Gee….never saw this coming from a mile away.  Change we can believe in my ass.

Iran says Obama’s offer to talk shows US failure.

The last time I checked in, I was giving our new president the benefit of the doubt.  Ten days on the field later, much like the last guy I gave the benefit of the doubt to, Messiah is mismanaging the game clock and calling the wrong plays.

A nearly trillion dollar stimulus pork bill passed through the House this week under the cover of “we gotta get this shit done now!” philosophy.  The voting results were somewhat bipartisan – no Republican House member voted for the trough and were joined by nearly a dozen Democrats in opposition.   Messiah’s concept of a reach around out across the aisle for Republican input was basically reported to be to ignore all verbal communications. “Yeah, we’re not gonna do that” appeared to be the mantra, including the now famous “We won” argument.  If he’s gonna pull these kinds of meetings, it would be more efficient to flip off the minority party and yell “Fuck you!” across the Mall (without fresh sod) so that less time is wasted on glorified puppet shows.

The hurry-up-and-pass-this-damn-thing mentality is no doubt an effort to keep additional scrutiny from being expended on finding more wasteful items. Granted, the GOP headline grabber line items represent fractions of a percent of the overall spending (resod the Mall, more contraceptives, more STD treatment, etc.), but it reflects the bigger philosophical issue with this boondoggle.  Specifically, we’re told that passing this baconfest is highly critical and must be approved without delay.  While we appreciate the idea of nipping these recession signs in the bud, the Pelosi/Reid Congress doesn’t really have a good track record on pushing bills through on the fast track these days.  $700 billion banking bailout?  Passed quickly, with half the money released quickly.  Oopsie…we forgot to put in any kinds of spending standards or oversight of the program, and generally had no idea how the money should be spent in the first place.   Oh well, no biggie – it’s more important for us to fire up the printing presses at the Mint and fling $1.5 trillion that we don’t have around blindly.  Oh, and we can’t forget to financially reward our various constituency groups that elected us with free taxpayer cash.  Change we can believe in my ass.

Not content enough with bending the economy & taxpayers over, he’s gotta prove his weakness on defense.  One of his first foreign policy acts, as expected, was to start shuttering Club Gitmo.  Yes, we knew this was coming and there were questionable activities going on there, but blindly changing the locks is a terribly short sighted idea.  First off, what do we plan to do with these guys?   It’s not like these fellows were picked up on chance with a sandwich bag of weed. There are some really bad guys in the crowd, guys who want nothing more than to see the US and it’s culture wiped off the face of the earth.  (And they’re not perserving liberals to kill conservatives either – they want to see Western life including Hollywood to become extinct.  They want us all.)

Different trial balloons have been floated uneasily.  Pelosi wants the place closed, but she says they’re not going to refit & reopen Alcatraz (by coincidence in her district).  Various other prisons have been suggested with a predictable outcry of NIMBY.  John Murtha (D-umbass, PA) said he’d take them in if he had a maximum security prison.  To him, they’re no more harmless than that dime bag perp or tax cheat.  Unfortunately for this bozo (who calls his own voters ignorant rednecks) there are no maximum security prisons in his district.  One Congressman whose name escapes me makes a tremendous point – putting radical zealots into a prison population is like dropping a lit match in gasoline.  Many hardened prisoners have a dislike for society for putting them away.  What happens when a terrorist starts filling head with ways to attack the US?  Others are plain old being released into the wild, where they’re starting to turn up on the battlefields again.  Big shock there.  One lucky releasee, Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, was spotted in a recent militant tape.

Messiah is also starting to experience media criticism that he was insulated from during his campaign.  It’s becoming known that he has a specified list of reporters from whom he’ll take questions.  On a tour of the White House Press Corps cubicles he bristled at the idea that someone would dare ask him a legitimate question when he was just visiting to introduce himself (a laughable concept itself).  Surprisingly, he picked a fight with top rated talker Rush Limbaugh, trying to drive a wedge between Limbaugh and elected officials.  It seems like a huge mistake to poke the lion Limbaugh at a time when his audience is galvanizing in opposition.  One is not successful on the radio over 20 years by not winning challenges.  It’s true that Messiah comes in with a large approval rating and political capital, but he seems hell bent on spending it wildly upon entering office.  Spending it like a pork barrel spending bill.

I wanted to give Messiah a year or so to prove himself, and just like a football coach the doubts are already there.  Seems like I’m starting a bad precedent of giving Democratic executives a chance.  Last time I did that, my Mountaineers ended up stuck in the annual Welfare Bowl and we all got ugly ass “Open for Business” welcome signs.

…please hear my prayers and let the Steelers get their asses kicked Sunday.  It’s getting unbearable around here.

–Hammy

In life there are going to be choices people as a group make that are unpopular with individuals, such as who is going to be a leader, what item to purchase, whether that item should be bought, borrowed, or rented, what cause to follow, what ideology to believe, and so forth.  These outcomes occur every day, so it’s a guarantee that everyone will end up on the short end of the stick sometimes.

Case in point: yesterday’s presidential inauguration seated a President whom I did not support not vote for.   My oppositions to him were clear and striking – he advocates the continued expansion of government in our everyday lives at an annual deficit of over one trillion dollars (not that Bush 43 or the current GOP was doing much better).  He wants government to reach deep into our pockets for money, own our retirements, give us healthcare, and pretty much nationalize our lives.  At least that’s what he alluded to for the two years his presidential campaign was active, and was the message I kind of voted against when I cast a GOP ballot.

A funny thing started happening, though – the President Elect version of speeches started softening up a good deal from the Presidential Candidate version.  He started getting the same briefs as the lame duck administration, and all of a sudden we’re not talking fire and brimstone anymore.  It’s as if he finally realized he couldn’t govern like his Candidate alter ego, and that’s a good thing.  Unfortunately that’s a bad thing to the hardcore followers who saw him as the Messiah, who are gonna push back and push back hard.  It will be interesting to watch during 2009 just how far he swings and where he lands.

So despite all my opposition to the Candidate, I’m giving the new President a chance.  Maybe he’s going to see adding trillions to the national debt is a bad thing, or at the very least lower the amount of debt accrued.  Maybe he’s seeing that he can’t govern from the wings, that he has to come to the center.   However it come about, if he softens up and governs like a sensible person should (don’t run deficits, let people control their own lifes, etc.) he might not be so bad.  I’m gonna give him a year or so to show me what he can do.

Unless he lets this newest version of a stimulus package blow well past the 12th zero.

As a nerd I normally enjoy most applications of technology.  However, the stupid & nonsensical deployment of tech can leave me scratching my head.  For instance:

- I went to see a specialist regarding lingering questions from my hospitalization last month.  (Off topic – clean bill of health.)  Instead of having the usual sign in sheet they have a touch pad entry at the front desk.  It’s likely to remove the difficult middle-man task of taking a sheet of paper and pulling up the patient appointment record.  While I see the value and time saving potential, the savings are lost when the receptionist has to explain how to use the touch pad for each patient.  And being a specialist, the age & tech savviness of the patients are not exactly stellar.  To top it off, upon my sign in I was issued a restaurant-style pager.  Maybe it’s a privacy thing to not have a nurse shout your name across the waiting room, but it seems pretty damn pointless.  To further irritate, the receptionist resets my pager and gives it back to me, instructing me to go to a smaller waiting room where a second patient director was standing in maitre’d fashion.

- McDonalds has put in many of their drive-thrus a new computerized drink dispensing system that takes the beverage order, selects the appropriate cup size, adds ice, and dispenses the drink in a circular method.  I presume the proper syrup to carbonated water ratios are maintained in there as well.  While it’s an interesting idea, it tends to break down when the window person is not there and is trying to figure out which drink goes with which order.  It also fails if the cup grabber grabs more than one cup (which I have seen more than once), which tends to catch the cup on the nozzle and pour soda down the sides of the cup.

- I actually am a big fan of the self scanners at grocery stores, Wal-Marts, and other places.  I do get turned off when some yokel or yokel couple decide to use one, then stare at it like it’s a sentence diagram when they have no clue how to operate it.  Here’s a hint – punching random buttons and saying “what the fuck?” at it  will not make the machine ring your order any faster.  I also am slightly peeved that there isn’t some kind of a discount (2-5% off an order, perhaps) for my usage of the lanes.  Beyond the one time cost of installation and regular maintenance (which any register requires over time), a store can now have up to 12 lines (Ikea Pittsburgh) open with 10% of the normal labor pool to supervise them.  They provide the store with cost savings each day…why not cut us in on the action?

- I was reading an article on pcmag.com about weird USB gadgets, most of which don’t add any real functionality.  Why?  Who buys this crap?  USB ports are limited now – why tie up a precious resource with a blinking owl thing?