Like the county being charged rental fees for property that had long been sold, paying for phone lines that had been disconnected for years, or buying stuff from a magistrate’s store.

Why does this sort of stuff just plain piss the left leaning person off? I mean, even if you are a dedicated communist shouldn't you still wish to find corruption, overspending, and waste, and squash it? Shouldn't that be something anyone from any party would rally behind?

You do realize that the reason this sort of wastes happens is because of idiots constantly reducing the budgets for things by slashing taxes, which reduces staffing, which in turn results in the government operating in a completely haphazard manner, right?

You think 'corruption', but no, the government was not deliberately paying for phone lines it didn't have as part of some clever scheme to funnel a few hundred dollars to...the phone company? Uh, no. Those lines were being paid for because no one was employed to keep track of that stuff. Lewis County KY was paying for extra stuff because their government was too small and didn't have some sort of comptroller position.

Probably because the county couldn't afford anyone to actually do that job, as Lewis County KY is very poor. Until they elected Massie, who apparently decided it was part of his job. Which I guess is fine if they actually manage to find a competent executive who can do that, but that really seems like it would be saner as a non-partisan salaried position. (Which the county presumably cannot afford, but that's where the state should step in.)

This.

As an aside, I have to wonder how much more dangerous texting while driving has gotten when all these smartphones. I mean, before them, plenty of people had learned how to 'touch type' on a cell phone, and could do it without looking.

Good luck doing that with a smartphone, where you have to constantly check where on the screen you're pushing and get no feedback. (Not that I'm saying it used to be safe, or that we should 'fix' smartphone so a stupidly dangerous activity is slightly safer for a small portion of people. I'm just pointing out that touchscreens require sight.)

Anyway, yes. 'Electronic modes', of any sort, in cars, are wrong. If here must be modes, there should be a damn physical toggle. Hell, even AM/FM, which has been electronic as long as I can remember, would work just as well with a button that stay pushed in for FM and pops out for AM.

And volume and tuning should be knobs, which people forget can be electronically based...my grandmother's car has knobs that do not have any sort of 'home'...they'll spin forever either way. So the radio can control the setting without it being 'desynced' from the knob position, because there is no knob position.

Also, here's a fun question: Why don't they spend two dollars and put a text-to-speech chip in these radios, and, for example, read off the radio stations as they get tuned? 'Ninety-seven point one...point three...point five...'

There are three types of distractions in a car.

First, there's the plain 'Thing is happening' distraction, which can be anything from listening to the radio to talking on a hands free cell phone to another passenger. Luckily, not only are such distractions pretty minor, but in a lot of cases are actually helpful, as opposed to highway hypnosis and falling asleep and whatnot. The only real problem occurs when the other person isn't in the car, aka, they're on a cell phone, and thus they don't realize when they need to shut up and let you just drive for ten second.(1)

Second are eye distractions. Looking away from the road.

Third is hand distractions, where your hand is busy. Note this is the only 'distraction' that is built into cars, like the window control and the radio, which are designed to operate without eyes. Also eating is one of these. (This isn't really a 'distraction' issue as much as a 'control' issue. It makes dangerous situations worse, but only if they're already happening.)

The real problem is that texting is all three of these. It requires looking while you read and reply, it requires one hand all the time (cell phones do not float in midair), and it also requires some actual thought as to what to say.

It's pretty much every possible distraction rolled up into one. It's hard to think of something that could be worse. Seriously, just call the damn person, even without hands free. At least then you can watch the road.

1) Which is why everyone should really get in the habit of saying 'Hold on a sec' while they're driving and talking on the phone. All the time. No, it's not rude in any way, and people who are talking to drivers need to understand that anything might be happening. (Of course, when I mean 'driving and talking on the phone', I mean 'using hands free'.)

There are also a surprising number of people with 'educational' background, and a lot of doctors, for some reason. (I suspect 'educational' background often means administrative, like school board member and principle. I suspect only small percentage of them actually have taught people.)

See here. It's the 2009 Congress, so a bit outdated, but the numbers probably haven't changed that much.

Notice the incredibly high amount of people with 'business' background, which usually means 'manager or owner of something'.

Fun fact: There are more automobile dealers than engineers.

Something I'd really like to see: How many members of Congress have held jobs with hourly pay, ever?

Well, at some point the entire brand gets so tarnished that, frankly, I have to question if it's worth it.

The right seems to have trouble kicking out 'civilian' leaders that are batshit crazy, and doesn't seem to make any effort to just kick out the ones that go offtopic.

Over here on the left, it would be 'Look, we're sorry, you're in charge of an organization about tax policy, please STFU about gay marriage. Unless you can come up with some way it impact tax policy, and even then, you better take a very centrist-looking position.' (And it would be 'Holy fuck, did you just wink at 9/11 conspiracies? You're fired.')

But, hey, if the northern Kentucky (Which, as a 'northern Southern' state, has always been a bit odd, politically.) has managed to keep the other folks out, I guess I can't complain. I certainly have no evidence otherwise, I can't think of any time the northern Kentucky Tea Parties have ever made the news.

But, like I said, at some point it seems like it would just be more sensible to pick a different name. It's like trying to talk about how moderate your branch of the Earth Liberation Front is.

Anyone trying to use 'Robin Hood' as a justification for anything is an idiot.

Especially as Robin's 'usual hero', King Richard, was the person who, in real life, had actually set the tax rates, because of the damned idiotic Crusader. Prince John was just collecting taxes for Richard. (Actually, he wasn't really even doing that. Taxes were collected locally.)

In actual real life, Richard's stupid war so bankrupted the country that after he died, England was so deep in debt that John had to raise taxes so much that the nobles revolted. (Leading to the Magna Carta.)

No shit.

I love how we have people yammering that people will not choose to 'make as much' or something, and that's presented as a bad thing.

Any trivial thought experiment will show that this is idiotic, that in fact we want people who are sufficiently 'far enough' up the economic ladder making as little as possible.

Why? Because the economy is not some magical thing that grows and shrinks based on what they're doing.

If they're making less money out of 'spite' or whatever nonsense, then other people are now making more.

Let's say that I happen to own a 10 acre orange orchard. I have such economics of scale that I'm the only supplier of orange juice to the entire county, and I employ 100 people. (9 an acre, and the rest do paperwork and deliveries.) And I currently make $1,000,000 a year, and pay 10% in taxes on the first $100,000, and 30% on the rest. (As I know nothing about orange growing, those numbers do not actually make sense, but let's pretend.)

But, wait, they've raised the upper tax rate on me to 40%, costing me another $90,000 a year. Well, fuck them, I'm not going to expand my operations. In fact, I'll lay off 18 people, and sell 2 acres, and the sale will net me back some of my income this year.(I actually think this is insane behavior, but let's pretend rich folks are entitled idiots.)

...wait, the guy that bought the 2 acres hired the guys I let go, and two more people for paperwork and deliveries. And set up a competing business! And now my goddamn workers, which used to work at the only game in town, now are talking about how workers over there get an extra dollar an hour... which they get because apparently that owner has decided to live on only $60,000 profit a year, with only $6000 in taxes! The bastard!

So, yeah. Anytime anyone talks about 'going galt', invite those fuckers to. Because, right now, half the goddamn problem is that we don't have 'inefficiencies' in the market, and if some of those companies would get smaller and more numerous we would. (Because 'inefficiency' often means 'having an employee do something'.) Giant corporations are only helpful to the superrich. Paying people huge amounts of money are only helpful to those who are paid.

For everyone else, the less those people get paid, the more other people get paid, which is helpful even if it's not you. A town having ten people making a million a year is a fuckload better for the average person than having one person making ten million a year, for a dozen different reasons.

(Obviously, this is only true down to a certain level. Having two people making $5000 a year is not noticeably better than having one person make $10000 and the other $0.)

Or, you know, you put money, in a savings account, and just retired. Savings accounts being at their lowest these days, might I add.

Yeah, putting moving in a savings account was a great plan in 1913. Why, that was a totally awesome plan as long you died within the next 16 years.

Sorta sucked for people after that, though.

Someone who joined the Tea Party at the start, when it seemed honest (Whether or not it actually was is another debate.) is entirely different from someone who still supports it.

The Tea Party, at this point, is 'the radical base of the Republican party', on pretty much every issue, from abortion to homosexuality to war-mongering to whatever. And home to every crazy Glenn-Beck conspiracy the very far right has been promoting.

In fact, it might be fun to actually ask members of the Tea Party why the Tea Party exists, and see how many of them can give an answer close to 'We don't want our taxes going to bail out banks and car companies.', which was the premise of it. (Which means it was pretty damn close to the OWS movement, although the OWS movement was more about money flowing the other way and buying the government...and in fact both of them got my respect at the start. One of them has kept on track, and kept my respect, and the other started ranting almost immediately about Obama's birth certificate and lost my respect.)

Of course, the Tea Party is a bunch of different organizations, but none of them are particularly any sort of 'free', 'non-crazy' organization. They're all either crazy, or, in a few cases, been captured by the Republican party. It's not like there's some reasonable independent Tea Party organization to point at.

It's a very interesting feature of the right, in fact. The issues constantly blur, where an group founded to push X, and only X, will end up supporting the entire agenda of the far-right. The Tea Party starts pushing social issues, churches end up pushing economic policies and being pro-war(!), everyone flirts with birtherism, etc, etc.

...something really fucked up is going on over there, and it seems very hard to find honestly 'single-policy' organization over there for people to join. I guess the NRA is still that, but that seems about it. (I know there are plenty of libertarian think tanks, and the party itself, but those aren't the sort of 'organizations to join' I'm talking about. You can't join AEI, and the party itself is ignored by the right.)

Over here on the left, if I join an environmental organization or a school reform organization or something, I know they're not going to start talking about gay adoption or 9/11 conspiracy nonsense or seizing the means of production or whatever. Organizations have missions, and stay on task, and there are large and angry debates when they try to act outside their scope, so the leader of the organizations are very careful about even personally expressing opinions outside that scope, just in case those positions are taken to represent the organization. And I'm talking about reasonable, left-ish positions, not crazy fringe ones.

Oh, and the ultimate example of this:

I volunteer at a theatre that is near that bar. (Which is why I started going there.)

One night, at 11 or so Friday night, we finish up a performance and go outside...cops everywhere. At least three cop cars with flashing lights, one parked halfway in the street, cops standing around looking suspiciously at everyone.

We speculated about what has happened, and most of us went home, but the theatre people who went to that bar had the real story the next day.

Apparently, someone had been spotted holding a beer while walking down the street. Which is, apparently, illegal.

This requires the entire police department to run around looking for them. Despite the fact that they were causing god-knows how much disorder to enforce a law that is clearly intended to be used like anti-loitering laws...something to use against drunk disturbing the peace in the park, or hassle drinkers who are obviously underaged. (A law, in other words, intended to help maintain order, but the police have stopped trying to do that.)

And the police had no idea what the person really looked like, so unless he was stupid enough to hang out in the same area, and continue to hold his beer (Which, I must point out, might have actually been something else like a root beer.), there was no way they were going to catch him.

But I'm sure there were all sorts of police reports filed about 'searching for the suspect'. And absolutely none filed about how the police themselves disturbed the piece for no fucking reason.

If the police are going to behave like this, then we need to get rid of all these 'help maintain order' laws, the laws that are supposed to be a tool for the police to use against actual problems, not anyone they want. We're really lucky the police haven't started trying to 'enforce' the loitering laws by constantly running up and demanding people on the sidewalk explain their purpose there. But it's only a matter of time.