Monday, January 02, 2012
Scary Thought
With this last gasp tremblor, one has to ask, should we be getting the frack out of here?
Y'know, Crack Dealers Are More Ethical
Keeping America addicted and enslaved, one credit card at a time.
Attention: Tourists To NYC
Please check local gun laws before you come here and get arrested. There's entirely too much of this stuff going on around here, and you'll be jailed for a while before you even come to trial.
Ignorance of the law is no defense, and NYC specifically bans carrying a gun unless you have an NYPD-issued carry permit.
There Had To Be A Better Way To Handle This
Over New Year's weekend, 68 people were arrested as Occupy Wall Street sat in Zuccotti Park, welcoming in the new year. Their crime? Apparently, becoming a bit overexuberant in their desire to reclaim the park.
For their efforts, they were tear-gassed, batoned, and subject to a violent police response.
I would have hoped Mayor Mike had made it a resolution to find a smarter, more competent way to respond to the protestors. I'm sad to see he's as incompetent as the next hooligan.
Not Sure I Understand This
It seems to me to be a wasted effort to go after Rick Santorum so hard in Iowa, particularly for Mitt Romney. I can understand Rick Perry needs to, it's like Santorum provides a hand-hold in his scramble to catch up to the other climbers, but Romney really has no reason to do anything but protect his flank from Ron Paul at this point.
The World's Richest Thief
Meet John Hammergen, of whom it has been said:
“As far as I’m concerned, a board that keeps loading up its chief executive with more stock and options each year is, from a shareholder perspective, basically committing theft,” says Albert Meyer, a former accounting professor who runs a money-management firm called Bastiat Capital. It’s all legal, of course, but to Meyer you can tell if an enterprise exists for the benefit of shareholders or insiders by the number of options it awards its top executives. Options aren’t free; they dilute the worth of everyone’s shares. And the practice hurts more than the privileged few. Anyone who owns an index fund of the country’s 500 largest companies owns shares in McKesson, a Fortune 500 company. “It’s nothing short of a massive wealth transfer from the retirement accounts of middle-class Americans to a privileged few,” hidden in the guise of stock-option programs like McKesson’s, Meyer argues.
But wait! There's more...
This Is Rather Distubring
The hot potato that is known as Gitmo looks like it's about to be passed back to the very people who baked it in the first place.
Really? If these people really are bent on our destruction, then they ought to be charged and brought to the United States in the name of democracy and justice. And if they're safe enough to return now, why not five years ago? Or even three years ago, so that President Obama could make good on his boast to close Guatanamo Bay?
A Sad Crack To Fall Through
Imagine, for a moment, you're one of the first people to respond to a terrible tragedy. You have emergency medical training. You're there, helping people escape the flames and rubble. And suddenly, the tragedy compounds and the people like you, men and women whose only crime was to run towards a disaster instead of away, die.
You aren't on any of the official rosters of emergency responders, because you worked for a private ambulance company, not the official rescue services. You are a student in a law enforcement environment, but haven't applied to the police department because you're thinking of going to medical school.
It takes a while for official acknowledgement of your sacrifice, presumably because identifying remains was so difficult under the circumstances. When it is established that you are dead, you receive a hero's funeral, with dignitaries giving speeches and you receive full police honors.
A decade later, a memorial to the tragedy is erected, and mysteriously, your name appears, not on the official roll call, but as a footnote. As it turns out, you were actually considered a person of interest in instigating the tragedy, because you are Muslim, Pakistani, and hold a degree in biochemistry.
It's not clear that Salman Hamdani was denied a place among the official first responders because of the initial suspicions surrounding him, or his Muslim background, or whether he simply slipped through a bureaucractic crack because of his unofficial status-- which is both my guess and my fervent hope.
What is clear is he gave his life trying to make one small correction to the terrible misconception that America has deluded itself with: that Muslims hate us, fear us, and want to destroy us.
I'm sure that was not on his mind as he watched the towers burn and came to the fateful decision to help. I'm sure his only thought was for the people in those buildings, and those trying to get in to help them get out. I'm sure he didn't think, "Most of them are Christians or Jews." I'm sure he didn't think about whether those people were there officially or unofficially. I'm sure he merely thought "People in trouble, and I can help."
We should accord him the same decency.
Friday, December 30, 2011
My Photo Of The Year
There were quite a few candidates, but this one has stuck out in my mind as the most memorable one to take, and among the best composed I had for the year
Thursday, December 29, 2011
All Due Respect, Dick...
I say this as one who subbed for you once when you couldn't make an appearance, but...
Remember "The Birds"?
You know, that wonderfully thrilling Alfred Hitchcock movie about birds that somehow take a real disliking to a particular woman and begin to mass attack her and the town she's in?
Well, apparently, the film was based on a real incident...
How Would You Feel About Your Birthday Always Being The Same Day Of The Week?
Well, that might happen if this idea catches fire.
Io-what, now?
Well, Mitt Romney seems to be the inevitable winner of the caucuses in Iowa.
Unless Ron Paul beats him.
Or Newt Gingrich picks up more momentum.
Even Rick Santorum's message is spreading.
And if you're going to look at Santorum, you may as well look at Rick Perry, who's about in the same place as Santorum.
Indeed, about the only candidate who has completely obliterated her chances in Iowa is Mickey Mou-- I mean, Bachmann.
And lurking in the shadows for whomever comes out the front-runner is Jon Huntsman, who decided to insult Iowans and bolster New Hampshirites by skipping and then dissing the Iowa caucuses
Huntsman's strategy at least is clear: skip the nomination this year, position himself for a run against the Democrat to succeed Obama in 2016, and hope for a fluke.
A couple of days ago, a Republican strategist was lamenting how the GOP wasn't fielding their A team (wish I could recall the link, but memory fails me today.)
Well, newsflash: this IS the Republican A team! Therein lies the tale. It's a tale of thirty years of deciding that power trumps good governance, that compromise is for wusses and arrogance will win the day.
When Ronald Reagan ran for President in 1976-- he lost in the primaries to Gerald Ford-- he made a pact with the religious right: in exchange for the support of the evangelicals, Reagan promised to support their platform and espouse it as his own, despite the fact that Reagan was about as religious as any Hollywood movie star was.
He married this constituency to the economic royalists who had lately become the Republican funding backbone. It was an uneasy truce, and early dust-ups between the two factions were always smoothed over by Reagan himself. He'd toss a bone to the ideologues while scrupulously plotting the economic downfall of America while avoiding any hint of upsetting those religious types who might notice.
Indeed, so successful was he at co-opting the religious vote that he managed to ram through dismantling of whole departments that were in keeping with little things like God's commandment to humanity to shepherd the earth and its inhabitants.
No one really noticed.
When Reagan left office, the task of placating both groups fell on Lee Atwater's shoulders, who devised the "big tent" image: an inclusive club that anyone could feel at home in.
Sadly, a complete lie. It might have been a more interesting dynamic if the Republicans worked harder for, say, the minority vote or the gay vote.
In turn, we watched as Republicans tried to discredit science, logic, the Constitution, the Congress, and even a President, with mixed success. It was the underlying message, however, that Republicans would prefer to be elitist and aloof that got leaked out, along with this hatred of anything remotely smacking of liberality or progress.
The people who were attracted to this belief system, the "new blood" added to the already stodgy Republicans of pro-war, anti-humanity ilk, were pretty radical in their beliefs. And they were zealotous in their dogma. My way, or the highway. The perfect patriarchal moment.
Take a look at the Republican field: apart from Huntsman, who almost sounds normal, who there has a clue about the America of today?
They have what they have, and looking deeper into the party, there's not a lot of "there" there. Your frontrunner, Mitt Romney, is about as close to a real candidate as they have, and he's a former liberal who ascribes to a religion that has some very curious and ambiguous standing as a real religion.
Contrast this to the 2008 Democratic primary, where we had three candidates who gave us sharp differences and real choices in candidates. That's the sign of a healthy political party.
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