Paid Vacation Act of 2009!

Representative Alan Grayson of Flordia (district 8) today is going to introduce legislation on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

What do you think it is?

Cap in Trade? Funding to fix our crumbling infrastructure? Tort reform to reduce the cost of health care? Legislation to deal with the problem of the Guantanamo Bay Camp Delta detainees?

Nope.

He is introducing the "Paid Vacation Act", which will require companies that employ more than a certain number of employees to provide those employees with one or two weeks of mandatory paid vacation.

Grayson's district includes Orlando, Florida. This happens to be the location of Walt Disney World, the "Happiest Place on Earth". Hmmm. Nobody thinks that this has anything to do with the legislation, does it?

Let me get this straight. Companies are going bankrupt in record numbers, the ranks of the unemployed have swollen to OVER three million (9.2% as of May 15), margins between loss and profit are shrinking faster than the American dollar, and Mr. Grayson wants to FORCE employers to PAY for one or two week vacations for their entire workforce.

Do you want to guess which political party this guy is affiliated with?

26 Percent of Americans Admit to Texting While Driving.

According to a poll of 4,800 people released by Dave Grannon of Vlingo (a mobile voice applications development company) about 26 percent admit to having "texted" on their mobile phones while driving.

I respectfully request that those 26% please raise their hands right now, with their driver's licenses in their hands so that your privilege to drive a vehicle can be revoked.

A car, like any other conveyance and especially when driven in traffic, can become a high-speed 3,000 pound missile. The act of driving requires a knowledge of the rules of the road and constant vigilance in order to drive safely. It literally takes only a few seconds of distraction to produce disastrous results whose measure is lives lost, permanent injuries and the cost to repair broken people and cars.

America, if you won't stop this mad practice for the sake of your fellow drivers, then consider doing it for the far more selfish reason of potentially saving your own neck.

California's Fiscal Woes a Microcosm of Our Culture of Greed.

So, the people of the Republic of California have spoken. On Tuesday of this week, they failed to pass five of six "reform" propositions that were intended to help the state out of the huge fiscal deficit that they find themselves in. Just in case you weren't paying attention, here's a very brief summary of each proposition:

• Prop 1A (Failed): Rainy Day fund. This proposition would have placed limits on gov't spending during boom times to increase rainy-day reserves to be used during major natural disasters or economic down times.
• Prop 1B (Failed): Education Funding. Contingent on Prop 1A passing. Annual supplemental payments for K-12 schools and community colleges to begin in 2011 to make up for recent cuts.
• Prop 1C (Failed): Lottery Modernization. Authorizes state officials to borrow five billion dollars to be repaid by profits from a revamped California State Lottery.
• Prop 1D (Failed): Special Education Reallocation. Authorizes the state to shift 1.7 billion dollars from the early childhood development programs over five years to help balance the state budget.
• Prop 1E (Failed): Mental Health Budget. Authorizes state officials to ship money away from a mental health program established by voters in 2004 in an effort to help balance the state's books.
• Prop 1F (Passed): Elected Official Salaries. Would prevent pay raises for legislators and statewide officeholders during deficit years.

California's electorate may finally be waking up from decades of nightmarish propositions that have continued to increase government benefits while failing to address how those programs would be funded or maintained. As the Govinator put it, the people of California have now told them to "go all out and make those cuts and live within your means". I doubt that Californians really understand how much pain that is going to cause.

In 1978, Californians approved Proposition 13, officially titled the "People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation". This resulted in a cap on property tax rates and an immediate collective reduction of about 57%. The intent was to prevent older state citizens from being taxed right out of their homes as property values continued to spiral out of sight. This proposition is a metaphorical and political 'third rail'. To touch it is to commit political suicide. And yet, with this legislation in place, it is almost impossible for California to raise the needed revenues for all of the programs that it's citizens have demanded through countless idiotic "propositions'. Even a "reform" candidate like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was advised by mega-investor Warren Buffet to repeal this act, has been powerless to do anything about it.

Much of the United States is in the same lamentable boat. We want less taxation, but we want the government to give us more benefits, not less. Yet anybody who knows how to balance a checkbook understands that if you continue to make the income each month while spending a little more each month that you will eventually come to a point where what you spend is greater than what you bring in. At that point, you must borrow to make up the difference or you must cut spending.

It's not like we haven't seen this coming. We've been talking heads on the alphabet broadcasters and 24 hour news channels proclaiming the future insolvency of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades. But we have become jaded by the frequency of the message and the remoteness of the actual eventuality.

Well, it's not remote anymore. The United States of America, once the leading market as well as military superpower in the world, is about to have it's AAA rating by Moody's revoked. Sixty billion of California's enormous debt is at "junk" status. The American people, led by their failure to recognize the financial disaster looming before us like the iceberg ahead of the speeding Titanic, and captained by Presidents and Congressmen who have failed to take the necessary hard and unpopular steps to correct the course of our doomed ship of state are about to be tossed into the icy seas of state and federal bankruptcies.

All because we were unable to balance our checkbook.

GPS About to Fail? Too Valuable to Yahoo and Google?

According to Bobbie Johnson, Dateline San Francisco May 19, 2009, on the Guardian website, there is a danger that the current global positioning system or GPS infrastructure may start to break down as soon as next year. This could result in system blackouts or even worse, incorrect navigational data.

The system is administered by the U.S. Air Force. Apparently, there have been some major problems in getting replacement satellites in orbit and the USAF is now running nearly 3 years behind schedule.

This is happening at a time when GPS-enabled smartphones and other gadgets that use GPS are more available than ever before.

Tom Coates, the head of Yahoo's Fire Eagle system – which lets users share their location data from their mobile – said he was sceptical that US officials would let the system fall into total disrepair because it was important to so many people and companies.

Well, if the system is so darned important to so many companies and people, why don't they put their darned money where the mouth is and help FUND the system?

Let Me See If I Get It. You Make a Mistake, But You Want the School District to Eat the Cost.

So I'm perusing CNN today. Ok, sidebar. Any of you who read these rants know that I'm something of a conservative. Can you "neocon"? Now back to today's rant. So I'm perusing CNN today and I see a story about a Florida high school student who apparently decided that she did not want to have her pantylines visible on school picture day. Her solution was to not wear any panties to school. I don't know if this is something she does frequently or if she only did it on this particular day. The article did not specify.

However, in a group photo that she was in for some club that I do not recall she is sitting in such a manner that there is a question as to whether you can actually see up her skirt to territory that should remain unknown to all except her mother and her future husband. Note I say "question". This is because the school administration believes that what we are looking at is not indecently exposed flesh but simply a shadow. However, the student is allegedly so humiliated that she hasn't returned to school since the yearbooks were handed out. Moreover, her mother is angrily demanding that all of the yearbooks be confiscated and new ones printed and passed out.

I have some thoughts on these demands...

First, wearing a skirt that isn't at least knee length while also going "commando" on school picture may not be in the top ten list of dumb things to do as a high school student, but the consequences of such a decision are certainly both probable and predictable. As in, "Duh!"

Second, since both mom and "victim" decided to go public on CNN with this little story, it would have been nice to get some indication of mom's disapproval with her daughter's indiscretion. Nope. Instead, we were treated with a mother's misplaced righteous indignation that the school would dare to leave these yearbooks in the hands of pubescent young men and woman which now apparently contains pictoral evidence of her daughters most intimate ... you get the idea.

Were I able to speak to mom, I would remind her that her daughter's own poor decision is what resulted in the questionable photo being taken. Had I found out that my high-school aged daughter had EVER gone to school without wearing the full complement of correct underclothing there would have been absolutely no question as to my displeasure.

Another thought that occurs to me is that yearbooks are pretty expensive. When I went to high school back in the late 1970's, they were twenty to thirty bucks apiece. They were printed on high-quality glossy paper. It took all year to make those year books. And when they get handed out, the American ritual is for the students to pass those books around to as many of their friends as they can to get a signature or little written token of their affection. It would cost several thousands of dollars to repeat the printing. Further, there is no way that the school is going to get all of those handed out copies back, with their precious signatures that some of these students will have no opportunity to collect again.

For this mother to DEMAND that the school confiscate those books and reprint them at public expense is a shockingly glaring example of just how "me" centric we have become.

This is a very tough learning experience for that young, indiscreet student. I hope that she recovers from it, learns from it and can move forward. But to be clear, for her family to make the demands that it is of the school administration and all of those students for what is clearly a bad decision on one student's part is selfish. It also fails to address the root cause of this problem, which is the belief by this student that it is acceptable to go to school in a short skirt without wearing underwear. Mom, do you have a comment on that?

I Agree with Kanye West. Twittering Sucks.

There is something that is happening in America and the world. I'm pretty positive that this is a bad thing. It's an outgrowth of what you are reading right now: weblogs. That's right. First there were weblogs and personal web pages, then we started getting instant messaging, then phone SMS texting, then "social networking" like MySpace and Facebook, and now "Twitter".

In this progression, it now becomes possible for you to notify more and more people of every little ridiculous and personal action you take in your life. And those that subscribe to social networking, and now Twitter, have become passive voyeurs ala the ill-fated movie "The Truman Show" starring famous funnyman Jim Carrey.

This trend really perplexes me. As an example, my wonderful daughter Heather has a Blackberry Storm (as do I). The difference between our two phones? She gets text messages at the rate of several per hour well into bedtime. And what confuses me even more is that she frequently responds to those messages.

I have asked her why her generation feels the need to let the world know her current mood in two, three or four character "emoticons", such as happy :) or surprised :0 or goofy :p or dull |-(. Or, BFF (Best Friend Forever), ROFL (Rolling on Floor Laughing), etc. She says that her friends like to know how she's feeling and she likes to know when her friends are :( or >:(.

I suspect that for some, a virtual hug or shout-back may be the only thing keeping them from being alone. On the other side of the coin I wonder whether this electronic coccoonish buzz that surrounds us actually is resulting in a real distancing between people. Why go and visit a friend when a lazy and effortless text message will work? Can you really get genuine human contact through 166 character SMS text messages? Isn't Twitter just a new form of casual spam, the primary difference being that most of those who Twitter aren't trying to sell you something?

For myself, I cherish those times where I do not have any access to any electronic paging device or telephones. I do NOT feel the need to be a virtual reality exhibitionist and I have even less desire to be a virtual voyeur. Whatever happened to time out for ourselves to tie flys, build a chair, mow the yard (I love that smell) or sit outside my front door on my patio bench and watch the Sonoran desert sky sunset fade from spectacular golden-red to lavendar to purple to star-dusted black, with the only interruptions the happy "Good evenings" of my neighbors as they take their evening walks with their dogs or kids.

So when Kanye West ranted about Twitter yesterday, I realized that a famous hip-hop performer and I can actually have something in common: A sincere belief that being connected to everybody all the time is F****** stupid.

Politicians are More Concerned with Job Stability than Principles

In a story by Larry Margasak published on May 12th concerning Democratic participation in the CIA interrogation memo investigation. In this story it was documented that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) will be chairing Wednesday's hearing. It was further clarified that Sen. Sheldon, with Sen. Feinstein (D-Ca) offered legislation banning so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Apparently, Sen. Whitehouse said that "he never protested to the Bush Administration because 'it never crossed my mind that it would make the least bit of difference'".

So it makes a difference now? In hindsight? When the damage has already been done? Or is it because these techniques had the tolerance, if not enthusiastic support, of important Democrats who were more concerned about appearing to be soft on terrorists instead of being truly concerned about the harshness of enhanced interrogations. Maybe like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) who at that time was a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee. She was briefed on these techniques in 2002. What did she think these briefings were for?

Why not simply admit that in the frenzy and hysteria of the post September 2001 era that our government, in it's zeal to protect it's citizens and it's interests overseas, both Republicans AND Democrats permitted actions that previously would not have been considered acceptable. But for the Democrats to claim that they were completely unaware with what was going on is disingenuous and purposefully deceptive.

I would like to remind all who read this that "torture" in the United States of America is a very different thing, with very different consequences, than in much of the rest of the world. We use sleep deprivation, humiliation and water-boarding techniques which, while very unpleasant and hard to endure do not permanently injure or kill the person being interrogated. Compare that against the common use in much of the world to techniques which include fire, branding, electricity, the use of knives, pliers or other tools to injure and maim people believed to hold critical information.