What a device...

I have a cool, new cell phone, an android HTC Incredible, a real “mobile device”.

I, like, love it.

Well, that is, except for the fact that my bloody thumbs are too large by half and I often end up calling the poor bastard whose name sits right under the name of the person I intended to call. No matter how quickly I end that call it still goes through and moments later I get a call from the wrongly dialed asking if I just called them. Yes, Sparky, but I don’t want to talk to you today!

There are apparently screen touches and then there are touches. If I poke a button that usually initiates a call to someone, a screen may appear out of the blue which doesn’t help me to make a call at all, or do whatever I’m trying to do, but gives me some sort of list of things I might be interested in. So this touching the screen shit is, like, small and nuanced.

This phone has unlimited texting which would be nice if I could actually text anything that was decipherable. I tried putting it flat on a counter, sort of like toast in need of butter, to help with this and tried poking it with my forefinger. If you read Serb-Croation maybe you could read this.

If I held down the red button on my old cell phone, it would end the call and then shut off the goddamned phone. Good if I was heading  into church for a funeral or appearing before the City Council. This one can be set to vibrate after a number of touches to the touch-screen but the damn thing can’t be shut off! I know this because I asked when I was in Android class at the Verizon store. The best I can do is to place it in “airplane” mode after lots of touching buttons.

Now I know what all those uber cool people are doing standing there slack-jawed whaling on their touch screen cell phones. There trying to shut the bloody things off!

Thanksgiving in paradise

Up until this year, Martha and I had always had folks at the house for Thanksgiving or we had been with elderly relatives elsewhere and Martha did most of the cooking or daughter Jessica arranged the day and we helped. The last two years my daughter’s family visited me here in Hilton Head and we went out for dinner. This year that was impossible since they have just moved to Texas.

So, what did I learn on my first Thanksgiving entirely on my own?

First, the little, anorexic turkey took twice as long to cook as I had anticipated. Normally I would have cooked it at 350 but the wrapper clearly said it should be cooked at 325. The result was roughly 30 minutes per pound versus 15. Thankfully, I was watching football, didn’t have guests arriving and didn’t really care when I ate. I had enough sense not to start the potatoes and vegetables until I knew I was close to finished with the bird.

Second, cleaning up without help, even for a modest feast like this one, was a pain. My grandmother Callery’s theory about many hands making light work certainly applied here.

Next year, I am not planning on being in Hilton Head for Thanksgiving. I am mooching off relatives. Anyone got an open seat at the table?

My thoughts on voting in 2010

As O'Rielly would say...Factor 1: I have the attention span of a nit. Government and business suffer from our collective desire for everything to happen instantly, in the moment, without any wait. I think technology feeds into this. How did the world survive before cell phones and instant messaging?

Shareholders would rather sue a successful company than allow the management to make investments to strengthen that company for the long term. We want our dividends now and as large as possible. This is one of the reasons privately held firms are making such a come back today.

In governing, we can’t wait two years for a slow recovery from the worst recession in decades. It doesn’t matter that it took Reagan and his tax cuts and budget deficits and Bush and his wars and his tax cuts and budget deficits a combined 16 years to make this mess. Our impatient cry is “Why isn’t it fixed immediately”.

I can't wait to hear the outcry when more Republicans like Reagon's former budget chief Stockton start agitating for tax increases to reduce the deficit they are so worried about. In a country with very low overall taxes compared to other civilized countries we still want more for less and God knows let's not tax the wealthy!

Factor 2: Time to make some practical changes to our voting process. We need to do away with the Electoral College. We have all kinds of machines that can count individual votes and we settled the state’s right’s issues some decades ago. Florida alone doesn’t get to choose the next President as much as Floridians might wish it. The popular vote is what counts.

We need to do away with lame-duck sessions of Congress and delays in seating those elected to office. Election winners should be swore in that week or at the latest that month. We can all get to Washington pretty quickly these days since we are not traveling by horse and buggy.

Elections should be held on a Saturday or Sunday like in the rest of the world. I know Republicans don’t want to make elections convenient because then the young and the poor might remember to cast ballots but I think we should try to make voting easy and convenient.

And I hate to break the Tea Party’s collective heart but forget term limits, it is never going to happen. Even those crazy Tea Party candidates that got elected will forget that promise as time goes by in a seniority based system. Instead, pass a mandatory retirement age like judges have in Massachusetts. 70 seems reasonable to me. It’s often after this age that legislators get into big trouble.

Finally, I know the conservative members of the Supreme Court decreed that any entity, foreign or domestic, could donate millions to the candidate most likely to do exactly what that entity wants. In that case, I think we should implement some sort of full disclosure measure so we know how much the government of India is paying for Republican Congresspersons so American companies that outsource additional jobs there will not be chastised.

Some random thoughts on being a Democrat after the 2010 mid-term election

I agree with John Stewart on The Daily Show that President Obama and, especially, the Democrats in Congress should have been much more “audacious” in writing and passing legislation during the past two years.

The desire to find compromise with a group of angry and unhappy people who tell you up front that they will not agree to anything you want is obviously ill fated from the start. This desire by Democrats to feel like “I’m a bigger person than you are” while failing to get the job done frustrates everyone including the very Know Nothings who are beating your brains out.

That 3,700 page health care reform bill typifies what everyone thinks is wrong with Washington. Of course, it got that way because of the Republicans and their “doubling-down” to a big no on everything that came before them. Compromise to conservatives is to do it their way, which in the case of health care insurance reform was and still is to NOT do it at all!

So the dopey Democrats end up with a bill that pleases no one, is practically indecipherable to the average bumper sticker reading citizen, and lets their opponents make all manner of outrageous charges about what it contains.

Here’s what Democrats should have insisted on:

Universal health care insurance coverage in a single payer system that covers children until age 26 and prohibits denial for pre-existing conditions. The insurance companies can administer it. Period. That is not my thought. It actually comes from the CEO of our local hospital group here on Cape Cod.

And as much as Democrats wish to feel like free spirits, they are not when they serve in Congress as Democrats. The leadership needs to explain what will happen if you break ranks. Clearly the Republicans did. Had the Democrats held together on the health care bill many more of them would be returning to Congress in 2011 than will be.

What should Democrats do now?

Forget compromise. It is frightening to hear the President saying he is willing to compromise even more! What the Hell hasn’t he already compromised on?

Let the Republicans think of ways to cut the Federal budget in the House.  There will be few cuts and they will be far between because, as I have heard from their leadership since the election, approximately 93% of the Federal budget is off limits or so they say. But let them do that and let the people now targeted to be jobless from the Head Start program, from the FBI, from the local schools, and police departments begin contacting their local reps. Since 80% or more of federal funds are used on personnel budgets, let’s see how that changy-feely crap works out for them.

Just one of the ironies of electing a Republican House at this point is that the tax breaks for the wealthy that they will insist on, the wars they hope to continue, the deficits they rack up and all the people who will lose their jobs to the few budget cuts they actually make will only worsen the recession situation. This, of course, pleases some in their ranks because they hope it will lead to President Obama being a one term President as Mitch McConnell said the other day.