Weekend Wrap Up

I think our society is way too cavalier about prescription opiates.  People don’t start out to be addicts.  Pain pills kill.  Jeff Conaway died.  

I’m thinking about going vegitarian.  So there's this article about going to BBQs this summer when others are grilling meat, and they have suggestions about what YOU can grill instead.  But riddle me this:  If you don’t want to eat meat/meat products, how would it be okay to grill your meal on the same grill that has blood from the other meat products on the racks?  Especially when the steam/smoke from those meat products flows all around your tasty little veggie burger? 

If you’re married and trying not to be, don’t be going on any gameshow or winning any lottery...until it’s all over.  Otherwise, expect to pay half to your delighted not-yet-ex.

President Obama visited Joplin, MO.  Of course that was a magnet for the Westboro Baptist Church in their efforts to gain public attention for shocking protests at ceremonies for the dead.  This time, bad-ass biker dudes were there again to block them from sight…and something even stranger than strange, so was the KKK. 

TGIF 2

It's been a bad week for me.  But never mind, it's Friday, and I'm in love.

Enjoy:   Love Song by The Cure...

Print Paper Feels like a Throwback

I've read the newspaper online for a number of years, now.  At first it was because my work schedule shifted to early early mornings, and the paper never arrived in time to read before I left for work.   Then it got burdensome to recycle the papers, themselves (before curbside recycle arrived).

Over the weekend, I impulsively signed up for a year's delivery of the Statesman.  I'm wondering, will it even last a month before I say, no thanks?

The one thing I really missed about the paper was all the little kitschy ads and announcements, which I never got with the online version (who pays attention to those when there are 327 inane comments about lady cops causing a riot in downtown Boise?)

I'm almost ready to buy a Kindle (have the iPad 3G).  I have more to say about e-reading (mebbe next post?) but for some reason, it feels decadent and old-fashioned to read the newspaper by print...

Free Voter IDs Should be Given

The Republicans purport to believe that rampant voter fraud exists, and it’s all perpetrated by the Democrats.  They can’t really explain how it happens, but they propose to stop it by requiring some type of identification be presented, in order to cast a vote.

I’m guessing they think someone registers under different fake names and then goes to vote (for a second time, or third or tenth, depending upon how dedicated they are to committing fraud) as those persons.  Politifact debunks this concept as false.

Therefore, to combat the multiple votes, they believe requiring the presentation of official ID such as a picture identification would inhibit fraud because PEOPLE CAN’T FAKE PICTURE IDs, right?

No.  That’s been proven as patently false.  So, it must have another less immediately obvious purpose.  And the only one that makes sense is that they believe there are many people out there who won’t be able to afford an official ID, or who won’t be able to hang on to the one they have, or have a reason why they are opposed to the idea of official IDs, and those people need to be stopped from voting.  Democrats cry foul, because they say, the voter ID laws target the populations of people who tend to vote Democratic.

Voting is a not only a responsibility, it’s a right.  If a person has a right to vote, then the state can’t put restrictions on that right by requiring something additional from the voter that the voter does not possess.  That would be unconstitutional, would it not? 

If the state makes picture ID a requirement to vote, it must make sure every voting citizen is given that required ID, FOR FREE.   

TGIF!

I want to head into each weekend with something musical, since music is such a big influence in my life. 

For the kickoff TGIF, it's a no-brainer to introduce my current favorite musical artist, Cary Judd.  Cary was raised in Thousand Oaks, CA but spent a lot of time in the Jackson Hole area and is currently in Boise. 

Cary is a young man with carefully crafted lyrics, intense delivery of the song during a live performance, and a gifted storyteller in between songs.  In the live show, he's perfected the art of the digital one-man-band, individually layering different beats and harmonies into a personal Wall of Sound. 

This particular song is very appropriate for today, given the idea that "Rapture" is upon us.  Enjoy!

It's Okay to Be Takei

So Tennessee Legislature wants to prevent school teachers from discussing homosexuality with the students (will that make teh gay go away, d'ya think?!)

And George Takei, bless his soul, has made this kind and generous offer:

Abuse is Everywhere

Any program you can create for the needy will have some loopholes, and some outright abuse.  And some will find ingenious ways to commit fraud, and there will also be unavoidable waste as programs are run by people. 

How different is that from any government program at all?  Such as farm subsidies, military spending, and the IRS, even?  Loopholes, abuse, and outright fraud.

In fact, it's not different in private enterprise.  Companies spend millions every year trying to fight internal loopholes and abuse and fraud.  They apparently also spend millions trying to find the government loopholes they can exploit.  It's all in the game.

Here they're decrying a man who continues to be eligible for SNAP (Food Stamps) in Michigan, despite the fact that he won $2 million dollars in the lottery last year.  He has little current "income" and is able to get the benefits because the state stopped looking at assets when the economy went south. 

The idea was, people who had good incomes and lost their jobs, might have things like boats or ATVs that they couldn't sell because no one else had discretionary funding to be able to take those things off their hands.  So they could either eat those toys, or they could qualify for SNAP.  Plus, those who had liquid assets such as money in their savings accounts, would need that money to continue to make their mortgage payments or their car payments while they were looking for work.  Putting jobless people on the streets and without transportation does NOT serve to help the economy get back into gear, it worsens our problems all around.  So feeding them while they're pursuing employment is a reasonable long term strategy.

Look at it from another perspective.  If you have skyrocketing numbers of people on SNAP due to the poor economy, yet your state employees (who administer the program for the Federal Government) are fewer in number because of budget constraints, then removing that asset test allows your workers to complete more work every day without having to take the additional time to document and verify the assets of all the families.  Less strain on an already strained workforce.  We want fewer government employees, amiright?

The last I heard, lots of states had removed the asset tests for SNAP.  In fact, Idaho did this for several years, too.  But because of fears that this very thing would happen here, they reinstated the SNAP asset test this year.  So no welfare queens can be found HERE.  Or kings.

I don't know how I feel about someone getting such a large windfall and still on food assistance.  But I do know we need to be thoughtful in our approach if we want to make change.

Do we make a rule that they are ineligible for a period of time afterwards, even if they blow it?  In the interests of fairness do we also do that for those who have inheritances, insurance payments, Tribal gaming dividends, employment severance packages?  We'll be adding lots of new rules to enforce to try to prevent a few people from taking advantage of our system.  We'll have to pay people to write, promulgate, apply and enforce those rules.  

Seems like a lot of time, money and effort would be spent to make sure Leroy and a few of his counterparts aren't buy Twinkies, Pepsi and shrimp on our taxpayers' dime.

Lawrence O'Donnell Nailed It

Lawrence O'Donnell saw it from the get-go.  How did we miss this?  We were so invested in Donald Trump the monster-egotist that it seemed plausible. 

Trump, No Trump

So the ultimate symbol of American capitalism-at-its-worst chose to opt out of the race before it really got started.  Of course, he didn't do it willingly.  He wanted to be there.  He could taste it.  He desired the run, the challenge, the competition.  But he could tell, the real consumers (voters) weren't going to buy his candidacy.

Per this story on CNN, a poll this week showed that

"...71 percent of Americans think the business mogul has "no chance" of ever winning the White House."

He'll play things up in the coming years, like the story about how he alone got the long form birth certificate to be released after several years of effort by all others.  Like the story about how he was such a real threat, that Obama finally got serious about Osama bin Laden and took him out to put an end to the credible concept of Trump as the Republican nominee.  

So now what?  I think he should bring Glenn Beck to Celebrity Apprentice next season.  Both of them will need the pats on the back they aren't getting from Americans today. 

Electric Cars Under Attack

Should we tax owners of electric cars?

I have family and friends who drive hybrids but no one in my circle has yet purchased an all-electric type vehicle.   In the infancy of electric cars, most of us are waiting for them to get all the bugs worked out before we make the leap.

Why use an electric car?  Fuel efficiency, less air pollution, less dependency on foreign oil, I’m sure there are many other reasons.  So many that the government is promoting their purchase by giving you a tax break to make the purchase.

But some are crying foul.  Electric cars, because they don’t purchase as much (or any) gasoline, are not contributing to the road repair funding that comes from taxes on that gasoline.  Yet they are driving on those roads and contributing to their wear and tear.  The knee jerk reaction is to make a surcharge or tax in some way on electric cars, to have them pay their fair share of road repairs.

But.  What is our long term goal, here?  If the goal is to fund the road repairs, why isn’t the trucking industry paying its fair share for the (far worse) damage they make?  (Duh, they’re BUSINESS, and big business owns us.) 

If the goal is to reduce pollution and dependency on foreign oil, why penalize electric car owners for not buying that foreign gasoline?  And these vehicles are lighter so they create less damage anyway…

I sense, it’s a conservative penalty against the green liberals, for daring to want change.  For daring to take away some profit from oil companies.  For daring to support environmentally safer transportation.  If they create enough roadblocks, the desire to own those cars will fade away and we’ll be back to the status quo.  It was good enough for grandpa, and he liked it!

Stop the Luna-cy

Does the Idaho Legislature have a favorite conspiracy theory?  Yes.  It's the one about Idaho teachers trying to put high falutin' ideas like Democracy and Social Justice and Critical Thinking Skills into the heads of our impressionable younguns, so that they use their brains and mostly vote Democratic.  We can't let that happen, lawz, no!  Not in Idaho, we won't stand for it!

That particular theory is proven in action by those meddlers, the concerned parents and concerned taxpayers of Idaho.  When they get together and agitate, you have to watch out, or they might find a way to take the God-given power away from the Idaho Republican Party.

Particular things to watch for:

• Recall Tom Luna.  Go to that site, sign the petitions, donate, and for the love of all things NOT conservative, REGISTER TO VOTE and then VOTE.  How can they maintain their power if we don't let them do it?
• Referendum to Reject the Luna Laws:  Don't forget to quickly sign the petitions for a referendum on SB 1184, SB 1108 and SB 1110.

Conspiracy Theories 'R' Us

As a species we love conspiracy theories, we always have.  It may be that we feel out of control of our own destinies, and we think there must be a pattern in apparently random events that leads us to suspect something darker if we only dig deeper.

The "birthers" and the "deathers" and the "Bush orchestrated 9-11 like a Reichstag Fire", the "man-caused climate change is a ploy to enrich Al Gore" are modern day versions of the "Grassy Knoll gunman" and the "JBS New World Order" .

I can't swear there is no link between autism and vaccines.  I can't swear that the government isn't poisoning us with flouride.  I don't even know that we really landed on the Moon.

But I have no reason to doubt the established scientific opinions either.

Leave Your Medicine at Home, Idaho Visitors!

Medical marijuana is illegal in Idaho.  All over the state, it appears that the out of state drivers are learning the hard way from the ISP, that they should have left their medical marijuana at home. 

It's not legal to have that type of medicine in Idaho even if you are a resident of another state and obtained it legally there.   We're not alone in that backwards issue.  Lots of states don't have reciprocity for medical cannabis. 

Representative Tom Trail (R) Moscow, has introduced a bill two years running, to legalize medical use of marijuana in Idaho.  It never gets anywhere, even to have a serious debate on the pros and cons.  There's a knee-jerk visceral response about the demon POT, and a need to fill up the for-profit prisons and keep the hoi-polloi in line. 

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

Hello!  Hail, friend, and well met.

With these kindly greetings to my future audience, I open my new blog. 

I've played with many blogs along the way, some successful, some not-so-much.  They encompassed many themes and memes and dreams and screams, and each had its own hotly unique temperature that warmed my heart, for a time.  Each then slowly cooled down to room temperature and stayed lukewarm for awhile, before finally chilling me to the core.

When they reached absolute zero, it was clearly time to move on.

So how long do I expect this new venture to last? 

Long enough to revive my hopes and dreams for a new generation.  Long enough to make some sheeple think a little harder on their preconceived notions.  Long enough to draw a smile or two out of some very funny people.

Long enough.