Poll after poll cite the publics low approval of Congress. And why would they feel any different. Numerous examples exist of our legislative officials NOT serving the American people. Look at the Health Care debacle. These spineless Dem’s (I lean left.. but these jokers in congress are flacid at best) could not even get a bill passed both houses with huge majorities. Congress has not passed any major legislation since the Civil rights act. Clearly it’s broken.

Call it influence of Lobbyist money, call it tacking to the center, call it corruption.. whatever. Essentially they play an endless game of campaigning in hopes of getting re-elected to continue the farce of they call governing.

Senators serve for 6 years (unlimited), House Members for 2 (unlimited). Term Limits could help, especially in the Senate.. cap to 2 6 year terms.  But Look at the House. The framers of our government wanted the House to be more receptive to the will of the people. Essentially they have to earn their job every 2 years or get kicked. IMHO this is why the House is usually more progressive, they HAVE to get stuff done.

Aside: Progressive is not a dirty word. Read 1 and 3. Don’t you want your government to change and adapt and look for new ideas to do something better?

Idea: Every Senate Seat faces an up or down vote in year 4 of the 6 year term. This is not an election vs. a competitor. This is a simple up or down vote by the states constituents on whether that Senator can EVEN run for re-election. They Lose, It’s an open seat in Year 6. They win an up or down vote.. Politics as normal.

For The House Do the same thing.. but do it in year 5 of consecutive terms. So if a Representative is elected and then re-elected 2x more.. in the middle of their 3rd term they face the up or down vote on whether they can run a 4th campaign.

Short of hard term limits, these Up or Down votes should continue infinitum. I don’t think “Career” and  politicians should exist in the same sentence.   It’s a public service. And when you stop serving the public, the public should get a say whether you keep your job.

Why do I think this is a good idea? Why not just vote for the other guy? Here is my reasoning. Running a campaign against someone is very different from running a campaign on why you should keep your job. What if every currently elected politician during a campaign could only talk about themselves and their accomplishments while in office.   Imagine if they were forbidden to mention the other candidates name. The public and they themselves would be forced to judge the man in the mirror. On his/her actions, on his ability to govern. All of a sudden this thing called accountability comes into the picture.

Every corporation/business has some sort of employee review procedure. You want a raise or want to keep your job… This decision is based on your merits. Don’t perform? You are out.  Whether you keep your job as nothing to do with how Bob from the next cubicle performs, or whether the applicant for your job is a liberal or conservative. You are accountable whether or not you keep your job.

When you can run a campaign based on pointing out the faults of your opponent, it becomes a game of “looking better then the other guy” when it should be a “look what I did in Washington”. An Up or Down vote forces this conversation to be had. Forces the politician to be judged on their merits of governing, not the skill of their campaign to find dirt on the other guy.

When I was in grade school (socialist brainwashing camp) the teachers (mind polluters) I had really tried to teach critical problem solving (liberal bias) to us. Remember these:

The teachers were trying to teach problem solving skills to students. How to think through something. Look at one side, look at the other. Observe the situation. Then based on your understanding of Math (sacrilege), Physics (Witchcraft), or anything else,  you worked out the solution.

This seemingly simple act of critical thinking, even at an 8th grade level seems to be alien to so many Americans.  The Issues facing our generation are complicated and need to be looked at from both angles.

• Surely we can not torture prisoners and still open a can of whoop ass when needed.
• Surely we can adapt our energy production to more sustainable methods and not overly vilify the coal, oil, and gas industry.
• Surely Gay couples can be given the same rights as everyone else and the religious can keep their ‘holy union’ called marriage.
• Surely the mega rich could pay a tad more in taxes to repair our crumbling bridges and assist the poorest of the poor.
• Surely business can adapt and still be profitable with reasonable regulation to safeguard consumers.

I mean.. surely we can look at both sides and find a reasonable solution for the greater good, right?

Wrong. It seems the the onslaught of stupid is overwhelming.  Can’t beat em, join em. I am taking off my elitist crown, burning my college diploma. These shackles of common sense will bound me no longer. The mere act of critical thinking in my presence will be met by loud shouts of “Fascist Baby Killer!” in your face. Henceforth I denounce reason and analytical thought. There is no middle ground. There is no Gray. There is only the enlightenment of the squawk box. Bow to our leader, the TV Political Pundit sees all and knows all.

• Sarah Palin is the best thing for America. Moose Knuckle FTW.
• Obama really should be tried for treason. Where does he get off being Muslim?
• Climate Change is a myth. Those emails prove it.
• We ARE less safe since Cheney left office. He was our protector after all.
• The Earth is only a few thousand years old and will end in 2012. Dinosaur bones are a Muslim conspiracy to discredit the pope.
• Jesus was NOT a liberal, he actually helped the moneylenders get pay raises. It’s called Trickle down economics.
• Exxon really will lower oil prices if we drill baby drill! They promised!
• Insurance companies don’t have death panels, it’s called underwriting.

And it just keeps going. It feels so nice to have all that nasty intellect and reasoning skills out my head. Finally I know the truth. I am going to watch some NASCAR now and email some Mexican wetback jokes to my hunting buddies while I pray for God to smite the Socialist Canadians.

Moveon.org is pushing a petition to tell Harry Reid how you feel about the Public Option being in danger.

My message:

You spineless fool. Trade away the only reasonable method to keep the insurance companies honest for expanded medicare. Get your act together and grow a pair (of balls). If you are a man of any sense of integrity you would put the public good over your re-election bid. Congress is a fail and you continue to prove it daily. Let wall street go back to business and the health insurance companies line your campaign coffers.. and you just keep going on being a douchebag.

Please, for all that is moral and just in the world: do what is right, for the PUBLIC. NOT what it right for your corporate masters.

Joshua Strebel, Small business owner – Arizona.

Sign your own petition at moveon.org

My insurance rates have climbed almost as fast as my coverage as declined. YOURS HAVE TOO. Free market capitalism.. I am all for it. I am a business owner and I have a reasonable expectation of profit. I think insurance companies should as well. BUT… they are middle men in a system that only exists for profit at the expense of the public at large. No good Samaritan is going to come out of the woodwork and start an insurance company that “works”, in that vacuum the government has to step in to regulate and create an alternative that focuses on coverage, not profits.

Tell me how it’s socialism, tell me how it is unfair.. tell me how the government will ration care. I will call you a fool. I will tell you how in a split second the insurance companies will adapt and change for the better when presented with a legitimate competitor to their monopoly.

Seriously.

Please stretch your mind.. ask around, show me any evidence, make something up if you need. Answer me this:

WHAT BENEFIT DOES DIRECT TO CONSUMER DRUG ADVERTISING PROVIDE TO ANYONE BESIDES BIG PHARMA?

How many commercials mentioning anal leakage do I need to see?

Boner pills, Heart pills, Arthritis pills, Asthma pills, Restless leg syndrome pills.. yeah restless leg syndrome gets a pill, Cholesterol pills, Depression Pills.. you have it, you may think you have it, you are now convinced you have it: pills. I ranted about this a while ago.. still bugs me.

Drug Consumers are a buying a product like a TV or a new Couch. They are sold to, marketed to. Rather than go to Best Buy and get a TV, they go to the Dr. and get Erection meds.

This only benefits big Pharma.

Doctors are suppose to diagnose and prescribe treatment. Maybe 20 years ago. Dr.s today get kickbacks from drug companies for writing scripts to consumers who have diagnosed themselves.

Harvard Medical School is caught up in a scandal over big pharma.

WTF? Show me how this benefits anyone but big Pharma?  You want health care costs to come down, stop letting every dumb American walk out of urgent care with 30 scripts for what ails them.

When I was going to school at NAU, my professor Chris Johnson did me a solid; He stressed the importance of constructive criticism.  We would have peer reviews of our work (BFA – Visual Communication) where you would put your work up on a projector for the class to critique. Chris had a few ground rules. 1 be honest. 2. give useful feedback 3. your feedback better be longer than a few words. Or in other words, “its cool” or “it sucks” basically earned you a scowl and likely impacted your grade negatively.

At first some of students were very uncomfortable opening themselves up to feedback, some even shed a few tears. As my class moved from Soph, to Junior and to our final year in the program the feedback sessions became vital to the artist achieving their best work. Well thought out critiques of why the piece worked, or why it did not helped push the boundaries of the artist.

So here is where I am going with this. Next time you have something to say about something, anything. Be it taxes, be it phx community organizations, be it on healthcare, be it on Obama. Do yourself a favor of not looking like an ass, or a troll. Ask yourself why “it” is working or not working. Ask yourself how you feel it could be done better. Ask yourself if your feedback is helping or hurting the cause, the organizer, or the artist.

I am guilty of giving short answers as well. Derek likes to talk about community a lot. My last comment on one of his posts was “less talk, more do”. Is this really the most constructive feedback I could have given. No. I think it made my point but it did little to add any value to the dialog. Perhaps a bit more detail of why I think leading by example rather than rhetoric is choice, and cite some examples would have been more appropriate.

“It sucks”, or “You suck” are answers given by the ignorant. Why does it suck? How can it be better? What can I do to add value here? These are questions that move the dialog, or the artist, or the planning committee forward towards the goal. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it?

Big excerpt below… of this article.  I lean left, but consider myself a centrist like 70% of America does.  We have to get back to reasonable dialog in this country. When reasonable questions like “Where’s the WMD?” get ignored and “Where’s the birth certificate?” get weeks of news coverage. THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG.

Nevertheless, there’s a growing conventional wisdom in the press alleging that both sides of the political spectrum are equally guilty of wackaloon attacks and conspiracy theories.

Granted there might be one or two very fringe exceptions but this is otherwise a false equivalency written by the establishment media as part of their self-conscious effort to seem balanced. The distinction is that any “fringe” attacks from the left during the Bush years weren’t mainstreamed and legitimized the way the wingnut attacks are today, even though the fringe attacks from the left turned out to be mostly accurate.
On the right, we’re hearing about communist takeovers, birth certificates, Oval Office dress codes, teleprompters, death panels, czars and a return to segregated buses.

During the previous administration, on the other hand, the left insisted that Iraq didn’t have WMD. This turned out to be true. The left insisted that there wasn’t a connection between Saddam and 9/11. Also true. The left alleged that George W. Bush was incompetent. The rest of the nation caught up with the left when Katrina slammed into New Orleans, shattering the levees while Bush was eating cake with John McCain.

Some, but not all, of the left thought Bush had prior knowledge of the September 11th attacks. It’s a matter of record that he knew an attack might be imminent based upon the famous PDB titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” So that one was partially true.

The left also accused the administration of using illegal wiretaps, torture and other human rights violations. All true. Did Bush have business connections with the Bin Laden family? Yes. Did 100 Democratic members of Congress co-sponsor a bill calling him out for it? Of course not.

And throughout the Bush years — no matter how accurate the left’s “fringe” attacks might’ve been — liberals were marginalized and laughed off by the establishment press, ignored by certain leaders in our own party and attacked as unpatriotic by the Republicans. Sean Hannity, Tom DeLay and Bill O’Reilly, who are all busily ripping the current president an array of new holes, actively accused the left of undermining the troops because we were criticizing the commander-in-chief during wartime. Ah yes. They abandoned that one faster than Newt Gingrich abandons sick wives, didn’t they?

Friday night..

I am coding, debugging the shopping cart code for purchase of upgrades to page.ly.

Thinking about how much time

and money

and diversion of resources

and missed opportunity

and stress

and sleepless nights

and…

Startups are hell and joy, defeat and glory all at once.

Nearly seven years and 4 legitimate (all money making.. even if some are not profitable) startup’s, and dozens of late night ideas turned into websites later and I still don’t know why I do it.

Thinking about my close friends and business colleagues.. estimating how much time and $ they put into their own projects.. $1 million dollars totalled before I get to the 4th name on list of 8.

Thinking of the bitch ass punks that talk trash with their hand out. Cashing their paycheck while at the same time thinking they can to it better than me.

Are we a service business, or a product business? How many client projects do we need to float us, to buy us the time to work on the internal projects?  How fast can we get product to market, how quickly will it scale, when will client work no longer be needed? Gotta make payroll next week. Will I go broke before then?

Everyday it is looking for the next client gig or spending those earnings developing a product.

If none of this makes sense to you, STFU and punch your time card.

EPILOGUE (30 minutes later):

So yeah.. that sounded a bit harsh. I am not busting on the honest working man.  I put my self thru college on various construction crews. Nothing wrong with working for someone else.

Just reflecting more so on the sacrifices entrepreneurs in general make to realize their dreams.. huge sums of money and effort that go into starting, running, and building a business… employing others, taking the smallest paycheck, working 18 hours a day – forever.

Risking it all..

Really Facebook?

Aside from the fact that apparently “2 of my  buddies from scottsdale think I am stupid” they use the <blink> tag to shout the IQ rank of my friends to me..

Hey facebook app developers.. please go play in traffic.

Facebook is on the backside of awesome and is speeding 100mph towards suck

Click to enlarge..

So I have been giving a few guys @gangplank a hard time for coming into the office wheezing, hacking, coughing and otherwise spreading their sickness around.

Getting sick sucks.. but it happens. But it doesnt need to happen to everyone you work with.

A couple years ago one of my employees came into work looking like walking death, I had a meeting that morning so he was there a few hours before I came in. When I got there and saw him, I told him to go home. And not in a nice way. I did not want to get sick, and I did not want to lose more productivity by the rest of the team catching his funk. Of course though.. i did get his death, and so did 2 others.. so the company as a whole lost a few days of billings/output. That is real $$$ gone.

To his credit, He was commited to his job and felt compelled to come in. Thank you, but no thank you.

Think about all the common surfaces someone comes in contact with at business office:

• the restroom
• the break room
• the water cooler dispenser handle
• the fridge door handle
• keyboards, and desks
• printers, faxes, and copiers
• door handles
• air

So you are sharing all these surfaces with the sick guy that means wells, but is leaving little bacteria/virus cultures on all these common places throughout the office. I am no bio-scientist but I know these microbes can live on these surfaces for a few hours to a few days.

So be kind to your fellow workers, employers, etc. Stay home when you are ill. If you sickness takes the boss and 2/3 of your team out for 5 days.. you cost the company.. and the ECONOMY for heavens sake a multiple of your wages/productivity.

UPDATE:

sure as shit i got a cold.. muther f$ckers

So Last month CitiBank attempted to bump the APR on my creditcard from  5.89% to 14.99%.

I told them to jump in a lake, and they backed off. Except it basically terminates my account upon the expiration of the credit card.

Today Chase bank tells me they are bumping my APR 3%.. If I decline, my account is closed immediatly.  They DO NOT say whether the balance is due today.. or at the expiration of my card.

They both cite “market conditions“. That is code for “We got our ass handed to us by making stupid investment decisions, so our boys in congress gave us a bunch of money so we can make the down payment on the new Leer Jet, and cast our CEO’s comode in gold… and now we are gonna stand on it while we piss on all of you”

So lets play this out. I  have excellent credit, never late or over limit on these cards… and they can unilaterally make changes to the account terms, and then penalize me if I don’t agree. They are recipients of our tax dollars to cover their bad mortgage paper.. and they turn around and use that money to buy private jets, and push rate hikes back on their customers.

Whats wrong here? Where are the consumer protection laws? Why has congress let the banks write legislation for the last 40 years? Where is my power to modify the terms in my favor?

The Bums in congress better do an anal-cranium extraction real quick. The middle class is at the end of it’s rope.. and unlike the poor, they have the power to change it. The poor cant vote with their wallets, which seems to be the only thing these guys understand.

Looks to me like there is a huge gap waiting to be filled by a new, smaller, and bullshit-free bank that can take advantage of the exodus of customers from these tainted institutions.