Tag: Politics

Shortie Digits

My contribution to the continuing decline of political discourse in this country: Short Fingers. A Tumblr featuring manipulated[?] images of Donald Trump’s tiny hands.

It’s small. It’s petty. It’s a thing that has gotten under Trump’s skin since the heyday of Spy magazine. And, damn, if it isn’t funny.

It’s me, right?

Companies advertising specials for folks being affected by the shutdown of the federal government rub me the wrong way. Giving away free crap, well, I suppose I’m not as irritated by that kind of thing. It still reeks of taking advantage of tragedy for a little self-promotion but I can see how it might be an even trade.

The thing I’m really starting to get irritated about however is this phenomena of “half off tickets to $FOO for folks with IDs proving they’re affected” advertising. To me that reads as, “Hey, you. Experiencing hard times, right? How about stupidly spending some of your dwindling capital on some cheap entertainment? Well, come right this way…”

This isn’t a party. It isn’t a marketing opportunity. It’s a tragedy being foisted on us by a group of people who are trying to take legislative shortcuts because they lack the popular support to do things the right way. And crap is about to get a lot more serious in the coming week. No one thinks that Congress will force us into default but no one thought Congress would shut down federal operations either.

Le deluge

So I’ve tried being circumspect about this. I know and even like folks on both sides of this issue. I’m trying out this a-political public face because, like many of y’all, I’d rather we just hang out and drink beer instead of wrestle in the mud.

But, crikey, what even the hell? And, yes, my political slip will be pretty openly showing in the coming paragraphs, Dr. Freud…

I get that the ACA, Obamacare to you who want to be disparaging about this bit of legislation, is not at all a perfect law. I’m way up front with the fact that I think a single payer system a la Canada is a way better solution to the problem than the private/public meld a la Germany. I am also way up front with the fact that doing nothing is worse than doing something at this point. Fully funded private healthcare is at least as damaging as the slightly mishmashed pre-ACA mess and even more damaging than what the ACA provides.

Assuming the goal is utilitarian here. Which, when it comes to public policy, is a pretty sound way to go.

Why is this so? Because despite claims to the contrary, fully private funded healthcare is also strictly rationed healthcare. Broken leg and no insurance and no funds to pay as you go? Hop-a-long, Hobble Pants, hope you can afford some aspirin. Tuberculosis and no money for treatment? Too bad, Mister Kaupfsalaut.

But also too bad for the rest of the population too. That is unless we’re also going to confine people who have communicable diseases but no ability to pay to treat them. This just stinks of “penny wise, pound foolish.” On the other hand, hooray for curbing population growth[?].

So obviously there is a need to address the provisioning of healthcare in this country. The ACA makes an attempt at this. Of the many unquestioned benefits, my wife cannot be denied coverage any longer despite her chronic condition. That right there, my friends, is my price of admission. You want to get rid of that, you’re essentially telling my wife to [expletive] off and die should I lose my job. You’re already saying [expletive] off and get back to work doing something you might not dream of doing because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to provide for your family since doing something you do positively enjoy and that might possibly increase the number of economic growth centers in your community comes without health insurance. I may be a chunky, middle-aged, pasty geeknerd, but I will [expletive] a person up when they start playing life or death with my family.

So some Republicans want to bring the entire nation to its knees over a novel interpretation of the intent behind the debt ceiling because the ACA is ruinous. Yet as part of this whole sturm und drang they offer no alternative to the pre-ACA world which we’ve already established is an unfair, strictly rationed, inflationary nightmare of a system.

First, the debt ceiling is a convenience of Congress. It wasn’t drafted with the intent of forcing the federal government to live within a certain level of debt. It was drafted to relieve Congress of the need to debate the minutia of how and under what terms it needs to issue every penny of debt it incurs. There are alternative ways of approaching this puzzle. We, unfortunately, chose one of the more contentious ways of doing this in 1917 and continue on through inertia.

Second, if you want to repeal the ACA, do it via legislation; the same god damn way every other law is made or repealed. Pass legislation through both houses, have the president sign it, or bypass the veto with a 2/3rds majority. It’s worked for this nation in crises much more daunting that this. You cannot honestly argue that this falls into the same realm as even the Whiskey Rebellion. It’s a social policy, fairly passed, and ratified in the same sense that the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions were ratified in the following election. It’s even stood the test of Constitutional muster in a Supreme Court headed (and voted for) by a Chief Justice of the Republican’s choosing. Yet now you want to play political and financial chicken because this is not something, in the end, your position is capable of pulling off. Sore Loserman, indeed.

Third, barring doing it via the appropriate channels, tie the continuing resolution and repeal of ACA to replacement legislation. You’ve had how many years now to draft an alternative? If you seriously want to do something about the ACA and fear the pending Armageddon, and you seriously want to compromise with people who are at least as opposed to the pre-ACA status quo, show us the money. What, other than a program ripped from the 1990’s right wing thinktank collective, is the Republican solution to this issue? Because, [expletive], the ACA is exactly what was used to shoot down the single payer/public option system being floated the last time the federal government tried tackling this problem. Newt “Leg Humping Multi-Jesus Serial Wife Swapping” Gingrich stumped for exactly the approach the ACA puts forward before the same policy was enacted by the party opposite.

So, seriously, play along or get out of the way. I’m not sure I could be more frustrated at the moment. You control, at best, 33% of the legislative process. Republican House members who are actively rallying against a clean continuing resolution and/or not lifting the debt ceiling are starting to poll in the single digits in terms of favorable ratings. You’re representing a highly vocal but fleetingly small population.

Grow up, accept that repeal is a difficult multi-election row you need to hoe, and do your [expletive] job. My family thanks you.

Another thing to do

Also, because I lack a comprehensive bookmark management system these days: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_long_con/print.

I don’t expect many of my right-leaning acquaintances will enjoy reading this so you have been forewarned.

The project? A wiki that documents the web of connections between movement conservatives and their dealings in the marketplace. There would also have to be some faceted navigation to that data dump lest one get bogged down in the fog.

The marketing angle presented in the link is something I’ve often mulled when listening to local AM talk radio during its interminable run of commercials. Things like how most answers to your economic woes are investment opportunities in numismatics presented as investment in their underlying metals. Other things like as you get later into the evening, the likelihood that the particular personality will be pimping their most recent book will increase geometrically. I used to think that Colbert doing the latter was distasteful until I recently realized it is another satirical bit.

I’d go on, but then I’d be getting preachy. And I’ll save that for the wiki project.

A fun little thing

The Romney campaign’s web site is coded with a bit of an open loop. It makes sense from a dynamically generated website perspective I guess. However, it’s also the sort of thing that lazy RESTful programming gets you. The idea being that you have a template that is populated by values from a data store based on parsing the URL that lands you there. The lazy was of doing things is to just assume that every value passed is valid. The smart way of doing this is to check to see if you have something useful for that value and to redirect to some kind of error if not.

For example, the good way of doing this is this very blog. Let’s say you want to see every blog entry published in 2012. You’d use the address http://blackfez.com/2012. Let’s say you’re on to the trick and want to see every blog entry published in 1948. You’d type http://blackfez.com/1948. Notice how the second link redirects to an error page? This is smart. And relatively simple. You just check your input before going off to render stuff.

Enough of the theory, why is this fun? Because with lazy RESTful programming you can do stuff like this:

Anyway. It’s fun. At least to me. It’s also a bit of lazy programming and leaves the Romney campaign open to some needling. And it seems like the last thing the guy needs is another exposure to ridicule.