Telephone tips

I used to call one of our large customers and I got his voicemail all the time.  The thing was that his message said he was on vacation but every time I left a message he would call back in a couple of hours.  I just got it one day - he was really at work but could return my call or not.  either that or he just forgot to update his message when he came back from vacation. 

I adopted that technique but now I'm going to claim that I'm on a 'special assignment' of unspecified duty and length (probably forever) so I might not be able to return your call in a timely manner. 

Back in the days when the long distance carriers were fighting over customers like hyenas over carrion, I was working in a very small company.  We would get inundated by people urging us to switch to their long distance plan.  We invented Brian.  Brian was our telephone guy that would make that decision to switch but -wouldn't you know it? - Brian is on vacation for two weeks.  That seemed to satisfy them and we always had a great laugh.  It turned the annoying phonecalls into fun.  One time we actually got a call back for Brian after two weeks!  Those guys were persistent.  I told him Brian wasn't back yet or something.  Then I thought I should have told the guy that Brian got fired because he drove the boss nuts when he was always switching long distance carriers.

The latest blessing in the fone wars is caller ID.  Our phone tries to say the name of the caller and sometimes it is hilarious.  Caller ID is a great way to avoid calls you hate - use it, be merciless.  I've even programmed the phone to drop specific phone numbers so they barely ring - that is cool and I wish the phone had more memory so I could ignore more numbers.  Still, for having a land line this makes it tolerable.

Actual Journalism by Progressives

If someone tells you cable news is all fluff and biased tell them this story.

Rachel Maddow interviewed Rand Paul about his primary victory in Kentucky and ended up pressing him about his stand on civil rights.  This turned into a big deal andThe New Yoirk Times published a story under the headline Tea Party Pick Cause Uproar on Civil Rights about it and said that Rand was asked if he thought businesses should have the right to refuse to serve black people.  The paper said Rand Paul said 'yes'.  This could be a huge point for Paul's Democratic opponent in the Kentucky general election and you might think the Rachel Maddow Show would be all over reporting what the Times had said.  But no, last Friday Chris Hayes was the guest host and went to great lengths to correct the paper's article going so far as to play the part of the interview where it was obvious Rand Paul did not say yes to that question even though Rachel kept asking.

Here's my point, The Rachel Maddow Show went out of its way to correct something that played to the liberal audience but was wrong.  They corrected something that could have been a great talking point but they chose accuracy over spin and  corrected a misreading of the interview.  I call that Real Journalism.

Challenge your friends to find an example from the conservative side of the news. 

Here is the link but there's no guarantee it will last, if it doesn't work search msnbc.com for Rachel Maddow and Rand Paul or New York Times

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#37285934

Obama and the presidency - so far

With the nomination of Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court justice I had a revelation. I was hoping for a progressive nominee that would somehow balance out the c-c-c-conservative justices appointed under W.  I thought Obama's first nomination was too conservative but I think she will be a great justice, just not as liberal as I might like..

What hit me today was that President Obama is running his administration the way he thinks the Constitution envisions it.  He is not running it to win the next election or to help his friends or to be popular, he is being The President.  In short, he is an honorable guy trying to ignore the political wrangling and actually improve things for everyone.

You may not agree but try looking from that perspective at what Barack doe.

A tip for Amazon.com

With the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people too ("Soylent Corp.  it's people, it's PEOPLE!!!!"), it is just a matter of time before our senators and representatives are bought and sold to the highest bidder.  Will they be traded on Wall Street?  Will they be treated like commodities and tracked along with pig bellies?  [You can do your own jokes here and send them along as comments].

I think eBay might be another place, an auction seems natural to sell yourself to the highest bidder.  They have consistently disallowed sales like this though.

But I think Amazon might dominate the trade.  I can just see their helpful comment, "Corporations that bought this Senator, also bought these Representatives: ..."

I think this makes it official, we have the best government money can buy. 

Doesn't it make sense to have everyone pay equally for elections rather than rich people and corporations?  Work for government funded elections.

There's something wrong ...

There's something wrong with  our financial system:

There's something wrong when investment banks are sued for fraud one day and the next announce that they are giving over 4 billion dollars in bonuses. 

There is something wrong when a bank can take your money, pay modest interest to use it, then gamble with it, and when they lose, you have to pay for their losses with more of your money.

There's something wrong when corporations can act like people to give political gifts but to be not-people when liability claims arise.

There is something wrong when corporate executives make huge salaries and bonuses running corporations but when systemic criminal activity is revealed they claim to have no knowledge of what the corporation was doing. 

There is something wrong when people (corporations) can give so much money to politicians that  they can influence the very laws and regulations that affect them. There is something very very wrong when they can write their own laws.  This warps and damages our very democracy.

There is something wrong when laws can be changed by corporate influence to reduce or eliminate oversight or regulation of those same companies.

There's something wrong when the Daily Show is one of the best sources to explain the causes of the financial crisis we are now in. 

There is something wrong when bankers can market products they know are faulty - and not only that, there is something terribly wrong when they can then bet against the products they sell and make money when they do fail. 

There is something wrong when those bankers get bonuses instead of prison time.

There is something wrong when financial leaders take government jobs to regulate (or de-regulate) the very companies they had worked for.  Especially when they then return to those same companies to reap the rewards of the laws and regulations they have created or changed.

There is something wrong if we don't all work to fix this.

There is something wrong when - well, what do you think?

Living in Hipocrisy, USA

So here are my question -

Why do some people decry governmernt overreaching (think healthcare) but think business is ok when it overreaches (think home loan fail)?

Why do people protest against abortion and also oppose healthcare for pregnant women?

Why is abortion bad but capital punishment good?

Why is it ok to send death threats to congress people who vote to provide  healthcare? 

Why is it that a Christian militia group can plan to kill police and do other terrorist acts and nobody freaks out that they use the word Christian?

3/5 of a person in 10 seconds

Now that the Supreme Court has allowed corporations another right of personhood - free speech in the form of campaign donations - it got me thinking about similarities and differences of live persons and corporations.

It seems to me that corporations sometimes like being persons: "Senator, here's $50,000 since I can't tell you I favor dismantling the EPA." And sometimes they don't: corporations don't seem to die . Think of corporate law as healthcare for corporations - now there's a government run healthcare program even the right-wingers can get behind. But I digress.

Corporations can now do what people cannot now do. But in the past, people could do it but corporations couldn't. Guess what it is? Well, persons used to be able to own other persons (or 3/5 of a person for census purposes) but corporations couldn't buy other corporations. We came to our senses about slavery for real people but if a corporation is a person, isn't it slavery to buy another corporate person? I say, stop corporate slavery!

We have now stretched the 'person' part of a corportation to absurd lengths and it is time to end the crap. Corporations are not people and they should not be treated as such. There is no reason for it. There are plenty of good reasons for corporations but they don't need the person idea to work.

I'm sure there are many more problems with corporate law - the biggest is that corporations can grow beyond countries and individual country law. Maybe I'll rant more about that sometime.

p.s. Ten bonus points if you got the song reference in the title. And double them if you read this far.