Panic. The Government has shut down.

View 792 Tuesday, October 01, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

The government is ‘closed’. You can’t view the baby pandas live on-line (wonder what they save by taking that off?). The Copyright Office has a new document in pdf on small claims court and copyright infringement, but if you didn’t download it last night you cant get it now: http://www.copyright.gov/eco/notice_special.html If you try to follow that through you get to

https://eco.copyright.gov/eService_enu/start.swe?SWECmd=GotoView&_sn=AvxXpeHmpES71DI8aKPOdRB7DygyDfPLPeQ6h-OrR.5MP153yJBDRziUt-A.mlQR&SWEView=Home+Page+View+%28eService%29&SWEHo=eco.copyright.gov&SWETS=1380654308

but you will never get the pdf itself. I wonder why they didn’t pass that along to others who would be glad to make it publicly available, but I am sure there is some government hoo haw preserving civil service jobs that prevents that.

The kabuki goes on. I have not yet been able to determine whether we are having to do without bunny inspectors, but I am sure they even if they have been furloughed they will be able to collect their back pay when the government comes back into existence.

The US government takes in more than $2 Trillion in revenue and cannot operate without borrowing a Trillion or so more. Some of the borrowed money goes to the bunny inspectors. Maybe the House ought to pass a budget line by lane, sending the funding to the President who seems too busy to take that laser-like look into the budget he promised at his first inaugural. Or perhaps he has and has decided that the Bunny Inspectors do a job so important that we must borrow money in order to pay them for their services. The Federal Government is the largest employer in the nation – the President reminds us of that daily – but there is not one surplus employee in there.

And the LA County employees are going to strike for 12% raises, because they have not had a raise in years, and surely they deserve more. None of them are surplus either.

And it’s lunch time.

L.A. Unified School District started distributing free iPads recently to the students.  LA Unified has tried to get its iPads back since they all got hacked and started accessing social and porn sites.  These weren’t just any iPads. They were higher priced than usual because they had special programs and –  well you get the idea.  But they were misused and are being recalled, except that only a third of them are still missing and apparently will not be found.

And the LA Unified superintendent tells us that this is a move to deny deserving students the means to succeed.  If it weren’t lunch time I’d comment on that: how does a random student deserve an iPad paid for by my neighbor, or for that matter you since there is a federal subsidy involved.  What do they do to deserve these marvels? Exist? But we have not talked about the deserving poor in a while, and apparently no one cares any longer.  Everyone is deserving of everything. As it was in the beginning, is now….

 

Obamacare starts today but the web site, which is not closed, isn’t working. Real soon now.