

So will disclosing the actual price of airline tickets help people better understand what they're paying for? The current, unbundled system may cause people to spend

OVER TWENTY MINUTES!

trying to figure out airfares, but I don't expect that's causing people to give up in frustration and never fly. And the unbundled system helps disclose exactly how much of the price you pay goes towards being on the plane as opposed to having your luggage on the plane as opposed to having government regulations about the plane as opposed to just plain old taxes that get imposed on travelers everywhere.

So, to help consumers, we are going to provide them less information about what, exactly, they are paying for.

Imagine this: Right now, foods are required to contain a myriad of information about ingredients, and comparing those ingredients (as I do, since having a heart attack) can be difficult and time-consuming. Suppose I took a of me spending

OVER 20 MINUTES!

at the grocery store trying to figure out which Mini Wheats I wanted to buy as a replacement-for-Doritos-snack.

And suppose that led the Department of Whoever Is In Charge Of Food to conclude that this was wasteful, and instead, the boxes should simply say "Good" or "Bad."

It'd be easier for me to decide, wouldn't it? So shouldn't that be the rule? Car-buying is complicated, what with all the features and mileage and disclosures and add-ons and options. Why not just have a rule that says "One car, one price, no haggling, no little seller sheet," because deciphering all that information is time-consuming.

This rule is a quick-fix designed to help consumers who really don't need help -- airline travelers are far more likely to earn over $100,000 per year and 60% of all airline travelers have a college degree -- so that politicians can feel good about themselves while, in the long run, doing nothing, because consumers will now know less about how their price was calculated and will understand less the actual cost of things.

Also: How long until airlines are forced to disclose that your flight will in no way resemble the careless whisting of a feather through magical terrain?

I would really like a chance to know what it is I'm thinking...

2012-01-25T19:00:00.001-08:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of livecitizen for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Do you like to talk and read about politics? And if so, what’s your political alignment – red, or blue?

Or I should say, what do you think it is, and what is it really, as those two questions might not have the same answer. Lots of people think they’re one thing, and they’re really another, or a mixture of both. Or their views change over time.

Take me, for example: I always liked to think of myself as a conservative. I even registered to run for office as a Republican, about 15 years ago. Then, one day, I was writing about politics – health care – and it occurred to me just how liberal I seemed . I’d just never thought of myself as a liberal, and yet suddenly there I was.

I bring this up because I just found out about this great new political site, LiveCitizen. It’s a community political debate platform that lets people like me and you (you’re reading this blog, so you must like politics) discuss social and political issues – and while doing so, LiveCitizen helps you gauge just where you REALLY stand on the spectrum.

See, users can, when they sign up, say “red” or “blue” for their political persuasion – but LiveCitizen then uses that person’s activity over time to help them decide whether to stay with that color or not.

That’s an intriguing idea, and one that sets LiveCitizen apart from the rest of the Internet: It’s not just a chance to think about and talk about politics, but a chance to get some feedback on your own views. And that’s something to think about. It’s easy to say “I’m a Republican” or “I’m a Democrat” because that’s what you’ve always been but what’ll happen if after looking at how you actually think you realize you’re not as this or that as you thought you were?

Re-examining your own beliefs is the best way of challenging them and making sure you believe things for the right reasons, rather than out of habit. I’m going to join LiveCitizen over at www.livecitizen.com; hope to see you there!

http://www.livecitizen.com/?utm_source=socialspark&utm_medium=paidblog&utm_campaign=campaign1

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Federalism: Blogging The Federalist Papers, Introduction:

2012-01-24T04:39:00.010-08:00

This week, Obama made his State of the Union speech, talking about how much he'd like to frack for oil under mortgage bankers or something.

(I didn't watch.)

This week there was also the 65,789th debate among the current crop of candidates for the Republican nomination, in which Newt Gingrich claimed that Mitt Romney was unfit for the presidency because the moderator wouldn't let the crowd cheer for the execution of a gay soldier, or something.

(I didn't watch.)

And also this week, the Supreme Court issued a decision in which it said that the Founding Fathers would have disapproved of attaching a GPS unit to the car of a wife of a suspected drug dealer, and that therefore such activity violated the Fourth Amendment. This was after the Supremes also held that the Founding Fathers would have liked gory novels but that gory video games would be patently unconstitutional. Or something like that.

(I didn't read either of those opinions.)

This all got me thinking, though: we are in the midst of a debate about what our government should be, what protections we should have, what the Constitution means, and how our country should work.

Technically, we've always been in that debate. Since the dawn of the Constitution, we've been discussing what the Constitution allows and what it should not allow and often times we've framed that in terms of what the Founding Fathers meant by what they put in there.

As though that should matter.

Why should we care what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote the Constitution? Does what a bunch of dead guys felt about a government that treated a majority of the people under it as second-class citizens or property matter, anymore?

Yes, and no.

It matters, I suppose, because words have meaning and not words have meaning, by which I'm saying that what the framers of the Constitution wrote and what they did not write means something about what those words mean. Did they think that speech, religion, and the press were all equally important rights and therefore lump them into the First Amendment, rather than giving them one Amendment each? Why did they select certain words and not others? Why elaborate on powers the Congress or the Presidency would have in the Constitution, and is the list exhaustive, or illustrative?

Those are important considerations, to be sure.

Then again, it doesn't matter at all what they thought, for two reasons: first, we've amended the Constitution what, 17 times since the Bill of Rights was adopted? Not to mention passing statutes that change how constitutional procedures operate. So we've changed the meaning of the Constitution. It's stupid to ask why, for example, the Framers adopted the electoral college when we now directly elect Senators and have laws dictating who the Electors must vote for: we no longer adhere to the Framers' interpretation of the Electoral College. We've got our own interpretation of that.

Plus, the Constitution can be changed, so what the Framers wanted doesn't matter a whit if we want it: Want Video Games to be on par with Religion? Pass an Amendment that says:

Congrefs shall pafs no law respecting the Freedom To Shoot Fake Prostitutes In Ye Video Gamese.

And now the Constitution protects that.

Still, as the debate goes on, as I see people on Twitter commenting on how stupid the Electoral College is, as I see that there are people who will actually vote in as President a man who has as part of his platform arresting "activist" judges who disagree with him (any reasonable definition of "activist" judge would include the 5 who voted in the majority on Bush v. Gore, so Republicans don't know what they're really voting for there), I thought to myself that maybe it was time that I started helping clear things up, explaining what the Framers actually meant and comparing that to what's going on now and what people are proposing go on and by doing that, help explain to people why things work the way they do and why they shouldn't work any other way.

The problem is, I never read the Federalist Papers, despite being a political science major. I never read them or Common Sense or much of anything; I'm not sure what it was I learned in college, other than "don't rollerblade down hills in Shorewood without making sure there's not soft tar or you're going to need skin grafts," which, sure, THAT was very educational.

So I'll be reading the Federalist Papers for the first time, and blogging about them, and explaining them as best I can, in what might well be an ongoing series if I remember to do it.

And I'll begin with the Introduction, written by Publius, or Alexander Hamilton.

The text of the original paper is in red:

To the People of the State of New York:

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.

So, are you getting this? At the time the Constitution was being debated, there was a real fear that the "United" States would no longer be "United." The old government, the Articles of Confederation, with its weak, limited ...

... weak, limited...

...federal government was falling apart, and consider what that would have meant: Instead of 13 united states banding together to form one country, we'd have had up to 13 separate little countries in a balkanized eastern seaboard, all of them racing to settle and colonize the western regions.

Europe, in our lifetime, had to decide to tear down, a bit, the barriers that kept it being separate countries in order to compete economically.

With nothing less than the future of the entire country at stake, Hamilton went on:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

So Hamilton then raised the stakes and challenged his readers: Not only our little country is at stake, he's saying, but the fortune of mankind, and his challenge is to decide not just the form of government, but whether our government can be one which arises by thoughtful deliberation, not "accident and force."

This past year, Congress repeatedly couldn't agree on debt ceiling legislation, and ultimately tried to force itself to act by nominating a superCongress which would pass legislation because the alternative was automatic, draconian cuts.

So what kind of government have we slid into?

This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event. Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.

Okay, so bear with Publius here. Adding the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism needs to be read in context with the happy it will be sentence: What Hamilton is telling people is that the Constitution that was newly proposed and very controversial is important not just to narrow American self-interests, but to the public good: That continued his theme that what America was doing -- this idea, this Constitution -- was a service to the world.

"Yeah, sure, it'll be great for us," as I read it, "but really, we owe it to the world to adopt the 3/5 compromise and a Commerce Clause that someday will be used to try to force people to buy health insurance."

Only he put it better.

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

Or, to put it more bluntly: there's some guys who have a bunch of power at the state level, or who would profit from Balkanizing this continent, and they're going to place their own greed over the interests of the American people and humanity, so expect a big fight.

Greed and a thirst for power that can be used for one's own aggrandizement jeopardizing Constitutional elements? Good thing that never happened again in our history!

Oh, also: The Republicans have for some time been focusing on lower-level state offices in hopes of taking over state legislatures so they can redistrict to capture more seats in Congress, while at the same time urging people to be discontented with the electoral college so they can split up some "winner-take-all" states that traditionally have gone to Democrats by narrow margins, with these efforts funded by a handful of very rich men who then get elected representatives to do things like hold up funding for scientific research in hopes that federal money can be diverted to their own programs.

I don't know what made me think of that. It just popped into my head.

It is not, however, my design to dwell upon observations of this nature. I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views. Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable--the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears.

Recently, I took issue with some people on Twitter who were commending Rick Santorum for being "sincere" in his beliefs, and saying that Newt Gingrich was an intellectual because he was the smartest guy in the GOP race.

Sincerity of belief is no virtue when that belief is wrong, and opinions, even sincere ones, can be wrong, especially if founded on false facts. If I sincerely believe that you are an idiot because you disagree that the world is flat, I'm wrong and not to be commended for my sincerity. I may be blameless but I am not respectable.

So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists.

See? The lesson of people who believe other than we do is that we should make doubly sure we are right.

And also: just because someone advocates for the "right" position does not mean they are doing so for good and pure reasons. Insurance companies advocated for the individual mandate in ObamaCare before litigating against it. Why? Not because ObamaCare was, in their idea, a good move -- but because without the individual mandate, they would have had a much harder time making money hand over fist.

By the way, did you know that in 2011, three years into the Second Great Depression, health insurance companies were on their third straight year of record profits?

Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.

Let's talk about ambition and avarice, briefly. These days, people think "Why would someone want to be President?" It's described as a thankless job that earns "only" $400,000 per year and demands a lot of the person.

But consider: becoming president means that you'll be well-off, if not rich, after 4 or 8 years of working. And running for president often is itself a lucrative business move: what has Rick Santorum ever done since leaving the Senate? Other than make millions from (in part) sitting on the board of a hospital that allows unauthorized exorcisms as autism treatment and at which patients have been raped and murdered?

If a person is already rich, which many take as a disqualification for public office, avarice at least can be removed from the list of motivating factors. But it would be worthwhile to ask people why do you want to be President, and demand not bland platitudes, but real answers.

Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

Here's something you rarely hear from Republicans, who adore the Founding Fathers in all other respects: The Founders almost universally abhorred political parties. So when Reagan says above all, speak no ill of fellow Republicans, he is elevating to the status of virtue the love of party, which the Founding Fathers would have found morally repugnant.

A true strict constructionist would never join a party, and would remain suspicious of anyone who does.

And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose.

Good thing that never happened again in America, too.

To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty.

Wait, what? Did Hamilton just presage calling people "socialist"? He DID. Back in the 18th century, Alexander Hamilton correctly guessed that a large number of people would paint people who think government can work as "fond of despotic power and hostile to ... liberty."

Alexander Hamilton wrote the Tea Party's operating manual.

An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty;

Wait, what? A Founding Father... a Founding Father... thought we needed a powerful government to secure liberty?

Let me see if I've got this straight... thinking... thinking...Got it:

Alexander Hamilton was a socialist!

I mean, besides the fact that he advocated for the national bank and liked free trade and all that. SOCIALIST!

that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

Ha! Take that, Tea Party: "a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of people."

Why would Hamilton think that people who wanted a restrained, weak government were more dangerous than people who advocated for a more efficient federal power? Perhaps because regardless of where our rights come from, they can only be protected by an efficient government.

Perhaps.

And if the government isn't so great at its job it becomes easier to, I don't know, set up a system whereby you give billions of dollars of loans to people on "stated income" and then secure those loans with liens on real estate and then securitize the whole thing in a massive game of hot potato, only to nearly destroy the entire Western Hemisphere's economic system before demanding that the federal government then hand you money to keep your business afloat long enough to process fraudulent foreclosures on those homeowners, so you get the money and the land.

Perhaps.

History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

People who begin as demagogues and end as tyrants?

In the course of the preceding observations, I have had an eye, my fellow-citizens, to putting you upon your guard against all attempts, from whatever quarter, to influence your decision in a matter of the utmost moment to your welfare, by any impressions other than those which may result from the evidence of truth. You will, no doubt, at the same time, have collected from the general scope of them, that they proceed from a source not unfriendly to the new Constitution. Yes, my countrymen, I own to you that, after having given it an attentive consideration, I am clearly of opinion it is your interest to adopt it. I am convinced that this is the safest course for your liberty, your dignity, and your happiness. I affect not reserves which I do not feel. I will not amuse you with an appearance of deliberation when I have decided. I frankly acknowledge to you my convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they are founded. The consciousness of good intentions disdains ambiguity. I shall not, however, multiply professions on this head. My motives must remain in the depository of my own breast. My arguments will be open to all, and may be judged of by all. They shall at least be offered in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth.

I propose, in a series of papers, to discuss the following interesting particulars:

THE UTILITY OF THE UNION TO YOUR POLITICAL PROSPERITY

THE INSUFFICIENCY OF THE PRESENT CONFEDERATION TO PRESERVE THAT UNION

THE NECESSITY OF A GOVERNMENT AT LEAST EQUALLY ENERGETIC WITH THE ONE PROPOSED, TO THE ATTAINMENT OF THIS OBJECT

THE CONFORMITY OF THE PROPOSED CONSTITUTION TO THE TRUE PRINCIPLES OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT

ITS ANALOGY TO YOUR OWN STATE CONSTITUTION

and lastly,

THE ADDITIONAL SECURITY WHICH ITS ADOPTION WILL AFFORD TO THE PRESERVATION OF THAT SPECIES OF GOVERNMENT, TO LIBERTY, AND TO PROPERTY.

In the progress of this discussion I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention.

It may perhaps be thought superfluous to offer arguments to prove the utility of the UNION, a point, no doubt, deeply engraved on the hearts of the great body of the people in every State, and one, which it may be imagined, has no adversaries. But the fact is, that we already hear it whispered in the private circles of those who oppose the new Constitution, that the thirteen States are of too great extent for any general system, and that we must of necessity resort to separate confederacies of distinct portions of the whole.1 This doctrine will, in all probability, be gradually propagated, till it has votaries enough to countenance an open avowal of it.

Does anyone still believe in "states rights?" They do?

Weirdos.

Also: Anti-Founders.

For nothing can be more evident, to those who are able to take an enlarged view of the subject, than the alternative of an adoption of the new Constitution or a dismemberment of the Union. It will therefore be of use to begin by examining the advantages of that Union, the certain evils, and the probable dangers, to which every State will be exposed from its dissolution. This shall accordingly constitute the subject of my next address.

PUBLIUS.

Hamilton had a footnote, which I love. Footnotes are my favorite things, next to semicolons. On the issue of whether the 13 states were too different to be bound to a single government, he footnoted:

1. The same idea, tracing the arguments to their consequences, is held out in several of the late publications against the new Constitution.

It's important to remember that "The same idea" lost.

I could've won $1200 buck for being a temp in a terrible office?

2012-01-19T15:00:00.001-08:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Contest Factory for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

My worst workspace conditions ever were when I was a temp at this computer company in Milwaukee. I worked there for two months, with the title “administrative assistant.” My workspace was a desk that was sort of wedged into the side of a series of cubicles, so technically I worked in the space between the cubicles, not even high enough to warrant my own three-and-a-half walls. The desk was about three feet wide, and had a terrible chair, and was mostly taken up by the computer I had (the oldest one in the company), and I directly behind me was a cabinet where a bunch of old floppy discs were stored.

Not the greatest working conditions, but I made up for it by being not the greatest worker.

That was about 20 years ago, so there’s not much I can do about it now. But if I had a terrible office NOW, I could enter it into the Pimp My Cube contest the Contest Factory is running.

The Pimp My Cube Contest is looking for the the absolute worse, most pathetic, messiest, cluttered, cramped, annoying, terrible work spaces. Is your desk a cardboard box? Do you work in the corner of the basement by the trash compactor? Did you just think “Hey, Star Wars!” when I said “Trash compactor”? Me, too.

Anyway: if you have a terrible office, or horrifying cubicle, or cluttered workspace, the Contest Factory wants to hear from you. Not to make fun of you, but to give you $1,200 in prizes:

o New high end computer system
o New Desk, Chair and Decorations
o New Entertainment Package with high end stereo, espresso machine etc.

To enter, just record and upload a video of your terrible cubicle, then get your friends and family and coworkers to vote your office the worst ever. Videos will be chosen based on quality of video, terribleness of office, and number of votes, and you’ve got until January 31, 2012 to enter. As of now, nobody has yet entered, so you’ve got great odds. And even if you don’t make the top three can win a second-prize $200 gift card chosen by random drawing.

So make that terrible cubicle work for you! Go take your video and get entered!

I wonder if that company would let me come back and make a video to enter my old workspace?...

Thursday Scramble! Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World! (NSFW)

2012-01-19T07:50:00.001-08:00

This is actually chapter 23; to begin the story at the beginning, click here. Or, to download the entire story in book form for free, click here.

WARNING: This scene is graphic!

Rachel, after awakening from her zombie state, fell in love with Bridget, who through the magic of a time warp, gave birth to their daughter Harper. Now, having been disintegrated by Harper to save her from the Bubbles, Rachel has been captured by Bridget's dad. No, that doesn't explain anything, which is why you should read the story.

"Let go of me," I said.

He pushed me back on the bed, his leering face only inches from mine. "No," he breathed. "Do you know what I've been through? I've literally been to Hell, died, had my body reconstructed into this monstrosity," and he pointed down at himself, "All to search for what is rightfully mine."

He paused.

"You."

Another pause, as he loomed over me.

"You, you are mine."

"I got that," I told him, trying to sound braver than I was feeling. He was lying on top of me and was heavier than I felt I could move.

"I created you, Rachel. Not literally. I did not myself carve up the women who would become your parts. I did not myself go and kidnap you from that concert. I did not drag your unconscious body down into the cellar where that mad idiot works doing things only he can do. I did not remove your chip and I did not pick out the limbs that would become the new you and then sew them together into this remarkably sexy package, binding them seamlessly by calling on energy from in between the dimensions."

He looked down at the stump of my left arm.

"Except for that one. I picked out that one, and that one in particular was the one that belonged to me." He stared back into my eyes and then put one of his hands, the one with the delicate nails, onto my breast, began kneading it and pulling it, roughly.

"Do you want to know why?" he asked.

"Don't touch me, please," I managed to whisper.

He took his hand and pushed harder against my breast, and I felt a cold sweat break out. Shifting his weight, he pressed his knee into my stomach, just below my ribcage.

"Don't tell me what to do, you lesbian zombie whore," he said, and my blood stopped in my veins at the threat in his voice.

With a tiny twitch of his weight, he pumped his knee into me. My breath whooofed out of me and tears sprang to my eyes and I gasped. He pinched my breast and then punched me in the face.

"Stop it!" Bridget yelled. I couldn't see her. I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath as my legs were roughly pushed apart.

"You don't know what resources went into creating you, all to have a body that could hold on to that hand and all because that hand was the final ingredient in controlling the thousands of slaves we created," Bridget's dad said.

"Don't do this, Daddy!" Bridget yelled again.

"SHUT HER UP!" Bridget's dad roared and punched me in the face again. Before I could even catch my breath he pushed his knee into my stomach again and I gasped again, feeling emptied of air entirely. His hands were pushing in between my thighs and I wanted to fight him, I did, but I couldn't even catch my breath and my lungs were so empty it caused me actual pain inside my chest.

I heard a crack of metal on a head and Bridget screamed and The Me's voice said "Don't do that!" and there was a scuffle sound as Bridget's dad's hand pushed into me and I tried to fight and he said:

"Don't fight me. You have lost the one thing you were created to keep and since this body belonged to others before it became your demon soulless shell, you shouldn't care what I do to it." He pushed his knee down again and my body felt like it was turned inside out as I struggled to breath. He punched the side of my head and I saw stars.

"I would kill you, but I need the body alive. I must make sure you understand never to oppose me again," he said, and viciously raked his nails over my inner thigh. I would have screamed but I couldn't even suck in air, as he was keeping his knee pushed into my stomach now.

I began to black out.

I felt his hands in me, inside my thighs and on my breasts and one pushing into my mouth and the room went all spinny and then a voice crackled through an intercom:

"It's not here!"

Bridget's dad stopped staring at my pussy and turned his terrible face back to look at mine. Through blurred tunnel vision, I saw him purse his lips.

"That is very bad for you," he said. "But worse for your lovers."

He punched me again in the face, and said: "Kill them."

Obama thinks maybe Lea Michele can convince you to vote for him. (Election 2012)

2012-01-17T09:43:00.002-08:00

The Tennessean got its hands on a top-secret, "proprietary" (because even lower-level campaign hacks like buzzwords) list of people the Obama 2012 team thinks would be good endorsers. The list says a lot about... well, almost everything depending on how you interpret it.

While big names like Oprah Winfrey are getting all the publicity, the list (which is 7 pages long and captioned "Confirmed and Passed Surrogates") doesn't just focus on Hollywood types. It includes names like "Kaye Wilson," listed as "Sasha and Malia's Godmother." (Kaye is actually Eleanor Kaye Wilson, and she was profiled in the Chicago Tribune, which mentioned she got to greet foreign dignitaries as part of her duties taking care of the First Daughters.)

Also on the list? Vampire Weekend, the band that is too cool for you to listen to (but not too cool to get sued over unauthorized use of a cover model), Gloria Steinem (whose job is listed as "feminist," which isn't actually an occupation), Chris Pine (whose career includes playing a guy who threatened a cop with a gun but all was forgiven after he stopped that runaway train), Bebe Neuwirth (who I thought was dead), Bruce Hornsby, because fans of 80s-lite-rock are crucial to every re-election (but not The Range?) Maggie Gyllenhaal, and a listing for "Fergie Ferguson," Musician.

Fergie's real name, by the way, is Stacy Ann Ferguson. Just to clear that up, Obamans.

This one stuck out: Rob Dyrdek, "Professional Skateboarder/ Producer/Philant"; they left out "enterpreneur, producer, and reality TV star."

You can read the whole list and draw your own conclusions from it. My personal opinion? The list shows that some mid-level staffer on the Obama campaign has only a passing familiarity with pop culture.

Here's Vampire Weekend's best song, "Walcott."

There are absolutely no problems in our “health care” “system”! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

2012-01-14T13:00:00.001-08:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Walgreens for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Sometimes, following health care news developments is like wading into a crowd of fighting five-year-olds: You don’t know what caused the problem or where the next punch is coming from, but it’s sad and ridiculous anyway.

That’s my feelings on the dispute between Walgreens and Express Script.

Express Scripts, you may not know, is a health care middleman: they contract with health insurers and the like, and contract with drug stores on the other end, and provide payments to the drug stores for the prescriptions people buy. How a company like that even EXISTS is beyond me: what benefits do they provide to the world for doing what they do?

They must provide SOME benefit, right? Because Express Scripts’ profits are growing at about double the rate of all other health-care industry businesses. So they’re doing SOMETHING, but is that something really good for people (which is, of course, supposed to be the point of the “health care” “industry.”)

What Express Scripts seems to be doing is peeling off (as Sherman McCoy’s wife would put it) the crumbs from the golden cake: wedging itself into the middle and demanding profits. It’s a Profit Troll, a phrase I just made up but which I like: a company that provides no real benefit but demands money.

And how it’s demanding money! Express Scripts recently in its negotiations for a new contract with Walgreen’s wasn’t willing to accept Walgreen’s offers to keep its rates flat and to ensure lowest prices for Tricare; no, Express Scripts wanted more power and more money and so as a result, Walgreen’s and Express Scripts aren’t in business anymore.

That means for you that you either pay higher prices at your local Walgreen’s and Duane Reed, or you have to go to a new pharmacy where nobody knows you and it’s farther away. And for military families, who get their insurance through Tricare, what it means is that you’re not guaranteed the lowest prices for prescriptions. Thanks for risking your lives for defending Express Scripts’ demands for obscene profits!

Walgreen’s is at least doing something. They’re letting people enroll in their Walgreens Prescription Savings Club for a discount for January:

http://www.walgreens.com/pharmacy/psc/psc_overview_page.jsp

So $10 will get a whole family in ($5 for one person), and that’ll get you discounts on 8,000 different brand-name medications, plus low prices on generics and Walgreen’s discounts on flu shots, pet scripts, nebulizers and other things. Members also get bonuses for using other Walgreen’s services, like photofinishing, so you can continue to save on medications and still do one-stop shopping at your local pharmacy.

With every OTHER problem health care faced, this is unnecessary, and you should pick sides, like me: Stick up for Walgreen’s: Like Walgreens on Facebook and follow Walgreens on Twitter (@Walgreens), and help make things better.

what is 'the After'?

2012-01-12T07:04:00.001-08:00

the After on Prezi

the After is...

... everything you want it to be.

...a trap

...where all your friends and family wait for you

...frighteningly perfect

the After is my latest book: four years in the making, the After tells what happens to Saoirse following a plane crash that leaves her standing in her perfect kitchen with her perfect family in a perfect world that she cannot stand. Told by William Howard Taft -- yes, that William Howard Taft, who appears on her doorstep -- that she can leave, Saoirse sets off on her own travels through a world almost entirely of her making, trying to find out how to leave and to decide if she wants to.

If you ever wondered what comes next, the After is a must-read. Buy it on your Kindle for $0.99 or in paperback on Amazon.

Click here for a sneak preview of a portion of the book.

Ron Paul, you are CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAZY. But the women who support you are hot. (2012 Election)

2012-01-10T04:47:00.007-08:00

As New Hampshirinos go to the polls today to decide who will briefly be the front-runner for the Republican nominee before all the Racist Uneducated Anti-Mormons who currently make up the GOP base realize, no, they're stuck with Mitt, I thought it would be... instructive?

No, that's not the word.

Fun?

Getting warmer, I suppose.

A space-filler that helps point out how dangerously crazy Ron Paul actually is?

Bingo.

To point out how dangerously crazy Ron Paul actually is by combining actual Ron Paul quotes with hot women. The hot women come from the "Pin-Ups For Ron Paul" calendar, and I'd link to it but linking to a Republican website automatically enrolls you in the Ku Klux Klan, so you'll have to find it on your own if you are so inclined.

The pictures are from the "Hotties 08" line-up, because (ii) I could only find pics of that and (^) Ron Paul's chances to get elected died long ago anyway, so using a 'blast from the past' set of pictures seemed appropriate.

On making sure your medicine is safe: Asked whether the federal government should regulate drugs, Paul said

"you don't need government to do that... On regulations, no, I don't believe in any of these federal regulations ... [W]ho ends up doing the regulations on the drugs? They do as much harm as good."

By the way: There may kind of be some powerful prescription painkillers in your Gas-X, so make sure you take extra free markets with you to Walgreens.

On AIDS: Paul, a "medical doctor" of the same sort Tom Coburn claims to be -- don't be their patient!-- once proposed a simple treatment plan for AIDS sufferers, which included this:

Do not allow the [AIDS] patient to eat in a restaurant.

To be fair, he was probably concerned about making sure the restaurant's bathroom was open in case he needed to use it to avoid catching gay from an apartment.

On how you could pay for health care if only Big Pharma wasn't using doctors to keep you sick:

Paul, who admits on his site that medical expenses are too high and who proposes to give the poor a tax break for actual health care expenses -- a "solution" that would give the poor a break on taxes they don't pay (because they have no income) to offset the money they don't make that they don't spend on health care they don't receive -- says that everyone would be fine if doctors would just provide free care, but they don't because:

Unfortunately, the current medical monopoly corrupts many doctors by rewarding practices that are not in the patients’ best interest. Pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in not curing people, but getting them permanently addicted to expensive drugs that have many side effects, thereby requiring additional drugs to suppress those side effects. Many doctors are afraid to speak up and question the system for fear of being ostracized by their peers or even losing their license.

See? We don't need socialized medicine. We just need the free market to... um... undo what the free market has done.

That quote, by the way, comes directly from Paul's website.

On how the government was just the right size in 2001, and we can get back to that paradise if we just put in federal toll roads: Paul is quoted at "On The Issues" as being in favor of getting rid of the income tax:

But, you know, if you got rid of the income tax today you’d have about as much revenue as we had 10 years ago, and the size of government wasn’t all that bad 10 years ago. There’re sources of revenues other than the income tax. You have tariff, excise taxes, user fees, highway fees. So, so there’s still a lot of money. But the real problem is spending. But, you know, we lived a long time in this country without an income tax. Up until 1913 we didn’t have it.

In 2001, the federal government took in $1,991,100,000,000. (Source.) $1,145,400,000,000 of that came from income taxes. I'm no mathematician, but that's over half of all revenues. Ron's not proposing, mind you, to cut government in half in that quote. He wants to get the government to its 2001 size and fund it without income taxes: so "tariff, excise taxes, user fees, highway fees" would all have to double to get Ron Paul the government he wants.

Enjoy paying about $400 for that Mattel action figure toy you want: action figures are largely imported and taxed via tariffs. That's just an example, of course: In RonPaulAmerica(TM) circa 2001, you will also pay to drive anywhere the federal government makes a road, and you would enjoy user fees for other government services like police protection and the Army.

"Hello? This is Wisconsin. We've been invaded by Canada and need some army."

"Certainly. Do you want to pay with a credit or debit card?"

I certainly look forward to that.

Being invaded by Canada, I mean. It's got to beat living in RonPaulAmerica(TM) circa 2001.

Also: I'm pretty sure this girl to the right is bleeding.I hope she has some money to get that treated right away so that next year, RonPaul'sGovernment (TM) Circa 2001 can give her a break on her taxes.

On the other hand, this means a bumper crop of liberal voters 18 years from now...

2012-01-10T04:38:00.003-08:00

Last year, Wisconsin politics returned to a much-loved subject on the right, probably the thing the current GOP loves second-best (next to making sure that every nutjob in the state carries a gun secretly): Making sure kids get pregnant and diseased.

They don't say it that way, of course: The politicians who want kids to get pregnant or sick as quickly as possible don't come right out and tell people that. Instead, they say something like:

"We want to promote abstinence-only education," which, let's face it, is the same thing as telling kids to get pregnant.

The usual argument made by people who support early pregnancies among teens is that if you tell teens how to have safe sex, you're giving them the green light to have sex. It's funny, though: sex is the only area where people (conservatives, so I'm using the term people loosely) argue that telling someone how to be safe creates the urge to do that thing.

That is: Conservatives say telling someone if you're going to have sex, be safe makes kids more likely to be safe.

But wouldn't that hold true for everything kids want to do? Nobody says "if we tell Sally to wear her seatbelt, it will only encourage her to drive. We'd better never mention seatbelts around her." They don't say that because it would be ridiculous: Sally's going to want to drive no matter what; you might as well make sure she's belted in.

That's why I made sure to tell our kids about condoms and why they should use them: I'm a responsible parent who knows that his kids are someday going to have sex. I'd prefer if they wait until never to do that, but I'm a realist and I know that teens want to have sex, and so I made sure they were prepared.

Teens and young adults go to parties. They go on spring break. They live in dorms where the opposite sex is walking around in towels. They live, in short, in a smorgasbord of sex opportunities and so I make sure they know how to be healthy about all that temptation.

And it's easier than ever to stay safe: You can order condoms online, from sites like that link goes to, and they'll be delivered discreetly and quickly, so you don't have to go to the corner store and get them, and you'll never have to be without them.

Abstinence is fine, in the abstract. But people aren't abstract. So they ought to be smarter about sex, and use condoms to avoid pregnancies and disease.

A man accused of exposing sex organs to children thinks Scott Walker is an excellent candidate. (On Wisconsin)

2012-01-05T10:41:00.004-08:00

News is breaking that Brian Pierick, a Walker campaign worker's "longtime partner and a staffer at the state Department of Public Instruction"(source) has been charged with child enticement. Court records in Waukesha County case number 12 CV 22 show two charges filed, for violation of 948.07(3)(Child Enticement-Expose Sex Organ) and 948.10(1)(Child as Actor/Close Age of Actor and Child).

While we don't yet know what Pierick thinks of those charges, we do know that Pierick supported Gov. Patsy in the past election. Signing a "Petition For Mark Neumann To NOT Run For Governor," Pierick wrote:

Scott Walker is an excellent candidate. Neumann should stay out of this race and not cause Walker to waste valuable resources. Now that the left has had a taste of what they can have with Doyle and Obama, they will throw a ton of money behind Doyle to keep that seat. We cannot let happen. We need to come together and support Walker. Walker stepped aside for the good of the party in the last election...Neumann should do the same thing now!

Up next: Jerry Sandusky to appear at a pro-Walker rally!

The full complaint is available for your reading, but be forewarned: it includes the word "twinks." Also, the text-chats (in full graphic detail) suggest that there were two men ready to...

well, I'll let you read it.

If you are conservative, you're more likely to be hot, and a terrible person.

2012-01-04T14:26:00.005-08:00

And also, conservatives are basically like Russian leaders, but don't want to admit it!

This morning, on The Dan Patrick Show where I don't normally get my political news, Dan and his minions talked about posting a poll asking, simply "Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin," without explaining what criteria people would use to vote, and from there went on to try to figure out what Democrats they could throw into the mix...

... and they came up with Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton which, okay, maybe they're not my cup of tea, but are they anybody's cup of tea?

And I thought "Really? You can't come up with a hot liberal politician right away?"

And now, 8 hours later, I still couldn't think of one -- and so I googled hot liberal women politicians because that can't get me in any trouble at work, right? -- and found all kinds of links to a study released back in March, 2011, that said right-wingers were generally hotter than left-wingers.

The researchers didn't have a solid theory why that is, but theorized that it's cause and effect: if you're good-looking, you're likely to be anti-egalitarian; that is, the more privileged you are, the less you want others to have privileges.

Which sounds about right, pun fully intended, doesn't it?

As if to point out how painfully unattractive you have to be in order to actually care about people as a politician, this June list of the 30 hottest political women of 2011 found only two actual politicians to include on the liberal-hot side, Maria Cantwell,

Who is Alison Janney's less-attractive older sister, and Barbara Boxer,

Who is a male Sarah Palin impersonator.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But even allowing for politics hot as opposed to real world hot, neither of them are hot.

To underscore, too, the fact that all liberals are secretly Marxists, that list included Alina Kabaeva:

who is undeniably hot and who was included on that list of "liberals" because she's been linked, romantically, to Vladimir Putin.

The (conservative, duh) author of that hot-lady article, Eric Golub, claims he "began blogging on March 11, 2007, the midpoint of 9/11." Huh? 9/11 had a midpoint and it was 6 years after the actual day? In any event, Mr. Golub was too busy making incomprehensible jokes (?) about 9/11 to bother looking at Putin's policies. Vladimir Putin instituted a flat tax (favored by most GOP candidates as of October, 2011), reduced corporate profits taxes (ditto), promoted energy pipelines (a pet project of the current Congressional GOP), arrested people who protested his policies (a less radical step than Newt Gingrich's proposal to arrest judges who don't do what he says), and so on.

In short: Eric Golub is too dumb/lazy to know that Vladimir Putin is a Republican, which is too bad for Romney because it just means that after everyone finds out Santorum is a nutjob, too, the GOP is likely going to cling to Vlad the way it once tried to grope Herman Cain.

Hooter Girls For A Better Society! (It's The Great Ranking Of Priorities!)

2011-12-29T06:46:00.006-08:00

Seems as though it's time for me to take the bull by the oars and once again tell the world what to think and how to think about it, given that people were for a very short while doing things like #Occupying Wall Street in hopes of getting some economic justice but all that quickly went away in a flurry of downward finger gestures and protests against First World Injustices.

By which I mean: I am going to Rank The Priorities we ought to have, because what I saw this morning led me to think that the uptick in social engagement and activism we saw in 2011 has suddenly been led astray -- I don't know by who so I'll just say "by corporations" -- and people are starting to forget that our world is in a crisis in which the federal government is about a week away from directly letting people who helped create the housing crisis continue to profit from it because not even the Obama Administration really gives a #(#*@ about anything anymore, and as people forget about all that they're using their energy to protest what I was going to call dumb things but instead I'll be politic and call them less than important things.

By which I mean:

Chicago-area mothers joined a nationwide demonstration against restrictive corporate breastfeeding policies Wednesday morning at Target stores citywide.

The "nurse-in" is an increasingly popular tool for breastfeeding advocates and nursing mothers to highlight alleged violations of Illinois law, which does not classify public nursing as indecency. Whole Foods stores were recently targeted after an employee reportedly told a nursing mother to cover up, and Wednesday's demonstration was inspired by a recent incident at a Houston-area Target store, Time reports.

(Source.) There were, at last report, over 6,000 people "liking" the protest or something dumb on Facebook, which, yeah, okay, it takes a second to click that thumb or whatever it is, so that's hardly worth noting -- but also this:

Best for Babes [the people organizing this shenanigan] reached out to Target last week to see if they could work together in advance of this event. "Nurse-ins require a lot of time, planning and effort from busy moms," Best for Babes wrote on their website with hopes that they could come to an agreement with the chain. Target's response was unsatisfactory, and the organization has decided to move forward with their demonstration, which will take place today, December 28th.

(Source.) Nurse-ins require a lot of time? Yes. Yes, they do. So it's a good thing that those mothers used their scarce resources -- time and money are scarce for most of us and especially so for "busy moms"-- for something that ultimately

Isn't.

That.

Important.

Okay, breast-feeding moms, I get it: You want to whip out your boobs everywhere you go because God forbid you should have to feed your baby and not browse those cute tops on the discount rack at the same time. But is that where you want your efforts, your social activism, your time and money and attention to go?

Was that the single biggest problem you could think to address at that time?

I've talked about stuff like this before, noting that people who try to rescue pets while children starved are horrible people, and that people who parade a camel around Washington D.C. were wasting time and money, too, and that mild complaining didn't seem to help, so I decided that maybe we, as a society, ought to have a list, a ranking, of priorities for our society so that we can tackle problems that really matter before problems that only sorta matter.

And I am the person to create that ranking, and this is the start of it. So here we go! On The Great Ranking Of Priorities, I put "Making Sure Women Can Breast Feed At Target" at...

...7,397th.

Also: I'm not just a complainer, I'm a fixer-upper -- so rather than simply make fun of women who took time off from getting the Subaru detailed, I thought I'd also point out that those Chicago-area Moms With Boobs could have done something really helpful, like, say, provide child-care for homeless women.

Over at Volunteer Match.org, it's easy to find charities to volunteer for. I typed in "Chicago" and "Moms" and got this:

San Jose Obrero Mission

One of the greatest obstacles facing single, homeless mothers is an inability to locate affordable childcare. Without affordable childcare, searching for jobs and housing, attending job interviews, attending school and career training, and running errands are extremely difficult tasks. That's why SJOM is searching for volunteers that would like to fill in the gaps so that our women can focus on becoming self-sufficient for themselves and their families.

Childcare is needed most at these times:

Days: Each month, we host a 10-day Career Training session at our Families in Crisis facility for non-working participants. [Contact us for specific days and times.]
Evenings: Every Tuesday from 6:30 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. we host Self-Esteem Building workshops for our women.

Childcare providers are encouraged to help children with homework and/or plan other activities to engage them in learning.

So, Moms With Boobs And No Time, you could have spent your time providing some childcare and homework assistance to a fellow (but homeless) Mom who is getting career training to make her life better.

But, no, yeah, I'm glad you were able to show your hooters at Target. Thanks for caring... so little.

So They Made A Song About Recalling Scott Walker, 4

2011-12-16T19:36:00.002-08:00

I'm in a good mood tonight: The Senate got a two-month extension of the payroll taxes on the middle class and will pay for it by charging higher fees to mortgage investors while giving Obama a chance to kill the oil pipeline and the Recall Walker folks have 500,000+ signatures and are on their way to winning the right to force a referendum on Walkernomics.

So let's celebrate RECALL STYLE! Here's If You Can Sleep With Open Eyes; lyrics by Adrian Grimes and Andy Ford, performed by Hell’n’Ade,

Look at that -- someone dropped a little boy and forgot to pick him up.

2011-12-16T19:23:00.004-08:00

See that boy? He's a victim of Christmas Shopping Fatigue. And that could be you, if you're not careful.

I love Christmas shopping, but I have to admit, even I have my limits, and we hit it tonight with trips to three different stores on top of the five different stores we went to last night -- but we had to go tonight because we had to get our presents in the mail and tomorrow's the last day we can do that and still maybe have them get there on time...

...and note that I said maybe because I did all that before I realized I could get all the Christmas Shipping Deadlines online from Best Online Coupons.

I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Best Online Coupons is BOOKMARKED on my computer, because it has all kinds of Amazon.com Coupons, which is where Sweetie shops, because Sweetie is smart and efficient and I am not.

But even with her smartness and efficienciness, Sweetie didn't realize about the Best Online Coupons guide to Shipping Deadlines for Christmas 2011 and how much help they could be, and so we ended up at the stores tonight, tramping around until our poor son collapsed...

... well, okay, he was probably also looking for a little attention, but still...collapsed!

And we could've just gone to Best Online Coupons, gotten all kinds of online discounts and savings, ordered our gifts and had them shipped, all the while knowing exactly when they would have to be shipped to make sure they get there by Christmas.

Don't let the horror of SHOPPING FATIGUE strike your loved ones. Head to Best Online Coupons right away! Before it's too late!

The 1% is now down to just SIX people, really.

2011-12-12T06:34:00.003-08:00

The news the other day that just six people in the United States own as much stuff as the bottom thirty percent of our country, coupled with an idiot commenter on someone else's blog, has made me want to point out something that cannot be pointed out enough: The rich are getting richer and the rich are not you and me, and never will be unless we start having a more fair society.

The comment was left on a blog written by author/epic critic/guy Michael Offutt, who was writing about truthtelling and mentioned #Occupy Wall Street, and got, in response, a vituperative and incorrect comment from a deluded man who finds arguing on behalf of the selfish rich to be in his, and/or society's, best interests. Said Jay Noel, a self-styled "sales and marketing warrior",

1% actually control anywhere between 38% - 42% of the nation's assets depending on which study you look at...Oh, and by the way, to get into that top 1%, you have to have an income of more than $343,000. Hardly middle class, but hardly a millionaire.

And a VAST majority of that 1% are people like doctors, dentists, school administrators, small business owners, insurance agents and actuaries, rocket scientists, and non-profit executives. They're all assholes?

...

Even if we took every single penny from every single millionaire and billionaire in this country, it still wouldn't even pay off our national debt!

The free market and true capitalism will never see it's full bloom until it's fair. That's what many protesters are asking for. And I can't agree more.

But heck, even those right-winger show hosts give a lot to charity. Even if it's just for the sake of a tax deduction. In fact, academic studies on the subject empirically show that Republicans give a higher percentage of their earnings than Democrats. And they give something even more important to charities: their time. They volunteer more as well.
...

Where to begin with that? There is so much misinformation and misunderstandings, and after I read that last night, I woke up to this:

Six Wal-Mart heirs are wealthier than U.S.' entire bottom 30%

That was the headline on the LA Times site today, over an article that is well worth reading and hard to understand, as evidenced in part by the fact that sales and marketing warriors don't get it.

We live in a country where the money and property of six people at the top end outweighs, if put on a scale, the money and property of one hundred million people.

The U.S. as this moment, 3:26 p.m. Friday afternoon, December 9, has 312,757,380 people. 30% of that group is 93,000,000 people.

Six people on this side. 93,000,000+ people on that side -- and the six people are heavier than the rest, when weighed by wealth.

Let's have an idea what that looks like. Numbers are so hard to grasp.

Here are six people:

i i i i i i

I used lower-case is because they kind of look like people.

Now, let's look at 93,000,000 people.

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
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That's not actually 93,000,000 people. That's 5,920 people. If you take that 15,709 times, you get 93,000,000 people.

Those six people:

i i i i i i

Have more money and wealth than 15,709 groups of 5,920 people.

That's the 1%.

Some more statistics made real: The LA Times says:

The wealth of the 1% is about 225 times greater than that of the typical family, compared to 125 times in 1962, according to analysis from labor economist Sylvia Allegreto with UC Berkeley.

That seems dry, doesn't it?

So here's some more pictorial help.

This is rich vs. poor in 1962:

Poor:

$

Rich:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Seem fair? Remember that old saying, A rising tide lifts all boats?

Here's rich vs. poor, 2011:

Poor:

$

Rich:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Funny. That poor boat doesn't seem lifted.

Today, in America, most people consider you rich if you make more than $150,000 per year. There is no definition of rich, but in America, more than one-half of the people think you're "rich" if you make more than $150,000 a year. That is to say: If you earn $150,000 or more per year, more than half of all Americans would say you're rich.

But that doesn't necessarily make you rich.

The median household income in 2009, according to the census, was $50,221. I always use median in this context because it tells you a lot, and what it tells you is: one-half of all households in the United States, in 2009, earned less than $50,221.

Remember that old law school trope, look to your left and look to your right? Well, look around the group of people you saw most recently: half of that group, in 2009, lived in a household that earned less than $50,221. For the year.

That's the 99% -- but not all of them, because only half of all Americans lived below that line. The remainder, the other half, lived above $50,221, and that's Idiot Jay Noel's point, in part: Lots of people make lots of money, he says, and they're not rich:

Oh, and by the way, to get into that top 1%, you have to have an income of more than $343,000. Hardly middle class, but hardly a millionaire.

That's what Idiot Jay Noel said. Let's look at that.

The highest median income in any locality in the United States is $248,355. That's in Hidden Hills, California. What that means, again, is that one-half of the people in Hidden Hills, California, make more than $248,355, while the other half makes less than that.

Which means that if you make $343,000, per year -- if you are in the 1%, then you make $100,000 or so more than the median income wherever you live.

I like pictures, so let's compare again. Here is the median income for the United States, as a whole:

Half of all people make less than that.

Here is the median income in Hidden Hills, California:

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

Half of the people in Hidden Hills, the wealthiest municipality in the U.S., make more than that.

And here is how much income you have to have to get into the 1%.

Only 1% of Americans make that much money, according to Idiot Jay Noel.

So are they rich? That 1% who makes all those thousands per year? Let's consider, by looking at what it is people pay on a day-to-day basis.

AAA estimates that the average annual cost of owning a car is $6,114 per day, plus about 18 cents a mile driven.

At $50,000 per year, that uses up 12% of your gross income. (Not counting the per-mile costs).

At $343,000 per year, that uses 1% of your income. (Hey! One percent!)

Of course, after paying that $6,114, the bottom half of America has $44,000 or so remaining (gross). The 1% has $337,000 remaining, gross.

What about housing costs? The median rental in 2010, according to the Census, was $1,000 or so per month. So one-half of all apartments cost less than $1,000 per month. If you paid just $1,000 per month in housing costs, that would use 24% of the bottom-half's gross income. Meanwhile, it's just 3% of the income of the 1%.

And, of course, in real dollars, after a car and an apartment, the bottom half have $20,000...gross, while the top 1%, driving that same car and renting that same apartment (likely!) have $325,000 left in their pockets.

Then there's food: the U.S. Census' average household grocery budget for a family of four on the "thrifty" plan, in 2010, was $118.10 per week. I can tell you, that is extremely thrifty: back in about 2000, when I was just starting out, our weekly grocery budget for Sweetie and myself and three kids was about $100, and we barely made that.

At $118.10 per week, the average household spends $6,141 on groceries. If you're the bottom 50%, that means another 12% of your income gone to just barely get by on groceries. (To get an idea what that's like, read this MSN article about a woman who tried to spend just $100 per week on groceries.) Again, that's only 1% of the top 1%'s income.

And, keeping track: if you have a car, and an apartment, and food, that bottom 1% now has just $26,000 (gross) left. The top 1%: $319,000 still sittin' in the bank.

Now, Idiot Jay also mentioned paying taxes. There would, of course, be taxes to pay, right? Certainly on the top 1%. Using the IRS Withholding Calculator, we can estimate the maximum tax bite for our family of 1%ers.

I assumed straight wages, no deductions of any sort -- one income per family. That's about as flat, (and unfair) a tax as you can get. Using those assumptions (two kids both tax deductible, standard deductions), the 1% family pays $81,933 in federal taxes.

That's a lot!

But not all that much, really. It's 23% of that family's income, sure, but remember, that's sans deductions. Still, $81,933 is a hefty tax bite. I'll agree with that.

But after paying those taxes, our nondeducting, nontaxplanning 1% Family with a car, a modest apartment, and thrifty grocery habits still...still has $237,607 (gross) wages remaining.

So presumably they will be able to make ends meet.

What about that bottom-halfer family across the hall? With the same criteria: 2 kids, no deductions beyond the standard deduction, their tax burden is $2,694 -- 5% of their total income.

(Which means that if a family earning $50,000 in income truly pays no taxes, it is because they have been given $2,694 in tax deductions and credits to offset that -- given that by politicians you voted for.)

That same family, after taxes, with their car, apartment, and Ramen-noodle-based meal plan, has, after paying that tax, has only about $23,000 left (gross), after taxes.

So if both people, the 1% Family and the Poor Family, live identical lifestyles, then a rough measure of the disposable income left after basic needs are met and federal taxes paid is:

Poor family:

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000

1% family:

So, not rich, right?

Well, bullshit.

After meeting the most basic of needs, the 1% family has ten times the disposable income; if the two families lived identically, the 1% family has $237,000 left over at the end of the year, which is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. You can't invest or make your money work for you when you have no money left over.

And let's not kid ourselves: the 1% are not living the same as the bottom 50%, not by a longshot.

Idiot Jay says:

And a VAST majority of that 1% are people like doctors, dentists, school administrators, small business owners, insurance agents and actuaries, rocket scientists, and non-profit executives. They're all assholes?

To which I say: Yes. Yes, they are, if they are not willing to contribute a little more to the effort of keeping our society one which does not provide for the worst-off among us, and not willing to shoulder a little more of the burden of contributing to that provision.

In that hypothetical 1% family, with the $237,000 left over, if you doubled their tax burden -- made them pay $162,000 in federal taxes -- they would still, after all that, be far better off than the poor person, but idiots like Jay object to doing that because it's not fair.

Fair is in the eye of the beholder. I think it's not fair that doctors can live in a gated community surrounded by a golf course and complain about being taxed while people starve to death in America and we provide $117 a week in food stamps, especially because you could take more of the doctors' and rocket scientists' money* and not hurt them.

Rocket Scientists aren't very likely to actually be in the 1%. The highest return on a tech education comes if you go to Caltech, which, on average, earns a person $1,713,000 over a 30-year career. That's an average of $57,100 per year over a 3o-year span. The mid-career median pay for a Caltech grad is only $120,000 -- half, of course, make more than that, but half make less.

That's the final idiot argument Idiot Jay makes: That you could tax the rich into submission and still do nothing:

Even if we took every single penny from every single millionaire and billionaire in this country, it still wouldn't even pay off our national debt!

That, of course, is an argument that starts from a false premise: That the debt is solely the responsibility of the poor and social programs, and that it must be paid off right now.

Leave aside the consideration that actually paying off the national debt might be a terribly bad idea. The "national debt" is not the deficit, which is presumably what Idiot Jay means; it's the accumulation of all the deficits ever, including the ones that Ronald Reagan -- classic Keynesian Ronald Reagan-- ran up. The current debt has been growing since 1836, so the responsibility for the amount of debt we have goes back nearly two centuries. It's not a liberal thing.

Deficits going forward are hard to predict -- the US government runs an aspirational budget, setting out what it (definitely) plans to spend and (hopefully) plans to bring in. But looking at past deficits is easy. The deficit was $1,300,000,000,000 in 2011. It was $1,290,000,000,000 in 2010.

So to make ends meet in fiscal 2011, the U.S. would have had to spend less and take in more, to the tune of $1,300,000,000,000. Again, leave aside some obvious points, like the fact that we have spent $806,000,000 in Iraq alone since that fake war was started by Worst President Ever. That's $1,000,000,000 per year on Iraq alone.

$1,300,000,000,000
_______________
$1,000,000,000

= 1/1300 of our 2011 deficit was owing to Iraq alone. That's why I'm not saying much about that (except that if we hadn't spent all that money in Iraq, we'd have it for national health care without charging anyone a penny.)

What Idiot Jay and idiots like him want to say is that taxing the rich alone won't make up that deficit.

In part, that's potentially true. The 1%, while they control one-half of all the money and property, only make 18% of the total wages -- probably (but I'm not sure) because the 1% aren't exactly W2 earners. (That 18% figure counts the cash value of such programs as Medicare and things like foodstamps as income, so the 82% earned by the other 99% includes the cash value of governmental programs, which is an unfair way to measure it: if you're going to include the cash value of programs that hand money out, count the cash value of tax deductions for mortgage interest, among other things, and see how that changes the figure.)

(In fact, the Washington Post has already done that: When government benefits and income from investments and the like are included, the 1%'s wages are $516,633 per year, which emphasizes what I said earlier: that 1% family with the $237,000 left over is investing that money and will make even more in most years than they did the year before, leaving behind the lower half.)

I began by using as my population figure 312,757,380. That means that 1% of the population equals 3,127,573 people. Since they earn on average $516,633 per year in income, that means the top 1%'s gross income, on average, in a given year, is $161,580,783,501,540.

The top marginal US tax rate is 35%-- you pay 35% of your income over $379,150 as a tax. So right now, the 1%'s top marginal taxes are:

$516,633 - $379,150 = $137,483 * 0.35= $48,119.

That's the amount of tax the 1% pays on their highest amount of income.

If we increased that marginal rate -- that top marginal rate -- to 40%, then the average 1%er would pay slightly more:

$516,633 - $379,150 = $137,483 * 0.40 = $54,993 per year. Increasing the top marginal rate to 40% results in taking just $7,000 more per year from the 1%ers.

$7,000 more per year times all the one percenters=

$7,000 x 3,127,573 = 21,893,011,000.

More per year in tax revenues. Of course, that still leaves $129,978,106,989,000 in 2011 deficits alone to make up, but a modest increase in only the top marginal tax rate still cut the deficit by 1% (hey! There's that number again!) without hurting anyone, really. They wouldn't even notice it. In fact, they wouldn't even notice tripling that figure -- taking $21,000 more in top taxes from the highest earners, and thereby increasing the revenues by $63,000,000,000. Or more. If you took 10 times the amount -- $70,0009 from each person, raising $218,930,110,000, or 10% of the total 2011 deficit, each 1% would still have tons and tons of money left over.

To see why that's so, consider this. Here is the average total income from all sources of a 1%-er:

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

That's $516,000.

Here's that income after taking $70,000 away from it.

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
$1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $1,000

See much of a difference? Me, neither.

It's easy to throw numbers around, until you understand what they mean. Defending the right of the superrich to continue to be superrich while people starve around them demonstrates not liberty, not freedom, not fairness, but ignorance of the worst sort.

We all have an obligation to make the world a better place. The 1% have the means to do it, and can do so without hurting themselves. If you could save a man's life without in any way negatively impacting your own, and you did not do that, you would be, in Idiot Jay's words, an asshole. (In my terms, you would be evil.)

The 1% can do just that: they can save lives and not even notice it. The fact that most of them are unwilling to do so, and that most of America is not willing to call them on it, makes me ashamed to live in this country.

Over HOW MANY searches are performed each day?

2011-12-12T06:30:00.002-08:00

There's two ways to not get lost in a crowd: 1. Wear a giant cowboy hat, or 2. Make sure your website gets found.

Me, I'm not so big on cowboy hats, what with living in Wisconsin and all, and also what with not being in any way cowboy-esque. So I opt for the latter, and so should you: You should make sure that your website gets found by the people you want to find it.

Did you know that every day over 1,000,000,000,000 searches are performed on the Internet? I just made that fact up, but it proves my point: There's a lot of people using the Internet to find a lot of things, and you want them to find YOU. So use a company like Tasty Placement, a Dallas website design firm that'll help you with your SEO.

They've got samples of websites they've created on their site, and they have a no-contract, no termination fee policy that guarantees they'll keep working hard for you. And you don't even have to wear that giant cowboy hat. (Although you can, if you want.)

Freedom always finds a way to rise...

2011-12-11T11:33:00.002-08:00

...like a red, heartshaped balloon, as it were.

I sawthe this whileto looking at thethe State Tree today:-

I think there should always be a red heart balloon up there.

So they made a song about Recalling Scott Walker, 4:

2011-12-11T08:29:00.003-08:00

Have you seen the Walker ad featuring "Kristi, High School Teacher?" She made news this week when she claimed to have been the subject of threats after lending her smarmy comments and smug attitude to the Walker anti-recall effort.

Of course, the "threats" aren't anything of the sort; they're mostly just claims that "Kristi, High School Teacher" will be fired, but Kristi's "sour grapes" over being singled out by teachers unions are just that: she expected to come on the air and air her views but not have others air their views, "do as my billionaire bosses command me to say, not as I do" being the current Republican platform.

Or one plank, at least, another plank being "I got mine, screw you." See, "Kristi, High School Teacher" earns more than $92,000 per year in salary and benefits, according to "SP-EYE," and when she's not getting paid $92,000 by the state to teach public school, "Kristi, High School Teacher" is an active supporter of Scott Walker's, filing amicus curiae briefs (according to that same site) and vigorously posting pro-Walker stuff on her Facebook page.

(Hope she's not doing that during school hours, right?)

Here's something "Kristi, High School Teacher" posted back in July in response to Walker's claim that he was going to replace "No Child Left Behind."

Kristi Lacroix
For those of you on this post that are screaming that Walker "hurt" teachers and "ruined" education: I am a teacher and I support Walker. I am excited at the prospect of being able to be free and clear of my union in two years (we are still under contract so I am still forced to pay). There are many educators like myself who have been patiently waiting for someone to stand up and do what is right for our schools. As somone [sic; glad she's teaching your kids?!] who has been in the classroom for 13 years...I know what I am talking about. Thank you Mr. Walker for doing what is right!!! Now it is time to start talking to those of us who see what is going on and have real solutions to solve the problems facing education!

Keep in mind that "Kristi, High School Teacher" got her $92,000+ in benefits and salary through the union negotiating on her behalf, making her efforts now the equivalent of having someone help haul you up off a precipice and then throwing them over it.

When not being hypocritical about where she gets her money, Kristi's other hobbies include "racism" and "having a husband who works for a company that directly benefitted from Walker's removal of legislation."

That is:

Kristi applauded a "white pride" speech, (maybe?) denoting her (apparent?) belief that people of color are one of "the problems facing education?"

And:

Mr. "Kristi, High School Teacher" is an employee of "Rehrig Pacific." Rehrig makes those recycling bins that Wisconsinites are forced to buy under state law. That company (with some others) got Walker to continue the mandate in the budget this past year -- because there's conservatism (government shouldn't intervene in the free market) and there's Republicanism (government should help out our buddies, screw the free market) and the Patsy Walker administration is the latter.

Here's today's Recall Walker song, finally:

Do you think I'm being too subtle?

2011-12-09T13:08:00.002-08:00

There's always people out there who are SUPERHARD to buy a gift for, don't you agree? Those people who we either can't think of something cool to get them, or we know what we might want to give them for a holiday present, but it's too expensive?

I'm not the only one with such a dilemma, and now I'm not the only one with a solution to those problems, the solution being one of my favorite websites, "Geek Alerts."

Geek Alerts gets mentioned so often on this and my other blogs because it's an incredible website: It offers cool presents for people who used to not be so cool; it's great to be a geek NOW, when everyone thinks geeks are awesome, and it's even greater to be a geek now when there's so much stuff out there to love, like Yoda license plates or tiny RC helicopters or turntable scratch pads for cats or more stuff like that -- and Geek Alerts has the latest, best, funniest, weirdest stuff for the geek you know (or are).

Plus, they help you afford buying that stuff with their ThinkGeek coupons and Musicians Friend coupons and other savings from things like the ThinkGeek promo codes and whatnot. They don't just tell you about the things you want, they help you afford them. Right now, there are coupons to save up to $200 on musicians' stuff, including 50% off Marshall Amps, which I don't know what those are, but I'm sure your musically-inclined friends would understand why that's such a great deal.

Geek Alerts makes holiday shopping easy: go there, page around, find something for every single person on your list, from that guy in the office gift drawing to your dad (I'm sure he'll like anything they've got) and then saving you money on what you picked out.

And it EVEN helps pick out a gift for that one blogger whose blog you're reading right now. I could sure use those Yoda plates. *hint hint*

Wisconsin to allow rape victims 2-for-1 coupons at area businesses! (On Wisconsin)

2011-12-06T04:35:00.005-08:00

Well, not really, but that's the practical effect of the two "initiatives" unveiled this week by J.B. "Van" Hollen's "Department of Justice" in Wisconsin.

On Monday, the Wisconsin Department of ~~Transferring Crimefighting Money To Walker Supporters~~ Justice announced that it was cutting grants to sexual assault victims services by nearly half -- 42.5% -- blaming the cuts on falling revenues. But the revenues they blamed, criminal surcharges, did not fall by 42.5% or even close to it, so the Do[TCMTWS]J is putting the brunt of (completely unnecessary) funding cuts on sexual assault victims.

What's not being cut? Ties to businesses: This week, too, the offices of "Attorney" General "Van" Hollen -- who, remember, campaigned on a platform of ousting terrorist training camps from Wisconsin, and, like the man who uses a banana in his ear to keep crocodiles from attacking, has been wildly successful in that -- announced that they'll implement a new (boondoggle) crime awareness network.

Although the DOTCMTWSJ press release seems primarily to say the program will help businesses identify crimes that affect them (like counterfeiting or retrieving stolen property, it also says:

In a recent theft case at a Chippewa Falls hospital, an alert went out with surveillance photos of the suspects and within a half-hour, local police were receiving tips about the identity of the main suspect, who was later arrested.

but doesn't provide details. A google search for "Chippewa Falls hospital theft" turned up no reports of anything like that, but I'm sure it was a real thing and all.

And, the "Van" Hollen release (suspiciously light on news of how this will fight terrorism) also says that a Minnesota version of this program for helping return some missing children.

But in testimony to support the bill creating the program, "Van" Hollen talked about thefts from businesses, including scrap metal and pharmacy thefts, and mentioned no crimes against individuals. (See here for a news release: http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lc/comtmats/old/09files/ab0785_20100318130646.pdf.)

Nice to see that Wisconsin has shifted its priorities, from fighting terrorism and/or helping sexual assault victims to making sure J.B. "Van" Hollen has a reason to go to local businesses. That ought to make you feel a little better, rape victims -- J.B. "Van" Hollen isn't just sitting around his offices, he's out fighting crime at places like Middleton Ford, helping ensure that the public understand that Wisconsin's government is owned by businesses.

Did I get that slogan right?

Forget that Christmas sweater; here's what you should be doing for the little woman.

2011-12-06T04:30:00.002-08:00

Tired of looking at that dingy old bathroom, with it's yellowed ceramic and humidity-warped doors? Well, even if you're not, your wife is, so you should treat her to a special Christmas present this year and update her bathroom. With the modern bathroom vanities from Bathroom Vanities Only, you can quickly, easily, and inexpensively upgrade to a new, fancy, nice-looking, modern bathroom vanity. Upgrading even one room can give the whole house a new feel, and this is actually something she'll like AND use.

In Russia, Candidates Want YOU to vote for THEM. (Other People's Politics)

2011-12-05T04:35:00.002-08:00

How bad has the Republican Party gotten? Really bad: While the GOP tries to suppress voter turnout through such tactics as Voter ID and making it harder to register to vote, Russia...

... yes, Russia...

is encouraging people to vote:

It's official: The GOP is less for democracy than Vladimir Putin.

Further in the files of the GOP Minitrue, GOP National Party head and Vowel Abuser Reince Priebus recently declared Wisconsin to be "riddled with voter fraud." In doing so, Reince ignored the evidence, as we've come to expect from the Grand Old Prevaricators: Wisconsin had exactly 7 cases of voter fraud, out of 3,000,000+ ballots cast.

Curiouser and curiousist: Priebus made the "riddled" claim while defending the Republicans' recent vote dismantling the Elections Assistance Commission, a group that is supposed to help prevent voter fraud:

Are you havin' a laugh? You will with Uberhumor's funny photos.

2011-12-05T04:25:00.004-08:00

Is the state of politics making you want to cry? Bang your fists on the table? Write an angry letter to the editor?

For Pete's sake, don't do that last one: Nothing marks you as a crackpot faster than writing a letter to the editor. Instead of wasting your pen and paper (nobody reads those things), why not check out the funny photos, pictures & videos on Uberhumor.com?

I've had Uberhumor.com bookmarked on my browser for a couple of months now, and I check it out a couple of times a day to get the updates. Hey, I work in a serious job dealing with serious things and of course there's all the bad news out there, so I try to lighten things up with their Daily Morning Epicness, pictures of hot women and funny GIFs and awesome landscapes and more, and then I go back to check on the stuff they've added throughout the rest of the day.

I especially like the photobombs-- those pictures of people who aren't aware someone is in the back of the photo doing something crazy. Those crack me up, and I've started looking more closely at my own photos to see if I've caught some.

Life is serious -- but you don't always have to be. Go check out Uberhumor.com and see if that doesn't make you smile.

Certainly Wrong: Why it's a bad idea to argue from a generalization, and a worse one to read Chris Rickert.

2011-12-03T07:34:00.008-08:00

Recently, on Twitter, I was asked by Wisconsin State Journal's columnist Chris Rickert to explain this comment:

@ChrisRickertWSJ But Rickert is WAY better at overgeneralizing from a false premise.

To which Chris Rickert asked me:

And the false premise was?

As nice as it was to realize that not even Chris Rickert pays much attention to or remembers what he wrote, thereby reducing the harm that can come from poor argument, weak thinking, horrible justifications, general wishiwashiness, and bad humor printed in a newspaper -- but who reads newspapers anymore? Not me, in part because they continue to publish the likes of Chris Rickert -- I still felt like I needed to respond, because this particular bit of overgeneralization stemmed from a particularly weak premise.

I've said over and over that I don't mind reading someone who disagrees with me (in fact, I seek it out in order to not ghettoize my thinking, which is important), but I do mind reading poor writing and Chris Rickert's December 1 column calling Recall Walker supporters was poor writing in every single way writing (and thinking) can be bad.

Rickert's column seemed primarily to take issue with the Recall Walker campaign's announcement that it had reached 300,000 signatures already. I say "primarily" and "seemed" because, really, the whole point of the column was hard to discern. At first I thought a set of notes for an idea for a column had accidentally been posted.

But Rickert begins:

On an overcast, rainy Tuesday in 2004, some 1.48 million Wisconsinites trudged to the polls and voted to re-elect George W. Bush president of the United States.

To the state's credit, about 1.49 million other Wisconsinites voted for John Kerry, so the state's 10 electoral votes went to him, even if the election didn't.

Now-- SPOILER ALERT! -- it struck me that Rickert's point, after reading this column was that a majority of people liking something doesn't necessarily make it right. But if that was his point, then beginning with an example of a minority --the Worst President Ever voters being a Wisconsin minority in 2004 -- is a terrible way to support your argument. "Majorities aren't always right, just as that minority was clearly not right that time," Rickert's argument begins. In short: the majority in 2004, in Wisconsin, was right.

Rickert, having begun his "majorities are wrong a lot" column by proving the exact opposite, then tries to say he's not exactly talking only about majorities by noting

Americans were getting killed in Iraq due to a poorly supported but greatly hyped allegation that turned out to be flat wrong. And here enough people were apparently OK with that to re-elect the falsehood's cheerleader-in-chief.

So: he's talking about just a lot of people being in support of a bad idea? Not a majority? All of the other examples Rickert gives in his column are majorities, so you'll have to decide what his actual point is, since Rickert didn't bother really having one, other than "I don't like you Recall people and so I'm going to tar and feather you somehow."

That becomes obvious in the next paragraphs:

Which brings me to the announcement Monday that those collecting signatures to recall Gov. Scott Walker have surpassed the 300,000 mark, giving them more than half the 540,208 they need by Jan. 17 and proving there's a constituency for everything.

I know this and other hyped milestones in the march toward next year's obscenely expensive, special-interest-driven gubernatorial do-over are just part of keeping the recall troops energized.

"Proving there's a constituency for everything." That is, Rickert is saying, the fact that 300,000 people are willing to say Governor Scott "Patsy" Walker should be recalled is proof that you fools will believe anything.

Rickert's thought processes, not mine.

Note, too, that Rickert has tossed in that trope so frequently used by people who oppose democracy: recall elections are the law, allowed by a formerly-much-more-progressive Wisconsin as a check on the power of officials who had been elected but who were not living up to the standards people elected them for. We are constantly told, by people who oppose democracy, that democracy is expensive. Special elections, recall elections, recounts to verify the accuracy of the elections: these things cost money!

The idea that democracy is too expensive to actually allow is a pernicious nugget of misinformation that people like Rickert should have the responsibility to not argue, but which they argue, nonetheless, because they have no other answer to what is, after all, a constitutional right. In what other area of the Constitution do "conservatives," or whatever Rickert will claim he's, not, really, argue that a Constitutional right is too expensive to allow? (Leave aside criminal defense, which is always underfunded and a waste until your son is accused of something.)

Nobody ever talks about how expensive elections themselves are, but a regular old election costs the same as a recall election: Poll workers are poll workers, ballot counting is ballot counting. Doing a recall means, just, holding two elections, and if two elections is too expensive than eventually they'll be arguing that one election is too expensive, too, and we ought to just leave Walker in charge until he's tired of treating our state like it's a private eBay for the Kochs. (Don't scoff: Handing power to the for-now-governor in the name of cost savings is what the Republicans are all about.)

Just out of curiousity, I did a search for "Chris Rickert Walker ipad" to see how the ever-cost-conscious Rickert, who finds constitutional rights too expensive to exercise when he disagrees with the goal, felt about Walker handing his public-private boondoggle commission all a bunch of iPads on the state dime.

But Google must not have been working, because I wasn't able to find anything Chris Rickert, Fiscal Conservative When It Comes To Causes He Disagrees With, said about Walker's cronies at Walker720 all getting iPads.

I guess Rickert, like a fiscal Potter Stewart, knows obscenity (in costs) when he sees it. iPads for your buddies? Okay by Rickert! Exercising a constitutional right that has been allowed for nearly a century? Whoa, there, buddy! Do that and we might not be able to get Walker's kids an iPhone 4S for Christmas! Think of the children!

Or think of the other numbers that aren't preceded by dollar signs but which still horrify Rickert, who goes on to say:

Nevertheless, it's a rallying cry premised on the power in numbers.

Did you get that? The rallying cry is just NUMBERS. You people, with your recalls and your chants and your wanting a living wage so that you don't have to go on foodstamps while you work your government jobs and don't have to see your special education funds cut in the future, you don't have any real ideas, you've just got numbers!

Numbers! Not ideas! Numbers! Rickert, who presumably thinks of himself as a journalist, saw in the announcement that 300,000 people had signed the recall petitions already -- a rate of 25,000 per day, more than 1,000 per hour (if you want to talk numbers) only numbers, not ideas.

You people probably don't even know what you're signing, you're just doing it because everyone else is doing it, Rickert begins to argue. Like baggy pants on kids, or Justin Bieber, or the TV show Happy Endings, if other people do it, you'll do it, and you won't even know why. That's Rickert's thesis.

Nope. Not making that up. You can't think for yourself, Recall Lemmings, says Rickert:

The 300,000 signers — like the tens of thousands who protested at the Capitol in the spring — are meaningful to the anti-Walker crowd largely because they speak to an ingrained psychological reflex that more is better, and popularity denotes worth. Or, in this case, 540,208 people can't be wrong.

That's my emphasis but Chris Rickert's denigration of the cognitive abilities of the people who sign Recall Walker petitions. You know how 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong? They can, and you are, because you're only signing those petitions to keep up with the Joneses, says Rickert.

Just how wrong are you? Let Chris Rickert guide you through the Forest of Your Wrongness by pointing out the Trees Of Large Numbers:

So in addition to George W. Bush's vote total in 2004, I thought I'd throw out a few more large numbers, just to test that notion.

• In November 2006, 1,166,571 Wisconsin voters passed an amendment to the state constitution to "protect" marriage, thereby discriminating against couples who've done nothing worse than love and commit themselves to someone of the same sex.

• In November 2010, political novice Ron Johnson, who ran on an anti-government platform, won a U.S. Senate seat with 1,125,999 votes, despite running a company that's taken government money and relied on government to provide health insurance to some of its workers.

• In April, despite having lobbed some decidedly injudicious insults and threats at a fellow justice, Supreme Court Justice David Prosser was re-elected with 752,694 votes.

I'm going to have to call Google and file a complaint. I can't find anything from Rickert on the marriage amendment, and when I google "Chris Rickert Ron Johnson" I find only this article, in which Rickert brags about having a degree in nothing helpful to mankind whatsoever, and spends more time discussing the lamentable quality (?) of his college education than the lamentable lack of quality in Wisconsin's newest senator.

Google "Chris Rickert Prosser" and find this article in which Rickert admits not bothering to read an entire report before reporting on it, but don't be dismayed -- Rickert still manages to add, in that column, a suggestion that the Supreme Court of Wisconsin simply issue a per curiam one line opinion that, in its simplicity, demonstrates either a reckless disregard for, or complete misunderstanding of, where courts get their power.

For Rickert, I'll spell it out: Courts get their power from persuasion. From convincing you that they are right. Saying "We're right, go home" isn't, ever, the best way to handle a decision.

(From a journalistic point of view, Rickert's decision to publish a column in which he says that anger management would have been a "slap on the wrist" for Prosser even though he admits not having read 117 pages of the reports is itself shocking, and would be grounds for dismissal at any reasonable, credible newspaper. Opinions based on partial sets of facts are only, only allowable when the complete set of facts is not available. When Bill Lueders published the article that set off that particular firestorm, he did not have all the facts but had made an attempt to get them. When Rickert attempted to support the Walker/Prosserites in a seemingly evenhanded column that continued Rickert's role as a de facto Walker campaign aide, he had the 117 pages of reports but to quote his own lead, he "gave up" reading them and went and read news coverage instead.)

Now you know, though: Rickert's opinion is based on the facts that he's not too lazy to read -- if you shovel some facts up for him, he'll maybe digest them, so take that into consideration as you go on reading his Damnation By The Numbers of the People Who Would Recall His Hero:

It's one of those weird ironies of life that majority rule is both a linchpin and a drawback of representative democracy. A man who dragged the country into an unnecessary war got a second term in the White House, and a man who's done nothing worse than employ conservative principles to balance the state budget is facing recall.

"Done nothing worse than employ conservative principles to balance the state budget?"

Which conservative principles? Local rule? That's a conservative principle. This article, among many, describes the impact of Walker's legislation that restricts the local municipal authorities from raising property taxes to help fund local services. What part of conservatism denies local municipalities the right to decide what level of services, and taxation to pay for those services, they want? I live in Middleton, by choice, because the relatively high taxation has relatively high levels of local service, including special education for my two youngest. I voluntarily choose to live there, and Walker's "conservative reforms to balance the budget" have allowed people who live in Kaukauna, or Superior, or Waukesha, to determine what my property taxes ought to be, and how much education my boys can get.

That's "conservative?" Centralization of power away from local control is in no way a conservative principle.

What about upholding basic constitutional rights, like free speech, or access to the Capitol? I can't remember any other governor turning our Capitol, which I used to like to cut through to get to court and to take my boys to to see the Christmas tree, into an armed camp with searches and seizures -- let alone charging people for the right to protest him. Conservatives are supposed to be against the overexercise of government power. Scott Walker and his Hillbilly Legislature are exercising power like petty tyrants. That's not conservative, Chris Rickert.

Leaving aside the budget that has already started to decimate Wisconsin's schools and government workers while producing less than zero new jobs, and the tax cuts that had no impact on job creation either, look at what else Walker has presided over in just a year: Wisconsin is an armed camp where people can now shoot you for crossing the threshold of your house uninvited. He has reduced the role of state agencies in rulemaking, taking away expertise from the people who are on the ground dealing with those issues and putting it into the Capitol. He has helped redistrict the state in a brutally partisan way, pushing that legislation through on a short timetable without debate. He tried to have state legislators arrested during session, a completely unconstitutional action. He admitted to having given consideration to sending thugs out to mix it up with protestors. He has spent more on security than any governor prior to him. Many of his appointees got hefty salary increases while he was decreasing pay for regular union workers. His Act 10 budget proposals caused an unprecedented retirement among sitting circuit court judges and his delays in appointing new judges have led to even more court backlogs.

That's just off the top of my head.

But Rickert is not willing to credit any of that with being the basis behind the recall petitions' phenomenal popularity -- not if it means taking away Walker, whose lap Chris Rickert apparently wants to sit on and gaze lovingly up at the beatific, smug face of the Man Who Will Not Be Governor next year. It's just a numbers game, to Rickert: He starts from the false premise that you have no reason to be mad at Walker, and continues on to the premise that now, the people who are signing are doing so only because of the others who sign, and suggests that the people behind the recall are promoting "the numbers" to get others to sign because they are devoid of other ideas: it's a numbers game, the popularity of the recall creating the popularity of the recall in an ouroborean cycle that has no intellectual basis behind it.

That's the false premise of Rickert's latest sin against journalism: That it's not ideas driving the recall, it's just petty grudges and numbers. That's a thought promoted by the Walker camp: If you disagree with them, you're just holding a grudge from the last election and you don't really know what you're talking about -- and now, even more, if you're signing a recall petition you're only doing it because someone else did it.

Rickert's comparisons of Recall Petition signers to Bush and Prosser voters and anti-marriage amendment voters is particularly disagreeable because it suggests that all majorities are the same and that if you're in the majority you must be wrong. But Bush misled people into war, with the help of supposedly dignified, smart people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, who sacrificed their intellectual dignity and credibility to further a murderous cause of neoconservatism, the neo completely negating the rest of the word. To link the Recall signers with people who voted to put Bush into office in 2004 despite having been lied to is to suggest that Recall organizers are committing a similar lie...

...to suggest it without backing it up or having the guts to directly make the comparison. What lie have the recall organizers foisted off on the public, Chris? Apples can't always be compared to apples and all majorities are not created equal.

To link Recall supporters with Prosser voters is even worse: The Prosser-Kloppenburg race will go down, with the 2000 election, as the most suspicious of elections in Wisconsinites' memories. Whatever you believe about the race -- and I'm on the side of those who don't trust the votes from Waukesha and think they were manufactured -- it was a tainted race for everyone and Prosser will never regain his credibility, either, making him useful only to the conservatives who would rather the Court side with them than the law, but suggesting that Recall organizers and Prosser campaigners are coequal majorities is to suggest that there is something tainted or underhanded about the Recall, and what is your evidence of that, Chris?

To link the Recallers with the hate-inspired antimarriage amendment that has resulted in more travesties of family law than I can recount here -- although I could, with permission, provide a transcript of a judge lamenting the fact that a good parent cannot get a remedy for the de facto kidnapping of her children, a result that occurred in part because of that amendment -- is just as bad. The Recallers are not proceeding from a position of personal hatred and animosity, or of false, holier-than-thou jury-rigged claims. The Recallers did not look at Walker and say "I am going to, based on my own personal so-called religious beliefs, try to deny you basic constitutional rights others enjoy." They said they disagreed with his policies and exercised their constitutional right to do something about it. There is nothing personal about the Recall, and it is not being sold to the public on the same sham basis ("Protecting marriage from the gays!") that the antimarriage amendment was.

There have been plenty of majorities that were right, of course, including the majority of Wisconsinites who lead off Rickert's awful article by simultaneously rejecting Worst President Ever and undermining Rickert's false premise before it gets going, but Rickert doesn't want to note those -- majorities that include the majority of legislators who had to (twice) approve the Recall process and the majority of voters who had to approve it to get it into the Constitution.

Let me, like Rickert, finish up with a John Kerry quote. Rickert ends his random collection of letters thusly:

It brings to mind another memorable episode from the 2004 election — when in a debate Kerry pointed out the obvious flaw in one of Bush's most vaunted selling points: his "stay-the-course" "certainty" in world affairs

It's one thing to be certain," Kerry said, "but you can be certain and be wrong."

That's the problem, you see, with relying on other journalists to think for you -- you can, as Rickert is, be certain of your quote, and also wrong about the gist of the quote. Rickert is attempting to use Kerry's words to paint Recallers into a corner, as the intellectual (?) equivalents of Worst President Ever, and trying to shame them with the words of someone they (presumably) support.

But Rickert didn't bother reading the whole quote. Here's the whole thing, from the transcript of the debate. Commenting on Worst President Ever's assertion that presidents need to be certain in foreign policy -- Worst Ever had just commented on Kerry's changes of position and said that a president needs certainty-- Kerry responded:

...let me talk about something that the president just sort of finished up with. Maybe someone would call it a character trait, maybe somebody wouldn't. But this issue of certainty. It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong. It's another to be certain and be right, or to be certain and be moving in the right direction, or be certain about a principle and then learn new facts and take those new facts and put them to use in order to change and get your policy right. What I worry about with the president is that he's not acknowledging what's on the ground, he's not acknowledging the realities of North Korea, he's not acknowledging the truth of the science of stem-cell research or of global warming and other issues. And certainty sometimes can get you in trouble

That puts a different light on it, doesn't it? When you realize what Kerry was really saying, you can see that the actual quote that Rickert didn't want to use demonstrates first that Kerry had no problem with admitting that sometimes certainty is right, too -- and also that people must be willing to change their positions given new facts -- to acknowledge what's on the ground and modify one's position.

Walker supposedly wanted just to balance the budget -- but would not negotiate on the issue of collective bargaining even after unions said they would take the exact pay cuts proposed.

There are two Republican suits trying to enforce the brand-new districts for the recall election, despite having already lost that battle.

After two of six senators lost in the summer recall elections, Walker made exactly zero overtures to moderates and Democrats to soften his stances.

When job numbers continue to fall, Walker's office continues to spin the results.

I could go on.

It's Walker's certainty -- his refusal to accept that his cronyism policies handed out like candy on behalf of wealthy benefactors who guarantee unpopular Republicans sinecure jobs if they lose office are hurting the state on the most fundamental levels -- that has turned the debate from one over merely collective bargaining to one over the very soul of Wisconsin.

You wouldn't get 1,000 people an hour pulling over their cars to sign a recall petition to support collective bargaining. Workers are not downloading petitions to circulate at private offices, or standing on street corners on their lunch breaks and after work, as a fight over union rights. A woman did not walk around our neighborhood in the pouring rain one Saturday afternoon to fight to collect union dues through a payroll.

Wisconsinites, at a rate of a thousand an hour, have watched the damage done to their state in less than a year, and have concluded that whatever they thought last November, they need to rethink it.

They need to rethink it, because Walker won't.

And they need to rethink it because idiots with a newspaper column that helps magnify the effect their ill-supported reasoning would otherwise have refuse to think in the first place.

Society would be a better place to live... (We Have Enough Money)

2011-11-29T06:37:00.005-08:00

... if we treated the sick and the poor with the same (monetary) respect we give to quitters.

Urban Meyer has quit his job... twice. Once, he said, was for health reasons. The second, he said, was to be a "better husband and father."

Having achieved, apparently, all of his off-the-field goals -- Urban Meyer is now incapable of dying and also the greatest husband/father in the multiverse, one must assume, making him a Demigod -- the two-time quitter has now been recognized for the Greatness that he is in the only way that really matters in our society: by being handed a buttload of money.

"The" Ohio State University is a public university that gets public money, even though it has an endowment, or permanent fund of money, valued at $2,000,000,000, an important figure to note because an endowment is money donated voluntarily to a university, and the proceeds of investing that money, which means that over time, people have voluntarily given $2,000,000,000 to "The" Ohio State University. I wonder many of those people feel taxes are too high?)*

*According to Wikipedia, and I'm sorry for using that as a source, in 1995, OSU began a 5-year fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $850,000,000. The campaign was wildly successful, raising $1,230,000,000 in voluntary donations. People gave 50% more than OSU asked for.

"The" Ohio State University, with its $2,000,000,000 trust fund just sloshing around, sits in fact in one of the states that used cries of phony "fiscal crises" to cut funding for vulnerable people in necessary programs: Ohio this year cut funding for public health, all levels of education, government workers, and aid to the elderly and disabled.

Ohio also -- and this is important to note, now that the Number One Husband/Father In The Multiverse, the Demigod Urban Meyer, is coaching at their premier university -- cut child care funding.

Maybe The Demigod Urban Meyer will babysit those Ohio kids whose public schools are now struggling for funding?

Anyway, leaving aside all the things Ohio-ans find unimportant, like childcare, health care, mental health care, the elderly, K-12 education, higher education, and local municipalities' ability to balance their budgets, the BIG EXCITING NEWS is that in the midst of this fiscal crisis, Ohio State University was able -- using money contributed by taxpayers voluntarily or involuntarily-- to dig deep and find a meager amount of money to pay the Demigod Urban Meyers with.

I hope he'll be able to make ends meet. According to CBS Sports, The Demigod Urban Meyers, Ultimate Father/Husband, will have to make do with such minimal compensation as $4,000,000 per year (he can earn more if he actually stays on the job, but as a Demigod, we cannot know when Urban Meyers might be called to other, higher pursuits.)

Only $700,000 of that is "base" compensation, money The Demigod Urban Meyers gets paid for existing. Beyond existing, The Demigod Urban Meyers will also be asked to make public appearances and promote ~~Himself~~ the football program, but he'll be paid $1,850,000 for that ("The" Ohio State University finding promotion of its football program 2.5 times more important than actually running the football program, it seems.)

If The Demigod gets 80% or more of his players to graduate, then he gets an additional $150,000 bonus, which is comparable to the $450,000 he'll get as a bonus just for not quitting before the end of January, 2014. "The" Ohio State University finds "keeping The Demigod on staff" to be three times as important as graduating its players. Student-athletes!

The Demigod Urban Meyers also gets $1,200 per month as a "stipend" towards his car payments. I'd think with $700,000 paid just for existing he could handle his car payments himself, but what do I know about matters on Mount Olympus, where The Demigod now exists?

Much has been made of how the Demigod gets a free golf membership, but did anyone note that The Demigod must pay his own personal expenses on that golf course? "The" Ohio State University does not handle tipping the caddy, people.

Also, consider this sacrifice, verbatim from the contract:

8. Ohio State shall fly Coach by private (not commercial) aircraft when Coach is making recruiting visits and other mutually-agreed upon University business. When such recruiting visits or University business are more than 200 miles from the City of Columbus, Ohio State shall fly Coach by private (not commercial) jet aircraft. Ohio State agrees to let coach use such jet aircraft for his personal use for thirty-five (35) hours [in-air and dead time inclusive] each year during the term of this agreement. Coach's use of such private aircraft for recruiting and other mutually-agreed upon University business shall not exceed fifty (50) hours [in-air and dead time inclusive] during each contract year.

I'm sure you caught it, too: Yes, The Demigod gets a private jet for his own private use... but only for 35 hours a year. That's barely three hours a month. Practically everybody gets about three hours a month on a private jet, right?

*sound of crickets chirping.*

Moving on. Did you know that Ohio reduced "College Opportunity" by about 20% last year? It's true. And their jerk-off "governor," John Kasich -- a poor man's Scott Walker, and that's saying something -- proposes to cut nearly half -- $35,000,000 -- in the next year. Meanwhile, 14 states saw higher full-time college enrollment increases than Ohio in the past year, and 20 states saw higher 5-year increases in full-time college enrollment.

So while it's getting easier for The Demigod Urban Meyer to get to college in Ohio -- he can take the jet -- it's getting a lot harder to find students able to attend those colleges.

Maybe we should launch terrorists into space? (We Have Enough Money)

2011-11-15T09:36:00.005-08:00

I won't (unlike my usual) claim that this person reads my blog -- I know he reads some of them, some of the time, but I don't know that he read this particular blog, and I have 87,000,000,003 blogs (at last count.)

Anyway, author Rusty Webb just today put a post on his blog "The Blutonian Death Egg" that mostly talks about how he (and I second this) thinks we need more big projects. You should read his whole post -- it's a great plea for a return to the days when we thought big -- but what I was taken by, in this context, was two points Rusty made, which I will aggregate, with proper attribution, here:

Point one: Rusty bemoans our dropping the SuperCollider project, the Space Shuttle, and similar programs, and notes that our mentality may have shifted from World War II-era big thinking:

I want it back. I want us to do something big, so challenging that it might not work. The funny thing is, the main reason given is that it costs too much, that these projects are too much a financial burden, it would be foolish to waste our money on them.

To those who say that, I say you’re wrong. We spend more money on air conditioning in Iraq then we spend on NASA in a year*. I’m not making a political statement (as any discussion about congressional money quickly becomes), I’m just saying we spend money, lots of it, on things that don’t matter that much in the big picture.

Point Two: That footnote from point one leads to this observation;

*What is more profound to me, the total amount of dollars spent on NASA since it's inception in the late 50's totals around $500 billion. A lot, but we've spent about two and a half that amount on the U.S. war on terror.

He's got links to back his argument up, too.

Think about that: The "war on terror," which I think is overstated and overblown and is a massive boondoggle Republican giveaway to defense-contracting firms and has not made us a single whit safer, has cost us more, since 2001, than every penny we've ever spent on NASA ever.

Rusty's a smart guy for pointing that out, and I welcome his observations. Go read his blog.

This is a CLASH OF THE (really very cute and cuddly) TITANS!

2011-11-14T23:01:00.001-08:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Puppies vs. Babies for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

There are some questions that will never be answered, like "What is the meaning of life?" or "How many roads must a man walk down before he is proven a man?" or "Where did I leave my keys?"

And then there are questions that will be answered almost immediately, like "Which is cuter, a baby or a puppy?"

That's the question that will be answered by YOU, voting in the Puppies vs. Babies online contest that will finally settle that issue for once and for all. Between now and November 23, you can vote in the contest that will determine, for once and for all, whether Puppies or Babies are cuter.

Which I think is kind of a ridiculous question, because EVERYONE KNOWS that babies are cuter. What's so great about PUPPIES? They drool way more than babies, and their breath smells like dog food, which is NOT a good thing at all no matter how you try to spin it, and, yeah, maybe they have those little legs but then consider this: When you wash a puppy in the sink, can you make a hat out of suds and put it on that puppy's head and take a picture? YOU CAN NOT. I rest my case.

Or I don't, because babies also smile at you, and puppies cannot smile except in Disney movies, where they look creepy when they smile. Babies can say stuff, like "Da-da," which is AWESOME even though moms then get mad and wonder why you didn't teach the baby to say "Ma-ma," but then they forget because the baby has a bow on its head from the Christmas presents and it's time to take 3,742 more pictures.

I think you know how I'm going to vote. Whatever, puppies, talk to the hand. (I think it's time we bring that expression back.)

In fact, let's show those puppies the what-for. Go vote today and keep track of the voting and urge your friends to vote and, if you're rich, maybe slip a little illegal campaign money under the table to help the babies out in the voting (note: Do not actually commit voter fraud. This is just for fun)(Note, two: If you are rich, slip ME a little illegal campaign money under the table. I'll keep it a secret. I'm good at that. I didn't even tell people about that time you and I totally swiped those 200 apple pies from that McDonald's delivery truck and lived like kings for a week, did I? I took it to the grave.)

Anyway, that is your update on the Puppies vs. Babies question, and here is a that totally would have won if I'd entered in time, which I did not, but I am going to rectify that by voting BABIES! all the way.

So who are YOU going to vote for? Leave a comment and weigh in-- then go vote!

So They Made A Song About Recalling Scott Walker, 3

2011-11-12T07:46:00.004-08:00

This week,Ohio voters roundly rejected anti-union bashing as a fake "cure" for manufactured/fictitious budget "crises", voters in Mississippi decided that enough was enough and they weren't going to let "conservatives" belie their claimed orientation and attempt to use spurious definitions of life to turn back legitimate family planning efforts and women's health initiatives.

But, emboldened by the peculiarly-American way of thinking that lets people ignore most politics while simplifying what they do pay attention to down to mere slogans and instead rant about Kim Kardashian divorcing or protest in favor of a coach who put winning football games ahead of protecting children from being raped by Penn State alumni, Scott "Patsy" Walker, whose budget has resulted in almost across-the-board increases in class size and cuts to advanced placement and other higher-learning classes, doubled down, betting on lazyness, inattention, and the power of money to buy results, and forced cuts in Medicaid that will prevent the poor from getting health care while keeping Patsy and his cronies in iPads for as long as they're in office...

which may not be long. *fingers crossed*. Politicians whose main goal in life is lining their pockets and setting up jobs working for the Koch Brothers after they leave office, and who do so by deliberately making it harder to get education, health care, jobs, and clean water, deserve to be recalled...

... if not arrested and locked up. *fingers crossed, again.* We all do what we can, but some do more than others, and to the brave people who are gearing up to Recall Walker, I say: Thank God For You, and here's a song to help spur you on:

Previous songs:

2. Ida Jo and the Show, No (We Won't Take It)

1. Toss Out The Bum

Wherein I display my knowledge of the Founding Fathers.

2011-11-12T07:35:00.003-08:00

You know what all the Founding Fathers had in common, besides "being completely misinterpreted by Justice Scalia?"

They all wore glasses. And that's not surprising, since glasses can make you look smart, unless they make you look dumb.

I am in the market for some glasses, potentially, because my eyes recently developed arthritis, or whatever it is happens to 42-year-old eyes, and I have found things to be blurry when they should not be, and have had more and more difficulty doing things like "reading what I'm typing."

So I may need some glasses, which is okay, because if you wear glasses, MOST people assume you're smart.

Not me, though: I actually assume that you're dumb, because I've owned glasses in the past and I know that glasses are super-expensive for most people, because most people go buy their glasses at the store and pay hundreds of dollars for them, overpaying like suckers.

What I want are cheap eyeglasses. Not "cheap" like "bad" but "cheap" like "I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars." And I'm going to get them from Zenni, which knows that you shouldn't pay a lot for eyeglasses because while you want to look GOOD in glasses, they're still a medical necessity and so you should be able to get nice glasses for low prices.

Which you can at Zenni; ordering online, you can get Zenni-made stylish frames for just SIX DOLLARS. That's super-low. And they do that not by skimping on the glasses, but by making the glasses themselves and marketing them online, so you don't pay all these marketing and middle-men costs. You just get great frames for about what you'd pay for lunch.

Which means that if I DO need glasses, I'm going to be able to afford them and I won't have to go sit at a store all day and end up buying some "designer" frames that cost more than my mortgage. Which makes ME as smart as the Founding Fathers. And more stylish, because while we both wear glasses, I don't wear a powdered wig.

Not often, anyway. What I do in my house is my OWN business. Back off, Scalia.

Are Americans Smarter, or Dumber, Than I Give Them Credit For?

2011-11-06T08:01:00.009-08:00

Just over a week ago, a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll asked Americans which of a list of p revious presidents they would pick to manage the current economic crisis...

... about which, if it goes on for years is it still a crisis? Did Americans in 1938 refer to the Great Depression as a crisis? The way I see it, Pearl Harbor was a crisis. World War II was not...

...and I'll get to what the actual results say about actual Americans in a minute, but first, in all the stories I heard reporting about this poll, not one single journalist commented on how they chose the presidents to ask about.

SO, once again, it falls on me, a lowly lawyer/part-time blogger, to do the investigative journalisming, just as I had to do with this important story, and find out whether they artificially limited the choices people could pick, or whether some American somewhere actually picked William Henry Harrison on his/her own.

The poll, which was uniformly reported as "Americans would bring back Reagan before FDR" notes that "some low-percentage answer choices have been omitted" in the fine print at the bottom, which suggests that there were other options, too -- and that less than 1% of the people chose those other options, which still doesn't explain how Tippecanoe made it into the top four, what with his having died forty days into office.

I googled around a bit trying to find out more about which options might have been allowed, but couldn't find anything about the methods used (the overall poll asked a bunch of other questions, like How long can you sit in Starbucks and use the Internet). So it appears that those were the only options which were given; you can take the poll online yourself to get an even less scientific view of how Americans view their past presidents and the current economic situation, and if you do, you'll see that Reagan is losing in online votes:

Which says something else entirely and is open to interpretation. Are Republicans less likely to vote online for something than Democrats? Do traditional Keynesians make more use of the Web than supply-siders? How does William Henry Harrison factor into this at all?*

*Harrison, you probably already know, ran for president twice, once in 1836, where he was part of a split ticket promoted by the Whigs, who hoped to throw the election to the House of Representatives, where they felt they could more easily gain control using cheaper local elections; the plan was to get Whigs elected to the House, take a majority there, and then, when the presidential election ended with no candidate getting a majority of electoral votes, use control of the House to put a Whig candidate into office. Which, in essence, is almost exactly like the GOP's current plans to use the less-expensive local elections to take control of government and then, via redistricting, union-busting, and such measures as giving the governor control over administrative-rule-making, set the stage for bigger wins down the line. Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it, indeed.

Anyway, the major point of this post is not the Republicans are the new Whigs; **

**The Whigs favored a strong public education system, which alone separates them from the current crop of billionaires-who-made-their-money-creating-toxic-waste-financed GOP wastrels who direct public money to the wives of GOP legislators.

it's that Americans may or may not be smarter than many people think. 65% of Americans would choose either Reagan or FDR to steer our national ship away from Scylla of economic downturn while avoiding the Charybdis of inflation, which actually says less about people's political preferences and more about how they actually think the problem should be solved:

Reagan initially cut taxes, primarily on energy-related matters, to help ease the energy crisis that was then holding back the American economy. But by 1982, Reagan had undone nearly 1/3 of his initial tax cuts, and shortly thereafter he increased payroll taxes on individuals to pay for Social Security and Medicare. Reagan also borrowed heavily, tripling the national debt from $997,000,000,000 to $2,850,000,000,000.***

***This author does not believe in shortening important numbers. Saying "$997 billion" and $2.85 trillion" makes those numbers seem relatively equal. Put the zeroes on them, and you can see the growth.

That was Reagan's answer to the economic "crisis" he faced: increase the flow of capital in the area of the economy that was logjammed (then: energy), temporarily increase the money in consumers'/corporations' pockets, and then gradually increase the government revenues again both through growth in the economy*4

*4 on a recent Planet Money podcast, a Worst President Ever-supporting economist pointed out that no credible economist has ever argued that "tax cuts pay for themselves." That man supported the WPE Tax Cuts, but agreed that they did not "pay for themselves."

and increasing taxes.

That suggests an extremely reasonable way to address the current mortgage problem that is bogging down the economy now: Make money available where it is needed. Don't just give banks money and have them hold it. Give borrowers money through the banks and guarantee those; and target tax cuts temporarily by, say, giving banks a one-time break from all income taxes for any mortgage loans refinanced in the next 2 years -- meaning this: If a Bank refinances a loan between now and November 5, 2013, then all income derived from that loan is forever tax free unless and until the bank forecloses on that loan, at which point all tax that should have been paid accumulates and is paid in the year of foreclosure.

See? I've solved the mortgage crisis twice.

FDR, in the meantime, first addressed the Great Depression (which he had no plans for attacking when he was inaugurated; somehow, America was able to vote for a president during an economic crisis without even asking him what he'd do about it) by cutting federal spending -- he reduced federal government workers' pay, then passed a bill that the Hoover administration had authored to stress-test banks and merge unsound banks into larger, better banks (sound familiar?). FDR argued strenuously against deficit spending (while allowing it for what he called "emergency budgets") and opposed a government program that is credited for avoiding bank panics: The FDIC, which insures bank deposits.

All of which is to say: Americans appear to favor only temporarily cutting taxes while increasing federal spending to address economic problems, and are against balancing the federal budget during economic downturns, especially at the expense of government workers.

Or, put more simply: Those who do not learn the lessons of history think choosing Reagan over FDR to address financial problems is somehow an endorsement of current Republicanism. It is not.

Hi-Yo, Silver!

2011-11-06T07:47:00.003-08:00

All you've heard for years now, really, is how you have to buy gold gold gold gold, to the point where I believe that gold is now selling for

per ounce.

Or maybe not. I'm no expert. I just know what I make up on the spot.

You know what you don't hear a lot about? Silver. I bet you don't even know what the silver price is right now. I bet nobody does.

With everyone focused on gold right now, and the economy still in the tank because the Republicans are being told not to let it get better by their evil overlords, now might be the right time to start thinking about the next thing, and maybe the next thing is silver bullion and other silver investments.

I mean, what sense does it make to invest in something after everyone knows about it? Nobody wants to get in at the end of a bubble, and even if gold continues to go up (who knows if it will?) it's not clear how much more valuable it can get, and it costs a bundle to get into.

But lately, I've seen more of those "we buy gold" places talking about "other precious metals" and silver is another precious metal, isn't it?

I'm pretty sure it is.

I'm no investment expert. If I were an investment expert, I wouldn't have most of my money in investments like "comic books" and "McGriddles." But I know common sense, and common sense tells me that when investing, you want to be ahead of the curve, not behind the curve. So if you're looking for a sound, precious metal investment, you should consult with experts (not me!)(the links in this site will take you to "Regal Gold Coins," a good place to start getting info) and make sure you have all your information, and then you should look into silver and see if silver's right for you.

The silver rush came after the gold rush, after all, and if history repeats itself, you'll be in on the ground floor and stand to make a bundle -- the way I got in on the ground floor on this McGriddle investment. *takes bite*. Mmmmmm. Financialicious.

What is it, America? Are you dumb, or just mean?

2011-11-03T04:13:00.001-08:00

Because of the subject matter, this is a triple-post and is appearing simultaneously onNonsportsmanlike Conduct!, Thinking The Lions, and Publicus Proventus.

I'm only 78 items into my once-daily series "1001 Ways To Tune Up The World," but my impact is becoming clearer and clearer, even if it takes a while for people to realize how right I am.

Back in August, 2009, Way Number 15 was "Just Allow Colleges To Pay Athletes Already," which, I'll note, everytime I mentioned it most people were aghast -- but they're college students! - -they'd say, and I'd point out that many college students get paid for interning in a job.

Now, in November 2011, colleges have decided I was right all along; the NCAA recently proposed to let conferences decide to pay athletes up to $2,000 a year to cover "expenses," and, as a Grantland writer pointed out in commenting on the story, once you decide to pay someone $2,000, you can pay them $5,000 or $10,000 or $100,000; the "moral" objection to paying "student-athletes" being removed, the only question is how much can they get paid.

If he'd seen this coming, Cam Newton might have stayed in college. And also: I'm not a hypocrite for saying Newton shouldn't have the Heisman because not only did he plead guilty to a felony while in college, but also, he broke the rules at the time. Future Cam Newtons should have the right to demand a $175,000 signing bonus to go to a college. This Cam Newtondidn't.

(But, then, it doesn't matter because the Heisman Trophy is the most overrated sports award ever.)

That alone was enough for me to mention Grantland, which is actually one of the better sports sites around (not surprising, since Bill Simmons gets much of his material from me.)

But even better, that writer went on to note why it seemed fair to cut "student-athletes" in on the mountain of money generated by college sports.

And it is a mountain:

But the ancillary income — television revenues, the sale of jerseys and other gear, the use of a player's "likeness" in video games, and on and on — completely overwhelms the equation and makes the relationship inequitable. The Southeastern Conference made over a billion dollars last year. The Big 10 made $905 million. These people may have a moral right to their ticket sales based on the scholarships they provide, but they don't have a moral right to every last nickel they can squeeze out of their labor force. That's absurd. It's un-American. And it cannot last.

I'm just going to highlight the important part of that block quote:

The Southeastern Conference made over a billion dollars last year. The Big 10 made $905 million.

Last year was one of the years that took place in what news organizations blandly refer to as "the current economic crisis," wasn't it? I'm pretty sure 2010 was part of "the current economic crisis." I'm pretty sure that in 2010 we were bogged down in Racist Tea Party arguments that we didn't have enough money to pay for Medicare or pretty much anything else that wasn't Dennis Hastert's million-dollar-a-year-office. I'm 100% certain that Candy Man Paul Ryan began 2010 by saying that we couldn't pay for health care for seniors.

But we -- you-- could spent two billion dollars on college football games.

TWO.

BILLION.

DOLLARS.

That's just on two conferences. And one of those conferences is pretty awful, when you think about it. (I'll let you figure out which one.)(Hint: It rhymes with Mig Men.)

I keep wondering when it's "Game Over" for people like the Racist Tea Party and every Republican currently running for office and Scott "Patsy" Walker, and I keep being amazed that people are so damn dumb. And before you get mad at me for thinking people are stupidfor voting for Republicans and letting them claim we've got no money when we can spend two billion dollars watching %(*%^%&$ Purdue play Iowa State, remember that the only otheralternative is to think people aren't dumb but are just mean.

So what is it, America? Dumb, or mean? We've decided that we can take two billion dollars of our money to pay college athletes to play games, because Lord knows we need more football on the air. Having voluntarily done that, do you think you can maybe quit supporting people that want to kill the poor and start making this a country that lives up to its promise?

I'd have gone with "Cousin Oliver." (Election 2012)

2011-11-02T06:28:00.003-08:00

"He's such a second Darren!"

-- Mo Rocca, on Rick Perry -- the second coming of Worst President Ever.

And you know a huge percentage of that was spent on "Snooki" themed items (We Have Enough Money)

2011-10-31T05:50:00.005-08:00

Over the weekend, the GOP complained that the poor don't pay enough in taxes, what with only paying payroll taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes, and meanwhile the Wisconsin GOP began to gin up support for ending the homestead credit for section 8 recipients -- doing so to save $13 million a year even though four major corporations paid no Wisconsin income tax last year -- and while all that was going on, there were two reactions taking place:

1. I was wondering just how Americans got so stupid and so mean that they would actually let real politicians espouse a tax plan: "Tax The Poor!" that my idiot younger brother once proposed while drunk at a Packer game, and

2. You all were spending $2,500,000,000 to dress up as slutty this-or-that.

CNN reported that's how much Americans spent on Halloween costumes... this year alone.

Don't tell me we can't pay for health care and need to raise taxes on the poor. Americans spend an average of $4,756 per minute on Halloween costumes.

Yep.

Nearly five thousand dollars a minute.

Keep that in mind when you vote for a person who promises to cut your taxes, because it's going to be awfully ironic when you end up in Hell dressed as a Slutty Devil.

Pay-for-play, unless by "Pay" you mean "pay the fees for the lawyer of the people you ripped off." (On Wisconsin)

2011-10-27T06:39:00.001-08:00

This is a shared post between Publicus Proventus and Family and Consumer Law: The Blog.

How much does justice cost? That depends on who's doing the selling. If you're a Wisconsin court, justice can cost as much as $150,000. If you're a Wisconsin legislator, "justice" goes at the bargain basement price of $10,000.

Recently, the Wisconsin Assembly introduced a bill that would limit attorney's fees to a maximum of 3 times the award of compensatory damages awarded to a plaintiff in a case. The bill, in its current form as SB12, creates a new statute that incorporates the traditional factors that go into determining an attorney fee award in fee-shifting cases, and would apply the 3x-limit only to cases in which compensatory damages are awarded. In a case where only injunctive or declaratory relief is awarded, a plaintiff could still get a full award of fees, while if you get an award of damages and injunctive relief, the court must merely presume that the 3x cap is reasonable.

On its face, this statute is absurd. It applies across the board, meaning that mortgage brokers under chapter 224, negligent banks under section 138.052, lenders who don't provide notice to tenants, landlords who fail to make promised repairs or rent life-threatening apartments, and, last but not least, murderers, cannot be hit up for attorney's fees.

That's right: The Republicans want to make sure murderers and thieves don't pay more than a nominal amount of fees. Section 895.446, the "treble damages" statute, allows for an award of compensatory (or "actual") damages, plus tripling of those, plus actual fees, for people who are (among other things) victims of theft by fraud and crimes against bodily security. This bill would help immunize people like that from getting sued by making it harder for people to pay their lawyers.

Most consumer cases, of course, are over relatively nominal amounts of money -- with the attorney's fees/fee shifting being used to encourage attorneys to take on these cases and enforce consumer protection laws. With an attorney general who's more interested in letting the governor off the hook than enforcing consumer protection laws (J.B. "Van" Hollen once said most consumer complaints amount to people crying about not getting enough Chicken McNuggets) that type of private enforcement...

...private enforcement, Republicans, by private businesses like mine, which employs 33 people in our office alone...

... would seem important, unless it's more important to you -- "you" being "Republicans" -- to sell a little "justice" old-school style, by taking money to pass laws:

Republicans in the Legislature are trying to pass a bill to cap attorney fees that can be awarded in response to a case in which a firm owned by a GOP donor had to pay more than $150,000 in legal costs. The legal fees were included in a settlement after a man who bought a car from John Lynch Pontiac-Chevrolet alleged he had to pay nearly $5,000 for repairs he never approved. In response, Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington) has written a bill that would limit the amount of attorney fees that could be paid in such cases to three times the amount that is disputed in a case. In the Lynch case, the attorney fees would have been limited to $15,000 because the case centered on $5,000 in repairs. The Burlington dealership is owned by David Lynch, a Vos constituent who has made 36 contributions to Republicans totaling $10,650 since 2008. He gave nothing to Democrats during that time.

(S0urce.) Lynch, of course, is mad that he had to pay $151,000 in legal fees in the case he got sued in. Those are fees he agreed to pay, in a settlement, but why should a good, cash-carrying businessman be held to his agreement when there are legislators to be bought and sold?

Should Lynch be mad? Should he be able to buy a change in legislation that will let him rip people off in the future? Before you decide, consider the actual opinion and the background facts of the case that got Lynch so mad he decided to buy himself some "justice," Republican-style.

The case in question is captioned Kaskin v. John Lynch Chevrolet-Pontiac, 767 N.W.2d 394, 2009 WI App 65 (Wis. App., 2009). Kaskin was a guy who bought a brand new truck and when it hit 3300 miles, developed some troubles with it. So he took it to John Lynch, which provided him an estimate of one penny to repair it -- because John Lynch, owned by a major Republican contributor, assumed that the truck was under warranty.)*

*What was that thing my third grade teacher said about assuming things?

A week later, John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, called Kaskin and said that bad fuel had ruined the injectors and they'd replaced them all. Oh, and, they added, You owe us $5,000 smackeroos.**

**Not a direct quote from the Good Republican.

Kaskin didn't think he should have to pay; after all, he'd been estimated one penny as a cost, hadn't been asked whether they should go ahead, and now owed $5,000 smackeroos. But John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, would not release this truck.***

***I note that by repairing the truck before telling Kaskin what the problem was -- the claimed bad fuel -- John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, may have done the car manufacturer or the gas dealer a favor there. If "bad gas" really had ruined the fuel injector, a questionable proposition given that "bad gas" typically requires buildup to ruin a fuel injector and the car had only been driven 3300 miles so far, then Kaskin could have maybe figured out where he bought the bad gas and tried to hold them liable for the $5k. If, on the other hand, it was a fuel injector problem, Kaskin might have had remedies against the manufacturer under laws like the lemon law. But by repairing the problem without even telling Kaskin, John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican who was no doubt watching out for other "small" (giant) corporations, might have spoilt the evidence, which in turn could eventually have prohibited Kaskin from making a claim against those other potential culprits.

Hmmm.

So Kaskin paid the $5,000 smackeroos -- I promise that's the last time I'll use that word in this post -- and sued, ultimately losing in the circuit court because, the court reasoned (siding with John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican and therefore entitled to special treatment in the legislature, if not the Court of Appeals, as we'll see) Kaskin hadn't suffered any pecuniary loss: He'd paid $5,000, and gotten $5,000 worth of repairs.

Not so fast... the Court of Appeals didn't say, but should have. The circuit court said that it didn't matter if Kaskin authorized the repairs or not -- remember, he'd said that John Lynch, Good Republican Car Company, could go ahead with repairs if they cost no more than a penny -- but the Court of Appeals thought otherwise because they did something I like to call "reading the law."

In fact, they began their opinion by making everyone else do just that:

WISCONSIN ADMIN. CODE § ATCP 132.09(1), (4)(e) (Oct.2004) states, in pertinent part, that "[n]o shop may ... [d]emand or receive payment for unauthorized repairs, or for repairs that have not been performed." We hold that a major purpose of this provision is to prevent either unexpected repairs, unexpected expense or both. Therefore, if the work done here was unauthorized, then the harm to the consumer, Randy W. Kaskin, was that he was deprived of his prescribed right to be informed and his concomitant right to consent or refuse consent. The remedy for a violation of this right is that the repair shop must forego being paid, even if the shop did, in fact, satisfactorily repair the vehicle.

If you're John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, that's not starting off on the right foot for an appellate opinion in case accusing you of doing unauthorized repairs. It's always easier for people who want to rip off consumers if you don't, you know, read the law, the requirements of which the Court of Appeals said are both "clear cut" and "stringent."*4

*4 Don't you just hate it when you're subject to a clear cut and stringent law that says "Maybe you should call your customer and let them know you're going to charge them five thousand simoleons [I made no promises about other slang] before you actually hold their brand new truck hostage?

But, I mean, what's the big deal with telling consumers what you're going to do and what it's going to cost? That is, can't you trust a company owned by a Good Republican?

Apparently not, as the Court of Appeals found reason to explain. The idea of requiring authorization is to have informed consent for repairs, and

The "informed consent" concept is an integral part of consumer protection law, not only here, but across the nation. Many states have adopted stringent rules regarding motor vehicle repair. See Jay M. Zitter, Annotation, Automobile Repairman's Duty to Provide Customer with Information, Estimates, or Replaced Parts, Under Automobile Repair Consumer Protection Act, 25 A.L.R.4th 506 (2008). These states have crafted statutes or rules requiring disclosures by automotive repairers before work is begun, just as this state does. Why? Washington State's automobile repair law provides an answer. Its code "is a consumer protection statute designed to foster fair dealing and to eliminate misunderstandings in a trade replete with frequent instances of unscrupulous conduct." Bill McCurley Chevrolet, Inc. v. Rutz, 61 Wash.App. 53, 808 P.2d 1167, 1169 (1991).

A trade replete with frequent instances of unscrupulous conduct? How DARE the Court of Appeals imply that John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, would do something unscrupulous. He hadn't even tried buying a change in the law to immunize him from further consumer protection lawsuits based on him scamming customers yet!

But to make up for implying that sometimes car repair shops might act less than scrupulously, the Court of Appeals gave John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, a Good Idea:

The repair shop ...believe[s] this construction to be unfair, especially if, as they claim is undisputed in this case, the repairs made actually fixed the vehicle in a satisfactory manner such that the consumer received a valuable benefit. We understand that and commiserate with the repair shop and amicus curiae to the extent that the repair shop acted in good faith in not engaging in excessive and unnecessary repair. But to paraphrase an oft-repeated and now trite expression, the law is what the law is. If the association feels that the statutory damage provision is out of proportion to the harm done by the lack of authorized consent, its recourse is through the legislature.

That was back in 2009 when the Court of Appeals issued that opinion. April, 2009, in fact. So, one might ask, why didn't John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, go immediately to the legislature to demand that the law not be what the law is?

One might ask.

Perhaps, one might then theorize, John Lynch didn't go running to the legislature because John Lynch went on to read what else the Court of Appeals said:

And frankly, our view is that the requirement of a written repair estimate with an estimated price is a simple procedure that does not impose a great economic burden on repair shops. This is important because the policy makers in this instance obviously weighed that insignificant cost to the marketplace against the need to curtail the persistent practices of exploitive merchants bent on targeting the unknowledgeable motor vehicle owner. The policy makers no doubt intended to protect consumers against misunderstandings arising from less-than-clear estimates and the legal disputes and litigation that result from the fait accompli nature of claims for repair work already done.

I'm sure that was it. I'm sure that John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, was not just lying in wait and contributing only to Republican causes until the Republicans captured the legislature and he could buy himself a law that would make it okay to engage in persistent practices ... bent on targeting the unknowledgeable motor vehicle owner.

In fact, I bet that it was simply a change in the market. Economic downturn and all that, right, that made the insignificant cost of "asking a customer to approve a repair before doing it" no longer insignificant.

That was probably it.

Even then, the case wasn't over: the Court of Appeals simply remanded for the circuit court to determine whether Kaskin had actually authorized the repairs... and Lynch promptly settled, paying the $150,000 in fees plus damages.

Now, keep in mind, that John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, had many many options. They could have

(a) called the manufacturer to ask if the repairs were under warranty.
(b) called the customer to ask if he had determined that the repairs were under warranty
(c) called the customer to say "Repairs'll be $5,000, want us to do them?"
(d) once they realized the customer was mad, they could have refunded some or all of his money, losing only $5,000.

They didn't do any of that. They chose to litigate, and litigate so strenuosly that they and their opponents racked up a presumed $300,000 plus in lawyers' fees -- suing over whether the customer should or should not have paid $5,000.

In other words, John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, felt it was worth spending $150,000+ in lawyers' fees to defend his right to keep $5,000 -- but felt it was unfair that Kaskin got to spend $150,000+ in order to not pay $5,000.

In other other words, John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, wanted an uneven playing field. He wanted to force a consumer, who doesn't know about repairs and wasn't given a choice in this case to litigate against a well-heeled car dealership, with the outcome being at best the consumer would get $5,000. Which means that absent the fee-shifting provision built in to the statutes, Kaskin would never have sued.

Never.

And the consumer protection laws requiring that repair shops get your permission before charging you $5,000 and then holding your car hostage until you pay it would be meaningless.

THAT is what your Republican Party stands for nowadays. Your right to get ripped off by people who know more than you and can't be bothered to make a phone call to get your permission.

So They Made A Song About Recalling Scott Walker, 2

2011-10-19T11:24:00.002-08:00

As you either (a) begin to get trained to help Recall Walker, or (b) recoil in horror at the fact that the State of Wisconsin has the money in its budget to keep developmentally disabled people living in their homes rather than institutions but refuses to do it because Secretary of Death Dennis Smith would rather the government buy iPads for him and other Walker cronies, or (c) both, listen to

Ida Jo and The Show, No (We Won't Take It):

Prior songs:

Toss Out The Bum

So They Made A Song About Recalling Scott Walker...

2011-10-19T11:16:00.003-08:00

... and then some.

This morning I heard on WTDY a snippet of a song about Governor Patsy, and decided I'd start posting, to help out in my own small way, those songs that I can find.

Here's one:

More to come in the future.

Also: Make your online contribution to the Recall Walker effort by clicking here to go to the Wisconsin Democrats' site.

It's OUR world, and we should get to live in it. (Occupy Wall Street.)

2011-10-17T05:38:00.015-08:00

I confess to being a bit -- well, a lot -- behind the curve on the whole Occupy Wall Street phenomenon/protest, but what happened over the weekend -- when the WORLD seemingly was occupied -- caught my attention.

That changed on Saturday night, when I couldn't sleep and used commercial breaks during a re-airing of Mission: Impossible 3 to review my Twitter feed from the day, and got caught up reading retweets from a Mother Jones writer named Josh Harkinson, who sat in on the occupation of the Washington Square park in New York City.

I read Josh's Tweets, which continued until he said he was going to stop Tweeting and record this video:

There's been a lot of talk about the goal, or goals, of "Occupy Wall Street," and the related occupations around the country -- some fault them for having no goals, or an amorphous goal, while others (wrongly) compare them to the Tea Party "movements" that sprung up following Obama's election.

That comparison is particularly odious; the growth of the Tea Party has largely been driven by corporations which tapped into Tea Party racism to benefit themselves, bankrolling visits by Andrew Breitbart and Sarah Palin to show "support" for divisive Republican party politics-- support largely expressed by racists who have found, in Obama and minorities in general, an outlet for the anger they feel. In short, Tea Party members feel the same insecurities we all feel, but they're channeling that, with the help of the Koch Brothers and similar ilk, into the politics of hate.

After watching Harkinson's video, I read up more on Occupy Wall Street, which now has its own Wikipedia page, a page that includes this as an outline of the goals:

Perceptions vary as to the specific goals of the movement. According to Adbusters, a primary protest organizer, the central demand of the protest is that President Obama "ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington".

I found that looking for the goals of Occupy Wall Street, because I've heard a lot about whether or not there even is a goal to the protests, and so I wanted to see if what the protesters were saying was their goal was what I actually think is their goal.

I haven't occupied anything and I don't know any occupiers (although I do follow, on Twitter, @legaleagle, who I think was occupying Milwaukee for a bit over the weekend) so I'm not exactly the person to speak for them, but as part of the 99%, I can speak with them, so I'll try to do that, and explain why I think I know what they're doing even if they don't say it exactly the way I do.

In Chicago yesterday 175 people were arrested for occupying Chicago.*

*I italicize the word occupy because I can already tell it is going to become a catchword that gets used and then overused then broadened. Just as every political scandal worth its salt is a -gate, every protest worth talking about will henceforth be an occupation, but the word is as good as any about protests, because occupation is a better goal than protest. Wars are won by holding land, as any good general can tell you. Protesters who set out to demonstrate or oppose may make a short-lived point. Protesters who occupy stand a better chance of winning the war. And the occupation began, this iteration, by the Winter Warriors who first began marching around Wisconsin's Capitol and then quickly moved in and refused to leave. Remember, dissidents-wh0-hope-to-take-power: your buzzword is occupation.

That was only a percentage of the 2,500 people who occupied Grant Park in Chicago. While the media focused on the thousands who occupied Times Square in New York, protesters occupied (among other places) Tucson, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Denver, Detroit, London, Belleville, France, Madrid, Rome, Toronto, Tokyo, and Melbourne:

"Our protests are to show our solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and also protest various problems -- from indigenous issues in this country to government problems," said Alex Gard, one of the Melbourne organizers. "We know we have it better than the protesters in the States ... but there are still problems in this country."

That quote may help shed light on where the occupation begins and why its goals seem so amorphous to some. Again:

"We know we have it better than the protesters in the States."

...said an Australian man.

Not to run down Australia, but since when is the rest of the world supposed to feel sorry for the United States? Since when do other countries protest to highlight the living conditions in countries like ours?

One of those links above leads you to site with all the usual graphics that confuse even people like me, who (theoretically) have an education, and graphs are great except they're not because they don't always make the point in ways people can understand.

People living in parks makes that point: that the United States has become the country other countries feel sorry for.

Not our military might. Not our disproportionate use of resources or our economic impact. They don't feel sorry for those. They feel sorry for the people who make up our country.

People like those four people that Josh Harkinson interviewed to show what occupiers looked like: a laid-off 24 year old truck driver who lives with his parents because he can't even get a low-paying fast food job. Or people like Michael Smith:

Who got his hours as a machinist cut in half and can't find a second job to make up the gap.

Yes, in the United States now, you can even hope to achieve the American Dream unless you are willing to work not just one, but two jobs (and to find them.)

Smith had this to say to Harkinson:

"They say that everything has gotta be spread across the board, but the poor and middle class are bearing everything...The rich have got to be taxed.... I wanted to get involved because I believe that people can't keep sitting on the sidelines."

In Minneapolis ("Occupied since October 7", as the slogan grows -- has your city been occupied? For how long?) -- police took down transparent rain shelters but 150 people still slept there, and the OccupyMN group released a financial report. (They've taken in $12,000+ in 6 days, marking Occupations as a growth industry. With that kind of start-up money, can it be long before venture capitalists start seeking a way to get in on an IPO for occupations?)

That information helps explain what I found as I investigated this, and also explain why I think I know what the occupations are all about, but first let me give you one of those statistics that I mentioned that doesn't as adequately explain why the occupations are happening but which still is necessary to include in here: The Human Development Index.

The Human Development Index is a measure of a variety of factors that include how economic policies impact the quality of life. According to the latest UN Rankings, the U.S. is currently fourth in the world in terms of broad quality of life measured by the Human Development Index.

That's not bad at all, although it does fly in the face of the USA! We're Number One! mentality my generation grew up believing in and the next generation, I gather, did not.

What is notable about that is that the U.S. moved up from ninth in 2007 to fourth in those areas that are measured for quality of life. That is, after nearly two full terms of Worst President Ever, we were ninth best in the world. (Originally, estimates had us as low as 12th.)

That 2007 ranking came out after 27 years of mostly-Republican rule: 27 years of mostly-tax-cutting, mostly-supply-siding rule; even the intervening 8 years under Bill Clinton were pretty conservative years, given that Clinton had to "tack right" to stay in power in after 1994.

So we were 9th, and now we're 4th, after just three years of Obama-ing, with 2 of them being Obama+ Democratic control. Things were improving, right?

They were -- which alarmed the 1%, and that's why the first two years of the Obama administration saw a change in tactics by the right: Republicans began focusing on things like "REDMAP," a move to take over state legislatures and redraw congressional districts. Republicans focused on loosening up campaign finance laws (a move I generally support even though for now it hurts, but that's for another day). Republicans resorted to (as I noted the other day) simply lying about what people said and when they said it.

2008 almost served as a watershed moment: Obama accepted his party's nomination and suggested that life would get better: The oceans would recede and the day after the elections, you could almost feel that palpable sense of optimism; the worst economic crisis almost everyone alive had faced, a Depression**

**there really is no significant difference between a recession and a depression. A recession, in government economics' terms, means a slow-down that lasts six months or longer. A depression is a word that people simply no longer use; popular legend has it that FDR used the word recession in 1937-38 to talk about the slowdown then occuring in order to avoid telling people that the depression was still going on. Depression, like "Bank Panic", appears to be a term that is relegated to the past.

and a Depression that had gone on while we were fighting in two wars, wars which impacted people largely by stories of soldiers coming home limbless, while we felt guilty about feeling angry that we had to take our shoes off at the airport.

The first 8 years of the 21st century were, in short, a disaster: people elected a numbskull president who sat next to his Svengali and presided over a gradual erosion of every single national ideal we ever had.

Including, but not limited to, conservatism: Under Worst President Ever, federal spending grew by a greater rate than at any time in the previous fifty years. So he didn't even believe in the things he believed in. By the end of Worst President Ever's term, he was signing off on a massive infusion of government cash into banks. That's conservative?

At that same time, long-cherished American ideals such as, say, privacy and civic life were being eroded as the government pushed itself increasingly into every nook and cranny of our lives, sometimes figuratively-- the ability of the government to subpoena records about what you checked out at the library-- and sometime literally: the first full-body scanner in the U.S. was introduced at a New Jersey mass transit station in 2006.

During those times, people were almost literally scared to death: Anthrax was being mailed to people, the D.C. snipers were picking off consumers at gas stations while the gas they were buying (under heavy fire) continued to rise and rise in price -- one study found that gas prices doubled between 2003 and 2007.*4

*4 That's right, Michele Bachmann and other Tea Party racists. Doubled. During Worst President Ever's term.

I could go on, and I probably should, because as I read about occupy Wall Street and the other occupations and then read everyone from Tom Tomorrow to Twitter feeds about the goals of Occupy Wall Street:

I keep thinking that it's almost like people forgot what 2000-2008 were like.

I've been alive for 42 years, and I can tell you, the period of time between when Bush stole that election with the willing cooperation of five Supreme Court justices who proved then and there they were willing to put politics ahead of even the rule of law*5

*5 Making Citizens United not even kind of a surprise when it happened, and, as I said, I support the idea of unlimited restrictions but I also support the rule of law, putting me at odds with 5 of 9 Supreme Court justices today.

... the era between that day and the time when Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 presidential election was the worst time I can recall being alive.

Every single day of those 8 years felt like things were going from bad to worse:

Constant terror alerts: bring your duct tape to work today, just in case!

News stories about schools being dropped from No Child Left Behind.

"Extraordinary renditions."

Wars wars wars wars wars and the effect of those wars is still going on as our country lets military contractors enslave Filipinos to work at Taco Bells in food courts in Iraq while living in railroad canisters so that 21-year-olds can get their legs shot off in a war that didn't need to happen and we can all feel good when they come back home and we build them a wheel-chair accessible ramp.

Those Iran Hitchhikers who definitely weren't spies were mistreated in part because for 8 years (and still) we mistreat our prisoners of not-war/eternal-war.

It was 8 years of bad to worse to even worse. When Bush squared off versus Gore, does anyone remember? Things were pretty good and maybe going to get better: we'd survived an Internet bubble, we'd had a balanced budget or two, we weren't really at war with anyone, and yeah, the 1994 "Contract With America" had resulted in a country that would, by 2011, execute a man based on recanted statements, but we'd fix that and the worst problem facing America, in 2000, was whether Social Security would remain solvent for a long time, or a longer time.*6

*6 Reviewing the issues from 2000 is like reading "A Kindergardner's Guide To Presidential Politics," while somehow also being like reading page two of a newspaper today. Gore talked about fighting crime by putting 100,000 police on the streets, and suggested that gays and lesbians have equal civil rights, while Worst President Ever took a strong stand in favor of tax cuts and against racial preferences. The more things change, the more you realize that 2000-2008 was at best a holding pattern, and at worst, a kidnapping.

But Bush and his cronies took care of that. They reduced our country from one which thought that we'd licked the world to one which was afraid to try to carry too much toothpaste onto an airplane.

And then Obama got elected, and the Democrats took control, and TARP was seemingly working, and we passed Health Care Reform and even though there were racist Tea Parties out there shaking things up, life still seemed to be on an upswing.

That's not just pie-in-the-sky optimism and Obama's going to pay for my gas naivete. That Human Development Index showed it: After dropping to ninth, over the course of the previous 7 years, we were climbing and climbing fast -- in just three years we'd leapfrogged up to 4th and were possibly going to be a country where it was worth living again.

Until 2010, when the Republicans fought back and took control over seemingly everything and began just cramming stuff down our throat, passing bills without even following the usual formalities and bankrolling idiots into the Senate and redistricting and proving that they weren't going to go away quietly because, after all, they'd been in charge for 20 of 28 years, and kind of in charge for 6 of those other 8, and then the recession dragged on as the Republicans wanted it to, and then and then and then -- between November, 2010 and September, 2011, can anyone argue that life seemed like it continued to get better? We went right back to the Dark Ages and it had nothing to do with Tea Parties, who are simply racist tools, and nothing to do with changing electoral preferences and, frankly, nothing to do with Obamacare, but it had everything to do with the fact that the 1%, that power elite, were simply not going to give up and so rather than try to fight a charismatic president and a Democratic congress that wanted to, you know, make government work, that 1% -- the Art Popes and Kochs and others -- simply got some other pawns to remap the way they were going to stay in power and then there we were: Teachers getting pay cut, judges retiring almost en masse, state Supreme Court elections being stolen, and I began waking up in the morning checking headlines to see if they'd taken away the insurance benefits that let my kids get special ed.

There was a bit of a pushback, in 2008, and then there was a massive retaliation to that pushback: Remember the surge in Iraq? 2010 and the resultant redistricting and REDMAPing and union-busting and all that were a Republican/1%/aristocratic surge against the people, a surge that was working as Florida made it harder to get unemployment benefits and Republicans began openly joking about shooting minorities...

... and then, one day, people began occupying Wall Street.

I didn't, as usual, know that was coming or even what it was about; I had to be corrected by Emily Mills after I made an (ill-advised) joke about it. But they began doing it the same way soldiers fight in wars and those students overthrew Mubarak: they moved in even though people like me didn't know about it and people like Art Pope didn't want it. They moved in and protested and lived in camps, and so the occupiers came. They occupied Madison's Capitol for a while, and now they're occupying Wall Street and Chicago and Ketchum, Idaho and lots of other places like Nashville, and their goal, to me, seems simple: to live in the world we want, not the world they -- that 1% -- are willing to give us. They're camping out (because they don't have jobs anyway) and voting on things that matter to them (like should they buy sleeping bags to camp out in) and collecting money given to them by people who support their efforts on our behalf and in simply doing so they're living in -- occupying -- a world they want, not the world they were told to accept.

And as I began to actually follow them I saw the media asking what it was these occupiers wanted, and I read all these stories about what the occupiers wanted, and I realized then that it was like everyone had forgotten what 2000-2008 was like -- it was like they forgot how terrible our lives had become, how even though everything was supposedly getting better and we had phones with the Internet on them life began to seem less and less secure and it began to seem more and more like we'd never get that house, not even a nice house, just a house, and credit card debts were mounting and medical bills were mounting and there were metal detectors outside the registrar of deeds' office...

... it was like everyone forgot what that was like and hadn't noticed that 2010 and 2011 were just becoming more of the same -- settlements with banks that would immunize them from claims they'd stolen people's houses with forged paperwork and all that.

Not everybody forgot, though.

Not the people Occupying Wall Street, and not the people who support them. Those mostly-kids who graduated college and went into a world where even law firms were no longer hiring, those 24-year-old machinists who have to live with their parents, those people almost all of them under 30 who had therefore spent their entire adult life living in a world where the rich were occupying them...

...they didn't forget.

I'm not surprised that the Occupy Wall Street protesters -- around the world -- have somewhat vague, amorphous goals, or at least goals that seem vague and amorphous to the powers-that-be. Did you ever see a really messy house, one of those houses occupied by hoarders, say, and wonder where do we begin?

That's what the occupiers are facing: where do we begin? And people who ask them what their goals are, you're part of the problem because it's not so hard, really: The way I see it, their goals are to occupy our country again: to live in our country and have it be ours, because for a long time it hasn't been ours and for a long time, things were getting worse and worse and worse, worse in ways that graphs could show, confusingly, and statistics could show, confusingly, and examples could show, confusingly, but worse.

Worse in the kind of way that lets a so-called "think tank" say something like "the poor aren't so bad off, after all, they have refrigerators" and people by then have been so conditioned to accept what they're told that a great many of them nod and say yeah, that's right.

That kind of worse.

For a brief moment there, there was some hope -- that maybe things, which had been going from bad to worse to even worse to oh my God how can they get any worse -- that things might stop that slide and reverse course.

But then they didn't. They didn't reverse course.

And then they started getting worse all over again as the select few -- that 1% people keep hearing about and some people, remarkably and stupidly, keep defending -- decided to simply take for real what we'd almost taken before.

This generation of occupiers -- joined now by unions and others on the outside -- didn't grow up believing that we were number 1, they came of age in a United States that was, at best, ninth and which was pitied by Australians. And that's not what they wanted, and that's not the country they believed should exist.

So they began to occupy the country they were already living in and in occupying it, were insisting that this country, their country, our country, be the country they wanted, not the country the 1% were willing to give them.

That's my take, anyway. Maybe that's not how the occupiers would put it, but that's what they're doing, as I see it: They're the foot in the door to the good life that Americans used to actually have a shot at; they're taking up space in our world, to keep the 1% from locking us all out of the lives we should have.

Sometimes Republicans don't want you to die in the street... at least until they can take your words out of context (Bad Republicans)

2011-10-14T06:35:00.003-08:00

Relax, everyone; it's not like Republicans knocked down 78-year-old grandmother Marlene Quinn and broke her hip! All they did was take her heartfelt story used to support unions, and completely twist it so that it looks like she actually is against unions!

When you look at it that way, it's kind of sweet, right? Oh, what? It's not?

Here's what I'm talking about: Marlene Quinn is, as I said, a grandmother -- and actually, a great-grandmother. In November, her great-granddaughter was saved from a house fire (that's a picture of Zoey, the great-granddaughter in question, with the picture and news coming from this source.)

Ohio, as you may have heard, is in the middle of a battle over what they call "Issue 2," a November 8 ballot initiative to veto (or, in this case, repeal) the Ohio law banning collective bargaining. Issue 2 opponents -- that is, people who want to keep the law in place and deny collective bargaining to unions -- are being funded by "The Alliance For America's Future" and the like, but it's not enough, for Ohio union busters, to rely on billionaires financing a Virginia-based group. They also want to twist Marlene Quinn's words.

Marlene, see, made an ad proposing a No vote on Issue 2 -- no meaning get rid of the law, apparently -- and Republican promptly cut-and-spliced her into looking like she's a yes vote:

See what they did there? The public outcry over this in Ohio prompted all but two stations to pull the ad, and Democrats in Ohio have introduced a bill to prevent the mis-use of such materials in the future, but the damage is likely done: Millions of people will have seen the ad, with a woman theoretically thanking the lack of collective bargaining for saving her great-granddaughter's life.

Once a lie is told, it can't be untold, and since we live in a country where 12 people can hear a defense lawyer say "maybe her baby drowned in a pool", produce no evidence of that, and vote to acquit, the Republicans know that all they have to do is put the lies on the air, and they'll be believed. But at least spreading the word about the fact that they lied might help. So pass it on: Republicans lie, and Marlene Quinn wants a no vote on Issue 2.

Also, help more tangibly: We Are Ohio wants your donations to help put an ad on the air correcting this problem; click here to help them out.

It's good to know Gov. Patsy. (We Have Enough Money)

2011-10-12T03:57:00.004-08:00

Sly in the Morning on WTDY today is talking about Gov. Scott (Patsy) Walker's using a state airplane to fly his buddies to a Packer game, including a side trip to Waukesha, raising questions about Walker's personal use of a state plane, but those questions have been around for a long time:

The Political Environment asked way back in February whether Walker's use of a plane was fiscally conservative and who was covering the costs of flights, Uppity Wisconsin reported in March, 2011, that Walker had already racked up $42,000 in air costs in the first two months in office (or actually in the first six weeks in office, according to this site.)

The cost per air mile is estimated at about $7 per mile. The Walker administration mostly defends this by pointing out that prior Republican governors flew even more, but at this rate, Walker's flying habits could end up being more expensive than his emulation of Entertainment 720, by which I mean that Scott Walker's public-private agency boondoggle for patronage jobs has spent $60,000 on iPads for people he set up in office, making him the Aziz Ansari of Wisconsin:

My Generically-Titled Autism Post: Today, sleep disturbances, and why maybe melatonin isn't right for your kids.

2011-10-11T04:25:00.000-08:00

I used to call this "Autism Works," but then I found out there's a group called that already. (Find them here; I'll talk more about them in the future.) So while I think up a new title, I'll just go with the generic title. Click here for more posts like this with information about businesses, apps, people, and other aspects of raising a child with autism.)

It's 5:53 a.m., and I'm awake and working on my blogs instead of sleeping until... well, I'd usually only sleep until 6 a.m., so it's not that bad that I'm up, but still, I don't like losing that last 15 minutes of sleep on days like today, which began with Mr F and Mr Bunches both waking up at about 5:45 a.m.

Or, at least, that's when they woke me up. Mr Bunches woke me up by yelling "Dad!" and getting me in there to restart the movie he's currently watching ad infinitum ("Lilo & Stitch"), while Mr F had likely been awake for a lot longer, given that he was wide awake and tapping a stick against a wall to kill the time.

Mr F doesn't sleep. Or at least, not like we sleep. Sweetie and I joke that Mr F only sleeps every fourth day, and that's about right: Most nights, we can hear him in his room (which we keep locked to avoid him wandering around or getting out of the house at night) until well after we fall asleep, and many nights we can hear him around 2 or 3 a.m. wake up and begin his day. Then, about every fourth day, that catches up with him and he can't be woken up, as happened this past Sunday when he fell asleep on the couch from 4 to 5, then, after I gave him a bath to wake him up, he fell asleep again and then fell asleep in the car while we were driving around until finally we let him go to bed at 7 p.m.

So sleep is on my mind this week: Sleep and autism.

This study, "Sleep Problems In Autism: Prevalence, Cause, and Intervention", looked at just that problem. It noted that as many as 89% of autistic children exhibit some form of sleep disorder at one point, and summarized the types of problems:

Studies of sleep in children with autism have generally reported severe problems associated with sleep onset and maintenance. Irregular sleep–wake patterns, problems with sleep onset, poor sleep, early waking, and poor sleep routines have been found at all developmental levels, with increasing severity at lower developmental levels.

Additionally, shortened night sleep, alterations in sleep onset and wake times, night waking and irregular sleep patterns (with the presence of a free-running rhythm in one case) have been reported.

That's Mr F right there: all of them. The study concluded that autistic kids are more likely than any other group of children to have sleep problems and also concluded that it's likely due to something specific in the kids.

And it doesn't just cause dads to be awake before 6 a.m.; it also leads to problematic behavior during the daytime, including communications delays. Or, perhaps, the study notes, communications delays lead to sleep disturbances:

A relation between social and communication difﬁculties and sleep problems is possible. The sleep–wake cycle is a circadian rhythm and there is evidence to suggest that, as well as the light–dark cycle, humans use social cues to
entrain circadian rhythms.

Routine and social cues are thought to help young infants develop stable sleep–wake patterns with the longest sleep occurring during the night hours. Children with a primary social-communication deﬁcit may therefore ﬁnd it difﬁcult to use such cues to entrain their rhythms, resulting in problems with their sleep–wake schedule.

See? You didn't know that you know when to go to sleep because society tells you, did you? And autistic kids may not pick up on that.

The study also noted that melatonin deficits may be a problem, about which more in a minute. Another possible cause of sleep disturbance was increased anxiety, which makes me sad -- I don't like to think of Mr F and Mr Bunches being too nervous to sleep, but it seems to fit at least Mr F's personality. And, finally, there was some stuff about EEG's in sleep and REM sleep patterns.

Bottom line: We don't know why autistic people don't sleep well, which makes it kind of silly to recommend cures or interventions, but, then, we do lots of silly things, and the paper goes on to recommend some cures and interventions for something that we don't know the cause of.

To editorialize for a moment: Suggesting a solution for a problem without knowing the root cause of the problem is stabbing in the dark, or treating only a symptom, and either one may or may not be better than doing nothing. Consider an old joke:

Man: Doctor, my arm hurts when I go like this.

Doctor: Don't go like that.

That solves the problem, right? But it's not medical care. Or suppose a person shows up at the ER with a gunshot wound, and the doctor removes the bullet fragments and sews up the wound and sends the person on his way. Would you consider that an effective treatment? Or should the doctor have inquired how the bullet got there?

Just some thought experiments. Now, on to the solutions for the unknowable problem!

The study begins by noting that medications were the most common form of help for autistic kids with sleep problems -- but that about half of the parents questioned thought behavioral interventions worked just as well as medications. In our house, we've talked about medications at times for Mr F, and I downloaded the Autism Speaks Medication Decision Kit, a helpful packet that helps provide information and questions to guide you in a decision on whether or not to medicate your child-- for whatever problem. (Get it here.)

Using it, I decided (with Sweetie's help) that we wouldn't medicate Mr F, at least not yet -- because most of the medications listed don't have any clearcut effects on Mr F's conditions and some of them can have severe side effects. It seemed wrong to me to put a 5-year-old on strong antipsychotic medicines when he's not that much trouble.

If your child is on medication, or you've considered it, you should definitely get the kit and read it through. It raises a bunch of issues that I hadn't considered at all, and has helpful questions to ask your doctor, and yourself, about the medications.

Another attempted treatment was faded bedtimes, or moving bedtimes gradually to get the kids to sleep at the appropriate times. This was found to have little effect on the autistic children in the study, something I could've told them. (Currently, our routine is to begin bedtime at about 7:15, with the boys getting medicine, then a story read to them, then a bath, then bedtime with a movie on their TV. The movie on their TV is imperative: they will not sleep without a movie on, and we've learned to put movies in that have a continuous play feature, because the movie ending will frequently wake Mr Bunches up, and you haven't lived until you've been woken up every 87 minutes to restart a movie.)

Then there was parent training: Teach parents how to properly encourage good behavior (sleep) and discourage bad (not sleep.) Although only one family completed the 6-week program, that family reported reduced stress and slightly better sleep routines; I suspect the reduced stress came from parents being more able to cope with the stress through the training, but that's the cynic in me.

Then there's the one I might try: Light intervention:

Two additional treatments for sleep disorders which involve adjustment of the circadian sleep–wake cycle, are light therapy and chronotherapy. Light therapy may be used to treat a variety of rhythm problems, including sleep problems. Bright light suppresses the secretion of melatonin.

Additionally, it has been shown that periods of bright light treatment in the morning will advance the melatonin and sleep–wake rhythms, while bright light treatment in the evening has a delaying effect.

That is, show kids a light box in the morning to get them to sleep better at night, which might work for kids (like ours) who routinely wake up at 3 or 4 a.m., when it's dark out and then have trouble getting to sleep at night.

Finally, melatonin, which almost everyone we talk to treats as a panacea for this problem. At the boys' 5-year-checkup, Sweetie asked the doctor whether it was okay to take melatonin for their sleep, and he approved it: 1 mg each night, he said.

The first melatonin we were able to find was tablets, which is a problem, because the boys won't take pills -- they won't even take medicine from a spoon or those little plastic cups; we have to put it in a syringe and squirt it into their mouths.

We addressed that by pounding the pills into a powder -- literally, I hammer them into a powder, because I'm not a 15th century chemist and don't have a mortar-and-pestle -- and then mix them in with some other liquid, ordinarily some ibuprofen or water; it works better with ibuprofen because they (oddly?) like the flavor of that. (Lately, they've had a cold, so they get the melatonin mixed in with their nighttime cold medicine.)

That worked okay until Mr Bunches saw me scraping the pills into the medicine and then didn't want to take the medicine, at all -- because he now knew it had pills in it and it grossed him out. So for a week we had to wrestle him into the medicine and risk him spitting it back out, until he cut his foot one day and I began telling him the medicine was to make his foot feel better, after which he took it.

(So at night, Mr Bunches will say "Medicine!" and when I say "Yes," he still sometimes says "My foot!" even though his foot is long since healed.)

We also got some of the Natrol liquid melatonin, which we thought would be easier to use than the crushed-powder pills, but the boys hated the flavor of it -- spitting it back out each time, so we've foregone that and every night I get out my hammer, medicine, tablets, and syringe and go to it.

But here's the thing:

I don't think it's working.

Mr F has been on melatonin for a month now, and so has Mr Bunches, and I've seen no real changes in their sleep patterns, at all. I'm not ready to call it quits yet, but I suspect that the melatonin is like the gluten-free diet and other fad remedies: Not exactly the catalyst for change, but it gets the credit for change when it happens, like an ineffective quarterback who wins the Super Bowl in spite of himself.

And here's the other thing: I'm not sure melatonin is a good thing, because I took it for a week or two; I've also suffered from insomnia most of my life and have had sleep problems off and on for the last few months, and so I took the same dose that the boys took for a few weeks, and I didn't like it: My sleep felt less restful, and I had more realistic dreams that left me feeling tired -- it was like I never slept, at all, even though Sweetie would swear I did.

So after two weeks, I stopped taking it entirely, and I won't go back.

Which makes me wonder about why I'm giving it to the boys, if it doesn't seem to work and I didn't like it. But I'm not ready to declare it a failure yet, because a month seems too short to really test it out... for the boys? I don't know what effect it's having on them; Mr F can't tell me "It gives me vivid waking dreams that make it feel like I never sleep," so I have to guess whether it's doing good, or bad, or nothing. 2 out of 3 of those say don't give it to them...

...These are the kinds of decisions you never even suspect you'll have to make. I'll let you know what I decide.

Thanks, Michael Offutt!

2011-10-07T07:32:00.002-08:00

Author Michael Offutt has posted the Smilin' Mr F badge on his blog, SLCKismet to show his support for government funding of Autism research and treatment.

Want your own Smilin' Mr F Badge? Copy this on to your blog

and say you support continued funding of research into autism treatment and prevention.

To learn more about autism and autism-friendly businesses, blogs, and research, click here.

An alien invasion, you say? Well, THAT has never been done before! (RE: What You Said)

2011-10-07T06:56:00.000-08:00

Time again for comment roundup-- now featuring a Dane Cook joke, some great music, and, at the very end, my WHO TO FOLLOW ON TWITTER -- picking out the best comments on all my blogs and responding to them.

Before I go on, though, have you checked out:

IO17: humans have been overtaken by them, a race of aliens who came to what used to be Earth with two demands. Now, a century later, a second race of invaders has arrived to battle over what humanity has been, and what it will be. A horror/sci-fi classic in the making!

Click here to read it.

Now, on to your comments:

On my post "... (The I Should Have A Catchy Title For Posts Like This Post)" where I compared the Chargers' new brand of wine to the ultra-classy gnome bank San Diego offers on their website, Rogue Mutt pointed out that the Chargers don't just steal hope from their fans, they also take other teams' ideas:

Every year the Red Wings have a charity wine tasting party and one of their former players even has his own brand of wine. So the Chargers stole that idea from us! Not sure who stole the gnome from whom though.

I figure they stole the gnome from Travelocity, or from King Of The Hill:

My Off The Top Of My Head List of sci-fi stories that aren't Star Wars or Star Trek also caused Rogue to point out that I missed V and something called Silent Running

The top of my list would have been "V" (the original not the reboot I never watched) followed by Robotech (or Macross in Japan) and "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. And Transformers if that counts--there was a TV series, several actually.

What was "The Black Hole"? There was a "Robot Chicken" skit about a new Special Edition of The Black Hole and they just keep showing one of the stupid little robots like in the poster going down this corridor. "Action!!!" the announcer says, trying to make it sound exciting, which I take it it's not. Though when I think of that I think of that "Silent Running" movie where some guy was on board a spaceship with some plants and a couple of robots. Why hasn't anyone rebooted that yet? Oh right because we only care about rebooting stupid '80s movies, not stupid '70s movies. Then after I think of "Silent Running" the movie I think of the song "Silent Running" by Mike and the Mechanics that has nothing to do with the movie and actually sounds more like it should have been the theme song for "Red Dawn," the remake of which was made in Michigan and is due out at some point, or maybe it already came out and flopped. I have no idea.

When I get really bored at work I launch into these stream of consciousness comments.

I'm not sure how you get from V to Mike + The Mechanics, but I did think, when V was originally on TV, that the alien girl who turned out to be a lizard was hot, which then caused me to be rather confused because I was attracted to an alien lizard. Being a teen is hard!

Also, I researched it, because that's what I do, and she wasn't actually an alien at all; she was a teenager who sympathized with the aliens and got pregnant by one, which really makes her kind of a 1983 version of Bristol Palin, if you think about it. Her name was Blair Tefkin:

What's weird is that when I began writing this post, I didn't actually think it would be primarily about aliens invading the Earth, but let's role with that idea and move on to why Stephen Hayes thinks monkeys are better than people:

I never put much stock in the notion of monkeys randomly typing and eventually ending up penning Hamlet. It's like speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Quite silly, but there's another issue to be addressed. Its quite possible that we humans need to create works of art because we're inferior to animals, who exist contentedly without the need for such things. In a perfect world there probably wouldn't be a need for art--it pains me to say. Monkeys, and all other animals, live in a perfect world provided we leave them alone. An argument can be made that this makes them superior to humans. If a monkey ever did peck out Shakespeare, I hope it would have the good sense to hit the delete button.

That was left on my post ranting about how a blogger claimed to have finally proven a thought experiment involving an infinite number of monkeys, and I never thought that my blogging, which is art, after all, proves that I'm inferior to monkeys, who don't feel the need to create art but will, at times, throw their poop at people.

Which is no reason to not own one, if you'll spare the double negative:

Anyway, hope you weren't thrown off by the fact that I didn't label that as NSFW, and also that it didn't really talk about owning a monkey at all. If there's one problem that plagues society, it's people mislabeling their pirated Dane Cook Youtube videos and making it hard for me to copy them here in a way that makes sense. That and Republicans.

Rogue Mutt commented on that same post by noting that Dark Matter is more than an ice cream flavor I'm inventing, it's also an Andrew Bird song:

So now you've got that going for you.

Author Michael Offutt made clear, in response to my post about going to Apple Fantasy Camp (SPOILER ALERT! It has nothing to do with Steve Jobs and instead has a lot to do with Macintoshes) that while Mr Rose was in the knife business, he was in the Understanding Allusions To John Irving Business:

I love aquariums. I had no idea you needed advanced tickets. It sounds like you learned a lot about apples...kinda like Homer Wells learned about Apples in the Cider House Rules. And yes...that's where Rogue's quote comes from in case you are wondering :)

See? Read my blogs and you will be fully-equipped to take part in society, provided that all you want to do in society is go to aquariums and read John Irving. Not at the same time. Well, you could, if you wanted to. I don't see why you couldn't, in fact.

That should be a thing: People Reading John Irving In Aquariums. That will be some more art I'll invent, since nobody has yet offered me a jillion dollars for the last art I invented.

Where were we? Oh, yeah: Alien invasions, and how Stephen Hayes managed to take my clever references to the Ship of Theseus philosophical question and make it all about seeing Dale Arden in skimpy clothing:

Aren't both of them derivative of Flash Gordon? If I had to pick between Star Trek and Star Wars, I'd pick Star Trek. I like the political ramifications of Star Trek while Star Wars is more of a comic book. But Star Wars has always had the better special effects.

That was in response to the way I managed to take Star Wars and Star Trek and deconstruct them down to "Jennifer Aniston as Slave Leia."

But I posted Slave Leia there, so here's Dale Arden:

In what really looks a lot like Slave Leia getup, doesn't it? You may be on to something, Stephen, but I have to point out that monkeys, for all their perfection, never thought to dress hot women up in metal bikinis, which proves that evolution works.

While I've been writing this, I went on to listen to Andrew Bird's Cataracts, because that's what I do, and I thought it worth sharing:

I like the whistle part. I once wrote a song, called If I Was Paul McCartney, that had a "Whistle Part Reprise" in it.

I'm not even kidding about that. You can hear the song here. And two other songs I wrote and played, because once I was going to be a rock star along with a famous writer. You could also get Big Mouth Frog t-shirts. I recommend listening to my song "The Big Mouth Frog Blues," too. It's awesome. Seriously. It is.

I'd also completely forgotten I put those online.

I should note that the line "What if I was Tom Brady/And I'd just won the Super Bowl" was written before VideoGate, and also that the point of the song was that it would change and always be the last person to win the Super Bowl. When it was first written, the line was "What if I was Brett Favre/and I'd just won the Super Bowl."

I should also note that I am correct, in that song, that the Pope is not allowed to date. I went to Catholic school for three years, after all.

On to more alien invasions, only not so much, as this is more of a "Kids Playing With Lockers" type of thing; my photo essay of Mr Bunches and Mr F messing around in the locker room at the health club turned out to be a glass-half-full moment for Anna:

your boys give me hope that having kids of my own someday won't be totally terrible ( :

Anna, having kids is supereasy. Provided that you also have a Sweetie to take care of them for you, leaving you free to do stuff like "take them to the park where they'll accidentally fall into a lake but it totally wasn't your fault".

Keep the comments coming! In closing, let's look at Rogue Mutt's unique insight into Colts football:

I bet that cheerleader could throw for more yards than Curtis Painter.

I'm guessing Rogue wasn't looking at her quarterback rating, if you know what I mean.*

*I actually don't know what I mean, there. But it sounded good.

Why don't you try reading, and commenting on...

The Best Of Everything: Our opinions are righter than yours: Everything you never thought you wanted to know about pop culture!

Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! The sports blog for people who hate sports and hate blogs.

AfterDark: Your home for great horror stories, now featuring "IO17," a sci-fi/horror story about what humanity might be.

Thinking The Lions: Make Life More Interesting! By reading how I live MY life!

Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World! In the future, everyone will eat squid jerky, and the fate of the 73 dimensions will rest on the slim sexy shoulders of Rachel, who once was a pop singer but now just might be the queen of the lesbian zombies.

You might also want to read:

SLCKismet: Author Michael Offut's blog features amazing gifs, excellent reviews of books, movies, and TV shows, and also lots of thoughts on writing and culture.

Every Other Writer Has A Blog, Why Can't I? Rogue Mutt blogs about writing and how you're doing it wrong, reviewing and how you're doing it wrong, movies and how they're wrong. He's grumpy, but he's also right.

[i like that]: Anna's blog recently featured brownies that may or may not have pop rocks, and also every day has an amazing sense of wonder and optimism. You can't read her blog without smiling the rest of the day.

The Chubby Chatterbox: Stephen Hayes is an award-winning illustrator who has written a paranormal romance, among other things, and whose blog makes you think about the details of things.

PERSON I RECOMMEND FOLLOWING ON TWITTER!

@forwardwithkurt:

The name of the #SarahPalin documentary was "The Undefeated". Well, I guess you can't be defeated if you don't run. Clever strategy.

Kurt Baron's a local (Madison) talk show host at WTDY. His couple of hours on the air each day bring a fresh spin to business, politics, and local life. Sure, he's wrong on the gun issue, but don't hold that against him.

Highway Choice! The Secret GOP plan to privatize your roads is underway.

2011-10-04T03:25:00.007-08:00

Earlier this week, the "Reason Foundation" decided to back its way into larger, more intrusive government and higher taxes by recommending that Wisconsin convert its interstate highways into toll roads. The proposal was almost immediately and very disingenuously (if not completely dishonestly) seconded by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which said:

Tolling does appear to be a viable way of paying for the large and unavoidable costs of modernizing an interstate system that won’t last forever — and a way to do it without raising taxes,” said George Lightbourn, president of the WPRI.

(Source.) So there you have it: The conservative position is that tolling -- government collecting money from you, in this case by photographing your license plate as you drive along -- is not taxation.

Lots of things are not taxation, according to conservatives, who appear to define taxes in a very limited way -- mostly, these days, conservatives appear to define taxes as things they won't force the rich to pay. It was curious, though, to see WPRI and the Reason Foundation touting a tax, which is what a toll road is, regardless of what you call it.

But what was more curious was that the Reason Foundation didn't just back raising taxes; it also backed (in promoting the study) increasing public transportation. On its website it noted that

An added benefit for southeastern Wisconsin commuters, in either case, would be reduced congestion and faster and more reliable express bus transit during peak periods, thanks to the pricing system.

It's not clear whether reduced congestion would come from people not using interstates -- one thing that could happen, if you put tolls on the Interstates (which is the only place they're being proposed) is that you could drive traffic to state highways and other alternate routes, in which case you not only don't see increased revenues from tolls but you in fact place more congestion on those routes and cause more wear and tear on those roads, resulting in simply shifting the cost of highway construction -- or whether reduced congestion would come from making new express lanes, as the study appears to suggest would be done to justify the tolls.

Or maybe the reduced congestion would come from more reliable express bus transit during peak periods, which is a big assumption the Reason group makes without suggesting, at least in the summary, how that would work.

More reliable express bus transit is more public transportation, which is what conservatives shot down when Gov. Patsy killed the rail project by refunding federal money. (Remember that? One of Gov. Patsy's first acts in office was to send your federal tax money off to other states. He didn't reduce your taxes; he just gave them away. No wonder he's so popular elsewhere.)

How will we get that more reliable express bus transit -- since the poor and mass-transited should ride buses and not trains, apparently, in the conservative mind? I wondered, and that was not all I wondered, because I found it odd that a libertarian group would align itself with lower tax conservatives and anti-public transportation demagogues, and I wanted to get to the bottom of this, so I went right to the report and decided to see what I could see.

You can read the report online. I did, so you don't have to. It would have been nice if any of the reporters who mentioned the report this week would have read the report, but I don't think they did. Or, if they did, they didn't bother thinking about it or asking questions about it. But I had questions right from the start -- and, as you'll see, I didn't like where they led me.

Take this quote, from what would be the "About the Author" section of a book:

Reason Foundation’s mission is to advance a free society by developing, applying and promoting libertarian principles, including individual liberty, free markets and the rule of law. We use journalism and public policy research to influence the frameworks and actions of policymakers, journalists and opinion leaders.

I'm glad someone is for the rule of law.

But really, free markets?

How is a toll road a free market?, I wondered. How is a public road a free market?

Over a year and a half ago I pointed out that once upon a time, we had private roads. Isn't that the free market? Why can't I decide to go into the road-building business, build myself a superhighway alongside of I-90 from Madison to Milwaukee, make the speed limit be 90 miles per hour, and charge you to drive on it?

Would the Reason people support me in my quixotic quest to build the Pagel Superhighway? Or do they support government suppression of my individual liberties and free markets? Their support for government-run toll roads suggests the latter. Socialism!

Or not.

It turns out that the author in fact might support private roads: The author is Robert W. Poole, Jr., who brags that his

1988 policy paper proposing privately financed toll lanes to relieve congestion directly inspired California's landmark private tollway law (AB 680), which authorized four pilot toll projects including the successful 91 Express Lanes in Orange County. More than 20 other states and the federal government have since enacted similar public-private partnership legislation.

That made me wonder what was really behind the Reason's report. How could libertarians and conservatives be for more government and more taxes even though they say they're not? So I went looking for this 1988 paper that the author was so proud of, and although I didn't find it, I did find Poole's testimony before the Little Hoover Commission in March, 2009.

The "Little Hoover Commission" is a California commission that studies issues and makes recommendations for legislation about them.

Poole's 2009 testimony before the Little Hoover Commission begins with an overview of how California came to approve four private toll roads -- lanes added to public highways but operated as toll roads by private companies, giving people the ability to travel on private highways for by paying money, or public highways for free. Apparently, only two of them got built, and one of them ended up resulting in another fight when the state tried to expand the free highway to deal with congestion, only to face the threat of litigation from the private company, which the State then had to buy out.

Poole then goes on to say that the roads have generally been successful, a claim that, like tolls aren't taxes requires a heavy does of salt: one of the roads was bought out by the State, the other faces cost overruns and lower revenues than projected, and Poole notes that there have been problems in other states, too (and in other countries), with companies going into receivership. Poole says that the taxpayers were not at risk in those cases -- but we know how quickly that can change, don't we, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Goldman Sachs? If a private road operator goes into receivership, who picks up the road, ultimately?

Not only does the taxpayer end up at risk, but it also seems that libertarians don't necessarily think that purely private financing isn't the way to go. Poole's lessons learned from the California experiment include:

What most other states with workable PPP legislation have concluded is that it makes sense to permit mixed funding, under which the majority of a project is toll-supported but the state makes up the balance.

That is: Free markets rule, especially if you can get the State to bear some of the cost of getting into that free market. How ~~socialist~~ libertarian!

Poole in his Little Hoover testimony went on to propose various measures that would improve a then-just-passed private/public toll road law, including a measure that would compensate private road operators if a "competing project"-- presumably a free road -- took away their revenues.

That was 2009. Now we're back to 2011, and Poole's Reason report recommending that Wisconsin adopt toll roads.

That report does not propose public-private toll roads, at all -- it mostly ends up suggesting that toll roads are one way to make up what the report assumes will be a shortfall (although the math the report uses doesn't seem to add up)

But as I read, having learned how libertarians can back a toll road (because they want to make it private; they would let me have my Pagel Superhighway!), I then began wondering, as I read this report, was why it existed.

And why now?

Did Reason just up and decide to study Wisconsin's highways, because they were bored? Or liked Wisconsin?

Of course not. The report itself doesn't say who commissioned it, and only credits Poole and a research assistant with drafting it, but has both Reason and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute listed on it -- and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that WPRI commissioned the report.

Why would WPRI do that?

Maybe because as far back as 1996, WPRI has been pushing private toll roads for Wisconsin. The study that link sends you to was done by... you guessed it, Robert Poole, WPRI's private-toll-road flack for nearly two decades now.

The WPRI proposed private toll roads back in the Thompson era, but after the proposal was attacked (by trucking industries, among others) Poole and WPRI published a new proposal to do the same thing, and both the 1996 and 1998 papers were cited in a Missouri proposal which noted that toll roads must be "politically feasible."

They'd learned their lesson, see: You've got to sell the public on selling their roads to private companies.

So they kept pushing, and by 2005, the idea was gaining notoriety, being featured in USA Today, and the arguments for it were the same ones Poole makes all over the place: Governments will get cash and avoid raising taxes.

So now, we have this report come out, suggesting that we're going to spend billions on roads and we don't have them and what are we going to do? We have to do something, and we don't want to raise taxes... so along comes a suggestion: toll roads. That's not a tax, right? And we could start them down by Illinois and screw over those Bears fans on their way to the Dells.

Again, the current report does not suggest private toll roads, or Poole's public-private partnerships. But can it be coincidence that the report came out in Tea Party season? WPRI has for two decades been trying to convert the public roads to private roads, and has now opened up that fight again, using the exact same person to make almost the exact same arguments.

Just more politically feasible arguments. Like charter schools, toll roads will start out small: some vouchers here and there become a shifting of public education money, and a toll road between Racine and Illinois will morph into a private-public partnership (like the kind that Gov. Patsy touted for his tourism efforts. Remember those?)

I don't tend to buy into the slippery slope -- but the fact is that conservatives trying to privatize everything work on just that principle, and WPRI has learned from the mistakes of the past. They've been waiting until a friendly administration comes in, and mark my words: When this idea comes up, you're going to see Poole (or someone like him) testify, and someone's going to float the idea for public-private toll roads and pretty soon we're shoveling barrelfuls of taxpayer money onto the Koch Superhighway.