Personal Musings category archive

It was the wrong thing to do morally, but the right thing to do politically. To the extent that the GOP had ACORN to take shots at, ACORN was a distraction.

The Republican Party needs villains to attack, because it has nothing to offer except making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Just look at their track record, for Pete’s sake.

If it cannot find villains, it will make them up, which is what it did with the Voter Fraud Fraud and Acorn.

Of course the Republican Party attacked ACORN. ACORN tries to help poor people, and we can’t have that, now, can we?

Addendum, Later That Evening:

The BooMan describes what it was like to work for ACORN.

Read it.

Why did I get a spam phone call to my cell phone, in Spanish, from an unlisted number in Omaha, Nebraska?

Probably a war dialer.

By the way, I have no problem with Spanish nor with those who speak it; I mention it solely to show that whoever made the call needs some help in basic market research.

Why would anyone imagine that the Republican Party is any more honest, trustworthy, or competent than it was a year ago?

Yeah. I remember where I was.

I remember what happened the whole day.

I remember the scene in the cafeteria, where the television held everyone’s attention.

I remember conversations almost word-for-word.

I remember my co-worker–later my boss and the the next-to-best boss I ever had–saying, “It’s a good thing we have a Texan as president.”

How wrong he was.

To argue that bankruptcy, ruin, and homelessness are legitimate side-effects of seeking medical treatment is absurd.

The leaves on the dogwoods are starting to turn.

Teacher strikes. It’s tradition in southeastern Pennsylvania.

The contract for the 1,070-member (North Penn School District, Montgomery County) union expired Tuesday. Talks broke off Friday afternoon, and no new bargaining had been agreed to as of last night.

Union officials said the school board had made work-rule changes that amounted to a lockout, mainly adding 20 minutes to the elementary-school schedule. The board contended that any work stoppage would be illegal without 48 hours’ notice.

By and large, teachers in this part of the world are paid pretty well. Not great, but okay.

In such circumstances, strikes and threats of strikes usually have more to do with working conditions and with a sense of being generally mistreated by management than with any quantifiable item, though unions will ask for pay or hours changes because you cannot negotiate courtesy.

I worked in a unionized industry for many years. The managers and departments who had “union problems” (grievances, work-to-rule, and stuff like that) were invariably–not usually, invariably–the ones who treated their workers like dirt.

Republican nominee for governor, Bob McDonnell.

I’d like to have a talk with whoever decided that English ivy was a proper ornamental.

There is much gnashing of teeth in Left Blogistan and Left Journalististan because President Obama has been unable to wave a magic wand and get our elected officials incongruously assembled to do his (and their) bidding. Persons are starting to fulminate about a “trust” problem.

Anyone who paid attention during the campaign would know that Mr. Obama is not a doctrinaire (in Republican terms, “wild-eyed”) liberal. He did not campaign as one and has neither portrayed himself as one nor voted as one.

But he does have a “trust” problem.

He trusted that the Republicans would deal in good faith and with truth.

They don’t.

Read more »

Does hurricane Bill mean no hurricane Guillaume?

Aside: The weather system that Bill caused to stall over Delaware dropped 1 1/2″ of rain on my backyard. YMMV.

My father had a Living Will and an Advance Directive. So do I.

He and we were glad he did. The jury’s still out on me.

I sat at my father’s side as he died. I do not have words to express my disgust a the Republican Party’s choosing to twist this type of planning into “euthanasia.”

Nothing they have done since the Terry Schiavo carnival so exposes the venality and hypocrisy of the Republican Party.

The Booman wrote about Gog and Magog last week.

Now comes Andrew Brown in the Guardian. After quoting the relevant passage, a relativerly minor one in Ezekiel, Brown explicates it:

Who are all these people? The best opinion is that like all Bible prophecy, it is a mixture of wish-fulfilment and contemporary (iron age) politics. Some of it at least seems to refer to the turmoil brought about by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC (unlike Bush, Alexander actually conquered Afghanistan). But they have been for the last two hundred years the subject of increasingly excited evangelical fanfic, especially in America; in the 70s and 80s, Gog was meant to be Russia. Ronald Reagan seems to have believed that.

Ezekiel was prophesying to his countrymen, not ours, 2500 or so years ago.

Anyone who calls himself a Christian, as I do, must accept that Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophesies and that, from that point on, it has been a whole new ballgame.

Playing semantic games with the scriptures–any scriptures, not just Christian scriptures–for contemporary terrestial political gain is the worst kind of pandering.

Afterthought: There is no halfway point for BIblical literalism. If one chooses to be a literalist, one must, at the next wedding one attends, demand to see the proofs of virginity following the consummation of the marriage.

Good luck on that.

Melissa Dribben twits no more. Read the whole thing:

It’s not that the swift, succinct social network has wronged me in any way. My relationship with e-mail has been far more strained. Twitter has never, as far as I know, infected my computer with viruses, slimed my home page with pop-up porn clips, or clogged my family’s cyber-arteries with spam. E-mail has done all of this, plus losing important messages and sending me annoying notes telling me my mailbox is full and to please deal with the problem. (She must use Microsoft Lookout–ed.)

But if e-mail is the exasperating, all-knowing secretary you would love to fire but can’t live without, Twitter is the lightning-fast tattooed bike messenger who never brings a package worth opening.

Rant follows

Thirty-five years ago, my friends and I left Zebra Pizza (probably long since closed for health code violations) and went up the Washington Monument.

The Park Ranger told us it was the lightest crowd he had ever seen, but, to us, looking down on the White House seemed to be the appropriate way to celebrate the moment.

But you can see a lot of stuff that fits the bill when you look beyond the surface and the dramatic overheated cops-can-do-no-wrong narratives.

A black thing? A racial-profiling thing? A racist thing?

Those are the motivations most often proffered in the saga of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. vs. the Cambridge police. What other possible explanations are there for a white officer stopping a 58-year-old black man with a cane, in the heinous act of trying to open the door of his own house? But it wasn’t a black thing. Or a racial-profiling thing. Or a racist thing.

It was a cop thing.

(snip)

They are cops. And if you have dealt with a cop in your lifetime, you know their propensity, the nervousness you feel in even approaching one for a traffic direction and the look given in return, as if you have just interrupted the study of the Talmud. You know that the interaction has too many times been unpleasant, unless you are some law and order right-wing radio show snake-oil salesman crafting your beliefs to the reactionary masses who would like to change the name of the tooth fairy to the tooth don’t-ask-don’t-tell.

As I’ve told a couple of people, I’ve thought from the start that the Gates thing had more to do with Sgt. Crowley not getting subservience from a citizen than it did with race. It certainly wasn’t “racial profiling,” which refers to stopping someone because of his or her race or ethnicity, though I can understand why an angry man, tired from flying home from China, being harassed in his own home, might say the first fool thing that comes into his mind.

There was a legitimate 911 call, but, as the tapes have shown, race or ethnicity did not figure significantly in the call. Nevertheless, Sgt. Crowley’s report claimed that it did.

Where did it come from, then, if not from the caller and not from the dispatcher? It came from Sgt. Crowley.

This leads me to two related questions:

• How did Sgt. Crowley come to make up the reference to race as being part of the initial call?
• Was Sgt. Crowley even aware he made up the reference to race as being part of the initial 911 call?

Frankly, I think the answer to the second question is “No.” If I’m right, the answer to the first question becomes a subject for a dissertation in sociology.

The last bird flew yesterday.

Me, I think I’ll fly south for the winter.

Why do persons drive to a park in air conditioned cars to go running in the sun?

In my frequent trips back and forth to Virgina (about every two to three weeks this spring and summer), it seems to me that the volume of through traffic between Philadelphia and points north and Virginia Beach and points south is substantially less than it was even last summer, when gasoline prices were out the roof.

Why do the persons who say we can’f afford a few billions for health care say that we must afford umpty-ump quadrillion to go to Mars?

(No, I’m not linking the Charles Krauthammer. I already have enough bad karma.)