Well…I don’t know if you’ve been following the first rulings in the lawsuits that have been filed against the new healthcare law, but I see a troubling thing happening; that the two judges that upheld all provisions of the law were appointed by Dems while the one that recently struck down the individual mandate portion of the law was appointed by a repub. I was always taught that judges were supposed to be impartial arbiters of the law, using precedence as a guide, that were blind to political pressures…it was even one of the founding principles of this country…that an independent judiciary was necessary to rein in both the passions of the populace and as a check on the legislatures reflecting those passions. When did judges abdicate their responsibilities to be fair and impartial? One of the most egregious of these is the supreme courts overturning of a hundred years of precedence in the Citizens United decision that gave corporations the same rights to political speech as flesh and blood Americans; which the right wing majority knew would tip the political scales in favor of the repubs. But, don’t think I reserve my scorn for only those on the right, any judge that abdicates his responsibilities to be fair and objective, and follow the law, whether they lean right or left should be removed from office.
That said, the repubs who shout all day about following the constitution are the ones who expect judges to strike down laws they don’t like…just because they don’t like them, and they don’t fit their narrow view of what America should be. To those folks I say: please get a copy of the constitution and read it….the judiciary is not another political toy for you to play with…there is great danger to what you want judges to do…geez…
Well…the days are starting to run together with boredom and I’m not sure what to do about it..but that’s my problem, huh? There was a pretty good Wings game last night and I got to see Nicky Lidstrom get the first hat-trick in his career…over 1400 games but he’s a defenseman so that’s not unexpected. Pretty cool, though, and it couldn’t happen to a classier guy. Slept okay again but there are so many new aches and pains that I’m not sure what is going on….it’s a pain getting older…ha,ha. Yeah, I know, bad joke…Not much to do today…have to get the makings for the dish I’m making for G’s party sat…a shrimp fettucine with Feta that is really light and tasty…but I don’t like to cook for people much anymore since I think my tastes have started to skew along with my brain as I get older and there is nothing worse than making something and having everyone hate it….yep, feeling that insecure tight now and I don’t know why…..hey, keep watching…I may be going off the rails soon…the signs are there and it may make this more interesting…more later…
Well…haven’t done one of these addendum in quite a while because you probably think they are cheating in a sense…and it would be if I was counting the quantity and getting paid by the number I do each month…you know I don’t get paid at all to do this…is there a way to get paid to do this? If you know, please let me know because I could use the cash…was just thinking that there may be a connection between sleeping and writing…yep, I did say that before and if you’ve been here you’ve seen it…well, can’t make that assumption, either. Okay, a quick summary…I have finally been sleeping pretty well over the last week or so but that has resulted in the edge going off my brain…not having as many ideas or any outrage to drive them. But, with the crappy sleep I had last night, I have had some of the outrage come back and a couple of ideas that were worth writing about. Can you make a connection between the two? Not on this sample size I’m afraid….but I’ll let you know in a couple of days if there is something to it…
Anything else…hmmmm….oh, still getting to like the Pandora service more and more and watching less and less tv….a good thing, I think…and reading a lot more…have gone through a couple of books in the last couple of days….that’s it…more later, maybe…
Well…it didn’t take long for my predictions on the impact of the November elections to begin to be seen….we have all of the tea partiers that were elected hiring lobbyists as their chiefs of staff along with bellying up to the trough to see how much money they can grab from business and lobbyists…nevermind that their primary reason for being elected was to “change” the way things are done in Washington…yep, they changed it alright…from one pocket to the other. Do you feel betrayed yet tea partiers? And, all of this is happening even before they take office…do you think there won’t be strings attached to this money? How is that changey thing working out for you folks? This is identical to what the repubs did to the Christian right in the 90’s…they mobilized them to get elected and then just ignored them; just another piece of evidence that these repubs are a bunch of two-faced liars that will say anything to use their constiuents to get elected and then kneel to their real masters….business and the rich.
We can see this philosophy easily and starkly in the statements of the incoming chair of the House financial committee, Spencer Bachus, who stated: “Washington and regulators are there to serve the banks”….just remember what this kind of thinking did to the country over the last 10 years… but that is the problem…no one remembers who it was that championed the business take all strategy….it was the repubs folks…and you think it was bad before….this next two years is going to make the meltdown look like kindergarten….geez….
Well…another night out in Ada but I lost again and did not win at Keno…I don’t know what I expected….yes I do….I expect to win every week…oh, well. Missed the Geminid meteor shower since it was cloudy last night and into this morning but I avoided the 15 degree temps and freezing my butt off so that is a plus. A bad night of sleep last night…started getting up at 1:16 and have been up and down since…but three out of 4 days with tolerable sleep is not bad…much better than the last couple of years. Not much to do today…going to take the day off from everything but coffee and the newspapers…oh, and getting some posts out since there are developments in the world that I need to comment on…just not right now since I do have to get ready to go out….more later…
Well…I think I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking in sounds bites and prejudices which has taken me away from the resonableness that I have been espousing. Some of it is a hangover from the “I hate Bush” syndrome that I regretfully admit had me in its clutches for quite a while and some of it is was caused by the growing demise of the middle class and my situation in particular. It is really difficult to watch the people who are still doing well in their 500 dollar gloves and new Mercedes when that used to be an attainable aspiration for me and it no longer is. What makes it even more difficult is that I know it’s not something I can correct…there is no way I know of to make myself not be 57 anymore; to be 35 again with prospects….I may have let these facts color the way I see the world and has led me to see that any compromise in a complex political situation was a defeat, was a failure of Obama to stand up and support those that supported him.
So, on that note, I am going to try to be more objective in my thinking starting now….as the tax bill is parsed and studied, I think it may be a better deal than I thought and it could be the start of grownups looking at real solutions for the terrible recession…after all, there are stimulative measures in the bill that will help get the economy going and we did get the extension of UI benefits…now, if we could just teach the rich that they have enough and giving some back to help continue the country’s success is in their self interest, things might be able to get better…..we can hope anyway….
Well…had a fun night out with G and laughed some….for some reason, I feel like crap today and no it wasn’t from being out….I think it’s forgetting to eat after I got home…oh, well….I’ll have breakfast today to make up for it….I’m already tired of the cold and the old Mazda doesn’t like it either…it creaks and groans like I do when I get up and I just hope it will make it through the winter…I hope I do too, for that matter. Not a lot to do today..except Ada…and I’m shooting for another win and another 100 bucks playing Keno…that would be really weird if I could do that two weeks in a row but stranger things have happened. I will have some topics for later…I know, I’ve promised that before but today I mean it….well, I meant it before, too, but as I said before, I think the sleeping has taken the edge off my brain…I may have to try to cut back to see if that helps my creativity…more later…
Well…this one was supposed to be about the idea that I may have been hasty in condemning Obama about the tax cut deal…but I’ll get to that later…this one is a little more existential, a little more introspective than normal but thoughts have been popping into my head for a couple of days now that I need to write about to figure them out….sometimes that helps but it’s not guaranteed but I’ll try anyway. Part of this thought comes from a couple of encounters I’ve had in the past couple of weeks where the people I met always ask the same question first: “what do you do?” Up until now, my flip answer has been ‘whatever I want”, but, when I started to think about it today, of course my strange thought process drove me to the larger question of how we define ourselves; how do we get to the shorthand that explains us as individuals? I know a lot of people believe that it’s our work that defines us…that it is hard to separate what you do from who you are….so who are you when you don’t have anything that you do? Since I started to write in earnest in my 30’s, I’ve always thought of myself as a writer who worked at other things so I could write, but can you consider yourself a writer if you’ve never sold anything? And, if I’m not a writer, what the heck am I? Just another unemployed old guy I guess….hmmm….this isn’t going anywhere right now so I’ll stop….
Well…I am still in shock…the Lions won a game yesterday…yep, I said it…the Lions won a game yesterday. Other than that, it was a normal Sunday…no SF…but I told you about that in yesterday’s post. I don’t know where the huge winter storm went but it never got here, just a couple of inches on my car but it is quite cold….and it’s going to be for a few days…might even have to get the gloves out. Not much to do today….and this time it’s really true…I can’t even think of anything to do….of course, going out to get the papers and coffee but that’s it….I can already feel the boredom starting to creep in and I’ve only been up for a little while…maybe I’ll get a couple of posts out…who knows? More later…
Well…okay, the title is a little hyperbole and I know that most Christians are not the murderers that the Taliban are, but they are so similar on the way that they want to control the women and ideas in their societies that I have to make that comparison if only to raise the big red flag and wave it like a crazy person. This is what we have to look forward to with the idiots who’ve been voted into office…
First, we have Boehner and Cantor, with the prodding of one of the right wing religious blogs threatening to withhold funding for the Smithsonian because of what one person found “objectionable”, never mind that in the months the display was there no one, not one person, complained that the exhibit was inappropriate. The display in question has a short film (all of 14seconds) of a decayed crucifix with ants crawling over it and this one person, with the help of Fox news, got the head of the museum to withdraw the display. Doesn’t anyone see the parallel here between the conservative Muslims threatening to kill anyone who makes an image of Muhammed and conservative Christians threatening to kill an organization for art that steps on the toes of Christianity? There will be more of this to come….I will predict that right now with 100% certainty.
The second harbinger of doom I can’t attribute right now since I can’t remember what rep it was who said it…I’ll look for it and amend later but I wanted to get his idea down first…but one of the new repub chairs of a house committee said this week that his primary focus was going to be on getting stronger restrictions on a women’s rights; going after Roe V. Wade to make abortion and other women’s health issues (like contraception) much more difficult for women to cover in the new healthcare law. I’m not making this up folks….they just want to take us back to the culture wars that have made such a huge divide in our country just so they can get what they want from their base and force the non-religious and those of other faiths to heed their religion; sounds like an organization that starts with a “T” a little doesn’t it? ….geez….