Burn Baby Burn

A house fire in Tennessee has recently lit up the web with left versus right ideological arguments about personal responsibility and other such stupidity that seems to be on the rise in America.

I'm not sure I even have the energy to throw my opinion into the ring here.  But basically, some dude lives in a county where there is a $75 fee for fire protection services.  The aforementioned dude did not pay this fee, and unfortunately for him, his house caught fire.  Fire crews rushed to the scene in response to the 911 call, and once they arrived, they stood there, and watched the house burn to the ground.  The only time they turned on their hoses was to protect the neighbors home, because that guy had paid his fire protection fee.

The hose Nazis were not even moved into action when the unfortunate homeowner offered to pay any fees or costs associated with putting out the fire.  They simply did nothing, despite having the equipment, tools and ability to stop the fire.  They were only following orders.

Right wingers have jumped on this as an example of how personal responsibility is king, and those who do not take responsibility deserve everything they get.  The left has described the issue with the obvious human element to this.  The fact that the system is okay with this level of indifference to human suffering and personal tragedy is pretty sick in my opinion.

I see it as the encapsulation of what's wrong with America today.  The right wing increasingly seem completely ambivalent to the human costs of any argument.  Which is especially ironic when so many of them also profess to be Christian.  Libertarians and Tea Baggers bleat on about small government and every man for himself, until it comes to a hot button issue like abortion, when they appear to want the government at national, state, and local level to intervene in personal liberty and a woman's right to choose.

The issue, at it's core, is a departure from the state of mind, 'do unto others...'  We are in danger of becoming a petty and small society, where everyone cares only about themselves, and no one looks at the bigger picture.  We dump trillions of dollars into our military, while our roads fall apart, our schools produce ignorant and uneducated people, and allow stupid small minded people to set up a system whereby a person can lose their home to a fire, because they didn't pay for the fire service to come.

And let's not even get on the subject of health care.  As long as people are relatively healthy, and can afford their health insurance, they seem to have little stomach for making the tough decisions necessary to rebuild our failing health care system so that every American can enjoy quality service, and not have to lose their home and everything they have if they get sick.

My big question to America is this.  If we are going to campaign for prayer in schools, and have God in the Pledge and on our money, shouldn't we at least begin with REAL valuing of other human beings, and show actual compassion and love for our fellow human beings?  Isn't that essentially the message of Christ?  Or are we just becoming a nation of selfish hypocrites?

Justice For Gaile Owens

I'm glad I didn't live in America in the 1980's because it seems that back then there was no such thing as justice, a mistake we run the risk of failing to learn from.

The picture is that of Gaile Owens, a woman that the state of Tennessee are getting ready to execute, after 25 years in prison. In the 80's while the rest of us were watching The A-Team and Knight Rider, this woman was being sexually and physically abused by her husband.

Eventually in a bid to protect her children she discussed a hit on her husband. This eventually led to a person killing her husband. She was arrested in 1985 and decided to plead guilty in a deal that would lead to her spending life in prison, something she did to protect her children from hearing the evidence of sexual and physical abuse she had suffered.

But after a series of legal blunders she ended up sentenced to death without ever being able to speak in her own defense, or have the jury know of the physical and sexual abuse.

Fast forward to A-Team The Movie and a failed attempt to rekindle Knight Rider (with a Mustang, seriously?), we have the present day. All her appeals have fallen on deaf ears. Despite the absurdity and horrific miscarriage of justice, no one in the legal / political system can be bothered to put a stop to a potential execution date that is looming. That's right, this battered woman is about to be killed (the first woman killed in Tennessee since the 1800's) by the state for asking someone to kill her abusive husband.

Never mind that she didn't pull the trigger. Never mind that she was trying to protect her children. Never mind that she has already spent 25 years in prison. Time to murder her? Are we really still no better than this?

I say that 25 years is enough. That's a stout sentence and far more than so many other criminals get; even the ones that actually kill people. David Phillips, just reported to jail for his role in killing a high school girl in a 2005 traffic accident, where he was racing on city streets with a youth in a Mustang. The 100 MPH crash left one 17-year-old girl dead and another severely burned. But David and the other driver got just 6 years in jail, which in the real world will probably be less than three years.

In the case of Gaile Owens, she was trying to get out of a horrific situation that was endangering her life and the lives of her children, and she actually serves 25 years, with the likelihood of execution hanging over her.

If you care about justice at all, please inform yourself further about this case, and let's see if we can get the politicians to listen for once, and reverse this horrible miscarriage of justice.

Visit her official supporters web site here, and learn how you can write the State Governor.

Tennessee Whine

The other day I made a trip to the Package Store where I buy my wine. For some reason there is some fucked up law that requires a liquor store in Tennessee to refer to itself as a package store, in some obviously archaic nonsense that should have been wiped off the books years ago.

As I approached the store, I noticed that there was a new sign in the window. This sign read as followed:

Dear Consumers,

We have been fucking you in the ass now for many years. We offer shoddy service, a crappy looking store, and the inconvenience of our location. But thankfully, state law gives you no choice but to buy your wine here, so fuck you. Oh and by the way, we are going to ass rape you on the price too, because we are a monopoly.

Have a good day, bitch.

Okay so I'm lying about the sign. It didn't really say that. But the sign was there and it did ask me to go to some web site and sign up to oppose Tennessee changing the law on liquor sales.

Effectively they were asking me as the consumer to advocate for their shitty over-priced store, and ask our politicians to block legislation that would allow my local supermarket to sell wine as they do in civilized parts of the world.

Now Tennessee has some of the stupidest and most draconian liquor laws in the country. They require waitresses and waiters who make minimum wage to get certified to sell alcohol. They have weird laws that allow the government to punish a minimum wage worker who accidentally sell alcohol to a minor. And they also have all kinds of stupid consumer laws:

• You may buy beer in a gas station or grocery store.
• You may not buy beer in certain counties before noon on Sunday.
• You may buy beer in a grocery store, but not wine.
• You may buy ale in a liquor store, but not beer or lager.
• You may buy Everclear that contains 95% alcohol, but you cannot buy coke to dilute it or a plastic cup to drink it out of in a liquor store.
• You can buy margarita mix in a grocery store, and mix it with the finest tequila purchased in a liquor store. However, if you buy margarita mix in a package store it will be tainted with the legally required 1% alcohol content.
• You can buy a corkscrew in a grocery store, but not in a liquor store.

The bottom line here is that this is 2009. 33 states (and D.C.) already offer wine in grocery stores, and no evidence has been produced that link this to underage drinking or drunk driving.

I am sick of having to go to a special store to buy my wine. I don't want to shuffle out of a 'package store' with some dirty brown bag containing my purchases.

I'd like to be able to go to a grocery store 24/7 and pick up some wine, some cheese, perhaps a little pasta. But instead the state requires me to plan ahead and purchase my wine at a time of their choosing in a special store that provides over priced products due to a monopoly stranglehold they have.

Tennessee voted Republican in the last election. A clear vote for small government, less regulation on businesses, less red tape, a free market. And all the other bullshit they might lead you to believe.

In any case, a vote of Republican is clearly a vote for less regulation and less government interference.

If Walmart wishes to sell wine in their stores, there is no reason why they should not. They do in 33 other states without a problem. They already sell other alcoholic beverages such as beer. So there is simply no good argument for maintaining these out dated laws.

Eight states that border Tennessee have already given up this archaic vestige of prohibition. Time to take another step towards being a 21st century state. Just for once, let's not be the idiot in the room who has to wait until everyone else is doing something before finally figuring it out.

For more information click here.