Making Widows Wince

“No, I’m romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.” F. Scott Fitzgerald So OK, I quit. I know this surprises no one, what coming from the pie hole of a member of our most disappointing generation -- but trust me, this needs to be said – because this raw, stuffed naked and in your face kind of quitting is necessary, and because I’ve been way too nice about it up to now. It’s become clear to me that all has been written in the big book of what must be and it’s time for me to accept and let go. Free will is a sucker bet for dreamers and the uninformed -- it's just for the hoi polloi on stage, reading lines in clothed flesh, to an audience that wrote the book they are reading from, and doesn’t even like them anyway. What if Trump and his supporters are right? Have you ever even thought of the possibility that the little shit head of a person is right? That maybe Trump is the man for ...

After I avoided watching that Zany new program, ‘Homeland’ on TV today, I told Mary: “Someday when we as a nation are down and out and struggling for a bit of understanding and mercy our new overlords will pull out a show like Homeland and say, “this is when you had a chance to change things.” The things that we do, and the attitudes we take while doing them, will all be used against us on the way down, and everyone goes down eventually.   The barbarians will have their scribes repeat our own words to us and then say them out loud to our children as they do the things to us that we have done to them. We are so powerful that we cannot see anything from anyone else’s point of view, and if we could, it would hold no value to us. Just as we now think that one American life is worth 60 Iraqis, our eventual fall will reflect a different changing math game of attitudes that our educational system has ill prepared us for. We will also become confused because all the words comin...

This is the Republican plan. It means that the total amount of money coming into the government won't change, but who pays for what will. It's not a tax cut, it's a tax rearrangement. (Any actual cut will be financed by anticipated future growth, growth that will come from the animal spirits released by the government taking in less money, and by the inherent goodness of people doing the right thing.) If this sounds plan familiar, it is. If you think it's for you, or that it will help you in any way -- it's not and it won’t. Think Kansas . Brownback Kansas nationwide.

RALSTON: How would you have voted on that bill to extend unemployment benefits?     ANGLE: I would have voted no, because the truth about it is that they keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does. And what we really need to do is put people back to work. So if you want to ease people back into work, what we need is an unemployment benefit that pays part. You know, you go to work, you have something of a safety net, in unemployment. But just to give them full unemployment benefits and then extend those for two years or more gets them not only out of the working class but it also depreciates their skills, so they're not actually able to go out and compete in that workforce, so what we really want, is we want something that stimulates a group of people to go back into what we know as that free market. Ralston then played a clip of Angle, exp...

I’ve spent the morning absolutely not in deep thought or careful meditation. I’ve spent it doing my income taxes. I may never write again. My taxable income was $17k, and, based on this amount, I owe the Federal Government $1,929.00. Most of this was deducted, thankfully, from the job I had for a few months last year. I only have to pay $230. I could make payments, but the fee to set up a payment plan is $110. I am going down the hall to the community printer in my building after I finish my writing this to steal some paper and print out my return. I will then mail it later today, with a check I hope the IRS doesn’t cash too fast. I’m also hoping they give out free hot dogs at the Post Office like they did last year. Most of my income was unemployment compensation this year, which was made taxable in order to balance some imaginary budget dreamed of by Congress, or, maybe they just thought that people without jobs needed some extra motivation that only debt could provide. It seems a...