I have a very red face

I've been Snopesed.

I wish to make it known that my previous post was wrong. Reagan never said that in his diary. The quote attributed to Reagan's diary was actually from a satire article in the New Republic written by Michael Kinsley.

Even Reagan knew

Despite being accurately described as an "amiable dolt" and despite being in late stage Alzheimer's while in office, Reagan knew the truth about the Shrub. This is how Reagan, in his recently released diaries, described our current President:

May 17, 1986

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

And to think that said ne'er-do-well got elected to the highest office in the land. Twice. This chickenhawk draft dodger who has never worked a hard day in his life now runs the free world. Oh, wait, that's not what happened, is it? His rich oil buddies puppet masters stole two elections fair and square.

God Bless America? The Greatest Nation On The Face Of The Earth? My ass.

Well . . . what can I say, eh?

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Why I'm not a believer

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion."
-- Steven Weinberg, Nobel prize-winning physicist.

By way of background, I was raised Catholic in a family that had a healthy dose of convert zeal. Of course, I was force-fed all of the usual Catholic dogma. You know, Jesus came to Earth to save me because I'm a worthless sinner, the Pope and his priests are his representatives on Earth to whom I have to pay my extortion money tithe and confess my sins. I was told that the Bible (which I now call the "buy-bull") was the literal and inerrant word of God and that I had to obey every last one of its Commandments under pain of eternal hellfire and damnation.

Even though I was always a bit suspicious of these claims and was always told that the post-Vatican II Church was more "open," I quickly learned that questioning and skepticism were not permitted. This post was originally going to be all about the numerous internal contradictions and historical inaccuracies in the buy-bull that render laughable any claim to its divine providence, but the great Richard Dawkins can explain all of that much better than I can.

What follows are two parts of a BBC documentary featuring Dawkins. About midway through the second one, he neatly sums up as "barking mad" the idea of Jesus' substitutionary atonement. For the uninitiated, this is the idea that God took human form and came to Earth to be tortured and killed for Adam's "sin" of not following an impossible-to-adhere-to law that god himself supposedly created.

I could not have said it better myself.





Having mostly (but by no means completely) shaken the fetters of Catholicism off of my mind, I now live my life by the following four Commandments:

1. Question Everything.
   
2. Believe nothing upon insufficient evidence.
3. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
4. That which can be believed without evidence can also be rejected without evidence.
   

To the "stay and fight" crowd

Many of my progressive brethren have responded that I should not leave the country. They say that it would be be better for all concerned if I and others like me stayed here and fought the good fight for what we believe in.

There is a big part of me who feels that way. After all, opposing things like the erosion of a woman's right to choose, the gutting of our consumer protection statutes, and the wholesale handover of the government and the people's wealth to moneyed special interests are all worthy goals.

How have we done, eh? Well, let's take a look. Here are a few random examples plucked out of thin air:

• In this case and this case, the U.S. Supreme Court made it more difficult to shareholders to sue companies for securities fraud. Check out this article about Tellabs.
• In another anti-consumer, pro-big business ruling, the U.S. Supreme court weakened the already very thin protections of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
• Speaking of the FCRA, the GOP-led Congress threw consumers a bone with the FACT Act - minus a private right of action. In other words, mere commoners have no recourse if the credit reporting giants ignore the law, as they are wont to do.
  
• Prior to the election, Congress was poised to undo state laws that allowed consumer victims of identity theft to put a "freeze" on their credit reports. The bill, with the Orwellian title of the Financial Data Protection Act, would have preempted the laws.
  
• The California Supreme Court ruled, in In re Tobacco II Cases, that the First Amendment and the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act protect the rights of cigarette makers to market their wares to children.
  

By contrast, the Supreme Court of Canada, in Canada (Attorney General) v. JTI-MacDonald Corp. unanimously upheld a Canadian law that mandates graphic, full-color warnings and more on all packs of cigarettes.

The Canadian law has very sharp teeth in it. Directors and officers of tobacco companies personally face fines of up to $300,000 per day and/or imprisonment for up to two years for each day a violation by their company is committed. Imposing those kinds of personal penalties on corporate executives in America is unheard of and unfathomable.

Believe me when I tell you, dear reader, that I could could go on for many hours about the damage wrought to consumers, the environment and the Constitution over the past 20 years. Suffice it to say that things have gone from bad to worse. They're quickly moving from worse to horrible to intolerable.

And I've had enough.

Why should I stay and fight a losing battle against the Bush cabal and the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court when I can go someplace that is more in keeping with my values?

News Item: Americans moving to Canada at 30 year high

This post started life as a "why I want to move to Canada" one.

Then, I saw this story. Read the article. More importantly, read the comments. They illustrate much better than I can how far the country of my birth has fallen. I came away feeling like if this is what my country has been reduced to, then I know I'm making the right decision. My hand remains firmly wrapped around the ejection handle, ready to pull it at the first opportunity.

If my countrymen are so stupid as to embrace their corrupter, then there is no hope and it's time to give somewhere else a try. Likely, many of those people still support the Resident despite having lost their jobs, health insurance and retirements under this abomination, I mean administration.

They believe the USA is still The Greatest Nation On The Face Of The Earth despite an entire litany of sins (Iraqi invasion, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial or evidence, "enhanced interrogation techniques," Abu Ghraib) that have made it an international pariah and have a lot of people believing that it got what it deserved on September 11, 2001. The release of the CIA's "family jewels" confirmed what we knew to be true about the U.S. being a rogue state and international bully.

I am fully aware that Canada is far from perfect and far from a utopian paradise. People flat-out suck no matter where you go. The difference, though, is that Canada has not been overrun by a rampant paranoia that renders its government's every decision immune from scrutiny.

And it doesn't have an obsession with being TGNOTFOTE. From what I've seen, the Canadian attitude is, "you know, we have it pretty darn good here. But there's undoubtedly a lot of room for improvement. What can we do to improve our lot?"

By contrast, the American attitude seems anymore to be that criticism, even well-deserved, equals treason and a willingness for the "tur-rists" to win. This is not a country I recognize, not one whose many egregious transgressions I want to be a party to and not one I want to live in.

Guess this means Canada it is. Take a deep breath, submit piles of paperwork and hope for the best.

Well, I guess I'm supposed to post something here, eh?

So this is where I tell a little about myself and why I'm publishing this damn thing. I think I read somewhere that's what this whole blogging business is all about.

Here's a bit about my background. I've lived in Seattle since 1995. Prior to that, I lived in Spokane, where I grew up. I started school at Eastern Washington University. Eventually, I used those credits to get an Associate of Arts degree from Green River Community College in Auburn.

Realizing that I needed to get the hell out of Low Wage Hell and make some real money right now, I put off finishing my Bachelor's and picked up a paralegal certificate from Edmonds Community College. I highly recommend that program for anyone who wants to become a paralegal, especially if you don't have any prior legal knowledge experience.

My first paralegal job was for an attorney who did insurance company defense work. For the uninitiated, we got appointed to represent drivers who got sued because their insurance company took eminently reasonable and defensible positions like denying liability for rear-end or DUI collisions. In other words, gutter law. About the only worse practice areas would be collections (i.e., garnishing the wages of people working for Wal-Mart) or landlord-tenant (kicking poor families out on the street).

The attorney I worked for treated me and all of the other employees very poorly. After giving us our assignments for the day, my boss would come back screaming about some pseudo-emergency that Had To Be Taken Care Of RIGHT NOW. Later, of course, bossie would scream at us for not completing all of the assignments we were told to put aside for the Emergency. Later, I found out that her average paralegal worked for this attorney for all of six months. I at least beat that number. I later filed a bar complaint against my ex-boss. You just can't treat people like they're your and expect them to cover up your mistakes for you, yanno?

Since then, I've been doing a legal writing gig. It's pretty nice, my office is wherever my laptop and I happen to be. And I get to occasionally slip smart-ass headlines past my editor, such as "RJR wants Seattle to Butt Out of Cigarette Sampling." It's not a bag gig my any means. If anyone out there wants to see samples of my work, feel free to email me and I'll send them right over.

That's all for now. It's late. I'm going to bed.