More Moral Quandries

I've been home a lot lately, which you may or may not know. I had a DVT that did the whole "travel to the lung" thing, which, when it doesn't kill you, makes you tired as hell for a long time. So I'm just not getting out and about like I used to. This means that I'm having more political discussions with my dad than usual, because, holy cow, that man is home a lot. Recently, there have been two things we've talked about that I wanted to mention here. I actually got off my butt and am mentioning them. It's a minor miracle.

First thing: "pension relief" in New Jersey. The concept that raising the retirement age will save money for the state because older retirees won't receive as much in pension money is a wash. Those people are working for the state at full salary, people. And the odds are that if they're at retirement age, then they're at the top of the earnings scale. Paying out their pensions would actually cost the state less, wouldn't it? Am I missing something?

Second thing: Gonzales, replacing US Attorneys, should he retire, etc, etc. My dad said to me, "At least Gonzales is better than what we had before". I'm not so sure, though. Yes, I think that Ashcroft is a bit of a loon who has firm beliefs about the world and how it works that I think do that whole "causal disconnect" thing. I admit it, I think the man is nuts. But I think that Gonzales is self-serving and anti-Constitution. I think he, in addition to plenty of other government officials, has been successfully undermining the document that is the foundation of American society the entire time he's held his position. I find that I can't make a better/worse comparison between insane and amoral.

Where Are We Going?

Down the economic tubes, baby.

Wall Street Slammed After China Stock Woes

NEW YORK — Stocks had their worst day since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Tuesday, briefly hurtling the Dow Jones industrials down more than 500 points on a worldwide tide of concern that the U.S. and Chinese economies are stumbling and that share prices have become overinflated.

Who does the U.S. government owe billions of dollars to (beside Japan)?China. Go ahead, explain to me how the stock market and the national debt aren't at all related.

Let's face facts, the minute we ditched the gold standard for federal reserve notes, our initial situation of pretending something was valuable went out the window for a scheme based on *actually* nothing. We (the U.S.) will never have enough money to pay off our national debt. We must instead simply hope that the countries we owe so much money to develop such severe economic problems that our debt somehow gets cancelled out. It's like a never ending game of Monopoly on a global scale.

More Stuff That I'm Thinking

Because I figure if you're here, reading, you actually care.

I'm thinking that much in the same manner that you cannot get blood from a stone, you cannot get 20,000 more troops from an organization that does not have 20,000 more troops to give.

Delaware Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, a contender for his party's 2008 presidential nomination, told MSNBC that Bush was making a mistake by planning to put more troops into volatile Baghdad and needed to work toward a political solution in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'ites.

"I think the president has got it backwards again. This escalation, he's going to come to regret. We've tried it twice," Biden said.

Biden's a contender for the '08 nomination?. Really? Because you couldn't pay me enough to vote for the man who sided with the credit card companies that rule his state on the bankruptcy bill. That bill really pissed me off. Delaware is small, but it's full of pointy bits.


So there you go, my disjointed thoughts for the day.