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.

I’m really tired of the rumbledy-toss of big banks buying small fry – and then going under due to hilarity at the home office.

We use two banks and a credit union; the latter is WAY out of state, and I’d transfer over to that except that we’d never have a local bank.

Bank #1 was Mid-America, which was bought by National City, which was then bought up by a big Pittsburgh bank.  Bank #2 was a local bank, which was then purchased by Park National, and subsequently went bust and was taken over by the FDIC  and is now part of US Bank – another Big Bank.  In both of the cases, heavy mismanagement at the top killed the banks.

National City, however, has had some heavy use of fees and charges, and just this week zinged us for a $100 with three overdraft fees – except that there was no actual overdraft.  Just that there might have been one the next day, except that we had put in a deposit that they decided not to consider relevant.  According to online sources I’ve been reading, they are notorious for this sort of stunt, and I’m sick of it.

I complained, and they told me to stick it.

Any suggestions for a new bank for us greatly appreciated – IF the bank isn’t one of these big outfits that mismanaged their way into serious problems and then decided to squeeze all of their customers to make up the difference.  We live out in the DuPage suburbs of Chicago, if that helps.

“Sarah Palin is a great friend to the bowling industry and we’re so proud and honored to welcome her as our keynote speaker at International Bowl Expo 2010,” said Steven Johnson, executive director of the BPAA.

A bowling columnist writes:

Politicians don’t seem to give a hoot about championing the great sport of bowling and that bothers me when politicians who know nothing about bowling are invited to speak at a bowling convention and barely mention the sport. I would venture a guess that a keynote speaker at Bowl Expo earns between $25,000 and $50,000 for maybe 25 minutes of jokes and their beliefs about what is happening in the country…views they probably have expressed numerous times on numerous cable and network TV shows.

And that’s the point.  The convention brings her in for the publicity and she’s there for the payoff and to reread her lines.  

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.

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.

Part one of ‘why I weren’t posting none’ is that the internet connection here at The Marmotage has been deadly sucky at best.  Details on the tech wrangle are after the cut.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Lewis, one of my all-time favorite writers on Wall Street and high-end finance, has a Vanity Fair article on the fall of AIG that I thoroughly recommend.

And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem is that they knew him. And they believe that his crime was not mere legal fraudulence but the deeper kind: a need for subservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses. “When he said that he could not envision losses, that we wouldn’t lose a dime, I am positive that he believed that,” says one of the traders. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn’t that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right. More than anything, Joe Cassano wanted to be one of Wall Street’s big shots. He wound up being its perfect customer.

Also check out Felix Salmon at Reuters,  Bonddad, Robert Reich, the Epicurean Dealmaker, Barry Ritholtz, Paul Krugman in the NYT op-ed area and his NYT blog for other voices worth listening to on high finance and economics.

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.

I am singularly uninterested in the Jackson story.  I’ve seen enough oddball celebrity circuses, and the really interesting and truly weird stuff will not come out for a while for most people.   I expect more news circuses repeated endlessly on the news, and I will ignore them all.

Finally, someone sems to be doing something about rescuing Antioch College, which the alums will have to tell me if it meets their requirements.   I just love Yellow Springs, and want it to remain whole.

Sanford: there’s just no end to the dumb on this; obviously, the man forgot what the color of the sky was in the rest of our world.  Somewhere in South Carolina, a divorce lawyer is going to be very well off in the near future.

Exit question: Show of hands, ladies. How many of you would be willing to take back a guy who told you, “I’ve met this other woman and she’s totally my soulmate, but I’m going to try real hard to fall back in love with you”?

Chicago: In the past Mayor Daley has always survived his tough spots by letting his critics lose their nerve, get distracted, or simply self-destruct. The difference this time is that there are a whole lot more of them, and each day thousands are reminded of why they’re pissed off when they pull into a public parking space. No doubt.

(Buy it now here!)

What do you get,
When you open the top,
And look inside,
And smack your lips,
And turn it over,
And spill it out?
What do you get?

Lip-smacking’
Whipcrackin’
Paddywhackin’
Olagazackin’
Infolackin’
Alliganackin’
Crackerjackin’
Cracker Jack!

Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts, and a prize…
That’s what you get in Cracker Jack!

Rush Limbaugh: Sanford was probably driven in desperation to cheat on his wife and get some small pleasure out of life by Barack Obama’s efforts to destroy America, as in what-the-heck-it’s-all-over-I’m-just-going-to-have-fun.

Full quotes at the link.   At the other end of the world, Congressman Michelle Bachmann is suggesting that the Obama Administration is going to use Census information to round people up that it doesn’t like, and cites the Japanese-Americans rounded up during WW2 and taken to internment camps.

So I guess it’s probably really my fault for voting for Obama and plunging us all into a deep, dark gay socialist hell on earth.  Sorry, Governor Sanford, I just had no idea as to what I was doing.    I was only follwing the instructions of Comrade  Jiang Yu Cai as she was directed by the ChiCom Politburo, too, so they’re involved in the heinous plot.

I can’t read the love letters from Governor Sanford to his girlfriend without this going though my head.  Sorry.

As one right-wing blog said today:

Under different circumstances I think he could have survived this, but it’s a quirk of our politics that voters don’t mind cheating as much as they do inept cheating. Infidelity makes you a cad; unannounced week-long disappearances and rambling confessional pressers about the new lady in your life makes you a cad and erratic, and Americans don’t dig erratic in their would-be presidents. Word on the street via Geraghty is that if he doesn’t resign the state legislature will move to impeach him.

Me, I still want to know who anonymously tipped the South Carolina paper with the emails back five months ago, about the time he first came out on this to family and friends.   (my guess: had to be either a very close aide or honked off close family.)  And what the heck he was doing down there for *five* days to say goodbye and break up with her.

I will freely admit that I’ve done some dumb things in my time, but I’ve usually not been the dumper in a situation like this.

Gov Sanford of South Carolina admits that his mysterious disappearance over the last week was to go off to Argentina to see his mistress.

Well, there’s always the Sanford / Ensign ticket for the GOP next time, with the motto: “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”

And yes, that is Gary Hart to the right.

“I spent the past five days of my life crying in Argentina,” he said, “so I could come back and cry here.” Dude.  That is specifically what Eva Peron didn’t want people to do, ya know?