Tea Party vs. al-Qaeda

Q: What is the difference between the Tea Party and al-Qaeda?

A: One hates the United States government with a white-hot, purple passion .... and the other is a group of international terrorists.

Carole Keeton Strayhorn gets to say “I told you so”

Interesting story in the Express-News over the weekend.
It turns out that this $20-plus billion deficit that the state is facing should not have been a surprise to anyone, least of all Gov. Perry and Lt. Gov. Dewhurst. The two individuals most responsible for our current predicament were warned that this would happen more than five years ago. Yet they did nothing.

Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn didn’t win friends five years ago when she warned Gov. Rick Perry and state lawmakers they were writing the “largest hot check in Texas history” during a tax overhaul that resulted in lower property taxes and a revised business tax.
Strayhorn told them their plan would fall about $23 billion short over a five-year period. Five years later, state leaders are staring at an estimated budget shortfall of nearly $27 billion.

Yeah, Perry and Dewhurst didn’t care because they knew that cutting taxes would make them popular, consequences be damned. But now that the time has come to pay the piper, Perry is pretending like it’s no big deal and all we have to do is trim a little here and cut a little there.
At least Dewhurst is acknowledging the problem while trying to blame it all on Bush....

At the time, Dewhurst called huge budget shortfall projections “hypothetical and speculative.”
He now says he knew that revenue projections from the revised business franchise tax “were inflated” and told Senate members in closed door caucus meetings at the time that the business tax would not perform as advertised “and that we were going to create a structural funding deficit in state government.” But Dewhurst said he also believed at the time that “we would grow out of it by now.”
He blames the nation’s economic collapse in 2008 for contributing to the state’s projected budget shortfall today.

Strayhorn acknowledges that Bush is partly blame, but shouldn’t get all the blame:

The nation’s economic collapse three years ago contributed to some of the state’s revenue troubles, but the biggest problem is that the new business tax did not generate enough money to pay for the school property tax cut, Strayhorn said Friday.

Don’t blame us!

That’s the message we are getting today from leaders of the Tea Party movement in the wake of the mass shooting in Arizona over the weekend that killed six people and critically injured a Democratic Congresswoman.
After a particularly vicious and nasty (and largely successful) campaign to defeat Democratic lawmakers across the country in which violent imagery and slogans were constantly referenced, should we be surprised that a deranged individual decided to take matters into his own hands and carry out a “Second Amendment remedy” against one of the Tea Party’s top targets who barely managed to hang onto her seat?
Certainly it is unfair to spread blame to everyone involved with or connected to the Tea Party movement. Most, I’m sure, are gentle, peace-loving folks who wouldn’t harm a fly, much less shoot a moose. And only a handful would be radical enough to purchase and wear a provocative t-shirt like the one shown above.
But is it too much to ask that this tragedy at least serve as a wake up call to those out there who have been far too willing to tolerate hateful, violent, anti-government rhetoric in order to advance their political causes? Can we quit referring to the federal government as “the enemy”? Can we quit with the paranoid, alarmist crys that THEY are “out to take your guns”? Can we quit scaring people with hyped-up fantasies about “death panels” and “terror babies”?
Sadly, I am afraid that it IS too much to ask. The initial response from folks on the right has been angry denunciations of those on the left for having even dared suggest such a thing. Their immediate response was to deny any connection whatsoever with the deranged shooter and claim he is some kind of left-wing anarchist who was never influenced by their campaign against the congresswoman.
And, I am afraid, that there will be continued resistance to restoring common sense gun laws such as the Clinton-era Assault Weapons Ban that Republicans allowed to lapse in 2004. If that law had been in place, the deranged gunman would not have been able to buy a brand new extended clip with 30-rounds for his Glock 19 which he purchased without any need for a license or a waiting period or a background check.
What exactly does anyone outside of the military or law enforcement need with an extended clip for a Glock 19 other than to make it easier to commit mass murder?
But getting common sense gun laws through this current Congress is now likely impossible since voters, in their inestimable wisdom, decided to reward the Tea Partiers big victories in the last election and hand control of the House back to the Republicans again.

My basketball obsession

I’ve always considered myself to be a big fan of baseball above any and all other sports. Ever since I was a kid starting out in Little League, collecting baseball cards and rooting for my beloved Cincinnatti Reds of the Big Red Machine era, my enthusiasm for baseball has been very high. But recently it has become apparent to me that while my love of baseball has not abated, it has been eclipsed by a fresh new enthusiasm for basketball.
Perhaps it is due to living for the past 10 years in the largest U.S. city without a Major League Baseball team (or NFL team, for that matter). But I have simply been completely won over by the local pro basketball team, the San Antonio Spurs. I find myself following the Spurs much closer than I have followed any baseball team at least since the 1998-03 Yankees, if not the ‘73-’76 Reds.
I was happy when first the Houston Astros and then the Texas Rangers made their first ever appearances in a World Series these past few years. But I had not really followed either team that closely and couldn’t name most of the players beyond the few standout stars. With the Spurs, however, I find myself following every player, game-by-game, down to the lowliest bench warmer.
Now I’m keenly interested in any news of personnel shifts or trade talks. I look forward to the sports news after the weather and get irritated when the local station leads with news about the Cowboys before getting to the Spurs. I will sometimes read the sports section in the local paper before I turn to the editorial page or even the comics (Gasp!). I try to watch every game I can and record those I can’t for later viewing. I even find myself following all of the other NBA teams and not just the Spurs, rooting for certain teams to lose so that the Spurs will advance further.
It’s clear that I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Spurs Fever, though I’m still not as bad as some. I don’t own a Spurs jersey (though I do have a couple of t-shirts). I don’t drive around with a Spurs flag flying on my car. I don’t wallpaper my cubicle at work with posters and newspaper clippings of the Spurs. I will actually talk about and pay attention to other things that are non-Spurs related. And I won’t be going downtown to celebrate in a mass frenzy should the Spurs win their fifth championship this year.
But still, I’ve got it pretty bad and I suppose that admitting to the problem is the first step in the long road to recovery.

2010 Year End movie post

2010 movies I've seen

Toy Story 3
Alice in Wonderland
How to Train Your Dragon
Tangled
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
Yogi Bear

2010 movies I own and will see eventually

Iron Man 2
The Karate Kid
Robin Hood
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Inception

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Despicable Me

Megamind

Shutter Island

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Knight & Day

True Grit

Secretariat

The King's Speech

2010 movies I still want to see

Tron Legacy
The Social Network

God Bless America

Healthcare is too damn high

Midterm results

Well the midterm election was every bit as bad as I had feared.
There were only a few bright spots to cheer me up such as the losses by Tea Party stalwarts Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, Joe Miller and Sharron Angle.
There were the heart-wrenchingly close losses by Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Alexi Ginniaoulis in Illinois; Alex Sink in Florida and Ted Strickland in Ohio.
And there were those who just squeaked by such as Michael Bennett in Colorado, Patty Murray in Washington and Joe Manchin in West Virginia.
Harry Reid held on in Nevada while Russ Feingold was toppled in Wisconsin.
Some Democrats weathered the storm with little problem. Richard Blumenthal easily held on to Chris Dodd’s seat in Connecticut. He had been the state’s attorney general when I lived there in the early ‘90s and was being touted even then for higher office. Glad he finally made it.
Chuck Shumer and Kristin Gillibrand had little trouble keeping their New York Senate seats and Andrew Cuomo steamrolled over the obnoxious extremist Carl Paladino. Vermont elected a Democratic governor for the first time since Howard Dean. And Connecticut elected a Democratic governor for the first time since I don’t know when. Since I lived there the state house has either been held by an Independent or a Republican.
Jerry Brown easily reclaimed the governors office in California that he held 20 years ago despite a mountain of money spent by his Republican opponent Meg Whitman. And Barbara Boxer withstood a multi-million dollar campaign by former HP CEO Carly Firorina.
But elsewhere the tidalwave of corporate cash was too much for Democrats to withstand. The U.S. Chamber of Republicans spent millions of dollars to defeat Democrats all across the country dipping into a big pool of corporate cash that was supplemented by donations from foreign entities. And it was all carefully orchestrated by Rupert Murdoch’s Faux News and the rightwing radio jocks who instructed their brainwashed minions that voting for Democrats was unpatriotic and unAmerican.
Republicans picked up more than 60 seats in the House giving them control again after just four years out of power. During that time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accomplished a tremendous amount - only to have the bulk of her legislative achievements watered down or buried in the Senate where Republicans took obstructionism to new heights by misusing and abusing that institution’s archaic filibuster and hold rules. But even with all the obstructionism, Democrats somehow still managed to pass major pieces of legislation such as health care reform and banking/finance reform.
But ultimately by abusing Senate rules the way they did, Republicans have set the new standard that Democrats will follow meaning that no partisan legislation will pass without a 60-vote supermajority. Even relatively benign, non-partisan legislation will have to meet the 60-vote threshhold each time because in essense every piece of legislation and, indeed, every action the Senate takes is now dictated by an unspoken filibuster rule.
So what that means is that the Republican takeover of the House will result in near total gridlock. The Republicans have swelled their ranks with radical Tea Party extremists who have some seriously flawed and absurd views of the government and who will insist on stopping even the most basic functions of government on the grounds that it doesn’t pass muster with their fundamentalist reading of the Constitution. As such, there will be little room for compromise as Republicans continue to adopt the “My way or the highway” attitude. They will insist that Democrats kowtow to their demands and be submissive in light of the fact that “the people have spoken!” Nevermind the fact that Republicans themselves did nothing of the sort during their time in the minority, which, by the way, was an even tinier minority than Democrats have now.
And will Obama now be a “lame duck” president and cast aside his agenda in deference to the newly empowered House Republicans? Was Ronald Reagan a lame duck in 1982 after his party shrank down to just 166 seats in the House? Of course not. As everyone well knows, Reagan went on to win a landslide re-election two years later and reshaped the political landscape for the forseeable future. So people who want to count Obama out at this point need a serious history lesson.
I think the thing that was the most disheartening about the election was the Republican onslaught in local races. I really hated losing my local congressman Ciro Rodriguez. After spending most of my adult life being represented by Republicans like Joe Barton, Lamar Smith, Larry Combest and Henry Bonilla, I was thrilled four years ago to finally get someone to represent me who I could relate to. But now I will be stuck once again with someone who will automatically vote against everything I deem to be important. It is very depressing.
But, alas, the tide will turn again at some point and in the meantime I will just have more things that I can gripe about on my blog. So if there is any silver lining in this election it is the endless fodder of blog material that it will bring for the next two years.

Vote, Vote, Vote

I cast my vote today for Bill White for governor and Ciro Rodriguez for Congress. Those were the two “big” races I had a say in.
In addition, I supported mostly Democrats all the way down the ballot with the exception of Susan Combs, the Republican comptroller, who did not have a Democratic opponent but was facing candidates from the Libertarian and Green parties. Since I think most Libertarian candidates are a bit nutty and because all (Get Republicans Elected Every November) GREEN Party candidates are dupes and imbeciles, I cast my vote for Combs. Besides that, I’ve always thought she was a nice person and she seems to have done a decent job in a relatively non-partisan office.
Beyond that, I voted for Carlos Uresti for state senate, Massarat Ali for state representative and Rebecca Bell-Metterau for state board of education.
After that, I had little interest in the remaining races and feel that most of them should be appointed or hired positions anyway.

Republicans benefiting from mass confusion and ignorance

I guess it is appropriate that the election falls so close to Halloween this year because it promises to be a real horror show. Even though a few of the Tea Party’s scariest candidates don’t have a chance of winning – like Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell and Carl “I’ll Take You Out” Paladino — there are plenty of others like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Joe Miller in Alaska and Ken Buck in Colorado who have a very good chance of winning. And then there are the ones who are already shoo-ins for election like John Boozman in Arkansas and Mike Lee in Utah.
Suffice to say that the Senate is going to get a lot crazier even if it stays majority Democratic. But the really sad news is what is likely to happen to the House. A Republican takeover in the House, which seems all but assured, pretty much guarantees legislative gridlock for the next two years. What this means is that any kind of progress on legislative issues will be stymied and, worse, there will most likely be a number of confrontations over the debt ceiling and threats to shut down the government. At the same time, we can all enjoy the spectacle of partisan witchhunts as Republican lawmakers use their new powers to pursue vendettas against the Obama administration.
What is hard to understand is why people would want to choose this course. I chalk it up to flat-out ignorance mixed with a good deal of Faux News/Wingnut Radio brainwashing.
‘Unfair,’ you say! Perhaps in some cases there are people who have thought these things through and believe for their own reasons that it would be best to return to the policies of the previous 10 years. But some recent studies have revealed that too many people seem to be seriously confused about some of the key issues.
Steve Benen addresses those studies here and here.

In a democracy, the system breaks down and produces counter-productive results when those in charge -- the voters -- are uninformed. And the fact is, a whole lot of Americans are deeply confused about the facts.
The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past four quarters.
Most voters don’t believe it.
A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 finds that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t be recovered.
Public perceptions aren’t even close to reality -- by a 52% to 19% margin, for example, likely voters think their federal tax burden has gone up over the last couple of years, even though it hasn’t. Indeed, Democrats approved one of the largest middle-class tax cuts in American history, and the public has no idea that it even happened.
The same is true of the strength of the economy in general -- the economy stopped shrinking and started growing more than a year ago, but 61% of respondents in this poll said the economy continued to shrink in 2010, even though it hasn’t.

Needless to say, it is hard to win an election when people are this confused about things.
And then there is this...

After a historic legislative session that saw the passage of health care and Wall Street reform bills, most Americans think Congress accomplished less than or the same amount as usual.
In a new Gallup Poll, 37 percent said Congress did less than what is accomplished in a typical session, while 35 percent said it did the same amount.
Only 23 percent said Congress accomplished more than usual.

So people think taxes have gone up when they have not. They think the economy is worse than it really is. And they think Congress has done very little when it has actually accomplished more than any other Congress before it.
When people go to the polls holding such backwards and upside down assumptions, it is no wonder that they end up voting against their interests.
All I can say is that the rightwing campaign to keep people ignorant and misinformed has been highly effective. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, et al. are very, very good at their jobs. That is why they get the big bucks, no doubt.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to end up with a country that is hamstrung and dysfunctional for the next two years, if not longer. It is highly depressing especially after the promise of what could have been after the big blowout Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008.
But Republicans managed to hold fast even with one of the smallest minorities in history and by massively abusing Senate rules on filibusters and secret holds. Thus they were able to stall, stymie and kill large numbers of bills and change others far beyond what would have easily passed on a straight-up, majority vote.
So the new standard now is that 59 votes in the Senate is not enough to do anything, therefore nothing will get done until we actually get a party with a lopsided majority in Congress or until reason and rationality breaks out and we finally reform the Senate’s antiquated and undemocratic (not to mention unconstitutional) filibuster rules.
Alas, the former is much more likely to happen in my opinion before the latter.
Good luck, my fellow Americans. We are all going to need it.

Too many have apparently forgot....

Cell phones in 1920!!!

Don't you just love stuff like this?

Don't ask, don't tell repeal

Since I don’t have any close friends or relatives who are openly gay and because I am not gay myself, it would be easy to simply ignore the whole controversy surrounding gays in the military and gay marriage.
But I can’t. It still ticks me off to no end that such a basic issue of civil rights continues to be such a hotbed of controversy today.
I am disappointed that the Obama administration is fighting against the latest court ruling striking down the antiquated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law. This idea that the military needs more time to study the matter and adjust and prepare is all a lot of bullshit. If you are in the military, you deal with it. End of story. If you can’t handle it, then get the hell out.
There will always be rightwingers who will claim that integrating the military will have adverse impacts on troop readiness and cohesion, whether we are talking about race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation. And every time their prognostications have proven false and their fears unfounded.
What’s more is that it seems like such a simple issue to me. Sexual orientation is a matter of biology, not choice. Throughout history, in every society and every culture, there has always been about the same percentage of the population that is homosexual. It is simply part of the natural balance of life. Put another way, it is the way God set things up.
I am well aware of the fact that the Bible condemns homosexuality. I’ve been reading the Bible straight through recently (I’m up to Nehemiah) and what strikes me about it is the huge swath of things in the Bible that we completely ignore and blow off today. Sure, the ancient Israelites condemned homosexuality (and by extension believed that God did as well), but they also condemned eating pork and touching a woman while she is menustrating and a long list of other “abominations” that we conveniently overlook today. And then there are all the things they condoned or tolerated that we now find insufferable and wrong. Things such as slavery, polygamy, animal sacrifice, and much more.
It is not fair to ignore the parts of the Bible that we personally find inconvenient while strictly enforcing other parts when they happen to mesh with our favored ideology. The best thing is to consider the Bible in its historical context and weigh it against the teachings of Christ who called on us to put aside our judgmental ways and focus on neighborly love and forgiveness.
Homosexuality is a fact of life and we really need to evolve as a society to the point where we are not always freaking out about it.

A new favorite John Wayne flick

I’ve always loved John Wayne movies and have been collecting them on DVD now for several years. But only last night did I take the time to watch “Hondo” for the first time.
I was greatly surprised by how much I liked the movie. It has now vaulted to the top tier of my list of all-time favorite John Wayne movies along with “The Searchers,” “Stagecoach” and “Rooster Cogburn”.
The iconic photo of John Wayne carrying a saddle and walking next to a dog hung on my dorm room wall for four years in college. But I did not know until the other day that the image came from the movie “Hondo”.
My favorite scene in the movie is when Wayne has his first confrontation with the absent father at a nearby outpost. As the man storms out of the tent he finds his way blocked by Wayne’s dog “Sam” who growls menacingly. He prepares to kick the dog and then stops when he hears Wayne protest and cock his rifle. The man glares back at him and Wayne says “Walk around him.”
The man spits back that he would never walk around a cur dog and Wayne responds with this classic line, “A man oughta do what he thinks is best.”
The man looks back at the growling dog and then walks around.

Balanced Budget craziness

There is a cute video up at the Cato Institute purporting to show how simple it would be to balance the federal budget without any tax increases and without allowing any of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich to expire next year.
Daniel Mitchell, the president of Cato, starts out in a folksy manner explaining that all we need to do is “go back” to the Constitution and only fund those federal programs specifically authorized in Aticle 1 Section 8 of our founding document.
And then “Voila!” No more budget deficit. Because what that would mean is that we would eliminate a huge swath of government departments and programs that were unknown or not deemed necessary 250 years ago. Mitchell rattles off the following departments that would be wiped out under this scenario:

• Agriculture
• Energy
• Housing and Urband Development
• Small Business Administration
• Education
• Transportation
• National Endowment for the Arts

The very fact that Mitchell is proposing such a course of action with a straight face and expecting people to take it seriously is very disturbing. That is because it takes a high level of willful ignorance to buy into that nonsense.
Turn back the clock to the horse-and-buggy era and all our problems would be solved, Mitchell is saying. Seriously.
Let’s just take Transportation as an example. What does he expect would happen? Do we shut down all the airports when we disband the FAA and fire all the air traffic controllers? What happens to the U.S. Highway System? Will each state set up tolls for non-state residents to drive on their roads? If coastal states have to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of sea ports will they then charge tariffs to inland states before goods and services are delivered? How long before our entire economy collapses in a jumble of feuding municipalities?
Or how about the Agriculture Department? No more ag subsidies? Sounds great, unless you live in a farm-belt state that relies heavily on these subsidies to get by, especially when the weather is uncooperative. And if the Ag Department is gone, what happens to the School Lunch Program which is financed by USDA? Tough luck kids, you go hungry now?
What about the research that USDA does on farm and livestock pests? How expensive will our grocery bills get once all this federal coordination goes away? Do you think the invisible hand of the market will step in and make everyone right?
This is crazy stuff that is not even worth anyone’s time to refute. If you think we can just wipe out all these federal programs, get a big fat tax cut in the mail, and then go on with our lives like nothing happened, they you clearly don’t understand what is at stake here.
We live in a very complex, highly evolved society that has gone through multiple decades of trial and error getting to where we are today. There is always room for budget cuts and operational efficiences that can eliminate waste and save money. But a radical overhaul of our system of government as the Cato wingnuts are advocating would shred our society and result in chaos and disaster.
There is no question that we have a big government that spends lots of money. We have a large welfare state and have had one for decades. But name a single country that doesn’t have a large welfare state where you would be willing to live today and raise a family. There are none that I know of and tiny little desert islands don’t count.

Obama-Reagan parallels

Republicans need to win 39 House seats this fall to take control of the House and a lot of political prognosticators think they can do it.
But even if the Republicans’ wildest dreams come true and they ride a tidal wave of voter resentment back to power in the House, it will ultimately mean very little.
President Obama may seem to be in a precarious position with his low poll numbers and his party possibly slipping into the minority, but he would still be better off than Ronald Reagan was at the same point in his presidency.
During the 1982 midterm elections, two years after Reagan swept to victory over former President Jimmy Carter, his poll numbers were almost identical to what Obama’s are right now. Furthermore, his party lost 27 seats during that election. But the big difference for Reagan, was that his party was already in the minority at that point. They lost 27 seats when they didn’t have that many to begin with. Republicans had 192 seats and fell all the way down to 166. By comparison, Democrats currently have 256 seats and even the most optimistic forecasts for Republican election prospects don’t have them dropping below 200. So, even in a worst case scenario for Obama, he will still have more allies in the House than Reagan did after his mid-term fiasco. And we all know what happened to Reagan two-years after that. He won one of the biggest landslide elections ever over a major Democratic establishment candidate.
Republicans will be lucky if they can even get one of their better candidates through the primary process which is likely to be controlled by the extremist Tea Party faction.
So while things might look bad for Obama in the short-term, his long-term prospects are likely to improve as the economy continues to recover.

Tax cuts explained

Racist lies from Mallard Fillmore

Here is another letter I sent to the San Antonio Express-News concerning the Mallard Fillmore strip. The last letter I sent was never published.

“People who adopt black children” are, according to the Mallard Fillmore strip in Monday’s San Antonio Express News, “mostly white”.
This is a blatant lie. When you look at all the transracial and transcultural adoptions of anykind in this country it comes to less than 14 percent, and the percentage of white families adopting black children is well below 10 percent which means that more than 90 percent of black children are adopted by black families.
But telling blatant lies is standard operating procedure for the rightwing Mallard Fillmore “comic” strip. The author was apparently annoyed that some liberal commentators pointed out that Glenn Beck’s latest rally in D.C. a few weeks ago was made up mostly of white people, so he decided that gave him permission to make a bunch of “jokes” riffing on racial stereotypes such as the false notion that black people don’t like to go bowling or cycling. But the kicker was the mean-spirited suggestion that black people leave it up to whites to adopt black children. That is absolutely false.
Whenever Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip, tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians and celebrities he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Why does the Express-News continue to publish garbage like Mallard Fillmore everyday?

Music cloud on the horizon

When I was in college in the mid-to-late 1980s, the digital music age was in its infancy. Compact discs or CDs - introduced in 1982 - were just starting to make an impact on the market although it would still be several years before I would buy my first CD player.
During this time, my friend Joe Johnson and I got into a discussion about digital music and the possibilities it entailed. Joe had an idea for a device he called the “digibox” which would essentially be a juke box with a hard drive containing far more music than could fit in a conventional juke box of the day.
I had a different idea. I figured why not build one giant computer hardrive and load up all the music that you could get permission for and then set it up like a cable TV subscription service. I imagined a firm that would run a cable into your house and plug it into your stereo. Then you would get a large catalog listing all the available music and some kind of interface device where you could type in the numbers of whatever songs you wanted to hear and Voila! instant music. For that, I figured a person could pay a monthly fee like getting HBO or something.
Unfortunately, neither Joe or I ever seriously pursued our ideas. Years later when the first iPod came out from Apple, I immediately recognized it as a mini-version of Joe’s Digibox.
So Joe’s idea turned out to be a huge success while I figured that mine was just a dead end that never would have got off the ground.
But just the other day I heard a story on NPR about a cloud-version of iTunes that is still in the planning stage and I was immediately reminded of my variation on the digibox idea.
I have a basic iPod which I love but which is woefully too small for my music collection (4GB). I used to have a diverse selection of Rock and Jazz music loaded up on it, but since I’ve recently been on a Classical music kick I have no room for anything else. So the idea of a cloud service where you could put all your digital music and have ready access to it at the push of a button is very intriguing and falls right in line with what I was thinking about back in college. Unfortunately, it appears that the music cloud is still a long ways off as the music industry tries to figure out how it can get the biggest possible cut from it.

The foul fowl's stench gets worse

The following is a Letter to the Editor that I sent to the San Antonio Express-News this morning...

The foul stench emitting from the Express-News comics page was even more odorous and offensive this past week as the “Mallard Fillmore” strip launched a vicious and nasty week-long attack on public school teachers to mark the beginning of the new school year.
Why the Express-News editors tolerate this nastiness is a mystery to me. Whenever the Doonesbury strip has anything even remotely controversial they are quick to yank it and run replacement strips. But I suppose a mean-spirited “comic” strip that mocks public school teachers as being stupid and lazy is perfectly fine with them.
The public school system is a favorite target of Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip. Whenever he tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Real conservatives should be just as offended by Tinsley’s hateful diatribes as the people who get slapped in the face everytime they open their newspaper. They should demand that the Express-News follow the lead of its sister paper in Houston and dump the foul fowl and replace it with a conservative strip that does not bring shame and dishonor on their side of the political spectrum. Prickly City, which already runs in the E-N, is one example and there are many others.
I am not a teacher, nor am I employed by the school system or any part of the public sector. But I send my kids to public school and I respect the good work that their teachers do to give them an excellent education. It is too bad that our teachers have to be denigrated everyday in their daily newspaper’s so-called funny pages.