Kinda puts things in perspective, don’t you think?
Republicans flip on payroll tax cut
I know it’s hard to believe, but Republicans in Congress dropped their demand for spending cuts to offset the costs of extending the Democratic proposed payroll tax cut. Even more difficult to believe, this about-face came from both House Speaker John Boehner and Eric Cantor, both of whom have balked at every single thing the Democrats have tried to pass over the past year.
Boehner and Cantor blamed Democrats for blocking agreement on spending cuts to cover the roughly $170 billion price tag of extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance for a full year, along with keeping doctor payments under the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly at current rates.
“(This) has made it necessary for us to prepare this fallback option to protect small business job creators and ensure taxes don’t go up on middle class workers,” they said in a joint statement.
What? Politicians throwing away their firm moral stances for political expediency? Who’d a thunk it? [Anyone who knows about poody heads, that's who...]
Governor Robert McDonnell wants to rape your wife
Now do I have your attention? Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he wants government to watch while a doctor is forced to use a machine to rape your wife – feel better now? I’m talking to guys here because women already get it. They fully understand the consequences of having someone to force a object up inside them against their will. Do you? If your state congress passed a law that said you had to have an ultrasound wand shoved up your butt to check your prostate every time you wanted to take one of those little blue pills — would you understand it then?
This legislation is no more about abortion than rape is about sex. Both are about power. Forcing a woman to get an invasive ultrasound procedure utilizing a transvaginal probe is not only medically unnecessary for an abortion, it can be dangerous. Once it’s law, women and doctors will have no choice in the matter, so it’s being called “rape by object”. And it’s being done to punish women who dare to want control over their own bodies. And while I’ll admit that “Transvaginal Probe” would be a great name for a Heavy Metal band, it has no place in legislation.
Robert McDonnell, the Republican governor of Virginia who has high hopes of being the next GOP Vice President, has repeatedly said that he will sign this monstrosity into law the moment it hits his desk. Well – Robert McDonnell has said that in the past, but now he’s changing his tune. It seems that the constant bombardment from the “liberal media”, the mocking from the “Daily Show”, “Saturday Night Live”, and talk show hosts, and the fact that the public are just now finding out what the procedure actually involves has caused the governor to re-think his position. He’s offered up a slight change in the wording of the law to make it less invasive. McDonnell also supports legislation that forces any woman seeking an abortion to have her “moral character” investigated, but that’s a different post.
Republicans in the House are saying they didn’t understand what the bill called for, which is a lie. The national uproar only started after a Democrat forced them to go through the bill line by line and explain what that would mean. But, because of all the blowback, they’re willing to go along with the Governor’s changes. Apparently unconcerned, Republicans in the Senate have reassured their voters that the governor will sign the original bill into law, and no one will be allowed to change it.
What the courts have to say after that may be a different story. Women are up in arms. What I want to know is: Why Aren’t You? Any guy who doesn’t want to storm the Virginia legislature over this makes my poody head of the week list…
Has Mitt un-done it again?
For all their chest beating about voter fraud, it seems that the only cases the GOP can ever find involve Republicans. The latest issue has popped up in their Maine caucuses. It’s obvious to anyone that the Republican “powers that be” have decided Mitt Romney will be the GOP representative in the presidential race this fall. How else can you explain the obvious “rearranging” of their own contest results to fit the meme. Unfortunately for them, they forgot to include the voters in their decision.
Some towns didn’t report their numbers in time to be counted Saturday, while others did report but were not included because of clerical or computer problems in the rush to calculate the winner, [Charlie Webster, chairman of the Maine Republican Party] said.
Waterville’s caucus results, for example, were reported but not counted in the state’s total. Paul beat Romney 21-5 in Waterville, according to numbers provided Tuesday by the Kennebec County Republican Committee.
There also were a few cases of incorrect numbers being entered into the official breakdown, Webster said.
Officially, Ron Paul lost Maine to Mitt Romney by 194 votes. But there were three counties that weren’t included in the “official” numbers. And all three counties voted strongly for Ron Paul in the past. Plus no one knows how many other county numbers were entered “incorrectly”.
So now the votes will have to be re-counted (or just counted, if you want to get technical), and Mitt may find himself losing another contest after announcing a win (see the Iowa results if you don’t know what I mean). It must be very embarrassing for such a poody head to keep losing when he was promised it was his turn to win. Darn those old voters!
LightSquared vs. the telecom industry
There’s a very interesting fight going on in Congress right now. It features one mega-bucks corporation against an entire industry. In this day of corporate-owned politicians, it’ll be fun to watch and see which purchased legislators win the battle.
On the face of it, the problem is simple: Lightsquared, a multi-billion-dollar company that touts itself as a tiny David versus the giant GPS infrastructure, purchased a small sliver of bandwidth and wants to use it. There are two problems: (1) the bandwidth they purchased is smack in the middle of the GPS bandwidth and has been set aside for small-power applications because (2) if high-power applications are used in that bandwidth, it interferes with GPS signals on either side. Oh, and even though Lightsquared purchased the bandwidth with the full knowledge that it could only be used for low-power applications, it wants to change that. You see, Lightsquared doesn’t have any low-power applications — it only has high-power usage.
Oops – wait, there’s one more thing. The only reason that Lightsquared high-power signals interfere with GPS signals is that GPS is sloppy. You see, GPS already spills out of their purchased band over into that middle section and it doesn’t want to spend the millions (or maybe billions) it’ll take to fix that. Neither (understandably) does Lightsquared.
Maybe the problem’s not so simple afterall. Sounds to me like both sides are being poody heads. Only, in this case, Lightsquared spent a billion dollars on a gamble that may not pay off…
John Fairfax Dies at 74
John Fairfax is dead. If you’re not a rowing enthusiast or a friend of the family, that may not mean anything to you. But it should. John Fairfax was the last of a rare breed – a pure adventurist. You know that beer commercial about “the most interesting man in the world”? They should have used Fairfax instead of an actor.
Here are just some of the things he did: at age 9 he stole his Cub Scout Leader’s pistol to settle a fight. After he shot up the campsite, they kicked him out of the Scouts, but he won the fight. (Calm down — no one was hurt.) At 13 he decided he wanted to be Tarzan, so he struck out into the jungles of South America and lived on his own for months. At 20, he battled a jaguar hand-to-hand. He hadn’t planned it that way; it was a love-sick suicide attempt but he changed his mind at the last minute. Later he signed on with pirates in Panama to learn the trade. At 33, after training in a lake only a mile long, he took off in a special rowboat and rowed across the Atlantic. Although he went crazy for awhile during the six month trip, he managed to make the first solo rowing of any ocean in the world. At 35 he and his girlfriend took off across the Pacific in a slightly larger rowboat. It took them a year, but they made it into the record books that time as well.
A unique person, John Fairfax sought adventure everywhere he went. He didn’t just participate in life, he devoured it. He should be every child’s hero – right up there with Tarzan and Robinson Crusoe. John Fairfax was the one person from whom all poody heads should run in fear, because he was real.
Why do Republicans hate women?
This seems to be the year for the GOP to throw off that liberal attempt to woo women and minorities and return to their type of “traditional values”. Every time you turn around there’s another headline showing just how much disdain Republicans have for the female sex. This week, it’s violence against women. In 1994 a bipartisan Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), designed to combat domestic violence. It has come up several times for renewal, and always passed without any problem. This time two Senators (a Democrat and a Republican) offered changes designed to fix problems with the original bill. It has not, however, been well-received by the Republicans.
The bill includes smart improvements aimed, for example, at encouraging effective enforcement of protective orders and reducing the national backlog of untested rape kits. The Republican opposition seems driven largely by an antigay, anti-immigrant agenda. The main sticking points seemed to be language in the bill to ensure that victims are not denied services because they are gay or transgender and a provision that would modestly expand the availability of special visas for undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic violence — a necessary step to encourage those victims to come forward.
There was a GOP version of the bill that would have weakened the protection offered by the original bill, but it was voted down along party lines. When the new bill passed out of committee, there wasn’t a single Republican vote in favor of it. Things don’t look promising for it when it goes to the Republican-controlled Congress.
The Republicans say their main concern is that the bill might help some transsexuals and immigrants. Is there nothing those poody heads won’t find to complain about?
US Senate Barbershop loses shirt on haircuts
Senators used to get their haircuts for free. There was a barber shop set up just for them. After voters complained, the Senators started paying for their cuts and the public was allowed to trade there too – if they could afford it. The Senate barbers charge a lot more for their services than their civilian counterparts, according to The Daily.
A shampoo, cut and blow dry is $27 and highlights are $105, according to the barbershop’s website. A trim costs $20, more than double what Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., gets charged when he goes to his barber back home. “I give him $12 with a tip,” Leahy said.
So it comes as a bit of a surprise to some Senators that their barbershop operates at a loss, since it probably brought in about a million dollars last year. A bailout from the Senate covered the $230,000 loss. Former Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R) blames the federal employees who work there.
“They are using union labor, and so their benefits and wages are higher than those of many jobs,” Fitzgerald said. To support his argument, Fitzgerald contrasts the salaries and benefits of the Senate’s stylists to what is offered by Capitol Barber, three blocks away.
I think the (former) Senator is barking up the wrong tree – which isn’t unusual for a politician. Considering that the eight barbers served 27,000 customers last year, that means that each client cost the shop $8.50 more than the client paid. Somehow I don’t think that’s the stylists’ fault.
If eight stylists saw 27,000 clients, then that’s about a dozen per day each. For that they were paid a total of $277,293 in salary and benefits. Averaging that evenly across the eight barbers shows an average salary of $34,660, which is only slightly higher than the wage slaves at Capital Barbers down the street who average $30,000.
If you low-ball the average customer payment at $25, then the stylists brought in at least $675,000 (or $84,375 for each stylist), which is more than double their salaries. And the actual take is probably twice that. Which means that the main cost MUST be the lease and other overhead. You can’t run a business that costs you more per client than the client pays. It just doesn’t work, even if it is the way government usually operates. It does bring to mind the question: what about the business costs so much?
Politicians – always finding more ways to prove what poody heads they are…
Whitey Bulger trial date set
Reuters: Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, who faces 19 murder charges, will be going to trial on November 5. His attorney wanted another year to prepare his defense because of the large amount of evidence, including a half-million pages of documents and over 900 wiretap tapes.
The judge said the defense could hire additional lawyers to speed up work on the case. Bulger’s defense attorney objected to the trial date but said he would work within the court guidelines.
Carney told reporters after the hearing he was granted years to prepare in other recent cases that had significantly less “discovery,” the process of exchanging pre-trial evidence between prosecutors and defense.
“The allotment of a reasonable amount of time to review a tsunami’s worth of discovery does not depend on the age of the defendant, nor his notoriety,” Carney said in court filing earlier in the day requesting more time.
Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler ordered lawyers in the case to return to court every month for a status conference on their progress.
We Need a Second Party
Thomas Friedman has an interesting column at the New York Times about how the Republican Party is self-destructing. That’s why he thinks we need a new Republican Party. But he didn’t title his piece “We need a new Republican Party”, he called it “We Need A Second Party”. So I agree with his title, if not his actual thinking. He thinks we need a viable Republican Party – one strong enough to make the Democratic Party work hard at doing the right thing. I, on the other hand, believe that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have become so much alike, we, in effect, only have one party to vote for. So we need a second party — a viable Progressive Party to counter the center-right Dems and the far-right Repubs.
Yeah, a second party would be nice. Poody heads need not apply…
