TheWorx

The Supreme Court recently struck down laws that prevented corporations from campaigning for political candidates. That the Supreme Court can view corporations as citizens speaks of the blinders that too often guide these nine people down a road to ill-conceived or misguided justice. It is almost as if they were saying, "We are tired of your First Amendment lawsuits. We are going to take free speech and wrap you up in it so tightly that it will suffocate you." Now that corporations have freedom of speech, what else can we bestow on them? Shall we give corporations the right to vote? Shall we banish them to a desert in Arizona when they are found guilty of a crime? If a corporation is an entity with unalienable rights, what about other entities? Do we welcome the Vatican and the rich Muslims into our political arena? I can see why the justices are confused for we bail out and subsidize the corporations like they were relatives. We baptize them into being and dissolve them at ...

In grammar school, I thought unions were great. They were great when the injustices committed against Joe Schmo were atrocious (child labor, pittance pay, toxic environment). Today, I believe that those with unions are parasites on the those without unions. Invariably, those with unions are at an advantage not enjoyed by the rest. They get better pay, job security, benefits, and perks. Not always, of course. The hotel industry has found ways to unionize with unions that are nothing more than fronts of respectability and responsibility--organizations that remind me of Popeye's chicken soup. For non-boomers, Popeye used to make soup by dipping a dead chicken once or twice in hot water and serving the water as chicken soup. So what are the rest of us to do? We can start by considering the possibility of a government option for unionizing. I know, public options can get blown up by the likes of an industry puppet like Joe Lieberman. But we've got Pelosi on our side. She may not be ...

In last year's New Jersey gubernatorial election, Chris Christie was worried that Daggett would spoil his chances of being elected by taking away Christie votes. In a political novel, I fantasized that a rich person like Corzine just might be able to "plant" someone like Daggett in order to do just that. But fantasy or not, Chris Christie had valid concerns and, in looking at the problem, I saw that it was a simple matter to eliminate this problem--you merely let the voters vote twice. If you let the voters vote for their top two candidates, no vote will go to waste. When all votes are tallied, If their first choice (let's say Daggett) falls into third place then, the voters who had a third place candidate as their second choice will have their "first choice" votes transferred to the top two candidates. He's an example. If I voted for Daggett and Christie, and all the first choices tally as Corzine, Christie, and Daggett in third place, my second choice ...

It's hilarious to see the confirmation hearings. You see, the government wants someone like Sotomayor who, as Chuck Schumer has said, has voted with the government in over 90% of her decisions. That is what most in government want. Just like Roosevelt wanted the court to support his Japanese Internment activities and the incumbent Bush wanted to win the election, today's government couldn't give a rat's ass about the rights of the people. The only reason Soto voted against the white firefighters was that she was voting FOR the municipal government's decision. She really has no judicial philosophy other than the right of government to do as it pleases and the people be damned. Where government is not involved (baseball leagues), she might be useful. Overall, however, she would be a sad addition to the court but what else can we expect in a goody two-shoes suck-up candidate. But then, she would not have gotten where she is today if she had not sucked up to those in po...

At Salon.com, a blogger can, at whim, delete any comment that he/she does not like. That's not a salon in my America but it might be one in Stalinist Russia, though. This does not happen at Ariana Huffington's site. Sure, they can delete your comments if they are off topic, abusive, ad hominem, and a few other criteria. But those are site-specified rules not the whim of the blogger who is posting his opinion on a site that has full public access. I'm had stuff deleted on the HPost but I knew after it was deleted that I had gone BloggerPostal according to the rules of the site. What's wrong with the salon.com methods? If we are told that we can comment on a posting/blog, we are tempted to read the whole thing knowing that we can disagree in public with the writer. We take the time to read it and to compose an opinion that was at variance with the blogger. We feel that, in some small way, we can temper the opinions in a balanced way. But instead, the blogger decides that ...

This is the text of the decision made by Judge Sotomayor and two other judges that trounced a student's first amendment rights. My comments are in bold. Some sections were underlined. I am not a lawyer but I can see through the smoke and mirrors of Sotomayor's decision. She's smart--just as much as Douglas and Frankfurter were when they helped the government put 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry behind barbed wire. This is just one girl's quagmire but we all are at risk if Sotomayor doesn't start respecting our constitutional rights. I hope she gets asked about this decision because if she still believes in it, I don't believe she has any right on the Supreme Court. Being chronically unemployed, I now have the time to address these matters. If I had been unemployed at the time of Alito or Scalia, some of their decisions would have received similar treatment. It's not hard to look at legal arguments and see the bull. I strongly recommend that public schools...

I have often asked myself why I seem to be the only activist for miles around. I found my answer in the likes of Sonia Sotomayor and President Obama. Judge Sotomayor, in her Doninger decision said that public school officials should be respected by the students (Avery Doninger had, on the Internet, called some official a douche bag). This is how the government and douche bags like Sotomayor stifle our freedom of speech at an early age. When students can't express themselves at peril of punishment, they learn that authority reigns supreme in this country and when authority does something wrong, they timidly look the other way until someone with guts--someone not afraid of Sotomayor types--takes action and blows the whistle. President Obama has picked someone who is prepared to stifle our freedom of speech early on so that authority figures can get away with torture and war and encarceration and taxation without representation and every fucking evil shit they choose to do because the...

Commissioner Cooper and her sidekick, Maurer, sided with Sacco. It turned out that the town of North Bergen did not need to hire a law firm to keep me away from their books. Cooper and Maurer were hell bent on not giving an inch. I asked that the state attorney general look into possible malfeasance on the part of Cooper but this is New Jersey and it's why someone like Christy will not get elected. It is said that people are more interested in the economy than they are in corruption in government but it is corruption in government that accounts for all our ills. When the economy is not going anywhere, why do you think we turn to government to fix it? Of course it's because they have the power but what we don't realize is that they always had the power to PREVENT the downward spiral but, federally, all they could do was pay Greenspan a whole bunch of money to play games with the interest rates. He succeeded but it looks like it was just luck and stochastic processes that wor...

I hear the President Obama has chickened out of allowing all options on the table. Speculation runs wild on what lobbyist did this to him-- oh, don't tell me it was not a lobbyist! My guess is that the A.M.A said, "Yo, who you gonna call when the girls get sick?" and, "You want to do what to our cash cow?" Why do I say this? Because, any increase in efficiency is a decrease in their fees. President Obama, we did not elect you to be manipulated by unseen forces. What I mean is, we'll be here for you if you tell us you can't think straight because those forces are overwhelming.

I was recently prescribed Zegerid for acid-reflux. It annoyed me to no end that the MD prescribed a medication that was not on my insurance company's preferred list necessitating an expenditure 2-3 times greater. Serendipity would come to the rescue because that caused me to look it up and I found that A.) Nexium was better and B.) Nexium was cheaper and C.) the reason Zegerid was so much money was that some marketing genius at the company had said, "hey, why not combine some sodium bicarb with omezapoleto and charge an arm and a leg for it." They did it and the idiotic MD's fell for it. I still would like to see a major expose by the New York Times on why MD's fall for the spiel from the drug reps. Somewhere, somehow, a person who goes through that many years of training just doesn't give up common sense and start prescribing stuff just because someone with a vested interest comes knocking. But all this would be water under the bridge if I could just approach...

I tried to log this entry at complaint sites that came up on a Google search but the good ones were in England and not available to me. One site had the unmitigated gall to offer a complaint form and then say, "Thanks, hope you feel better," end of story. Your complaint reached no one. Unless the webmaster was a masochist, I doubt that he gave a gnat's ass. So, here I am, resorting to my blog and hoping someone enters Ridgefield, NJ cops into a search box. In Ridgefield, NJ, you are guaranteed to get a summons from the cops for something or other if you pass through at least once a year. One cop in particular thinks he is very smart at doing his job. He will wait for a car to pull up to a red light and then he enters the plate number into his computer. He then pulls you over if you should have any irregularities showing up. Is allowed to do this? Why ask? Unless the ACLU is moved to do something, the State of New Jersey's only mandate to investigate official misconduc...

Today, President Obama went to a police academy and said it was proof that his stimulus package was working. So, maybe the good President has seen a novel way of preventing the bankruptcy of towns--give them more police to write traffic tickets. He is also helping to keep the penal institutions of our country well-staffed. And, he'll also help to build more jails that will benefit the unemployed masons. But my poor misguided President fails to note that he's not wearing any clothes for, in the long run, an incarcerated man is a man on public welfare and when released, he is a smarter man that's going to require more police to catch. Can I ask the good President why he would choose to increase the police force? Why he has turned against his own 1/2 race by incarcerating more Blacks and Latinos? Why has he chosen to perpetuate the drug wars. But let's look at a more broader picture. When was the last time that the police stopped a crime? Can the President or anyone point ...

Does the IRS play politics? Well, apparently, yes. If you or I had not paid our taxes, how long do you think the IRS would let us get away with it? Yet, half the time someone gets nominated, congress or someone finds out that they haven't paid taxes. What is up with that? I think some big honcho at the IRS fears losing his job and lets the fat cats in Washington fall under their radar. Do you want proof? The IRS has very sophisticated programs to determine if you are cheating on your taxes. There is no way that they didn't know about it. Also, why don't we hear that so-and-so has been penalized by the IRS? My personal suggestion to them is to start using Turbotax--this program will not let you make a mistake on your taxes. I call upon congress to demand that the IRS put every government employee's tax return under a microscope. There is an obvious conflict of interest here that no one is reporting on. Congress funds the IRS and the IRS "funds" congress. Also c...

It's been awhile since I'm gotten riled up with the people at the other end of the Internet. Originally, it was everyone's nemesis--the big M. Recently, though, I've been afflicted with unsubscribitis. I'm sure all have been so afflicted at one time or another but I am starting to notice a trend. You know, you get tired of receiving an email that doesn't do much for you anymore and the thought of just throwing it into the spam folder goes against your principles. What I think is happening is that advertisers (Unsubscribitis is spread by sites that have advertisers) have a formula that includes how many active email addresses are on the site's mailing list. The more the better, of course. If a website makes it easy to unsubscribe, their revenues could see a hit. Some of the techniques used are quite blatant and patently phony. They will ignore you altogether or tell you they will send you a link that you must click on to unsubscribe and that link--surprise su...

I've written here about increasing the availability of quality (top-notch)education to the masses. It occurred to me that the powers that be might not want that for who is going to support so many people with advanced degrees? Who is going to sweep the streets and pull the potatoes from the ground. It was then that the answer came to me from the manifesto of the Zeitgeist organization. If everyone is smart, there is available that many more people to create machines for us that will do all the work. Then, we become self-supporting and there is no need for anyone to carry any burden. The rich will have no need for excessive funds because everyone can do everything they desire. Mind you, not everyone will want a yacht a penthouse suite but if everyone did, there would be enough brainpower to make it happen. How would it be possible for everyone to have a penthouse suite? Easy, you have cameras on the roof and broadcast the images to windows that are further down. How about yachts? Yo...

Well, I received a letter from one of Mr. Maurer's sidekicks who said that the position I had applied for had 7 applicants all ranked #1. How the hell is that possible? Anyway, I appealed again and asked him how Mayor Sacco was able to determine the best candidate without interviewing anyone. By implication, why wasn't the NJDOP able to do the same and saved us all a great deal of grief. It's a sad day for democracy when a small town mayor can do whatever he pleases while the clowns in Trenton collect their salaries, await their pensions, and tell us to go do things to ourselves that they wouldn't do to themselves. I wrote to the governor of New Jersey just as an exercise in futility because no governor of New Jersey has ever stood up to the Hudson County Democratic machinery. I'm glad that, during the primaries, they chose Clinton over Obama because I would have hated to see my candidate for presidency tainted by association with New Jersey's Hudson County Demo...

It's been over a year since I naively filled out a New Jersey Department of Personnel application with a ripoff $15 fee. I was applying for a job with North Bergen. At the time, I thought I would be working for the state gathering data on the municipality. I ranked #1 but never even received an interview from the "progressive" mayor Nicholas Sacco. He says his town is progessive yet his hiring practices date back to the middle ages. I filed an appeal with the NJDOP and waited patiently for some word on whether justice is served at the NJDOP. Nothing happened after several months and I again contacted the department who asked me to resubmit the appeal saying, through an online intermediary, that they would expedite the appeal. That was over a month ago. I called them cowards and that's what they are. People in Trenton still behave as if Hudson County is filled with mafiosos who might kill their kids on their way to private schools. Schools that we help pay for with our...

Well, I did my part. I campaigned for the man in PA. It was a wonderful experience made possible by friendly people in the Slate Belt of PA and beautiful automnal colors. The weather was, thankfully, cool for it's hilly country and I'm dreadfully overweight these days. Luckily for tongue-tied me, Patricia, a veteran campaigner (her second trip to a battleground state) took me under her wing and gave the opening schpiel while I stood backup. On the bus, I was interviewed by Lizzie Widdicombe, a lovely journalist from the New Yorker Magazine. How I managed to say anything meaningful to her, I just don't know but she very graciously wrote me up in her online article. Damn! I had so much more to say to her. What's up with my verbal brain anyway. On the way back home from the Port Authority, I was stopped by an African-American who wanted to know where I got the Obama sign I was carrying--he was disappointed to learn he would have to go to PA to get one. Obama ran a great fu...

It's mind-boggling how prescient sci-fi writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury could be. How the heck were they able to anticipate such government perversion as the following from this month's ACLU email newsletter: "On July 21st, Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, called on Congress to take dramatic steps to subvert the Constitution. Mukasey asked that Congress issue a new declaration of war that would make the entire globe -- including the United States itself -- a “battlefield” where the president decides who will be locked up forever." That Bush the Texan would ask for this is understandable but that America hasn't stopped him cold preferring to wait for the next president to get it right, is as lamentable as the day Chamberlain appeased Hitler. That was one man. We are millions. I consider it lamentable because we have always had terrorists and at no time did we think that such draconian measures were necessary for our safety. The Japanese-American ...

I figured out what I'm going to do once I win the lottery. I am going to sue the state of NJ on the the grounds that charging small business owners a minimum tax of $500 a year when the corporation owner has made zero profits is unconstitutional. I sold my landscaping business a year and half ago. I have not engaged in any business pursuit whatsoever. But because the state of NJ is run by people with a mafioso (think loan sharks) mentality, I have to fork over to them a thousand dollars from my family savings all because I was stupid enough to incorporate. Yes, State of New Jersey, you should do whatever you have in your power to stop me now before I win the lottery. You've been warned. You're going to have to return every bloody cent. Speaking of the lottery, how many of you are aware that there are no absolute safeguards against bogus scratch-offs? Think about it, when you buy a scratch-off, what guarantee do you have that it is not bogus? If the vendor wanted, he could s...

This was an email sent to me by my sister-in-law. My comments are in italics. This was written by someone who is deathly afraid of a half Black man running the country. It is full of specious arguments aimed at instilling fear in people who are easily swayed because they themselves hate Blacks. See notes with each comment: The Obama Tidal Wave We are witnessing a political phenomenon of rare magnitude with Barack Obama. His speeches have inspired millions, and yet most of his followers have no idea of what he stands for &n bsp;except platitudes of "Change" or that he says he will be a "Uniter". The power of speech from a charismatic person truly can be a powerful thing; Certainly, Billy Graham had charisma, and both his manner of speech and particularly the content, changed millions. On the extreme other ha nd, the charisma of Adolph Hitler inspired millions and the results were catastro...