Paul Ryan explains Romney’s tax plan in Scranton Pennsylvania
Ok. Just for fun. But if you enjoy it, please share it.
Strange referral
I really don’t think I want any more visitors to my blog from infectionvaginalyeast.blogspot.com.
Not joking!
I’m just feeling a bit reflective, and I feel the need to express my feelings about the last few months of my career. I’m going to do it in an analogy.
Let’s say you have a couple of friends – Friend A, we’ll call him T-Dawg, comes up to you and says, “It would be really, really great if you had an X-box so we could play games. Here’s $500.”
At that point, the logical thing to do is to go out and buy and X-box, right?
Friend B, our good friend Frank, overhears the conversation and says, “Hey. I have a old Wii you can have.” Ok. That’s interesting, but since it’s T-Dawg’s money, and Frank’s Wii, you have two choices. You can spend the money on a brand new X-box, or you can spend the money trying to make the Wii play X-box games. Still a no-brainer, right? You go out and buy the X-box.
So. Here’s how this relates to my career. 6 month ago, there was a conversation at my place of employment where there was a decision made to try and make a new, off-the-shelf software system perform the same as the old software system. I thought at the time that the decision was to try to make the Wii play X-box games. In reality, the past 6 months has been much, much worse. We went out and bought the X-box. And now we’re trying to make the X-box play old Wii games. Yep. We’ve spent the money TWICE.
And somehow, people are surprised that they aren’t getting good results.
Is it just me?
Not intended to be mean. I was just struck by the resemblance.
Kaley Cuoco from Big Bang Theory
Miss Piggy
Does anyone agree?
What dreams may come …
Here’s a dream I had this morning.
There were kids out playing in the snow. They were strapped into some contraption and getting towed around the snowy streets. (It was kind of like a ski lift on wheels.)
I was walking down the street as they were coming towards me, and I couldn’t resist picking up a snowball. I aimed at the side of the contraption so my snowball would make a loud ‘bang’, but I underthrew. The snowball hit the foot of a little girl, all bundled up in her pink snowsuit with a little pink hat with a white poof on the tip. When she was hit, she looked down at her feet and then looked up at the sky and yelled, “OW, JESUS! Why are you so mean, old Jesus?!”
I literally woke myself up laughing.
The truth about fiscal responsibility
I read a ton about politics. It fascinates me. And of course 2/3rds of all political stories right now are about how America is mad as hell at all the government spending. I agree. I’m totally on board with fiscal responsibility. What I don’t get is why people think that voting Republican is a means to return to fiscal responsibility. Here are the facts. Pure, unadulterated, real, honest-to-goodness FACTS.
The source is
I would have preferred to use a federal government site, but the only one I could find (www.cbo.gov) only had data back to 1968. The data from this website matches the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) data for the overlap, so I went ahead and used it without further verification. I added in the column for President and Party. The ‘President’ column is the president in office when the budget was signed. (E.G. Because Reagan was in office in Oct/Nov 1988 when the budget was signed for FY 1989 … even though Bush was in office for all but 20 or so days of FY1989, Reagan gets credit for FY 1989.)
Here are a couple of interesting things to note. The last Republican president to sign a balanced budget was Eisenhower (1960). Clinton and Johnson both signed balanced budgets. The average of ‘deficit as a % of GDP’ (average of % is not exactly a valid measure, but work with me here) for Democratic presidents is 1.0%. For Republican presidents, it’s 2.6%. If you prefer the average size of the deficit then Democratic presidents (only counting years that were ACTUALLY deficit years so it doesn’t advantage Democratic presidents for budget surpluses) is $82.4 billion. For Republican Presidents, the average size of the deficit is $173.9 billion.
Here’s another interesting fact. Here is the size of the deficit reduction over the President’s term. (Taking the size of the deficit inherited from the previous president to the last budget signed. E.G. Bush Jr inherited a $128 billion surplus from Clinton and left office with a $1.4 TRILLION deficit – totalling $1.5 trillion deficit increase.)
Again. The last Republican president to reduce the DEFICIT (not the debt … rather, the SIZE of the deficit) was Eisenhower. In the past 50 years, ALL Republican presidents have ACCELERATED deficit spending. On the other hand, the ONLY Democratic president to increase the size of the deficit (counting Kennedy/Johnson as one administration for obvious reasons) was Carter … who increased the deficit by less than 1/2 the increase of his predecessor and by 1/4 of the increase of following president.
There are holes in what I’m presenting here, obviously. I may bring this up again when I can nail down a couple more things (like party control of Congress.) But as of now, it’s pretty clear that Democratic presidents have a MUCH better track record of fiscal responsibility than Republican presidents. It’s not even close. I certainly won’t trust another Republican presidential candidate that talks about ‘fiscal responsibility’.
What I am NOT an expert in
My dad had a bypass a month ago. Because of the bypass, he’s not allowed to drive (or ride in the front seat), lift anything over his head, or do a bunch of other things. He’s also attending rehab at a hospital 90 miles from my grandpa’s farm. So, I (temporarily) moved out to South Dakota to help out. I’m the chauffeur.
So three times a week, I wake up at 5:45, set the cruise control and drive to Pierre South Dakota. (Seriously, I think Pierre is probably the smallest of all state capitals.) We get to the hospital, go up to the 4th floor, and my dad gets wired up so he can be monitored while he walks on a treadmill (and a couple other machines) for 30 minutes. I sit down, open a book, and try to not get caught checking out this adorably cute girl that works on the other side of the rehab center. She’s about 5’5″, wears her blond hair pulled back in a french braid, and smiles a lot at the people she works with.
Yesterday, the cute girl walked into the hospital carrying a grocery bag filled with 2 liter bottles of soda at the same time my dad and I walked in. I don’t usually go out of my way to meet people, but when a gift-wrapped opportunity comes along, I’m not terribly shy about siezing it. So I offered to carry the bag upstairs for her.
Now, if anyone STILL wonders why I’m single after all this time, here’s the reason why. My best opening line of the year is “Can I carry your books?” Yeah. I’m still flirting on a 6th grade level.
How do they remember?
So, funny conversation with my 95 year old grandpa who I’ve introduced myself to about 18 times in the past 4 days …
The conversation started when he asked, “Do you think that birds have enough memory in their heads to remember where to go every spring?”
How does that work?
My 95 year old grandpa just asked me how telephones work. “How does it work that you can talk to someone all the way over there in Utah?” he asked. I REALLY didn’t want to go into cellular towers and relay signals and satellites, so I told him, “There are wires all the way there.” He’s skeptical. I think he thinks I’m lying.
Totally not cool
I just got to my gpa’s farm in South Dakota. He’s 95 now, in pretty good health, but has some memory problems. Whenever I come to visit, I expect to introduce myself just about every day. But it puts my gpa on his best behavior since I’m ‘company’. This is my 6th trip out here since I started my nomadic lifestyle nearly 2 years ago, so I’m used to the routine. Today, when I walked in the front door, I asked my gpa if he remembered me. He said no, so I said “I’m Randy. I’m Florence’s son.” He said, “I thought you were going to say you were Mike.” Not cool. Mike is my older brother who lives in Shanghai China. He’s been here exactly one time in the past 2 years (for my gma’s funeral). How does HE rate a memory?
At least I’m here before mosquito season this time. The BIG suckers here scare me.
Randy is a nomad 