Beck Loves To Bloviate

Today on my way back from a doctor appointment (apparently I'm not terminal yet) I tuned in to Glenn Beck's conservative radio show. Glenn's a strange fellow. He goes from seeming lucid on some points to wildly bonkers on others. Today he's going off on the "March to Socialism".

As I said last, this is to be expected but it's still fun to listen to. His comment this morning was, "Did you hear that now the government has taken over the warranties on all our cars and now we're firing CEO's of car companies?"

Really Glenn? "All" our cars? Are you sure the government said "all" and didn't actually refer to just GM and Chrysler? Are you also sure they've already done this or said that they'd take care of it as a means to help save these companies IF they went into bankruptcy?

I also noticed that he conveniently left out the tiniest detail about these two companies having first choosing to go down this path by taking money from us. So why is it that the family that takes a mortgage they may not be able to afford is bad but when a car company does something similar that it's the government that's bad? Why is that Glenn?

Why isn't it socialism when corporate American turns to us for a bail-out but it is socialism when we actually give them the money and then expect something in return? Oh, the contradictions....

GM CEO To Step Down Bringing Socialism

There's no doubt in my mind that Monday's airwaves will be filled with vitriol from the Right about how GM's CEO, Rick Wagoner, being asked to step down by the Obama administration is a clear indication that Obama wants to take the country fully into socialism. They'll paint it as an administration that's secretly happy to take control of GM instead of letting it find its way through this without the government control.

The fact of the matter is that I'm not buying it for one second. General Motors could have avoided this with the simplest of solutions. They could have not taken money from the public. Once they did it they did so knowing full well that they were getting into something that would have major strings attached.

This is no different from a company, no matter how historied, going to investors to ask them to bail them out. The new investors make demands in return for their investment in the name of protecting their investment. If you don't like the terms you don't take the funding.

Nothing prohibited GM from skipping the funding except for greed. They figured they'd get a free hand-out and it backfired. Ford chose not to take the risk and they're in control of their own fate. Should things not improve there they will know full well what the best path is if they want to avoid government oversight or control.

GM could have opted for bankruptcy. They felt it better to avoid that and it'll be interesting to hear Rick Wagoner's insights once he gets his footing under him and starts showing up all over the talk show circuit. I'm curious to hear why he felt it was more important to let the government in risking his own skin over going into bankruptcy and keeping control of the entity. Frankly, I respect Wagoner for the choice. I'm not saying I think it was the right choice but it seems to me that he believes that this path was ultimately better for GM as a whole regardless of his personal outcome in it. In this environment that's an incredibly selfless act that, if true, deserves utmost attention.

Here's hoping all of that isn't lost in the rhetoric.

Knowing I Love You, Man....

I had a pretty interesting week for movies. I managed to catch two different films that were on opposite sides of the spectrum in nearly every way.

First up was the Nicolas Cage sci-fi thriller, Knowing. This might turn out to be the best "worst" film of the year. It was almost universally panned except for one 4-star review from my favorite reviewer--Roger Ebert. Like a rating over 90 on Rotten Tomatoes, I've often had trouble with anything Ebert has given his highest rating to. Thus, I went into this movie with pretty much all of karma lined up against it.

The story revolves around Cage's character. He plays a pretty bright professor at MIT who stumbles upon a letter stored in a time capsule 50 years prior that accurately predicts disasters of the future. We're along for the ride as he sets out to both understand the validity of the information and to prevent the forecasts from coming to pass.

I spent most of this movie glued to the screen sitting on the edge of my seat. If the story interests you at all then you're in for a fun experience. However, this story does require a good ability to suspend your disbelief but isn't that what sci-fi is often all about?

Be prepared to feel like you're riding an intense roller coaster. Also be forewarned that you're not likely to have seen carnage portrayed this realistically in any other movie of late. One scene involving a plane crash feels so real and looks so horrific that I had a hard time getting it out of my head. If there's any knock here it's that so much destruction happens in such a short period that you get a bit numbed by it.

The point of the story many found lacking. I had a question or two about it but not anything that couldn't be easily imagined into an acceptable ending. For those looking for a definitive, simple ending, this is not your movie.

Just yesterday I caught the next "Apatow-like" movie called I Love You, Man. Like the others in this continuing genre, it includes alums from some of the others in the group. It's getting to the point where a flow-chart might be fun.

Anyway, when I saw the previews for this one it looked a bit dull to me. The solid reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and a recommendation from a friend helped to get me behind seeing it. It helps that I like Paul Rudd and find Jason Segel even more to my liking. Segel's character in this movie offers a wonderful contrast of personalities that he handles with ease.

This one is pretty standard fare. Don't expect lots of rapid-fire jokes or even a bunch of big laughs. It's entertaining and includes some nice enjoyable laughter sprinkled throughout. One stand-out in the movie is Rudd's fiance in the film played by Rashida Jones. I've seen her in other vehicles and have never really found her that entertaining or attractive. Here she's both. One interesting note is that she's the daughter of music mogul Quincy Jones and yet, in a couple of scenes--unless she's doing some amazing acting--it appears as if she doesn't have a whole lot of rhythm. She doesn't need it but it's just something you'd think would go with the heritage.

In the end it's a movie that you won't regret seeing but that I expect will be hard to remember a week or two from now.

Oh, in a side note this one was also marred by phone use. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the myriad of Blackberry's and iPhone's littered all over the theater while waiting for the previews to start. Two high school girls sat directly in front of us and one was knee-deep in a text conversation as they started. The phone then thankfully went away. Sadly it was just a rude taunting by the girls. Within minutes of the movie starting she began an all-out text blitz. Phone on, phone off, phone on, phone off. After the third foray I leaned forward and said, "Could you please stop the texting?" She replied, "Oh, sure." To this the older couple next to me could be overheard voicing their thankfulness for the intervention. However, just minutes after that she was back at it. Her answer to my query was to just slide more to the right away from me. After a bit more of this the older man leaned forward and said, "Look, get up and stand at the back of the theater if you're going to play with your phone." That finally seemed to put an end to it. What's more is that, for the first time, the pair seemed to be able to enjoy the movie.

This just has to stop. No less than four different phones were opened, brightly, during the movie. Meanwhile my own phone received two calls and four texts while the movie ran. I know this not because I answered them but because of the light vibrating I felt from it in my pocket. I don't know how but I managed to contain myself for a whole 90 minutes without answering these and I didn't seem to suffer any ill effects either! If only I could bottle that restraint I could make a fortune. It's time for theaters to get off their asses with this and start physically removing people from the theater for this infraction. I'd pay extra just to know I'm in a theater with a bouncer at the back who will home in on anyone with a phone and toss them out at the first sign of trouble. I'd gladly put up with that distraction as it will only take a couple months of that before the idea sinks in.

More Straw Man Arguments From The Right

The last few days have been incredible to listen to conservative radio and Fox News. You'd think President Obama has morphed into the anti-Christ. You've got Glenn Beck crying and hysterical conservatives calling in suggesting, seriously, that Obama is about to enslave all of us.

The various shows are all up-in-arms over just about everything under the sun that Obama has been doing down to complaining about his use of tell-a-prompters. It seems obvious to me that the Right has returned squarely to the ingenious Karl Rove tactics of the past. This is the tactic that states that you take the targets most revered positives and turn them on their face. In the best example of it Rove, earlier in his career, took down a judicial candidate with a long history of protecting abused children by questioning his motivations. He suggested that he was just a bit too close to these children and might, himself, be a pedophile.

For Obama that equates to his charismatic and eloquent speaking. Take this strength and ridicule it by pointing out how often he uses a tell-a-prompter. It doesn't matter that his previous boss, George W. Bush, would have been well served by using one far more often himself. Keep suggesting that Bush was able to speak without the need for one while ignoring that the results of those excursions were often disastrous or hilarious ("Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country.")

Now the big thing making the rounds is to take the thing Americans like most about this President--namely his willingness to tackle the big problems head on--and turn that into the tired old mantra of us going down a path to socialism. Sean Hannity's show the past couple of days has been filled with much rhetoric about this. Evil Obama wants to tell corporations how much to pay their people, how big their bonuses can (or can't) be, how to run their business, etc.

Forget that his answer--unrestrained "capitalism"--got us into this mess in the first place. No, none of that matters when you can mention the specter of socialism to a conservative audience. We've had these sorts of controls in place for years already in the banking industry with the FDIC and it's something Americans have come to rely on and trust. Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner is simply suggesting that we create the same sort of organization for critical non-banking firms. To help make his case Hannity had on the always entertaining Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. This woman will say anything to try to sound intelligent on a subject while generally leaving her with egg on her face. Yesterday she tried to quote Reagan and blew that. She also took an inclusive comment from Geitner and turned it into a side-show suggesting that Geitner plans to take us into a global currency. All he did was suggest that it's worth considering.

Anyway, the battle now is to ignore virtually everything that's actually happening and just keep invoking the conservative fear word of socialism. If it's socialism it can't possibly be good. These people always ignore the post office, libraries, the reliability of Social Security and Medicare, non-volunteer firemen, police, sanitation workers, etc. Have people forgotten that the FDIC's creation came out of the hubris of Wall Street that gave us the Great Depression? The reality is that there must be a balance between government and corporate America. Either without the other is a recipe for disaster.

By the way, was I the only one to notice that the health insurance industry put forth a plan to cover absolutely everyone in the country at a lower rate and to drop pre-existing conditions? Let's see how this proposal morphs into socialized medicine when explained by the Right.

The Versatile LG Versa

I've been looking for a decent phone for a while now and being pretty much stuck with Verizon Wireless means that I have no choice really but to only choose from their phones. They're not known for having the greatest selection of phones or phones with the best features but you could do worse.

Until just recently I really was fine with a fairly basic cell phone. I don't live with mine tied to my hip like so many do these days. Mine is very much a tool and not so much a social experience. The camera in any of my phones have all gone pretty much unused so that's never been a factor. What I've really wanted was a neat phone with some cool features but that also gets the job done well.

A couple phones back I tried a Samsung Glyde. This was my first foray into a touchscreen. It was a total disaster. The screen, even with a protector, worried me continually and its responsiveness drove me nuts. The one nice thing about it was that it included a slide-out full keyboard and for someone like me a real keyboard is a major benefit. Upon returning the Glyde I moved to an LG enV2. This phone really worked well for me. It was easily the ugliest phone I'd ever seen and it didn't have anything that would get it into the flashy territory. It just worked. It too had a full flip-open keyboard and nice screens. However, it was also a bit dull as phones go.

The enV2 recently received a major firmware upgrade so I needed to take it into Verizon to get them to apply the upgrade. You can do it from home but with stores all over I figured I'd let the "pros" do it. While I was at the store I, of course, meandered around looking at the various other phones. For a bit I considered upgrading to a Blackberry. I tried a Storm and found it completely useless for me. The lack of a keyboard was no good. Then I tried out a few standard Blackberry's but they just didn't feel right to me. When you factor in that using one requires an additional $30 a month for a special data plan, and that I really wouldn't use it for e-mail, there really was no reason to go that way.

Other phones looked interesting but not interesting enough and then I saw the Versa. It's sort of an odd duck as phones go. It's primarily a typical touchscreen phone but it also comes with an attachment that gives it a very full QWERTY keyboard that also acts as a nice cover for the touchscreen.

I tried out the interface in the store and was amazed to find it extremely responsive, very pleasing to look at and simple to use. I decided then to give it a shot.

Since getting it I've been reading about a number of people using this as a touchscreen-only phone and I can't imagine why. It's very functional that way but the keyboard just makes it so much quicker and easier to type messages with.

The keyboard snaps into place simply enough. You remove the battery cover and snap it into the keyboard attachment. Some people find this annoying but only if you plan to swap between these setups. It means you'd need to also carry around the battery cover for when it's in touchscreen-only mode. For me, it will almost always have the keyboard attached so that doesn't bother me a bit. The keyboard hinge also covers up the opening to the microSD memory card slot but since I only ever put one card in here and leave it in this too is not a factor for me.

In use the phone is quite nice. The interface is LG's newest and it shows. The graphics are fresh, intuitive, pleasing to the eye and, frankly, very cool in my view. The touchscreen itself isn't huge and it's extremely long but not very wide. A friend of mine actually commented that she thinks the Versa's graphics are better than those on her iPhone. That's saying something.

The touchscreen also supports all the standard finger sliding actions. You can slide a row of contacts, for example, up or down and a flick of the finger sets it rolling until it slowly stops. One negative I have noticed is that sometimes the system just refuses to acknowledge a touchscreen button push. I push it. I see it go down. A noise is made but nothing happens. Sometimes you have to push it several times for it to take. This is something that should be addressed in a firmware update but you can't always depend on that.

A left-to-right or right-to-left finger slide and you'll find that the device features four distinct content pages. One is for shortcuts to favorite applications, one is for quick access to favorite contacts (very slick features on this one), one is for quick access to each of the various modules (notepad, mobile IM, e-mail, etc.) and one is for your favorite media or websites. There's also a main menu for many tools and such. There's a bit of redundancy here and the main menu approach breaks the interface a bit but not to the point of distraction.

Editing these screens is a breeze. You touch a gear icon and drag and drop icons into the available buckets. I do miss the concept of the "function" button on my enV2 that allowed you to hit one key to bring up your favorite apps. Here you first have to scroll to the right page and then you can get to what you want.

The favorite contacts screen lets you quickly access your most popular ten contacts. Each contact gets their own icon. Initially it has their name in it but you can change this to an avatar or any graphic you provide if you so wish. I like it just the way it is. When you tap on a name the box expands to provide four more icons surrounding the main one. These let you call the contact, bring up your text history, send a text message or jump right into the details of each contact.

Each of the four main screens (except the main menu) features a bottom "info" bar that has four icons. One is for access to messages, the next brings up the dialpad, the third brings up the main menu and the last one brings up the contact list. Above all that is a small thin bar that changes to display action icons to let you know you have messages, appointments, that the phone is in vibrate mode and so on.

Below the screen you'll find three regular physical buttons. The are for answer/dial, voice dialing and hanging up. Each of them also has other double-duty functions (like going back a menu) depending on where you are in the phone.

The screen can also be used in landscape or portrait and the screen quickly snaps to whatever orientation you have it at. I've read that this action changes a bit if you don't have the keyboard attached, but since mine always is, I can't really speak to that. One oddity is that while you're in "portrait" mode there's no indication of how many other screens there are but moving to "landscape" produces a set of four dots that indicate that there are four pages and the one you're on is highlighted in green. Why this doesn't appear in portrait presentation is a mystery.

The biggest gripes I have deal with the outside of the QWERTY keyboard accessory. It looks nice enough and has a nice leather feel to it but it's design is simply too basic. It includes its own small display showing the date, time, signal strength, battery life and other action items. There are also two hard buttons at the bottom for answer/dial and hang up. However, that's all there is. You can use the answer/dial button to dial the last number talked to or received but that's the only way to make any call without opening up the phone. I would have much preferred that they follow the enV2 design and allow this to have more actual keys. At the least adding cursor keys like the enV2 would allow for bringing up a contact list and scrolling to the right entry or through my recent callers list. I have some hope that if the phone sells well perhaps they'll put out a better version of this later. I also liked that the date is shown on the small display but, alas, it goes away as soon as any of the action icons appear so it's rarely there to depend on.

One thing that bugs me is moving between a Bluetooth headset mode and non-Bluetooth mode. There doesn't appear to be a way, simple or otherwise, to quickly jump from your headset to a typical call. You can easily move between a headset call and a speaker call. The only way I've found to acheive this is to disable the headset connection when I'm done with it. That's not the easiest thing to remember so you end up having a lot of aborted conversations simply because your headset is within reach of the phone.

In use you'll find that with the keyboard attached you pretty much have to open it to make calls or to interact with the phone to do anything of any value. However, this also has the nice benefit of acting as a great overall screen protector. Texting on the phone is a breeze. If you're in portrait mode you can use the touchscreen to type and it can be set to any of a number of input types. In landscape mode, with the keyboard attached, you just use the keyboard. Amazingly the keyboard holds the main Versa body up with ease in this orientation. I was a bit worried about this upon seeing the screenshots of it but it's a total non-issue.

Battery life seems to be quite acceptable though I expect we're not too likely to see much in the way of an extended battery here as I can't see how they'd pull off a bigger battery and still have the keyboard attachment work. I'm finding that for my light use that the phone needs to be charged every few days. If I sit around and make several calls and play a few games then it drains quickly but no more than any other phone I've had.

Aside from the few problem items so far it's been a wonderful phone and has worked almost flawlessly. Bluetooth has worked without a hitch and all the apps do a great job (though I'm not a fan of the browser that's provided). It isn't the best phone for web browsing but it's better than any of the other phones I've had for this. It's also the first phone that has gotten me to really use its fairly functional and approachable calendar app. All in all I think I can be happy with this one for some time to come.

I Watched The Watchmen

This past weekend found me at the theater for my first official 2009 movie, The Watchmen. The movie is taken from a highly-celebrated and successful graphic novel of the same name. The movie also was the focus of legal wrangling that threatened to derail the entire project.

If you don't know the story (and most don't) it's a bit similar to Batman in nature. You have a group of regular people who decide it's time to take on crime by dressing up and fighting back. It's a dark story filled with despair, sadness, loss and just about everything else challenging in the psychological spectrum. This is not a feel-good story.

The movie version does the typical job of trying desperately to stay true to the original story and, as a result, it clocks in at nearly three hours long. It also feels like it at a few points. It's a story that you'll need to pay close attention to as key elements fly by at every turn.

The first thing that strikes you about the film is the look of it. It's visually stunning. It's also quite apparent that much effort was made to create looks and find actors that match the book as closely as possible. Several scenes looked like they were filmed with the goal of matching every minute detail of the drawing of a single cell in the book.

The movie starts out strong and, for us, kept our interest throughout. I can see where many might find trouble after the start. You either accept this kind of storytelling or you don't. The characters tend to be complex and the main ones are no exception. This leads to scenes that feel over-done in trying to make sure we get all we're supposed to get. Some scenes are played and replayed to make the point.

A decision was made to use mainly lesser-known actors in the roles (the notable exception is Billy Crudup playing a fully CGI-rendered character, Dr. Manhattan). It shows in spots. The brightest positive is Jackie Earle Haley who plays the critical role of Rorschach. If anyone can be said to steal this movie it's Haley. The screen comes to life every time he's on it. Three other choices heavily let the movie down. The actors that play Night Owl II and Ozymandias are out of their league for much of the film and the woman playing Silk Spectre II is a complete disaster. She appears to have been hired simply because she's attractive and willing to take part in a near-pornographic sex scene that had no need to be so graphic.

There's also need to mention Dr. Manhattan. This is a CGI character because he's the one exception to characters not having super-human attributes. Due to a mishap he was re-created as a being with incredible powers but of so high a level that he struggles to remain connected to humanity at all. The reason he bears mentioning is that he spends most of the movie onscreen naked and blue. That includes full frontal nudity in nearly every scene he's in. There's nothing wrong with it but it does distract.

Many reviewers have said that only fans of the book could possibly like this movie. I tried to read it and gave up at the mid-point. My friend had never been exposed to it and we both really liked the movie. It's complex, overly-long and poorly acted in parts but when it works it works on all levels. You're taken with it. It looks great. It sounds great and it compels you to keep watching.

My curious question is, would this story have been better off if the agreement to allow it to be released wasn't given and this version scrapped for another effort? We will likely never know.

Almost Forgot

I couldn't help but notice Sean Hannity and other pundits jump at the chance to point out that President Obama has been so negligent that the unemployment rate is now as bad as it was in 1983.

You have to love these people..... You really do. Why? These are the same people who gloat over all the incredible, amazing, nearly-miraculous things Ronald Reagan did while in office. He was the President in 1983. He's been there for two years by then. If things were so great when Reagan was in office then how do they justify this?

Don't give me Jimmy Carter. That boat just doesn't float. Unemployment was 7.5 percent when he came into office and was at 7.50 when he left office.

In 1983 unemployment started the year at nearly 11 percent. All of this happened while Reagan gave the country the biggest tax cuts in history to that point. In his second term he reversed much of that and gave us the biggest tax increase and unemployment dropped to 5.30 percent at the end of his term.

Meanwhile Obama is a disaster 45 days into office. How can people take these people at face value?

Ah The Sweet Perfection Of Historical Government

Sean Hannity spent this past week talking about the wonders of what's possible in a government when capitalists are free to do their thing without the shackles of regulation holding them back. He continually pointed out that most of our history has been spent living this way and that it's been a huge success story. Of course this is about as accurate as a description of the world as seen by someone who only looks at the sky why surrounded by trash.

Fans of his point of view believe that, left to their own devices, capitalism is self-balancing, self-righting and self-monitoring and that nothing else is needed. If one company exploits another will come along to win consumers over to them driving the first out of business--or so the myth goes.

Yes, we spent the majority of our history with capitalists free to do what they felt was right without interference from the government. So can someone once again explain how capitalism saved the day with respect to slavery, racism, sexism, ageism and any other -ism we can come up with?

Where would we be without child labor laws? We had children not even in puberty working in coal mines for 16 hours a day and the capitalists saw nothing wrong with it--unless it was their kids.

Where was the balance of capitalism to free us from the chains of slavery? That one took a war and 600,000 lives to correct all because those wonderful capitalist rednecks in the south could only see African Americans as property. The will of the majority of the population couldn't wake these people up. If not for the government we might still have slavery today. Don't laugh. As you get older you realize that 1861 wasn't really all that long ago. We still have many things today that came directly from that era.

It took the government to get big tobacco companies to finally explain to consumers that their product was dangerous. It took government to break up Standard Oil. For those that don't know the Standard Oil company, suffice to say that Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Chevron and many other of the biggest oil companies were all once Standard Oil. Their abuses were so blatant that the government finally stepped in and broke them up in 1911. Standard also made the way for the robber barons among others.

For a more recent example it took the government to break up AT&T and look at what's happened to phone prices and features. An even more recent example is the current mortgage fiasco. Almost everyone in the field jumped at the chance to take their cut of the pie looking the other way while they approved loans for people who had no means to repay them. This is what unbridled capitalism bears. Government isn't always the answer as it took government to allow AT&T to gain the very monopoly they later broke up but it is essential in keeping things in balance. Don't even get me started on the Enron's of the world.

Today you've got doctors causing the deaths of patients because they're paid by insurance companies to deny claims of the very people they swore an oath to heal. Are you kidding me with this? People love to talk about the big bad government. Yet the tune of these very people change at the first sign of trouble. Nearly all of us have been aghast at the total lack of compassion and understanding that capitalism can bring. A building that has no working sprinklers that kills dozens in a fire. A product made with inferior parts to save a penny or two against some lost lives. The bean-counters at these companies that decide that a cheaper gas tank costs them less in "accidental" death cases than to use a safer, more expensive design.

History teaches us that without government regulation and government oversight capitalism doesn't self-balance. They instead collude against the populace all in the name of the almighty bottom line no matter what the costs. Capitalism is also extremely near-sighted--often lacking any desire to think for the long term because it's often about getting the money while the getting is good. Meanwhile the Hannity's of the world continue to act as if all of this is acceptable and, in fact, preferable to the evil specter of "socialism".

Gas And The Stock Market

One thing I haven't seen a lot of talk about is the relationship between the price of oil and its impact on the stock market.

I just got done looking over the numbers and it's pretty compelling information. The reason I looked at this is that my recollection is still pretty fresh regarding the impact of $4 a gallon gas and how it impacted our spending habits.

When gas was $2 a gallon we were planning trips, considering a new vehicle, eating out, buying gadgets. In short we were consuming the way any good consumer does. Then the price started to climb dramatically and when it hit $4 a gallon we, along with nearly everyone we interacted with, reacted just as dramatically. We canceled plans for trips, stopped eating out, looked for bargains anywhere we could find them, lowered the thermostat.

When you look at the data you see that the price of a gallon of gas was bouncing up and down from 2004 through 2007. Then at the end of 2007 it started to climb and showed no signs of retreating. It climbed over $3 a gallon, stayed above it and continued an upward path to $4 gallon in late July 2008. That's eight months of solid increases that everyone saw and felt.

Meanwhile the stock market is behaving similarly. As the price of gas fluctuated the stock market continued a slow rise. It then began to falter at the end of 2007 and started its one-way downward spiral soon after.

Is this all just coincidental? To me it looks very clear that consumers woke up as a result of this direct attack on their bottom line and reacted by taking immediate actions to curtail their spending and to focus on reducing their discretionary spending. They'd need that money, presumably, just to pay for gas to get to work or to heat their homes.

Yes, the housing collapse is huge but much of this is all due to consumer confidence and spending. If consumers stop consuming nothing works.

It's now my contention that big oil is very much to blame for what's going on with the world economy today. They gave us all sorts of rhetoric regarding why the price of oil should be $150 a barrel. We were told there just wasn't enough oil to go around. Meanwhile OPEC was telling everyone that this was totally bogus. They were saying that inventory was perfectly fine and that speculators and the oil companies were artificially driving up the price for the sake of collecting record profits.

The reason this is important is that now, with the price of oil down to $40 a barrel prices at the pump are still being held artificially higher than they should be. Refineries are making excuses for cutting back. Stories abound that even though demand is down the prices will continue to go up as prices for everything else in the world decline.

The one thing the world needs right now is cheap gas. If the economy is in the toilet and you can't heat your home or get to work we're all in much worse trouble than we should otherwise be.

The bottom line is that the oil companies thought they could pull this one over on us. They thought people would just suck it up and continue to pay whatever the oil companies demanded. It was their greed that drove consumers to stop the very engine that makes the world economy turn. We saw the problem and reacted. Now oil companies want to continue the party while the rest of us worry about being able to feed our children and keep a roof over our heads.

Enough is enough.

And Now The Independent Response To Rush Limbaugh

At an event called CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) Rush Limbaugh spoke and said the following:

"Let me tell you who we conservatives are. We love people. (big applause) When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere--We see Americans. We see human beings. We don't see groups. We don't see victims. We don't see people we want to exploit. What we see...what we see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work, we do not see that person with contempt. We don't think that person doesn't have what it takes. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes, regulations and too much government."

He went on to say:

"We love and revere the founding documents--the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. (big applause) We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, (big applause) liberty, freedom, (big applause) and the pursuit of happiness. (big applause) Those of you watching at home may wonder why this is being applauded. We conservatives think all three are under assault."

Well Rush thank you for those great words. It's a pity that none of them add up to a hill of beans when you consider that all of your own actions and those of the people that follow you betray everything you spoke about.

You love people? You have no love for Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, home owners who received a mortgage they couldn't afford, welfare recipients, illegal aliens and on and on and on. You love only people who follow your mantra to the letter. Simply listening to your program for any short period exposes this hypocrisy.

You don't see victims? Well, that's one thing we can agree on and I think it should be underlined. It's part of human compassion and understanding to see victims when they're before you. That you can't see them speaks volumes as to why I'm not a conservative. However, that's also a nice bit of rhetoric because you do see victims but only when it's in your best interest to see them--like victims of 911 but yet you can't see victims of Katrina. Why is that Rush? This selective inability to see victims explains why civil rights, for one example, took more than 100 years to take root after the abolition of slavery.

You don't see people you want to exploit? Are you kidding with this one? When your bottom line is all about the almighty dollar then it pretty much goes without saying that you'd be best to keep an eye on your wallet. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a conservative that coined the phrase, "Buyer beware." The world was the way you wanted it (without regulations) for far longer than it's been regulated and all that gave us was masses of exploited people. When left without regulation we've seen from history that exploitation is all too often the outcome. Frankly this one goes hand-in-hand with the inability to see victims if you ask me.

I also agree that what you see is potential. Potential to exploit and brainwash more people by telling them one thing and doing the exact opposite. As far as people being the best they can be if only the obstacles are removed from their path--good luck with that. Go explain that one to the slaves of the past. Go explain that to those who were held down by racism, sexism, ageism, socialism. Without those checks and guidelines we'd be stuck in the world of the 1950's. I'm guessing a large contingent of your listeners would just love that vision--and that too goes a long way towards explaining why most of the country doesn't agree with you. The rest of us have no interest in returning to a black-and-white world where only whites excel, where women are seen primarily as birthing vessels and maids, where ignorance and blind compliance dominate the masses.

You claim a love of the founding documents but this too is nothing more than a blustery boast without anything to support your contention. You didn't believe that all people were created equal at any point previously. You also just spent the last eight years under President Bush supporting an administration that did everything they could to ignore and break down the very documents they swore to protect and that you claim you love.

Conservatives, all too often, love the IDEA of what you speak to. It all sounds great in a speech and in concept but yet the actions never seem to follow the words. Why is that?

I'm sorry Rush but none of what you said stands on its own merits and until you come to the reality that the rest of the country has figured this out you're going to continue to sound like the crazy fanatic from the fringe that the rest of us see. Rest assured we don't see you as a victim--with the possible exception of possibly bad parenting.