Take Me Away

Another big winter storm this weekend. Started Thursday and kind of ruined Friday. Should actually be nice out over the weekend, though. Nauber, meanwhile, is in Florida on vacation. I took him and Darrell to the airport Wednesday evening. There was a cop (statie) sitting around a corner inside the airport express HOV tunnel. A deserted exressway tunnel that takes people to the airport with (apparently) a 35-mph limit. Goddammit. And every week my job just sucks worse and worse. Nobody I apply at ever contacts me, though, so I have no idea how long it will take to escape. I need a vacation!

Go Mass!

Massachusetts is gonna try to get rid of DoMA!
I'm just glad they waited until there were no major elections in the pipeline!

Why Republicans Keep Winning

Have you ever had a religious discussion with a seriously devout believer? After you finally stopped banging your head on the wall, you realized that your lucid logical arguments do you no good when the believer simply classifies them as the words of the devil and digs in his heels.

Turns out, Republicans get more convinced of their beliefs the more proof you have that they are wrong. In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Conspiracy Theory

Illegal immigration has been in the news a lot, lately. Besides the "fence" discussion, there has been a crackdown on the employers who don't check social security numbers properly. The idea is to reduce immigration by making the jobs less desirable.

I was talking with my Brazilian friends the other day, and they commented on how much more money they are spending on housing payments back home now that the dollar is tanking. The 'real' used to be worth about a third of a dollar, now it's about half. A Brazilian making 9R/hour in Sao Paulo might not be able to afford a mortgage payment, even though it's about 50,000R for a nice place. But at $9/hour in the US, they are making an equivalent to 27R/hour, and can send that money to pay off the mortgage pretty quickly. Now that those $9 are more like 18R, it's a little harder.

My first thought was that the Brazilians would not want to be here any more if the exchange rate gets worse, and they'd be better off just getting a job back home. Then it hit me. This is the PLAN. The government is purposely allowing the dollar to slide because that will discourage immigrants from coming here!

Nut case

I read an article today about a court case in Georgia. Some right-wing nut job sued the school board to ban the Harry Potter series of books. She believed they were promoting a lifestyle of witchcraft to young children. The case has worked its way up to the Georgia State Supreme Court because she won't accept all the verdicts that say she's a nut case.

They are fully expecting her to appeal again. The article on ABCnews.com ended with the following two lines:

At Tuesday's hearing, Mallory argued in part that witchcraft is a religion practiced by some people and, therefore, the books should be banned because reading them in school violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

"I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again," Mallory said. "I think we need him."

The reporter obviously caught the hypocrisy. The scary part is that the religious nut cases don't. They don't really want separation of church and state, they want separation of churches they don't like, and state.

Hearing Aid

For those of you who don't recall, two years ago (almost exactly) I was in a car accident. My little PT Cruiser was totalled. I was making a left turn, saw an on-coming car, stopped. The retiree in the other car drove full speed into my car, despite the red light 20 feet in front of me. According to state law I was automatically at fault because I was making a left, so I filed an appeal. My insurance went up anyway, so I looked it up. The appeal form just starts a process where they schedule you for a hearing. I apparently missed my hearing; but I know for a fact I would not have missed that notice in mail. So, I've been paying about $700/year extra because of the accident on my driving record.

Tonight I got the hearing notice in the mail. TWO YEARS LATER! It's scheduled for late October. Are you kidding me?!?!? Of course, this is organized by the State of Massachusetts, and the hearing is at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Luckily, they do schedule it for the department in your own area, so it's walking distance, not 3 hours away... I sure hope I qualify for a refund on all those insurance premiums I've been paying.

Assuming, of course, that they believe me when I tell them that it's not my fault the old fart wouldn't stop.