Note: Google has changed its blogging software, Blogger, in incomprehensible ways, as has destroyed paragraf breaks in the HTML screen I usually work in. I have had to use a different way of doing things to try to work around the problem, and have complained to the 'geniuses' at Google.

Wasting Our Time on B.S. Three of the 'big stories' on NBC Nitely News today were the (1) trivial sex scandal involving the Secret Service, (2) an 'alarming' spike in measles: the U.S. went from 60 cases a year to 222 a year of this trivial infection that produces essentially NO consequences for anyone — in a Nation of 312 MILLION people!; and (3) the retirement of a women's basketball coach. Who the HELL needs to know any of this? Why are the media wasting our time on such NONSENSE?
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This is supposed to be not only the world's only superpower, but also a democracy, in which an informed citizenry is expected to demand intelligent public policy from government, corporate powerhouses, and social institutions, affecting not just the United States but also the entire planet. How are we supposed to make decisions on public policy when the media spend the bulk of their time on idiot drivel?
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Who CARES if a basketball coach retires — esp. a women's basketball coach in Tennessee, not even in a major city? And why is she receiving a medal from the President? Absurd. So she did some work on publicizing Alzheimer's "disease" — which is not a "disease" at all, in that it is not caused by a microbe and is not transmissible — so what? Did she find a cure? No. Why are nobodies being given Presidential medals for nonsense?
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This country's values are skewed toward madness. Media waste hundreds of television hours a week on empty-headed, useless celebrities, whose hollow, useless lives have nothing to do with the lives of the rest of us. Why?
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These "bread and circuses" distractions keep us from informing ourselves on things that matter. While morons are watching make-believe people — whose vacuous fame is predicated on playing "make believe" for scads of money, and who present a largely fake persona to the public — the rich export our jobs, cheat on their taxes, and yearly make the bulk of us ever poorer so they can become ever more obscenely rich. Coincidence? It might be, if the media wasting our time were owned by nonprofit, publicly dedicated citizens' organizations. But they're not. The major media are huge corporations owned and controlled by the rich. Get the picture?
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The magical takeover of every part of society by the rich has been accomplished by the same thing that makes all "magic" possible: diversion and distraction. Keep everyone's attention on one, inconsequential thing, while you carry off your trick of stealing hundreds of billions of dollars from their pockets, and reduce them, bit by bit, to penury.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Funding Clean Energy; Romney's Servants. Environment New Jersey sent email today to solicit my signature on an online petition demanding that Governor Christie stop raiding clean-energy funds to balance the State budget. Naturally, I not only signed that petition but also personalized it with these comments:

Fossil fuels are for economic-policy fossils, people living in the past. Solar, tidal, and geothermal energy are the future. You must lead NJ into the future, not the past. And you don't do that by stealing from future generations -- today's children and grandchildren -- to fund the present. Solar includes wind, hydro, and wave generators, as well as biomass conversions thru ethanol production and even the burning of wood and agricultural wastes. These are endlessly sustainable and ultimately very inexpensive sources of energy for New Jersey. Why would you steal from our future?

The claim is made by the defenders of fossil fuels that alternative, "green" energy is not economically competitive. This is an outrageous lie. The only way fossil fuel can even begin to compete with FREE energy from the sun, tides, and the Earth's internal heat is by deducting all the costs of exploration, extraction, refining, and distribution as business expenses under the tax code. If NONE of those expenses were tax deductible, a gallon of gas might cost — oh, I don't know, since no one seems to have done this calculation — $20 a gallon.
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Contrast that tax treatment with green energy. If a homeowner installs a solar water-heating array, electric-generating array, or backyard or rooftop windmill(s), s/he must come up with the entire expense of purchase and installation, often borrowing money from a bank, which demands not just repayment of the entire principal amount but also interest. A tax credit might be available to cover PART, but not ALL of the cost, as is the case with every gallon of gasoline. In future years, the homeowner might be able to take some depreciation on that equipment. Might. S/he might also be able to deduct the interest paid to the bank. Might. That is, if the financing were done by a second mortgage, or mortgage modification that merged that cost into the property's first mortgage, the interest would be deductible for Federal income-tax purposes. I'm not sure that all state taxing authorities also permit such a deduction.
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If green-energy equipment is not financed thru a mortgage, is any portion of the equipment purchase, installation, or loan repayment tax-deductible? I don't know. Nor does almost anyone else out there in the general population of homeowners who would like to install solar or wind equipment but believes the costs are prohibitive.
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What I as a homeowner do know is that I cannot afford to install any form of green energy generator on my house or in my yard, so I cannot contribute to the solution of our energy and pollution woes. But fossil-fuel companies can charge off every cost of producing fossil energy against their taxes. Which means that the taxpayer is SUBSIDIZING fossil fuel, but NOT subsidizing renewable energy. And THAT is why we don't have solar collectors and small windmills on every appropriately situated house in the Nation. So, which form of energy is it that is nonviable without subsidy?
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Ann Romney's Servants. I raised here on April 13th the issue of how many servants (how much "help") the Romneys have had with their housecleaning, child-rearing, transportation, etc., then did a Google search today, and found NOTHING. No one in media has, apparently, investigated whether 'heroic' Ann Romney "did it all" herself, or had a little "help", a fair amount of help, or tons of help from tons of servants of various kinds: nanny, cook, housekeeper, maid, butler, chauffeur, pool "boy", personal assistant/secretary, yacht captain and crew, etc. Why is that?
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An excellent opinion piece appeared today on AOL's Huffington Post, Pamela Kripke's "Work, Yes; Job, No". Kripke mentions Ann Romney having servants, in general terms, but I don't know where she got her (entirely vague) information, because as far as Google's early search results are concerned, the Romneys never had any servants of any kind.
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There were, at 2:15pm, when I started drafting this section of today's post, only 60-some comments at Kripke's opinion piece, one of which claimed that the Romneys weren't always rich. YES THEY WERE. Mitt's father was George Romney, who was ALWAYS, even during Mitt's early childhood, a major corporate or government executive, making very good money. Mitt WAS always rich, and NEVER IN HIS LIFE had to worry about money.
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But the question remains: how much domestic "help" — and we know that good "help" is hard to find — did the Romneys have during the period that they are now claiming Ann Romney worked like a slave to raise five boys and clean house as a gentle, modest housewife? Someone in major media needs to do a comprehensive investigation. And if major media won't do it, the Obama re-election campaign needs to do it. If, as I suspect, the Romneys have always been rich and had servants of various kinds to "help" Ann Romney thru the bulk of her "stay-at-home-mom" shtik, the electorate has the right to know that Ann Romney is as much a bull* artist as her husband.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:58 PM

 
Ann Romney's Cowpoop. The Republicans have created an absolutely PHONY controversy about the remark by a Democrat, Hillary Rosen, that Mitt Romney's wife "never worked a day in her life". The Republicans have focused on that short-form statement, without addressing Rosen's longer-form attack, that Ann Romney "never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing, in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future." Nothing in Rosen's long-form accusation is false, dishonest, or misleading in the SLITEST.
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"Work" means, in general use, "for money". Everyone understands that, tho Ms. Rosen's statement would have been clearer, and UNASSAILABLE, if it had been "never worked in the paid economy a day in her life".
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The Federal Government does not recognize staying at home to take care of children as a legitimate activity for POOR women who ask for Government assistance.

As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, if you're poor, deciding to stay at home and rear your children is not an option. Thanks to welfare reform, recipients of federal benefits must prove to a caseworker that they have performed, over the course of a week, a certain number of hours of "work activity."

So Republicans are absolutely falsifying what Ms. Rosen said, to suggest that there is an economic, moral, and legal equivalence between staying at home to raise children and "working". NO, there is not.
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Women who raise children as their sole devotion, but are not rich, are NOT regarded as making a fully valid choice — and Ann Romney shamelessly used the word "choice" repeatedly, as tho she and her husband and the Republican Party are pro-"choice". What a bunch of shameless, but hopelessly clueless and clumsy, con artists they are. Republicans actually portray stay-at-home mothers, if their husbands (if any) cannot support the children without so much as one red cent of public (taxpayer) assistance, as CRIMINALS, STEALING from "decent people" to support their 'parasitic' children. "If you can't afford to take care of your own children, from your own resources, don't have children" is the uniform, uncompromising, unrelenting propaganda of the Republican Radical Right.
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So we have this interesting notion: the rich are entitled to reproduce; the poor are NOT entitled to reproduce. Of course, you never hear it put that blatantly, but that is, of course, what the Radical Right is saying.
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Implicit in that stance is the assertion that the poor are genetically inferior, and their progeny will never amount to anything more than a drain upon society. The rich, of course, always produce progeny worthy of a place on this overcrowded planet, and no one should ever question the fitness — be it intellectual, physical, moral, or any other kind of fitness to exist on a grotesquely overcrowded planet — of the rich.
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Mitt and Ann Romney had 5 children (all sons; how lucky for Mitt, so he needn't worry about unwanted pregnancies among dauters) and have at present some 15 grandchildren. All this at a time when planet Earth was becoming profoundly overcrowded. But Republicans believe they have the right to litter the Earth with as many children as they can possibly produce. Sterilize them all.
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Did Mitt and Ann Romney raise their children with NO help from nannies, maids, or other servants? That is INCONCEIVABLE, no matter what they might say. Inconceivable. Obscenely rich people do NOT do all their own housework, childcare, cleaning, etc. If they say they do or did, you need to DISBELIEVE. Even people of modest means in this country in the 1950s hired occasional help. Whether the Romneys called their help "maids", "nannies", "babysitters", "housekeepers", "chauffeurs", "drivers", "personal assistants", or anything else, only an idiot would believe that a family whose wealth was in the hundreds of millions of dollars did all their own housework, childcare, etc. Only an IDIOT. If I had five sons, but millions of dollars, you can bet YOUR bottom dollar that I would hire help, if not with the boys, then with the cleaning or laundry or cooking or SOMETHING. Especially would that be the case if I had, as is now claimed for Ann Romney, MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS and CANCER. The idea that she did all the work in a household of 7 people while sick with multiple sclerosis and cancer is ABSURD. What kind of idiot believes any such thing? How STUPID do the Romneys think we are? PLENTY stupid, it would seem.
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Ann Romney never "worked" (for money) a day in her life. That is absolutely true.
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Worse, her husband, Mitt Romney, hasn't worked a day in the past TEN YEARS, since he was 55 years old and perfectly healthy. By contrast, I retired, on niggardly Social Security, at age 62, because I had serious trouble walking and, especially, negotiating stairs, after three knee surgeries. I worked seven years longer than Mitt Romney, despite knee problems, but he pretends to have been a hardworking model citizen all life long. What a bunch of bullshit.
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The Romneys PRETEND to be hard-working, ordinary Joes (and Josephines), who have suffered the very same worries about paying the rent, or mortgage, meeting their bills, putting food on the table, etc. How stupid do they think we are? In a revolution by the poor, the Romneys would ALL BE KILLED as vile, worthless PARASITES upon society.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:51 AM