Interesting discussion recently about taking firearms into municipal buildings. What crossed my mind this morning is the reason that decisions are always mailed out in small claims court cases in San Francisco. They didn’t used to be. The change came after a defeated litigant bit the nose off the prevailing party. Think I’d at least ban guns in courthouses, even if they were allowed at city council meetings.
I pretty much loathe Facebook but check it out every week or two in case someone’s posted a good photo of Sunset at the North Pole or something, and I liked a couple of the images my former secretary posted recently:
A couple of years ago near San Francisco I ran into a former client whose company I had represented against, among others, folks from El Paso Electric Company. He was older than I, but we’d become friends.
Now, in the spring of 2008, I was glad to see that he and his wife were alive and well. As we talked, they told me about an incident when they’d lived in Hawaii, where he’d been with a big Hawaiian company. They were well off, of course, and their daughter attended Punahou. One evening her date for a big dance was to pick her up, and my friends were worried: their daughter’s date was a black kid, which was fine with them, but my friend’s mother was very conservative. They said nothing to her, but wondered how she’d take it. Eventually the young man came in, politely placed a lei around the neck of the girl’s mother and grandmother, and left for the dance. Afterward when my friend and his wife looked closely at Grandma, she just said, "Wasn’t that the sweetest young Hawaiian boy!" He was light-skinned. His name was Barack Obama.
The Republicans hammering Obama on the Economy is natural, but even more hypocritical than most politics. As we all know, Bush and his zealots got us into two wars, one of which bore no significant relationship to its purported causes and was sold to the nation and the world based on lies and on suppression of intelligence. Bush also championed the "Bush Tax Cuts" that made tax rates on rich folks among the lowest in the world and the lowest in the U.S. for at least a half-century. In short, with Republicans in control the country jacked up its expenditures astronomically and reduced its income. To blame Obama for not having rescued us from Bad Times in a couple of years in office reminds me of a guy running up hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit-card bills, switching from full-time to par-time work, then handing his wife the checkbook and blame her for not having got everything fixed within a couple of months.
That’s particularly so when the Bernanke, initially appointed by Bush to head the Fed, warns that drastic spending cuts in a recession could spell disaster – and Tea Party Republicans in Congress won’t hear of anything but spending cuts.
Monday Night Football opened a little differently last Monday, although since I have the sound down I wasn’t blown over by the difference: instead of the usual rowdy Hank Williams, Jr. song Mike Tirico was talking to us from a booth. Of course I learned the reason later, that he’d compared Obama to Hitler. Although I like Obama’s politics better than Williams’s or Hitler’s, Personally, I’m not outraged by the comparison. I don’t always speak as cautiously as I should, and I’m not even a famous singer.
But the funniest part was probably Williams’s lukewarm apology Tuesday, in which he said he objected to the heads of the country’s two parties "jukin and high given on a Golf course, while so many Families are Struggling to get by" – but if that made him "Boil over" then why doesn’t he Boil over at the strategies of the Republican Party to keep rich folks getting richer and avoid anything close to a fair deal for the folks "Struggling to get by"?
One of those folks, a 63-year-old Montana woman, reportedly penned a pretty neat comment. Wyoming U.S. Senator Alan Simpson, Co-Chair of Obama's deficit commission, had called senior citizens "the greediest generation" and compared Social Security to a milk cow with 310 million teats.
Patty Myers wrote back:
"Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight.
1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole for FIFTY YEARS.
2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).
3 My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero ambition losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would have made Bernie Madoff proud..
4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and your ilk pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to age 67. NOW, you and your shill commission are proposing to move the goalposts YET AGAIN.
5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now you morons propose to change the rules of the game. Why? Because you idiots mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal money from Medicare to pay the bills.
6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again. Why? Because you incompetent bastards spent our money so profligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt. To add insult to injury, you label us "greedy" for calling "bullshit" on your incompetence."
She also asked him a few very pertinent questions:
"1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?
2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?
3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?
4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing
in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or, as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?
It is you, Captain Bullshit, and your political co-conspirators called Congress who are the "greedy" ones. It is you and your fellow nutcases who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers. And for what? Votes. That's right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing your pathetic political careers. You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it.
And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a bitch."
My favorite line of the week actually was uttered more than 40 years ago by a man I never met: a friend’s father, a mature man in the 1960's when son came to manhood. Far from being appalled by the growing protests, or the catch-phrase "Don’t Trust Anyone over 30!," my friend’s father remarked one day, "What they really ought to do is shoot us all [old folks]."
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