Fiat Lux

So Scott and I had a quiet New Year's at home. We cooked up a yummy dinner (grilled wild salmon and pasta with asparagus and a lemon cream sauce), watched "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and various add-ons from the DVD, and then flipped the TV on at midnight to watch a rebroadcast of the ball dropping in NYC.

At which point I got incredibly homesick, and started crying when Sinatra's "New York, New York" came on. This morning I'm still sad. There's something in the air that makes me wish I were tramping the streets of the West Village, heading off for brunch in a noisy diner, and then just out for a walk, maybe clutching a carton of coffee to keep my hands warm.

We only got home to NY once in 2005, and I think that has something to do with why I'm feeling so homesick today. I need a city fix.

It comes down to reality
And it’s fine with me, ’cause I’ve let it slide,
Don’t care if it’s Chinatown or up on Riverside,
I don’t have any reasons,
I’ve left them all behind
I’m in a New York state of mind.

I know all too well the tradeoffs involved in living in New York. Tiny apartments, everything is expensive, noise, dirt, and stress. Right now I could care less. I want to go home.

I was planning on catching a cheap flight sometime this month before classes start, but with the internship starting Wednesday that's not in the books anymore. Well, Passover's not that far off....

Ezra:

Bush's actions were illegal. And that's all there is to that. You can argue that they were justified, or righteous, or that the legislative structure is outmoded and wrong, but none of that changes the fact that they were in flagrant violation of the law of the land, a law the White House could have attempted to amend or asked the Supreme Court to invalidate. Which means that not only were Bush's actions illegal, but he offered no attempt to make them legal. It wasn't simply that he thought the law outdated, it's that he believed it didn't, and shouldn't, apply to him.

Digby also indulges in some lovely irony, quoting some nice Rep. Henry Hyde rhetoric from the Clinton impeachment:

That none of us is above the law is a bedrock principle of democracy. To erode that bedrock is to risk even further injustice. To erode that bedrock is to subscribe, to a "divine right of kings" theory of governance, in which those who govern are absolved from adhering to the basic moral standards to which the governed are accountable.

I suppose this is another case of IOKIYAR, though.

Not only are they massively fuel-inefficient, they are NOT safer for the kiddies:

Children are no safer riding in sport utility vehicles than in passenger cars, largely because the doubled risk of rollovers in SUVs cancels out the safety advantages of their greater size and weight, according to a study.

Researchers said the findings dispel the bigger-equals-safer myth that has helped fuel the growing popularity of SUVs among families. SUV registrations climbed 250 percent in the United States between 1995 and 2002.

"We're not saying they're worse or that they're terrible vehicles. We're challenging the conventional wisdom that everyone assumed they were better," said Dr. Dennis Durbin, a pediatric emergency physician who took part in the study, published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics.

Good. Maybe people will finally stop clogging the roads with them and I will once again be able to actually see more than one car in front of me when stuck in traffic.

Today was the first day at my new internship, which is why nothing's been posted here. I'm home and fed, and Bloglines tells me I have 132 unread posts waiting for me in my RSS feeder. I wonder if I'll get through them all before I get too sleepy to finish?

I won't be talking about the internship here much, if at all, but I will say in passing that anyone who says that switching from Windows to Mac is easy is kidding themselves. I have been given a G3 as my workstation and the lack of either a right-click or a scroll wheel on that horribly non-ergonomic joke of a Mac mouse is no fun at all.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a dominant figure for decades in shaping the Middle East, was fighting for his life on Thursday after suffering a massive brain hemorrhage.

As I write this, whether Sharon even survives or not is still up in the air. If he does survive, the odds that he will again be active in politics are slim indeed.

A friend of mine pointed out this afternoon that whether Sharon's illness is bad news or not depends on whether you think that continuity of government in Israel is a good thing. I'm not so sure about that.

Regardless of what you think of Sharon or his government, political instability is not what Israel needs. A sudden transition of power with elections upcoming and with both Likud and Labor in transition thanks to Sharon's recent forming of Kadima, make for a very, very confusing time Israel this spring.

This pic of Bear and Tommy is too good to wait until tomorrow. Plus I was out and about all day so I haven't gotten anything else up.

Bear is closing in on six months old now. Oddly, the grey ruff around his neck seems to have faded. He's pretty much a solid dark brown now except for his tail, which is still somewhat grey, and a few small patches of grey on his underbelly. Go figure.

On a related note, go say hi to NTodd's new critter, a mixed-breed bundly of fur named Mexico.

- My office is exactly 33.5 miles from my home.

- Twinning's "Vanilla Chai" tea tastes totally, completely gross.

- Cactus, on the other hand, isn't bad. It reminds me of a green bean, only a little chewier and a bit more flavorful.

Must be something in the water over in Indiana, this is the second time in the last 12 months that some wingnut legislator is trying to roll back the clock 100 years or so.

Abortion would be illegal for most women in Indiana, including victims of rape and incest, under a bill filed this week in the Indiana House. Indiana's legislators have chipped away at abortion for decades, imposing waiting periods and other restrictions, but the measure proposed by Rep. Troy A. Woodruff, R-Vincennes, is the first direct attempt in years to outlaw most abortions.

The only exception allowed under House Bill 1096 would be for women whose health or life would be permanently impaired if a pregnancy continued. The bill would define life as beginning at conception and make it a felony to perform all other abortions. Anyone convicted would face up to eight years in prison.

Lately it feels like I've been innundated by spam. Every single e-mail account I have has seen an increase in spam, the blog's been getting an upswing in trackback and comment spam ... I can't seem to get away from it. I don't know it it's just a seasonal thing or if the change is permanant. I'm hoping for the former, because if not then I'm going to have to take some steps to get things back to a manageable level again.

One particularly annoying event that happened in the last 48 hours is that some jerk sent me a virus. Although between Thunderbird and Norton, the virus didn't infect my computer, the act of cleaning the virus out of my in-box blew away all the rest of the e-mail in my in-box, including a number of communications from friends that I needed to reply to.

In short, spammers suck.

Amazing. Anybody, any phone number, any time.

Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls

John of AMERICABlog tests one service out, and finds that their web advertisement is correct:

The company boasts on its own Web site:

Give us the cell phone number and we will send you the calls made from the cell phone number.

So I went to their site, plopped down $110, and within a day I had a list of every single phone number that called my cell, or that I called from my cell, for the month of November. I even had the dates the calls were made, and for a premium I could find out how long the calls were.

I called Cingular and they were shocked by what I told them - yeah right.

No I am not linking to the site in question. I'm not giving them the free publicity. But I'm pissed off. Why this isn't illegal I don't know. If it is, someone ought to be going to jail pronto. And if it's not, it ought to be.

Ran a lot of errands; not feeling very bloggy.

However, Atrios had a nice piece on the concept that "Leaving = Losing" that's worth a read.

Also, back on Friday, Reddhedd had a long but truly excellent piece titled "A Question of Doing What's Right" that if you missed it, you should go back and check it out.

I can understand abuse, harass, threaten, and so forth, but annoy? If it's really illegal to annoy people on the Internet now, the avalanche of lawsuits is going to be frightening. I can't wait for the test cases on this one:

A new federal law states that when you annoy someone on the Internet, you must disclose your identity. Here's the relevant language.

"Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

At least it's criminal law, not civil. Individuals can't go around suing everyone who leaves a snarky comment on their weblog, they'll have to convince a DA to file charges. However, as News.com points out, "trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring". Especially these days.

I just can't bring myself to care about the Alito hearings. Mostly because I'm quite sure he will be confirmed unless a massive smoking gun emerges, so why bother getting upset?

So today was Day #4 at the internship. I've spent most of my time so far working solo, putting together a strategy document for marketing one aspect of the newest version of the product. I submitted the completed memo to my supervisor, and had a few hours of down time while I waited for him to read & respond to it.

Since I'm still new at the job, I didn't really know what the protocol was -- should I ask for more work, start working on a project I'd mentioned in the first paper, or wait for feedback on my first work product? My supervisor was in and out of meetings and I didn't want to bother him. Unsure, I fell back on self-reliance. I did some research, read over some internal documents, and started jotting notes and ideas for other possible projects.

This worked for a couple of hours. But after lunch, I started to feel worried. The other intern, who started the day after I did, was working busily away on two different projects, talking to people, asking questions. I was sitting there, working by myself, and feeling a bit isolated. Dark thoughts descended. I started wondering whether maybe, despite what I'd been told when I was hired, they didn't really plan on keeping both of us? Perhaps this first week was some sort of weeding out process to see which of us was the better hire and the other one would be quietly let go? Was my lack of new tasks some sort of signal? Had I blown it already? For two more hours, I alternated between paranoia and telling myself I was being an idiot.

These last 4 years have been pretty rough in a lot of ways, but I didn't realize how deep the scars had gone until today. Once upon a time, I trusted what managers told me and would have welcomed a few hours of slack time. Now, I'm both more cynical and more insecure.

Finally, just as I was starting to think that maybe I ought to wash out my coffee mug (the one personal item I've brought to the office) and make sure it was clean, dry, and ready to go in case today really was my last day, an email from my supervisor popped into my mailbox, telling me what a great job I had done and would I present my ideas to the rest of the marketing staff in 30 minutes.

I had to read the e-mail twice before the relief set in.

Hopefully I won't let my insecurities get the better of me next time.

While checking my RSS feeds this morning, I noticed that Bloglines had switched languages on me. Very odd. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

UPDATE 1:15PM: It's back to normal.

The NY Rangers' Cup-winning season of 1994 is a long time away, but the memories are still sweet.

Mark Messier, who led the New York Rangers in 1994 to their first Stanley Cup in 54 years, had his No. 11 jersey retired on Thursday in an emotional celebration at Madison Square Garden.

Surrounded by many of his teammates from that Stanley Cup winning team, members of his family and the Cup itself, Messier watched as his No. 11 banner was slowly lifted to the rafters to the strains of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

His was the fourth jersey ever retired by the Rangers, joining Rod Gilbert (No. 7), Eddie Giacomin (No. 1) and Mike Richter (No. 35), the goalie on the '94 championship team.

I'm lucky enough to have seen all 4 of those excellent players at The Garden. I wonder who will be the next Ranger to join their company.

Sorry I've been silent these past couple of days. No new photos for cat blogging, and I don't have much to say on what's going on in Washington.

I'm also realizing, now that Scott and I are, for the first time in several years, both on a weekday work schedule, how much that impacts your ability to get things done. Instead of my being able to run errands on weekday off hours, leaving the weekends for more enjoyable things, we have to cram the to-do list into those hours when everyone else is trying to get through their to-do list as well. It's a bit of an adjustment.

Yesterday, for example, we went up to San Francisco for an event at the SPCA. After that, we decided to run a couple of errands. For example, I have a low-value Best Buy gift card I wanted to use, and there's one a block away from the SPCA. So we go, and have some fun wandering around and looking at various stuff. We made fun of the insanely expensive TVs, looked at some speaker systems for the iPod, and checked out the software and DVDs. Eventually I made a selection and we headed for the cash register. At which point we discovered 15 to 20 people were on line ahead of us.

"Forget it," I said. "I'm not waiting on that line just for this." And we left.

This isn't meant to be some sage observation about business, because I'm not sure what the point here is. Is is that Best Buy is not doing so well and thus is trying to skimp on cashiers or that Best Buy is doing really well even in the post-Xmas slow times? I don't have the data to come to a conclusion either way.

At any rate, the computer game I've been thinking about buying remained unbought, and we moved on to Costco.

Because I'd be willing to bet his crackpot theories would be a perfect fit at this little bash:

Iran said Sunday it would sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, an apparent next step in hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's campaign against Israel and a move likely to deepen Tehran's international isolation.

Ahmadinejad already had called the Nazis' World War II slaughter of 6 million European Jews a myth and said the Jewish state should be wiped off the map or moved to Germany or the United States.

UPDATE: Whoops, I didn't realize Irving was currently in prison in Austria.

Shakespeare's Sister today reposts one of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr's best speeches in honor of the holiday. There's not a man or a woman alive today who's as good a speaker as he was. We have some gifted speakers, no doubt, but none with quite the combination of fire and poetry as he.

It's a fun game to conjure up a ghost from our past and ask, "What would So-And-So think about today's world?" I'm not foolish enough to put words into MLK's mouth, but I'm pretty sure he would not be happy with the world today.

But the important thing is that Dr King was not a pessimist. Look at that speech again. Those are the words of someone who deeply believes that tomorrow will be better than today. If in 1963, Dr King could look at an America deeply racist and divided, and see a better future, then we here in 2005, with so many gains made since that day, should be able to see a brighter future too.

Just saying....

I have an old text file knocking around on my drive with a collection of quotes that I found interesting. Here's an apt one, although unfortunately I did not save the name ofthe person who wrote it:

It is a great mystery of late-stage capitalism that, in a marketplace of hypothetically unlimited choices, consumers should all want the same things.

Despite my having hung onto this quote, I actually think that the opposite is true. Everyone wants different things. Retail stores, however, try to persuade us
that we all want the same things. Especially the larger ones. Stores, that is.

Case in point: there's a few things I've needed to buy for the apartment. Nothing particularly wild or unusual: More clothes hangers. A new sugar bowl to replace the one I broke. A couple of baking pans to replace ones that have rusted out. In short, standard household items. Here in the SF Bay Area, with stores of all sorts in every direction, getting this stuff should be a matter of a couple hours, tops.

But it's not. Take the sugar bowl I broke a few months ago – an inexpensive bowl from a very mainstream Mikasa china pattern. I've been looking for a new one for months now. I've come to the conclusion that I can't get a replacement for it unless I either spend a lot of money or special-order one off the Internet. I've tried looking in a number of stores for an alternative, and it's amazing how few sugar bowls stores are selling. Teapots, coffee mugs, even full tea sets are all over the place, in both big chain stores and small Mom & Pop shops, but nobody sells sugar bowls. Hell, I'd settle for a 2-piece 'cream and sugar' set, but even those are hard to find. What are stores selling instead? 4 and 5 piece 'completer' sets that cost a bunch more money. Well, screw that. I don't want to buy 3 or 4 pieces of china that I neither want nor need in order to get the one piece I do need.

Target, of all places, actually had three different sugar bowls available for sale yesterday. Unfortunately Target's offerings were: 1 really ugly option, 1 flimsy-looking option, and 1 option that was neither flimsy nor ugly, but it totally and completely did not match anything else in my kitchen. So I didn't buy it.

Now, maybe I'm just being picky here. Sugar bowls are not exactly a daily essential, maybe I shouldn't expect to find lots of options. I should probably just give up on my sugar bowl quest and either store my sugar in a plastic container or special-order the Mikasa piece and be done with it.

But why is it so hard to buy clothes hangers? A significant % of my hangers are the cheapo wire ones that you get from the dry cleaners, and that's fine, but since we don't dry-clean much stuff these days, we need to actually buy hangers. All I want is some simple plastic hangers for the new shirts we got for Scott's new job. What do I see in the stores? Expensive high-end padded and/or wooden hangers, funky suit/skirt hangers, "5 in 1" hangers for space saving – these are all over the place. But standard plastic hangers, you're lucky if a store
carries one kind.

Again, I'm sure if I hunted around on the Internet I could find some specialty web shop that would be happy to sell me exactly what I wanted, in any color. Call me a Luddite if you like, but I don't want to buy clothes hangers on the Internet. I want to drive to a store, buy them, take them home, and put them in my closet.

And don't get me started on how few choices I had when trying to replace our rusted-out 8x8 and 9x9 baking pans.

Now, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just really, really picky and don't know it. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, or am just being cheap. But what I feel is not picky, nor cheap, but manipulated. I feel like I'm being driven willy-nilly to buy products that have features I don't want or cost a lot more than I want to pay, because those products create a higher profit for the retailer.

So much for late-stage capitalism.

Apropos of my last post bemoaning how hard it is to find stuff when I shop, I actually did find some chairs and a table for the terrace when I was out on Tuesday.
It's a bit too cold to sit outside right now, but once Spring comes this ought to be a nice place to drink a cup of coffee in the mornings. If I can get the wifi to work out there, even better.

The Goddess Echinde has been on a roll lately despite having had Internet access issues. I found this segment particularly funny:

The third paradox I want to write about is the all-powerfulness and insignificance of feminism. Feminists, those evil, hairy and manless shrews. They are all-powerful. They have destroyed everything that we hold dear: the family, the military, the labor markets, the Western civilization. Their power is felt everywhere, though hidden from sight. Even when conservatives run this country they are really just abject slaves of feminists. Pick any crime you can think of, and feminists are the guilty party. They are even to blame for blow jobs! Scary, scary feminists! Tremble, you poor wingnuts.

But at the same time feminists are nothing! Nobody takes them seriously! They are a sorry lot, manless and ugly and nobody invited them to the prom. And they haven't gotten laid for centuries.

Besides all that, feminism is deader than the doornail. NO! It's all over the place, swarming upon us, drowning out the the strong voices of masculinity, weakening and corrupting the culture! Making Men into Mice! NO! Feminists are the laughing-stock everywhere. Nobody takes them seriously. Nature is not a feminist and nature can't be denied! God is not a feminist and God can't be denied! The feminist experiment is therefore doomed to failure but never stop fighting it, because if you do they might win!

Bear is getting bigger and bigger, but still loves to cuddle! Here he's snuggled up with Gimi.

This Saturday, last January, was new student orientation at school. Looking back, I notice I was pretty heavily poli-blogging in January of 05; I didn't even mention school until after the first week of classes. Considering how nervous I was about going back to school, I'm surprised I didn't say more about it.

I'm looking forward to the start of classes & seeing my friends again. I'm a bit nervous about how well the internship & school will mix; in particular, the 4 hour night class in San Francisco after a full day's work in San Jose is going to be a major drag. I do have the option to drop that course and take it over the summer instead, but I'm not going to make any decisions until after week 1 is over & I have a better sense for how demanding my other courses will be.

One of the (few) benefits of working in an office that runs the Mac OS is that I've started paying attention to the Apple world beyond that of my iPod. So this morning, I ran across the site Apple Matters via a link from CNet. I read an interesting article about why Microsoft won't be able to successfully take down the iPod (an argument I tend to agree with). It's worth reading, both for the article itself and the thoughtful commentary.

For what it's worth, it seems to me that Apple has decided they are not going to be able to unseat Microsoft in the office, so have decided to focus on 'lifestyle' computing instead. The iPod, building real photo and video manipulation tools into the OS, and a host of other details, all say to me that personal users are the target. And all things considered, that's a smart move.

Whether it's working remains to be seen. My mother told me about two weeks ago that she was thinking about buying an Apple laptop to replace her recently-deceased Windows laptop. When I asked her why, she mentioned the digital camera that she'd recently acquired and said, "Apple is suppsed to be better at that sort of thing."

She ended up buying a Sony Vaio, though.

So I caught a few minutes of the Ford press conference this moring as I was getting ready for work. Job cuts, plant closings, big changes, new ways of designing and building cars, fewer SUVs, yadda yadda. What caught my ear, though was Bill Ford on the TV saying (more or less) "Why didn't we make these changes sooner? We didn't have to."

One of the more memorable things my Systems prof told us last semester was, "Don't boil the ocean." If Ford really thinks they're capable of making sweeping companywide changes in a smooth, adroit manner, they're kidding themselves. A company that sat on its butt doing little more than raking in the profits on oversized low MPG SUVs when their competition was taking them to the cleaners is not going to be able to pull that kind of a move off. Toyota or Honda might, but the whole reason Ford is in this mess is because they are not Toyota or Honda.

One of the CNBC commentators noted that the scope of the plant cuts announced implied that Ford was cutting production capacity by about 1 million automobiles. I wonder what that's going to do to the dealership network. Job losses due to dealership closings will not be counted in the press releases, but surely Ford will not need the same number of dealers if they're producing so many fewer cars.

Insomniacs unite!

However, being awake at 5:00AM at least gives me the time to blog this bit of New York weirdness:

more than 160 riders participated in the fifth annual No Pants Subway Ride before police halted their No. 6 train about 5 p.m.

I don't think riding the subway in your boxer shorts qualifies as illegal activity, although going commando and then offing your pants probably would. Apparently this lot were all underpants-clad, so hey, go for it. Whatever floats your boat.

Nice catch by Political Wire ... but in what alternate reality do they really think the votes for impeachment exist?

"The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress," Insight magazine reports.

Could be a trial balloon, I suppose...

Ok, today is officially the "Day of One-Word Post Titles".

Heading up to school for the first day of classes soon. You'd think, this being my third semester and all, that I would not be so nervous at the start of the semester anymore. You'd be wrong.

For the next few months, Wednesday are my Hell Days; I leave the house about 8 AM and don't get home until after 10PM. Since it's Bad Form to blog from work or in-class, expect little to no blogging on Wednesdays.

I'd be lying if I said I were not deeply concerned by the results of the Palestinian elections. Hamas' charter, after all, does not even recognize Israel's right to exist.

However, I remind myself that Sharon was viewed as a similarly unlikely partner for peace when he became Prime Minister, and those dim expectations of him turned out to be not so dim after all. So perhaps there's still hope.

John Kerry to lead a filibuster against Alito? Interesting. Markos' assessment seems pretty reality-based.

This whole "be offline for 6 to 8 hours at a time" thing with school and/or work really messes up my ability to stay on top of the news. I need to slack more (just kidding!).

Friday night, I get home from a long week of work and classes, wanting nothing more than to catch up on the news and have some fun on my computer, but to my dismay, our 'net access was down and remained so until just a few minutes ago.

"Comcastic" my butt. Sorry about the lack of blogging.

I click into Bloglines to try to catch up on what I've missed in 24 hours of downtime and found a whopping 163 posts unread in the various blogs on my blogroll.

Who has time to read all that? I have errands to run!

With more than 4 years' distance between 9/11 and today, I suppose it's time to start asking where 9/11 fits into the larger tapestry that is American history. In the NY Times this weekend, Joseph Ellis takes the question on. He is likely to get roundly smacked in some quarters for this comment:

Where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.

And in fact, by his own definition, I'm not sure even World War II qualifies as "first tier", because although it was a dire time for many of our allies, I am not convinced that either Germany or Japan would have been able to seriously threaten the survival of the American republic. Perhaps if the war had gone very differently, and then both countries united in an invasion attempt ... but I digress.

At any rate, he's right about 9/11. Now, saying that does not negate the fact that 9/11 was a horrible day for me personally, for the people in my life and my home town, or for the country in general. However, worse things have happened to us, and they may yet again. Demogogues use this to their advantage, though; inflating 9/11's role in the grand scheme and trying to whip up people's fears that 'the terrorists' are lurking outside their local strip malls and Wal-Marts, ready to strike at a moment's notice with just a cell phone call from Osama.

The Heretik asks, "Where does it end?" 4+ years later, that's a more than fair question.

So, for the first time in the Bush administration, there's a bill in play - the "Deficit Reduction Act" - that actually cuts Federal spending. Typically, it does so by screwing the poor. The CBO has weighed in on this bill, currently awating House approval. It's not a pretty picture, according to the NY Times:

The budget office predicted that 13 million low-income people, about a fifth of Medicaid recipients, would face new or higher co-payments for medical services like doctor's visits and hospital care.

It said that by 2010 about 13 million low-income people would have to pay more for prescription drugs, and that this number would rise to 20 million by 2015.

"About one-third of those affected would be children, and almost half would be individuals with income below the poverty level," the report said in addressing co-payments for prescription drugs.

Under the bill, states could end Medicaid coverage for people who failed to pay premiums for 60 days or more. Doctors and hospitals could deny services to Medicaid beneficiaries who did not make the required co-payments.

The budget office said the new co-payments would save money by reducing the use of medical services.

"About 80 percent of the savings from higher cost-sharing would be due to decreased use of services," the report said.

That last line is the money quote. This plan is pathetic.

Let's say a company is losing money. One easy way to get the bottom line under control is to fire a bunch of employees. However, if you don't look at why you're not making enough money and take steps to change that, the layoffs won't really solve anything. You'll just be a smaller money-losing company. The same holds true for Medicaid. If you don't fix the system, then forcing people off the rolls isn't really going to solve anything.

Oh, and no, HSAs are not a good solution.

I don't usually do all-out commercial plugs here, but I make an exception for Cafe Cosa. It's a family-run coffee company in Costa Rica that both grows and roasts the coffee in-country, then ship the finished product to the US in vacuum-sealed bags (which is not generally the case for Central American coffee growers). It's nicely roasted, smooth, rich but not over-bold, and makes excellent coffee.

Coffee purists will object to the shipping time delay (about 2 weeks), and point out that the optimal coffee is achieved by roasting in small batches to maintain freshness, and the longer the beans sit, the worse they get. That's true, but I'm not that much of a coffee geek. Roasted within the last month is fine by me.

Plus, even with the shipping, the price is very reasonable. So if you like coffee, give it a try!

Obligatory disclaimer: No, I do not get anything for pitching this product on my blog. The American agents of the company are friends, but I'm doing this because I want to. I like their coffee. And also because I don't feel like blogging about the dismal political situation this morning.

UPDATE: It must be something in the air today. Digby is blogging about coffee too, and pointed me to a new blog on the subject: Smelling the Coffee.

I was in class and missed the whole thing. I have no interest in raising my blood pressure by watching the news snippets and/or reading a transcript of the President's State Of The Union speech. I'm just going to pretend it didn't happen and get ready for Wednesday Hell Day.