There is no gravity, the Earth just sucks

A while ago, my Angelfire blog disappeared for about a day. I could still get access to the webshell where all the entries were stored, but no one could see the page from the outside. After spending twenty minutes hunting for an email address, I finally found a way to contact Angelfire's help desk and a few hours after that, they got things straightened out again. However, since Angelfire has had problems like this in the past, I took the opportunity to create this mirror site at Blogger, moving everything I had on this blog here.

However, if you like, you can find the original page, more or less, at http://www.angelfire.com/droid/annals/000

The plan is to continue cross posting everything I have at this one blog over to the other, and vice versa, though I actually think the blogspot page is easier to read -- by coincidence, Mike Norton and I seem to have hit on the exact same formatting template.

No one seems to have found this page as yet, given the utter lack of comments here (well, few enough have found the other one, by that standard). Still, I'll try to keep both going. I'd like to get a little more exposure to one or the other blog, although I'm not sure how to do that at the moment...

Anyway. In local news... hmmm... stuff to talk about, stuff to talk about...

My job sucks, but like most people with bad jobs, I'm pretty much stuck in until I can line up something else, and moving from one acceptably paying job to another in River City hasn't been the easiest effort in the past. What mostly sucks about it is that, once again, my bosses seem to be singling me out to be monitored at great length, and last night, I got pulled aside and told I'd made yet another mistake in the information I was giving out to a customer and I had to call that customer back and give him the right info.

It was, as a chick with a carrot on her nose once said, a fair cop. But I can't think of anyone in the world who wants to work this way... with their bosses monitoring everything they do every minute of the day, waiting for them to make a mistake (as is inevitable; none of us are perfect) and then giving them shit for it. I badly need to find another work environment. But that's something for another day; I realize that Tony Collett, just for one example, would take my job in a heartbeat if he had the chance.

My mom and stepdad were up this last weekend for what was supposed to be a six day visit, Thursday to the following Tuesday. However, for one reason or another, they cut it short and left Monday afternoon. Officially it was because they were both feeling under the weather. Unofficially, Super Adorable Toddler and they did not mix well and I think they were happy to be shut of her. She was rather cranky on occasion, and while at times she was on her best behavior, at other times she was at her most spoiled. I've learned how to talk to her to get her to stop behaving that way, and SuperGirlfriend has her own methods, but my mom and stepdad are not wise in the ways of The Baby.

In all honesty, I was probably more brusque than I needed to be during their visit, too. I'm never good with disruptions to my routine, and this just wasn't a great time... my new job sucks, and we're having a crisis with SuperDependable Teen right now, and approaching an imminent one with Super Drama Teen. Respectively, SuperDependable Teen is so enchanted with her new popularity in high school that she's decided she doesn't need to do any schoolwork. She's making up for this, however, by talking in class a great deal to her friends. The end result was an interim report full of Fs and a report card (brought home yesterday) with two Fs, two Ds, and a couple of Cs. All of the SuperKids have Super Intelligence, reinforced on both sides of their family (SuperGirlfriend is beaucoup brainy, as is her ex hubby) so this is just not acceptable.

So SuperDependable Teen is grounded from all the household stuff -- phone, computer, TV, like that -- for a month, plus she does nothing social while she's at home. Separately, as I have no respect for a slacker who is as smart as SuperDependable Teen, I've grounded her off all of MY stuff -- most of the movies, my X-Box (she's gotten hooked on KOTOR), the HeroClix, and my comics -- for... well, the forseeable future, I'm not setting a time limit, I want some kind of hard evidence in hand that she's bringing her grades up steeply before she puts a hand to anything that's mine again.

This is punishment for me, as well -- SuperDrama Teen is caught up in her own stuff, and SuperAdorable Toddler and I don't have much in common, but SuperDependable Teen has been my buddy on weekends and after work, and I've enjoyed telling her about comics history and continuity, showing her the ropes on KOTOR, sharing some of my movies with her, and playing clix with her. (SuperDrama Teen will play with us, too, but she isn't really into it and doesn't concentrate so she plays badly and then gets sulky and isn't much fun.)

Super Drama Teen is on the cusp of getting some grounding herself, as her report card yesterday wasn't anything to sing arias about, and it's pretty much entirely because she spends every waking moment that she's at home talking on the phone or chatting with the IM feature to her girlfriend. I have been Super Drama Teen's biggest booster on this girlfriend thing because the chick she is seeing pretty clearly loves her and it seems to be a good, positive relationship. However, she comes home from school and picks up the phone; two hours later SuperGirlfriend chases her off the phone and she heads straight to the computer... I am thinking we need to have a talk to her about the word 'obsession'. And, well, her grades need to come up a great deal before she can afford to spend six hours a night doing nothing but yakking with someone.

My old buddy Hartmut has been sending me some interesting stuff in the email lately, and I wanted to publicly thank him for that. I guess he still can't hang comments over on this side of the planet from where he is in Germany, despite the fact that Angelfire and blogger both have different engines from Squawkbox... and I really wish I could find something to use my Squawkbox account for, since I am paying for it. Ah, well...

Last week sometime, I got a sudden spate of emails from a guy calling himself Gandalf the Grey, whom some of you may remember as a heckler/troll who seemed to appear out of the ether a while back at my previous blogging site. He gave me a ration of shit about how I'd said various things on previous blogs a few years before and now I was living a life that made those things a lie, and generally seemed to be devoting a lot of energy to trying to make me miserable, although that's been tried by better men (and women) than he, and if uber-skank/megabitches like Robyn Pollman and Dave LeBlanc can't bring me down, I don't think some lame dweeb who can't be bothered to make up an original webnomen has much of a chance, either.

The odd thing about Gandalf was that he was a self pronounced conservative, and he was also very articulate, which between the two of them pretty much eliminated anyone I actually personally knew or could think of who might be coming after me. I mean, yeah, I considered for a moment the possibility that Dean Esmay might be throwing a hissy fit in my direction, but I'm way too small potatoes for Dean to bother with... in fact, I'm way too small potatoes for anyone sane to bother with, it seems to me. You'd have to be borderline sociopathic to start with, like the guy at the Speedmonkey site, or, well, Robyn Pollman, before you'd get so upset at anything a weeble like me posts to a site maybe four people total ever read, to put that much effort into coming after me.

But I didn't worry about it much; I just changed URLs and got on with my thing.

However, last week, Gandalf apparently finally got his clairvoyance spell right and he stumbled across this new page. Rather than litter up a comment thread with his surly whinging, he threw a barrage of venom into me email box. I didn't read most of it; his opening paragraph started out with something like "You really shouldn't promise people you're not blogging on one page and then go blogging somewhere else, especially when you're so easy to find... all I had to do was check some pages I knew you read and hit their links and here I am on your new page."

From there he segued into something about how I shouldn't say things like "Bush stole the election" without quoting some pertinent election law, and I stopped reading his nonsense and deleted that note and the two others (with attachments, yet) unread.

I've already dealt with the thing about quoting election law at more length than it deserved further down the page. But let me note at this juncture that it frankly amazes me that I seem to have this kind of power -- that somehow, simply by typing into this machine from wherever I happen to be at any point in the world, I can make otherwise sane and rational adults so frickin' crazy that they will move heaven and earth to... I don't even know what. Blow raspberries at me. Try to ruin my day, I guess.

Don't these people understand that when you obsess on someone else this way, you give them enormous power over you?

Well, give Gandalf his props, he does understand this. A few days ago I got another email from
him, and I read it, because the subject line said, "I quit".

It's a pretty extraordinary email:


Ok, viz my three emails on Saturday, I don’t know if your planning to eviscerate me on your website, move to a new website, but please be advised that I quit. I haven’t spent a lot of active time on the web, gotten in a few intellectual tussles, but when it comes to the more active interactions, there’s got to be a way of dealing with the tensions of life that makes you feel better than this, like say cutting off a finger. I thought that I was justified for a while because you acted in what I would have to say was a shitty manner when I was Corwin of Amber, but I don’t know how you draw the line, and maybe I just can’t. All I can say is that, while you won’t believe it, this isn’t me, it’s never been me, and I sure as hell am not going to let it be me. Take my apologies if you want them, which I’m sure you don’t, curse me if you like, I doubt you’ll do a better job than I have, but in any event I am gone, and you will not see me back.

Now, I think that's a pretty good apology, and more, a good depiction of a normally rational, mature adult suddenly coming to their senses after a prolonged period of irrational 'net rage. So

I say hurrah for Gandalf, I accept your apology (for whatever that is worth) and offer my own back (and I already sent him an email to that effect).

Here's the thing, though -- when I read that email, I had not the vaguest idea who "Corwin of Amber" was, other than, you know, the Zelazney character.

So I went to Google (lovely Google, brilliant Google, pretty Google... Google, my precious, my precious) and did a search and up popped the following page:

http://www.angelfire.com/blog/abehm/dsp/101803.html

So, yeah, now I do remember Corwin of Amber... vaguely.

Having reread that page, yeah, I cannot argue with him, I was pretty shitty to him. However, here's the thing:

I'd do it again.

I explained myself on that page, and you're welcome to go there and read what I said, which I still stand by. But to sum it up: he initiated an email response with me, based on stuff of mine he had read. Anything you read by me pretty much speaks to my honesty; if you're going to stick your snout into my email box, you get what you get. I expect grown ups to understand that, and I expect children who write me out of the blue will tell me something like "Dear Highlander I am Cindy Lou Who who is no more than two, please don't be mean to me". And I wouldn't.

But the thing I like best about myself is my honesty. I don't volunteer my opinions on things any more except on this blog page, which, you know, is mine and nobody has to read (and most bodies don't). But if someone comes to me and says "this is what I think, please respond to my opinions", well, I will damned well do so (if I have time and I feel like it and the person writing isn't obviously a damned fool to start with; there's just so many summers babe, so many springs). And Corwin, despite his horribly fannish and unoriginal choice of a nom de Net, was a funny, intelligent, articulate guy with interesting views, and he got my best work in response... and that includes my honesty.

Apparently, he liked most of the stuff I sent him, but then he didn't like my honesty in one particular passage where I told him I honestly thought one of his opinions was a piece of prime jackassery. And he could have responded in a similar vein. Or quit corresponding with me, which for a long time was what I thought he had done.

Instead, he adopted a brand new pseud and started heckling me again, after letting things lapse for long enough that I wouldn't suspect his previous identity.

I don't know. That just seems crazy to me.

Maybe he's really my old buddy Slappy, trying to prove some kind of point. Maybe this seems to him to be a parallel to me writing him fannish emails under various pseuds (because I knew he wouldn't read them if he knew they were from me) and posting criticisms of his work to an ASTRO CITY board under a pseud, as well. If so, well, Slappy has his own subjective viewpoint that is both emotionally retarded and entirely demented, and if he feels there is a parallel there, fine. (There isn't -- Slappy could write me at any time under his real name and I'd read it and probably respond in an appropriate fashion, which is more courtesy than he's willing to extend to me. And, frankly, I have a right to send commentary on THE AVENGERS to the guy who is writing the book and have that commentary read and evaluated just like any other fan; if he's got a girder up his ass because I kinda dated his wife ten years before they got married, well, that's his psychosis, not mine).

Anyway, I doubt Gandalf is actually Slappy, but whoever he is, I'm happy he finally had the scales fall from his eyes and decided to stop wasting his time on a nobody like me and get back to whatever he does in his real life.

But if he IS Slappy and he's reading this... great work on the JLA/Avengers crossover. Superb stuff. But that Crime Syndicate story blew toads; if you're going to make your villains that blatantly evil, you have to have the nads to really bitch slap the bastards at the end of the story. Letting them walk away like you did was worthless and weak. And the typeface captions in the CONAN stuff don't work; it's intrusive and constantly disrupts the atmosphere. I understand what you are trying to do, but the original REH stories weren't done in a visual medium. He was creating pictures with that typeface; you are constantly disrupting the flow of the artwork with that typeface. Cut it out.

Okay, that's enough from me for now.

Little plastic people

SuperGirlfriend took pity on me last night and let me open one of my several birthday presents early. So I am now the gleefully chortling owner of a Veteran Superman (from ICONS), a Veteran Dr. Strange (the FANTASTIC FORCES fig, with the coveted Spider Man TA allowing him to use the new FF Team Ability that all the DC geeks loathe with a passion, and well they should, too, the big babies), and a Fantastic Forces Wolverine Unique, the futuristic version of the character from the DAYS OF FUTURE PAST.

Now, yes, it's true, I loathe the character of Wolverine with every fiber of my being and hate Chris Claremont's X-MEN stories even more than that, but DAYS OF FUTURE PAST has a special place in my history and heart, because the first professional writing sale I ever made was a scathing review of that story called "The All New All Dead X-Men". I sold it to a long defunct New Media Irjax fanzine called LOC, for the princely sum of $35.00, and the bums never sent me my promised comp copy either, which is sad because not only did it have my article in it, but it also had this great article by Mark Evanier called "What it Was Was Fandom" that even Mark Evanier doesn't have a copy of anymore. And no, you can't find copies of LOC anywhere any more, either; if you ask Doug Sulipa, who can find any other comic or comics related publication in the history of the universe, he just stares at you as if you are unhinged and then cautiously changes the subject.

But then, a lot of people do that with me.

Anyway, I love these clicks. SuperGirlfriend is the BEST. But all three of my readers knew that already.

It's looking like we're going to have to ground the older two SuperKids off everything fun in their life, though, as their report cards are coming out next week and early returns indicate that we will be appalled by what we see. That means I lose my only two dependable clix opponents. See, THEY screw up and I get punished. How is that fair? But, anyway, it may be a looooong time before I can take my "Fantastic Four with Dr. Strange visiting for tea" team out to play. Which is too bad, because I'd enjoy watching the SuperKids try to hit the Sorcerer Supreme when he's got a 21 defense against missile fire! Whoo hoo!

Still, one of them would play Ultron and the other one would play Thanos and I'd just cry.

Moving in stereo

Okay, the Angelfire site (www.angelfire.com/droid/annals/000) is back up again. However, Angelfire seems to be only middlin' reliable, so I think I'll keep this site as a mirror, and post anything of note to both.

So, you pays no money and you takes your choice.

Although you could certainly pay me money if you wanted to.

Moving Day

Sometime just before 8 pm EST on Thursday, October 9, 2005, my new Angelfire blog at www.angelfire.com/droid/annals/000, seems to have vanished into the ether.

Angelfire briefly gave me a similar hiccup a few weeks back, and then everything miraculously reappeared. However, as of this posting, the contents of that blog are still missing. Fortunately, I could still get into the Blog Builder page and so I have laboriously, over the past two hours, copied and pasted everything from THAT blog to THIS blog.

Why this has happened is a mystery to me. I suppose I could have been hacked... I recently got some email from a guy who had been harassing me on a previous blog, which I ignored, and then obliquely commented on in a recent entry, and maybe he got busy with his html coder, or something. Or perhaps the entry just before this one, which links to a page created by an avowed Satanist, triggered some kind of evil protective cantrip.

Or maybe Angelfire just sucks.

I don't know. I guess we'll try this for a while and see how it goes. Hopefully I won't forget my log on or password...

I think I'll just blog quietly for a while over here, and give the Angelfire blog a chance to come back up.

Apparently, my conservative email heckler found the new Angelfire blog through a link on one of my fellow blogger's pages (in the very little I read of his first email, he was gloating about his masterful triumph in locating me again, and chiding me for saying I wasn't going to be blogging any more and then doing it at a different URL... I mean, jesus fuck, this guy is purportedly a successful mature adult with a family and apparently he has nothing better to do than ransack the Internet for me and then gloat when he finds me again... can you say 'loser'? Sure, I knew you could...) Given that, I'll hold off on letting anyone except SuperGirlfriend know about this URL. And, to anyone who finds having to type it all in aggravating, sorry... all the shorter versions were taken (probably by me during previous tries to set up a blog over here, but I can't remember any of my passwords).

Okay, into the work day.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

9 November 2005 21:37 EST Posted by Highlander

Here's some scary shit from Digby's blog:
But that's not General Vallely's claim to fame. He is known for a paper he wrote with a military intelligence officer named Michael Aquino in the late 1980's called From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory. Aquino is also the founder of a Satanic cult called "The Temple of Set" which has had many run-ins with the law regarding satanic pedophile rings on military bases. I still kid you not. You can find a copy of this paper on the Temple web-site. He founded the cult in the mid-1970's more than a decade before he wrote this paper with our friend Vallely. I'm not big on guilt by association -- but really.
General Vellely is one of the cult of neocons that hangs out pretty much full time with Dick Cheney. If you check out the link digby posts, you'll find a site chock full of nutty neocon nonsense about nuking the enemy and mindwars and psy ops and all this other really freaky stuff... and if you scroll down, you'll find a lot of even more truly mind bogglingly terrifying stuff in regard to how this close associate of Vellely's, and of Cheney's, is a devoted Satanist who has founded his own temple of 'reformed Satanism' based on ancient Egyptian pagan theology.

Now, the last thing in the world I am is narrow minded about alternative religions, and from what I've read about this guy's Church of Set, they seem to take the fairly standard 'good Satanist' stance that the Christian God is actually the embodiment of all evil, while Satan is actually a friend of mankind who has just been maligned by God throughout history, because God essentially controls the press. And that may well be. But the fact remains, this guy is a deeply deeply whacked out occultist who is heavily into some truly deranged fringe philosophy, and apparently he's very influential with our current Administration.

Personally, when I see real world super scientific neocon nutjob stuff about nukes and psy ops juxtaposed on the same page with stuff about the Reformed Church of Satan, and realize that both sets of apparently wildly dichotomous beliefs are encompassed within the same skull, well... I get kind of freaked out. People who believe in the sorcerous abilities of Alistair Crowley, just for starters, should not exercise any influence over any real world government.

That may be narrow minded of me, but it's how I feel. Metaphysics is fun to b.s. about with open minded friends, but we don't need it in our highest government circles. Brrrrrr.

I have to wonder how the conservative base would react if someone told them that Cheney likes to hang out with Satanists...?

Now, jingle your bells just a little

9 November 2005 11:41 EST Posted by Highlander

There’s a blog I’ve just discovered that I like very much. It’s called Orcinus, although it’s URL isn’t anything that remotely resembles that, and other than as the Latin term for a killer whale (I think) I don’t know what Orcinus means, or why this blogger is applying the title (if I’m understanding it correctly) to his blog.

I mean, for all I know, it’s a Tolkien reference. But I like this guy’s writing very much. If you want to find the blog, it comes up first after a Google search on ‘Orcinus’. I could paste a link, but it’s way more trouble than I want to go to right now. Sorry.

Anyway, everything I’ve seen on this guy’s blog is worth reading (I’m especially enjoying the way he’s been bitch slapping Michelle Malkin all over the place lately) but here’s what I wanted to write about a bit – an entry from November 7 2005 which he opens with:
Ask yourself which is the more important principle:

- the right of American citizens to vote, or

-- preventing those who are ineligible to vote from doing so.
Now, think of this as a kind of Rohrschach test: The answer you give is neither right nor wrong. But it does tell us a great deal -- about your politics, about your priorities, and about what kind of American you are.
First, I suspect he’s spelling ‘Rorschach’ wrong, but it’s a tough word and maybe Alan Moore spelled it incorrectly all through WATCHMEN, I don’t know. But I’m more interested in the essential principle he is exploring here, because as with many seemingly simple questions, I can’t pick either A) or B).

What I think is primarily important, in terms of enacting a civil and functional democracy in which liberal values like individual freedom will continue to flourish in a meaningful fashion, is not letting fools vote.

It is, in my opinion, very much that simple. When you let fools vote, you get… well, you get the last five years. And in this context, it does not matter that the administration that has been screwing up America and much of the rest of the globe for the last five years did not actually legitimately win any elections. That administration could not have stolen any elections, either, if 50 million or so fools hadn’t genuinely and sincerely voted for them.

Let me digress here for a moment and mention something that a conservative troll recently wrote to me in an email I pretty much deleted after reading about the third sentence, but which, nonetheless, remains with me. Essentially, this person indicated to me that I had no right to say things on this blog like “Bush stole the election” unless I was going to back my statements up with pertinent quotes from specific election law. Let me say this to that:

First, no, you are confused. I have an inalienable human and individual right to say any goddam thing I feel like saying at any time. I don’t have to support it with a single frickin’ thing, and if you want evidence that this is true, please go spend five minutes listening to Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, or Michelle Malkin. If people had no right to express unsubstantiated and utterly retarded bullshit without some kind of reasonable support, every conservative mouthpiece in America would be in the Big House right now.

Now, having said that, no, I am not comparing my work to that of any of those people, I am comparing my RIGHTS to those enjoyed by those people. Get that straight before we move on.

Second, let me also add this: in my experience, when conservatives ask liberals to please support any statement in regard to the illegitimacy of Bush’s presidency by quoting something or providing some sort of factual evidence, well, they do not mean it. What they are hoping for is the opportunity to say “Well, the Supreme Court SAID it was legitimate and they are the highest law in the land, SO THERE!!!” Conservatives love to say this about the Supreme Court, which is, according to conservatives, absolutely unimpeachable on every subject involving the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, and only becomes error ridden and addle headed when we take up the subject of legalized abortion and gun control laws.

If I were to take that bait and start listing off all the various acts of Republican thuggery and (to use the Nixonian term) ratfucking that were enacted during the 2000 and 2004 campaigns and elections in order to steal the elections, which range from sending thugs in Halliburton and Enron funded planes to Florida to stage violent demonstrations outside recount sites in order to shut them down, through sending mass mailing to predominantly black neighborhoods claiming that election day for Democrats had been moved to Wednesday because high turnout was expected at the polls, to, most likely, reprogramming the Diebold electronic voting machines to hugely pad Republican vote margins wherever possible (resulting on occasion in various Ohio counties recording significantly more Republican votes than the last census recorded living residents), well, conservatives then start to haw and harrumph about how none of that is proven, and anyway, Democrats don’t have the cleanest electioneering record either, and , and, well, the Diebold thing is a ridiculous urban legend, and besides, isn’t it time to put all that in the past and stop indulging in the politics of hateful discord and come together as a country and a nation to solve the very real problems that we all face together, like legalized abortion and gay marriage and all those hateful dope smoking liberal traitors who are causing us to lose the War on Terror?

All of this is largely why instead of bothering to reiterate in detail any of the reams, droves, drifts, and/or tractor trailer truckfuls of inarguable documentation proving irrefutably that Bush did indeed steal the 2000 and 2004 elections, I simply say things like “Bush stole the 2004 election” and move on. All us sane people know that Bush stole the 2004 election, and those of us sane people who are liberal will actually admit to it. Conservatives, on the other hand, can be divided into two groups in regard to this subject – the intelligent and sane ones, who also know Bush stole the election and who have no actual problem with that because they think it's pretty cool, actually, but who won’t admit it because, well, they know other people don't agree with that, and the emotional retards who still can’t admit we are not winning in Iraq and we will not ever win in Iraq using conventional combat techniques.

(This is a lesson you would have expected nearly everyone to have learned after Vietnam, but if everyone had learned that lesson, I imagine we would never have invaded Iraq in the first place, so clearly, there are a lot of people out there who still just don’t comprehend the notion that in guerilla warfare, it doesn’t matter who has the most expensive toys, all that matters is who is willing to do the nastiest stuff… and in this particular war, the religious crazies who are willing to die for Allah if they can take a lot of the enemy with them have a large advantage over the fat decadent lazy imperialists, who want to live to go back home and watch Internet porn while they drink beer and get blowjobs from the next door neighbor’s girlfriend when he’s at work.)

Now, it’s pointless to argue with the smart, sane conservatives, because, as I say, they already know Bush stole the election and they have no shame regarding it, however, they are never going to admit it, either. And, to paraphrase Heinlein, it is pointless to try to teach anything to a cretin; it wastes your time and annoys the cretin. Conservative cretins are often well armed, so, all the way around, it’s just a bad idea.

Back to the subject at hand: I do not feel we should allow fools to vote. Now, I know, you are going to say “well, that’s a subjective interpretation, everybody is foolish about something from someone else’s point of view, unless you can impose some kind of objective definition of ‘fool’, you’re wasting everybody’s time”. And I agree with you, which is why I have an objective definition of fool for you that is, in my mind, inarguable:

Anyone who voted for Bush in 2004 is a fool, and must never ever be allowed to vote again in any sort of democratic election.

Look, people can argue that they had valid reasons for voting for Bush in 2000. I personally disagree with every single one of those reasons, and actually think they all border on being abjectly retarded, but still, I’m biased and I’ll grudgingly concede that, yeah, I can see how some people might have thought the country was heading in the wrong direction after 8 years of Clinton and feel we needed some sort of change. Those people are trusting gullible emotional morons who are, apparently, perfectly willing to base their vote on an individual’s sexuality and then blame an entire political party/social philosophy for that sexuality… which is a fancy way of saying, these guys decided they were disgusted because a married Democrat got a blowjob from someone who wasn’t his spouse while in office, so they decided to vote for a Republican instead. And I think that’s pretty damn foolish. However, I will concede that this is perhaps a subjective point of view and give those who voted for Bush in 2000 a pass.

However, if you voted for the Shrub in 2004, well, you have no excuse. You knew what you were getting and either you liked it and wanted more or you simply insisted on believing that a plummeting economy, rampant political corruption and cronyism, over a thousand dead American troops, and an administration that never met a lie it didn’t willingly embrace and that was willing to out its own covert agents in a petty, foolish attempt to cover its own ass, was somehow not Dubya’s fault.

Either way, you’re a goddam fool, and while I would never in my life try to say you shouldn’t be allowed to say anything you want, or do anything you want that doesn’t cause any harm to me or others, casting a vote is hardly a socially neutral or consequence free act. You want to watch NASCAR and various spin offs of SURVIVOR 24/7, you want to eat exclusively at Pepsico franchises, you want to go to church every Sunday and let your kids play Grand Theft Auto as long as they can’t see any naked cartoon bosoms while they do it, that’s fine… you’re a dipshit and I don’t want to hang out with you, but you certainly have an inalienable right to be as foolish as you want. That’s what America is all about.But when your foolish behavior starts screwing up everyone else on the planet, well, I draw a line.

So I say, which is most important – the right of citizens to vote, or preventing those who are ineligible to vote from doing so? Well, it depends on why you are making certain people ineligible to vote. Personally, I think that if someone is an ex convict who has enough wisdom to vote for anyone but the Shrub in 2004, well, that person should be allowed to vote.

No votes for fools. We just can’t afford it any more.

I wish the real world would just stop hasslin' me

9 November 2005 08:20 EST Posted by Highlander

My birthday is coming up. SuperGirlfriend is scheming... something... I don't know what, although I've deduced, and she has confirmed, that part of it is an orchestrated email blitz of birthday greetings from everyone I know that she can get an email address for. But there's something else... something she hopes I will find "sweet and thoughtful" but is afraid will actually "cross the line" and make me angry... and I have no idea what that is. I guess I'll find out. But SuperGirlfriend rarely makes me angry, and when she does, it's usually because I'm being a jerk, so I imagine I'll enjoy whatever it is.

I think I could be very very happy at this point in my life, if not for, you know, my stupid job. My personal life is about as close to perfect as anything human is going to get... SG and I are getting along fine, the SuperKids are all well and happy (going through various individual crises, but, well, they're kids, that happens), I'm running my RPG again if only sporadically, I have some indications that more people are finding this blog now (so far, only a few unpleasant people desperately in need of attention have made themselves known to me, but hopefully more will come along behind them, some of whom may actually be civil and interesting human beings, if not potential friends)...

...This goddam keyboard has a left shift key that sticks, which aggravates the crap out of me, but never mind that, keyboards are easily replaced.... It's just the new job. And it's not that the new job is really that bad... as I've noted previously, it's better than mopping floors at a supermarket... I get to sit down while I work, there's more money, I'm not dealing with anyone named Bobo... but, well, working in a call center is never any fun.

Being chained to your desk for the vast majority of your shift just sucks, as does remote monitoring. In fact, the monitoring may be the most pervasively unpleasant part of call center work... I don't know any other adult with any other kind of job who would be happy with the knowledge that their bosses were secretly watching everything they did at least part of every day, and could be watching them at any time.

It's nerve wracking, and aggravating, and never more so than when I reflect that, like the idiot at the front desk who makes me walk all the way around to the back door just because "that's where the temps come in", it's all completely unnecessary.

Everything that Quality monitors for is something that can be checked some other way. At my current call center, the two big procedural matters they look for are (a) call documentation and (b) offering customers the survey at the end of every call. Both could be handled without actually listening to calls. A quick check of stats will show how many calls an agent took in a given day, and how many surveys they got during that day, too; if the percentages get too far out of whack, then you go to the agent and say "Are you offering the survey?" The same procedure will work for call documentation. If an agent takes 45 calls, but only docs 43, well, you can go ask why. Nobody needs to actually listen to the calls. Monitoring is for more than that, of course... they are also checking to see if you are giving the customers correct information, and generally checking on the quality of the service you are providing... or that's what they will tell you. But, again, if you're giving out bad info, it's not going to stay secret very long... everybody that calls me these days is obviously writing down my name, and if I tell someone "yeah, you can be reimbursed for your breast implants" and then their claim gets rejected, the first thing they are going to scream is "well, HIGHLANDER told me they were eligible!"

And it's the same for everything else in relation to customer service... if you're making customers unhappy, they are going to let your supervisor know. And at that point, sure, pull the call and listen to it and see what's going on.

Which is my point: monitoring is unnecessary until you have a customer complaint in hand. If I'm hitting my various goals in terms of talk time, schedule adherance, hold time, etc, if I'm getting an amount of surveys in proportion to the calls I'm taking that indicates I'm offering it, and if my call documentation numbers are up, then in my opinion, you should have a customer complaint in your hand before you start listening to my calls.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know... I'm whining because I don't like it when other people eavesdrop on how I do my work. To which I say a couple of things: you'd hate it too, if it was happening to you, and at least if we did it my way, there would be an objective standard that had to be met before I had to worry about some idiot who hasn't taken an active call in years (if ever) deciding that "there is a problem with your tone".

First, no, there isn't a problem with my tone. Second, there also isn't a problem with me using my sense of humor to set a customer at ease. I've worked at many call centers; I've done this for a long time. I know what I'm doing; I have customer commendations in stacks and piles and no justified customer complaints, ever. I've had customers complain about me, and I've had those calls pulled and gone over with me, and I have never been written up for anything a customer complained about, much less disciplined or fired.

Any job where you deal with thousands of customers, some of them are going to be mean, stupid, and unpleasant, and decide that if you won't comp their thousand dollar international calls to Belize, or process their six hundred dollar claim for "a medically necessary prosthesis" (that somehow or other they still cannot get any doctor to write them a letter of medical necessity regarding) they are going to get you in trouble with your supe. But those guys are idiots. My real customers love me. They always love me, at every customer service job I have. And I show up for work on time and I hit my stats.

And to me, all that should be the bottom line. So when some half senile maundering bitter obviously desperately lonely old wannabe grandmother listens to one of my calls and decides that my TONE was a problem (although the customer did not complain), and calls my supervisor up about it, and they listen to six more of my calls (monitored during a period when we had about a dozen people constantly in queue for several hours straight and I was just doing my best to process them all as quickly as possible so the center's stats wouldn't suck) and find out "hey, he isn't offering the survey or documenting all his calls"... that kind of thing just aggravates me. If my stats are good, and you don't have a customer complaint fluttering in your hand, you shouldn't be listening to my calls. Period.

I understand that people who monitor other people are, for the most part, petty and unpleasant, they've generally failed at every other job they've tried to do in the call center, and the whole Quality Control niche is essentially just a control thing... it's not enough to be able to look at a board and see who is on the phones and who isn't, and what the people on the phones are doing, and why the people off the phones aren't on right now, and to check stats and take escalations... no, management wants to actually LISTEN to what you are doing, because that puts a little more fear into you and keeps you straight. If you never know when Big Brother is watching, well, you never dare to scratch yourself. I understand all that.

I'm just really tired of Big Brother.

And I think a call center in which people were not monitored until a customer complained about them would be a more relaxed place to work, where employee morale would be much higher.

Supposedly, employee morale is regarded as a good thing, although in all honesty, I've never worked at a call center where management was willing to do anything that might actually make a significant difference to it. Set aside a thousand bucks a month for idiotic sales prizes, sure. Get rid of a completely unnecessary dress code so your people can relax and do their job a little better? Oh no, can't do that, then the suits might actually be envious of the people making a tenth of their salary. And ditch monitoring unless there is a specific, objective reason to do it to a particular rep? Oh noooooooo. Random monitoring is an essential supervisory tool; a modern call center would descend into primordial chaos if a bunch of tiny minded bureaucratic assholes weren't listening in on everyone's calls all the time.

Crap. People just like being snoopy, and take any justifiable opportunity to do it.

Now let's talk about security. The building where I work has security guards at the front and back doors, and the full time employees have electronic badges that let them in and out of the doors. Now, keeping the doors locked and making everyone use their badge to get in and out makes sense to me. It's scurrilous, petulant, bullying sense; management wants to track people as much as they possibly can, and electronic badges combined with internal check points is another fine tool for those who are already emotionally inclined to implement police state tactics whenever and wherever possible.

Other than providing a computerized roster of who went in and out when, though, it's not good for much. It does free your managers up from the need to do attendance, I guess... but in call centers, at least, people get paid by their call logs, anyway, so it seems very futile to me. It is, again, essentially a control issue... just another way for The Man to intrude a little tentacle into your sphere of privacy at work. "No, no, you don't come and go as you please here, buddy," this says. "We track you everywhere you go."

All this is stupid, and I imagine it's not inexpensive stupidity, either... the people who install these security systems and who do maintenance on them must be making a fortune, but the companies that use them are most likely shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars and getting very little in return. Does it help narrow down a suspects list when one of the spare computers from a long empty carrel disappears one night? Maybe... I guess... but in all honesty, all you have to do is prop one door open (like maintenance people do all the time so they can get outside to smoke) and then you can come and go whenever you like. It's kind of pointless... and it won't stop petty theft of office supplies (people carry that stuff out in pockets and bookbags and purses) and that's the kind of thing that costs corporations big money (supposedly).

So, unless you're running a place with a lot of cash or easily pawned and portable valuables lying around unsecured, I don't think locked doors and security badges get you much. A spurious sense of safety, maybe... one that you're paying through the nose for. But I guess most managers are insecure enough to find the warm feeling of control they get when they walk by such a checkpoint is enough.

What really strikes me as crazy, though, is having security guards at the doors where I work. I mean, look, I work at a CALL CENTER. We don't have big Scrooge McDuck type money bins in the building, nor do we have sacks of jewels lying around, nor are they any classified documents or national defense secrets lying in dossiers on anyone's desk. No one who isn't being paid to show up is going to ever want to enter the building where I work, not for any reason. And we have locked doors with electronic entry badges, although they don't give electronic badges to us temps (or 'seasonals', as they so coyly call us) so I can see where they would need some kind of workaround for us (although most other places I've worked at with this situation just issue electronic badges to the temps, because you can deprogram those things with the push of a button, and generally telling a temp "you need to turn in your badge or we deduct $60 from your final paycheck" is enough to get us to, you know, turn in our badge).

So I don't believe that the security guards at my building are just there to make sure us temps sign in when we walk into the building. Security guards are expensive, giving several hundred temps badges would have to be cheaper, I'd imagine. Nonetheless, we have security guards. And I'm bitching about this now because last week, after going in the front door just like a real person for six weeks (I'm not doing it just to be contrary, the bus drops me off out front and it's a loooooong walk around the building to the back, as I discovered on my first day), I got told by some Frank Burns type I'd never seen before that seasonals had to go in the back door, which was where the sign in books were kept, and we had to sign in.

He was very firm. The fact that the guards normally stationed at the desk had been letting me in with a smile and a wave and a "have a nice day" whenever I knocked on the glass for six weeks didn't back him up a step, and he wasn't troubled at all by the notion that, hey, I WORK HERE, DIPSHIT, I wouldn't bother showing up in this dump 5 days a week otherwise, either. He was going to talk to his staff and make sure they understood the rules, and I was going to enter and exit by the prescribed access point and sign in and out as I was required to do from this point on, regardless of the inconvenience to me, and that was that.

Fucker.

So, I've been trying to figure out exactly why my job, or maybe the people who own the building and rent it out to my job, are shelling out so much money on live security guards. It seems unlikely that it's just to harass seasonals who want to come in by the closest door to the bus stop -- I mean, management would do that if it didn't cost much, sure, but they must be paying these guards a bundle.

So... why are they there? Why does a complex that already has locks on the doors that you need a key card to get past need live security guards on the doors? All I can think of is that they're afraid someone who is pissed off because we wouldn't pay his claim is going to show up with an axe or a gun.

Now, this is a common fear at call centers... there isn't a customer service center in the world where you don't have to say 'no' to customers once in a while (or, you know, if you're David Spade, constantly) and some of them do take it amiss, yes, they do. But driving to River City with a gun to take revenge strikes me as... well, it's just crazier than anyone with a flex spending account is likely to be, anyway.

I suppose they could be there as a measure against, you know, a whacked out employee, or disgruntled ex employee, coming in and taking hostages and shooting up the management staff. But... well... a whacked out employee will still have his badge, and if he (or she, I guess) wants to kill the Boss, or that person who really really annoys them sitting in the next cubicle, chances are they're going to smile as they go by the guard with the gun in their coat pockets. A disgruntled ex employee shouldn't have his badge active anymore, and if he does, well, same thing... the guard isn't going to see the gun when this guy or girl goes by him.

Yet, suppose for a second that the guard at the door does see someone with a weapon coming in. What do they do? These guys aren't armed. If someone with a gun comes up to their desk, their choice is simple... do nothing and hope they live, or do something and become the first hostage/victim of the Call Center Shooting Spree.

I honestly can't see the grim spectre of Call Center Violence as being something that is likely enough to justify paying a staff of unarmed security guards who can't prevent it anyway. I mean, if you're really worried about it, get some off duty cops up there with .45s on their hips.
If you're not... then... why bother?

I guess it's all just to make me walk around the damn building, after all.

Second verse, same as the first

9 November 2005 07:16 EST Posted by Highlander

From Katherine Schrader of the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON -- At the CIA's request, the Justice Department is weighing whether to open a criminal investigation into the leak of possibly classified information on secret prisons to The Washington Post.

A story the newspaper published on Nov. 2 touched on a number of sensitive national security issues, including the existence of secret CIA detention centers for suspected terrorists in Eastern European democracies. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue deals with classified information, said the CIA's general counsel made the referral to the Justice Department shortly after the story appeared last week. The department will decide whether to initiate a criminal investigation.

The leak investigation into the disclosure of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity came about through the same referral procedure and led to a five-count indictment against the vice president's now former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Post spokesman Eric Grant said Tuesday the newspaper had no comment.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sidestepped questions about possible secret prisons, saying the United States was in a "different kind of war" and had an obligation to defend itself.

"We, our allies, others who have experienced attacks, have to find a way to protect our people," said Rice, who would not confirm the existence of secret prisons.

Who leaked this stuff? Well, given that it badly hurts Republicans in general, and Bush, Rice, and probably Cheney in specific, I'm going to say... I don't know. But my initial instinct -- that this is orchestrated by the Repubs themselves, as a way to slap down the press -- doesn't make sense.

If anything, this will simply mount pressure to pass that Federal shield law every newspaper and tv station has been crying about since Judith Miller went to jail...something the Republicans may or may not want (it will, effectively, let them leak any scurrilous nonsense they want to their media toadies without fear of reprisal, but on the other hand, it does strengthen a free and independent press, and Republicans aren't about giving power over themselves to anyone else, ever).

It also, as noted, makes Dubya, Condi, and The Old Gray Mule look terrible. (It also makes America look terrible to everyone else in the world, but never mind that.)

With Frist and Hastert pushing it, though, you know this is something with a lit fuse sticking out of it, however much it may look like a box of bon bons for the left. I just can't figure out how it benefits them to look into yet another national security leak from the Bush Administration.

One of the first rules of trial lawyering is that you never ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to. One has to assume, then, that with the Repubs being the ones who are tossing this bomb, the leak came from the Dems... probably someone on some House Intelligence Oversight Committee. If so, it will make a lovely counterweight to Plamegate... "see, the Democrats don't care about the war on terror, either!"

It will, at least, provide more red meat for the currently somewhat muddled conservative base, and give the conservative talking heads a reason to go on the attack again, which is the only place they're comfortable.

There could be more to it, though. This could be the first overt volley being fired by Republican Congressional leadership directly at the Collander In Chief, whose plummeting approval ratings are doing more damage to the growing consolidation of conservative political power in America than Sherman did to Georgia on his march to the sea.

This could, in fact, be a legislative coup d'etat in the making, as Hastert and Frist literally shoot the moon... or at least try to, taking their best shots at the Prez, Vice Prez, and Secretary of State. Hastert himself is in direct line of succession, right behind Cheney, and maybe Frist feels like he's got enough of a handle on the scandal to get the Shrub to appoint him as interim VP after Cheney resigns, and right before the Shrub himself does.

I don't know, myself. I just know that when certain people are clamoring for an investigation into a leaked news story that touches on national security, there's a smear of some sort coming.

Geez, I wish Fitzgerald would indict Rove and Cheney...

The future is here... and it sucks

3 November 2005 19:50 EST Posted by Highlander

One of the things I looked forward to from childhood on was living in the 21st Century. It's been a consolation to me as I grew steadily older, through my teens and twenties and thirties, using up and wringing out from the rag of my lifetime every last drop of anything you could remotely describe as my youth, that although I might be inevitably and irreversibly approaching middle age, at the very least, I was also approaching that epochal and much storied turning point, where I would get to peek into not only the changing of a century, but of an actual millenium.

For me, a lifelong science fiction geek, the year 2000 and beyond was a magical concept. I absolutely loved the idea that I might very well live to see a time period so constantly and continually evoked and imagined by so many of my favorite authors. As the turn of the millenium drew nearer, I was filled, more and more, with anticipation. Oh, sure, it was abundantly clear to me that most of my favorite fantasists had substantially missed the mark in a lot of different details... I wasn't going to get to vacation under a domed city on the Moon or Mars within my lifetime, nor could I go into a Radio Shack and buy a working jetpack, and it wasn't very likely I was going to get to ride around in a flying car any time in the forseeable future, either.

But, still, the world did and does have personal computers, DVD players, the Internet, cell phones, laser-beam tape measures, remote controls, holographic postal stamps, and a whole lot of other really cool shit, and if capitalism guaranteed anything, it was that people would keep inventing nifty gadgets as long as there was a profit to be had from doing it. So I was content. The future might not be what it used to be, but still, it was pretty spiffy nonetheless.

Then this idiot Bush stole the millenial Presidential election, and my entire 21st Century experience went straight to hell. It's a grisly irony, I think, that the dominant political figure of the real world 2001 is the ramrod for a social movement that would happily turn the clock back to 1952 tomorrow if they only could. And not even the real 1952, which was a terrible time full of anti-intellectual hysteria and paranoid xenophobia, but to some weird conservative fantasy 1952, where white men still wear coats, hats and ties whether they're at home or the office, white women are all smiling married mothers who stay home all day and bake, and non-whites are all cheerfully employed doing menial labor for 35 cents an hour any time they're not at church.

In fantasy-1952, there is no minimum wage, gas costs 22 cents a gallon and every service station has a uniformed fellow with a big smile who cleans your window and checks your oil in addition to filling your tank for you, cars are roughly the size of Texas but there's still plenty of free parking because only Caucasian folk can afford them, the only known midwinter celebration is Christmas, and everybody goes to Sunday School and prayer meeting. Nobody is homosexual, nobody gets pregnant before they're married, Americans are always the good guys and we always win, and everybody loves the President.

This is the antithesis of the egalitarian, fully integrated, sexually liberated and high tech future promised in the pages of Amazing Stories and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine when I was growing up, and while I can accept that that future is never going to actually happen, I have to say that I would certainly have liked to live to see a 21st century that embodied something besides a passionate headlong heartsick reach for a mythical American heyday that never actually existed.

Somehow or other, Bush and his insanely bigoted clique of pinhead conservatives have hijacked my future. And if I can't have jet packs, domed cities, orbital colonies and rocket cars, then at the very least I'd like to have a world where Americans aren't entirely despised outside our own borders, healthcare is affordable, tolerance and open mindedness are universally regarded as admirable social traits, and religious fanaticism is an acknowledged psychological aberration.

I want my 21st Century back, dammit. Who do I talk to about that?

Can't buy a thrill

2 November 2005 07:10 EST Posted by Highlander

This is going to be an odds n sods entry. Deal with it. I find it amusing that over at Boneyard's page on Collateral Damage, he has the new Clayface listed as 'confirmed' for the set. What's amusing about that is he has Clayface listed as '(Ultimate)'. Now, to the best of my knowledge, DC has no Ultimate characters, although recently they have begun ripping off Marvel's Ultimates line (a truly dreadful and appalling idea... well, both are; Marvel's Ultimates line, and the idea that anyone should rip the concept off) by putting out All Star versions of their characters. I guess this new Clayface is from one of the All Star Batman stories, although I'm proud to say it is very unlikely I would ever actually be in a position to state this in an authoritative fashion, because if you ever catch me with an All Star comic in my hands for longer than it takes me to ball it up and toss it in the nearest incinerator, you'd better check me for a pulse.

I also find it equally amusing and annoying when I see someone on the Internet spelling 'the' as 'teh'. I used to see this and think it was a typo (it's an easy one to make if you type quickly, as many of the up and coming generation does), but apparently it's morphed into some kind of deliberate textual slang for modern morons.

I find it annoying that the left shift key on this keyboard sticks about every third time you depress it, so I'm near constantly having to backspace out a line of inappropriate capitalization and then hit the left shift key again to unstick it.

I find it deeply entertaining to watch conservatives trying desperately to tell me that because only ONE member of the Shrub Administration has been indicted so far (on five charges that could, but will not under any circumstances, result in 30 years of jail time), this is a triumph for the Republican Party and a crushing defeat for liberals everywhere. I do wish Fitzgerald would get his thumb out and just paper the Oval Office with indictments, though. I think if he's going to issue indictments, he should just let the throttle stick wide open and indict every single Republican working in Washington for something, and get some paper on all those fucking conservative bloggers, too. Supporting the troops and cheerleading for the war from behind a nice safe comfy computer desk should be good for 90 days in prison or a mandatory tour of duty in Iraq, at the very least.

I find it depressing that I now miss Harriet Miers. I liked it when the righties were throwing grenades at each other over the nomination. I don't really know anything about this Alito guy, but when conservatives unite behind someone, I have to assume he's bad news.

I find it depressing that Halloween is over and we got no trick or treaters, especially since I went to a lot of trouble to get the night off from work so I'd be home for trick or treaters. Somehow, in my adult life, I have never managed to live anywhere that trick or treaters come by, or if I do, there's a tornado warning that year on Halloween and they all stay home.

But I find it exhiliarating that we're heading into Thanksgiving and beyond that, into Christmas. We won't have the SuperKids for Thanksgiving, which is exasperating, but it's in SuperGirlfriend's divorce agreement that she gets the kids for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so that will be wonderful.

And SuperGirlfriend has gone off to work, so the apartment is sadly quiet and empty. Time to go put some music on and take a shower.

The Last Boy On Earth

28 October 2005 07:01 EDT Posted by Highlander

So I had a really lousy day at work yesterday. But as all of you non-commenting lurkers know, I have the Greatest Girlfriend In The World, which is why when I walked out to the parking lot after my shift last night, I found her waiting for me with a gift wrapped present.

Upon tearing it open with the enthusastic glee of a 5 year old, I discovered -- -- the DC Archive Edition of Kamandi, probably my all time favorite, and arguably the absolute freakiest, of Jack Kirby's singularly creative comic book visions. The first ten issues, printed on wonderfully soft acid-free paper, in vivid colors that do full justice to the absolutely gorgeous Kirby art... ahhh, I am truly the luckiest of all men. Some of these ten issues I've read, others I haven't. I'm looking forward to acquainting, or re-acquainting, myself with all these stories. And I certainly hope DC continues to reprint Kamandiissues at least through the entirety of the original Kirby run.

SuperGirlfriend is the best!

Oh, and SuperGirlfriend wants to send a big shout-out of gratitude to Steve Tice, for helping her out with something related to this Kamandi archive edition. So there you go, Steve. Thanks for whatever you did.

That which one is obliged to do

27 October 2005 22:32 EDT Posted by Highlander

Okay. While SuperGirlfriend is out frying up some catfish and hush puppies for dinner (Gad, I feel Southern) let's talk a little bit about The New Job:

I work for a Third Party Benefits Administrator. That's going to be so much Mandarin Chinese to most of you, so let me explicate further: my employer is what is called a 'carve out' or a 'niche player' in the health services industry. If a company would like the benefits of offering certain types of benefit plans (specifically, Flexible Spending Accounts, for health care or dependent care) to their employees, but they don't want the hassle of actually administering those benefit plans, my employer will do it for them... for a fee.

This means that if you have an FSA, and you want to file a reimbursement claim for some of your health or child care expenses, and your employer is my employer's client, you file your claim with us. We process the claim, which means, essentially, we make sure you filled out the paperwork correctly and gave us the correct supporting documentation to prove you really did get charged $25 for your co-pay or $400 by your daycare provider this month, and if you did all that right, we cut you a check... or, in some cases, we send your medical provider or your insurance company a check, but mostly, we send it to you.

Flexible Spending Accounts, and similar but different benefit plans like Health Savings Accounts, are simple in principle... well, no, fuck that, they're actually quite complex in principle, and can be hopelessly complicated in individual application, and this is what I do, all day long... talk to people on the phone about their claims, more often than not, about why the claim they submitted was denied and what they can do (if anything) to get it successfully reprocessed.
If you have one of these flex spending accounts (and I honestly don't know who I'm kidding when I type things like that, since pretty clearly nobody is bothering to read these goddam blog entries, but still, it's a useful rhetorical device even if I am apparently writing for myself alone) then you probably know that there is a thing called 'open enrollment' every year, which is when you call your human resources department (or a carve out subcontractor like the one I currently work for) and you pick all your benefits and make your elections and figure out just what you're going to pay for. Open enrollment is the period when you make decisions like this, and if you miss open enrollment, then you're just screwed, and you have to wait until the next open enrollment to sign up for your benefits.

Open enrollment is a huge part of what my employer does for its clients. Open enrollment season is, in fact, the reason I am currently working there, because this time of year many many companies have their open enrollment, and in order to handle the huge volume of calls that come in now, my employer has hired several hundred 'seasonals' (their word for temps) to come in and help take the calls and process the enrollment data.

Now, you would think that a company that brags relentlessly about having 200+ corporate clients, and that does nothing all day long every day but administer those corporate clients' benefit plans, and which gets a huge percentage of its annual business volume during open enrollment periods, would pretty much have open enrollment down to a science. (You would especially figure this as they entrust a significant part of this work to temps. If you're going to hire 200 plus temps every year to do a very important and reasonably complex job for you, you had better have that job worked out to a point where a trained monkey can do it, because any time you place an order that size with any temp agency, some of the temps you get are going to be, effectively, trained monkeys. It's the nature of the beast.)

Of course, I suppose you could afford to be somewhat sloppy and a little bit disorganized if you were only dealing with little mom and pop organizations and smaller companies who don't make a lot of money, and whom, if you lose their business, you can easily replace the revenue by picking up another, similarly modest client. And, indeed, all the corporate clients my current employer has are tiny tiny little companies that you have never in your life heard of, like, I don't know, Pep$ico, and C0ca C0la, and the $tate of Ge0rgia, and the Feder@l Goddam Judiciary System, and S^n Microsystems, and the ^niversity of California, and a bunch of other pathetic little non-players like that. And when you're dealing with small fry like that, companies no one has ever heard of that don't have a lot of influence over the marketplace and that really can't afford to spend a lot of money on their service providers anyway, well, you really don't have to worry about having your shit together.

Which, I suppose, is why over the past two days I've been directly involved in several conversations nearly identical with this one:

ME: Hey, Juanita, I've got a guy on the phone from Pep$iCo who wants to enroll in his benefits plan for next year. Our department isn't handling open enrollment for Pep$iCo; who do I transfer him to?

JUANITA (not the name of one of my supervisors, but it will do): Oh God I don't know. Isn't it in the computer somewhere?

ME: Well, the computer has a note that we aren't handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment this year, we are supposed to refer Pep$iCo employees back to their HR department. But...

JUANITA: Well Jesus then, do that!

ME: Okay, but he says the last person he talked to here did that and he called his HR department and they told him we were handling their open enrollment. They were very insistent.

JUANITA: Oh Christ. (turns to another supervisor) Meg, are we handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment?

MEGAN: I don't fucking know, isn't it in the computer?

So then Megan and Juanita hunted through the computer and came up with what is supposed to be the master sheet for open enrollment this year, telling us exactly who is handling which of our many clients' during their OE seasons. However, the spreadsheet is somewhat flawed, in that (a) it does not contain one single phone number, internal or otherwise, and (b) the people it says are handling open enrollment, if you go through the laborious process of looking up their phone numbers in the computerized diretory (which hates all humanity with a passionate maniacal frenzy you would think impossible for a cybernetic organism) and then dialing them, disavow all knowledge of any such responsibility faster than the Secretary disavows all knowledge of Jim Phelps' Impossible Missions Force.

In point of somewhat amusing/depressing fact, when we look up Pep$iCo on this spreadsheet, it says quite clearly that Juanita and Megan are in charge of the department that is handling it.

JUANITA: Okay, there is no fucking way we are handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment, I know that for DAMN sure.

MEGAN: Um... well... if you're sure...

Eventually, we managed to find a manager in a different department who let us transfer the poor guy (who had been on hold for twenty minutes by then) to her. She was certain that her department wasn't handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment either, but she was 'aware of the problem' and was 'working on it'.

That was yesterday, and it's not like we aren't getting a hundred calls a day from Pep$iCo employees looking to enroll in their benefits from next year, and as of today, we are still 'working on it'.

Not working on getting them enrolled. Working on finding out which department is supposed to be handling it. So far, everybody is absolutely certain THEY aren't handling it, but after that it breaks down into an urban legend... each supervisor is pretty sure that someone else they know knows someone who may be friends with someone who knows who is handling it, but they aren't sure...

And the really amus/azing thing about this is that this isn't an anomoly. I mean, if it was an anomoly, it would be a pretty bad one, because, you know, if you have a list of 200 plus clients you are handling a very complex and potentially costly job for, you would think Pep$iCo, which just pretty much owns everything on the planet not already under lease to MicroSoft, would not be high on the list of those clients that you want to screw stuff up for.

But, well, Pep$iCo shouldn't feel like the Lone Ranger or anything, because much of yesterday and today I took similar calls from another very small company's employees who also wanted to enroll in their benefits for next year and who had been assured by their HR department that we were handling it. You've never heard of this company and will merely blink in bewilderment and apathy when I tell you their name is $BC. Now, you would think that,for the love of sweet baby Christ, if we've already screwed up Pep$i's open enrollment, at the very least we are going to learn from that mistake and not similarly fuck over the open enrollment of another inconsequential and easily replaceable client like the $outhwestern Bell Company, but if you thought that, you must prepare at this moment to roll your head on your neck like John Belushi and sneer "But noooooooooooooo" in a highly aggravated manner, because here's how that conversation went:

ME: Say, Juanita...

JUANITA: Holy Mother of God can't you see I'm BUSY? ::cuts another V shaped slash in the flesh of her forearm with a razor blade while jittering her bloodshot gaze frantically from one place to another around the room::

ME: Okay. Say, Megan, I've got an employee from $BC on the phone and he says we're handling their open enrollment and he'd like to enroll. Where do I transfer him?

MEGAN: To hell! TO HELL!!!! ::shrieks, leaps out window::

So, you know, that's what my current job is like.

There's more I could tell you. Like yesterday, I got pulled into a room by someone from Quality Review, along with two of my supervisors, and they proceeded to bitchslap me all over the place for a lot of stuff, including not documenting all my calls. Now, what you need to know here is, in order for us to document a call, we need a social security number, which is a whole different rant I may get to, but anyway, without a social security number, we can't even get the call doc program to open. So, now that you know that, here's how that conversation went:

ME: Well, a lot of the calls we got today were open enrollment calls, and they don't want to give us a social security number because they haven't signed up yet and they just want to ask general questions about how the accounts work.

MARGUERITE THE HORRIFYING BITCH WHO EAVESDROPS ON OTHER PEOPLE'S CALLS ALL DAY LONG FOR A LIVING: Well, you still have to document every call at 100% and you know that.

JUANITA: That's right, 100% documentation is the goal and you need to do that.

MEGAN: You know that is part of the process which is expected of you the Gold Call Process you were trained on in training and we expect it of you and you have to do it.

ME: Okay and I understand that. But if they won't give me a social security number then how do I open call doc to document their call?

MARGUERITE: Well, you put in 99999 and then your four digit extension and that will let you doc the call.

JUANITA: I thought it was 00000 and the four digit extension.

MEGAN: I thought it was 1111... and isn't it a five digit extension?

JUANITA: What did they teach you in training?

ME: Well, we were told about three different ways to do it but none of them work. And nobody out on the floor knows how to do it either.

So the three of them exchange an annoyed glance, and then they tell me they'll get back to me.

But in the meantime, I still have to doc every call at 100%, even though half our calls this time of year are general questions about open enrollment where the caller won't give us a social security number.

Then there was this exchange, just this afternoon:

JUANITA: Okay, H., I need to talk to you about something when you get done with that call.

ME: What should I sign off on?

JUANITA: Uh... ::turns to another employee who has been there forever:: Lloyd, if I need to talk to him after this call, what does he sign off on?

LLOYD: Aux code 5.

So I sign off on Aux code 5 and Juanita is showing me how I totally screwed up my last call, which she was eavesdropping on, the cunt, and telling me I have to call the participant back and give them the correct information, and suddenly here comes Wilhemina on a dead run with a horrified look on her face and she says:

WILHELMINA: Why in the name of God are you signed off on Aux code 5?

JUANITA: Isn't he supposed to sign off on Aux code 5 if I have to talk to him?

WILHELMINA: Jesus no!!! Aux code 5 is only to be used for emergency volcano eruptions and Presidential motorcades! Oh my God I have to write this up right now or democracy falls!

JUANITA: Well, okay, what code should he sign off on for something like this?

WILHELMINA: Uh... ::scratches her head, then turns to Lloyd:: Say, Lloyd...

Stuff like this makes it hard to have any confidence in management.

Oh, and then there is the social security number thing. See, all our files are keyed to social security number. Now, I'm reasonably sure that this is actually grotesquely illegal; I believe there are about eight Federal laws that expressly forbid anyone from ever requiring anyone to give them their social security number for any purpose without a court order, but, nonetheless, we open every call with "Thank you for calling The Planet Of Drunken Monkeys, my name is Bonzo the Inebriated Chimp, may I have the participant's Social Security number or alternate ID?" (I am of course paraphrasing; the last thing I need is a suit from management at my current employer doing a web search on the name of the company and turning this page up and starting a witch hunt for the man or woman with the funny funny blog page where he or she is blurting out all sorts of corporate secrets. But we say stuff a lot like that, just with different proper nouns.)

What amazes me is that most people just pony the fucker right up. But, still, a fraction of them... a significant fraction, like, maybe, one in 8 callers... balk. Many of these seize on the 'alternate ID' thing in the greeting. None of them actually HAVE an alternate ID, the idea of an alternate ID is yet another urban legend, every employer in the world and all the service providers in the health care industry just use the SS number because it's a unique number and they're all fucking lazy, but, still, we have to mention it in our greeting just in case unicorns or Keebler elves or yeti started up their own company last week and they are actually using alternate IDs. And these people who (quite cogently) don't want to give us their Social Security numbers will leap all over that and say "What kind of alternate ID?"

So then you have to explain "No, no, you don't have an alternate ID, it's just something we say to calm down the libertarians, give me your Social Security number". And then a surprising number of them will acquiesce, but still, it's a thing. Right off the bat, for everyone who calls, we are asking for something no one in their right mind wants to give a stranger over the phone, and that sure as hell doesn't help you establish rapport.

There is always a hard core who just won't do it. They aren't comfortable with it, they aren't going to do it, it's illegal, we should be ashamed. If I'm lucky, they hang up with that, and no one who works for a call center ever minds when a customer hangs up on them, no sir. But if I'm unlucky, then they will stay on the phone and demand I find some way to help them without using their Social Security number, which I suspect is probably their entirely legal (and reasonable) right, but, well, I can't do it.

So, all in all, my new job sucks. But it's better than my last two jobs, and I have SuperGirlfriend waiting for me at the end of every night, so, you know, life is pretty good. I just hate my job, but I guess we all do, right?

There oughtta be a law

26 October 2005 15:20 EDT Posted by Highlander

I gather that the 'criminalization of politics' non-defense against the various impending Fitzgerald indictments has become the talking point du jour among the right's talking heads -- apparently Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, among others, have been whipping their moronic audiences into a froth by repeating this phrase over and over again. I

'm trying to make sense of this -- not actual sense, because conservatives, especially the mindless masses that make up the right wing base, don't intellectualize things well, and I understand that. But usually I can at least put the latest right wing demagoguery into some kind of consistent emotional context and get a vague grasp on what buttons the big mouths are trying to push in their listeners' heads... and this time, well, you wouldn't think it was possible, but this 'criminalization of politics' makes even less sense than the usual conservative horseshit.

Again, I'm not talking intellectually. On the level of reason and logic, well, any thinking human being understands that a crime is a crime -- you break the law, you get caught, you're going to get in some kind of trouble -- and whether the lawbreaker is involved in 'politics' or not, at the time they committed the crime, is immaterial. Being a 'politician', whether you hold an elected office or an appointed position or you're just a mover and a shaker behind the scenes, does not convey any kind of legal immunity (unless you're the President, but, well, that's not what we're talking about).

But, as I say, I understand that Limbaugh and Hannity aren't trying to come up with anything logical or reasonable. They are trying to whip their audiences into an infuriated frenzy, which means that, like all demagogues, they are attempting to craft an emotional appeal that will overwhelm their target market's rudimentary thinking ability.

But usually these guys are pretty good at it and I can figure out what kind of gut level response they're trying to invoke. In this case, I'm baffled.

See, you don't go to a bunch of Joe Lunchbuckets and start whining about the 'criminalization of politics' and expect any sympathy. To Limbaugh's Louts and/or Hannity's Horde, all politicians are already assumed to be criminals unless proven honest, and 'politics' is already a dirty word. To talk about the 'criminalization of politics' is just going to perplex these guys. Of course all politicians are crooks, and of course all politics is dirty politics.

How many times do you think these people have heard about some sleazy deal in Washington and cursed to themselves over a beer "there oughtta be a law, the stuff they do in D.C. is a crime". They all implicitely BELIEVE that the entire political process is corrupt; Republicans have been coining votes for thirty years by promising to 'get the government off the backs of the average American', with the underlying and fundamental assumption being that government (politics) is inherently BAD.

So I have to think, if Rush Limbaugh starts going on and on about 'the criminalization of politics', even his most avidly mouthbreathing minions are going to be scratching their Dittoheads a little bit. I mean, wouldn't criminalizing politics be a good thing? SHOULDn't we have long since been locking these guys up? Aren't they ALL crooks?

I have to assume, if whining about 'the criminalization of politics', mixed in with a lot of bluster about how Democrats are picking on Republicans and it's just not fair, is the best that Limbaugh and Hannity can come up with, then, well... they're desperate, and they got nothin', and they know it.

This may be a very good weekend.

This is a job for Super-Geoff

26 October 2005 08:32 EDT Posted by Highlander

I can't imagine the world really needs yet another fanboy blogging about Infinity Crisis#1, but, well, it's not like anyone pays any attention to this thing anyway.

Given that, let me say this: what a difference a writer makes.

Infinity Crisis has been being billed for over a year now as a direct sequel to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, a 12 issue crossover miniseries that finally threw the last spadeful of dirt on DC's Silver Age, back in 1985. DC's Silver Age had been in Cheyne-Stokes respiration for about, I don't know, 5 to 10 years before that, as clueless editors frantically flailed their arms and legs in a desperate and never successful attempt to somehow transform what was once the greatest 2 dimensional superhero universe in existence into a 3 dimensional metareality like that depicted by their chief competitor, Marvel Comics.

Yet no matter how grim n' gritty DC got, no matter how many times Superman accidentally destroyed an entire planet full of Luthor worshippers or took Lois Lane off to 19th Century Paris for a long weekend of red sun light bulb powered, silk sheeted debauchery, or how often Barry Allen had to use lethal force to stop Professor Zoom and then go to jail, it just wasn't getting there. You could make the heroes and villains act darker, but lurking in the background there was always the knowledge that once upon a time (not too long ago) Superman had been exposed to Red Kryptonite and turned 200 feet tall, and Jimmy Olsen still had a souvenir collection full of magical and/or futuristic artifacts that could have turned him into a god if he hadn't been too stupid to deploy them competently.

In a universe that encompassed the likes of Bat-Mite, just how seriously could you take the characters?

To get around that, DC buried its Silver Age continuity and started anew, and for the past 20 years, the so called Original Universe has shambled stuporously through an evershifting mulligan stew of constant continuity improvisation.

THE HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE was a nice 2 volume Prestige set that came out right after Crisis; it was supposed to be the Bible for the new continuity, and various writers and editors had contradicted it in its entirety before the ink was even dry on it. A new SECRET ORIGINS series was rolled out to explain all the new origins of the entirely revised characters, yet Roy Thomas chose to waste the first several issues of the series doing 'secret origins' of Golden Age characters who, in the new continuity, no longer existed and never had.

From those blundering missteps the DC Universe never really recovered, despite the best efforts of many people, a few of whom actually had writing talent, to do otherwise. Every once in a while someone like Alan Brennert or Roger Stern would come along and temporarily erect a small pup-tent of sensible continuity somewhere in the chaos of fourteen different entirely mutually contradictory LEGION reboots and a long period when JUSTICE LEAGUE was a comedy comic whose editors were advising Batman fans on the letters page that they could 'regard the JLA Batman as out of continuity if it made them feel better', and Hawkman never, never, NEVER made sense. But then some hack (often Keith Giffen) would come along and wipe it all out with yet another poorly conceived miniseries, and we were back at zero again.
And through it all, however hard they tried, DC still couldn't really, fully get the 2 dimensional stink off their characters. It's tough to make someone like Superman grim n' gritty. I mean, it's just hard. And Wonder Woman... it's going to take more than a massive infusion of Greek mythology to make that profoundly disturbed concept work in the Modern Age, trust me.
However, if CRISIS was doomed from the start, it was only because it was handled with the utter ineptitude any sane person could but expect from the likes of Marv Wolfman and Len Wein. CRISIS had, without a doubt, some of the most beautiful artwork George Perez has ever done, but the story simply made no sense from start to finish, and every single creative decision that was made in the book, from the big ones (let's kill off Flash and Supergirl) to the minor ones (let's turn Kamandi into Tommy Tomorrow) were all such egregiously rotten ideas as to make nearly any long time fan's head spin.

Infinite Crisis, on the other hand, is being written by Geoff Johns.

And that, my friend, has made the difference.

There's been a breath... well, really, a gale force wind verging on hurricane status... of fresh air blowing through the DC Universe for the last couple of years. Suddenly, comics that I never in my life thought I'd ever read are not only being beautifully written in terms of plot and characterization, but the continuity is making sense, too. Who was doing it? Some guy named Geoff Johns. Johns managed to seemingly effortlessly untangle the mess lesser writers had made of the Justice Society, which is a pretty major accomplishment, yet it paled beside perhaps Johns' greatest pre-IC triumph... he actually made coherent sense out of the fucked up mass of incoherent crap various lousy editors had turned Hawkman into.

Now he's writing Infinite Crisis, and, well, it's a treat... but what's surprised me most is not simply that Johns is using the book to try desperately to untangle a lot of the overall continuity messes that have sprung up in the DCU since the original CRISIS, but he's directly tying IC to the original CRISIS plot... and he's making what I would have sworn was a recipe for disaster actually work again, too.

Is Power Girl actually, really, truly the genuine, authentic Earth-2 Supergirl, somehow survived through the cosmic reboot from one universe to the next? So Johns seems to be hinting; wouldn't it be great if it were true? Is that really the Golden Age Superman... the original Man of Steel... come back after 20 years in limbo to save the day, along with the Earth-3 Luthor and the Superboy of Earth-Prime? Is Johns really going to pick up the plot threads from CRISIS and do something with them, where lesser writers and editors (Wolfman and Wein, specifically) simply intended them to be tossed away and never mentioned again?

I'll tell you, simply the scene where the Freedom Fighters (dweebs though they are) walk down a hall in a supposedly abandoned warehouse, turn a corner... and confront Dr. Light, Dr. Polaris, Deathstroke, Black Adam, Sinestro, Bizarro, the Reverse Flash, the Psycho Pirate, and the Cheetah... and Bizarro says "Good bye" instead of hello... man, that hit me right in the spine. As with Blue Beetle, Johns took characters I never cared a bit about, made them, briefly, very human... and then killed them ruthlessly, just to show us that, yeah, this really IS a realistic superhero universe right now, and even heroes can die when they're overmatched. (And my God, weren't they overmatched? Just Black Adam or Sinestro would have been enough to make the entire team shit their drawers. Throw in Bizarro and, well, it's just over. The rest of the bad guys might as well have been out for popcorn, although they all got their sadistic licks in.)

(I can't quite tell, though... did Dr. Polaris die when the Human Bomb exploded in his face? I hope so. He's a yutz. Or he was.)

I enjoyed the four miniseries that led up to IC, and now it looks like I'm going to really enjoy IC, too. I just hope when it's over that Johns picks up at least JSA again. I've gotten really hooked on that book, and I'd hate to drop it... but I will if Johns doesn't come back to it after IC.

Tortured reasoning

25 October 2005 18:07 EDT Posted by Highlander

According to LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer, reporting on the "Senate-approved ban on torturing detainees in U.S. custody" --
"Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), R-Alaska, and Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., who chair Congress' defense spending subcommittees, will be among the leaders of those talks in coming weeks.

Young has said the United States has no obligation to terrorists, and he and other top House Republicans have signaled they will try to change the Senate-approved language."
"Terrorists" is, apparently, a code word meaning 'subhumans' or 'animals' or, I don't know, liberals, or something... something that isn't entitled to anything remotely like basically civilized treatment.

Now, I'm not saying that 'terrorists' should be entitled to the full range of Miranda rights, but it seems to me that every human being has a basic, essential right to not be tortured. That's something we, as civilized human beings, owe to every other human being on the planet. Whether they are 'terrorists' or not.

And, thinking on it a little further, it also seems to me that someone's status as a 'terrorist' is something that is supposed to be established in a court of law, after a fair trial. I'm not sure exactly what document, Federal, state, or international, gives a member of the U.S. House of Representatives the ability to simply pronouce someone a 'terrorist', and therefore, outside due process of law as well as all constraints of civilized behavior towards captives.

But, you know, I'm one of those soft headed bleeding heart liberals, so don't listen to me.

To the hounds!

25 October 2005 15:22 EDT Posted by Highlander

Buried in what seemed like a fairly straightforward news report from FOX on the most recent Plamegate rumors, I found this:

For several months, sources within the investigation have been telling reporters that it was unlikely anyone would be charged with violating a 1982 act that made it illegal to intentionally blow a covert U.S. agent's cover. Plame's undercover status has been the subject of debate, and testimony indicates there is little to prove Rove or Libby knew her identity was a secret.
Plame's undercover status has only been 'the subject of debate' by conservatives, and a better phrase than 'debate' would be 'desperate frenzied bluster' or even 'unequivocal bullshit'. As far as I can tell, Plame's status as a CIA operative working under a classified cover is well established by, well, every CIA source that has been quoted over the course of this story. The only people trying to say Plame may not have been under cover and her status as a CIA op may not have been classified information are, well, the same people who keep claiming that Joe Wilson outed his wife himself by posing for public photographs with her while out on a dinner date. This is one of the right's most infamously ridiculous talking points on this matter, and finding it reported in such an inarguably factual tone... well, I can see why people have so much trouble taking FOX news seriously.

As to how little or much there is to prove that Libby and/or Rove knew Plame's status as a NOC was classified, well, that's something Fitzgerald has been working for two years to establish, and I presume he will establish it, one way or another, by the end of the week. Any 'testimony' which indicates that there is 'little to prove it' would pretty much have to come from Rove and Libby themselves.

Fox News: Fair and Balanced, as long as you don't pay very close attention. But then, I suppose that's pretty consistent with their target audience.

Loyalty

24 October 2005 18:41 EDT Posted by Highlander

Amy Walters, Senior Editor of the Cook Report, feels Bush will stay the course on the Miers nomination, because ultimately, loyalty and political self preservation will see Senate Republicans backing his play:

But Walters doesn't think the Miers nomination will be withdrawn, in part, due to the larger political picture her nod is helping to make more serious.

"I think," Walter said, "that for the president, he really needs something to go right here. He really needs to be able to get his traction back. I don't think it's going to do Republicans very much good to make their president not look good."

I don't know. Everybody loves a winning quarterback... but when a guy can't move around in the pocket and is constantly throwing interceptions, most teams cut him loose pretty quickly. Or, to put it in somewhat more realistic terms, Dubya's (dis)approval ratings aren't helping his party at all, and conservatives are the most pragmatic of all politicians... and politicians aren't exactly the most idealistic crew out there.

When Dubya was successfully wrapping himself in the collective shrouds of 2000+ dead Americans, Republicans couldn't climb on the 9/11 bandwagon fast enough... but with more and more Americans (especially black Americans) starting to wonder what that awful smell is ("Mommy, I think it's coming from the President"), those conservatives who aren't insanely loyal have to be looking around for a lifeboat.

Given that the Miers nomination has most of the extreme right wing in an infuriated roar right now, those Republicans who are smarter than the average bear may well be thinking that taking a firm stance against her could be a wonderful way to suck up to nearly EVERYone that Dubya has alienated with his 'nyah nyah I don't have to be re-elected I can do anything I want' attitude.

So... I don't know. It could be a rocky road for Harriet. I wouldn't be counting on party loyalty if I were the Chimp in Chief. His political capital may be as far in the red as the country's economy is right now.