What a relief: Would you like your refund in installments or one lump sum?
Thanks to a perfect storm created by too many ballot initiatives, dipwad voters, Proposition 13 and Republicans so steeped in ideology that they’d rather watch the world’s eighth largest economy tank than—God forbid!—compromise, or worse yet, embrace some sort of socialistic shared sacrifice, California is officially in the shitter. But we got sunshine! And majestic state parks! Oh, wait…
Roughly 235,000 state employees recently accepted a third furlough day each month and now face the threat of a fourth from Gov. Recalled-The-Other-Guy-For-Bogus-Reasons Schwarzenegger, who is effectively sticking these folks with a 20-percent pay cut. That’s not weekly-latte territory. That’s desperate Jean Valjean territory. That’s murder-suicide territory. What’s The Terminator’s salary again?
Hardly unexpected, this long-in-the-making hose-job has finally snaked its way to the doorstep of our state universities. Both Cal State and UC—I work for the latter—voted recently on the best ways to close breathtaking budget gaps, and the results are not pretty. A nauseating combination of fee hikes, class-size increases, enrollment reductions, pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs are the wave of the future. Excuse me while I go lay down for a sec.
Every cloud has a silver lining though, and UCSD’s arrived in the form of a notification last week from the Office of the Chancellor, an announcement that Transportation Services has a plan to save the day. Well, that might be a bit dramatic, but you know me: I go for cinematic over catatonic every single time. Look alive, people. Stay with me.
Citing a desire to “ease our common financial burdens”—a wholly laughable and transparent phrase given the source—Chancellor Marye Anne Fox announced in a dour tone befitting both the collective mood and the scope of the proclamation, that the parking czars had “identified a way to provide some relief for faculty, staff and students through a temporary decrease in parking-permit fees.”
I’d like to say I read this e-mail with piqued interest. The truth, however, is that my eyelids drooped and my mouth smirked and I sighed as I read about this so-called relief, which wouldn’t pertain to me anyway since I got “relief” by canceling my $81 monthly parking pass in June. But I digress. I read without an ounce of inspiration about the 5-percent reduction in fees that Transportation Services would be offering to UCSD employees over the coming 11 months.
Now, I’m not great at doing math in my head unless it comes to working out a tip. And while I got an A in calculus during college, I cannot to this day balance a checkbook without being reduced to tears.
However.
It doesn’t take intimate knowledge of the Archimedean Property to know that 5 percent of $81 isn’t even enough to buy the average married couple a weeks’ worth of condoms. Barring contraception, it isn’t enough for one 24-ounce can of Nestle Good Start Baby Formula or a travel pack of diapers. You picking up what I’m laying down?
Still, I wanted to include an accurate number for the piece of mind I intended to send the chancellor, so I got out my calculator and clarified that 5 percent of $81 is $4.05. A month. That’s a grand total of $44.55 a year, 45 cents shy of one campus parking ticket. These are not exactly numbers that will alleviate murderous impulses borne of financial ruin. Then again, it is 10 Big Macs, and perhaps 5,400 extra burger calories would make even the most desperate person too sluggish for violence.
To be fair—or, to be fairly ridiculous depending on your point of view—$4.05 a month can totally make a difference, and I suspect this is the logic of those generous folks in Transportation Services, who regularly pat themselves on the back for their creative altruism.
They must know, for example, that $4.05 can buy one pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream from Vons, provided you possess one of those evil Club Cards that track your shopping habits and DNA and proclivity for pop-culture and porn. If Skippy peanut butter is on special for $1.49, you can get two jars and still have a little change left over for the couch cushions. Ramen noodles are generally a safe budgetary bet, as are SPAM and Campbell’s Soup. But most beer is out of the price range, so you’ll have to gag down Two Buck Chuck if you intend to drown your sorrows. A pack of smokes is out of the question, but you should really quit anyway since $4.05 won’t begin to cover the co-pay for emphysema treatments.
What $4.05 will cover, for now at least, is that extra gallon-ish of gas, which will subsequently get you to your parking spot, which will subsequently get you to the office, where you subsequently won’t be paid for your time thanks to imminent pay cuts, which will be offset by the rather insulting, condescending, seriously disingenuous reduction in parking fees gussied up to look like relief. I think I need to get horizontal again.
Had I been consulted on how to alleviate some of the burden, I would have suggested a meaningful 25-percent reduction in fees for an entire year and an increase in the fees associated with parking tickets. But what the hell do I know? I’m no good at ledgers and whatnot.
“With this meager discount on parking,” I wrote in my e-mail to the chancellor, “you might as well say more plainly what you disguise in sympathy: Let them eat cake.”
Or Big Macs. They’re more affordable.
(As published in today’s issue of San Diego CityBeat.)
Oh, barf!
“This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.” -The self-absorbed asshat, in light of his other dalliances that didn’t cross “the ultimate line,” which I can only presume—given the Governor’s record on social policy—is anal sex.
How many more crocodile-tearful press conferences, do you think?
Nuthin’ lahk beein’ wun with naychur…
How do you solve a problem like Maria? Governor Sanford does it by writing her emails, like this one in which he bloviates on becoming one with the earth and imagines what it must be like to be a man who works with his hands:
“…I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up. To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the back ground, the tranquillity that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds – and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt.”
Stand up: Hold the racist’s feet to the fire
Certain things frighten me to such a magnitude that they disrupt the normal motility of my colon. Reality television, Mustangs, mullets, self-inflicted penile injuries and the county fair all make the list. There’s vomit, Smucker’s Goober PB&J, The Jonas Brothers, suburbia and Dora the Explorer. Victoria Beckham’s boobs, pickled herring and the fact that a book in which the Pope fathers a love child spends years on the New York Times Bestseller list all blow the springs right off my We-Are-So-Completely-Fucked-O-Meter.
Add to this horror show Crocs, Mickey Rourke’s new face and 8-percent pay cuts at UCSD and I’m throwing back shots of Benefiber like Patron Gold on May 5. I’ll go ahead and add terrorism and global warming to the above list just to be PC, but in all honesty, I’m way less scared by all those things combined than I am by racist dipshits. Hands down, it’s hate that makes me think I’m staring into the abyss of End Times.
Last week, two GOP semi-nobodies put on a comedy show for their fellow Americans. Rusty DePass, fundraiser and former chair of South Carolina’s state election commission, used his Facebook page as a platform from which to compare our First Lady to a gorilla. Not one day later, an administrative assistant to Tennessee state Sen. Diane Black was outed for having sent a photo of all 44 U.S. Presidents to some friends via e-mail. In place of Obama’s image was black space with two white googley eyes peering out. The photo was titled “Spook.”
Both of these individuals offered tepid apologies that betrayed their true beliefs: DePass laughed off his gag as “clearly in jest”—clearly—and then went on to blame the victim (“The comment was hers, not mine”). The senatorial staffer, Sherri Goforth—who sent her missive using a computer at the office of an elected official during business hours—was even more impressive when she claimed regret for having sent the image to the wrong group of people. Presumably, the right group of people never would have forwarded the funny to the wrong group of people, and then Goforth wouldn’t be in this conundrum of feeling “very sick” about not being able to take it back. I wonder if her faux pas caused her tummy to hurt like mine does.
Everybody—but especially Republicans who shouted for eight years about the treasonous act of criticizing a president during wartime—should be denouncing DePass and Goforth. Yet, beyond the wink-and-nod wrist slapping, things are fairly crickety over there on the right. DePass has pretty much gotten a pass, and despite demands, Goforth has not been fired. As of this writing, there has been no response—shocker—to a letter I sent to Black’s office and the office of Tennessee Gov. Phil Breseden.
More disturbing than what either of these people did or said individually, though, is the collective hurrah from woodwork-dwelling, racist whack-a-doos who live among those of us who yearn for a true post-racial America.
Comments left on the Free Republic last week reflected a disagreement with DePass’ armchair genealogy: Michelle Obama didn’t resemble a gorilla, they said, but, rather, a howler monkey, a mandrill, a baboon. It was suggested by one person that an apology to gorillas everywhere be forthcoming.
Another bigot, hiding behind the screen name Thor, posted a response on a comment I left at Newscoma, pointing out that I must not “know the White race has been targeted for extermination, and if nothing changes, the last White person is predicted to be born in Iceland in the year 2,200.” He makes such an extinction sound downright Utopian.
“Why didn’t you adopt a baby from a White girl who was about to have an abortion you frickin idiot?” he continued. “You think you are a good person because you went along with the plan to destroy your culture?” Umm—if you represent my culture, then, yes!
But I don’t need to rely on cyber-strangers to say such vile things. While in a heated e-mail exchange recently with another local writer—and I use that term lightly when referring to him—he suggested I try finding out “why black kids sit in cars, with their stereos blasting, as if they think everyone else wants to hear 50 Cent. Or, why they sit in movie theatres making noise, talking on cell phones or at the screen, as if they are Chris Rock.” Never mind that it was largely white middle-class teens who made rap mainstream. This guy can scribble the dots, but he can’t connect them. “I’m sure you’ll get to deal with all that fun,” he wrote, “when your little one grows up.”
People like Thor are the extremists. His is the irrational vitriol of an angry and somehow marginalized white man. He is the dangerous, terrifying—probably mullet-wearing—person I hope never to run in to. He’s the one you can’t reason with because his frontal lobe has atrophied from lack of use. To be sure, he is in the minority.
More ubiquitous are the fly-under-the-radar bigots like DePass, Goforth and the writer. They’re the ones who run in the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black crowd, who know their attitudes are wrong and who bank on never getting called out when they’re caught expressing them.
Pete Kotz, a writer for the Nashville Scene, argues that firing Goforth “only picks off a middle-aged lady,” a low-level pencil pusher in a cabal of unscrupulous policy-making bigots. “It does nothing to heal the greater wound, which is composed by the creeps, racists, half-wits and professional victims who make up the Tennessee legislature. They’re the real affront here, the wound that will become terminal if left unchecked.”
He makes a point, but only to a point. I say: Change happens from the bottom up. So why not start with the lowest common denominator and some Metamucil on the side?
Can’t we drop him off in a jungle somewhere?
So much for “Obama deserves my silence.”
This today from our former leader who left office with abysmally low approval ratings: “I told you I’m not going to criticize my successor. I’ll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don’t believe that persuasion isn’t going to work. Therapy isn’t going to cause terrorists to change their mind.”
Number 1: Shut up.
Number 2: Did he mean that he doesn’t believe persuasion is going to work? Or did he mean that he thinks persuasion might work?
Number 3: Who is sending terrorists to therapy? Is that part of the proposed Health Care Reform plan?
Number 4: Trotting out this guy means the Republicans are definitely wandering in the dark.
Number 5: My mother taught me it’s never polite to say “shut up.”
Number 6: (Because I like bookends) Shut the hell up.
And because everyone loves an encore…
***UPDATE: Diane Black’s website has been taken off-line and her staff is not answering either of the phone numbers I provided. Innundated is the word that comes to mind. And while the Tennessee Democratic Party has called for the firing of Goforth, Black was on CNN defending her earlier today. To have your voice heard, email is the best avenue here. You can cc Tennessee’s governor at: Phil.Bredesen@tn.gov. Please spread the word.
Thank you.
__________________________________________________________
Sherri Goforth, an executive assistant for Sen. Diane Black of Tennessee, sent the following “Historical Keepsake Photo” to people in her email list:
This time, the apology was for sending the photo to the wrong email list. “I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong button,” Goforth said. “I’m very sick about it, and it’s one of those things I can’t change or take back.”
Very sick about it. Hmmm. I’m not quite sure I know what she’s talking about.
Sherri Goforth has been reprimanded but is keeping her job. It’s what I like to call the wink-and-nod reprimand. I personally think it’s worthy of a quick email or phone call to Ms. Black’s office.
Here. Let me make it easy for you:
sen.diane.black@capitol.tn.gov
You can even contact Ms. Goforth, should you be so inclined.
Nashville Address:
5 Legislative Plaza
Nashville, TN 37243-0218
Phone: (615) 741-1999
Fax: (615) 253-0207
Staff Contact: Sherri Goforth
Research Analyst – Valerie Yancey
Caucus Press Secretary - Darlene Schlicher
Memo to the fear-mongers
The House Minority Leader John Boehner says that bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States for trial and future detention is “…the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America.” I’d like to point out to Mr. Boehner that we don’t need to import any terrorists because we’re breeding them, incubating them, nourishing and growing and arming them right here at home.
Maybe Boehner is just confused. In his world, a terrorist is brown and Muslim. The reality is that the domestic Boogeyman looks a whole lot more like the reflection Boehner must see in the mirror each morning: Angry and pink-faced and pent-up and somehow disenfranchised.
Generally speaking: Family Obama continues to rock the cheap duds
In an attempt to pin down the exact coordinates of my happy place, I’ve reinstated my pre-election policy to steer clear of news articles whose headlines make me want to fling myself from the Coronado bridge (the murder of Dr. George Tiller) or run other drivers off the road (the $4.5 billion of tobacco-company stock held by health-insurance companies) or key every car in the parking lot of the Mormon monstrosity in La Jolla (18,000 legally recognized gay marriages still have not threatened the foundation of my one).
While I feel it’s my duty as a self-declared wonk to keep up to date on world affairs, I’ve let my New Yorkers stack up unopened, and I’ve recently been skipping online news articles in lieu of anything with glossy pictures. Why waste precious time with cumbersome words, I figure. They’re necessary, I know, but they’re so—wordy and, too often, molecularly depressing. Kind of like a Seymour Hersh exposé.
The daily cycle is a tidal wave of tragedy, hopelessness, injustice, familial murder-suicides, airplane crashes and foreign wars. Even the trashy stuff is more than I can bear, what with the follicularly challenged pair of cretins called Jon and Kate Plus Eight (breathe, Belfer).
Because my eyes can roll back in their sockets only so far, I’ve temporarily limited my intake of current events to articles that advertise visual aides in the headline: “Michelle Obama Visits Eiffel Tower with Sasha and Malia, Wears Stylish Scarf (PHOTOS).” Pictures of her stylish scarf, you say? Picture me uplifted and scrolling down, bypassing all the wordy words.
Of course, the missus hit the perfect note with her scarf. And, of course, she draped it with all the je ne sais quoi-ness of a true Parisian. I bet she even went so far as to—Mon Dieu!—speak the language. And given that she isn’t saddled with an accent from Midland, she probably didn’t say bon-jew-er when being respectful. Score one more for bringing civility back to the White House.
While I thought Michelle looked lovely, it was Malia who caught my eye this time. It took a sec for the full impact to register, but I did the cyber version of a double take when I clicked back one photo. There she was, the budding fashionista, sporting a sassy red windbreaker and, beneath it, the very same T-shirt I was wearing while not reading the article about her trip to France.
I was unnaturally thrilled that I could be so hip in my tissue tee with the Indian-inspired batik silk screen. But the realization that I was elated to be dressed like a 10-year-old immediately squelched my elation. Did I just shop in the Juniors section and not know it? Have I lost track of age-appropriate attire? And worse: Could I be in danger of dressing like my child?
The implications of that last thought were paralyzing as I saw my life play out beneath the vaulted ceilings of Rancho Peña-wherever, bejeweled tracksuits hung in the closet, Cookie Lee and Silpada parties the highlight of each passing month. Maybe the daily news isn’t so depressing after all.
The horror of my imagined life threatened to derail my end-zone fashion dance as I stared at the mini-me on the computer. But I didn’t let it because the real reason for my glee was that I knew Malia’s shirt wasn’t purchased at Barney’s or Bergdorf’s.
Our T-shirt came from Target. Yes. It. Did. Miss Malia wore our $12 Target shirt to the Eiffel Tower. Last week, her mama wore a $10 Gap tee and $24 Gap cardigan when she lunched with Nancy Reagan. And as documented by photographer Callie Shell, our president has holes—not diamonds—on the soles of his shoes.
All of this focus on clothing may seem, on its face, superficial. But it isn’t. Heidi Montag making the CNN homepage for quitting and then un-quitting a reality show in Costa Rica because “the devil” advised her to “get out of the jungle” is superficial. Our first family being frugal is reassuring and smart. Though, I’d like to openly encourage B. Obama to loosen the pocketbook and update his wardrobe with some Ben Sherman flat-front trousers. The pleats make him look disturbingly Republican and un-cool, especially when paired with his silence on gay service members.
What the first-family pragmatism does for me is instill a sense of patience and an ability to step back from the reactionary ledge. They embody a thoughtfulness nonexistent during the mission-accomplished years and have a way of bridging the daunting crevasse between red and blue. Certainly, those uncompromising outliers on the far ends of the political spectrum will never be satisfied. The temper tantrums of those who stockpile ammo and incite violence, and those who throw their hands in the air at the imperceptibly slow pace of change blind them to nuance.
On some level, I understand this frustration. As an unapologetic leftist who believes women should have the choice of what to do with our bodies, who believes all Americans should have access to healthcare and who believes gays should be allowed to marry and serve openly in the military, I want more and I want it faster.
If only because we have thinkers modeling proper behavior for the rest of us, I’m willing to wait and see, to give things time and to try to view the bigger picture, literally and figuratively. I take much comfort in knowing America currently has the best ambassadors I ever expect to see in my life, and while Malia and I spend our respective allowances at the girl’s department in Target, I’ll try to enjoy the apoplectic fits of the haterz.
(A version of this is published in today’s issue of San Diego CityBeat.)
Outrage
Today I’m recommending you read this open letter to AIG. It was cathartic reading it, so it must have been cathartic writing it. Melanie put a breathtaking human face to the story and now, I’m going to add another one:
I like her ending, only I wouldn’t have been so polite as to use asterisks. I’m too blinded by rage to even locate the asterisk key when I think about the futures stolen by these unscrupulous, relentless crooks who are now suing the US government for…back…taxes…