Personal Musings category archive

A bit of a fuss down the road over a new Hooters (emphasis added):

“We all know what Hootersis (sic) about,” she said. “If it was a family restaurant, it would be called Scooters. The waitresses are scantily clad. They’re provocative, and I don’t know whether that kind of establishment belongs in a neighborhood shopping center.”

Marc Clymer, president of the Meadowood Civic Association that represents the neighborhood behind the shopping center, echoes those concerns.

If it were named Scooters and everything else were the same, there would be less fuss. Hooters is really rather innocuous compared to any Delaware beach in July.

The fuss about Hooters had more to do with its name than with the activities.

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Politics is classically defined as the art of the practical. Republicanism is the art of the intractable.

If Mr. Obama tried to appoint me to something, I’d never survive the headlines.

I’ve been filing income tax returns for 40 years. I’ve made three or four mistakes. All have been resolved with no hard feelings (I won some, I lost some), but my public career would already be toast.

Why the hell any person of honor is willing to subject him- or herself to the pie-throwing contest that passes for public discourse is beyond me.

To hear the Republican Party prattle on about “fiscal responsibility” as if it were something that the party actually understood is sick-making.

Delaware Liberal has another take.

My mp3 player classifies its contents by all this fancy meta stuff, such as “Genre,” “Artist,” “Album,” and several others. Since I use it for podcasts and radio shows and those classifications are for music, they are pretty much irrelevant, except for “Artist.”

But wait! There’s more!

After the fuss over Zoe Baird some years ago, there really is no excuse for persons in public life not to be certain that their dealings with anyone who has done work for them in their homes are squeaky clean. (The Baird case involved undocumented workers.)

At the same time, I wonder . . .

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Every three months I do two things:

• Catch up with my filing.
• Swear that I won’t wait three months next time.

Continuity is a wonderful thing.

I do not know whether it would be good policy, but, oh! man! it would be fun to watch Wall Street bankers try to pay for their golden privies on GS-17 salaries and have to face annual performance evaluations from persons who really don’t like doing evaluations and do them with one eye on the budget and no eyes on performance:

There is a simple alternative, which can be called “bank rationalisation” in order to avoid the “n” word. Under this scenario, the government would take possession of insolvent banks. This is not interference with the market. It is the market. Bankrupt banks go out of business, but due to their importance to the economy, we can’t let them be tied up in bankruptcy proceedings for years.

Dealing with the matter all at once can both allow for a quicker fix to the financial system and also ensure fairer treatment of bank creditors. First, the shareholders of bankrupt institutions must be forced to eat their losses. However, we may not want to honour all the debts of the banks at 100 cents on the dollar, which has been current practice.

Activists of any stripe focus on trivialities so as to distract people from what’s going on and twist the public discourse.

That’s what the Republican fuss over family planning money in the stimulus bill was all about: distracting people.

Full disclosure: Unlike some, I don’t have a position on Tom Daschle’s tax problems. I don’t approve. I don’t disapprove. And I’m too lazy to research them.

I’ve screwed up my taxes a couple of times, and each time I thought I had them right, so perhaps my perspective differs from that of persons who have always filed a Form 1040-EZ and never had to file a Form 1040 Schedule SE.

Some Guy with a Blog suggests taking a larger view:

More below the Fold. Warning: Language

And a game that is not decided in the first quarter is not one of them.

John Cole found it necessary to take an aspirin to protect his heart.

Back to my regularly scheduled reruns.

The competence of sports broadcasters is the reciprocal of the number of sports stations.

Facts are starting to trickle out about the woman who, with the help of implanted embryos, bore eight babies last week.

Now, I’m not going to get involved in any discussion of the morality of fertility drugs, in vitro fertilization, or stuff like that there. For one thing, I haven’t thought it through, because I’m well past the age when stuff like that could conceivably (as it were) affect my daily life. For another thing, it’s just not worth the effort.

But this sentence at the end of the article in today’s local rag caught my eye:

Forty-six physicians and staff assisted in the deliveries of the six boys and two girls.

I know persons with serious health problems who refuse to go to the doctor because they have lousy or, indeed, no health insurance.

Something about that makes my nerves jangle.

Addendum, That Evening:

According to the Times of London, Mama wants to go on a Magical Money Tour.

A dog is man’s best friend. Except when it is man’s most annoying friend.

And there’s no looking forward to the empty nest.

(Wanna dog? Free shipping. Tranquilizers are on you.)

One of the appalling things about modern American conservatives is that so many of them seem to be nasty, unpleasant, hate-full persons.

My brother gave me a cane for Christmas.

No, not because he thinks I’m decrepit. Though he probably does, because I am.

Because he knew I enjoy making useful things of wood and would admire the quality of the woodwork. It’s gorgeous. (Really, follow the link and look at the samples. I think the one he selected is number five.)

I needed it today.

The rain that was forecast to follow the snow yesterday never got beyond a drizzle, so it did not wash away the snow. When the temperature dropped below freezing over night, it just added a nice little one-inch layer of ice on top.

Then, when the temperature nudged above freezing in the morning, a silly little millimeter of water formed on top of the ice.

I had nature’s own Slip ‘n Slide for a front yard.

I needed the cane to walk down the little hill (about a four-foot drop) between my house and the street without falling on my–er, never mind.

(I have another cane that is more functional. Unscrew the handle and it holds five shots of whatever you want to put in the little test tube thingees. I recommend whiskey. It never goes bad. Great for Independence Day fireworks shows.)

One can only hope.

It is somehow fitting that the ranking Republican representative from Lala Land is Jerry Lewis.

Wonder whether he’s popular in France?

In California, a Christian school wins an appeal affirming its right to expel students for homosexuality.

The case is troubling, not least because there was no evidence of homosexual behavior, except for “my word against your word” claims.

More below the Fold

I just heard John “Boner” Boehner gassing about tax cuts on Marconi’s Magic Box in a story about the economy.

Among other things, he said that “government cannot fix this problem.”

Why the hell not?

Government–most specifically Republican government–created it.

Addendum:

Krugman dissects the lies. A nugget:

. . . (W)rite off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

I know that politics (with a small “p”) are part of running any large organization.

The way I look at it, it’s “politics” when your position loses and it’s a “process of negotiation and compromise” when your position wins.

Compromise may not be a pretty thing.

Nevertheless, it is often a necessary thing. If you cannot take two steps forward because the current is too strong, one step forward is good. (Some of my fellow lefties haven’t figured that out yet, but that’s another blog post.)

But sanctioning the denial of truth is beyond the pale of civilized conduct and beyond the pale of the Gospel of Love.