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Showing posts from October, 2010

My mom was right: "It's not clean "down there", tho I didn't realize she was talking about Washington DC til now

It probably won't take me more than a month or two to wish I hadn't said this, or at least to change my mind, but after careful thought, I've decided that my hope for the outcome of the 2010 mid-terms is that the GOP will take control of the House by 5 or fewer people. It's the best hope, though not the only one, that we have for getting Obama re-elected. I was trying to figure out how I could explain why, but John Boehner took care of it for me, via The Hill and the dailykos: Boehner: "We will not compromise"   For the third time this week, a top Republican leader has made it clear that the GOP will not cooperate with Democrats after the election. The Hill reports: Boehner: 'Not a time for compromise' Republicans aren't in the mood for compromise, especially on repealing healthcare reform, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Wednesday. Boehner, the party leader who would likely become Speaker in a GOP-controlled House, dist

Or even just Anti-one-of-my-friends

"Maybe the president could be anti-me for a while. I could use the money." Slow to Spend The anti-business president’s pro-business recovery. by Ezra Klein Newsweek August 07, 2010 This White House has “vilified industries,” complains the Chamber of Commerce. America is burdened with “an anti-business president,” moans The Weekly Standard. Would that all presidents were this anti-business: according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, corporate profits hit $1.37 trillion in the first quarter—an all-time high. Businesses are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash reserves. Business spending jumped 20 percent last quarter, and is up by 13 percent against 2009. The Obama administration has dropped taxes for small businesses and big ones alike. Maybe the president could be anti-me for a while. I could use the money. The reality is that America’s supposedly anti-business president has led an extremely pro-business recovery. The corporate community has recovered first,

Never you mind that President Obama won by about the same margin!

I'm reading all sorts of advance predictions of what will happen in the days and months after the Republicans gain overwhelming control of the House, mostly in the NYT. And also advance reasons for its happening. One prediction I haven't seen, that I'll make here is that dozens, or more, of the races will be won by Rs by less than 5% of the vote at which point partisan D's, which is to say, people like me, will claim it doesn't mean that the country is overwhelmingly upset with us or Pro-Republican, but in fact, it is a squeaking edge, and possibly, someone will add up all the votes cast and see that the overall total actually bears that out...unless we need to twist those numbers to even better advantage, as needed! One more prediction - if the Senate ends up at 50-50 or 51-49, the two most powerful people in the Senate will be Two Guys Named Joe: Manchin and Lieberman, both of whom will be heavily coddled by both sides for every close vote. Interesting that

Juan was a good time to fire him? How about a year ago?

I totally disagree with NPR's decision to let Juan Williams go after his comment on Fox that he is afraid of boarding a plane if he sees a group of Muslims get on too. I think they should have fired him long before he made the comment.

Lets just hope we don't go the way of Betamax

If you worked for a company that made a product or provided a service that was WAY better than their main rival, but was terrible about showing the country, or even the world, that your product or service was much better,wouldn't it drive you crazy? Well, then you know how I feel as a Democrat. You either believe in a country By and For the People ...or the Corporations. Let's review. In less than two years: 1. The Democratic-led Congress enacted major reforms to the federal student loan program for college students, freeing up an additional $60 billion for students that would have gone for bank fees and profits. 2. The Democratic-led Congress enacted a “bill of rights” for credit card holders that will prevent credit card companies from gouging ordinary people and wrecking their credit. We are already seeing the results of that law. 3. The Democratic-led Congress enacted major reforms to the banking and financial sectors, reining in corporate excesses and restructu

I vote for Napkin Rings!

I'm guessing someone else has asked this question long before I thought of it, but...I just wonder: What was the greatest thing BEFORE sliced bread?! And have we really not come up with anything better since then, that we can all agree on, so we can start updating the standard comparison to something besides sliced bread?

Unless she'd prefer that we hold her under water for 5 minutes as the determinant

I say if Christine O'Donnell loses her Senate race in Delaware, we can all agree that she is not a witch, but if she does, it will confirm that she is one.

At least it beats keeping my eyes peeled

Having been in 48 of the 50 states, and at many different times of year, I can honestly say that there are times when I think about a place like San Diego, where the temperature is 72 and sunny, pretty much 350 days a year, and I think - yeah, that wouldn't be so bad - as proud as I am of our 4 seasons here, it would be nice to be warm every day and not to be drenched in sweat on other days, but then there are weeks like this one. Driving down route 282 from Glenmoore to Downingtown should be a requirement of anyone thinking of moving anywhere else because of their weather issues. The colors are just so incredible on such a windy road, that it's difficult to stay focused on staying between the lines of the road on some of the curves. I just can't take my eyes out of the trees sometimes. Wait, maybe I should re-phrase that.

Well, that and when they start spending more time in front of a mirror than the television

I think the precise point at which a person changes over from childhood to being a teenager has nothing to do with puberty and everything to do with when we are no longer fascinated by using our straw to blow bubbles in our chocolate milk.

Yet more evidence that hate and ignorance go hand-in-hand (too bad the colors of those hands always seem to be the same)

I don't know which is more disappointing: that so many people think President Obama is a Muslim or that, of those who do, they automatically use that as another reason to dislike him, instead of thinking that Hmmm, then maybe all Muslims aren't bad people after all.

What's black and white but not read or red all over? My Blog!

Maybe this is just my left-wing bias, but after numerous "discussions"..ok, "debates"...ok, "arguments", with my conservative friend...friends, it strikes me that there is an interesting dichotomy in looking at our approaches. Conservatives like to deal in a black and white, you're with us or you're against us, mentality. It's one of the reasons far-right, all-hate radio is so popular. They tell us the answers to all our problems, with no hesitation or sense that it would be one way or the other, it just is THIS way, as we explain it to you We Progressives dwell in the gray areas, consider all the more subtle sides of any issue, and that makes our opinions far less palatable. It doesn't make for especially good radio....witness NPR.  We all want ANSWERS. We all want to know who's good and who's bad. We want to know good policy and bad policy. We want a definitive answer as to what will happen if we choose option A vs option B.

Except my awesome wife, I mean...I can always listen to her!

Oh, and in reference to the previous post, below this one, there is one thing that seems to separate my friends of equal intelligence to me and puts them at a level well above me is their ability to sit and listen to one person talk for hours on end. I was at a conference in Hartford last week and went to 7 seminars in 3 days, ranging from 90 minutes to 8 hours, with breaks of course. But it is just torture for me, listening to people talk for that long, no matter who it is, or what they're talking about. And part of why I am so bad at speaking to anyone for even short amounts of time is that I really can't believe anyone really cares that much about what I have to say...about anything. So I just unload it here, never having to care how many people "listen" or ever really knowing if they do.

Besides Wall Street, I mean

Probably 90-95% of the people I know and hang with are in the same general range of intelligence as me. That said, of those who are clearly smarter, pretty much all of them are lawyers. It's probably not their fault that's how they've chosen to apply said intelligence. Just seems like we oughta find a better use of that brainpower than lawyering.

And just think how deprived they are, ya know, not being able to ever have access to brilliant observations like these

I remember when this new thing called an answering machine was invented and people were so freaked out by them at first. I heard people say so many times, "I'm not leaving them a message on that machine! If they need me, they can just call me back!" As if the person was supposed to intuit that someone had called and not reached them. Then people were a little freaked out by computers and emails. Of course, I'm mostly talking about people who didn't have to adjust to these things because they didn't have to learn for business purposes. Ok, mostly, I'm talking about my mom here, but honestly, don't we all know people to whom the idea is still quite uncomfortable and to whom there really is little point in sending an email? And forget about the "internets", as George W. Bush one famously called it...them. I can still remember just within the past few years hearing someone say, "I can probably plug a computer in, but after that, I wouldn

Or maybe we have Reagan to blame for all of this...on more than one level

I'll bet if I think hard enough, I can find someone who was elected earlier than Jesse Ventura to mark the start of what I think may be even more responsible for the results of some recent elections than their respective platforms, and that is a combination of our fascination with celebrity and the desire to just shake things up. It seems to show more on the Republican side, but there are examples everywhere: Al Franken, Jerry Brown, Christine O'Donnell. Heck, I think it's one of the main reasons the Tea Partiers have been so successful. It's not just that people like what they stand for, tho they think they do. It's more because they are so different: Carl Paladino, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Sharon Angle. Or maybe I just have such a hard time thinking people really want, not just to to significantly cut spending and taxes, which most people would support but to repeal health care legislation and financial regulations passed this year, and to phase out Social Secu

Don't vote for him - he's one of the ones who got us into this mess!

CHICAGO — An Illinois gubernatorial candidate's name was mistakenly listed as "Rich Whitey" instead of Rich Whitney on thousands of Chicago electronic-voting machines and will be corrected, elections officials said Thursday. This is news? Hasn't this same guy been running for hundreds, nay, thousands of years?

How republicans argue - When you can't win on facts, attack the messenger

This was an actual exchange on my facebook page, after I posted this "status update" which was just a joke from Jimmy Fallon's show. Even though you can see it on my FB page, I have changed the name of my Republican friend, who is a Supervisor in a nearby Township. And in his defense, I find that the later it is in the evening, the more bitterness and vitriol he spews, and let's just say, I don't think it's because he's getting tired, if you catch the way I've drifted: Jamie P. McVickar : Jimmy Fallon: "EA Sports released a new version of the video game NBA Jam that features Obama, Biden, Bush, and Cheney. Bush and Cheney play the first half, then Obama and Biden try to come back from a 6 billion point deficit." John D. Republican : LOL. Problem; there's no comeback; the hole just gets deeper. Jamie P. McVickar : except for the part where when Obama took office, we had just lost 780,000 jobs in just the previous month! And now we

People come and go so quickly here!

I think I had to read this story about ten times in three different newspapers before I finally figured out what they were trying to say. Oh heck, I just read it again, and now I'm not so sure. See if you get it: More people calling Philly home, study finds By CATHERINE LUCEY Philadelphia Daily News The number of people moving into Philadelphia has steadily risen over the past 16 years, according to a new study that supports recent census estimates that show the city's population stabilizing. The report on migration patterns from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative explains that while there are still more people leaving than entering the city each year, the difference has dropped in recent years. Aided by births and foreign immigration, the city's population is rising, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. According to IRS data analyzed by Pew, the city suffered a net-population outflow of 9,846 in 2008, compared with 20,284 in 1995. The

Roy Halladay Fun Facts

Three interesting facts about Roy Halladay that I haven't seen anyone else mention: 1 - He has now allowed just 2 hits and 1 walk in his last 18 innings pitched. 2 - That's gotta be the two most statistically, quantifiably dominating back-to-back pitching performances in baseball history, and one of them was a playoff game against the best hitting team in the league. Johnny Vander Meer famously pitched back-to-back no-hitters in 1938, but he walked 12 guys in the process. 3 - The most dangerous contact any Reds' hitter's bat made with any ball last night was when the ball hit the bat that was lying on the ground on the last play of the game.

If only they were as good at testing as they are at texting

I frequently hear parents say about their allegedly underachieving kids that their special kid just isn't a good test-taker, and will never get good grades as a result. In retrospect, I now realize I had the same problem, and, interestingly, I found it to be especially true when I didn't study before taking any said test.

Swing at a Myth

There are a number of myths surrounding past political events that the numbers just don't support. One of the ones I've maintained for years is wrong is that the reason that Gingrich and the Rs swept into office in 1994 was because of the Contract with (on?) America. I remember hearing at the time, the day after the election this is, that in exit-polling, very few people had even heard of it. But somehow it had become conventional wisdom that it was the main thing that drove people to vote Republican. Ever since, I've wanted to see the numbers to see if I had remembered it wrong. And after the recent "Pledge to America", Jed Lewison on Daily Kos wrote this: "The GOP's Pledge to America was a complete dud. 66 percent said they had never heard of it, and of those who had, more people said it would make them less likely to vote for the GOP (29 percent) than said it would make them more likely (23%). Compare that to the Contract With America which had simil

A test you probably didn't get in school...and please show all work

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A friend on Facebook commented that I had plenty of posts on here about sports and politics and not as much about "ya know", so, as I sat in some Land Trust seminars here in Hartford today on IRS issues regarding substantiation versus administrative technicalities, my mind wandered, as it so often does to, well, ya know. And as I thought of things to post, I thought, what the heck do I know about sex really. I may not have the broad swath of experience to draw from that some guys say they do, and anything I could say has probably been written about extensively by people who either have a great deal more experience or who get paid to research and write on such things. So that said, instead of making statements about sex, I'll ask questions. I doubt anyone will respond, if only due to the sensitivity of the topics, but regardless, I'll spout away:  - Is it true that the more women have sex, the more they want/need, and the more guys have sex, the less they want/need?