A new year and the same old shit

Ah, a mostly lazy weekend was just what I needed. The sports guy went on to another business and I've been doing my stuff, plus much of his job. I'm hoping to have a new guy in place by early February, but until them I'm not-at-all lapsednews(or sports)guy.
Being busy at work keeps me from dwelling on my usual distraction of being amazed at how brazenly hostile national Republicans are towards the American people. They are rallying around a clown in Massachusetts whose platform seems to be "If that colored guy is fer it, I'm agin it!" And their chief shill actually talks down donating money to Haitian earthquake out of fear that Obama will use donors' info for his reelection campaign.
The relentlessly obstuse obstructionism of the GOP is starting to pay divends for progressives, however. Obama has proposed surtaxes on TARP recipients and the greedy asshats who run them. Recognizing that taxes can do good and saying it publicly is a good first step toward real economic policy and forces knee jerk Republicans to side with the creeps who ran this country into the ground.
There is also Wall Street's plaything, Tim Geithner, on the ropes. Obama can't go back to the boardroom for Geithner's replacement, given how things are going, and may have to put an almost progressive in at Treasury.
And, to top it all off, Republicans become more and more beholden to the Teabaggers by the day. This is awesome because Teabaggers believe in made up stuff (yes, mouthbreathers, the Constitution does allow for government taxing and spending). They also believe that everyone else (except the coloreds and libruls) agrees with them, which is easy enough to disprove. They lash out at every thing they can think of, none of it sticks and they will stay home and pout in three years when the Republican who kissed their asses the most during the primaries runs away from everything he (Sarah's not running because she's just smart enough to know that a disastrous presidential run would derail her earning power) promised them on his way to getting stomped by Obama.
Oh, and here's a funny show from Jon Benjamin and Sam Seder. Enjoy!

BEAT COPS from Sam Seder on Vimeo.

And Merry Christmas, too

Yes, yes...I know liberals are screaming bloody murder about the Senate health bill and selling out to ass clowns like Liberman and Ben Nelson.
They need to relax. Eric Alterman has a good point about that here.
The bill is headed to conference, were it will be merged with the much better House bill. No, there won't be Medicare for Everyone in the final version, but preexisting condition discrimination goes bye-bye (speaking as someone with a nasty autoimmune disorder, that's a damn good thing). Drug reimportation from Canada is going to get badly needed support from the White House next year, I'm guessing as a result of the insurance and drug lobbies rolling Obama so well on this bill.
The Stupak abortion language is likely to stand, although a return to the Hyde amendment is possible, I guess -- abortion is still legal and accessible in every state. Make Planned Parenthood one of your good causes to support and the insurance problems with Stupak will quietly go away by 2012 or 2014.
I think this whole experience will give Obama the cover he needs to be superpartisan on the stump next year, when he's out raising money for Democrats running against Republicans beholden to the Tea Baggers. After all, you can't be bipartisan when the other party says "NO!" to EVERY FUCKING THING you propose.
Sure, the president's poll numbers are off. That happens when all the cable news nets talk about for weeks on end is how bad you're doing. And he has bent over too far to engage Republicans. And he hasn't reasserted the government's power over Wall Street -- yet.
Consider what's he has done: saved GM and Chrysler, passed the first real healthcare reforms since the 1960s, somewhat reintroduced the notion that the rest of us don't exist to serve Wall Street, injected real money into infrastructure and renewal energy development and greatly rehabilitated the U.S. as a good, serious presence in world affairs.
The Obama you're disappointed in today is not the guy who will seek reelection in 2012. He will run on a record that you won't have much trouble supporting, against an opposition beholden to a minority of voters who insist on believing made-up stuff.
Chill, my friends.
And have a Merry Christmas!

Respite

I'm back at the North Pole after a brief holiday respite with the wife and kids in the Circle City. The 16 hours in the car coming and going sucked, but a little QT with Josie, Jmo and Josh more than made up for it.
Thanksgiving dinner with the Springmans was excellent, as always. No matter how urbane and sophisticated I get, I'll never be too uppity for the turkey gravy or the wife's chocolate pie and homemade whipped cream. That blender I bought her a decade ago keeps paying dividends.
Back to work Monday. It's hectic, there's never enough time to do anything and the company couldn't care less, but newspapering in a small town is pretty satisfying. We do it justice (mostly) and everyone knows just about everyone else. New Macs, an extra reporter, a rebuilt Goss Community press, an ImageSetter and a full-time news clerk would be much better, but there's no sense in dreaming.
If I can't be back home with the family, I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather work.
No really, I'm serious.

Stupak isn't the Devil

There is all kinds of Hell being directed at Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) for getting public funding of abortions services separated from the rest of the historic health care reform moving through the House today.
Abortion is as old as sex and no amount of governance or money will ever change that. Whether we know it or not, most of us know someone who has been a party to an abortion. The thought of it makes me sick, to be honest; but I understand why it needs to be safe, legal and readily available.
I get why Stupak, who is center/left on most other issues, is catching the aforementioned Hell. The Stupak amendment does discriminate against women who can't afford abortion services out of pocket. It is a slap in the face to the majority of Democrats across the country...at least for now.
I hate to be crass, but Stupak is doing his party a favor. This health care reform package is less than Medicare for Everyone, which Obama supporters expected, but it is a tremendous move against the vampires who run private health insurers. You can't be denied coverage anymore because you have diabetes...or autoimmune disorders like mine. Your boss gets some more and better options to make sure you have coverage. You don't have to stay in a crappy job working for assholes anymore to keep your kids insured.
Stupak's move takes out the one big thing Republican politicians and their K Street pimps would hammer Democrats about in midterm elections. Abortion has historically been the hottest button the GOP pushed to shake money out of the hicks and zealots and Stupak effectively killed that.
This reform is better for everyone who doesn't run an insurance company or suck insurance company cock for campaign money. That will become evident and the Dems will be much better off for it...maybe not in 2010, but definitely in 2012 and beyond.

Podcast Nirvana

I'm addicted to podcasts, plain and simple.
I can't get to sleep at night without hearing an episode of Mervyn Bragg's BBC4 program, In Our Time. When I'm playing the PlayStation, I have to have the Napoleon Bonaparte podcast going.
I rush to my MacBook and hit 'Refresh' first thing every morning to see if Marc Maron has offered up a new installment of WTF, which is quickly becoming the podcast-equivalent of heroin.
I've swooned to Bart Ehrman lectures on St. Paul, laughed to Rude Pundit visits to the Stephanie Miller Show and succumbed utterly to the genius for James Howard Kunstler and his Kunstlercast.
Do a Google for something or someone you're interested in, add 'podcast' and you'd be amazed at what pops up. Between your kickass iTunes music library and a few hundred podcasts, you'll never have to listen to crappy commercial radio again.
Praise Jesus!

Stuff is coming

I know, I know...long time, less than jack shit posted.

Come back around Sunday and I'll have some prescient, insightful crap to fling at you.

It ain't snowin' yet

Lazy day today...except for updating the website for the day job, I did jack shit. I have to say, however, that I probably should have been out here.

Sleep would be good

I made the fatal error of falling asleep too early and now I'm wide awake at 2:30 a.m. I guess that gives me time to do notlapsednewsguy stuff, like going over some notes and prepping questions for an interview with the county hospital guy in about nine hours.
Things are actually kinda groovin' up here at the North Pole. I'm in a bigger place, as I outgrew the shoebox I've spent the last year in. News is breaking out all over the county and we're actually covering some of it. I've got Thanksgiving covered so I can spend a holiday with Josie and the kids in Indy.
This is the part of the personal post where I type "but", but there's no "but" today...at least not yet.
Have a nice day.

$5

I'll give $5 to the first person who can tell me what I mumbled in this video:

Now you know why I'm a newspaper guy instead of a broadcasting guy.

Hypocrite? Huh?

It's happening again.
Michael Moore has a new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, and the mouthbreathers are in full Greek chorus mode before they even see it (read the comments in response to the above linked story).
As I understand it, Michael Moore is a hypocrite because he's rich and he criticizes the supply side economics the U.S. has practiced for the last three decades. If Moore were heavily invested in the stock market and criticized it in his film, that would be hypocrisy; however, he isn't heavily invested in the stock market (or so he says). He's made his money in filmmaking, rather than investing.
There is also the point that FDR was more wealthy than Moore and much more critical of the wealthy exploiting the poor. Rich people can have shame about their peers' exploitation of the poor, and poor people can rabidly defend rich peoples' rights to exploit. I don't know why seniors on fixed incomes and working poor people rally around the half-assed economic theories of clowns like Limbaugh and Beck, but I don't think they are hypocrites for doing so.
Moore is candid at all times about his politics, and he uses his films to advance those politics. You know that going in, just as you pretty much know what you're going to hear when you tune into the aforementioned Limbaugh and Beck.
This is yet another example of a trend I'm noticing more and more at the day job: anti-Obama/anti-Democratic reactionaries who cannot bear even the existence of conflicting ideas. I run one letter to the editor defending Obama and a reactionary will scream bloody murder about liberal bias. I run a letter to the editor opposing Obama and I might get one response from a liberal objecting, with much more civility, to an assertion made against the President.
I don't really despair over this; it's mostly a symptom of slow, but steady, decline of the George Wallace/Richard Nixon/Ronald Reagan voting bloc. Our political culture is comprised of pluralities and this one is dying out, in part due to age but primarily because working class whites are slowly coming around to the realization that they have been fucked hard by corporate flunkies posing as Reagan's heirs. The smaller the group gets, the more shrill the diehards are going to be.

No idea

I had no idea just how oppressed insurance companies are.

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Paul Springman, an appreciation

Paul Springman went to sleep Sunday night and woke up in a much, much better place. Hopefully, he's sitting at the bar in the ultimate K of C council, drinking his third or fourth stein of Stroh's and taking pride in what and who he left behind.
The lapsednewsguy owes his grandpa a lot, which is sort of surprising considering that we couldn't have been more different. I run my mouth about everything, while my grandpa (whom I always called Hans for some reason) usually held his tongue unless it was really, really, really important. He endured the Great Depression and the slaughter of World War II in the Pacific and was grateful for the chance to raise his family and have a home. I still seethe because my boss fucked me out of a raise eight years ago.
He came home from the Pacific and worked for his pop at the family grocery store as a meat cutter. When Pop died in the early 50s, the grocery store succumbed to supermarkets, the suburban exodus and more than a few unpaid accounts receivable. Hans moved on to plumbing. He bartended on the side, too. By the he was 40, he had seven kids and a wife at home. He never laid in bed with a cold and often nodded off as he untied his boots after a long day on the job.
I can honestly say that the only mean words I ever heard from him came when he and Grandma fought (which wasn't rare and never amounted to much) and when I would get in a hurry on a jobsite and cut a piece of PVC too short.
He was a guy whose respect you treasured, not because his standards were high but because he did things the right way...no matter how long it took. One of the great honors of my life came on my graduation day from IU, when he braved the steep home stands of Memorial Stadium to watch me get my bachelor's degree...about three weeks before he finally got the hip replacement he had been putting off for a decade.
Alzheimers took his mind and spirit away and, to be honest, I grieved that loss years ago and was glad to hear yesterday that his body finally followed along.
Hans wasn't perfect; no man is. I could probably come up with a list of his faults if I thought about it, but they would pale in the his totality. Anyone who knew Hans was better for it, me very much included.
Rest in peace, Hans.