1. Trashy people. It’s an exaggeration to say I’ve picked up a ton of trash since I started my daily walks, but even so, every day I come home with pockets filled with bottle caps, cellophane wrappers and toting bottles, cans and all manner of trash that someone has thrown out in passing. We’re almost the end of a peninsula, so all this is likely coming from people who “belong” here – property owners or at least residents. Why the fuck they decide they want to trash their own spot is entirely beyond me. Even here, in the woods, and 500 yards from the headwaters of the Bay, people are simply infuriating in their inability to consider anything more distant than the end of their own nose.
2. Thanks Obama. I got a fundraising text message using former President Obama’s photo to plead for cash for the Democratic Party a few days ago. Boy, using the name and likeness of the guy who “led” me through years of pay and hiring freezes to send fund raising texts is really goddamned tone deaf even for the Democratic Party. I might have to vote for you jerkwads, but after the way their guy fucked with my livelihood for half a decade, there isn’t a single circumstance imaginable where I’d give a plug nickel in his name. Just consider my donation the non-existent and miniscule raises I received during the Obama years. The goddamned audacity of some people.
3. Chicken dreams. I had “chicken dreams” again last night. That’s how I’ve come to think of the goofy ass dreams I seem to have about one in three times I have some kind of chicken for dinner. Last night I was rushing back to Tennessee. Somewhere, somehow, I had inherited a dilapidated manor house in the woods and had to restore it. There was a series of oddball characters and charlatans equally set on helping or hindering the cause. I’m not sure where my subconscious was going here, but I do know I woke up grinding the hell out of my teeth, so something in there is percolating.
Tag Archives: democrat
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Logging in. When I boot up my work computer in the morning, I have to log in using my access card and PIN. When I log into Outlook, I use my access card and PIN. One Drive? Access card and PIN. Teams. One more time, log in with access card and PIN. Just to start the day I have to log in using the same credentials four to five times depending what opens on startup. I’m sure there’s some important network security reason this is necessary, but it feels dumb and is 100% a daily irritant.
2. Upgraded masks. For the last two years, I’ve survived plague free by 1) being vaccinated and boosted, 2) generally avoiding people as much as practical and 3) wearing a standard cloth face covering whenever I had to go into a questionable indoor environment. It hasn’t felt like all that big an ask. With the latest variant, word has gone out that it’s advised to switch over to more robust masks – primarily N95 or KN95 style respirators. That’s well and good, but I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of money so far on various upgraded masks and a host of add on extenders, inserts, and other bits to get a better fit. So far, no combination of any of them has given me a mask that doesn’t immediately blow hot air around my nose and cheeks and turning my glasses into a solid wall of fog sitting on the end of my nose. Not falling victim to the Great Plague is important, but if I can’t be both maximally protected and fog-free, I’m going to have to err on the side of being able to see what the hell I’m doing when I need to leave the house.
3. Maryland’s Republican governor has proposed eliminating taxes on retirees as a means to discourage people from spending their working lives here and then immediately decamping for jurisdictions that don’t tax retirement income. For those who will face a potential tax bill from Maryland when they retire, it has to be a consideration. For instance, if you have the longevity to enjoy a 20-year retirement and the state reaches into your pocket to the tune of $4,000 a year, that’s upwards of $80,000 you’re leaving on the table for the convenience of not moving to a more tax friendly state. That’s not the kind of win the Democratic controlled general assembly will want to hand a popular Republican governor. Given Maryland’s historic love of raising taxes on its residents, it’s not the kind of thing they’d want to do if there the governor was a Democrat, either. I’m an unabashed lover of my native state, and I’d love to be able to make a plan to stay here along the shores of the Chesapeake forever, but unless our fearless leaders end up endorsing a plan like this, finances are all too likely to dictate otherwise when the time comes.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Running out of time. Even as I grudgingly accept the fact that it’s necessary to work in exchange for money which I can then exchange for goods and services, I cannot quite shake off the feeling that I’d rather be safely tucked into Fortress Jeff with an endless supply of hot coffee and a mountain of books to read. Mentally preparing myself to go out and rejoin the world is, in a word, traumatic. It’s times like this I can see how one might just get suckered into the fool’s gold appeal of something like a “universal basic income” scheme.
2. January finances. As a professional adult head of household, January has always been a budget buster of a month for me. It’s the month when my biggest bills come due for the year – car insurance, home owner’s association dues, paying off Christmas gifts and travel expenses, the start of the winter heating season, and a few others. No matter how well the year is budgeted, January always comes around like a swift kick in the teeth and throw in one more large dollar item than I was projecting. It’s like the new year giving you a rabbit punch just to remind you that just because it’s a new year doesn’t mean it’s anything more than business as usual.
3. Congress and the president. If you thought having the executive and legislative branches run by the same party put the “fun” in dysfunctional, just wait until you see the magnificent shitshow that Washington devolves into this afternoon when Democrats assume power in the House of Representatives. To all those who scream “false equivalency” or who want to blame one side or the other, I’ll simply say go fuck yourself. A pox on both their houses. No one sitting in our hallowed halls of power is an innocent.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Non-final decisions. Should I ever find myself deified and empowered to pass judgement from high atop Olympus, the cardinal sin that would earn my condemnation would be indecisiveness. If you’ve got the charter to lead, then by God, lead. Make a decision. Do something. Or just keep deferring any kind of actual decision until the diminishing number of hours available in which to act precludes all but one possible course of action.
2. Partisan politics. When Party A goes to the wall screaming about what Party B is doing, I mostly tune it out. I know my mind and no amount of rending of Congressional garments for the cameras will change that. When Party A spends the day screaming about something that Party B is doing and it’s exactly the kind of procedural jackassery Party A did when they were in the majority, well lord, I don’t know why anyone would ever think we could have a functioning legislative branch. I’m sick to death of politicians and people in general who only find something objectionable when it’s done by someone else, but perfectly fine when they do it.
3. Lack of marketable skills. My particular skill set is pretty closely tailored to work on the inside. There just is’t a lot of call for someone who can slam together a 150 slide powerpoint briefing, plan a party for 55 of your closest friends without breaking federal law, or estimate how much ice or water you might need after a hurricane (and know how to order and ship it). I’ve been on the inside so long now I wouldn’t even know how to apply for a gig outside. Of course there’s too much now tied up in retirement and benefits to really consider a wholesale change – especially when the jobs that sound even remotely interesting would lead directly from professional bliss to personal bankruptcy. I’m feeling just a little bit trapped and that makes me fantastically edgy.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Single points of failure. If you can avoid it, the thing you never want to become is a single point of failure in any system. You don’t want to make yourself so indispensable in any position that without you nothing gets done. That’s true for two reasons. The first, is if they can’t function without you, you’ll never get to leave. The second, and more important, if you’re every not around and shit comes off the rails, everyone is going to know it’s your fault. Better to share your knowledge – and share the inevitable blame. As it is, if you’re the one toad in the road that’s holding up my progress and making me look like an idiot, don’t be surprised if I show up at your desk, pull up a chair, and then sit there making your day awkward until things start happening as they should have a week ago.
2. The primaries. In a speech at Georgetown today Senator Sanders laid out “what democratic socialism means to me.” I guess that’s red meat for his base. It would have to be, because sending up signal flares of appeal to the legacy of FDR, of an every expansive government, and ever higher taxes can only send every Republican and libertarian moderate screaming away from him at all possible speed. I can only assume the senator’s words hit my ear the same way an appeal to righteousness of the Regan legacy sounds to my friends on the left. When the preliminary contest demands we run as far to the extreme as possible, it’s hardly a wonder that the opposing sides never again find a middle ground.
3. Temperature control. Big buildings are notoriously difficult to manage when it comes to heating and cooling. Intellectually I understand that. That being said when you spend a week sitting at your desk wearing a coat and hat while the other end of the room has a bunch of fans running, it’s probably time to go ahead think about reworking how things “work.” Unless the plan, of course, it to slowly introduce us to into a cryogenic deep freeze so we can be broken out if the staff in a far distant future needs a superior PowerPoint presentation or has a conference that needs planning.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
Note: Usually this space is reserved every Thursday for three of the week’s petty annoyances. Breaking with that tradition, tonight’s post features the one big annoyance we should all be feeling. Tonight I want to talk directly to the blogiverse about the problem with claiming victory.
I’ve seen a lot of articles, Facebook posts, and general commentary claiming last night’s vote to raise the debt ceiling and restart those parts of the government that remained shuttered as a victory. Some say it was a victory for Democrats, others the Tea Party, others hail it as a personal victory for Senator Cruz. They’re all wrong. Last night was no victory. All sides who claim victory are celebrating over ashes – the ashes of dysfunctional Congress, the ashes of a more than $17 trillion national debt, and the ashes of our apparent inability of the great American people to govern themselves at all, let alone do it effectively. Last night’s vote was a failure of our politics, not a victory.
Eventually there will be an unavoidable reckoning that government can no longer afford to do all things for all people. The sooner we make the hard decisions about entitlements, government overreach, and a bloated defense budget, the sooner we’ll have a real victory… but that will never be achieved by men and women who are satisfied holding their breath, stomping their feet, and congratulating themselves when they simply manage to turn the lights back on and kick the hard decisions down the road for another few months.
There must be a grand discussion of national priorities – and nothing can be held off the table. The sacred cows of the left and right must be equally available for slaughter. We, as a country, need to evaluate the role we want government to play in our lives and in the world and then budget and spend accordingly. In his message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln states, “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Lincoln didn’t save the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Tea Party, or the Toga Party. He saved the country. That’s serious work for serious people, not the work of the raving ideologs on the lunatic extremes. Still, it’s work that needs done. It’s work we must demand of those who claim to represent the people. It’s work that every American voice should cry out for today… that is unless we’re collectively satisfied with increasingly hollow victories and the slow descent of the nation to the status of a second tier power.
Two days…
I’m back at work. Have been since last week. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped paying attention to the grand game of “How Many Asshats can We Fit in One Building?” that our political “leaders” are playing on the Hill. As bad as it is that Republicans and Democrats seem physiological incapable of talking to one another, that’s nothing compared to the truly remarkable feat of House Republicans apparently not even being able to talk amongst themselves. That takes political incompetence to a whole new level. Impressive work, Congressmen.
From my reading of the tea leaves, we’re inside the 48 hour mark now. Either these jackasses will get around to doing the hard work of governing or they’ll crank the throttle wide open and let it all fly off the rails. I’m a reasonable close watcher of politics and a betting man by nature, but even if I wasn’t owed back pay and had a fist full of cash, I wouldn’t lay a bet on which way this shitshow is going to break.
Universal wisdom is that careening headlong into the debt ceiling would be bad. The fun part? Absolutely no one knows how bad it might be. My reading pegs it somewhere along the scale of Accidental Nuclear Detonation in Times Square Bad. Even if it’s less bad than that, it’s going to be bad. Defaulting on the sovereign debt and/or other financial obligations of the United States is simply unimaginable from any sane, reasonable perspective. To do it over an issue of personal pride or to make cheap political points is damned near treasonous.
We have 536 “leaders” in Washington and there’s apparently not one damned statesman in the bunch.
Slow News Day or: Here Come the Democrats…
I’m a registered Republican and have been for most of my adult life. By the same token, I’m a Maryland Republican, which loosely translates into belonging to a fairly moderate strain of the party. I suspect that’s largely because the Democrats who perennially control the state house and governor’s mansion tend to subscribe to the west coast definition of what it means to be liberal. The result is a Republican party that tends, largely, to be pretty middle of the road when compared to our red state brethren in someplace like Wyoming. Sure, we have plenty of our own wackadoodle right wing nut jobs too, but they don’t tend to grow quite as thickly around here as they do in other parts of the country.
Usually I don’t think too much about the labels of politics, if only because I don’t find myself fitting nicely into any of them… but with tonight’s kickoff of the Democratic National Convention, I find myself glaring at the television and trying not to give in to the temptation to yell in its direction. To be honest, nominating conventions aren’t for guys like me. We made up our minds back during the primaries. Conventions are about rallying the faithful ahead of the long, hard slog to November. Well, that and maybe, just maybe reaching one or two percent of the undecided voters out there occupying the middle ground.
The only thing I’m going to gain from watching this convention is (re)learning that in a head-to-head comparison, I disagree more with the Democrats than I disagree with the Republicans. I should probably go ahead and switch over to a rerun of Big Bang Theory so my blood pressure doesn’t shoot into the stratosphere at some point this evening.
Default and disfunction…
Watching the nightly news or reading the newspaper headlines is something of a lesson in dysfunction. If the two major political parties that have run the country for the last 100 odd years can’t come to grips with the fact that the thought of the US Government defaulting on its debt should be unthinkable, perhaps it’s time to consider the value of having either of those parties around. The men who founded this republic literally risked their lives just by signing a document proclaiming themselves free from Great Britain. Today’s politicians, both Republican and Democrat, are so entrenched in ideology and in playing to their base that they seem willing to let the ship of state sink with all flags flying and their hands around each other’s throat. So much for heroics. So much for for their obligation to the republic they were elected to serve.
I’m not a mathematician, but the formula seems obvious. For the staggering debt this country labors under to come down, spending must decrease and revenue must increase. Yes, some social programs will go away and that will hurt some people. Yes, some taxes will go up and that will hurt some people also. It’s going to be painful for many of us to adjust to a world more austere than then one we think we’re entitled to. It was painful for our grandparents, too, when they went though the “economic adjustment” of the Great Depression, but they emerged from it and worse to be recognized as our greatest generation.
Where are our great leaders today? Where’s our FDR with his Hundred Days? Where’s this generation’s Reagan standing toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union? Where’s our Kennedy calling on men to reach the moon? Where’s our Nixon opening China? Maybe such men don’t even exist anymore. Today’s politicians aren’t fit to carry the water for those giants of the 20th century and shouldn’t be in the same history books with the leaders of our distant past like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
This current crisis doesn’t have to end in catastrophe, but only if the men and women we’ve elected start behaving more like statesmen and less like common street thugs. How optimistic are you?
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