As some of you may have sussed out, since November of 2007, I’ve been working 99% of the time out of my basement office…with a huge long line of doctor’s excuses, bases on either my non-healing foot wound, or my weak response to infections casing raging problems on and off.  The office finally said that they couldn’t do this as a temporary thing any more, and that I’d have to file for a ‘reasonable accommodation’ – i.e, a permanent excuse to work from home, giving me the right to get work to supply certain work-related things that I would need to do this.

The first step was the gathering of enough medical stuff to prove my case, which ended with me almost sending them around 300 pages of medical results from the last ten years.

The second step was in defining what I would need to work from home that the office would provide, and I was told to ask for whatever I legitimately needed.  This resulted in me asking for a work PC, with all the necesary web-crafting software, a color laser, various office supplies, and an office chair.

I haven’t had a proper office chair down here for a while.  Part of the problem is my weight, part my height and width and so on.  The office chair I had at the office was around $900, and I can’t justify that – but when you spend a LOT of time in it, as I do, you need something that is comfortable and works.   (Right now, I have a sturdy chair from the dining room, but it’s not built for the use levels.)

The problem now is getting all this stuff to actually get here, and that’s turning into more of a mess than I dreamed, as various people are doing a it’s-their-deal thing of tossing around the responsibilities of getting these items going.   Amazing bureaucratic nonsense, and I’ve been a bureaucrat for 26 years as of today and seen a lot of silliness in my time.

Another tricky element is the PC; since there were a flurry of situations a few years ago about government workers who were being schmucks leaving laptops around with a lot of personal staff info or patient info – the federal government has been on a bender on security issues.

Bruce Schneier can speak more to this than I can, but the powers that be seem to be going to considerable lengths on internal security issues, from the apparent concept of There’s No Such Thing As Going Overboard.   A lot of it seems to be more ways of getting things checked off of a checklist and getting gold stars from the Powers That Be that they were diligent than whether the measures taken are worthwhile or work.

So I have to get a mountain of paperwork and approvals for anything that goes on that machine, including software that the agency bought for me three years ago – and that’s just the start of it all.   At this rate, I’ll be lucky to get it here and working by March.

Discussion about a bailout bill for newspapers if they reorganize as 501c3 not-for-profits; the President had this to say about it:

Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election. “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.

No lie there, dude.   You can’t make news organization hot profit centers or milk cows for your big corporation with turning them into worthless piles of tabloid junk, centered on the cheap and dirty and not getting people to understand and think.

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.

Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning – look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on.  There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.

They fought immigration from ‘those people’ – first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on.  They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls.  Not to mention non-Christians.  And letting people who aren’t our kind into office?  Oh!

They fought taxation of any kind.  They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety.  They fought public schools.  They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress.    They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.

They fought medicine and science and public health.  They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.

They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders.  And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.

They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.

They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge.  They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests.  And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over.  They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.

They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense.  They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner – or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.

Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach.  I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.

I have no problem with political debate.  I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming.  And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.

I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life.   I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this.   I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.

And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds – whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to  care about anything but trying to destroy Obama  as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base.  That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.

When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.

Interesting article on how India’s endemic corruption problems are holding the country back, with this comment from the Prime Minister:

“The pervasive corruption in our country tarnishes our image [and it] discourages investors who expect fair treatment and transparent dealings with public authorities.”

Read it all.

The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports that five SEC exams and investigations of Bernie Madoff were incompetently done.   I can believe one screwup happened, but five?  Five is agency policy to not look too hard.

Both Markopolos and an SEC staff accountant testified that it was clear the Boston office’s assistant district administrator at the time “did not understand the information presented,’’ Inspector General David Kotz wrote in a blistering report. As a result, the Boston staff failed to investigate the complaint or, at first, to even refer it to the regional office in New York, according to the inspector general.

and:

“Moreover, we found that Madoff proactively informed potential investors that the SEC had examined his operations. When potential investors expressed hesitation about investing with Madoff, he cited the prior SEC examinations to establish credibility and allay suspicions or investor doubts that may have arisen while due diligence was being conducted.”

This was a man who was a former chairman of NASDAQ, and his family and he were on all sorts of securities industry oversight and control boards, including the industry’s internal compliance office.   He got away with his actions because there was a lot of loose money floating around, he was a fantastic con artist, and because of his numerous connections.  The Chinese call this guanxi, 关系 – the old-boy-network.

As in ‘we can’t being him to justice; he’s one of the connected people. Laws and taxes are for the little people.’

Dirty little secret #1: Not everyone who gets through law school with a diploma gets a law job. Not guaranteed, though it’s a common misconception – by non-lawyers – that law school graduates are not automatically given cushy jobs, that all law jobs pay astronomically well, and job security is everything.  Oh, yeah, and that anyone who *does* have a law degree will never be happy with a non-law job, so don’t give them one.

Dirty little secret #2: when there’s fewer jobs in law practices available, the state bar associations play hanky-pank with the pass rates on the bar exams.  Suddenly, a score that would get you a pass last year is way below what you need this year.

Imagine that.

And yes, it’s been 26 years since I graduated from law school, and I’ve never really worked as a lawyer, and I’m just as happy.

I am frequently dismayed by various Truthers out there who insist on a Grand Conspiracy theory of the universe; stories about how the moon landing was faked, the world is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job and how Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate smuggled into the country as a very small baby with the connivance of Moo-slims, Africans and atheists to bring our nation to socialism, that Hillary murdered Vince Foster, or how the Queen of England is a drug dealer just get me to a point of saying: you guys are passing over the real conspiracies for this crap?

It’s Calvinball, folks, where the rules change with a whim.   If you argue with the flat-earthers, they just call you part of the conspiracy, or deluded fools, or slaves of the Megatron, and screw on their aluminum foil hats all the tighter.  When is someone going to deliver an original Moon rock to my door so that I can verify it with my home chemical test kit?

And it’s usually motivated by ignorance and fear.   People who are afraid of the idea of the moon landing and the notion of space travel as such will hop on the ‘it’s all made up’ bandwagon.  People who can’t openly say that the notion of a African-American president  is alien and horrifying to them will look to Birther stuff because they feel in their guts that he *can’t* be a legitimate President; he’s the wrong color.

Not to mention that Democrats could not have legitimately won any election without trickery and fraud, etc.   Any concept otherwise would have to accept the fact that somone in the GOP messed up bad enough that they lost an election on the basis of policy issues, and that’s not acceptable in the place where the sky is paisley-colored.

Of course, this also feeds things racial and cultural on the Republican side of a similar nature with their own people: Bobby Jindal’s South Asian ethnicity and citizenship and Romney’s Mormon faith seen as cultism.   My own connection to Unity would be seen as some whacko cult, I’m sure, let alone that I’m a race traitor and Mere is a hanjian.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that they should put in an Amendment to the Constitution that says something like: …and naturalized citizens who have been resident in the USA for 30 years can be President or VP. That way, Meredith can be President and you all can face her mighty wrath.  Bwahahaha.

One blog commenter wrote:

These people didn’t need a black president to make them crazy, they were crazy when he got here. They’ve been told for almost thirty years now that God’s plan for America is a permanent Republican majority, for the last fifteen years that Democrats are “congenital liars” dragging the country into the depths of degradation through [Clinton], and for the last seven that we are now locked in a multi-planar existential conflict and our only hope is a strong Godly deciderer who will protect us all from our enemies. The birthers picked up with Obama pretty much where they left off with a Bubba from Arkansas. Remember, Clinton was accused of rape and serial murder because it was politically convenient to accuse him.

Or this one:

I’m still waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of Hawaii. Until I’ve seen something more reliable than the evidence at hand, I’m not accepting it. I won’t accept Hawaii’s existence unless and until I’m personally flown out there and accommodated in a sumptuous hotel for the rest of my life, at taxpayer expense.I’m still waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of Hawaii. Until I’ve seen something more reliable than the evidence at hand, I’m not accepting it. I won’t accept Hawaii’s existence unless and until I’m personally flown out there and accommodated in a sumptuous hotel for the rest of my life, at taxpayer expense.

Being that the only two states that I have never been in are Hawaii and Arizona, I can get behind that notion completely. 

Big jump in the rates of teen cases of STDs and syphilis and teen pregnancies during the Bush administration, according to the CDC.    A different sort of ‘don’t ask, and we won’t tell you’.

FOIA releases of a ton of emails to and from Governor Sanford of South Carolina’s office from various TV news types (most prominently MEET THE PRESS) offering all sorts of ‘we’ll act like we’re questioning you but we’ll make sure that you get all the softballs you want, and protect you from the nasties out there‘ prostitution-masquerading-as-journalism.    In short, they’re a bunch of insider suckups, which doesn’t surprise me but definitely disgusts me.

• Governor Sanford of South Carolina’s spokesman is resigning for a job in the private sector.  Comments from folks who know him say that he’s a nice guy who probably is very tired from this ride on the circus.
• Unlike at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, Arlington trashes the stuff left behind.
• As I’ve said before, I’m ignoring the Sotomayor hearings as much as possible to avoid raising my blood pressure.

New blasphemy criminalization law passed by the Irish Parliament. “Under the changes, the maximum fine for blasphemy will be cut from €100,000 to €25,000.” Gee, thanks.

John Ensign has decided that he’s not resigning his seat, he’s running for re-election and he’s expecting the voters to forget it as soon after Britney Spears is killed in a love-suicide pact with Lindsey Lohan and CNN spends a week of coverage on the aftermath as possible.    Well, whatever keeps his dad’s and the RNSC’s pockets empty as they try to defend the seat in the next election is fine with me and another example on shining levels of morality.

US Air Force missile launch site converted over into a state park site in North Dakota; wanna go visit the silo and play twist-the-key?  (Multimedia tour online)

The missile site, about three miles north of Cooperstown and about 70 miles northwest of Fargo, is one of a handful of U.S. locations that commemorate the Cold War. The National Park Service operates a former Minuteman II launch center and missile silo in South Dakota. In Arizona, historic preservationists operate a former Titan nuclear missile site.

Website for the remains of the old GM that they’re liquidating.   Wanna buy a golf course or a Superfund site?

At the first day of hearings on GM’s proposed asset sale restructuring chief Albert Koch estimated on June 30 that the company’s environmental liabilities for all sites are $530 million. Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson said money needed to wind down the old GM was $1.25 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $950 million, because of a reassessment of the environmental liabilities.

“The new GM hardly needs to be in the golf course business,” said Tom Wilkinson, GM’s director of news relations, in an e-mail. “The old GM will be selling a lot of potentially valuable but peripheral property the company accumulated over 100 years, kind of like a big garage sale. You will see some really good real estate deals come out of this for investors and communities.”

The short version seems to be that it’s unlikely without further explosions that Gov. Sanford of South Carolina will be forced to quit his job over the whole affair-affair, but it’s pretty certain that his political future is totally destroyed.   This review from the South Carolina paper The State puts it in a nutshell, without mentioning the reluctance many GOP types felt about elevating the Lietenant Governor to the job.  Allegedy, he’s a not-very-head-screwed-on-tight sort who is ambitious without ability, and has a bunch of his own personal skeletons rattling around.

Then again, I was on the road today, and heard a snatch of a couple of conservative talk dudes rolling on the floor over Senator Ensign having to get his parents to payoff the family of the woman he was having an affair with.   As in they thought it was freaking pathetic – which it was.  No way Ensign comes back from that politically, either.

And then there’s the whole Sarah Palin thing, which is beyond anyone’s understanding.

Locally in Illinois, the next set of statewide races for the Senate seat and Governor’s chair are suddenly defined by all of the people who are stating that they don’t want the jobs.

From a new WaPo article about details on how Governor Sanford elaborately jerry-rigged up an Official Trip To Argentina to see his ’soulmate’ in Buenos Aires, we have a new euphemism to go along with ‘hiking the appalachian trail‘ – to ‘go Dove Hunting‘.

Like nobody had ever heard of Russians using hookers to lure Western diplomats into compromising positions.    Sheesh.

The more I hear about the whole Senator Ensign story, the more I think that sex aside, the man should resign his office because he’s a crook and an idiot.    Getting your bazillionaire parents to pay off your mistress and her family?  Inviting the mistress’s family into your house after their house was ransacked by burglers, and proceeding to ‘comfort’ the wife all over your own house that weekend?  The mind reels with every new item.   Speaking of items, you too can buy your John Ensign for President boxer shorts at this location!

And finally, a high and horny Ohio couple are parked and busy in the front seat, and the cops find them in the act – with her two little kids in the back seat of the car.   Bleah….

Dick Durbin and some other Senate Democrats are saying – dudes, you Democratic senators who don’t wanna vote *for* a bill we ‘re putting through don’t have to do so, but fer pete’s sake, nobody lost their seats for voting to shut off debate and bring the bill to a floor vote.

The ‘close debate / cloture’ vote requires 60 votes.  An up or down actual vote on the bill / law just takes a simple majority to pass.

If that’s the deal, then Democratic Senators in Red states can vote to have the up or down vote, and we’re through with this 40-Republicans-can-choke-off-everything crap.

The Federal Protective Service, tasked to provide security to US government office buildings (like the one that Susan and I work out of in downtown Chicago) is in trouble; the Government Accountability Office ran teams through and past the security at several such buildings, bringing in bomb materials.

Numerous US government web sites were downed or struggling under a 50,000 strong zombie PC DDoS attack thought to have begun from North Korean sources.   As a government web person, this is not a happy thought…

No, I’m talking about Robert McNamara, one of my particular historical nemeses, considering the number of important things that he messed up, destroyed or ruined. Not to mention the uncountable dead.