Obama Despair

Someone I know, a former soldier, recently posted this on Facebook, and it just made me shake my head in wonder at how stupid people can be.

It seems at times that people who support the Republicans in this day and age have simply removed facts, reality, recent history, information and even knowledge from their thinking and are so doggedly Republican they simply cannot do anything other than attack the President.

When it comes to the relationship with the troops, let's be real here.  It was George Bush almost ten years ago, who famously sat like a deer in headlights after he was told our nation was under attack.  While Americans were in harms way, the man just sat there and did nothing.

After the worst terrorist attack on American soil, he rounded up tens of thousands of our troops and sent them storming into Afghanistan, with no real game plan or strategy.  Not so long later, he blundered into Iraq, in an operation that was supposed to take 'a few months' after being 'greeted as liberators' by Iraqis.  Yet here we are in 2011, our economic system at risk of dipping back into a second massive recession, scratching our heads and trying to figure out how to pay the tab run up by Bush and his bloodthirsty wars.

If the Despair poster above resinates with you, I'd love for you to tell me why.  Explain how it is that Obama is so ignorant and clueless, whereas Bush was a great sage of our time?  Explain how it is Obama's fault that Bush spent all the money and then ran back to his ranch in Texas leaving Obama to figure out how we pay up.  Please tell me what all these terrible blunders Obama has made with our troops that could justify this absurdly stupid image.

Often times the scariest thing about America is the sheer number of people that witness events unfold, promptly forget about them, and then hand the keys back to the assholes who just drove the United States off a cliff.

Right now that crying asshole and his band of Tea Bag owned cronies are trying to figure out how to rape the American people, even more to pay for the mistakes of George Bush.  They won't consider the logical or obvious, such as asking those billionaires who made out like bandits during the Bush administration to chip in.  They won't consider closing loopholes that allow rich people and corporations to avoid paying the taxes they owe.  No instead they want to come after their favorite whipping boy; the middle class.  Let's cut back on education, cut pensions, cut back on police, teachers, government workers.  Let's put a bunch of people out of work, kick old people and children off their health care plans, all so people like Donald Trump won't have to notice a slightly lower balance on their savings accounts.

How anyone can be disrespecting our President, as if we all made a mistake and we should instead have voted in old man McCain, his bimbo sidekick, so the man who announced that the fundamentals of our economy were sound, right before the worst recession in American history, would be doing so much better, is quite beyond me.  Talk about some delusional thinking.

As for the picture above, if you are worried about our troops, just remember who put them there in harms way in the first place.  And let's also remember who is enacting a plan to bring them home.  And finally, if you like that picture, get a fucking clue and learn some critical thinking before Idiocracy is upon us.

Casey Anthony Released

This weekend Casey Anthony went free from jail, free to live the rest of her life an innocent women.  Despite the release being shortly after midnight, there were people who made the effort to travel to the jail, stand out in the rain, and hurl abuse at this person as she walked to the car surrounded by armed guards.

First off, I don't know what derangement possesses someone to travel all that way, and wait around all night hoping to yell at someone who a jury found innocent on all charges (other than lying).

But my comment is simply this, Casey Anthony was destroyed in the media, she had to contend with that vile little bitch Nancy Grace et al telling Americans how she was guilty and how she should be put to death.  And now Anthony has to live in society with these crazy people, knowing that threats have been made against her life.

The media, indignant that a jury did not share their thirst for blood, went on the offensive talking about how she will probably make millions doing interviews and a book deal etc.  To all this, I say, so what, and leave this poor woman alone.

We have a criminal justice system that is deeply flawed, and clearly racist.  Innocent people get thrown in jail all the time, including petty criminals who certainly don't need to be in jail.  So even if Casey Anthony deliberately murdered her baby in cold blood, so be it.  All the evidence was presented, and the jury couldn't even find her guilty of mistreating or abusing the child, much less killing her.  Even if some people think she had a hand in the child's death by being irresponsible, just let it go already.  Thanks to our infant mortality rate (46th in the world - GO AMERICA!), dozens of babies will die today in America because we don't make quality affordable health care available to the poor.  These dead babies will not get 30 days of blanket media coverage, in fact they won't even make a newspaper headline.  It will just be another statistic, another oh well.  I suspect in fact that during the time Casey Anthony was in jail, the number of babies that died unnecessarily in America because of our fuck you attitude towards the poor would have hit tens of thousands.  How can we as a nation have such an outpouring of emotion over this one kid, but continue to support policies and political ideologies that sentence millions to die prematurely?

This woman is either so unstable she deliberately killed her child, so irresponsible she accidentally killed the child through action or inaction, or just plain unlucky.  But in any case she is going to have to live with that fact and the infamy forever.  Not a day will ever go by in her life when she will not be haunted by what happened, the death of her child, the three years in jail, the media circus, the death threats, the threat of death row, and the unwanted celebrity status (where you get almost all the bad, and almost none of the good benefits of being a celebrity).  She will never be able to lead a normal life, have a normal job, have normal friends and co-workers.  What happened will define her entire life in a pretty horrific way.  So for these assholes to be talking about what happened as her walking away 'scott free' is just beyond brainless.

As far as I am concerned I am totally okay that she is free.  I also could not care less if she makes a few million from what happened, because she isn't going to be able to earn that money in any kind of normal way.  Above all else, I really was appalled by the witch hunt and the trial by media.  I am further appalled at the despicable and disgusting fucktards who protested the trial, and waited around for hours and days just to hurl abuse at her.  It is so uncivilized, and is one step away from stoning people to death.  These protestors could have been working a soup kitchen, volunteering for the homeless, fostering an unwanted baby.  Any number of things.  But instead they were making an already horrific situation worse by being assholes.  So if you were one of those people; fuck you.

Speaking of Dead Babies

In 2006, I first blogged about the issue of our infant mortality here in the United States.  I was recently reminded of this in a discussion I was having online regarding the pitiful state of our health care system.  But I was further reminded of the issue thanks to the Casey Anthony trial.  It wasn't so much the trial, it was the assholes who sent death threats to the Anthony family and went down to the court house to protest, cry, and call out "won't someone think of little Caylee."

First off, I don't know what motivates someone to go and act like an asshole at a court house.  Isn't there enough pain and human tragedy in this case, without creating further drama?

Secondly though, the biggie for me is that so many people, and 24 hour 'news' networks have nothing better to do than obsess about this single child dying, when for the fifth straight year that I have been watching this, the infant mortality rate in the United States has fallen again.  We now have 45 countries in the world that do a better job of keeping their babies alive than we do.

The radical right has continued to attack women's right to obtain an abortion.  Several states are now investigating miscarriages as murders, with potential criminal prosecutions for women who cannot prove that they naturally lost their baby to the satisfaction of the state.  Several more states have defunded Planned Parenthood, because you know cutting off women's access to STD screening, reproductive advice, and contraceptives makes the most sense right?

To me it seems like a completely insane logic where we wring our hands over the unfortunate death of a single child, or talk about abortion as if it is routine and taken too lightly by young mothers, yet we as a country are ignoring the fact that we are slipping year on year in our ability to keep our babies alive.

Despite spending more than double what most countries spend per capita on health care, our babies continue to die at an alarming rate thanks to lack of access to health care for all; and the situation is getting worse.  Yet no one talks about this sad fact.  The 'news' networks continue to spew the emotive crap about 'poor little Caylee' giving us round the clock coverage of the trial, what 'experts' think about the trial, what pundits think, what random members of the public think, and so on.  Yet no coverage regarding the thousands of babies who died unnecessarily during the same time period because in our country we don't give a shit about poor people.

Casey Anthony

I have to start out by saying; I have not watched the trial of Casey Anthony nor have I become a part of the media frenzy surrounding this case.  However, as people all over the media and on Facebook tell me their opinion, I feel I should push back with mine.

In my mind there are three likely scenarios in this case:

Murder Most Foul

The young mother had a plethora of reasons for hating her daughter, and decided to terminate her in a very late term abortion.  Unfortunately, my understanding is that dozens of witnesses came forward and spoke to a very positive relationship between mother and daughter, so I find this pretty unlikely.

Manslaughter

The lack of sleep, stress of raising a child, and other general pressures caused Casey to snap and kill her child.  Possible I guess, but doesn't seem all that likely.

Death By Misadventure

Some terrible accident occurs that may or may not have been the result of negligence on the part of Casey, and the child dies.  The parent loses a grip on reality and makes up a series of lies to hide what has happened, with no clue how to make it right.

I don't know what happened, but I do know that I have a very hard time believing that a mother would plot to kill her little daughter and then do so in cold blood in a manner that would qualify her for the death penalty.  It just doesn't make any real sense.  It is not in keeping with typical human behavior.  Also even a stupid person would realize that if you just flat out kill your child, sooner or later someone is going to ask questions or find the body.

If you are going to take the time to plan a murder why not simply make it look like an accident?  Let the kid drown in the bath tub, or swimming pool.  Let the kid fall from an open window.  Putting masking tape over their face and dumping their body in a trash bag is clearly not much of a murder plan.

But I don't want to become just some other pundit expressing a baseless opinion about this case.  What I want to talk about first off is America's need for blood.  The number of otherwise normal people baying for an execution is really quite disturbing.  Even if she actually plotted and actually murdered her own child, do we really need to execute her?  Is she going to get released after 30 years in jail, have another kid and then murder them?  Execution should be reserved for war crimes, crimes against humanity, serial killers, and utterly heinous acts.  Something like this?  I don't think so.  And let's also be clear, the only countries in the world who still execute people suck.  We should not be striving to be like the Middle East, third world counties, or Communist China.

I'm also a little sick of people talking about this woman getting off 'Scott free.'  Really?  Scott free?  In any realistic scenario, she is going to have to live with the death of her child forever.  Then the assholes who judge this woman are going to make her life terrible for at least a decade or so.  She isn't going to be able to get a real job, so she is just going to have to write an autobiography or sell the movie rights because between that and welfare, is the only likely way she is going to make any kind of money any time soon.  And let us not forget she has already served close to three years with a death sentence hanging over her head.

I think what I find most sad about this event is that the media have chosen to spend hundreds of hours of television time milking this story in every possible way.  Not interested in the troops dying in our two wars, not interested with trying to fix the economy that the Republicans fucked up, not talking about the gun crimes happening every day in the inner cities of America, not concerned with actual world events.  No, instead we are turning the tragic story of this death into headline news for months.

People are so sick, I saw a news story this morning where random people were actually traveling to the spot where the child's body was recovered to see it 'for themselves.'  I mean really?  What kind of sick fuck travels across the country to see a place where a child's corpse was recovered?

In conclusion, if we are to pretend that people are innocent until proven guilty, we need to put a stop to trial in the media.  And as usual, the American media need to get back to the 'good old days' of journalism, and reporting actual news rather than creating a media circus and then reporting on themselves.

One Year Review: Chevrolet Camaro 2LT RS

This month is a year since I bought my Chevy Camaro, I've put 15,000 miles on it, and figured it was time for an updated review.  The initial review is here.

I'm pleased to report that the first American car I've ever bought new is still trouble free.  Other than a couple of oil changes, I've not had to do anything to the car.  It starts perfectly every time, including remotely via the keyfob or even via the iPhone or Android OnStar app.  It runs smoothly, it's still fun to drive.  In essence everything I liked about it is still true, and everything that slightly annoyed me is also still true.

The styling that makes the car so unique in this segment does create a few issues of visibility, and it did take a while to learn to park it properly.  With most modern cars you barely have to think about parking, but thanks to the unusual shape of the Camaro you just have to think a bit more and learn to judge the distances.  The trunk is still a bit annoying because of its limited aperture, this can make putting a large suitcase in the trunk slightly more of a chore than it should be, although in truth this is partly due to the fact that the car came with a trunk mat that has ridges on it and the wheels on my suitcases can get caught on those.

But the minor niggles about visibility and the trunk are always outweighed by just how well the car does everything else.  As I've already said, no warranty or maintenance issues so far.  The car is lively and fun yet very well behaved on a run.  Last week I had to drive through some of Louisiana and into Texas.  I reset the MPG monitor and drove for about 250 miles.  I cruised around the speed limit most of the time, and did a few over taking maneuvers with heavy acceleration and 'sport' mode on the gear box.  Despite making no efforts whatsoever to save gas, I was achieving 27 MPG on regular gas.  With lots of city driving, I still am getting an average of 24 MPG.  That's just not bad for a 312 HP car.

As well as being a joy to take on a long run, it gets compliments wherever I go.  People make positive comments all the time, and if I take a passenger or colleague, they talk about getting to ride in my car like it was some kind of special trip; like I had let them sit in a Lamborghini or something!  Considering this car starts at just $22K, it's surprising how many people are so impressed by it.

I count myself among them, and really have nothing but good things to say about it.  I was looking for a sports car experience in a well mannered reliable car, where I could still at a pinch carry a passenger or two in the back seats.  And that's exactly what I got, very sporty performance, a comfortable ride, an attractive car, all for a reasonable price tag.

I've also had the opportunity to drive the latest Mustang in both hard top and convertible forms.  I won't deny this is a fun car too, with better visibility, a lighter and more nimble demeanor, and arguably a more comprehensive stereo system.  But despite the upsides, the Mustang is still so common on the roads, the back lights look stupid when signalling, and I really didn't like the old fashioned automatic box that doesn't have paddle shifters or sports mode, merely the Park, 3, 2, 1 kind of deal which is a bit 1980s.  I missed having a HUD too!

So that's about it for my car, I recommend it highly, and hope to enjoy it for a couple more years.