Free Fry Mumia

Yeah, that's still going on. The Pennsylvania court system can't decide whether or not cop-killing is something they want to punish people for. The t-shirt is on sale for $12.95, probably in response to the US Supreme Court sending Mumia's murderous ass back to prison.

ER: Delight to disappointment in under 10 minutes

For the past few weeks, I've been playing old episodes of ER in the background while I'm working on my laptop. This is a long shot, but stop reading now if any discussion entails a spoiler. I just finished season 3, and among all the plotlines, one stands out. Dr. Mark Greene gets the hell beaten out of him by an unknown attacker (presumably over something that happened to one of his patients) in episode 20. This, understandably, changes him for the worse. He's angry at the world, and he's scared of everyone who doesn't look fresh off the set of "Leave it to Beaver". In the season finale (episode 22), Dr. Greene gets confronted by some thugs on his train. Just when it looks like he's going to get an encore performance of his assault, he whips out a 9mm and forces them back onto their train.

I was SO PROUD of the guy. Through the entire series, Greene's character has been the embodiment of a testosterone deficiency. Now, here he is, exercising his right to keep and bear arms and showing how concealed carry makes our communities safer. I was just beaming.

Of course, the next thing I know, Greene is in tears and throws his pistol into a river. What could have been a great moment in television turned into something that reduced me to crackers and ginger ale for the afternoon. Unbelievable.

For comparative purposes, take a look at this gem.

It always begins on a tax on the wealthy...

The income tax as we now know it began as something that less than 10% of the population would pay, and the phone tax now paid by almost all Americans began as an excise tax on the wealthy to help finance the Spanish-American War.

Shame on Us

Sean Penn used his Oscar to tell Californians how horrible they are for voting to ban gay marriage.

"I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way."

Since Penn had a limited amount of time to lecture Americans on how we should behave, it's safe to assume we should also be ashamed of our desires to:

• keep more of our earnings instead of paying it in taxes
• make public employees work harder
• protect unborn children
• own firearms
• operate outside of crazy environmental regulations
• dispute the lies about global warming

Fortunately, we have veto power in this edicts by choosing not to spend money on Penn's material.

More Obama Hypocrisy

I heard this quote from President Obama on the radio this afternoon:

"Because of what we did together, there will now be shovels in the ground, cranes in the air, and workers rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, and repairing our faulty levees and dams."

If things were so terrible, why didn't President Obama order these crumbling bridges closed or those downstream of faulty dams evacuated in the first month of his administration?

Memories of an Unbeknownst Indoctrination

It's funny how memories of long-past events can be triggered by things in our daily lives. Even more amusing is how you can sometimes figure out things you hadn't noticed at the time, except for when you realize it involves your parents getting intimate. Those memories should just forgo reprocessing altogether.

Anyways, when I was 10, my fifth grade class attended something called Nature's Classroom. It was a weeklong program that involved the two classes of about 50 students staying at a camp along with our teachers and several program staffers. Every day we had programs that ranged from learning how to track animals to studying the food chain to building geodomes. I imagine most of the people involved were anywhere from fervent to rabid environmentalists, as some (but not all) of the discussions had a political twinge to them (akin to that of "Captain Planet"), but as a whole, it was a good experience.

Today, I suddenly remembered one program in particular. I don't remember the name of the "game", but one evening after dinner, four or five stations were set up in the main building. Each station was manned by a staffer or teacher, and we were told that we had to visit each of them in order to 'survive'. I don't remember all the details, but I know for a fact that one was a "food bank" and another was some kind of unemployment office. In short, the game involved us standing in line for up to fifteen minutes, and being told by different stations that we had to go get cards or signatures or something from another station before we could get what we'd been looking for. At the time, we thought it was an exercise to make us feel bad for poor people. But looking back at the context, it seems there was a more specific agenda being communicated.

This was October 1994, and as the debate on welfare reform raged, my fifth grade public school class was being indoctrinated in the hardship that excessive bureaucracy was putting on those who wanted to live off the public dole. For the game to have been more realistic, the adult manning each table should have received a bonus for every person they signed up for welfare, and half the class should have been kept outside digging holes or some other kind of hard work while the welfare recipients got to sit inside in the warmth and wait for their numbers to be called. It makes me cringe to think about what nonsense about global warming students are probably being fed today.

A quick footnote: fifteen years later, Obama's stimulus stealthly repeals the reforms that voters overwhelmingly supported in the 1994 elections one week later.

Never Forget

Roger Toussaint has been on the radio talking about how his Transit Workers Union has been so faithful to the people of New York.

Except, of course, for that illegal strike that cost the private sector hundreds of millions of dollars.