From my new dreamboat of a man Keith Olbermann:

But our winners, whoever in the Ottawa County Clerk’s Office proofreads the ballots in Ottawa County, Michigan, a typo will cost the county $40,000 to print new ballots because the old one misspelled the word, public. Left out the “L.” You can enunciate for yourself how the mistaken version of that word sounds.

Obviously the County Clerk’s spelling was just a hair off.

The Economist posted and article about immigration issues that Europeans face. You think we have problems, understand that Europe has much less space and provides a greater attraction to immigrants (better social support systems). This issue revisits a point I made during our immigration tiff: that immigration is a two way street that involves both the countries that shed populations and ones that take them in. I am not encouraged by the agency being proposed simply because it is being headed by Peter Sutherland, chairman of BP and Goldman Sachs, but at least the topic is on the table.

Almost all of us our products of immigrant. Let’s see it as the global, rather than local, concern that it is.

Everyone on every side of the political spectrum knows the system is broken. Special inetersts trump voters in garnering attention of lawmakers. Now, even winning the popular vote does not assure victory. But even if we get “our” people in the lawmakers are more likely to listen those who lobby the best (i.e., can offer the most money and perks). The constant lament, with reasonable justification, is that our two parties have become one: the Republicrats. So how do we change this increasingly dangerous situation? Massive turner vote.

I know this seems counterintuitive since in the last thrity years we only seem to get to choose the ‘lesser of two evils’. But think of our situation this way. Politicians are doing everything to control who gets to vote for them. Between ballot rigging, gerrymandering and manipulation politicians want only enough people to vote for them to get elected. This assures them election and eases their job by letting them appeal to a limited base. This should offer the clue to our strategy as voters.

Another thought that should motivate us. Most of us realize that two parties, even if run optimally, are not enough. That is why most other democracies chose proportional voting. Getting proportional voting to even be considered we need viable third, fourth and fifth parties. Do any of you think these parties will come around with the paltry numbers that currently constitute our turnout? The first answer to change is to double turnout and maintain it. Then as a more representative populace we can demand changes.

The current state of low turnout is purposeful. Politicians do not want everyone to vote. Let’s scare the hell out of ’em.

What for it.

What for it.

He ex-Foley-ates !

To all pertinent authorities and fellow forum members :

I claim that on this day September 28, 2006, that I, Tony Dickey, aka, DeeK­(tm) has invented the following acronym

I.R.aQ.(tm) which from herein to eternity will stand for
International Recruiting al Qaeda.

Please consider this the official “paperwork” that will now make me a target of both Islamo and Christo Fascists.

Thank you for your time and interest,
DeeK.

I think we can replace those “Impeach Bush” signs with “Waterboard Bush” signs. I’m not sure why anyone would object. It’s not torture.

Some who really know me, know that DeeK, comes from my last name, Dickey. See that star on the map, near the Alabama, Florida state lines? That’s Dickey, Georgia. I’m told Mason jars originated from the plantations there. What do I care?

My father’s side of the family started in America there, but why should I care? I know the male side of the line goes back to a Dickey family from England. Dickey, Dixon, Dickinson, they all names that go back to Richard III, a popular king. Yeah, you know, I don’t really care.

You see, the woman that my distant male relative raped will always be a nameless woman, who got some extra privileges, for bearing a mulatto child to some man who used a whole bunch of nameless slaves to pass the Dickey name down through history. Google “Dickey”, follow the links and you’ll be there for a couple days. But her? She will always be a nameless woman, scared to hell in a strange land, lucky to have survived a voyage across the Atlantic where pigs and cattle got better treatment than she did.

Do I celebrate being a Dickey? Hey, look that’s the plantation where my great, great, great, great, great grandmother got her ass whipped. Where she was raped and maybe got to be called a house nigger, for the pleasure of having a baby, who was shunned for not being white enough to be worth anything. Yep, that’s my family history or one side of it.

How many more Dickeys are out there on whose backs the European nations of the world were built? How many Dickeys are there in the Congo, where the Belgians worked Africans to the death in the latter half of the 1800s to extract rubber for bicycle tires? How many Dickeys are there in Zaire now who slave in diamond mines so some asshole, yeah, some who are black, can wear fucking “bling” on his teeth?

Please don’t tell me that the civil rights movement is over. Don’t tell me that your white guilt is my fault. Don’t tell me that were all equal now. If had lived in New Orleans in 2005, I would have been in the Superdome. Or on a bridge. Or on in the Convention Center. You see, I don’t have a car. Don’t want one. Most of the time, don’t need one. But it would have been my fault that I didn’t leave town. It would be my fault, that I would have to live in a formadelhyde FEMA trailer, unable to speak to the press. Unable to get a job, because I am not a white Dickey, who may work for Halliburton. It is my fault the levees broke and that the wetlands could no longer blunt the force of a hurricane.

Please don’t tell me that you are a minority because you are a white male who gets dumped on now and again. Don’t tell you can’t figure it out. It’s all in front of you.

Dickey, Georgia. It ain’t pretty.

I responded to a post about the housing bubble on the Seattle PI (as wsdeek) with the following:

I think the housing and the dot-com bubbles show that our economy is built like a house of cards.

Answer these questions honestly:

What tangible goods do we really produce?

Who among us besides the top few percent really own something we can hold on to?

If China were to stop accepting our debt, where would we be?

How many of our jobs can be done in another part of the world for far less money?

How far beyond about three paychecks would most of us be able to live?

What support systems do we have in place if we cannot find the next bubble?

Why am I asking these questions?

Because we really need to figure out what we have become and how strong our country actually is and what game plan we should choose if the answers are less than favorable.

I have one more question:

Why shouldn’t I be able to ask these questions without someone asking me why I don’t leave my country, if I don’t like the answers to the questions above?

Any questions?

For those of you who pay attention to such thinks (okay, say geek!), the body Pluto has been demoted from planethood. Big deal, right??!

Some of you may know, I am an astrologer. I have been writing a book that specifically ties Uranus, Neptune and Pluto to history so it should be a big deal.

Believe or not I am not concerned about the demotion. I am not sure what Pluto is and neither do scientists. We do know that its is a Kuiper Belt body that shares its orbit with a “moon” Charon. But my study does convince me that Pluto is important.

How it matters takes an explanation too long for this media, but the synopsis highlights how the times between Uranus-Pluto, Uranus-Neptune and Neptune describe periods that history changes in similar matters. The conjunction of Neptune and Pluot and related angles tie together the Axial Age, Hellenism, the Dark Ages, The Fall of the Roman Empire, the birth of Islam and the Age of Reason. Also in play are the French, American and Industrial Revolutions. Pluto is central to all of these findings so shouldn’t I be worried?

No, as long as the orbital calculations remain the same, the connections between outer planetary movements and history will stay cogent. I know most of you are scratching your heads, but don’t mock what you don’t know. Google, Uranus-Neptune or Neptune-Pluto or Palden, Uranus, Neptune and keep an open mind.

Pluto, no matter what. I still love you!

You and I may just be speaking to one another, but my response is a little too long for the comment box.

You may even know this one already. Network Commerce, DBA under many names such as Shopnow.com and other names was a total sham. The executive assistant was fucking the slimy boss and everyone knew it. The CEO was a middle-aged black man, but if you were a pretty white girl in your 20s, you could probably get a high-paying job. Of course, the company was buring through start-up cash and offering nothing.

I get hired as a customer service rep, dealing with telephone and email. After a time, the company chose a new credit-card processing company to handle transactions, mostly based on the payment the company actually paid, in cash, for Network Commerce to try the system. In the long run, the new comapny did a good job, but people where I worked with did not know how to set up the new software properly. The resullt was that small-business owners were getting charged twice or thrice for the auto-pay tied to their credit cards. People were getting charged again because the new system was validating their payment incorrectly though funds were sufficient. After a second or third charge, banks of these customers were accessing insufficient fund fees and the like, and other purchases on the cards failed because of the bogus charges from my company. It took about two weeks to figure out where the problem came from, but of course all arrows pointed back to us.

We, of course, received an avalanche of angry emails, more than our six-person team could answer. Every phone call, if they got through, was venomous vitirol. The executive decision after a time was to basically erase about two weeks of email. People were calling in asking whether we had received their emails and we could likely answer honestly, no.

Eventually, the program was figured out and solutions applied, but what an adventure!

Man, that was long… Did I tell about my stint for the Urkranian Daily Newspaper?