S.B. 1959 / H.R. 1955

The Honorable Claire McCaskill
Hart Senate Office Building
SH-717
Washington, DC 20510
FAX (202) 228-6326

Dear Senator McCaskill,

I am writing to you today to state my firm opposition to Senate Bill 1959 (counterpart HR 1955) and urge you most strongly and sincerely to vote against it.

SB 1959 also goes by the name “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007,” and the potential for future abuse of its powers are enormous and frightening. As a trained journalist I can tell you that the bill contains dire implications for freedom of speech, and as such should be rendered unconstitutional.

The bill seeks to ferret out those who use, or plan to use, or threaten to use “force or violence.” That phrase is so wide-open as to invite a broad range of interpretation. Definitions like “bodily harm” or “personal property damage” do not appear anywhere, nor does it specify that “force” need be physical in nature. What does that mean? Is a peaceful protest using force? What if a group is sitting in the street or on a sidewalk, blocking 
traffic? Is that “using force?” Should that designate any of these protesters as a “homegrown terrorist?” If they are found to be “homegrown terrorists,” what Constitutional rights to they maintain? Are they considered “Enemy Combatants” at this point?

As it stands now, it would create congressional commission empowered to hold hearings, conduct investigations, and gather and hear evidence. The commission is to propose new legislation enabling punitive action against both the groups and the individuals who are associated with them. The language of SB1959 also 
allows multiple, simultaneous hearings in different parts of the country. The bill does not define terrorist 
behavior, instead leaving those definitions up to the Commission. The language is so vague: “homegrown 
terrorism” is “planning” or “threatening” to use force to promote a political objective...that just thinking about doing something could be enough to merit the terrorist label.

Although the bill gives a nod to Constitutional rights, we now live in a country which has Free Speech Zones for the first time in living memory. According to history and court precedent, the Free Speech Zone is, in actuality, the soil of the United States of America.

I implore you to do everything within your power to block this legislation from being enacted.

“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”


- Benjamin Franklin, July 4, 1776

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Google HR 1955 and decide if you need to call your Senators.

The Ron Paul Debate Game

HA!

Ron Paul is having a bit of trouble in his campaign. Fox (to many bloggers, "Faux") won't include him on any debates, ever. The first time they said there was "no room in the studio" (it was a bus), and the next one they excluded him from was at St. Anslem College. I seriously doubt there's "no room" there. From the Baltimore Sun:

Ron Paul supporters, out in the cold

by Jason George

MANCHESTER, N.H.—St. Anselm College shut down its campus to uninvited visitors for Sunday night’s Republican forum on the Fox News Channel, forcing a group of about 20 Ron Paul supporters to stand at the school’s entrance to protest their candidate’s exclusion from the forum.

Louis Devlugt, 27, of Trenton, N.J., called Fox's decision not to invite Paul “terrible,” adding, “We need to get active again as citizens and become the media.”

Paul was at the Manchester airport at debate time, flying out to California for a Monday appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

Jesse Benton, Paul’s national spokesman who was traveling with the candidate, expressed their frustrations with Fox over the snub.

“I don’t know why they would exclude Dr. Paul when he outpolls Fred Thompson in New Hampshire, he beat Rudy Giuliani in Iowa and raised more money than all of them this past quarter,” Benton said. “By all metrics, Dr. Paul belongs.” 

I also thought the "Paulites" (or "Paultards," depending on your point of view) were reveling in the idea of being the underdog in a giant conspiracy...you know, not that he could actually be, say, losing or anything. (I always pick the losing candidate. The one time I got the one I wanted, she reversed all her positions within six months and sold out COMPLETELY to the local land developers. Sigh.) 

However, I'm finding a lot of people posting stuff on YouTube. You know that "20 people" they talk about in the article above? The video looked more like 75-100. What gives with that? It also seems the local code enforcement officials out in Florida are sending out citations to anyone displaying a Ron Paul for President sign, telling them to remove it or face $1,000 per day fine. (Search "not Ron Paul" on the YouTube site) One man had displayed lots of political signs on his fence...a Congressional race, the Sheriff's race, a couple of other local ones. One day he came home and all his Ron Paul signs were gone. He went to campaign HQ and got some more. He got a citation from the County that threatened to fine him if he didn't take them down.

Another woman put Ron Paul signs all over her truck and she received the same citation, and threat of a $1,000 per day fine.

And finally, another man put up a small yard sign in his grass, and either the city or county came around and said that he had to remove the sign or pay $50. The statute says that either the candidate or someone designated by the candidate must pay the "deposit" until all the signs with the candidate's name are taken down after the election. The homeowner says he's confused, he's not part of the campaign or on the candidate's payroll, so he shouldn't have to pay. The local news media, amazingly, couldn't seem to get anyone from the city/county on the phone to explain.

The next thing I want to know, and don't, is if this kind of stuff is happening to ALL the candidate supporters. How many Hillary Clinton supporters have been cited and told to remove their signs? 

Now proving that they have a sense of humor, the Ron Paul supporters have devised The Ron Paul Debate Game. It works like a drinking game, using the debates. You donate a dollar to the Ron Paul campaign every time:

Rudy Guiliani says "9/11" or "September 11th."

John McCain says "my friend" or "my friends."

Mike Huckabee mentions God.

Mitt Romney mentions he's a "businessman" (without mentioning the Bain Capitol mess)

The debate moderator asks if Paul will run 3rd Party.

Optional: Any time Ron Paul mentions "Constitution" during a debate.

@ The Movies

Oh my. I'm so very behind on the news....

Tonight I went to the Graphic Design Meetup Group, for the first time in a long time. They used to have it somewhat nearby and then moved it so far towards downtown that it would be a 70-mile trip for me to make it...alone, at night, in the city. Um...no.

So anyway, they noticed a precipitous drop in attendance, and decided to have two meetings and more or less split the locations, one meeting downtown and the other closer to the 'burbs. So I made up a lasagna and threw it in the fridge for Doug to heat up and I went.

Nothing spectacular happened (though I'm proud to say that I left my business cards at home. Nice. Really a swift move to make when you're at a networking event, don't you think?), though I did have an interesting conversation with someone who took a break from design work to make a movie. It's not a huge budget sort of thing, but it sounded really interesting...I mean, how many people take time off to produce a movie? So what kind of movie? In a nutshell, a woman wakes up in a pit of mud on a construction site, with no idea who she is or what happened to her, although it appears that she's been beaten up and left for dead. She spends most of her time going on a quest to figure out what has happened. There's a male character who appears throughout the movie who's "trying to help her, although, as the audience, you're not sure if he's really helping her or going after her," she says. There are a few paranormal instances thrown in, weird flashbacks which, inexplicably, seem to be set in the 1850s, and you're not sure if your heroine is remembering being a character in a movie, has been reincarnated, has gone completely insane....and there's a twist and a surprise ending, which obviously you're not going to reveal to a complete stranger standing there in Starbucks. Makes total sense to me. 

I asked how she was going to distribute this movie...she says probably via a couple of film festivals and some private screenings and such. I'd have no idea how to go about such a thing. 

She says all of it was shot here in and around St. Louis. The interior church scenes were shot at SLU's St Francis Xavier College Church, which is a positively amazing venue. And so many of the scenes just fell together so nicely, it was eerie. "About a week before shooting, we still didn't have a place to shoot the opening," she says. "We were hoping to find a church that had some construction going on, so we could do the mud pit scene with all the construction stuff there in the shot. All the churches I kept contacting were either uncomfortable with it or couldn't for various reasons. And one day I go driving and a church right next door to me suddenly has scaffolding up, so....it took me four days to get a hold of the right person, but once I did they were like, 'Sure, no problem.' And it was great, the day we were there the real-life construction crews were doing work, so we had our actors in hard hats in the foreground, and in the background we had real construction workers climbing around and all their heavy equipment." I can't imagine what that would have cost if she'd had to hire all the extras, and the set, not to mention the equipment. 

Some of the other scenes were also shot around Old Town St Charles, a place I know and like quite well. They had a lot of people dressed in period clothing to do the scenes, and used a bed and breakfast which was already decorated for the right time period. Everyone was totally cooperative with the whole thing...she says her parents came to visit her for a few weeks and they got to come to the set to watch her work. They were a little worried about the movie (I mean, what, she's filming something in someone's backyard?), but she says that night they'd set up on Main Street on one of the cafe patios, "fogged the whole thing over, and we had like an 80-foot crane with a huge spotlight shining down, like it was moonlight."

"What did your parents think?"

She thought for a moment. "I think they were impressed, you know, it wasn't something like they'd been worried about, and that night we were able to just sort of sit in the corner of the patio and watch all the scenes unfold."

There's a preview of the movie on YouTube. It's called Shadowlands. 

So that was my evening. Before that I had SUCH a good time at home; I scrubbed out the shower, gave the kids a bath, cleaned out the litterboxes to the nth degree, and did five loads of laundry and three loads of dishes. Glad I didn't have any pressing client issues going on!

We went to Eagle Days again, and this time Lauren wanted to come. David likes to go because he actually LIKES eagles. He's kinda got this raptor thing going. Lauren wanted to go simply because David was going. So of course she's freezing to death and whining and complaining and essentially ruining it for everyone else. I REALLY don't think I'm taking her next year. Heck, David might not want to go next year. Who knows? 

At any rate, I DO have more news, but frankly, it's getting late, so I'll catch up a bit more later.

Cell Phone Obituaries

____________________

Palm Treo died January 9th from complications of a cracked screen. A freak accident involving a 24-inch drop to the carpet resulted in the fatality. No children were involved. 

No services will be held for the Treo. Burial plans are for inclusion in the Cell Phones for Soldiers program.

____________________

10 bonus points to anyone who can predict what this means for Kelly's cell phone situation.

Car shoes and horseshoes

My van decided it needed new shoes. We noticed that it started...er...riding a little rough. Actually, as I explained to the mechanic, "It feels like someone glued a tennis ball to one of the wheels."

So we took it in and they said that the tread on the back tires was now shot and the steel belt was trying to separate from the tire. That's the same thing that happened to the front tires, and all of those were strange Chinese brands I'd never heard of. Goody. So in addition to the two new front tires the van got in July, it now has two new back tires. (And I, of course, have substantially less cash in my business account.)

Since the van was getting new shoes, I didn't have a mode of transportation for the day, so we were quite stuck. That's not so bad...yesterday was so nice weather-wise (it was 70 degrees!) that I really didn't have the heart to coop David up in the house and make him learn anything, so I released both kids into the backyard. (It's been cold and they were getting stir-crazy, so I didn't even have to shove them out the door...it was definitely more of a catch and release program.) They had a great time. So did the weather last night...it got downright nasty, and we were right on the edge of a vicious storm system. We had high winds, a ton of lightening, absolute sheets of rain, and a little hail. We had the weather up on the TV and the computer for most of the evening; we were under everything from severe thunderstorm warnings to tornado watches until dawn. 

While there were tornadoes outside, I had a couple of tornadoes inside. Lauren decided to get all cute and act hyper and she broke...BROKE!...our desk in the living room. I said something about the fact that I was going to make lunch and she swung off the chair and tried to hang off the keyboard tray and busted it. She didn't just pull it off the track, the actually sheared the plastic brackets off the tray, leaving the screw behind in the wood. Both of us were absolutely livid, and Doug wanted to take the computer away entirely. The compromise is that they can't use anything in the house AT ALL before earning it back. (David has culpability in this since I've caught him leaning on the keyboard tray; I think he probably cracked it at some point and weakened it enough that Lauren was able to break it.) They earn things back by taking care of their own stuff, let alone the big stuff like furniture. They have to pick up after themselves. We took their little chairs away, and they have to sit on the floor for awhile. There's no TV, no computer. We also took away their seats at the table...they got to eat on the floor with the cats (much to the cats' delight) and wash their own plates and put them away when they were done, not to mention sweep up the crumbs. I let them back at the table this morning, mostly for schoolwork. (We did a review on tally marks, graphing and story problems, and then I decided to skip the next several chapters and picked back up with definitions of "sum" and "difference," and working with numbers lines and multiple addends. (i.e., 2+1+4) He had a devil of a time with a story problem; turns out in the end he was confused because instead of writing out the word "dog," the publisher of the book had place a little illustration of a dog in the sentences. So it read "The first (dog) has a red collar. The next three (dog) have blue collars. How many collars in all?" Finally, David says, "Mom, I don't understand. What's a Three-Dog?" We put an "s" behind the illustration and suddenly the sun broke through and he totally got it. "Oh! DOGS! We need two more, so...four.")

You'd think someone else would have seen this before. 

Oh, and the newest from Lauren is that she would like to take piano lessons, please, though any instrument would be OK. And she'd like a horse. Preferably an appaloosa. With a pink horse blanket. "And a rope around his waist." Why? "So I can ride him," she says, with an air of someone forced to speak to a lower life form. Oh. Of course. My bad.

Scouts and Doubts

We had the Den meeting at our house last night, which did NOT turn out very well. At least on our part.

I spent most of the last week cleaning up our wretched mess of a house (seriously, how does it get looking like this?), and in the end I was throwing crap into boxes and pushing them into the master bedroom. A lot of it is LLL stuff; a large box of nursing clothes for a now-defunct fundraising effort. A "sales box" filled with a few slings and a couple of books. A huge library of books which only a few people check out and which nevertheless weighs a ton and I end up dragging from meeting to meeting. A rolling file folder filled with "information sheets" which you need to have on hand for the moms who come to the meetings. I wish we had a central office where all the groups could meet on any day of the week where all this crap could be kept. But of course the rent for such a facility would be astronomical. Sigh.

So anyway, I actually got MOST of the stuff picked up and at least moved to another room, the table(s) in the kitchen cleared off and Windex'd, and the carpet (at least up to the kids' room) vacuumed.

I didn't have much time by the time all that was done; I had most of the materials for the catapults put into a baggie, but other than that, I had no fasteners. I ran downstairs and dug up a box of nails and few little screws and a tube of silicone caulk which we had gotten for the laminate floor. The would have to make due with it; I had planned to have it all pre-drilled and such so that they could just follow from A to B, but I never got the chance. I found something obscene like five hammers (why so many hammers?), three screwdrivers and a jigsaw.

In all, only three other Scouts came to the meeting. I know one kid had basketball lessons that night, another was hyper-allergic to cats, and someone else was coming down with a cold. The rest just never showed.

I did have two other dads and a mom there, and two other little sisters came so Lauren had someone to play with. The other two girls spotted Lauren's play kitchen and descended on it like pink locusts. JOY!

I caught myself going into "teacher mode" with the catapults. I kept asking what they thought about one thing or another, what do you need to HOLD whatever you're going to throw, how would you extend the handle, which of these things has stored energy in it to be able to launch something, how would you raise the catapult, etc. The dads helped the kids build the stuff, and most everyone opted for the caulk. You'd think that was a good idea, but in reality, all the catapults fell apart with it. We experimented with rubber bands, but the nails and the screws ended up splitting the wood, since we didn't have pilot holes drilled. So they ended up with catapults which fell apart, which they were dismayed at. I tried to turn that around by saying, "OK, that didn't work. Now take it home and improve the design. Change things, do it a different way, try new things." Thankfully the Den Leader came completely prepared with his own project, which were really, really cool stands for their Pinewood Derby cars. HE also had them pre-drilled AND color-coded, and the boys put them together in nothing flat. So everyone had one failed project, and one successful project. They're supposed to make their Derby cars next, so all in all, that's probably a good balance...not every little thing they try is going to work right off the bat, but that doesn't mean that you put your tools away and never touch the again.

Speaking of the pinewood derby, David is still wanting a Triceratops derby car. We're going to have to build it this weekend, so I should probably spend tonight charging up my cordless drill. AND going to get the paints and such. I saw a wonderful tip in a book about those cars...get TWO of them. Then while you work on one, your kid works on the other. That way YOU aren't building HIS car, but he gets to watch what you're doing and follow suit. I thought that was very clever.

We did one of the Den activities after that, and David managed to lure the rest of the kids over while the adults were packing up and pretty soon every last one of them were on the floor playing Crossbows and Catapults, which he got for Christmas. (This was a Doug idea. "My problem is that I've never been a six year old little boy," I told him, "So I don't know what the penultimate in cool would be." This is how David ended up with not only the catapult game, but also a Nerf Target Shooting set and his own set of bows and arrows. I have more missiles at my house than you can shake a stick at.

David is currently earning his Swimming belt loop for Scouts. Which means that we're all sitting here watching him (and most of Dens 4 and 2) swarm around in the pool and kick their way through 25 feet of water and learn the basics of water safety. As unofficial, volunteer sorta-secretary, this means I get to bring the laptop and record who comes. After this I need to drop off something at Doug's work for him, and then we're going to tour the renovated JCC, which I haven't been a member of since...oh, since David was about two years old. But I'd like to see the place and they're trying to lure people back, so...maybe now is a good time to be more healthy. Maybe.

Speaking of health...our health insurance went up again. Now we're paying $775/mo for all of us to have insurance, and all of it comes out pre-tax AND at the first of the month...which is when all of our bills come due, so Doug's paycheck comes in extra-small and can't cover our expenses, so we end up bouncing checks and/or paying late on everything, which gets various services (like trash pickup) shut off periodically, and certainly incurs late fees on a regular basis.

When Doug started the job two years ago, insurance was only $550/mo....so while he's not getting a cost of living increase or raise of any kind, our expenses keep rising.

Apparently this is hardly news for most anybody. I've seen a couple of studies that say company-sponsored health-care costs went up about 11% in 2004, another 10% the next year and 8% in 2006. Companies have to pay about $8.500 per year for family coverage. Looking at our medical + dental, we're looking at a cost of $9,263. For us, that's about $6,500 out of pocket per year. And the thing that really galls me is that we tend to pay even more out of pocket for the privilege of staying out of the health-care system. Like say....$1.500 for a midwife, so I don't have to go through another $5,000 insurance-paid hospital stay. We tend to really not even utilize the doctor's office. The most obvious exception to that is the gallstone surgery, for which I remain deeply grateful.

I'm about to look into individual health care plans, to see what's out there. I don't know what I can get, but it should be interesting to find out. I know we can pick higher deductibles and such, but I don't know what the savings look like pre-tax versus post-tax, and especially versus covered and non-covered. Because we're younger, it will probably tend to be less, but I know that won't always be so. We'll have to be sure to find out when/if we can re-enroll if we drop. We would both love to ax the health insurance for a couple of years and put that money into our debts to get rid of them all, and then go back to being insured like a normal person. But that isn't very prudent, and we know it.

Can I quit being a grownup now? This part is no fun.