Those republicans are at it again!

Well, people are saying that recent elections--particularly that of nude pinup model Scott Brown--have shown that republicans are going to win big in the next election. POPPYCOCK! It is still the republicans who are dragging down government at every level.

In particular, Scott Brown used a single issue to get elected, and it was something he could only have done in Massachusetts. Massachusetts, tired of the federal government not doing anything to reform healthcare, created health care reform on a state level, for the first time in this country. Since they already have health care, the citizens did not want to pay for this twice--once on the state level, and once on the federal level. That is how he got elected--not to mention that the Democratic candidate simply lost the election with a very poorly-run campaign.

Last I saw, 61% of the citizens wanted a public option in health care, 29% did not, and 10% were undecided. Splitting the undecided vote gives us almost exactly a 2:1 majority wanting a public option. Any republican who fights this should not be re-elected, period! For the republicans to claim that these recent elections mean that the public does not like Obama is sheer stupidity. He still has not pulled out of the problems left by the previous administration. And he can't do so quickly because they left us in such a precarious state. The ONLY way we can fix things is to get things back the way they were during the Clinton administration--ie, raise taxes on the wealthy. The best way to do this is to eliminate all of the ways that the wealthy people AVOID paying taxes. I hate to say it, but a flat tax, with a basic deduction for cost of living, and no other deductions, would go far to accomplish what we need to accomplish. Just making the rich people pay their fair share would help out this country a whole lot. I have no problem with a break for long-term capital gains, but I don't think that wealthy people actually do that much direct investment. Wealthy people have so many ways to avoid taxes that many of them actually pay NO taxes every year! That is simply not right!

Now we hear that the Greek government is in a sorry state, and needs to borrow money. This recession would seem to be never-ending, yet I work in retail, and we are beating last year's figures handily. Except for January, sales are not that bad.... If companies would just hire more people, I think they'd see sales go up.

I still think that Chrysler makes better cars than Ford or GM, and I base this on having owned four Chrysler products in the last decade or so, along with one Chevy, and a Mazda and a Volvo. Worst of the lot was the Mazda. These are not very current vehicles, ranging from 1986 to 1995 models, but I got to see two Caravans with 191,000 and 208,000 miles on them, and I now have a '95 Doddge Stratus with 112,500 miles on it, which beats the heck out of a Sentra or Corolla. It goes down the interstate far better than, say, a Hyundai Accent, handles well, rides well, and is quieter. Chrysler's cruise control is far better than the others, as well, beaten only in my experience by current Volvos. The new Avenger--which we are seeing used by many police departments--gets within a mile or two per gallon of the much-vaunted Malibu, and it is a noticeably larger car. You should look at Chrysler. Toyota, which I used to sell, and always respected, has lost my respect.

Gotta run....

Long time no see....

Well, it's been a while since I logged in here. I've been working very hard at my job, and I got a new laptop, and did not save the web address for this site--I use Opera as a web browser, and had about 20 seperate tabs opened up on my old Dell laptop. Someone gave  me a Gateway because neither he nor the guy who had given it to him knew how to open it up to change the power jack, which had fallen apart. This thing has a Celery 1100, I think, compared to the C400 on the old Dell, and this has 512 MB of RAM, compared to 256, and a number of other advantages, including a decent battery, wide screen, and so on. Today I showed up at the library (no phone line at all at my house, and I can't afford to get wireless internet from Sprint yet) with both computers, and opened a tab in Opera and copied the URL from the Dell into this, so now I have an always-opened tab to this location, so I can spout off anytime I get to the library--even if it is after hours! Hopefully I'll have lots to say in the future. Meanwhile, the Dell is downloading the last 60 of more than 200 linux update packages!

I'm  not all that happy with Obama, either, and did not expect to be, but we need to be more open to his health plan. Remember, we already have one of the largest single-payer health plans in the world, and it's not that bad. It's almost totally funded by taxpayers, although they will collect insurance policy money whenever they can, and they get their wealthier clients to pay a copayment, so the taxpayers don't fund the entire amount. I refer, of course, to the VA!

There's been a move for years to get older cars off the road. This includes the legislation that permitted charities to offer tax deductions for older vehicles donated to them. Objections to that at the time came from antique car buffs who felt that a lot of cars with potential historic interest would be crushed, and this would prevent people from obtaining restoration parts in years and decades to come. That's a valid complaint against programs which specifically require vehicles to be crushed. There needs to be some leeway here. particularly since, like it or not, the worst gas guzzlers are the cars which tend to be the fastest, and thus will have the most historic interest to collectors. The latest cash for clunkers campaign is another example of the worst form of legislation you could expect to see in this area. It's simply another case of Congress going off half-cocked!

I think I could fall in love with Ken Burns. His series on the Civil War has had a lot of air time lately, and I like his viewpoints, and what he does with his material. As a longtime photojournalist, I am hard to please in that area, and he pleases me. Not to mention the fact that he is cute! Of course, I was once in love with another documentary producer, Nick Ursin (who I knew long before he became a cinematographer). He died years ago, presumably of HIV/AIDS. He and I sat next to each other for half an hour twice each week, while attending chapel sessions with Friar White, and I always thought he was as interested in me as I was in him--but I also thought he knew a lot more than I did about such matters at the time. I remember that he signed my yearbook "Here's the end of a year of comfortable chapel seats." So sad that we lost contact immediately after that.... I had my name in print pretty regularly before he died, but I don't know if he read the same magazines that I wrote for.... And I have never seen any of his work, either, but if anyone has any of it, I'd like to see it....

I work in retailing. My employer won't give me full-time status, because some pencil-pusher in Chicago thinks that our department should only have one full-time staffer. The economy is not doing all that badly, folks. Even in a college town, where nobody buys anything when the kids are home for summer, I'm selling a fair amount of merchandise, and while our month is about $1200 below goal, that's not really desperately bad, out of about $100K as a goal. We're down maybe 1%, in a very bad time of the year for us, historically, and there was one day recently where we had an extremely high target, because apparently someone made a very unusual large purchase this time last year. That makes our goal unrealistically high for the month. And I got a call recently from my former employer, a day-labor company, looking for a skilled carpenter to hang some doors, and someone told the new manager that I could do that. So in spite of the fact that a lot of construction is stalled, there is apparently still work going on in that field, too. I was selling appliances for a while, and there is business to be had even in that area, so either people are still building new homes, or they are remodeling their old ones and staying in them. If only the doom and gloom naysayers would open their eyes, and start spending their money, we'd see a prompt return to normal, and reduced unemployment!