For politics related items
Sorry for diving into a politically tinged topic, but alas, an editorial from The NY Times this morning causes me to reflect on a recent discovery.
The editorial is How to Collect $1.4T in Unpaid Taxes, and it begins by reflecting how the imposition of payroll withholding drove the spending required to be victorious in WWII, even leading to wealthy people being proud of what their money was accomplishing (albeit a rare sentiment).
Continue reading →
We are about to see a pretty major social experiment in the USA. The red state governors are chomping at the bit to lift restrictions to slow the spread of COVID-19, and to get their economies flowing again. At this moment, South Dakota (never fully embraced restrictions), Florida, and Texas are about to play the canaries, betting that they will not see explosive growth of infections, and deaths in their states.
Continue reading →I try to avoid politics on my blog. That isn’t the same as avoiding politics in general, as I have fairly strong opinions and thoughts. However, I can’t keep silent.
Last night as I was in bed working on the Sunday NY Times Crossword (don’t laugh, it helps me nod off), I heard the beep of a text message hit my phone.
It was a Bernie volunteer, a chipper woman named Emily, who was spewing a line of how Sanders was fighting greed and corruption.
I promptly texted back that she should just fuck right off.
I am not a Sanders fan. I never “felt the bern”. I voted against him in the last round of primaries in 2016 (that he LOST decisively), and I will vote against him in 2020.
In my opinion, he is a large part of the reason that we have the orange turd sitting in the oval office right now.
Bernie Sanders is not a democrat, he just campaigns as one because without a nationwide major party at his back, he would be just what his record in congress is, a footnote to obscurity.
Fuck Bernie Sanders.
Tossing and turning in a fever induced dream state, I dreamt that the US had become the Libertarian Utopia that I have read about. This is the summary:
Joe Conservative wakes up in the morning and goes to the bathroom. He flushes his toilet and brushes his teeth, mindful that each flush & brush costs him about 43 cents to his privatized water provider. His wacky, liberal neighbor keeps badgering the company to disclose how clean and safe their water is, but no one ever finds out. Just to be safe, Joe Conservative boils his drinking water.
Joe steps outside and coughs–the pollution is especially bad today, but the smokiest cars are the cheapest ones, so everyone buys ‘em. Joe Conservative checks to make sure he has enough toll money for the 3 different private roads he must drive to work. There is no public transportation, so traffic is backed up and his 10 mile commute takes an hour.
On the way, he drops his 12 year old daughter off at the clothing factory she works at. Paying for kids to go to private school until they’re 18 is a luxury, and Joe needs the extra income coming in. Times are hard and there’re no social safety nets.
He gets to work 5 minutes late and misses the call for Christian prayer, and is immediately docked by his employer. He is not feeling well today, but has no health insurance, since neither his employer nor his government provide it, and paying for it himself is really expensive, since he has a precondition. He just hopes for the best.
Joe’s workday is 12 hours long, because there is no regulation over working hours, and Joe will lose his job if he complains or unionizes. Today is an especially bad day. Joe’s manager demands that he work until midnight, a 16 hour day. Joe does, knowing that he’ll lose his job if he does not.
Finally, after midnight, Joe gets to pick up his daughter and go home. His daughter shows him the deep cut she got on the industrial sewing machine today. Joe is outraged and asks why she doesn’t have metal mesh gloves or other protection. She says the company will not provide it and she’ll have to pay for it out of her own pocket. Joe looks at the wound and decides they’ll use an over the counter disinfectant and bandages until it heals. She’ll have a scar, but getting stitches at the emergency room is expensive.
His daughter also complains that the manager made suggestive overtures towards her. Joe counsels her to be a “good girl” and not rock the boat, or she’ll get fired and they’ll be out the income.
His daughter says she can’t wait until she’s 18 so she can vote for change or go to the Iraq War.
They get home and there’s a message from his elderly father who can’t afford to pay his medical or heating bills. Joe can hear him coughing and shivering.
Joe turns on the radio and the top story is a proposal in Congress to raise the voting age to 25. A rare liberal opinionator states that it’s an attempt to keep power out of the hands of working class Americans. The conservative host immediately quashes him, calling him “a utopian idealist,” and agreeing that people aren’t mature enough to make good choices until they’re at least 25.
Joe chuckles at the wine-swilling, cheese eating liberal egghead and thinks, “Thank God I live in America where I have freedom!”
Fortunately, I awoke and the world was normal.
This week, we have been treated to the spectacle of the house Republicans jamming their “replacement” of the ACA through their two subcommittees with astounding speed and virtually no comment or open debate.
Last week, it was the rage that the supposed plan was available to be viewed in a “secret” room, no note taking, no removal from this room, heck, the reports were that it wasn’t to be found anywhere. Amusing, funny, but tragic to our republic.
7 years of bloviating. 7 years of promising to repeal the disaster that was Obamacare – or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The complication was that the cheeto-faced Shit-Gibbon promised that they would replace the out of control Obamacare with something better, cheaper, and everybody was going to be covered. Continue reading →
I try to not discuss politics here, but sometimes, you hear or see something so over the top, so insane, so awful, that you can’t help yourself.
Today, that happened. I was sitting on my couch, drafting a blog post for my professional site, and I got a ping on my phone, an alert from the New York Times, that without any evidence, Trump tweeted that former President Obama had the phones tapped in Trump Tower, and some comments about how sad this was.
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
This is in the midst of a flurry of instantiations of the Trump campaign and administration team having contacts with a Russian ambassador, who is also a known Russian intelligence operator (aka – Spy). Already the original National Security Director, Michael Flynn, has resigned due to his lying about a conversation with this Russian spy. Continue reading →
A well written analysis as to why the congressional Republicans prefer to ignore the ramifications of Russian interference in our election last year. That seems like a catastrophically bad idea to me.
The CIA’s assessment that the Russian government probably had a hand in the hacking the Democratic National Committee servers and the subsequent release of leaked emails written by members of the party sent shockwaves across Washington Dc. To Democrats, the alleged Russian cyberattack was a deliberate campaign against their presidential nominee; an unprecedented act of…
via The GOP would rather live in dangerous ignorance than get the truth about Russian hacking — Quartz
A dream sequence of waking up in a Libertarian USA
Joe Conservative wakes up in the morning and goes to the bathroom. He flushes his toilet and brushes his teeth, mindful that each flush & brush costs him about 43 cents to his privatized water provider. His wacky, liberal neighbor keeps badgering the company to disclose how clean and safe their water is, but no one ever finds out. Just to be safe, Joe Conservative boils his drinking water.
Joe steps outside and coughs–the pollution is especially bad today, but the smokiest cars are the cheapest ones, so everyone buys ‘em. Joe Conservative checks to make sure he has enough toll money for the 3 different private roads he must drive to work. There is no public transportation, so traffic is backed up and his 10 mile commute takes an hour.
On the way, he drops his 12 year old daughter off at the clothing factory she works at. Paying for kids to go to private school until they’re 18 is a luxury, and Joe needs the extra income coming in. Times are hard and there’re no social safety nets.
He gets to work 5 minutes late and misses the call for Christian prayer, and is immediately docked by his employer. He is not feeling well today, but has no health insurance, since neither his employer nor his government provide it, and paying for it himself is really expensive, since he has a precondition. He just hopes for the best.
Joe’s workday is 12 hours long, because there is no regulation over working hours, and Joe will lose his job if he complains or unionizes. Today is an especially bad day. Joe’s manager demands that he work until midnight, a 16 hour day. Joe does, knowing that he’ll lose his job if he does not.
Finally, after midnight, Joe gets to pick up his daughter and go home. His daughter shows him the deep cut she got on the industrial sewing machine today. Joe is outraged and asks why she doesn’t have metal mesh gloves or other protection. She says the company will not provide it and she’ll have to pay for it out of her own pocket. Joe looks at the wound and decides they’ll use an over the counter disinfectant and bandages until it heals. She’ll have a scar, but getting stitches at the emergency room is expensive.
His daughter also complains that the manager made suggestive overtures towards her. Joe counsels her to be a “good girl” and not rock the boat, or she’ll get fired and they’ll be out the income.
His daughter says she can’t wait until she’s 18 so she can vote for change or go to the Iraq War.
They get home and there’s a message from his elderly father who can’t afford to pay his medical or heating bills. Joe can hear him coughing and shivering.
Joe turns on the radio and the top story is a proposal in Congress to raise the voting age to 25. A rare liberal opinionator states that it’s an attempt to keep power out of the hands of working class Americans. The conservative host immediately quashes him, calling him “a utopian idealist,” and agreeing that people aren’t mature enough to make good choices until they’re at least 25.
Joe chuckles at the wine-swilling, cheese eating liberal egghead and thinks, “Thank God I live in America where I have freedom!”
Yep, sounds like a dream. A feverish nightmare.
Yesterday1, a cryptic message came across my phone. The NY Times flashed a headline that last week both Donald Trump and President Obama were briefed on an unsubstantiated, but deemed credible report that Russian officials had a dossier on President-Elect Trump that was potentially damaging.
Reading the article, it was quite clear that it was un verified, and possibly unverifiable, but that it contained information that would be embarrassing to the incoming administration.
Then Buzzfeed (not linked, because they are clickbait) posted an image that highlighted that Trump was party to orgies in Moscow and St. Petersberg with prostitutes, and that waterplay (a.k.a. “Golden Showers“) was involved. Also that Trump purposely did this in the same hotel that the Obamas stayed at during their state visit, and even the same bed. Continue reading →
The new republican plans for health care sure sounds like “just die quickly, and quietly” Well, as we expected, once the Republicans captured the White House (well, in 29 days now), their first order of business will be to repeal the ACA.
They have been talking about repealing it and replacing it for 6 years now, bloviating at every opportunity, and doing fuck-all in the House with 54 attempts to repeal or defund portions of the ACA (or the pejorative “Obamacare”) so this isn’t a surprise.
However, some of the rhetoric coming out of the Paul Ryan camp is interesting. Suddenly, instead of shutting it down on day 1, they are talking about repealing and delaying for 2 – 3 years until they can devise a “replacement” for it. Yeah, that sounds do-able. Continue reading →