Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Canada Forgets that Bush is Gone

In a bold effort to keep all right-thinking Canadians from being exposed to people who might hold a different point of view than some of their leaders, Canada has stopped terrorism at its border. It has banned George Galloway from entering the country.

Galloway, it should be remembered, took a strong stance against the Clinton/Blair sanctions on Iraq in the 1990’s, against the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the attack on Iraq in 2003.

The man’s obviously a terrorist.

Democrats are the Problem

State Senator Morgan Carroll of Aurora, Colorado, is a health care reformer. She has taken on the arduous task of introducing some transparency into doctors’ relationships with pharmaceutical companies. She introduced a bill in the Colorado legislature that would have banned drug companies from giving gifts to doctors or reselling patient prescription information for marketing purposes.

Carroll brought the bill before a committee of the legislature. The Democrats around her were a little stunned, and used procedural maneuvers to kill the bill. Here’s her words:

* the health care bill was assigned to a committee on business, not health
* President Groff refused even a short extension to consider amendments that may have achieved pharmaceutical / health care reform, effectively killing the bill on a deadline technicality.
* Chairwoman Veiga refused to even entertain a vote on an amendment — something I have never seen in 5 years, also effectively killing the bill on a flex of bald chairing power.
* Democratic Senator Heath indicated because he had Roche pharmaceuticals in his district he couldn’t vote for the bill.
* Democratic Senator Tochtrop said her concern was about samples, even though samples were exempted from the bill.
* Not one colleague could point to one provision of the bill or recommend one change. Normally, members of the same party will at least attempt to work with a bill sponsor. Here quite the opposite was true.
* The Senators left during the hearing intermittently to talk to the drug lobby outside the hearing, missing key testimony.

This is the usual procedure for killing good bills, and it is usually done behind the scenes. Since most of the Democrats who killed the bill also campaigned on reform of the health care system, they have to act quietly and don’t want any publicity.

Sen. Carroll has broken with etiquette, and written about the matter on her blog.

Democrats are outraged. Not about the bill. They meant to kill it. They are mad at Senator Carroll for talking out of school, about blogging about their activities.

Do we need any more evidence of the real problem we face? It’s not Republicans. They are what they are. It’s Democrats who are nothing more than beards for special interests while talking about reform.

Democrats are the problem. Democrats are the Problem.

Cobb Field: a day at the ballpark

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I stumbled across this video while doing my usual Cincinnati Reds surfing. I don’t know how well-known the film is down in Billings. I grew up there and spent many a night in my early youth and then in my twenties and thirties in old, run down, but otherwise perfect in every way … Cobb Field.

Anyway, they’ve made an award-winning film about 24 hours in the life of Cobb Field, which you can purchase – just follow the links from Church of Baseball. I’ll wait to get it on Netflix.

Bess Buzzkill

Thanks to a boatload of free publicity from Professors Natelson and Juras of the University of Montana, I and many others are now aware of the Kaimin, the campus newspaper, and more specifically of its Bess Sex column, by Bess Davis. I should probably go to the archives to find the really salacious stuff, but I’m nearly 59 years old, and I just don’t have the energy. It feels a bit creepy.

Today’s column is pretty tame, urging campus couples to use condoms, or to avoid “riding bareback”, as she calls it. That’s good advice for young couples. (It’s an “advice” column.) Other than abstention, which few take seriously, promotion of the use of condoms is good public policy.

I’m a long-time observer of the way people behave, and become shrill and annoying when I see powerful people bombing and killing weak people and stealing their stuff. It’s all part of being the youngest child in a family, sensitive to injustice. Humans are capable of all forms of depravity, and also of justifying that depravity, and of even going so far as to claim that depravity is virtuous.

That’s part of what driving the professors – the notion that depravity is taken for granted. They are Victorian in their outlook, and open talk about sex, free indulgence – it’s all depraved in their eyes.

But sex is hardly something to get upset about. Since the 1960’s and the advent of the pill, it’s become easier to have sex without consequence, and social norms have softened. Many enlightened men now understand that women enjoy sex too, and occasionally have orgasms. So I’m told. And women are more open about it now, and men are taking this openness as an invitation. In olden days a girl who openly enjoyed sex was considered either a tramp or the “town pump”; now it is now understood that even good girls have sex, and enjoy it, and want it to be safe and protected.

But some things don’t change, and the current Bess Sex column hits on an age-old theme – honesty in a committed relationship, and trust. That part, it seems, has not changed. Women still want men to be faithful, and Bess acknowledges that men are often not faithful, and urges the use of condoms. Buzzkiller.

Only By Design

What little I know of computer programming can be put in a bean bag and still leave room for lots of beans. But I do know this – higher quality accounting software keeps a record of all transactions, including those in which transactions are deleted. There’s always a trail for the auditors to follow. They know who did what, and when it was done.

Election machines have such audit logs. But Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold) machines have an additional feature – a built-in “Clear” button that allows traceless deletion of the audit logs. (And five of the company’s models delete the first deck of ballots automatically – it’s supposed to be used to delete the test deck before actual use, but in practice deleted real votes.)

So the machines don’t count votes correctly, and can easily by tampered with.

No self-respecting voting machine manufacturer would allow such sloppiness. It’s so common, so basic, so well-known, that such a flaw could only be there by design.

Current versions of Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) have such design flaws. All of them in 34 states.

How ’bout that.

Going Galt

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Colbert means to be comical, but the idea of wealthy people “Going Galt” is in itself laughable. They should do so, if only to learn that wealth production goes on without them.

I have an idea for a novel – it will be called “Atlas Shoveled”. In it, all of the garbage collectors in the country go on strike, and the country slows to a crawl and eventually comes to a dead halt. They agree to come back to work on one condition – that they be paid a living wage and given some benefits, like health care. We give in. The country goes on as before, and wealthy people again undertake their wealth-producing activities.