Merry Christmas to all, may the season (which starts, rather than ends, today) bring you many blessings and peace for the coming year.

If the conditions of the roads at this point, with only a few inches at most of snow out there, are any indication, then it's going to be a long night and tomorrow might be impossible as well. I can't call out again tomorrow as I did today, but it's going to be difficult to get to work and home. It figures that we get the potential 2nd worst December snowstorm of all time on a weekend that I have to work.

And now, bless the God of all,
who has done wondrous things on earth;
Who fosters people’s growth from their mother’s womb,
and fashions them according to his will!
May he grant you joy of heart
and may peace abide among you;
May his goodness toward us endure in Israel to deliver us in our days.
Sir. 50:22-24

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

* Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
* I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
* Update your journal with the answers to the questions
* Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions


My questions came from sonria.

( See the questions, and my answers, through here. )

There's something intensely satisfying about finishing a book, especially when it's an interesting one that has nevertheless taken you almost a year to read. I really need to devote more time to reading and less to all the internet stupidity that I fill my time with.

Incidentally, if you want to read a book that's going to confuse you and mess with your head then I highly recommend The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Irish writers are always a little strange, this one is certainly no exception, but it is a very interesting book with an interesting twist at the end (as long as you don't blow it for yourself, as I did the day I started reading the book).

Obvious bias in reporting makes me sad.

There isn't really any question where the reporter stands on this issue. Council=valiant warriors for truth, Church=mobsters willing to hold the poor hostage to advance their agenda. The truth, of course, is far different. I can't imagine that the Council was oblivious to the consequences when they started toward this legislation, but perhaps it needed to be said that the Church isn't going to abandon thousands of years of theology to appease any government no matter how insistent that government may be. There are three options that the Church has, and because of my previous sentence the first one is off the table. The only other options are to refuse the funding in the future and do without or else eventually lose it while also getting sued by gay couples and losing more still through that process. If it would be irresponsible to stop providing government-funded social services, how much more irresponsible would it be to waste thousands if not millions of dollars of donations on fighting lawsuits when they're inevitably found to be in violation of the law? They may have to eliminate job positions and curtail programs to make up for the loss of funding, but in the long run they'll probably save tons of money by playing it safe. The DC Council wouldn't have rejected the creation of a religion exemption if they didn't intend this to be a trap for the Church, and so they would undoubtedly face lawsuits from gay rights groups as well as from the Council itself if they didn't capitulate to secular dogma on the issue. It is not blackmail to state an obvious fact, nor is it selfish to stop programs for the poor when those programs would get shut down anyway and probably cost you a lot more money in lawsuits in the process. If the Council wants to enforce these rules then they can find organizations that are willing to abide by them, perhaps the atheists and liberals who are carping about this should put their money where their mouths are and bid for the contracts themselves.

I was reading something today that insinuated that Catholic schools in DC would be vulnerable to lawsuit should this law pass. I don't know whether this is accurate or not, but according to what I was reading the Archdiocese is committed to keeping their schools open even if they're found to be in violation of the law for it. This makes a lot of sense in that they're entirely a Catholic thing and it's unlikely that anyone would be able to take their place should the Archdiocese stop running schools. If the Council takes them to court over it the Church will probably lose and end up having to close all the schools and pay a lot of fines. I'd like to think that the Council would be portrayed as the villains in such a circumstance, but I know better than that.

God bless John Allen Muhammad, as well as those who participated in his execution. I don't understand the need that we have to kill people who have been effectively stopped from killing again and basically pose no threat to us anymore, maybe it's a holdover from our base nature. He may have been unrepentant, but he never would have seen the outside of a jail again and killing him eliminated the possibility of repentance and rehabilitation in the future. God bless our country so that we may realize the wrongs that we commit and work to make things right. Lord have mercy on us.

If the people of New Jersey wanted an end to corruption and a better economic situation then they're going to see the rise of a new age of greed and economic catastrophe under the man they've chosen as Governor. They've chosen a man of spectacular greed and personal corruption, like Doug Forrester but a thousand times worse and connected to the very people who profited off of the economic disaster that they brought upon us. Do people not remember what things were like under Bush/Cheney, how our economy was brought to its knees until we finally wised up and brought in a government that was willing to fix the problems rather than just profit off of them? The man who is now presumably governor of our state considers those disastrous policies to have been correct and would certainly emulate them to the detriment of the people here. Virginia has it bad enough but they've always been a pretty conservative state without many of the programs we have here that make things a little more bearable for the poor. New Jersey has much further to fall, and fall we will.

Anybody who thinks that the election of Chris Christie will mean a return of property tax rebates should ask themselves exactly how this would be facilitated, the state has a budget shortfall in the billions and Christie has promised massive income tax cuts which will make the shortfall even worse. The only way that the governor can affect the actual property tax rates (which are set locally) is to increase state funding for school districts, which would increase the shortfall still more. You would think that we had learned our lesson from Christie Whitman, who cut income taxes by slashing state aid to schools and causing districts to raise tax rates, but apparently we didn't learn a thing. Any "wasteful spending" (by which he means spending that benefits poor people) that he cuts away from liberal programs will only be replaced by genuinely wasteful spending on the programs that Karl Rove tells him to create. Not only will Christie back away from the promise of tax rebates, but he'll take them away from the elderly and disabled who need them the most. No program will be safe from the cuts, save those of course that overwhelmingly benefit rich people and large corporations. If you thought that roads and bridges were bad before, they'll get much worse when there's no money for maintaining them. Christie will undoubtedly cut state aid to municipalities, forcing districts to propose property tax increases that will undoubtedly be shot down by voters and leading to lay offs of teachers and police officer throughout the state. By the time 2013 comes around we'll be praying for release from this guy, but by that point it'll probably be too late. Just as electing McCain would have been disastrous for our already ravaged country, electing an economic profiteer and BFF of Karl Rove in this fragile time for our state is going to lead to big problems that may be irreversible. California elected an "independent-minded" Republican because they wanted relief from their economic problems and look where it got them, bankrupt and mired in a seemingly unending economic catastrophe. The people of New Jersey will be lucky if we only fall that far, our new Governor is far more connected to the Republican establishment than Schwarzenegger ever was and will institute their disastrous policies without even thinking about the consequences. God help us all, it's going to be a long four years.

Everybody please get out tomorrow and vote, especially if you live in New Jersey or Virginia. I don't want to tell you how to vote, but we should all remember the horrible things that the Republicans did to our economy back when they were in power. Chris Christie is best friends with Karl Rove and takes orders directly from him and Dick Cheney, do we remember what those two men did to our country when they were in control? Christie claims that he'll eliminate corruption but he's no more of a maverick than John McCain and his record proves that he'll only make things worse. I don't know about you, but I don't want to look for solutions on corruption from a man who used his position as US Attorney to get out of traffic tickets and keep his family members out of jail. I also don't want to entrust our economy to a man who would take his cues from the same people who caused our state's economic problems in the first place. Christie may want to lay blame on Corzine for New Jersey's high unemployment rate but what they fail to mention is that New Jersey has high unemployment because so many of our citizens work in and around Wall Street. If you want to look for somebody to blame for the state of Wall Street look no further than Rove and Cheney, the aforementioned BFFs of Chris Christie.

Even if Chris Christie managed to keep his impossible campaign promises of restoring the property tax rebate for wealthier people and lowering income taxes he'd still have to decrease needed services in order to not sink us further into debt. Given the fact that his first act as Governor would undoubtedly be to slash taxes on corporations and rich people, these service cuts would certainly be deep and catastrophic in their effect. I know that some rich people simply don't care about the poor people who depend on things like affordable housing requirements and Abbott funding to survive in this state, but how are they going to fare when there's no funding to fix roads and bridges or pay for police officers and municipal services? It's not like they'll be able to fly their private helicopters to the grocery store when the roads are undrivable. Besides, if New Jersey woos the super-rich by driving poor and lower-middle class people away then who's going to perform the low-paying service jobs that are essential to the upper class standard of living? If Christie becomes Governor then it's going to become impossible for poor people to continue living in this state, even most middle class people will probably find it difficult to stay, and you're not going to find any millionaires who would be willing to clean offices or flip burgers or do any of the other things that people get paid a non-living wage to do.

New Jersey's bad situation is due entirely to the horrible policies of the Cheney/Rove Party, policies that Chris Christie has endorsed and would certainly enact. Corzine cannot be blamed for the loss of jobs that came as a result of the Republican destruction of Wall Street, nor can he be blamed for the budget crisis that came about because of decreased revenue due to the same Republican-caused catastrophe. Corzine may not be perfect but he has done the best he could with the situation he was given. Bringing in the Republicans would lead to a repeat of the same failed economic policies that have led us to the brink of disaster. Do we really want to see how our state would fare if the state funneled all of its revenue into programs that benefit the super-rich at the expense of programs that keep poor people off the streets and protect our infrastructure? I know I don't.

The Republicans seem intent upon decreasing their appeal and sinking further into irrelevance

Seriously, how is this a good idea? The district may be a safe Republican seat but if the most recent office holder is any indication it is not a conservative district and probably won't warm to a Cheney/Rove-style ultra-conservative especially when he's forced down their throats by the national party establishment. Of course, I wouldn't have thought that a Republican who wants to destroy the poor and middle class for the advancement of the rich and is best buddies with Karl Rove would stand a chance of becoming Governor of New Jersey and yet just such a candidate is in a dead-heat race with the Democratic incumbent in spite of almost daily revelations into his corruption and abuse of power. Money buys many things, and in politics money can be used to distort the issues and make people vote against their own best interests. I would hope that people have a long enough attention span to remember what the Cheney/Rove Party did to our country, how they made most of us poorer and less secure so that they could reward the rich and those who brought them to power, but the Republicans seem confident that they can make some midterm gains and the polls in Virginia and New Jersey seem to give them justification for doing so. If Chris Christie can still be in the running considering his obvious ties to Cheney/Rove and Doug Hoffman can be in a strong position after the reprehensible actions of the Republican national leadership on his behalf then I don't know what to think.

Another disturbing aspect of this case is the further irrelevance of the RNC's chairman in the face of powerful morons with radio shows. Michael Steele may have moved his support once it became clear that the Republican had been successfully undermined, but the coup had been achieved already by conservative talk radio figures like Rush Limbaugh and ultra-conservative pseudocelebrities like Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty. The fact is that these are the real leaders of the party, and that fact becomes clearer every time that Steele is forced to capitulate to their increasing irrational demands. It is not a good thing for a national party to be ruled by those who aren't responsible to the people (Limbaugh and Rove never were elected officials, Palin and Cheney currently aren't and Pawlenty soon won't be). If anything, people like Limbaugh benefit from getting things wrong because their whole appeal is the misguided idea that they're fighting some kind of gnostic battle against the forces of elitism who supposedly manipulate what people consider to be "true." If the Republicans succeed in "purifying" their message entirely toward anti-intellectualism and partisan obstruction then they'll be a weaker party for it, and if they get people to vote for them then our country will suffer as a result.

EDIT: As always a font of knowledge, udoswald reminded me of an interesting point in this campaign: the Conservative Party candidate who has been championed by the national party at the expense of the local population doesn't even live in the district. Is he going to be the representative of the people in a place he doesn't know, or is he going to be another voice for Cheney and Rove in the House? This is a question that people in that district need to ask themselves: is he the Representative of that district or is he essentially an at-large Representative for the party bosses? The good thing is that there isn't even a need for a write in candidate. If people in that district don't want to vote for the Dick Cheney option and can't support the Democrat then they can simply vote for Dede Scozzafava, whose name is still going to be on the ballot, and send a message to the national Republicans that they don't get to make these choices by fiat.

"I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me."

Welcome home to all the Anglicans who are coming to the Catholic Church. Hopefully one day we will all be one Church united in faith and love.

Further proof that more guns are not the solution to preventing violence

This case is a tragedy regardless of who the killer was and why they did this horrible thing. Two people are dead, and their three children are now orphans. What this case illustrates clearly, however, is that bringing more and more guns into more and more risky places is not going to make us safer. This woman brought a gun to a children's soccer game, a place where guns should never be, and when the Sheriff took her gun permit away for this display of reckless behavior she sued and got it back. Presumably she carried it around with her because she thought that it made her safer, and yet she wasn't really any safer than she would have been otherwise. For all we know she may have been killed with that very same gun, certainly many legally-owned firearms end up being used by criminals against the people who keep them for protection. Even if she was killed with another weapon, the fact remains that she wasn't able to protect herself from gun violence by having a gun herself. We need to work on getting guns off the streets instead of putting more of them out there in a misguided attempt to prevent violence. Guns are not the solution to any of our problems, and if we keep thinking that they are then a lot of good people are going to keep dying unnecessarily from domestic violence and home invasion and many other situations where a crime may escalate due to the presence of a firearm.

You mean there was actually a time when Obama was on "honeymoon" with SNL?

Overlooking the larger idea that Obama is and has always been the favorite of the media, which I think is questionable for all but the most liberal media (there were plenty of stories on the major networks during the campaign about Obama's "questionable" citizenship and "pallin' around with terrorists" and all), Saturday Night Live was never part of the group that was supposedly fawning over him. In fact, most of their Obama sketches during the campaign were making fun of his alleged status as media darling and insinuating that behind the adoration of the networks he was nothing and had no ideas. After the election they started portraying him as inept, unsure of what he wanted and unable to achieve his goals even when he knew what they were. They were so unable to see him as a viable candidate or an effective President that they didn't even bother to hire a cast member who could realistically portray him. If they had a Democratic candidate at all as their favorite it would have been Clinton, who they portrayed as the heir apparent frustrated with the young usurper, but the obvious conclusion from their sketches would be that their favorite choice (or that of Lorne Michaels, at least) was McCain. Their attacks on Obama and Clinton portrayed them as devoid of ideas and suffering from a mentality of entitlement, while their sketches "against" McCain and Palin portrayed them as folksy and light-hearted. Tina Fey's sketches about Sarah Palin may have hurt her image among liberals who already had no intention of voting for the Republicans, but among conservatives it made her look a thousand times better. The Republican Party could use the attention to make people think that she was being targeted for her conservatism while at the same time using it to portray her as a common person unaffected by the Beltway mentality or "ivory tower" conceit.

If the producers of SNL were so in love with Obama, then why were they so willing to bring back an old cast member to portray his opponent and so unwilling to find even a single person who could portray him. Even Mad TV got a good actor to portray Obama, SNL has a white guy playing him because they literally have noone else and all they keep doing is hiring white women. They don't even have somebody to play Mrs. Obama now, which leads me to believe that they aren't planning on Obama sticking around very long. Lorne Michaels is probably hoping that his Republican friends will succeed in impeaching Obama and then they'll get to rip into Joe Biden for the rest of this term of office.

I'm always amused by the people who are picked by CNN.com to do their commentary articles. I understand the desire to have commentary by someone who knows how Washington works, but do you really need to get partisan lackeys and K Street lobbyists who have an obvious agenda? The most recent one here is a great example. Do the people at CNN think that they're going to get an insightful commentary on the plight of the Democrats from somebody who used to work for Dennis Hastert and who currently lobbies for the likes of FOX News and the MPAA?

( More insight into the twisted minds of Republicans below the cut... )

UPDATE: As regards the Olympics thing, apparently somebody else said it better. It's true if you think about it that the conservatives seem elated at the thought of a failure on Obama's watch, whether that's losing the Olympics or suffering a terrorist attack. What they forget is that Bush gave us eight long years of embarrassment and failure, failing to see the clear warning signs of 9/11 until it was over and traveling over to China to take in the sights when our country was melting down and we needed him most. If the Republicans and other conservatives could stop salivating at the thought of America suffering a terrorist attack or economic collapse while Obama's in charge and start cooperating in making us safer and more prosperous, perhaps we could actually get stuff done and make this country a better place in which to live.

Earlier I saw a banner ad for Chris Christie where he said that the state should "gut" the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH). Seriously, this is one of the best reasons I've seen yet for people to oppose Christie. If it wasn't for COAH, New Jersey would have an even more pronounced geographical divide between rich and poor, middle-class towns would be full of million dollar condos that nobody can afford, and poor towns and cities would have no tax base and would sink further and further into economic crisis and despair. Even with COAH, towns get around the requirements for building affordable housing by building seniors-only housing that can be sold for market rate.

There's a town in my county that might serve as a cautionary tale. A decade ago, Cinnaminson was a largely well-off town that had a number of motels along the main highway which housed people who couldn't afford to live elsewhere in the area. Most of these people were good, decent people whose only fault was being part of the disposable class required to make capitalism work, but some of them were involved in drugs or prostitution or other illegal things and so the whole of them were demonized for it. More recently the township decided to tear those motels down and replace them with market-rate senior housing that fulfilled their obligations to COAH while also increasing the tax base. Several years later, most of the buildings in this project remain unbuilt or unoccupied due to the economy and the township may end up having to turn them over to low-income housing anyway just so that they'll be occupied (although I'm sure that they'll fight it tooth and nail). In the meantime, Cinnaminson still doesn't get the full benefits of an increased tax base because most of the project is unbuilt and the people who used to live there are forced away from their livelihoods and into towns and cities like Camden and Bordentown that are already economically depressed. This increases the despair of those displaced while making little or no difference to Cinnaminson's standard of living. There are many other wealthy towns in this area that are focusing on market-rate condos and using the senior housing loophole to keep the poor people out, and I'm sure that all of them are finding that the market for such housing has dried up because everyone who could afford such expensive housing already has it and probably lost it due to the economic downturn.

There is a word for a living situation that sequesters one class of people away from the rest of the population: ghetto. The towns in this area would like to pretend that poor people don't exist and that everybody who lives there is perfectly willing and able to pay $300,000 for a house. Even the richest towns like Cherry Hill and Moorestown have poor areas, and yet those areas are ignored or worse yet replaced with market-rate housing in order to bring about the "utopia" that the wealthy seek to create for themselves. Even when they can't find anyone to buy those hyper-expensive units, they fight to the end to keep them from becoming affordable because they think that nobody wealthy will want to live in their towns if they see poor people living there. Forcing poor people out doesn't get rid of them, of course, and ultimately they end up moving into already poor areas without access to jobs or programs that may help them out of poverty. I saw the same sort of situation when I lived in Washington, DC, poor neighborhoods didn't even have grocery stores much less obtainable jobs in proximity and all the homeless shelters were located on the periphery where their inhabitants had little or no access to job training or any other resources that could have alleviated their problems. This was done to ensure that the wealthy would have as little exposure to the poor as was possible, but it also served to increase the desperation of those in poverty and decrease their chances at a better life. Poor towns and cities end up getting poorer and losing tax revenue so that wealthy ones can become wealthier, and then the wealthier towns and cities complain when the tax-poor areas need help providing a basic education or other basic services to their people. It's easy to condemn poor people as lazy when you have no exposure to them or knowledge of their plight, which is exactly what happens when you create the rich town/poor town dynamic that exists throughout this state.

Rich people may choose to ignore the poor or act like they'll suddenly become prosperous if they're forced to "sink or swim," but the fact is that poor people are poor because that's the situation that's required for capitalism to work. Without the ability for the wealthy to exploit the poor and pay them poverty wages for hard labor, profits would be a lot lower and companies would be forced to treat their workers like actual human beings which would destroy the WalMart type companies that thrive in this country. Some people may want to believe the Ayn Rand-style philosophy that the rich would be better off without the poor and their "sense of entitlement," but capitalism requires an exploitable class in order to function and rich people would find out pretty quickly that their endeavors don't work out so well without workers to facilitate them.

This just goes to prove the point that I've made numerous times over the past couple of months: electing Chris Christie to be our governor would be a disaster of epic proportions. He'll destroy public programs for the poor and middle classes in order to fund extreme tax cuts for rich people and corporations. The middle class may not care that Christie would eliminate social programs and gut COAH and Abbott and all the other programs designed to make life for the poor a little less miserable, but I wonder how they'll feel when the only decent education in this state is a private one and they end up having to shell out thousands of dollars a year to get their children educated. For that matter, I wonder how they'll feel when they can't drive to their jobs because the roads and bridges are crumbling from lack of repair and the air is caustic from all the pollution that he'll let corporations get away with.

This is a very disturbing incident

I've been to this part of Kentucky, and the people there are mostly very kind and peaceful. Of course, politics can make people do crazy things and there are plenty throughout this country who see the government and anyone going out in its name as the enemy. Some people would like to point the finger at Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the other Tea Party instigators who have been stoking this anti-government sentiment for a while now, and maybe they're right. On the other hand, this sort of hatred is not new and has a history going back to the beginnings of our Union. The American Revolution was, at least somewhat, a war to eliminate central authority, and there were many who fought in the Revolution who opposed the creation of a strong federal authority in the first place. The Civil War was the same thing, a fight between federal authority and local rights, and there are many out there today throughout this country who seem to still consider themselves to be soldiers in that fight. Census workers are a visible representation of the federal government, coming to your door with credentials and asking you questions, and there are many who would see that as a threat. Beck and company may add to this paranoia by making claims that the government is going to use the census data to throw conservatives into internment camps and other absurd things, but that doesn't mean that people didn't believe similarly absurd things about census takers before. Those among this group who are racist will undoubtedly be further enraged by the fact that an African American President is in charge of the census, but they were probably just as concerned about past censuses that were run by Democrats. Personally I had more concern about the last census, where Bush and his people seemed intent upon twisting the data to create new safe Republican districts and eliminate safe Democratic ones. Of course, conservatives seem to see any action by the administration as bad no matter how innocuous so they'll see this the same way. Unfortunately, this may be the start of a pattern.

The Christie campaign should focus on its own candidates corruption instead of inventing charges against the other guy

Do most people know the officials who run the hedge funds that they invest in? I'm not rich enough to be part of the investor class, but I doubt that I would know. Christie's condemning Corzine not because he's investing in the casinos but because some of the people who run the hedge fund also have a stake in a casino? That's a stretch, especially considering that Christie has some far worse and much less ambiguous corruption problems of his own. If this is the best that they can come up with then maybe Corzine is in a better position than some people seem to think.

I don't know if it's a sadder fact that I just screamed at my television screen because of an inaccurate question on Jeopardy! or that they got it so horribly wrong. The answer was something along the lines of "This river flows through Washington, DC," and as the geek that I am I immediately stated the correct answer which is the Anacostia. To my surprise, however, the contestant gave the question "What is the Potomac?" which they said was correct even though the Potomac River flows between DC and Virginia and never actually passes between two parts of the city itself (unless you count National Airport, which is technically part of the city but nobody really looks at it that way). The Anacostia River, on the other hand, flows right through the city with most of Washington to the west but also a considerable part to the east. It would be like saying that the Delaware runs through Philadelphia instead of the Schuylkill, completely false. Perhaps I shouldn't get so worked up about such things, but if you're going to put something on Jeopardy! then you should certainly make sure that it's accurate. While the Potomac is the river most associated with DC, and even most of the better off people who live in the city have probably never seen the Anacostia much less crossed it, to say that it runs through the city is at best misleading.