Archive for the ‘WTF Is Wrong With PA’ Category

As with so many crises, the ‘rona has brought out both the best and the worst in people. But mostly the worst.

Like many others, I’m going a little stir-crazy under our “shelter in place” directive. Most of us understand that such directives are to a large extent necessary. But more than a few mayors and state governors have gotten carried away with their newfound emergency powers, and they’ve forgotten that they’re governing actual people. Ornery, independent, American people.

There’s a natural distribution to the level of inconvenience people are willing to put up with. Some will put up with virtually nothing. Most, it seems, will tolerate quite a bit of inconvenience… for a time. But every individual has their breaking point, and the longer the restrictions go on, the more people are going to be agitated. The less the impositions seem to have any rational basis, the less the people are going to tolerate much of anything. And then all hell will break loose.

The slow-roll of increasingly arbitrary guidance and restrictions has been most maddening.

Don’t wear a mask, it will only hurt. Wear a mask if you want. You should probably wear a mask. You must wear a mask in public in order to enter a store and buy anything.

Stay active, maybe go for a walk. But don’t go to a park. Or a beach. And maybe you can kayak in some states, but don’t go motorboating.

Liquor stores in PA were closed, but beer distributors are essential.

Stay in your Detroit-metro homes in the densely-populated hotspot, and don’t drive yourself out to your second home where you can safely hole-up for a while.

Lowe’s can stay open, but your locally-owned gardening center can’t. Or maybe you can go to a store that sells gardening supplies, but those seeds you wanted were roped off because the items are deemed “non-essential”.

In a moment of absolute absurdity in a universe where cancer biopsies are elective and therefore banned, Governor Whitmer defended the continued allowance of abortion services as “life sustaining”. Now, there’s a constitutional argument to be made about keeping abortion services available — it’s a constitutionally protected right that is time sensitive — but to be so tone deaf as to call abortion “life sustaining” is rather galling when, at least for a time, Michiganders were prevented from buying child car seats.

Accommodations must be made. Open the damned garden centers, and don’t rope anything off in a store that has so-far been deemed essential. Allow hairdressers and barbers to open by appointment only and with adequate sanitation efforts. Don’t make impossible demands of small businesses about open space in their employee break areas that aren’t exactly expandable at the government’s whim.
Governors and mayors are not going to be able to sustain adequate preventive measures if they act like petty dictators and deprive people of some modicum of normalcy. The longer the restrictions are in place, the more arbitrary the restrictions, and the more disruptive to normal life, the more turmoil governments are inviting for themselves. The natives are getting restless.

I recently received an odd, frantic email from some wannabe politico in search of a conservative blogger who would write a column about Obamacare and jobs to save Tom Corbett’s re-election campaign from itself. As if such a Column to End All Columns could be written.

I don’t want to be too hard on this fellow, as I too sometimes suffer from wannabe-ism. Far less so than in the past, as I become more jaded and more likely to just give up and flee the state. I have little hope for an electorate that thought “binders full of women” was a substantive and revealing gotcha against Romney. I’m still not even exactly sure what that binders thing was all about.
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Embattled PA Governor Tom Corbett signed the annual budget bill several days late, line-item vetoing some appropriations for the Legislature, instructing them to fix the state employee pension system. He did so in style.

You're number one!

You’re number one!

It pains me greatly that Corbett will probably lose re-election. And while he can certainly be blamed in part for poor relationships with the legislative leaders, the cold hard fact is that the Legislature deserves an unambiguous middle finger.

They have not passed pension reform.
They have not passed liquor privatization, or even “modernization”, the near-beer version of de-Sovietizing our idiotic laws regarding the sale of alcohol.

This is, by the way, and ostensibly Republican-controlled Legislature.

Heaven forbid they enact Paycheck Protection, one of the only things that could blunt the institutional power of the commie labor unions that really control this state.

I know the legislators are pissed. I know they can’t wait until Tom Wolf is Governor so they can raise taxes and spend until the cows come home, and go on pretending that nothing is wrong.

Word of warning to the NRCC – watch for collateral damage. Case study: Melissa Hart.

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If Toomey made a deal with the devil Bloomberg, as many suspect, it’s already biting him in the butt.

The deal, I presume, was that MAIG would stop running the “bad” ad.

Ok, great.

But now they’re running a “good” ad.  A kiss of death ad.  An ad that will continually remind every GOP primary voter what he did, twisting the knife a little.

Deals with the devil never really turn out the way you hope.

In a phrase: corporate cronyism.

More broadly, a glib lack of seriousness about policy.

I was trucking along with this Buckley Carlson column just fine… Obama hypocritically bending environmental rules and helping to bail out the oil refinery in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania as a cold political bribe to solidify light-blue PA’s 20 electoral votes

Then I got to the end:

It is a model of efficiency I hope the Romney administration is capable of emulating — without the demagoguery.

I don’t know if Carlson is serious or not.  Snark is difficult to pull off in a written medium.   He seems serious to me though.

I’m certainly glad the Marcus Hook refinery might remain open, but I’m not very happy about how it happened.

What she would want to see is an environmental policy that is consistent and makes sense so that everybody knows the rules.  Sunoco never should have been put in the situation where it would plan to shed refineries.  We should not see political favoritism in regulation, and we should not want to see state bailouts (–no thank you, Governor Corbett) of private industry.

 

 

 

Cartels in NEPA?

Posted: February 19, 2012 by doubleplusundead in WTF Is Wrong With PA

Holy chit, hispanic kid damn near took off a black kid’s hand with a machete in Wilkes-Barre.  These are young high schoolers.  Yikes.

Fuck you. Goblinfuck you with recycled fuckwipes for tolerating this clown to represent you. Fuck you for continuing your descent into poverty and not doing anything about it. Fuck you for continuing to vote for the dickheads who use violence as a debate strategy. And fuck you because I am sick of seeing towns such as you mooch off of others, and then threaten us if we don’t toe your line.

The Archbishop of the Diocese of Denver, Charles J. Chaput, will be installed as Archbishop of Philadelphia on September 8.  I think it’s a good move for Philadelphia; Archbishop Chaput doesn’t tolerate the sort of scandal that has overshadowed Cardinal Rigali’s leadership.

I’m very fond of Archbishop Chaput and will miss him terribly, and I know many members of the Archdiocese of Denver feel the same way.  He’s very down-to-earth and does an excellent job of explaining things in terms everyone can understand.   And you can’t miss how much he cares for each and every person he meets – there’s an immediate undeniable connection, and it’s obvious that he has an incredible devotion to his flock.

We’ll be praying for Archbishop Chaput to have the strength and wisdom to take on the difficulties the Church faces in Philadelphia.

(1) WSJ informs us that the unemployment rate of 8.9% is after adjusting for the reduced size of the labor force.  If we assume the same size labor force as we had before the recession, we’d be looking at 11.5% official unemployment.

(2) Sebelius more-or-less admits to double-counting the Medicare cuts in Obamacare:

(3) WTF is wrong with Philly?  The Philadelphia Republican committee is not even bothering to put up a RINO for mayor, and they are chasing down a genuine Democrat instead.  I guess we’re beyond the “In Name Only” stuff.  C’mon, guys…

(4) Mazda is recalling 2009 and 2010 model Mazda6’s because –get this– “a certain type of spider” that “may weave a web in the evaporative canister vent line and this may cause a restriction in the line.

One of the things that makes me laugh/cringe is how today’s progressives/leftists and yesterday’s racists all seem to have the same goals.

Case in point.

A Pennsylvania high school says some students are separated by race, gender and language for a few minutes each day in an effort to boost academic scores, raising controversy over the historically contentious issue of segregation in schools.

The initiative is a pilot program intended to capitalize on “enriching students’ experiences through mentoring” and is derived from school research “that shows grouping black students by gender with a strong role model can help boost their academic achievement and self esteem,” according to a statement from McCaskey East High School in Lancaster.

So, segregation is good now?

The balkanization of America is chugging along.

I can understand why, it worked so well in the Balkans.