As anyone who’s forced to interact with me for any length of time can attest to, I flip out when someone suggests that the reason we went to war with Iraq was to fight terrorism. I’ve ranted about it before, so I won’t reiterate my arguments here. Suffice it to say, those who would argue with me and spout the President’s BS about Iraq/Saddam Hussein assisting with the 9/11/2001 attacks on the U.S. or supporting the terrorists will have no leg to stand on after reading the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA Intelligence report done in 2005 (and just recently made public). In effect, every excuse that has been made by the Administration for dragging us into a war in Iraq has been stretched over the fire and toasted. (more…)

If ever you needed proof that elected officials disdain and ignore their constituents, just move to Massachusetts. Back in 1989, the Michael Dukakis days, when faced with a budget deficit, the government did not what they should (which would be to cut the fat, cut the corruption and better manage spending at a state and city/town level), but what was expected and increased the income tax from 5% to 5.75% (it eventually got up to 5.85% because the state kept bleeding money). The only way they got this to pass (and it never should have) was to promise that it was a temporary increase and that it would be rolled back at 18 months. Well, it’s 2006 and income tax has only been rolled back to 5.3%, when it was frozen by the Democratic house due to continued budget deficits. In 2000, voters approved a measure that demanded a rollback to the promised 5%. Guess what: it’s still 5.3%. (more…)

College is back in session and the expected flood of college kids has indeed arrived. There were at least four groups moving into my building at once, all on the same day, so who knows how many moved in, all told. All I know is that over the course of the long weekend (Labor Day, for you non-U.S. people - I’m looking at you, squid) the closet that hosts the trash chute was filled to overflowing with pizza boxes, empty 30-packs of Bud Light and bags of miscellaneous trash. This, I’m sure, was a combination of the long weekend (meaning no one on duty to pick up the usual weekend build-up) and the fact that a whole mess of college kids just moved in and added to the amount of trash. Tonight, I returned from a night ride on the motorcycle and held the door for a couple of cops, who remarked about what apartment they were visting. This is the first time I’ve seen cops at the building, and I’d bet a week’s pay that they were checking on complaints about our new residents. All told, I’ve still been very lucky. (more…)

I assume it was bound to happen sooner or later, but some assclown (or assclowns) has spoofed my domain and I’m now getting flooded with delivery failure and spam blocking notices. Kind of a pain since I’d finally gotten the comment spam down to a reasonable level using Akismet. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about this spam since I can’t prevent the spoof. Part of me believes this is payback for facilitating the spamming of our Marketing department: I am the Ops guy who works on the campaign management hardware/software. At least the spam my company sends out is opt-in (so technically not spam, even though I call it spam), but the fact that I’ve tweaked the system to make it capable of sending out 500,000 messages an hour still makes me feel dirty, somehow. Stupid karma.