A Forum for Grinches and Ho-Ho-Hoes

[Hank Chinaski]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,141541,00.html

they didn't get all of the sets of 10 Commandments out of Alabama Courthouses....

Judge's Robe Bears Ten Commandments
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A judge refused to delay a trial Tuesday when an attorney objected to his wearing a judicial robe with the Ten Commandments embroidered on the front in gold.

Circuit Judge Ashley McKathan showed up Monday at his Covington County courtroom in southern Alabama wearing the robe. Attorneys who try cases at the courthouse said they had not seen him wearing it before. The commandments were described as being big enough to read by anyone near the judge.

You think this guy might be angling for a appointment to a US D. Ct seat? Best part.....

"I had a choice of several sizes of letters. I purposely chose a size that would not be in anybody's face," he said.

[baltassoc]

So you know how those conservative "family" groups have been flooding the FCC with indecency complaints?

Now it's your turn! From Atrios (which I don't usually read, but I saw a link to it this morning on Wonkette):

• FCC Action Alert!!!
  
  1. Go to http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/menu/rush.guest.html and find your Limbaugh station.
  2. Send an email to fccinfo@fcc.gov with your own version of the following:
  
  On Monday, December 13 in the 2nd hour of his program (1pm EST) broadcast on [CALL SIGN HERE], Rush Limbaugh used the vulgar, sexual term "dick" when referring to a Miss Plastic Surgery pageant. Specifically, Limbaugh said:
  
  
  "LIMBAUGH: Miss Plastic Surgery. (chuckle) And – I’d – I’d – I – I don’t – I don’t know what the winner – I – and, oh, I didn’t print out both pages, so I don’t know what the – I don’t know what the winner gets. Probably a certificate to go to San Francisco to have an add-a-dick-to-me operation. "

Come on, you know you want to do it, RT.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_12_1...05730452212714

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
Careful, Regan is listening.

I agree - their wealth/savings/whatever is their money, and they should be able to spend it on whatever they wish. But they should not be able to claim financial support from the rest of us because they want to do something else with that money besides than support themselves (whether that something else is buy toys byond their means, blow it on coke & whores, or leave it to their children).

My parents will be able to leave me more money because they will receive (very nice) SS benefits instead of having to spend their own money. That is nice for me, but still pisses me off a lot in principle. Reforming SS along what I consider to be fair lines would harm me personally rather a lot. It says something about the extent of my outrage that I still think it should be so reformed.

I usually think of "wealth" as "revenue producing capital assets." Having a lot of money, whatever the source, is being "rich." (I think this distinction in vocabulary may be more in my own mind than objective, but there it is.) People may have pensions and wealth, pensions that make them rich but not wealthy, pensions that just provide an adequate income, or pensions that don't. But whatever the source, if one has resources sufficient to make SS payments effectively a "lifestyle subsidy," it pisses me off. Basically, I'm of the opinion that if one can support oneself, whether the source is capital wealth, private pension income, earned income, or whatever, the G shouldn't be taking money earned by the rest of us to give it to you to subsidize either a ritzier lifestyle or wealth transfers to your offspring (though I don't think the G should be taking those, either, if you manage to create and/or preserve them). Not sure if that clears anything up, but there it is.

I tend to disapprove, in principle, of most forms of government welfare, but if there is to be welfare it should bloody well go to the poor.

* eta: this is not related to ltl's point, which, as she points out, is not exactly the companies' fault. But it also gets into technicalities of private pension finance about which I know nothing at all.

Well, the money in SS is not welfare - it was earned by its receipients, so they should have the right to spend it as they like. Again, SS is not a govt fund for people - its govt giving people back their own money.

I don't agree that SS should be reformed to a "need based" program which you appear to advocate. That is an insidious form of wealth redistribution which would only serve to reward the irresponsible. If we follow Bush's privatization scheme, there will be armies of idiots losing their asses in the market and looking for pockets to pick later. The responsible should not be a crutch for idiots. This reason, among many others, makes me wonder why Bush would push for privatization. My cynical guess is he views privatization as the first step in a long GOP effort to undo SS entirely. Thats reckless, IMO. We need the program. Most of us are too goddamn stupid to be responsible for our retirement. I offer as evidence the mass of voters through the country who voted against their own economic interest this Fall. My second exhibit would be raw data on the lack of brains in this country. If you don't know simple geopgraphy or still believe Hussein was involved in 9/11, you probably don't have much investing acumen.

You're not losing money on this deal. If your folks don't need SS, the cash will trickle to you later. Any loss of the money from their spending on vacations and crap they don't need will be made up by the investment gains of their savings they're not using. You're just being impatient.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by baltassoc
So you know how those conservative "family" groups have been flooding the FCC with indecency complaints?

Now it's your turn! From Atrios (which I don't usually read, but I saw a link to it this morning on Wonkette):

• FCC Action Alert!!!
  
  1. Go to http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/menu/rush.guest.html and find your Limbaugh station.
  2. Send an email to fccinfo@fcc.gov with your own version of the following:
  
  On Monday, December 13 in the 2nd hour of his program (1pm EST) broadcast on [CALL SIGN HERE], Rush Limbaugh used the vulgar, sexual term "dick" when referring to a Miss Plastic Surgery pageant. Specifically, Limbaugh said:
  
  
  "LIMBAUGH: Miss Plastic Surgery. (chuckle) And – I’d – I’d – I – I don’t – I don’t know what the winner – I – and, oh, I didn’t print out both pages, so I don’t know what the – I don’t know what the winner gets. Probably a certificate to go to San Francisco to have an add-a-dick-to-me operation. "

Come on, you know you want to do it, RT.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_12_1...05730452212714

Should I wear my burka?

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Well, the money in SS is not welfare - it was earned by its receipients, so they should have the right to spend it as they like. Again, SS is not a govt fund for people - its govt giving people back their own money.

Uh, sebby, they don't, and never have, kept the money in a special place for you. they take the money deducted from your paycheck and use it to pay current benefits. Hence the problem.

Good to know you paid attention (sorta, well, for *you* you did a good job) in history in grade school and learned how they sold SS to the public.

Think of it as a regressive income tax and you will be better off.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by baltassoc
So you know how those conservative "family" groups have been flooding the FCC with indecency complaints?

Now it's your turn! From Atrios (which I don't usually read, but I saw a link to it this morning on Wonkette):

• FCC Action Alert!!!
  
  1. Go to http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/menu/rush.guest.html and find your Limbaugh station.
  2. Send an email to fccinfo@fcc.gov with your own version of the following:
  
  On Monday, December 13 in the 2nd hour of his program (1pm EST) broadcast on [CALL SIGN HERE], Rush Limbaugh used the vulgar, sexual term "dick" when referring to a Miss Plastic Surgery pageant. Specifically, Limbaugh said:
  
  
  "LIMBAUGH: Miss Plastic Surgery. (chuckle) And – I’d – I’d – I – I don’t – I don’t know what the winner – I – and, oh, I didn’t print out both pages, so I don’t know what the – I don’t know what the winner gets. Probably a certificate to go to San Francisco to have an add-a-dick-to-me operation. "

Come on, you know you want to do it, RT.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_12_1...05730452212714

The FCC is completely out of control. Apparently they are now investigating NBC's broadcast of the summer olympics opening ceremony, because one of the country's presentations was allegedly indecent (something about overtly sexual dancing).

Then there was the Saving Private Ryan debacle. The FCC has now concluded they are not going to pursue action, even though the movie was run uncut and included profanity.

Thank god (for now) for cable and satellite.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by ltl/fb
Uh, sebby, they don't, and never have, kept the money in a special place for you. they take the money deducted from your paycheck and use it to pay current benefits. Hence the problem.

Good to know you paid attention (sorta, well, for *you* you did a good job) in history in grade school and learned how they sold SS to the public.

Think of it as a regressive income tax and you will be better off.

I wasn't saying the money was kept in a special place, just that the character of the money is technically "one's own". Of course SS cash is used elsewhere, but if you're lucky enough to receive SS payments someday, those benefits will constitute a repayment of what you paid into the system.

[SlaveNoMore]

Saddam stooge and US-hating British MP George Galloway makes an even bigger ass of himself - if at all possible:

Brit MP says suicide attacks in Iraq legitimate
December 11, 2004 - 4:02PM

London: British MP George Galloway has refused to condemn suicide attacks on the country's troops in Iraq in an interview being broadcast today.

Asked if he would condemn suicide bombers, the anti-war MP said: "I will not condemn an occupied people for using their legal rights, their legal rights as well as their moral rights to resist the illegal occupation of their country"....

He also pointed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's pronouncement that the war was illegal.

Galloway said: "It follows that the only people fighting legally in Iraq, therefore, are the people defending their country against an illegal invasion".

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by sgtclub

Thank god (for now) for cable and satellite.

Just you wait. The crazies will be after pay tv soon enough. they claim they only want to ensure that they are not exposed to filthy things, but you know damn well they want to cleanse everything they can. They'll be angling to censor pay and satellite tv soon enough.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Saddam stooge and US-hating British MP George Galloway makes an even bigger ass of himself - if at all possible:

While I'm not going to defend Galloway's comments, you should know that the story that he was a "Saddam stooge" is now understood to have been based on fraudulent documents and that Galloway recently won a huge libel verdict against the paper that ran it.

[Gattigap]

You're in the Army Reserve, and have been commanded to drive supplies into central Iraq. You don't have enough trucks to move the materiel, and you are also missing crucial spare parts for your vehicles. Under Bush Administration policies, what do you do?

* Dig through landfills to find the parts and presumably entire trucks? Rummy says yes, but what other options are there?

* Refuse to go because of the lack of equipment? Hell, no. For disobeying direct orders, you'll get yourself imprisioned and court-martialed for that kind of attitude.

* Be creative and commandeer Army trucks that were abandonded by other units and use them to carry out your mission?

Sorry, solider. Try something creative like that and you'll be convicted of theft and destruction of military property, and spend six months in military prison.

• The two officers, Maj. Cathy Kaus and Chief Warrant Officer Darrell Birt, are among six Army reservists who were found guilty in court-martial proceedings earlier this year. Both were sentenced to six-month prison terms and given dishonorable discharges. The others were given lesser sentences.
  
  ***
  
  The main facts in the case are undisputed. Soldiers from the 656th Transportation Company arrived in Kuwait in March 2003, were quickly ordered to Iraq and found themselves without enough trucks to carry their equipment. They took two Army trucks and two trailers they believed to have been abandoned by units that had already moved into Iraq, loaded them with equipment and drove them to their base near the Iraqi town of Tikrit.
  
  Several weeks later, they found what appeared to be an abandoned Army truck along an Iraqi highway, towed it to their base and stripped it for spare parts.
  
  Mr. Birt said in a telephone interview that without those parts, his unit, which had 60 fuel-hauling trucks, would have been unable to complete its mission of delivering fuel to American bases throughout central Iraq.
  
  "The choice was either to find parts where we could, or do the mission halfway and expose our people to danger, or refuse to go," he said. "We felt we needed this stuff for mission sustainment."
  
  Another soldier in the unit, Specialist Robert Chalmers, said that its repeated efforts to obtain spare parts, both before it was deployed to Iraq and afterward, were unsuccessful.
  
  "We ordered parts, but they never came," Specialist Chalmers said.

I hope to hell there's more to this.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I wasn't saying the money was kept in a special place, just that the character of the money is technically "one's own". Of course SS cash is used elsewhere, but if you're lucky enough to receive SS payments someday, those benefits will constitute a repayment of what you paid into the system.

That's how it's often sold, but not really what it is. Were it so, then it would be difficult to explain how the payout of current retirees' benefits have vastly exceeded what those retirees have put in.

[Gattigap]

From Sullivan:

• My old boss and friend, Mike Kinsley, now running the editorial pages at the Los Angeles Times, poses the following conundrum, which he invites any of you to refute. Yep, he's a big media guy turning to blogs for an answer. Write responses to him at michael.kinsley@latimes.com. Here's his argument:
  
  My contention: Social Security privatization is not just unlikely to succeed, for various reasons that are subject to discussion. It is mathematically certain to fail. Discussion is pointless.
  
  The usual case against privatization is that (1) millions of inexperienced investors may end up worse off, and (2) stocks don't necessarily do better than bonds over the long-run, as proponents assume.But privatization won't work for a better reason: it can't possibly work, even in theory. The logic is not very complicated.
  
  1. To "work," privatization must generate more money for retirees than current arrangements. This bonus is supposed to be extra money in retirees' pockets and/or it is supposed to make up for a reduction in promised benefits, thus helping to close the looming revenue gap.
  
  2. Where does this bonus come from? There are only two possibilities: from greater economic growth, or from other people.
  
  3. Greater economic growth requires either more capital to invest, or smarter investment of the same amount of capital. Privatization will not lead to either of these.
  
  a) If nothing else in the federal budget changes, every dollar deflected from the federal treasury into private social security accounts must be replaced by a dollar that the government raises in private markets. So the total pool of capital available for private investment remains the same.
  
  b) The only change in decision-making about capital investment is that the decisions about some fraction of the capital stock will be made by people with little or no financial experience. Maybe this will not be the disaster that some critics predict. But there is no reason to think that it will actually increase the overall return on capital.
  
  4. If the economy doesn't produce more than it otherwise would, the Social Security privatization bonus must come from other investors, in the form of a lower return.
  
  a) This is in fact the implicit assumption behind the notion of putting Social Security money into stocks, instead of government bonds, because stocks have a better long-term return. The bonus will come from those saps who sell the stocks and buy the bonds.
  
  b) In other words, privatization means betting the nation's most important social program on a theory that cannot be true unless many people are convinced that it's false.
  
  c) Even if the theory is true, initially, privatization will make it false. The money newly available for private investment will bid up the price of (and thus lower the return on) stocks, while the government will need to raise the interest on bonds in order to attract replacement money.
  
  d) In short, there is no way other investors can be tricked or induced into financing a higher return on Social Security.
  
  5. If the privatization bonus cannot come from the existing economy, and cannot come from growth, it cannot exist. And therefore, privatization cannot work.
  
  Q.E.D.
  Or not?

Makes sense to me. Can anyone help me refute this?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Gattigap
You're in the Army Reserve, and have been commanded to drive supplies into central Iraq. You don't have enough trucks to move the materiel, and you are also missing crucial spare parts for your vehicles. Under Bush Administration policies, what do you do?

* Dig through landfills to find the parts and presumably entire trucks? Rummy says yes, but what other options are there?

* Refuse to go because of the lack of equipment? Hell, no. For disobeying direct orders, you'll get yourself imprisioned and court-martialed for that kind of attitude.

* Be creative and commandeer Army trucks that were abandonded by other units and use them to carry out your mission?

Sorry, solider. Try something creative like that and you'll be convicted of theft and destruction of military property, and spend six months in military prison.

• The two officers, Maj. Cathy Kaus and Chief Warrant Officer Darrell Birt, are among six Army reservists who were found guilty in court-martial proceedings earlier this year. Both were sentenced to six-month prison terms and given dishonorable discharges. The others were given lesser sentences.
  
  ***
  
  The main facts in the case are undisputed. Soldiers from the 656th Transportation Company arrived in Kuwait in March 2003, were quickly ordered to Iraq and found themselves without enough trucks to carry their equipment. They took two Army trucks and two trailers they believed to have been abandoned by units that had already moved into Iraq, loaded them with equipment and drove them to their base near the Iraqi town of Tikrit.
  
  Several weeks later, they found what appeared to be an abandoned Army truck along an Iraqi highway, towed it to their base and stripped it for spare parts.
  
  Mr. Birt said in a telephone interview that without those parts, his unit, which had 60 fuel-hauling trucks, would have been unable to complete its mission of delivering fuel to American bases throughout central Iraq.
  
  "The choice was either to find parts where we could, or do the mission halfway and expose our people to danger, or refuse to go," he said. "We felt we needed this stuff for mission sustainment."
  
  Another soldier in the unit, Specialist Robert Chalmers, said that its repeated efforts to obtain spare parts, both before it was deployed to Iraq and afterward, were unsuccessful.
  
  "We ordered parts, but they never came," Specialist Chalmers said.

I hope to hell there's more to this.

Hell yes lets hope so. Hawkeye stole a jeep in MASH because he needed to get to the unit, stealing trucks is fine. The military should rely on all the guys stealing stuff in the right way, they're there, on the ground- the soldiers will re-distribute trucks efficieintly. Military command decisions aren't necessary.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Military command decisions aren't necessary.

Nor, according to SecDef, is equipment.