The Triumph of the Proletariat

(or something)

Politics have endlessly fascinated me since the 1984 presidential elections, when I was <> 10.

My mother was a freelance reporter for our little tiny town weekly, and as part of that, she covered the local government councils, a village and a township. I went, whenever I could talk her into it, and had lots of questions on the way home. Even at 10-11-12, I thought that the township trustees were petty, back-biting, bickering brats, and the village council members were hoity-toity.

But the political process has continued to fascinate me, and the fact that we as citizens can contribute to that process with not just our money and our votes, but with our voices....well, at 34, I still think it is pretty freaking amazing.

A few weeks ago, I posted about Ohio's budget crisis, and the plan that our Democratic Governor, Ted Strickland, proposed to lawmakers, which would result in our state-run libraries operating next fiscal year with 50% of the budget of the previous fiscal year. I urged one and all to visit SaveOhioLibraries.com, where further information is available about how you can tell your Ohio elected official just what you thought of the plan to cut the libraries to such a devastating low.

I am proud, and humbled, by the number of people from Ohio (and beyond, too, impressively) who wrote to their local state reps, and to Gov Strickland, telling them was an abysmal idea the funding cuts were. Strickland spoke out vehemently against this public outcry, claiming he wasn't going to budge an inch on his proposed budget.

The folks elected to the Ohio State House and Ohio State Senate, however, recognized political suicide when they saw it.

In the end, the state cut 84 million dollars from the budget of Ohio's 251 library systems; painful, yes, but not as devastating as Strickland's proposed 227 million dollars. The state-wide protests, held in front of libraries and in Columbus on the steps of the capital, not only made noise, they got attention. National news coverage. I heard, although I have no source for this, that the telephone systems at the state house were so overwhelmed with the number of citizens calling to protest that they crashed a few times during this period.

So yea, I'm feeling pretty damn triumphant, and proud. A little of my faith in our system of government has been restored; they listened. It worked just like it ought to. Our elected officials work for us after all!

Power to the people, y'all!

Not as you think.

A few years ago, when my nephew made his First Communion, I sat at my sister-in-law's house and talked to her in-laws. They're conservative Catholic folk, and therefore in general, we don't see eye-to-eye. I try, really, I do, to keep my liberal lefty opinions to myself, but I don't always succeed.

As I talked to her brother-in-law about politics and public policy, the conversation turned towards some of my pet issues; the death penalty, among other things.  Eventually, he sat back, laughed, and said to me, "You are NOT as liberal as you think you are."

I told him we'd have to agree to disagree on that.  But.....

Last night, as I was driving home, I heard just a portion of this story, enough to make me remember to seek out the full audio and listen later.  It is about the drug problem in Mexico, and the official response of the United States' government to the same.

My gut reaction to this was annoyance, and I surprised myself by saying to the radio, "and this is MY problem, as a US taxpayer, how exactly?"  No, me talking to the radio was not the surprise. I do that all the time.

I don't take illegal drugs.  (Nope, I save my money for the legal ones, eyeroll.)  The drug cartels in Mexico aren't what we need to be spending taxpayer money on right now, people.  It annoys me that Mexico has its hand out, looking for money from the United States to solve problems in Mexico, of Mexican creation.  Their police force is corrupt.  Their jails are apparently a sham.  The cartels run things any way they see fit, committing murder, kidnappings, extortion....and they want the United States to fix this?  Buh?

And wow, that is about the most conservative right-leaning thing I've ever typed OR said.

I understand the argument that without the United States and the voracious appetite on this side of the border for cocaine and weed, there wouldn't be a drug problem in Mexico, but with respect, I disagree.  There's a market for illegal drugs the world over, and it was a very long time ago that the US had the largest population in the world.  After China, and India, the United States ranks third in population size, and somewhere, someone besides Americans on American soil, are buying Mexican product.

When did the US become the world's ATM?  Why does the perception that we have oodles of money to be handing out over every third-world nation conundrum persist?  GLOBAL Financial Crisis, anyone?

This all makes me wonder, too, if I would feel differently (i.e. more leftist) about this issue if the US economy were not hemorrhaging jobs at an alarming rate and several of our biggest industries - financial, automobile manufacturing - weren't on the precipice of complete disaster. 

I'd like to think so.

A Nation Divided

I was talking about the election with some colleagues.  We were debating whether or not we would know the results by Thursday morning.  (My vote is NO, btw.  I am fairly sure that we're going to face a Bush vs. Gore-esq long-term battle.)  Someone pointed out that there hasn't been a landslide election in a very long time, that the results tend to be 51%/49%.  I hadn't thought about it in that way in a while, but he's not wrong.

That divide is part of what makes the democracy work; I can have my opinion, you can have yours, and the twain need never meet.  Neither party involved in my example is afraid to make our opinions known, we hold the freedom of speech as a sacred right.

A tangent - - I've noted frequently on these pages that I am sick unto death of campaigns, political ads, hoopla and hullaballo.  Sick. Of. It.  And I'm a junkie when it comes to all things political.  We're all sick of it, and yet, what is the chatter around the water cooler?  The election.  Politics.  Red vs. Blue, conservative vs. liberal, what should be done about the financial crisis by those in charge, voting.  We bitch about how sick of the whole mess we are, and then the conversation turns right back to the election.  Human nature, I guess.

Back to the point.  This divide shows itself on election day more than any other.

Ohio allowed early voting this year, and I took advantage of that.  Honestly, they could allow it every year and I wouldn't know.  It has been in the news, though.  I did it this year because along with a long battle for us to know who the winner is, I think that there will be a record turnout for voting this year, and like every other red-blooded 'merican, I don't like standing in line.

The county board of elections is housed in a reclaimed big box retail store, and it looks like it.  They have panelling dividing the various county departments housed there.  It is ugly.  I was astonished that the parking lot was crowded, not just with cars but with milling people too.  I found a space and coming inside the building, was accosted by a guy working for someone running for a seat on one of the county courts.  The candidate in question has chosen an unfortunate purple-pink-mauve color for his literature.  It is memorable, I'll give him that.  

Inside, the line to get your absentee ballot (which is how they're letting Ohioans vote early, by absentee) was long.  I couldn't see the end of it from the door.  When I got to the end, I thought, "I'm gonna be here all day."  But it moved quickly, and soon I was standing at the counter, ID in hand, and the nice civil servant went searching for me in the voter registration rolls.  I think I waited for that longer than I waited in line.  Dunno why people have so much trouble with the whole hyphenated name thing.  People, it just ain't that tough.

The lighting in that old big-box store is weird.  Either it is too dark to see properly, as in was in the voting "booths", really just partitions where you could stand and darken in your ovals, or it was blinding bright with the florescent lights.  I tried, really did, to take a picture of my ballot with the crackberry, showing who I choose for President, but the bb overcompensated for the lack of light with its built-in flash, and the ballot is too washed out.  Since it did flash and make a bunch of noise, I decided that it probably wasn't smart to continue to try to take pictures.  Disruptive, you know.

I had to wait in line again to turn in the ballot.  The number of people there really gave me hope that this time, finally, more people are taking the right to vote more seriously.  Maybe, for the first time in a while, we will have more than 35% of the eligible population actually vote.  

I have hope.

The chatter in the lines was all Obama, Obama, Obama, if that's any indication of what's going to happen.

I have hope!

Juris

It really is no wonder that the rest of the world thinks Americans are arrogant.

I have read and heard and seen this everywhere over the last few days.  

The son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr., has been convicted of torture, from crimes committed in Liberia.  That's not the problem, that's the good part.  The part that confuses the hell out of me is that he was charged and tried by a court in the United States of America.  

Where the bloody hell do we get jurisdiction over crimes committed in another country, by nationals of said country?

If I recall my lessons in our legal system correctly, in order to have jurisdiction over a case, a court must have some vested interest in the crime.  I.E., it was a crime committed in a particular city, the person charged with the crime lives in a particular township.  This falls far, far, far outside of traditional jurisdictional rules.

From Reuters:

Chuckie Taylor was the first person charged under a law passed in 1994 known as the extraterritorial torture statute, which allows prosecutors to charge a U.S. citizen or someone present in the United States with acts of torture or conspiracy to torture outside the country.

In plain English, then, this law allows American courts to charge non-citizens with crimes not committed in America.  Huh?  How is that legal or possible?

Is what this guy did wrong?  To quote the odious Sarah Palin..."You betcha!"  But this trial makes a mockery of the Human Rights Tribunal in the Hague.  American courts trying non-citizens for crimes not committed in America?  WTF?  That takes away the teeth from organizations like the UNHCR, the Hague courts, and other already existing bodies of judiciary worldwide.

He should be punished for his crimes.  He committed truly evil acts.  I saw this story first on MSN when DH was surfing, heard it on the radio, and then saw it on CNN.  The gory details of what he and his cohorts did disgust me so much that even though there are literally thousands of stories out there on teh interweb that I could link to, I won't, because to read yet another account sickens me so much that I just can't read another one.  

Yes, what he did was wrong.  

Trying him in a court of law in the United States in not the proper redress for those wrongs, though.

Poli-sci-fi

Is there a single soul left in the United States (or, frankly, anywhere on earth) who is not sick unto death of the current US presidential election?  Gah.  And: boooooorrrrrrring.  I'm so over it, and I am a political nut. I started this blog yea those many years ago specifically to write about liberal-lefty-politics and the pro-choice side of the abortion debate.

I have not watched a single one of the debates.  I didn't pay attention to a single second of the conventions over the summer, other than the daily recaps I heard on the morning news as I drove to work.  I can't watch McCain.  I want to throw things at the TV when I do.  DH gets really upset at me hurling things at his flat-screen telly, and I like peace and serenity in my home.  I can't listen to Palin.  I scream obscenities at the radio if she's on.  I am making a good-faith effort (really.  No, seriously!) to clean up my language, so that's not good either.

My issue (abortion) is so decisive for me that I. Will. Not. Ever. vote for someone who is anti-choice.  The McCain/Palin team has made it abundantly clear where they stand on this issue. Truth is, though, that I wouldn't vote for him even if I wasn't such a pro-choice advocate.  He's out of touch with reality, out of step with....well, I was going to type 'the American people' there, but it sounds so pompous that I can't type it with a straight face, so instead I will say that he's out of step with ME.

I usually feel that a presidential election comes down to the choice of a lesser of two evils.  Who of the two candidates is going to do less damage during the 4-8 years they're in office? Yes, yes, there are always more than two, but reality, people, reality.  A third-party candidate has about as much likelihood of getting elected as I do of turning into a pretty pretty fairy princess.  With wings.  

I voted for Hillary in the primaries, because the possibility that there might be a female president in my lifetime is too beautiful to resist.  I didn't think she was going to get the nomination, but I wanted to vote for her.  Then, surprise, surprise, she won Ohio.  I was stunned, I didn't think she had a shot.  

Obviously, then, I will be voting for Barak Obama when it comes time to cast my ballot.  I don't feel bad about that decision in any way, and this time I think it is a choice between hope and evil rather than a choice between the lesser of two evils.  I have a hard time not feeling hopeful when I hear Obama speak.  My local paper (a rag if there ever was one) carries Parade magazine as part of its Sunday inserts, and last week's Parade had a small paragraph about what the tax plans of two candidates would mean for income levels from $10,000-$100,00, broken down in chunks of about 10K.  Under McCain?  My tax liability would stay roughly the same.  Under Obama?  My tax liability would DECREASE by over ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS.  $1,000! How can I say NO to that?  I can't.

It seems surreal to me that there might be a minority in the White House.  I'm excited about that.  So many predictions for the twenty-first century have fallen flat; where are our flying cars?  Our jet-packs?  Our vacations on the moon?  Nowhere, that's where.  But people who have been traditionally disenfranchised gaining more and more political power?  That's here.  Fantastic indeed.

American Civics 101

This is the Tuesday post, brought to you a day late...or a week and a day, since I didn't post one last Tuesday.  You'll see why.

The envelope was your basic #10 business envelope, with a plasticized window for my address to show through.  No indication that this was about to throw a monkey wrench (aside: WTF is a monkey wrench, anyway?) into my life.  The return address said "County X Clerk of Courts."  My heart rate sped up a bit...had I forgotten a city parking ticket, and this was now a warrant for my arrest?  Because they do that if you accumulate enough of them and you don't pay the fines.  I don't remember any recent parking tickets.....

When I ripped it open, however, discarding the rest of the mail into a messy pile on the floor of my car, it said Petit Jury Summons.  Huh, I thought.  I wondered when they'd get around to me.  I've heard people complain my whole life about jury duty, and always claimed that I would serve with nary a complaint when it eventually became my turn.  Jury duty lists are given to the Clerk of Courts from the rolls of registered voters.  A co-worker teased me, "That's what you get for voting!"  'Scuse me for exercising some of my (few remaining) civil rights, I snarked back.  I have been registered to vote since turning 18, and have voted in every election, EVERY ELECTION, since then.  It is a sacred right, as far as I am concerned.  If you don't vote, then don't whine to me about the state of democracy, or your taxes, or anything else that relates to living in this country.

Ooops, tangent.  Sorry.

There was a small white postcard in the envelope, and it promised dire consequences if it was not returned within 5 days.  Since I only check my mailbox about once a week, I was very worried that I'd already missed said deadline.  The mailbox is NOT attached to my house, rather a community group of mailboxes and I'm lazy.  Its too far away.  Accordingly, I filled out the requisite info (name, address, phone numbers) stuck a stamp on it, mailed it, and promptly mostly forgot about it, because it was something like 6 weeks away.

I wrote the date down on the whiteboard calendar in my office, but somehow the notation that I was supposed to serve jury duty never made it into the crackberry's calendar.  While talking to my assistant about big upcoming work things on a Wednesday, I turned to face the whiteboard and realized that no, I couldn't do what I wanted to that Friday, because I had to be at the courthouse.  (heeee, look @ me, I have an assistant!  OK, truth is that I share her with the rest of the office, but still. I so love being able to say MY ASSISTANT!)

This could not really come at a worse possible time for me.  New (relatively, I've been there about 4 months) job, and the biggest thing I'm responsible for is looming large on the horizon.  I love our legal system, and I want to participate in the judicial system in a manner that does not require me to be handcuffed.  But the timing suuuuucks.

When I got to the courthouse that Friday, the jury waiting room was nearly full.  I snagged a seat, pulled out my knitting, and knitted contentedly.  Unlike many other public waiting rooms, this one is nice.  Semi-comfortable chairs.  Soothing decor.  Kinda reminds me a of a doctor's office.  A very very busy and large doctor's office.

After a while, a gentleman with a county ID badge explained the events of the day as they would unfold.  We would go to the judge's courtroom, where he would instruct us about our responsibilities.  Should take about an hour.  'Lawyers,' I thought with amusement.  'Can't do anything without giving themselves a chance to be long-winded.'  After that, there was a questionnaire we were required to fill out, and then we would be free to go.  The questionnaire was not meant to pry into our personal lives, but it was important that we answered every question and answered every question honestly.

The county courthouse was built during a time that America was very impressed with herself, and felt that public buildings should be monuments, beautiful to look at.  It is a glorious structure, marble, granite, and gleaming hardwood everywhere.  I know from the days when I worked for ye olde evile bank as a runner of papers to and from the courthouse that those marble stairs inside the courthouse are slippery.  The judge's courtroom was on a lower floor than the jury waiting room.  I walked carefully down the stairs, taking my time.  The marble balustrades aren't much help if you need support, because they're slippery too.

The courtroom had more grandiose carved wood, and row after row of spectator benches, that reminded me of pews in the churches of my childhood.  Just the kneelers were missing.  It seems so cliche' to say that the courtroom was packed, but it was.  Every single seat was taken, and they even dragged in red leather chairs from somone's office for the standees.  As I looked around, I realized that one of the prosecutors was a good friend from my high school days.  I'd forgotten that he was a DA.  I like to joke about everyone in this town being connected by only 2 degrees of separation, instead of the six that people usually claim.  Its a small place.  There's a good chance that I know a handful of the people in the jury pool as well.

So much of what 'we' as a society know about the legal system is drawn from Law & Order, LA Law, Ally McBeal, insert popular legal show name here.  So it is vastly entertaining that what unfolded next was drawn directly from every court scene you've ever seen in every movie & TV show you've ever watched.  The bailiff was an adorable guy in a really nice suit, sharp red button-down shirt, contrasting tie.  He introduced himself, explained that the judge would be along shortly, and asked us to be patient.  Loudly.  A few seconds later, he shouted, "XYZ County Court of Common Pleas, the honorable Judge Blah Blah presiding.  ALL RISE!!"  Like obedient schoolkids, we did, and because I'm so short, I missed the judge's entrance.  But I heard the bang of the gavel, and the judge's announcement that court was now in session.  "Please be seated." The judge then proceeded to introduce every. single. player. in the courtroom.  The DAs.  The defense attorneys.  The defendant.  The court reporter.  The bailiff.  His secretary from down the hall. (No, really, he did.  That's not me being smart.)  

He spent considerable time explaining to us where 'the media' would be during the trial.  "Media?" I wondered to myself.  "Why?  Wasn't I summoned for civil cases?"  Nope.  Turns out that this was a Very Serious Crime, and we should expect that the media would be involved every step of the way.  

He read the charges against the defendant, 26 (!!!!) of them.  He explained the legal-ese, although I knew most of the terms.  I'm a geek like that.  He then read off the list of reasons that you could be excused from the pool of jurors for this case.  If you knew the defendant.  If you knew any of the people the defendant was accused of committing crimes against.  If you had a recent death in your family.  If you were a cloistered member of a religious organization, or Amish.  If you were addicted to alcohol or drugs.  That one got a chuckle from the crowd; the judge said he rarely had anyone raise their hand for that exclusion.  Wonder why?  Each person that raised their hand for a particular reason was asked to state their name, and then remain when the rest of us went back upstairs to fill in our questionnaires.

Then he spent more than an hour explaining what our duties would entail.  Those pews are hard, and dammed uncomfortable, too.  I started fidgeting, but so was everyone else in my row.  I also had to move my head constantly to be able to see the judge, I was far in the back of the room.  He gave us the line about the questions we had to answer not intending to pry into our lives again.  I think that was the 3rd time someone said that to us.

When he excused us to go back upstairs, I discovered that he'd kept us for 2 hours.

The questionnaire was an exercise in hilarity, because so many of the questions were directly related to my personal life.  

DH was a volunteer firefighter for many years, as were his brother and father.  I promise, this is related, and important to the narrative.  When I met DH, he'd just broken up with a girlfriend who had complained about the time he spent with the fire department.  Noted; don't bitch about the fire department.  Seriously, though, I was very proud of his service to our microscopic community.  That makes it sound like rescuing kittens in trees were the extent of his duties, but truth is that he did actually fight fires.  Many were the times when we were first married that I'd wake to the sound of the tones on the scanner going out, and he'd roll out of bed in the middle of the night.  I'd listen, rarely able to go back to sleep until he returned, unless I could discern that the call was BS.  You could tell when it was a big deal, because the dispatchers would be screaming bloody blue murder, and the first firefighters on the scene would be more serious, more focused, and much, much louder when it was for real.  Only once in all of those years was I worried for his safety, and if memory serves, that was before we were married.  I trusted the crew he ran with, and more importantly, HE trusted them.  With his life.  I respected the hell out of those guys.

So pages 4-15 had questions about firefighters.  What was my opinion of them?  Well, geniuses, I married one, so guess they're OK. It was that same question, asked several different ways through all of those pages.  Did I know any firefighters?  Did I like them?  Had anyone I known ever been injured in a fire?  What did I think of the first responders when that person was injured?

Not trying to pry into my personal life, eh?  Really.

Then there were questions about arson, and here's snag #1 to me serving on this jury.  DH studied to take the state's arson investigator test, and while he was doing that, I read some of the textbooks.  Yeah, yeah.  I'm a voracious reader of nearly everything.  Otherwise known as a dork.

There were questions about my regular reading material, my major in college, my minors, my interests outside of my occupation.  Why did I participate in whatever hobbies or sports those were?  Not trying to pry into my personal life.  Uh-huh.

Finally, the rest of the questions were about the death penalty.  Now, my opinion about the death penalty is probably not what you'd expect from a flaming liberal.  I'm all for it.  In fact, I think it should be expanded to include several crimes other than murder.  Which ones?  Serial rapists for one.  Repeat offender pedophiles for another.  Why?  Well, I don't think that violence against women is taken seriously enough in our society.  Largely, I don't think that you can 'rehabilitate' someone who has raped six women.  How long should we keep trying?  Until he commits his tenth rape?  His 20th?  The pedophiles should be pretty self-explanatory.  If there is a hell, then I hope that a special place is reserved there for the people who repeatedly sexually assault children.

It also irks me a whole lot that after somone is sentenced to death, we spend umpteen millions on warehousing these people whilst the appeals process drags on and on and on.  My tax dollars, that could be far better spent on programs that cut crime rates, are instead spent on the folks sitting on death row for 25 years.  And how, exactly, is that justice for the victim?  Their family?  Your sister/cousin/uncle is dead, and the person convicted of the crime sits on death row for 15 more years longer than the vic got to live until the appeals process is exhausted?  Are you kidding me?

Right, tangent again.  Sorry.

I left the courthouse and headed back to work, managing to get at least half a day's work in.  They kept me hanging over the weekend and most of the day on Monday, finally calling me late Monday afternoon to tell me that I had an 8.30 AM appointment for individual voire dire, which is the legal term for the opportunity that both prosecution and defense have to question each juror, making sure that the chosen 12 will be fair and impartial.

More waiting.  More knitting in waiting rooms.

When they called me into the courtroom, the judge introduced himself to me again, and he said, "I note on your questionnaire that you identify yourself as an atheist.  Will you swear an oath?"  I smiled; this particular aspect of atheism has always amused me; atheists don't want to swear that they'll tell the truth, "so help me God" because God isn't real.  I have no problem promising to tell the truth, and so I told him that yes, I would swear an oath.  

Duly sworn in, I sat in the jury box, facing the judge.  He sits higher than the rest of the courtroom, but I was nearly eye level with him, because the jury box is elevated too.  The prosecution was to my right, perpendicular to the judge's chair, and the defense was behind them.  I faced the judge the whole time, not looking around, because I didn't trust myself to look at the prosecutor I know without sharing a smile or smirk with him.  There ARE times and places where being my smartass self are just not appropriate.

My friendship with the prosecutor was the first thing the judge brought up; I had stated on my questionnaire that due to our friendship, I wasn't sure that I could be a fair and impartial juror.  I'm more likely to believe him, trust his statements, than I am for anyone else in that courtroom.  The judge lectured me for a moment about how he puts aside his friendship with various lawyers when they're in his courtroom.  I didn't see the point in fighting/disagreeing with him, although I do disagree.  

So then we moved on to my job, and the big event on the horizon.  He asked me a few questions about it, and what would happen if I wasn't at work while it was going on.  He asked how long I've been doing this for a living.  I told him that since it is the first time around for me with this event, I didn't know how they'd cope without me, but I didn't think it would be easy for them.  He asked several times about the dates, when was this going on?  Did I stutter, or was he just not paying attention?  I don't know.  I again restrained myself from being a smartass.  It is hard!  (thanks, Dad, for instilling that particular part of my personality!!)

He called the lawyers up to the bench, and they huddled and whispered for a few minutes.  My prosecutor friend kept nodding his head, although I don't know what they talked about.  Deaf, remember?

When the lawyers walked away, the judge told me that they'd decided to excuse me for cause, that missing my work event would clearly be a hardship.  (woot! doing the conga inside my head!) He told me, though, that he would really like to question me further, because my answers on the questionnaire about the death penalty fascinated him, but the court didn't have time for that today.  He seemed regretful about that.  I am too, I would have loved to hear what he wanted to ask about.

Released from the purgatory of waiting rooms and anxiously sitting on pins & needles, worrying about how the hell I was going to tell work that I'd be away for several weeks while this thing plays out, I walked back to my office.  

Thus endeth my brush with the legal system for now.  I hope I do get the chance, someday, to serve on a jury, to be a part of the amazing process that is the judicial branch of government.  Just not this week!!

Shattered

I am thisclose to declaring a moratorium on the news until the election is over.

Besides being sick unto death of the back-and-forthing over the longest presidential election in the history of the world, I'm also highly distressed over what seems to me to be a rising tide of ever-more bad news.

I heard this morning about an American-style school shooting in Finland.  Finland!  Western Finland, someplace that is close to my heart because my sister spent her exchange year in a little town called Karlby in Swedish (or Kokkala, in Finnish).  Scandinavia doesn't have the same problems that we do here in the US with gun violence, largely, IMESHO, because handguns are exceedingly difficult to get your grubby mitts on.  I'm about the farthest thing from an expert on guns; personally, like any warm-blooded liberal lunatic, I think they're pretty unnecessary.  I know my viewpoint is not universally shared, so let's move on, shall we?

It shames me deeply that in addition to exporting what is good about the US, we also export that which is bad.  School shootings get lots and lots and lots of world-wide media coverage; copy-cat crimes follow not far behind.

I had to spend quite a bit of time explaining to schoolkids in Sweden that MY high school wasn't exactly like the fictional West Beverly High in the old Beverly Hills 90210.  Perception...what is seen on the telly...ends up seeming like daily reality when viewed from so far away through the telly screen.

Obviously, someone who totes a gun into a school full of children (and these days?  I'm counting pretty much anyone under 25 as a child) with the intent to do serious harm has, what we might politely call issues.  Ya think?

Which spins me off into the tangent of the tendency of the media to treat mental illness as the demon in the middle of the room, but let's save that for next year's Mental Health Awareness week, mmmkay?  I don't want to lose my primary point here.

Which is?

My worldview is getting a serious ass-kicking these days, and I don't like it at all.  At ALL.

Somewhere in there is the explanation for why I like fandom so much.  Escapism...my daily sanity-saving drug!

"Real" ID

Because anything you're already carrying as identification is apparently fantasy ID.

I'd be laughing if I wasn't so worried about my own personal privacy.

The Department of the Fatherland, also known as the dep't of homeland security, I just can't help it, the name and their activities just remind me too much of the Third Reich, announced on Friday that they're moving ahead with the "Real ID" program.

They want the states to make changes to their driver's registration processes so that illegal immigrants can't get a driver's license, so that a license is nearly "proof" of citizenship.

Hello? We've ALREADY got a document that does that...called a passport, federally issued ID that proves that you're a citizen, is fucking expensive AND a pain in the ass to obtain. You need to prove citizenship in order to get one.

DH has a brand-spanking-new passport, issued last year, that has a computer chip inside it. Now I know that counterfeiters still exist, and a truly talented one could conceivably produce an acceptable facsimile, but what's to say that this "Real ID" program is any less prone to subversion? Nothing.

And then there's the privacy concerns. My Oh-hia-ia driver's license has a magnetic swipe stripe on the back, just like a credit card, which contains all of the information that is printed on the front of the license. When I got pulled over a few weeks ago for speeding, the cop didn't want my car's registration information or anything else, because, he said, "that'll all be on your license." Ulk. There's a scary thought; what else is encoded on there? Who else can access it?

Here's why this worries me:

I guess I hadn't realized that so much info was encoded on that stripe; when I worked as a teller for ye evile bank years and years ago, we could swipe someone's license and print the encoded information on a check as verification of identification. If the check was bad and came back to us, and you had that license info printed on it, you weren't in as much trouble as you would be if you hadn't gotten that information. But what it printed was a string of letters and numbers that was so much mumbo-jumbo. I never had any idea how to translate any of it into information that would actually be useful. But then again, I never needed to. I was only a teller for 6 months (because I hated, despised, and detested being a teller) and I was lucky enough to not ever have the problem of a 'bad' check coming back to me.

Now, I can envision bars, and restaurants carding you and gathering information not just about your age; you can very easily tell by looking at the printed information on an Ohio driver's license if someone is of legal age to drink or not. Minor's licenses are printed with the information vertically, with a red background to the photo. Those of legal age have their information printed horizontally, with a blue background for the photo. So there is no need to swipe the license to verify age.

Department stores, or other places where you write checks could also have the technology needed to swipe that license and gather goddess-only-knows what data about you. Not cool.

Just 17 states have passed legislation opposing the Fatherland's new program. It is very unclear what changes might take place in each state; I'm guessing that Oh-hia-ia, with its existing magnetic stripe, digitized pictures, and holograms that print over top of the address/city/state information, already meets the criteria for the "Real ID" program, and thus there won't be many changes for the state to make. But I'm guessing, and I have absolutely no intention of reading the thousands of pages of guidelines that the Fatherland's secretary issued on Friday.

Sigh. Makes me want to flee north and start singing "Oh Canada."

And here's a problem that they have apparently NOT considered; forcing you to prove citizenship to get a license will only have illegals walking away from the whole licensing procedure; then we'll have a horde of unlicensed, uninsured drivers on the road. Fan-tab-u-los.

Cultural Disconnect

A chance conversation with one of my uncles got me to thinking about being a part of, and yet separate from, American culture. My uncle, you see, is a big college football fan. I've written before about my dislike of football, American football, not the sport that is football to the rest of the world and we Yanks call 'soccer'. I like that sport. But the one that the NFL plays? Not so much.

It would seem if I were to judge by the standards of my uncle and his kids that I am beyond strange. And honesty compels me to admit that I am a bit strange. I grew to adulthood in the United States without ever once sitting through an entire football game, either on television or in person. I started working during my freshman year of high school and was never able to go to a high school game. Not that I cared; until I met DH, I had no idea what was going on down on the field during a game anyway. I was a sophomore in college before I actually sat through an entire game, and probably about 23 before I understood what was happening on the field.

Listening to my mother and her sisters talk about television, I thought again about how I've never really been connected to pop culture, even though I do know quite a bit about it. My parents didn't allow us to watch much TV when I was growing up, and by the time the television shows that were popular in the 90s came along, I didn't care about them anymore than I've ever cared about football. I've never watched an episode of Friends, nor of Seinfeld, nor Will And Grace or Everybody Loves Raymond. Neither has anyone else in my immediate family. My aunt was asking my mother if she'd seen the NBC sitcom Cavemen, and my mother was at some pains to explain that no, she hadn't seen it, and she was pretty unlikely to see it ever. Me neither. Anything with a laugh track...ugh.

I don't think that any of this makes me some sort of freak; most of my friends (naturally) feel the same way I do about television, although they do occasionally raise an eyebrow at the lengths and depths of my sports ignorance. Ask me if I saw 'the game' last night, and I'm likely to ask you if 'the game' was baseball, basketball, football or something else, because I'm never even sure which sports season it is. Mention a particular sports team to me, and I will probably know where geographically they're from, but I won't have any idea what sport they play.

That's not to say that I have no idea about local sports teams; I know the names and sport affiliation of most of the professional and college teams from Oh-hia-ia. It would be difficult to remain willfully ignorant about the Ohio State Buckeyes football team, for example, unless I lived under a rock or in some state of perpetual isolation.

But disconnected is a good word to explain how I feel about most TV and sports. To disconnect a phone call, you hang up. To disconnect your cable, you unplug it from the television. (Assuming, of course, that your cable isn't being disconnected because you didn't pay the bill.) A disconnect is an avbrytning in Swedish, literally 'a breaking off.'

Of course if you've been witness to any of my SN ranting over the last ten months or so, you're cracking up right about now, as you think to yourself, "She would go NUTS if I turned of her cable and she couldn't watch The CW on Thursday nights at 9 PM." And you wouldn't be wrong about that. But I feel obligated to point out that SN pulls in a regular viewership of about 4 million, a paltry sum indeed compared to the juggernaut that was Friends during its heyday.

I like being disconnected from the mainstream when it comes to things like that. I like that I'm a little out of step with the rest of the world on sports. I also like that my politics are far out of the mainstream around here, that I'm a little liberal island in the midst of raging conservatism. Even when it makes me feel like I'm constantly trying to re-acclimate myself to the culture of the country I was born in.

Tolerance

The stories swirling about in the news media regarding Senator Larry Craig have me thinking about the gross lack of tolerance here in America for the homosexual community. It makes me ill, realizing yet all over again how "land of the free, home of the brave" seems to apply to only a privileged few.

What the hell do you care if someone is gay, straight, bi? Why on earth would it matter? Does it affect whether they're a good person or not? Does it change the fact that they're human? Nope. Sure doesn't. It isn't any of your business what goes on in someone else's bedroom. Ever.

I understand curiosity; I have more than a generous dose of it myself and asking respectful questions has rarely gotten me into trouble. I'm also a gossip queen out there in the real world and have had more than my share of giggling conversations about other people's sex lives, but I'm not interested in being angry at someone because they're gay. That's exhausting, frankly, and a waste of time.

NPR has a story about an Idaho paper that had been investigating Senator Craig's sexuality. Here's why I must be crazy; I don't understand why that should be newsworthy. I understand completely that it is newsworthy due to the salaciousness of the news and the basic marketing rule that "sex sells." But much like Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs, I just don't think it is our business.

Am I so far out of the mainstream? Or should we finally simply live and let live and focus on real issues instead of someone's orientation?

I just don't get it.

And I probably never will.

The constitution of the United States sets up the doctrine of separation of CHURCH and STATE. To quote the founding fathers:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. (United States Constitution, Article VI)

Therefore it is with great dismay that I listened to a report on NPR's Morning Edition on Tuesday morning, about the Democratic presidential hopefuls coming together in a "debate" of sorts which was moderated by CNN's Soledad O'Brien. The focus of the debate? The faith of each candidate.

Personally, I don't give a crap what religion my political leaders are. I care about their stance on abortion and on women's rights, and I will vote for a pro-choice candidate every single time, all other things being equal about two candidates.

But after nearly eight years with President Idiot (who takes every opportunity to mention his own faith) at the helm, it seems to me that the line is blurred more than ever before between church and state. Certainly you hear lots more religion talk, what with those "faith-based" initiatives; and usually when we're talking religion in the media, we're talking Christianity and ignoring every other faith that exists. Don't get me started on that.

What I truly do not understand is why a politician's faith is at issue at all. Who cares? Tell me what you're going to do about poverty, about the fiasco in Iraq, about equal rights for women, about how you're going to protect a woman's right to choose, what you plan to do about America's dependence on oil, what you're going to do about the environment, if you're elected. Don't tell me about your faith, because not only do I not care if you're Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, whatever, I am not interested in hearing about it.

I know that the freedom of religion is not at all the same thing as freedom from religion. I'd like to live in a fully secular society, but even our money says, "In God We Trust" so I'm pretty sure that isn't going to happen anytime soon. But can we PLEASE stick to the issues for the coming presidential election and leave the personal stuff about each candidate out? Please?

Action!

I'm still reeling over yesterday's Supreme Court decision. I've been checking the news wires to see where public opinion falls, and I read a statement that has me thinking. I've read about a dozen wire articles and have a few to link, but first, this quote from Ralph Naes is dead on.

"The reaction to this decision could help educate many Americans who, quite frankly, have grown complacent about a constitutional right to reproductive health," said Ralph Neas of People for the American Way. (via ABC)

And he's not wrong. Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, a year and a little more before I was even born. I've grown to adulthood with the right to choose an accepted norm. It is only recently, within the past two years, that I've come to understand just how tenuous a right that is. It has hung by a fraying thread for a long time, and I firmly believe that yesterday's decision will cause that thread to break. Which terrifies the hell out of me, the idea that we could push women's rights back into the stone-age era of back alley abortions performed with coat hangers. Do you know how many women ended up dying from unsanitary conditions, from botched procedures?

I want the government to stay the heck out of this issue. Legislating moral issues like this hasn't worked well for us in the past...you need only to look to Prohibition for proof positive of that.

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, President Idiot and his merry band of zealots will continue to push for a society that is ruled according to their narrow religious beliefs. W has said that he wants people on the federal benches who share his views. Because only people on the right should be allowed to make decisions about women's health. Remember separation of church and state? Anyone? Anyone remember their civics lessons, about a balanced government? Grr, I'm so angry.

Let's move along to some of the news wire articles that piqued my interest this morning before I give myself a heart attack.

Abortion Ruling Emboldens Opponents M live.com

Abortion Fight Coming Newsday.com

Ruling Draws Lawmakers Toward Political Minefield Washington Post.com

Then, of course, there are the wise words of two of my old favorite standbys when it comes to women's issues. NARAL has this article, pointing out the complete lack of regard that the idiot administration has for women. NOW's statement from Kim Gandy is a wonderful bit of language, "Not since Bush v. Gore has the Supreme Court made such a political decision, or one that so completely distorts the law and disregards the U.S. Constitution."

The time is now for action, to get involved. Make your voice heard. Write to your legislators and let them know that you don't support any abortion restrictions. Get involved, get out there, DO SOMETHING so that the right to choose is protected for us, our daughters, our granddaughters.

Listening to: my favorite protest song, "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy

Beginning of the END

A severe blow was dealt to all women in the United States today when the Supreme Court handed down a 5-to-4 ruling, upholding the so-called partial birth abortion ban.

I TOLD YOU SO!

For many years now, this has been one of my greatest fears. That the door would be opened to the anti-choice folks, who are no doubt popping Champagne corks as I type. Any restriction on a woman's right to choose is too much restriction. Any ban on any type of abortion procedure is egregious. It is a slippery slope, which will end in the termination of YOUR right to end any unwanted pregnancy.

I'm not sure if abortion is "right" or "wrong", but what I do know is that I don't want a bunch of old, white men deciding for me if I am allowed to make decisions about my body.

Damn, Sandra Day O'Connor, couldn't you have waited to retire? Damn, Chief Justice Rehnquist, why did you have to die? Those two events were the catalysts that allowed today's decision to happen. President Idiot, who unsurprisingly, praised today's decision, appointed two conservative justices to replace the two who left, and you could hear the religious and fanatical right drooling when he did.

Supreme Court Justices are dangerous people, because they, more than any branch of the government, can have an impact on our lives for a very long time. Supreme Court Justices are appointed for LIFE. So to get a Supreme Court vacancy, someone has to die or retire, and the two vacancies that occurred in 2005 are remarkable for their rarity. Justices can, theoretically, sit for 40 years or more. They are the nine people who review laws passed by Congress, they are the arbiters of what is, and what is not, Constitutional.

In today's decision, the majority opined that the complete lack of any exception whatsoever in the ban for the sake of the mother's health does not preclude a woman's Constitutional right to an abortion. I'd like to know just how the fuck they got to that decision. Because to my understanding, even if a woman's life is at stake, this procedure cannot be performed under any circumstances.

Take note, American Woman. That's how important you are to this administration. That's how much you matter. Your life has that much meaning.

Don't you feel precious?

When is it enough?

I want to rant and rave about the massacre in Virginia, say bunches of things about guns, and how the University didn't handle it as well as they should have in the early hours, but none of that will change the fact that one person ruthlessly took 33 lives. I don't like guns, but the lack of enforcement of gun control laws is not to blame here. One person is. One person who was legally able to obtain the guns that he used; he was over 18, not a convicted felon, and the system, in this case, is not the problem. I'm sure he would have easily passed any background check anyone cared to run. He had a legal right to possess all the guns that he owned. I'm not suggesting that he shouldn't have had that right. But your right to own a gun does not extend to pointing it anyone and pulling the trigger, completely unprovoked. It certainly does not extend to killing 33 people.

Much like child abuse mystifies me, violence does as well. I have a tough time wrapping my head around things like this. I'm not alone in that, I know. Even President Idiot's speech writers managed to do a decent job yesterday, having him tell the grieving Virginia Tech community that there was no way to make sense of a tragedy like this. Astonishingly, I didn't even hear any grammar errors in his speech.


Remember Don Henley's Dirty Laundry song from the 1980s?

Get the widow on the set
We need dirty laundry

I'm watching CNN interview the brother of one of the victims, and he's not completely broken down, but he's a mess. Because you would be. Why do we do this, every time there's a tragedy? Why is there an insatiable appetite for sobbing family members? Can we not let these people grieve in private?

Why does this not happen in Canada, England, Europe? Hell, it doesn't happen in most of the rest of the world. Why is it America that has school shootings? When will it stop? When is it ENOUGH? How do we stop it?


I wish I had some answers.

Rosie and the Bush

I'm not sure why Fox News was talking about this yesterday, but while I was out to dinner with my fam, I saw snippets of this on the TV screens around the restaurant. I know, since it was Fox News, that they were glorifying the divine right of President Moron to do whatever the hell he wants, not about how awesome Rosie is, but I never heard the reportage.

Watch the vid for Rosie, who kicks ass!, talking about impeaching President Idiot.

Rosie: You ROCK! Thank you so much for saying exactly what I feel. "Enough, sir!"

I never watch the doofus, wait, strike that, leader of the free world who happens to be a moron on television if I can help it, since it reminds me too much of how a village in Texas is missing its idiot, so I missed the speech he gave that they're talking about on live television, which I assume was the State of the Union address. He was also on live TV yesterday, and I did watch that on YouTube. (You can too, in three parts or so, here is the first part.)

Who elected this buffoon? Can he really believe his own hype? Are three thousand lives not enough to 'win' a war that we shouldn't be involved in to begin with? And am I the only one who thinks the guy looks constipated when he speaks in public? Sorry. I know you wanted that mental image. I just call it like I see it.

The real question, though, is why aren't the American people calling for his impeachment? What ARE we waiting for? He's a LYING LIAR WHO LIES, and his lies have caused the deaths of THOUSANDS. Clinton, also a LYING LIAR WHO LIED, was simply a philandering spouse in comparison. Not that I condone cheating on your spouse, far from it, but the fact that he cheated on his wife was a private matter, not a matter of national security.

President Idiot, on the other side of the coin, has the blood of not only the young soldiers on his hands, but uncounted numbers of blameless, civilian Iraqis. No one even keeps stats on the Iraqi dead, and don't even get me started about the unfairness of that. Because even if you support the insanity that is our current presidential administration, you can't disagree with the fact that thousands of civilians in Iraq have died needlessly.

Is it any wonder, then, that our standings as a worldwide leader have diminished? That people the world over think less of America and Americans? Regular readers here know that my citizenship isn't something I've been proud of over the years, and this just makes being a card-carrying citizen of this country even more cringe-worthy. I empathize, deeply, with those in Arabic nations who brand Bush a war criminal. I wonder how he sleeps at night, with the blood of all those people, civilians, children on his hands.

Indeed, Rosie. "Enough, sir!" Preach it, sista!

You call THIS releasing information?

Before I start to rant about the press conference that wasn't, I must first get the obligatory fangirl squeeing out of the way. I haven't written anything specifically about Jensen Ackles for about a week, so it is time. Came across this picture on TWoP and oh. My. God. Wait. Let's look at that again. Freckles! How cute are freckles? And the eyes! ...um. Stopping now. My mother reads this blog sometimes, y'all.

So President Idiot took the stage to 'speak to the 'merican people' the other day, and as I was too busy wallowing in my own angst, I didn't take much notice of it. You can watch the Q&A session on YouTube. Or you can read the transcript here. We're talking about the firing of the US Attorneys, if you missed it. He suggests at one point that people read the e-mails that they released, voluminous pages and pages of stuff that contradicts almost everything the administration has said to date about the scandal. Pretty funny, coming from someone who is barely literate.

In another snippet, he asked for continued patience on the Most Meaningless War Ever (TM) and said that it would interfere with NATIONAL SECURITY if the troops were allowed to come home. Because, y'know, that's the reason for everything these days. Oil prices too high? Well, if they were lower, it would cause problems for our national security. Anything else that's bothering you? Blame it all on the need for hyper-awareness of national security.

The dems, and rightly so, lambasted these pronouncements as soon as they were issued. This administration releases information so grudgingly, so reluctantly, is it any wonder at all that the support for the president has gone right down the tubes? The Clinton Administration's habit of polling, polling, polling, and doing what the polls liked wasn't good either, but somewhere in between there must be a happy medium that allows the gubment to work the way the framers of the constitution intended, a government of, by, and for the people.

My frustration with the constant stonewalling that the Idiot Administration does is really an interesting thing. In this time of everything, all the time, instant access to any type of media that you choose, it is incredible to me that there hasn't been a huge backlash by the general population, and not just liberal nuts like me who think that the administration has the obligation to communicate with the general public on a more consistent basis.

The fact that they don't, that they choose not to, seems to mean that they've got something to hide. Or a lot of things to hide, and not just the fact that the president can't SPEAK ENGLISH. Because we know that already. Maybe the thing is that the powers that be, the men behind the curtain, are afraid that if they stick the idiot in the public eye more frequently, he'll do or say something so stupid that it would cause the whole house of cards to fall. Not that I buy into theories like the Illuminati, or anything like that. No. Really.

More reasons to dislike the Idiot Administration

Tempest time yet again! Here's a shocker...someone from the Idiot Administration has said something tacky, insensitive, and offensive in public. This time, it is Joint Chief of Staff General Peter Pace, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. And then he apologized, not for saying the offensive things, but for expressing his personal opinion. Sigh.

He said that he thinks homosexuality is immoral. And that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the military is NOT out of step with modern times. NPR is of course where I heard about this first, and I'm astonished and amazed, perhaps naively so, when I hear public figures being discriminatory. Politically correct speech began to be de regur when I started college, waaay back in the 90s, and while I don't always agree with the doctrine, I do think it is better to say things like mentally handicapped than it is to say retarded. So hearing someone be so openly homophobic, so derogatory, so outre, it really surprises me. What shocks me, is that this is one of the most powerful people in the country; I'm left with a sense of "He CAN'T do that, can he?" He can, and he did.

And then apologizing for expressing his personal opinion. Oy. Where, oh where, do I start with that one? As I have said so many times before, freedom of speech means that you protect the speech that you don't like even more vociferously than you protect the speech that you DO like. Why? Because the next time you don't speak up for free speech, it is going to be someone saying something you agree with that is being censored.

It is this idiot's right to have the opinion that homosexuality is immoral, even when he's dead wrong. And it is MY opinion that he is dead wrong, I firmly believe that homosexuality is genetic, that you are born that way, it isn't a lifestyle choice. If it was simply that someone could 'choose' to be gay or not, why would they, when society treats them the way that it does? C'mon.

As I said a few days ago when I was talking about dear old Scooter, I think you should do whatever works for you when it comes to sex and sexuality. Gay, straight, bi, poly, trans, mono, whatever, dude. Forcing men and women who serve in the armed services to put their personal lives on hold, and not have a relationship with anyone while serving, is just not right. Don't ask, don't tell IS outmoded, and it is time for the military to come into the 90s, at least.

The fact that this is Peter Pace's opinion strikes me as part of a larger problem; obviously, President Idiot knew about his POV when he appointed Pace to his current role. And that's OK with W? Yeah, he deserves that moniker I give him more and more every day.

More on Scooter Libby OR dipping my toe into the dirty waters of blogging about sex.

The jury is still out on Scooter Libby's perjury trial, but I was checking the news wires and found a few things. One, and this is of particular interest to me because I'm writing a book myself, Scooter published a book in 1996 called The Apprentice. Here's a link to Amazon's page about the book. Please check that out, and then come back to me. I'll wait.

(Hums a bit of Metallica)

All right? You back? Good.

Scooter? Is one seriously fucked-up sick puppy, y'all. I'm not going to write about my own perversions, I'll leave delicious things like that to Girl With a One-Track Mind, or Belle du Jour. But I will say that I'm pretty open minded about all things sexual. For the most part, I think you ought to do whatever works for you. I draw the line, however, at necrophilia and bestiality. The old bbs boards had some abbreviations that entertained me...YKINMK (your kink is not my kink) YKINOK (your kink is not OK) and those both apply in spades here. Not only does he write about bestiality and necrophilia, but bestiality WITH necrophilia, child pornography and child prostitution. Yuck? And how on earth did this get published?

I'd like to say something scathing about neo-conservatives and their hang-ups about sex, but the joke seems to be just out of reach for me. Also too much of an obvious answer. Insert your own here, please.


There's another story in the Wilmington Star about The Idiot Administration and Scooter that I'd like to direct your attention to. This is exceedingly well-written stuff.


Finally, my punk ideals are offended yet again. Earlier this year I complained about a credit card commercial using a very bad redone version of a Soup Dragons song. Today I saw a Wendy's commercial using a Violent Femmes song, Blister in the Sun. Watching Keith Olberman on MSN and he used a Nine Inch Nails song. I'm so annoyed by this. Mostly? Because it makes me feel old. I now understand how my parents felt when Nike started using the Beatles Revolution to sell sneakers. Sigh.

The Vault

Tuesday may hereafter be designated as brain-dumping day. Perhaps.

I wrote a snippet about working for the cash vault of a bank a few days ago and said that those were stories for another day. Since then, I’ve been thinking about that job, and remembering the funny things that happened there.

I went to work for a big bank when I was 19 or 20 years old, in 1994 or 1995. Can’t really remember exactly when, and it is no longer important. The bank that I worked for is what is known in the financial services industry as a “super-regional” bank, a huge establishment that is not nationwide, but extends its reach over a footprint of 6 contiguous midwestern states, with operations in about another 5 states not connected to the footprint. They offer all of the traditional banking services, and I started out as a part-time teller in an office close to home.

Being a bank teller is not easy work. When you wander into a branch of your local bank to cash a check, that teller who waits on you (if you in fact go into the office and don’t use the ATM) has been through at least 20 hours of training in policy, procedure, operations, customer service….it is a lot of work for very little pay.

I think that first year I made maybe $8,000. And I despised it. The branch manager at my first branch was an evil hag, who must have taken the advanced class of “How to NOT manage people”, because she was awful at any and all human resources issues. Her favorite way to discipline someone for anything was to wait until there was a lobby full of customers and then berate the person from inside her office while they were waiting on someone. She and I clashed nearly daily.

Hindsight has given me some perspective, and in retrospect, I should have probably not told her that she was a textbook case of how to not run a department or an office. Y’see, I was in my first year of business school, majoring in management, which is enough knowledge to cause problems, but not fix them. If I had to work with her today, I would do some things differently, but I would have still left.

I worked with the evil hag for about 6 or 7 months. I began applying for transfers anywhere within the system as soon as I was eligible. One job posting that caught my eye was for the International Teller, who handled all of the region’s foreign currency. Having lived in Europe, I could do currency conversions in my sleep, and it seemed like something that would be more fun, so I applied. I was thrilled when I got the job, which was full time, and in another city, about 60 miles away from home.

The International Teller’s office was located inside the main cash vault. At first, I was too busy cleaning up the cubicle area allotted to me to notice what else was going on around me, but I came up for air about a month after starting there. The former international teller hadn’t been the neatest person, and I tossed stuff that went back to the mid-80s. As you can imagine, this made obsessive-compulsive me absolutely tweak the fuck out.

When I had everything arranged as I needed it to be for efficiency’s sake, I felt able to assist my co-workers in what they were doing. The international teller job could have reasonably been a part time position, because there was relatively little for me to do. I bought and sold currency with a New York City trading house, sure, and that was fun, but I didn’t have near enough to do. This suited me, though, because I was in my last year at University by then, and I used downtime to study.

The rest of the people that I worked with did very different things than I did every day. The vault processed money from the Federal Reserve for distribution to branches of the bank in our region, processed any counterfeit money that the bank received (more about that in a second) and processed deposits from big box retailers that were delivered to the vault by armored couriers, plus processed change through huge coin sorting machines in the coin room.

The most interesting of these activities was processing the money that came from the Fed. The vault’s head teller would order money from the Fed on a weekly basis, and sometimes they sent new money (who doesn’t love the smell of new money?) and other times they sent currency that had already been in circulation. But when I say that she ordered money, I mean that she ordered millions of dollars. Millions and millions of dollars. Four million in twenty dollar bills wasn’t out of the ordinary. Four million dollars in cash is HEAVY, y’all. The couriers would bring it in on pallets. There were of course secure doors that you had to go through, and a process that we had in place to make sure that the couriers were legit, but it always worried me that they brought the cash in clear plastic bags, sealed and imprinted, yes, but clear plastic….I used to tell the people that I worked with that if anyone with criminal intentions paid any amount of attention, they would see a pattern of days and times when the money from Uncle Sam was delivered. Hit us on the right day, and you could have made off easily with two mil in cash. We never were, and I don’t know if that’s because no one was paying attention or if we were extraordinarily lucky.

The bank no longer does things this way, which is why I feel all right about telling these stories. The vault is no longer located at my old office, and procedures are radically different, security has changed lots. This was eight or nine years ago after all, and I have not worked for this company at all for nearly 3 years now.

After the courier passed the security checks, we would do a ‘rough’ count, ensuring that the imprinted and sealed bags were in fact still sealed, and checking that each bag had the amount that it said it did. Then the couriers left, and we would move the cash into the most secure area, a real vault with the ship’s wheel on the door and a timed lock. The room inside the vault was about ten feet wide and five feet deep, with one wall entirely taken up by smaller safes. Those safes limited the amount of room that we had to move and work inside the vault, but it was where the cash was kept after it was counted.

Once inside the secure area, we would open the imprinted bags and begin a ‘bulk’ count of the money. Bulk counting means that you run the bills through a counting machine, which counts the number of bills but not the denominations, so if there is a one-dollar bill in the middle of the twenties, it doesn’t register. We did bulk counting to separate the bills into more manageable stacks; every denomination was bulked in stacks of 100 bills, which in twenties is $2000, and ‘bricked’ in packs of 5 of the stacks of 100 bills, making the bricks of twenties $10,000.

After the bulk count was done, and totals matched the paperwork, we would do a fine count. Fine counting means that you personally touch every single bill, you eyeball every bill, and this is where the biggest potential for theft occurs. It is also where you’re going to find a counterfeit bill, or a ten in the middle of the hundreds. American currency has a very specific ‘feel’ to it…the paper that it is printed on has a very high cotton content, and counterfeit bills ‘feel’ wrong. Even someone who doesn’t work with big bunches of money on a daily basis can feel the difference.

Fine counting takes forever. It would take several hours to process the money from the Fed. The first time I helped process a Fed transfer, I thought it was pretty exciting. Who can say that they personally handled a million dollars at work? Cool. The only problem, as I saw it, was that the money wasn’t mine.

In order to work in a place like that, you have to be bonded and have no criminal history. And while I thought it was pretty cool to put my hands on that much money, I had to get to the point where my thought process went something like this….”It is just paper. And it isn’t MY paper.” Because otherwise, you could easily drive yourself bonkers thinking about what you could do with so much money.

Two other funny things about money. One, it is filthy. Filthy, filthy, filthy dirty. New money’s ink rubs off on your hands, turning your fingers black. Old money is just dirty, and your hands turn black from touching it. We couldn’t wear gloves while handling it because that sense of touch is important to be able to feel for counterfeits. So my hands were always chapped from frequent washing. Secondly, have you heard urban myth/legend that the US currency tests positive for cocaine? True.

We had a spate of counterfeits come through the office, and it was part of my responsibilities to send the bills to the Secret Service, which is who handles all counterfeit claims. Now that would be an interesting job, working for the Secret Service.

Like anything involving the government, there was an extensive process in place to send counterfeit bills to the Secret Service, forms to fill out, a very specific way it had to be packaged. It took about a half hour to fill out the paperwork and package it all up. The funniest thing about it was that it had to be sent registered mail, and it went to a facility in the same city where my office was located. We couldn’t send it with the couriers.

The bills were being passed at branches of our bank, and the tellers would send them to us with a “suspicious” tag. I always felt bad when I had to contact a teller and let him or her know that we were going to send a short ticket to them for the amount of the bill. Counterfeits, you see, come in a bunch of different incarnations. The crudest take the numbers off of a higher bill and paste them onto a $1 or a $5 and then try to pass them as a $20, $50, or $100 bill. The more sophisticated are attempts to print your own $50 bills. Regardless, the teller who sent them to us was penalized for taking the bill as part of a deposit, if that was in fact how it came in. Sometimes customers would bring them in, thinking that the bill seemed off, and then the customer would be out the money, which never failed to piss them off. And I saw their point….what’s the sense in being honest if you’re going to be out the money? Try and pass it along to someone else, leave someone else holding the bag. Unfortunately, that’s just the way that it went, with the honest person being shorted. Many times a teller could pass the short back to the merchant who took the counterfeit bill in the first place, but a civilian had no recourse.

I worked for the vault for about a year, moving on to another division of the bank when I graduated from college. But those stories are, again, for another day.

Listening to: Online radio station, an eclectic mix of adult contemporary stuff including Los Lonely Boys, The Pretenders, Life House and Maroon 5.

Scooter Libby

There is a lot that I want to say about the perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Most of it, I'm sure, is available from a myriad of other sources, but my opinion about the whole mess may not be.

First of all, I know what side of this whole debacle I ought to be on. The liberal side, which wants to string him up for outing a CIA agent. Yes, I agree, that was bad. Bad Scooter! And indicative, really, of the Idiot Administration's way of handling a problem. Ooohh, someone says that there's no WMDs in Iraq? Well, obviously, ob-vi-ous-ly, the way to deal with that is to discredit the critic's wife. Personal attacks on credibility being sooo much easier than actually talking about the facts, right?

And in many respects, I feel that if in fact Scooter outed Valerie Plame, maliciously, and then he lied about outing her, then yes, he ought to be strung up by his toenails, or whatever we're doing to punish the naughty this week. But on the other hand....this trial, at taxpayer expense, is essentially a he said-she said thing, with no real way to definitively prove anything one way or the other. So much high school style drama. There isn't forensic evidence that Scooter lied....how could there be? Sure, polygraph tests might show the truth, but in reality, there is no way show for certain what he knew, when he knew it, and who he told it to. There's also the fact that he's been charged with obstruction of justice and perjury when there's no underlying criminal case....usually obstruction of justice charges involve someone trying to cover up a homicide, for example. So the prosecutor has his work cut out for him in proving this case.

I'll admit that it is pretty darn damaging that a whole host of people have testified to the fact that he did, he did, he did it. I heard Nina Totenburg on NPR's Morning Edition this morning talking about how, in the tapes of the grand jury testimony, the prosecutor tiptoes around coming straight out and asking Libby if his boss (that would be Vice President Dick Cheney) told him to leak Plame's info, but the prosecutor never does come out and ask him directly, and nothing that Libby says through more than eight hours of testimony would indicate that Cheney did, in fact, tell him to release Plame's name.

Of course Libby never indicates that Cheney ordered him to out Plame; they're both reasonably intelligent people, and I would assume, being the conspiracy theorist that I am, that they'd be smart enough to have had these conversations about what to do, should either of them be in trouble, long before they ever got into trouble. Duh! Didn't you ever plan to do something you probably shouldn't have done, as a kid, and have the conversation with your friends, "Well, you just tell your mom xxx, and I'll tell my mom xxx, and we'll be fine." I know you did!! Guess what, those in political power are at least as smart as eight year olds, and they did the same thing.

At the heart of this whole trial for me is the issue of privacy. Yes, privacy. Valerie Plame had the right to privacy, the right to pursue a career that she was, by all accounts, good at and excited about, the right to live her life without such intense scrutiny, and that right was taken away from her. Whether Scooter Libby did it because his boss told him to, or not, the fact remains that Ms. Plame is no longer able to pursue her first choice of career, being a CIA spook, because she is now well known and recognizable. At the risk of sounding like I'm in high school, that's not fair. Not at all. Added to the fact that she is (as far as I know) no longer working for the CIA is the fact that her life could be in danger from this outing. Which is really unfair.

Privacy is, to me, one of those sacred rights. Yes, I know that I'm a big hypocrite for saying that, as I obsessively follow celebrity gossip. But! If you choose to be a celebrity, you know going into it that you're not going to have much of a chance at a private life. There are some trade offs...fabulously rich, the whole world on a string, screaming fangirls, et cetera. In general, I don't feel sorry for stars who whine about not being able to have a private life; I do feel sorry for them when the stalkeratzzi try to take pics of their kids or generally hound them. But I digress. Those of us who choose to go into less glamorous careers, who have ordinary lives, should be able to expect that our bidness isn't going to be splashed all over the six o'clock news. I dunno that being a CIA spook is an ordinary life, but for Valerie Plame, it was. The trial of Scooter Libby will resume on Monday. I'll be watching/listening.


Also: Wow. Wish I could write like this. Thanks to Mother Me for the link.