Month: January 2016

Dear Better Roads Ahead PAC,

Yes, in fact, there is a better use for a few pennies:  Back in my pocket where they belong.

What you don’t seem to understand (or perhaps you understand it quite well), all the money you’re paying unionized printers to send out 8-1/2×11 cardstock political ads would take the place of a lot of those pennies you want from me.  Why don’t you give that money directly to the state of Indiana instead of asking me to support raising the gasoline tax?

In fact, the Better Roads Ahead PAC is apparently funded, in part, by the very unions whose members would benefit from the state spending more wallet-hoovered money on road repairs.  In Illinois, where last year the PAC was making similar noise, it was supported by, for instance, “Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, one member of the coalition behind the BetterRoadsAhead.org PAC”.  But you can’t find out who the “coalition” is by going to the PAC’s website.

People in Indiana are already taxed to the hilt for a gallon of gasoline.  According to Wikipedia, the state tax on a gallon of gasoline in Indiana is 29.89 cents.  Add 18.4 cents federal tax to that and now you’re up to 48.29 cents per gallon just in taxes.  If my average fillup is 8 gallons, that means every time I fill the tank, the state and Uncle Sam get $3.86.

The state doesn’t need a few pennies more. The state already gets plenty.  Maybe the unions who back your PAC ought to take a wage cut, instead.

I can no longer support Sarah Palin.

If she’d endorsed Cruz, she would have accomplished much — backing a real conservative and sticking it in the eye of the GOP elites who hate her as much as they hate Cruz.

The Trump endorsement is beyond the pale.  Bye bye, Sarah!

That was close.  Got over to Mom’s today and sat down at her computer to do something for my stepfather, and the Get Windows 10 applet popped up and offered to let me schedule my upgrade.

I stepped directly over to The Ultimate Outsider, grabbed a copy of GWX Control Panel, and put paid to that silly idea.  Then I went over to the FCC to renew my stepfather’s ham ticket for him 🙂

Ooh! A REAL debate? Like, with a neutral moderator, a single proposition to be argued, and the audience voting on who won afterwards?

You know these things they call “debates” these days aren’t actually debates.  Point of fact, there probably hasn’t been an honest-to-goodness debate in American political life since the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Let’s try this on for size:

Resolved: That the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States unambiguously protects the personal and natural right of a citizen to bear arms in defense of oneself, one’s relatives and acquaintances, and one’s home, business, and chattels, against any attempted depredation of same by any private person or government agency, and furthermore expressly denies to the Federal Government the ability to infringe upon that right in any way, including, but not limited to, acts of Congress, regulations of the Federal bureaucracy, or executive order of the President. Mr. Obama will argue against, Mr. LaPierre will argue in favor. Mr. Obama, as the challenged party, you will present your arguments first. You have twenty minutes. Mr. LaPierre will have 20 minutes to rebut, following which each party will then have five minutes for closing arguments, after which the audience will vote by show of hands.

Sadly, I’m guessing neither one of them was on the debate team in school.

Why can’t we get rid of caucuses and primaries and go back to state conventions and smoke-filled rooms? Believe it or not, we actually had a better class of politicians in those days, even if most of them were crooked as a dog’s hind leg…and you didn’t have to worry about the other party vote-bombing your primary.

Plus, pre-Amendment XVII, the politicians — at least, the Senators — knew who had their balls in a lockbox.  “You want to be a senator, Fred?  OK, well, be aware that either you’ll do what you’re told by the governor, the legislature, and the state party, or you’ll serve one term and be back on your farm plowing the north 40 so fast, your head will spin.”

And this crap of presidential candidates running all over the place and flapping their jaws regarding the hot news of the moment — can’t you all be like McKinley and go sit on your damn porch while the party runs your campaign?

So sick of all of them.  Would that they had a single neck, I’d cut it through.  Except maybe Cruz.  That boy wants to mix it up.  I say we ought to let him.

A national registry where people could indicate preferences … for florists.

I would love to have the ability to log into a site and tell it that we don’t want any live plants, or cut glass vases, or any of the other silly sh*t that people send instead of a card or a simple phone call.

We have cats.  My wife has a black thumb, and I don’t care about plants all that much.  To me the perfect house has a well-manicured lawn, a few mature trees, and maybe an evergreen or two for accent — and if there are any plants INSIDE the house, they’re fake.  Like the plastic tree we have in the family room, or the ceramic black roses my wife got from someone that are on top of the kitsch cabinet.  (OK, fine; we have a philodendron that my wife brought to the marriage that hangs in the front window, and which by all rights ought to have died years ago, but I always manage to see it and remember to water it before it shrivels completely up.  My wife won’t have anything to do with it and wants to throw it away.)

So — of course, with my wife recently graduating from her master’s program, we got cut flowers from her parents, and someone else brought us a cute little potted flowering plant (no idea what it is) that I just got done watering.  In any other house, you could put these things on side tables or the front hall table or whatever.

In this house, the cats would have them on the floor in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

So we can’t actually enjoy plants and flowers here.  They always have to be displayed on top of some tall piece of furniture so that the cats can’t get to them.  Which means we forget about them and they die horrible deaths from lack of water.

A national floral registry that florists could consult when someone tries to send you flowers would be a fab idea.  Why can’t some enterprising venture capitalist get on that?