it's official

Greinke wins the Cy Young Award. How about that. Could you imagine if he was pitching in front of an outfield of, say, Carlos Beltran, Jermaine Dye, and Raul Ibanez? Baseball is an odd sport. It has good draft and trading systems that allow all franchises to develop star athletes. It just doesn't have the revenue structure to allow any but the largest TV markets to keep a nucleus of players for very long.

raider week pulls it out

It's been a long season, and we're barely more than half way through.

But the Chiefs sweatshirt was not for naught this evening! Time to go shopping for dinner now. Broccoli and Tacos.

And whatever unhealthy government subsidized sugar product captures our eye. I'm thinking glazed donut holes. But I get those a lot. Perhaps I'll branch out into ice cream sandwiches. That sounds good too.

happy armistice day

Well, we're about where we were last year. As we remember peace and veterans, we're stuck with wars and way too many policy areas that deny veterans the support they need.

How is it that there are homeless veterans in our country? Those without decent employment? Backlogs at the VA? Why does our prison system incarcerate so many veterans?

Don't hold your breath waiting for politicians to do anything bold about it. They're too busy waving their flags at the parades and talking about how brave and heroic other people are to allocate any real public dollars to these problems.

After all, we need the money to bail out corporate criminals and pay private mercenaries to imprison, torture, and kill scary muslim foreigners.

reproductive (non)healthcare

(P) This isn't about whether you should get an abortion or not. That's a touchy, complicated, messy personal question.

This is about how Democrats are stupid. That's something we can probably all agree on.

When you look at demographics, who votes for Democrats? Well, it ain't richer pro-life men. It's less affluent pro-choice women.

And can you think of anything stupider than telling your base that a common medical procedure isn't part of the healthcare debate? That's pretty much what the Stupak-Pitts amendment does, singling out funding to abortion services in health insurance plans (nevermind that the 1970s-era Hyde Amendment already prevents federal funding from being used for abortion services). Rules on excluding Viagra and Cialis apparently didn't pass the profit test.

'Reproductive justice', 'women's health', 'a woman's fundamental right to choose', 'affordable health care': these are core slogans that get Democrats elected.

This is like if the GOP came into office and decided to increase taxes on the wealthy. That'd get them real far with their base.

Just a refresher, this was Obama on the campaign trail:

Chicago, IL | January 22, 2008

Chicago, IL -- Senator Barack Obama today released the following statement on the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.

"Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, it's never been more important to protect a woman's right to choose. Last year, the Supreme Court decided by a vote of 5-4 to uphold the Federal Abortion Ban, and in doing so undermined an important principle of Roe v. Wade: that we must always protect women's health. With one more vacancy on the Supreme Court, we could be looking at a majority hostile to a women's fundamental right to choose for the first time since Roe v. Wade. The next president may be asked to nominate that Supreme Court justice. That is what is at stake in this election.

"Throughout my career, I've been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice, and have consistently had a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"When South Dakota passed a law banning all abortions in a direct effort to have Roe overruled, I was the only candidate for President to raise money to help the citizens of South Dakota repeal that law. When anti-choice protesters blocked the opening of an Illinois Planned Parenthood clinic in a community where affordable health care is in short supply, I was the only candidate for President who spoke out against it. And I will continue to defend this right by passing the Freedom of Choice Act as president.

And on ABC this week:

"I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill," Obama said. "And we're not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions."

Saying the bill cannot change the status quo regarding the ban on federally funded abortions, the president said, "There are strong feelings on both sides" about an amendment passed Saturday and added to the legislation, "and what that tells me is that there needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we're not changing the status quo."

The comedy really just writes itself. God bless Rahm Emanuel. He probably thinks this is what constitutes 11 dimensional chess. And it's a good thing Pelosi kept impeachment off the table so there was room for this political masterstroke of genius.

oppressors get upset, hilarity ensues

Let me premise this by saying I'm not one of those people who thinks we live in an honest, full blown police state, but I do care a lot about Constitutional rights (I did grow up in a town called Liberty, after all) and probably follow related news more than the average bear.

Well, sometimes our surveillance society ends up being comical as much as anything else. Check out these two stories I saw together this evening.

First, the Pittsburgh G-20 Twitter-Terrorist (I have that copyrighted, CNN!) appears to actually be under real government investigation. It wasn't enough that the police spent 16 hours searching his home for...something (the warrant wasn't real clear on that). A federal Grand Jury indicted him on a separate line of inquiry about alleged violations of the Anti-Riot Act. Yes, the guy tweeting publicly available locations of police who shouldn't even have been deployed so that protestors could avoid them is accused of inciting a riot. That's just brilliant. Next thing you know, people who advocate nonviolence are going to be locked up in jail as dangerous criminals. Oh wait, we have a great history of doing that, from this guy to that one.

The second thing I ran across was this devious sex criminal. How do I know she's devious? She's a Philadelphia Phillies fan, of course. She posted an ad on Craigslist. The Philly police, naturally having nothing else to do, read through Craigslist, found her ad, and asked her to meet a guy in a bar. They talked for awhile until some sort of implied offer for World Series tickets involved, gasp, sex. Then presto, guy replying to ad about World Series tickets turns out to be a cop, girl wanting World Series tickets turns out to be a danger to society.

Thank you Pennsylvania for removing two hardened, dangerous, violent criminals off our streets!

this is inappropriate

and way behind the times because it's a rerun but must be shared widely anyway.

Colbert's MILF comment about Dow 10,000 was absolute classic comedy.

Now that's a Market I'd Like to see Fluctuate.

toys

Excitement on the home front. New toys have come in. Now it's off to move things around, install some software, test everything, and hand things out. The laptop is going to my sister, and the desktop is off on loan to Julie. I think they must have expedited the shipping, because there was a problem with the credit card yesterday. Apparently buying stuff from all over the country set off Discover Card's fraud detection system and both Discover and MacMall called me. So I was a little surprised when my ground shipping that just went out yesterday afternoon was in my condo today when I got home from work!

P.S. To all our Fearless Leaders and Powers that Be: I am doing everything humanly possible to stimulate the economy. My roommate and I moved into a new condo. My little car has requested multiple expensive repairs. And now there is much shuffling of electronics to get to various peoples.

Now, please do your part! We need healthcare reform that eliminates the inefficiencies of the health insurance industry and ends the job bondage of employer-based healthcare. We need unemployment insurance that actually covers people who are unemployed, not just people laid off under certain limited circumstances. We need financial companies taken over, management fired, insolvent companies put through bankruptcy, decades-old regulations re-instituted, and new regulations implemented. We need, in short, policy aimed to benefit all Americans, not just a few.

/rant

Okay, optimistic Nate back. Yay toys!

finance jokes

You know things have gotten pretty bad when cartoons incorporating academic debates about inflation vs. deflation, wealth disparity, and the role of the Fed can be done so simply anybody can get the gist. Thanks to Jesse's for this.

the disgustingness continues

(P) This week, the ACLU put up another document that the government has belatedly released regarding the criminal (er, heroic, terrorist-stopping, manly, beer-drinking) acts of the senior officials of the Bush Administration.

As the document bureaucratically explains:

Note: This paper provides further background information and details on High Value Detainee (HVD) interrogation techniques to support documents CIA has previously provided the Department of Justice.

This paper focuses strictly on the topic of combined uses of interrogation techniques.

What I think is going to surprise a lot of people as more and more of the details trickle out is how cold and calculated everything is. One of the features of a large organization is that bureaucracy involves lots of decision-makers, and in order to disseminate information among the various groups, there is lots of information sent back and forth. The nature of this process thus can almost hilariously contrast with the particular subject matter at hand. Our nation's leaders discussed war crimes, treaty violations, and felonies as if they were discussing where to build a new highway interchange or quarterly projections for GDP growth.

This process is precisely why transparency, openness, 'sunshine', is a core element of good governance. Decision-makers have to know at the time of their decisions that their deliberations will become public, that there will be social and legal consequences for blatantly improper courses of action.

The PDF for this document from 2004 sent to the Office of Legal Counsel from the Central Intelligence Agency can be downloaded here. It's been clear for awhile that this is no group of 'bad apples' or 'rogue agents' or other nonsense. The dedicated staff at the CIA, NSA, DIA, INR, etc, etc, who are monitoring my blog, your email, your mom's phone conversations, your dad's credit history, your neighbor's political contributions, your kid's internet postings, your grandma's participation in peace groups, etc, etc, are not the people who designed these policies. And to a great extent, it's the bureaucracy itself, the countless professional civil servants, who are able to apply the brakes internally, to slow down inappropriate, counterproductive, illegal programs.

But that only stops so much. When a group of our leaders is committed to ignoring the law, there is only one group of people that can stand up to them, and that is us, We the People. Seven years after we first started this particular bit of horrific, counterproductive, illicit behavior, we have yet to stop it completely, let alone hold the architects accountable for their creation.

But hey, at least we've been able to arrest millions of other Americans over the past seven years for grave allegations like shoplifting, prostitution, and marijuana possession. It's good we've got our 'tough on crime' priorities in order.

how did i miss this

Oh, I can't believe I didn't see this clip before. This is John McCain back in Iowa on whether he's ever not had government healthcare.

Check it out!