Sep22

How do I Get a Bailout?

Posted on by
How do I Get a Bailout?

Come on, I’m looking at the credit card statements, the current value of our house, the gas prices and the utility bills, and I’m thinking that if Mr. Bush wants us to contribute to the rescue efforts for Insurance and Banking, he should be sending a little our way, too. After all, we didn’t get into this situation by making ass-backwards investment decisions, and we don’t have well-padded portfolios and personal assets to fall back on, so don’t we deserve it even more? Oh, wait – maybe that’s what you need to have to qualify.

The way I see it, though, we’ve already paid enough to the “decision-makers”, and giving them more of our money instead of making them pay the consequences is so incredibly. . .gawd, there is no way to simply express the absolute depth of the asininity of this. This is like giving your kid a brand new Maserati to replace the Ferrari he trashed when he got drunk, drove it into a house, set it and the house on fire to cover it up, and said it had been stolen when he was found the next day passed out on the front lawn next to the smoking wreckage.

Make the company owners pony up for their own bailouts. Take it out of the pockets of the folks who stole it in the first place. Either that, or let’s be fair and use that money to bail out the people who were hurt by these companies in the first place. That’s not the real world, I know. In this world, we have an in-group that sneaks provisions into things like the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that make corporate bailouts an unprotestable, no-voting-needed automatic gimme. If McCain gets elected, with Phil Gramm in a position to get even more of this kind of one hand washes the other legislation put through, there’ll be more of the same.

These are the folks who are trying to convince us that the other guys are “elitist”. This little club that gets to take things away from other people, and keep all the good stuff for themselves. Well, at least they’re not the undesireable kind of elitist, whatever that’s supposed to be. Oh, wait – that would be the rest of us, complaining about footing the bill for their selfish, stupid, wasteful investment schemes. Those of us who will be paying the bailout billions, not receiving them.

Sep16

Drinking the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid

Posted on by
Drinking the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid

I haven’t been astonished at the reactions I’ve been seeing among certain people to the nomination of Sarah Palin. Honestly, there are still people out there who think that Saddam Hussein engineered the 9/11 attacks, that we need to fight terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, and that George W. Bush is one of our greatest presidents EVAR. They write lots of letters to the editor, and they leave poorly-thought-out comments on blogs. Without exception, they sound like they have gone to the Fox News website and copy-pasted directly into their brains. Yesterday, though, I was shocked to see a Palin endorsement on the blog of someone I once considered a critical thinker. Yowza.

What did I see? Well, the complaint about the press coverage of daughter Bristol’s pregnancy. The argument that it’s a private matter is generally put forth by people who are unaware or unconcerned that Ms. Palin wants every child in the US to benefit from the same kind of sex education that got her daughter that way in the first place. Admiration that she can field dress a moose (a very important thing for the leader of our country to know.) A casual disregard for the fact that Ms. Palin did not know what the Bush Doctrine was – only one detail of what she does and does not know, as seen in her interview with Charles Gibson:

For me, this shows that during the time that she was secreted away, protected from the press, she was learning not about issues, or filling holes in her knowledge, but how to use approved Republican sound bites to dance around the issue without actually answering any questions.

What blows my mind is that the only issue mentioned where there is a difference of opinion between Palin and this person is abortion. I cannot fathom why there is no concern about the fact that Palin believes the world is only 6,000 years old, that man walked with dinosaurs, that she wants the Bible to be used as a history and science text in public schools, and that we’re living in the “end times.” I was surprised that nothing had been mentioned about her attitude towards Israel, since that is pretty much the top subject of the blog, but I wonder. . .most of the rapture-ready are very pro Israel only because they’re certain that the return of all the Jews to Zion will get the Revelation ball rolling. If I were concerned about electing a candidate who supported Israel, I wouldn’t want one who wanted to ship all the country’s Jews over there so the end of the world would come faster. In fact, regardless of that, I wouldn’t want a president or vice president who wanted to hasten the end of the world in any way whatsoever.

Why is there no concern about the Wasilla librarian fired by Palin because she wouldn’t take “objectionable” books off the shelves? Doesn’t it rankle that she lied about her support for the “bridge to nowhere” and earmarks in general? Is it unimportant that her geographical closeness to Russia is represented as “foreign policy experience”? That when she (or McCain) are caught distorting the truth, they manufacture outrages rather than issue corrections or apologies? (Lipstick on a pig is now a sexual slur, but it wasn’t when McCain said it a few years ago? Cut me a break. It’s a sexual slur the way “pot calling the kettle black” is a racial one. Which is to say, not.)

Nope. It looks like there is one overarching qualification Palin has that subverts any of her other shortcomings. She has a vagina.Around 3:19. . .Samantha Bee is parodying this attitude, but to see it in real life is disturbing. No matter how you expand it into an argument in favor of putting more women in positions of authority, when it comes down to that, it doesn’t count as a rational position. To see it coming from someone who purports to be a rational thinker is truly unpleasant. The thought that people all over the country will be so easily hoodwinked into the idea that voting this woman into office will in any way represent progress for women makes me fear for my daughters’ future.

Aug22

A Sad Way to Start a Birthday.

Posted on by
A Sad Way to Start a Birthday.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been nursing a couple of litters of kittens back to health, with varying degrees of success. The shelter released them to foster because they were scheduled to be euthanized, but had the potential to get healthy if they got the kind of one-on-one attention that a crowded, busy shelter just can’t provide.

A couple of them needed to be syringe-fed because they wouldn’t eat. One had me up all night twice keeping him warm and waking to an alarm every hour or two to give him water from a dropper. They went through a round of one antibiotic, then some went through a round of a stronger one, and some of them also had to put up with ointment being put in their eyes twice a day. It was important to watch to make sure they were each eating well, drinking enough, and having the right kind and volume of poop and pee every day.

Two of them recovered beautifully. Two of them seemed fine except for a goopy eye, which even so was improving. One still had a rattle in his chest, but was otherwise a happy, active, normal kitty. One had been a walking mucus factory until this past weekend, but now had big wide eyes, normal breathing, and a nice round kitten belly. The last was still having a hard time, but it was clear to me that she was less goopy than she had been – both eyes were open, if a little red-rimmed, she’d stopped sneezing, and she was right in there with the others when it was time to eat or play.

So I wasn’t worried when I sent them off with our adoption co-ordinator to the shelter for their next round of immunizations. Time for a wake-up call.

The last two I described were put to sleep immediately. The others have been given a week’s reprieve – isolated in a cage at the shelter to see if they clear up, put to sleep if they haven’t. B., the adoption coordinator, argued with them about putting them back into their foster home, or releasing them to the rescue organization so they wouldn’t be the shelter’s responsibility, to no avail.

The whole family was devastated. Even hubby, who essentially merely tolerates the cats for my sake, was in tears. I keep turning the waterworks on again when I think about it. Last night, every time I didn’t have one of the little boys snuggling into my neck, nursing on my jaw and making happy feet on my neck, I fell apart again.

I got used to letting the cats go when it was time for them to be adopted out. That became a happy occasion, because I knew they’d be going to a permanent, loving home (with a lot fewer cats competing for attention!) Each time I’d go in to the center to clean and see one of my fosters had found a home, it felt wonderful. This is completely different. Their fate will not be affected by how pretty they are, or how cuddly they are, or how goofy they look when they’re playing, or how much they love to be with their people. They can’t charm their way out of this.

We can’t do anything except hope that they all look healthy by the end of the week (which is, essentially, doing nothing, but feels like doing something). It’s raised some serious questions in the house, though. We won’t be fostering any more cats that aren’t free of the shelter system – falling in love with a cat who might be deemed unsatisfactory and destroyed later is too damaging to all of us. The question is, will we continue to foster, and if so, will we insist on being selective about what cats we’ll take? There’s a lot to think about.