The Milquetoast Wit

A recent study found that people who own guns and oppose gun control legislation are more likely to be racist than people who don’t own guns. The study carefully measured racism through a barrage of highly technical tests that eliminated the racial-bias that is present in all individuals to clearly identify those individuals who are objectively racist. At least that was the original plan before the researchers decided that was too much work and just wrote “conservative=racist” on a white board and called it a day. The research paper submitted explains how measures of symbolic racism were used to identify racist attitudes. Symbolic racism is measured by a series of questions regarding social welfare and affirmative action where favoring limited government is the same as suiting up in white every Friday to watch Birth of a Nation with your local KKK chapter. Admittedly the symbolic racism test was not developed by the gun-racism research team so the test questions aren’t necess...

Universal health care has been attempted in many other countries, and in every other country the results have been a mixed bag. The way the bill became law in the United States immediately set it up for heightened scrutiny. Pushing the bill through the legislative process without bi-partisan support only served to notify the public that Republican concerns were unfounded; the Democratic representatives knew what they were doing and failure was not a possibility. As we are finding out now, the concerns of the right weren’t entirely unfounded and the certainty of the left was based upon very little but party allegiance.  One of the primary concerns of the Republican Party regarding the affordable care act was the perceived inability of the Government to run anything better than a private enterprise. Compounding this concern were issues seen in other countries that had provided health care to all of its citizens. The rollout of the affordable care act needed to immediately quash a...

There are examples of government-run health care failing in other countries. However, those failures should never have deterred the United States from implementing its own health care system. Just because England and Canada’s health care systems are less than great, that doesn’t mean America’s version was doomed to failure. What has doomed America’s version to failure is the same egomaniacal attitude that propelled a Hawaiian kid to the oval office. President Obama believes he is always right, and that is a wonderful trait to have in a leader because that confidence inspires faith in followers, but that always-right attitude needs to come from something more than ignoring what other people say. Unfortunately, the Hindenburg-sized catastrophe that is healthcare.gov has revealed the President’s confidence to be nothing more than arrogance. The rollout of HealthCare.gov has been an unmitigated disaster with finger pointing all-around. On October 31, it was reported that th...

There are few things I hate more than shopping for electronics – chewing gum, and people failing to update their blogs are the only two that readily come to mind. It isn’t the process of shopping that annoys me, or the wave of technobable you need to understand if you want to make an informed purchase. I don’t hate the salespeople; even though most of them are completely misinformed (I worked as Best Buy briefly so I would know).   I don’t even hate the costs of the devices I want to buy. I hate knowing that something better is right around the corner, and then being disappointed when it arrives. It’s inevitable that technology will become outdated; the computer I am using to post this uses an Intel Core 2 cpu, a brand line that was discontinued in 2011. That fate has never scared me away from purchasing a product and I gladly accept the short lifespan of any electronics I buy. What infuriates me is the constant news and rumors of upcoming models that far surpass the current o...