A New Years Toast… and Thoughts on John Edwards

Toast! It’s even buttered!

What exactly were you expecting?

Seriously, I wish everyone happy celebrations this evening, and send my thoughts of peace, wellness, and happiness to all my readers and all living things. May 2008 be a year where good things come into your life!

Ok, now then, about John Edwards. I support Mr. Edwards. Well, alright, in a world where Mr. Kucinich is considered “unelectable” I support Mr. Edwards. I think he is the best of the top-line candidates. But nevertheless, I do not agree with every one of his positions — I’m one of those darned “free thinkers” — and that brings me to his commentary the other day entitled “Rallying the middle class“. This piece is timely, since according to polls, Americans consider the economy and health care to be top issues. His first four paragraphs are pretty much right on, revisionist history about the golden age where working hard would magically put your family ahead aside. I especially like when he says “How long will we let big corporations and special interests dictate the direction of our country, while middle-class Americans suffer?” Then we get into the four legs of the table he wants to rebuild the middle class upon. I’ll take them one at a time if you don’t mind.

The first thing we need to do is create more jobs and make sure those jobs pay enough for people to get ahead. As president, I will end the failed NAFTA trade model and pursue a trade policy that ends tax loopholes for companies that send American jobs overseas. I will also invest in renewable sources of energy to create new industries and good-paying jobs. I will make sure work pays by raising the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour, and I will build career ladders to help low-wage workers move into better jobs. I will put the government back on the side of working people by strengthening organized labor. And finally, I will reform our tax code to make sure that the people who need tax breaks – our middle-class families – are the ones getting them.

Ok, I can’t argue with creating more good-paying jobs. Investing in renewable energy is a win-win cause: it reduces our dependency on fossil fuels while creating high-tech development jobs and good wage manufacturing jobs too. Someone’s got to build the solar panels and windmills! Now, although I am an advocate of a higher minimum wage, I am a little nervous about taking it all the way to $9.50. That’s higher than any state’s minimum wage. I hope there is a plan to do it in stages. That would bring the annual pay of a full-time minimum wager to about $19,000. As for tax breaks, I still believe in radical tax simplification that includes making the poverty line the standard deduction and caps itemized non-charitable deductions at three or four times that level.

The second thing we need to do is give families the tools to build a secure financial future. In today’s economy, people cannot rely on their employers for their long-term retirement security, so as president I will create Universal Retirement Accounts that can be taken from job to job. To respond to the mortgage crisis, I will pass a tough new national law to prevent predatory lending abuses, and I will rein in credit card and other abusive lending practices by creating a new consumer watchdog agency.

Again with the “we can fix that with a special account!” business. Is there some reason we can’t simplify the law to get what he wants with the IRA accounts that many people already have? Can’t we make a way for employers to contribute directly to our IRAs instead of a separate 401k program (which is incidentally controlled by that employer)? This would get more retirement funds in place, give Joe and Jane Average fewer accounts to keep up with, which would in turn make them less subject to fees on those accounts, and would even curb the retirement account issues that plagued employees of Enron and WorldCom. Oh, and speaking of reinventing the wheel, I bet there already is a consumer watchdog agency that should have reined in abusive lending and credit practices. And I bet they have been underfunded for the last 7-20 years.

The third thing we need to do is remove the burdens that weigh families down. We need to help people balance their work and home lives by making sure that workplace policies keep up with changes in the economy. As president, I will expand early-education programs, provide paid leave and sick leave to all workers, and expand job protection under the Family and Medical Leave Act. I will also expand opportunities to attend college through my “College for Everyone” program.

Well, workplace policies that are at least not family-hostile seem like a good thing. Got a plan to make large corporations think twice about transferring people across country — making them abandon ties to their communities, straining relationships with extended family, forcing spouses away from jobs, leading to fractured educations in their children, and contributing to the housing bubble? Work on that. As for “College for Everyone”, I think that devalues a High School education. Not everyone needs college! I support a “money should not be a barrier to college” program instead.

The fourth thing we need to do is create universal healthcare in America. Not only are healthcare costs putting a huge strain on American families and our competitiveness in the global economy, but our broken healthcare system that leaves 47 million Americans without healthcare is also a moral disgrace. I have proposed a healthcare plan that calls for shared responsibility among people, businesses, and the government, and will ensure that every man, woman, and child in America has access to affordable, quality coverage.

Alas, when he says “universal healthcare,” he does not mean “Medicare for All”; he means “mandatory health insurance.”

In closing: information overload; more write-downs on the way?; a maternal health issue you need to know about; faith is great, but it takes money to pay the bills; the AeroCivic; and finally Jim Cramer, English Teacher? Happy New Years.

The Strange Things We Export

So by now everybody knows American businesses have exported a lot of jobs in places like call centers to relatively low-wage countries. They call it “offshoring,” and over 1,600,000 people are employed that way in India alone. The companies who employ these workers freely admit that these jobs are sent overseas to save money — not to insure that work is done at hours that it would be difficult to find American workers to do it. While these jobs pay less than they would in the United States, the workers still receive a wage that is competitive if not high by local standards.

In addition to sending 1.6 million American jobs to India, we have sent the stress and dysfunctional work environment that goes with those jobs. As a result, many of the workers are experiencing increased rates of “sleep disorders, heart disease, depression and family discord”. These problems cost an “estimated $9 billion in lost productivity in 2005” which “could grow to a staggering $200 billion over the next 10 years”.

I wonder how this will effect the bottom line. mmYeah.

In closing: one man’s idea of how to fund Medicare For All — and please don’t forget his consulting fee; canned goods and a blood pressure check; Forbes’s A Short History of Pigging Out is 9 pages long; Krugman on Unions; maybe I should stop being ad-free, as some bloggers are making money; An interesting analysis of “free” trade; the FBI is planning the world’s biggest biometric database despite the fact that biometrics is a not-ready-for-prime-time science, promising to only use it for good; heaven knows that database could never experience a security breach — thanks to Bruce Schneier for pointing out the top 10 data breaches of 2007; and more Schneier-ific items, where should airport security begin and don’t be terrified.

The Nightmare Before Shorties

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Merry Christmas, folks.

Let’s get started with two items on healthcare, one from the ever-insightful Dave Johnson, and one from Expert Ezra.

YouTube is now officially good enough for the Queen of England.

Are we prepared for Chinese investors?

CNN reports that “credit card defaults [are] alarmingly high“, and the Christmas bills haven’t even arrived yet.

JurassicPork must be in a more festive mood, as he brings us 10 more little known “facts” about Chuck Norris.

Devilstower over at Daily Kos explains to one and all why fundamentalism and democracy are incompatible. The money quote: “A theocratic democracy is an impossibility. That’s just as true for Christianity as it is for Islam.” Remember Salem, anybody?

The TSA has earned itself the position of just as unpopular as the IRS!

And finally, a really cute picture.

Glad the price wasn’t in pounds.

booty

I took this picture last year as all those little kiosk shops in the mall were trying to get rid of inventory before closing down for the year. Clearly they were selling “bootie” style slippers, rather than women’s derrières. If you need more evil pictures for Christmastime, try these.

In closing: too big to fail by design; steakhouse economics; Hooverville Reborn; top 10 gadgets of the year; it’s going to be a long time before anybody names a child Katrina; a run on the food bank; home is where the heart is even when you are “homeless”; David Sirota on the conspiracy of conspiracy theories; and finally, maybe we’ve been too hard on Congress. Maybe.

Hope everybody had a great Hanukkah and Solstice, hope everyone will have a great Christmas and Kwanzaa and whatever else you celebrate!

Call to Action: Call Your Senator; Call Harry

By way of background, the latest version of the FISA overhaul bill — yes the same one Nancy and Harry swore they would fix in September after getting back from being gone all August and caving in to Administration demands before leaving town at the end of July, yes it is now December — includes retroactive immunity for telecom companies who allowed the government to spy on citizens without warrants in violation of not only the law but the Bill of Rights.

Senator Dodd — a member of the majority party, and a current presidential candidate — doesn’t think that’s right.  Do you?   He and a mere handful of allies in the Senate are planning a filibuster.  Give a call.  Tell them to do the right thing.  Then call your own Senators and tell them you expect them to do the right thing.  And then call Harry Reid and ask him why the hell a member of the majority party has to filibuster anything, ever!

The Senate needs to be reminded who sent them to office.

In closing: if JurassicPork is right, we are worse off than we think;  fiscal sanity; one thing free trade zones are really good for is drug smuggling;  another way of looking at the DMV;  so much for manufacturing jobs; oh, and so much for the stable part of Iraq; an increase in inequality; and finally, Cynthia at Shorty Stories alerts us not-so-tall people to a new website for petites.

Advice for New Bloggers

So, you’ve decided you want to have a blog, eh? No? Ok, you can scroll to the “in closing” bits.

Yes? Ok then.

The first thing you will want to do — I mean it, before you even go choosing a name — is to figure out what you want to write about. Do you want to have an online diary? To write about a particular industry? To put up funny pictures of your pets? To document family stories? To give us your two-cents-worth about world events? To tell us what is going on in your hometown? What kind of tone do you want to set: funny, serious, sarcastic, psychotic, scholarly? You don’t have to limit yourself — and you will soon see why — but you need to have an idea what you are up to.

Next, you’ll want to decide where to keep your online “stuff.” There are plenty of places you can blog for free, and until you really get a following that is what you will want to do. Blogger and WordPress are fine places to start. They will host your content (put it on their servers and blast it out to anybody who requests it). They will also have “templates” on which you can put your stuff to keep it organized.

Now, what do you want to call yourself? You can use your name, and that’s perfectly alright. You can use a descriptive term — such as ShortWoman or Maya’s Granny. You can use a way of thinking of yourself — such as Defective Yeti or NYC Educator. You can use a place, real or fictional — PureLand Mountain or Welcome to Pottersville. You can base it on what you plan to talk about — MemeCats or The Market Oracle. All those are taken, and I think you’ll find them all in my Blogroll. If you buy your URL, www.whateveritis.com for example, you can forward it to one of the free hosting services I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Be aware that other people will be reading what you have written, and that will have consequences. Sometimes it’s good consequences, such as my being asked to write for Central Sanity. Sometimes it’s bad consequences, like losing your job after saying unflattering things about your boss. Not putting your name on the top of the page does not mean it is impossible to figure out who you are. Just like with e-mail, my advice is to not say anything you wouldn’t read out loud to your mother, your boss, or a judge. This will keep you out of a lot of trouble. Oh, Hi Mom!

The next thing is to make peace with change. Unless you are already a professional writer, odds are really good that your blogging “voice” will evolve. You can check this phenomenon yourself by looking through my archives. Four years is a really long time online. Just because you want to only write funny stories about dogs today doesn’t mean you won’t get really inspired by something completely unrelated tomorrow.

Speaking of inspiration, if you get stuck, feel free to go poke around a big news site, or one of those community sites where they talk about 83 different things on any given day, or a place that tracks current hot stories other people are blogging about? Surely you will find something that strikes you. Failing that, you may find someone else whose writing you like enough to say “Hey! Check this guy out!” This is where it’s handy to write about a fairly broad set of topics.

My final bit of advice is to pace yourself. It’s easy to get caught up in a flurry of new stuff and then burn out. Please don’t do that. Not everybody is as prolific as the big A-List bloggers. Not everybody has the stamina to post every day. And if you look at those A-List blogs, you will find that almost every single one is a group effort. Why don’t you start by planning to post every week, and if you feel motivated in between consider that a bonus?

In closing: Hello Kami; thanks to Preemptive Karma, Why am I being punished? Osama did it!; Human evolution may be speeding up; speaking of evolution, Ron Paul will be speaking at this week’s anti-aging medical conference in Vegas (you’ll have to scroll way down); standardizing international adoption policies; climate science as manipulated by the White House; and D-Ed Reckoning brings us not just one, but two “why oh why can’t we have competent reporting” stories.

Slaughterhouse of the Rising Shorties

What will they come up with next? Just what you probably don’t want to deal with first thing in the morning, a flying alarm clock.

Who needs extradition? “A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it,” if they are accused of a crime in the US. If that is so, why did the Feds wait until Skylarov came to the United States to arrest him?

Navigate By Numbers. A great quote.

Everybody Loves Dinosaurs. Here’s a mummified dinosaur, complete with skin and tendons! Scientists hope there may also be mummified muscles and organs. But wait, there’s more! As a bonus, we have a bus-sized fossilized sea predator.

Preach On! DeanDad pointed me to some inspired writing on at Tiny Cat Pants (don’t you love that name?), but I found Bradford Plumer’s commentary on my own.

News You Can Use. I’ll be crossposting this link over at BridgetMagnus.com, but thanks to the MetaFilter crowd for Landlord-Tenant Law in Every State.

So much for making fun of the Canadians. Not only is their dollar doing a lot better than ours, their health system is better than ours too, both in costs and results. And yet every presidential candidate except Kucinich wants to give us “mandatory giving money to insurance companies”.

Just what I needed! Toyota has built a robot that plays the violin. Elsewhere, someone has — for reasons known only to them — made cactus out of yarn.

Catch 22. On one hand, we have kids dying because drugs are not tailored to them. On the other hand, what parent wants to sign their kid up for experimental drugs?

What’s that line again, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”? I don’t know what to make of the revised WIC guidelines — the first major changes since the 70s — but I’m pretty sure that if the current administration is involved, it is probably not what it at first seems.

If you really care about education, you need to read this book. The nice folks at D-Ed Reckoning point out that Zig Engelmann’s book will finally be published. Learn the true story about a system that won’t admit it’s failures or anyone else’s successes, and get a bonus side order of My Pet Goat.

 

Happy Holidays, folks.