clubsodaandsalt's posterous

2012 Starts NOW

I can't believe that Obama wasn't tweaking Mitt Romney this morning when he told NBC that his health care plan is an awful lot like Mitt's:

When you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican Governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts.

Romney has been scrambling to distance himself from Obama's plan and not get stuck on the wrong side of a litmus test issue for conservatives, so Obama's helpful reminder that the two plans are similar is like throwing a drowning man an anchor.

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Trying again. That Obama is such a scamp.

The Baseball Card Bubble -- Swallower Of Childhood Dreams

Mar 30, 2010 | 27 posts in the last 24 hours

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The Baseball Card Bubble -- Swallower Of Childhood Dreams
Phil Villarreal
March 29, 2010 8:30 AM

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Testing our this posterous - Google Reader connection. Also, I had a great basketball card collection as a kid and figured it would be a downpayment someday. I still have the cards.

Blind to irony

Just saw on TPM that, like any decent political movement, the teabaggers now have their own documentary. Congrats, guys! Oh, but, while you attend the premiere in DC, you might want to have a big think about what made the venue possible:


At the time it was built, the Ronald Reagan Building was the most expensive federal building ever constructed, at a cost of $768 million. As a federal office building, it is second in size only to the Pentagon. Its naming was controversial, because Ronald Reagan was considered to be a champion of small government and the building was seen by some as an example of "big government" and government waste.

Myth bunked

I happened across this article on travel myths while looking at flights for a trip to Europe (well targeted, Bing). Most of the myths the author cites are, in fact, myth, and the debunking is well executed. However, the myth that serves as the jumping off point was irritating:


I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Two travel professionals, my dinner companions in Coventry, England, had just told me that they hadn’t been to London in years. Just a two-hour train ride away from shopping, theater and royal pageantry, and they didn’t go every other weekend?
 
“It’s cheaper and easier to get on a plane to Spain out of Birmingham, to tell the truth,” one explained. “Way cheaper, really. So, London versus Costa Brava? Two hundred pounds versus 50? Rain, sun?” He held his hands up in the universal shifting-weight scale.
 
That was my first clue that the famous axiom about getting around Europe — that trains are best — is a fable from simpler times. I later verified the truth of this on a three-week family trek around Scandinavia. We rented a car, spent less (far less) than it would have cost us on trains, and had infinitely more flexibility to wander up and down little country lanes.
 
When I did a little more research, I confirmed that my friends were right after all. The advent of low-cost airlines has made air travel cheaper, quicker and more convenient than rail. For instance, a flight on Easyjet from London to Paris in September costs $108; passage through the Chunnel on the Eurostar is $195.

So many problems with this. First off, he was talking to people in the UK, which almost certainly has the worst trains in Western Europe.  When people think of excellent european trains, they think of the TGV or Deustche Bahn, *not* First Great Western and the other Tory-created disasters.

Second, the question of whether to fly or train is largely driven by the city pairs in question, as well as how much you value your time and comfort. The author brings up a London - Paris journey, and yes, Easyjet is cheaper, but you will have to get to Luton, deal with the disaster that airports have become, and then arrive half an hour outside of Paris. The more expensive Eurostar will take you from city center to city center with much less hassle. The author is confusing cheaper with better - you can only equate the two when the same service is being provided.

Sorry, I just had to stick up for the trains of Europe, especially as we try to get some SUPERTRAINS built stateside.

At least someone's asking

A follow up to yesterday's complaint:

Attorney General John Jeremie is expected to advise Government on whether Chaguanas MP Jack Warner can pay the wages of 54 workers of the Chaguanas Borough Corporation. This was revealed yesterday by Local Government Minister Hazel Manning. Speaking to reporters at Claxton Bay during a tour of flood affected areas yesterday, Manning said a big issue had arisen following Warner’s decision to hand over a cheque for $309,000 to pay the workers.

“We have just got information that a private citizen has paid money towards the payment of salaries and we have gone to the attorney general to get guidance on this. “That is not the norm. We are concerned that this region has obtained over $300,000 from a private citizen to pay wages. That money is not in our books and we have now gone to the attorney general to get advice on what should be done. The attorney general will be able to guide us,” Manning said.
She said it was in May that the Government found out the corporation, under the former mayor, had hired more staff.

Good.

Our unquestioning media

Articles like this make me crazy. They couldn't find a single person to question the ethics of a borough accepting a massive donation from a private citizen? What if Jack Warner needs approval from Chaguanas to build something in the future? Are we to expect that he will be treated just like anyone else? Isn't the fact that he obviously won't a problem?

These are questions that our journalists should be asking, but instead they are meeting with Manning to learn how to sit down and shut up.

Empathy fail

Whenever I hear Americans whinging about the rare occasions on which they need to get a visa to go somewhere, I just roll my eyes. They usually think they are going to impress me with their tale of woe dealing with Brazilian bureaucrats, and I end up brusting their bubble by explaining to them that whatever they've told me is basically the same thing the US does to visitors, if they're lucky. Anyway, that came to mind when reading this article about a Trinidadian Muslim organization having a representative from the US embassy at their event yesterday. Specifically, the representative, Len Kusnitz, is told this (all too common) story by an attendee:

One of those who complained of victimisation to Kusnitz yesterday was Farouk Khan, public relations officer of the Trinidad Muslim League (TML).

Khan, a former primary school principal, told Kusnitz that during one of his annual vacation visits to the US in December last year, he and his family, including his 83-year-old mother, were interrogated by US security officials for hours, eventually had their visas revoked, and then, were sent back home.

"It is not my intention to make you uncomfortable; I'm not even begging for my visa back, but I just need to have my good name cleared," Khan said.

The standard response here is clearly, "How unfortunate! I'm sorry about that. I'll do an investigation into what happened," at which point Mr. Kusnitz would have been free to return to sampling the sweets on offer and never thinking about the story ever again. But no. Instead:

However, Kusnitz said he, too, was a victim of his country's harsh security measures and assured that it was simply not a case of discrimination against Muslims.

"Since 9/11, (the World Trade Centre bombings on September 11, 2001) the US has become more security conscious, I myself have been pulled into secondary (security checkpoint), along with my 14-year-old son, and had our shoes searched," Kusnitz said.

 That's right. This man - a professional diplomat, mind you - just compared deportation with having to remove his shoes. I'm not sure what Mr. Khan's reaction was, but I assume that punching the US official in the face would have made it into the story, so I admire his restraint.

Guys, there's a time to empathize, and a time to sympathize. Please try to tell the difference in the future. At least around me.


Habitual line-stepping

Even in a place like Trinidad where the population has got to be hardened by a constant stream of violent crime, you occassionally get an incident so heinous or brazen or shocking that it feels like a line has been crossed. I'm thinking of incidents like the Westmoorings Scott/Sa Gomes murders in the 90s (showed that rich white people were also vulnerable), or the Akiel Chambers incident (our children are under threat), or the Selwyn Richardson assasination earlier in the decade (and former AGs better watch out too). They're like little signposts on the road to anarchy. I'm going to say that with the storming of a factory in Diego Martin (owned by a minister's husband!) yesterday, we just passed another:
 
THREE young men who opted to do a "day's work" at a plastics factory near their homes in Diego Martin "crossed a gangland border", for which they were hunted down yesterday and killed by two gunmen reportedly dressed in tactical police wear.
 
I don't really have much more to say, except that I hope that someday I can read the papers back home and not get depressed.