Month: July 2012

Ah, it's satisfying to boomerang B.S. back into the face of editorial writers who hurl it. A few days ago I criticized the entire editorial board of the Portland Oregonian for calling the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act (OCTA) "farcical" when their extremely minimalist reasons for saying this were just that: farcical. But in that post I failed to address the equally nonsensical accompanying piece by editorial board member Susan Nielsen. Her "Marijuana in Oregon: Pot legalization measure would give kids quite an education" fails my basic standard for a good editorial. Opinions, especially regarding social policies, should be based on…

Political junkie that I am, I've been fascinated by the response to President Obama's statement in a speech that successful Americans owe much of their success to societal factors -- education system, roads and bridges, Internet, etc. -- they didn't build themselves. There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was…

This is a lie: "guns don't kill people; people do." No, that's wrong. Guns kill people. This is a fact. Believe it, unless you're so anti-American, you consider that citizens of the United States are hugely more violent and immoral than people in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and other western industrialized nations. Have a look at two Wikipedia pages: First, List of countries by intentional homicide rate. In 2010, these were the intentional homicide rates per 100,000 population: United States 4.8Canada 1.6United Kingdom 1.2Austalia 1.2Germany .8 Are Americans really three times more murderous than Canadians? Or six times more murderous…

Check out a great article by David Pogue in Scientific American, "The TSA's Dumb Air-Security Rules Are Not Based on Science: Outdated screening rules aren't making for safer skies -- just longer lines." Having flown from Portland to Indiana and back recently, I agree with everything Pogue says. Getting through airport security is deeply irritating, but I wouldn't mind if the screening made scientific, logical, and reasonable sense.  But it doesn't. Here's some examples from Pogue's piece: Laptops have to come out of their bags and lie flat in a plastic tub—but not tablets, phones, Kindles, cameras or portable game…

Two things drove me crazy during today's drive from Salem to pick up my wife at the Portland International Airport: (1) Listening to right-wing talk show host Lars Larson, because his station, KXL, has good traffic alerts, and (2) getting stuck for a long time in a backup on I-205 whose seeming cause says a lot about the need for more mass transportation. This afternoon Larson didn't blather on about the blessedness of cars, and the hellishness of bicycles, light rail, high speed trains, and other alternatives to getting around in automobiles. But I've often heard him do this. Which…

Beware! Republicans want to raise taxes on the middle class. A lot. How? By repealing Obamacare, a.k.a., the Affordable Care Act, thereby making health care much less affordable for Americans. Obamacare will provide tax credits for those who want insurance, but can't afford to buy it on their own. $686 billion worth over 10 years. By contrast, well-to-do people who can afford health insurance, but refuse to buy it, would pay only $54 billion in shared responsbility penalties. If you want to call those penalties a tax, as the Supreme Court did recently, fine. The net result of repealing Obamacare…

Mitt Romney never met a flip that he didn't soon flop. The guy has no spine. He bends to whatever his right-wing Tea Party masters want him to say and do. Not a great leadership quality for a would-be president of the United States. Latest case in point: at first he and his campaign argued that the Affordable Health Care penalty for not having health insurance wasn't a tax, contrary to the Supreme Court majority opinion. Probably this was because the penalty in Massachusetts under "Romneycare," which "Obamacare" essentially copied, also was handled by the tax collection folks, so if…