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2011 – Google Zeitgeist
The Payroll Tax Drama Continues
From The Slatest on Slate.com:
The standoff over the payroll tax extension continues, but the battle is starting to look more and more like one between House Republicans and pretty much everyone else in Washington.
Democrats—in the House, the Senate, and the White House—are all pushing the Senate’s two-month extension, and so too are an increasing number of Senate Republicans, either publicly or behind closed doors, who worry that the House’s unwillingness to pass a bipartisan deal hammered out between Republicans and Democrats in the upper chamber will hurt the GOP in the next election.
[snip]
A senior GOP aide went further, telling Politico: “This is a colossal fumble by the House Republicans. Their inability to recognize a win is costing our party our long-held advantage on the key issue of tax relief. It’s time for [Speaker John] Boehner and [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor to look these rookies in the eye and explain how the game is won or lost.”
Read the full post at Slate.com.
Lights Out at Candlestick
The headline writers are having a field day. The two power outages at Candlestick Park during the 49ers appearance on Monday Night Football this week have given editors an excuse to pull out their thesauri and make use of all those synonyms for “lights out,” “outage,” and “blackout.” To hear some of the breathless articles coming out of ESPN and other sports outlets, this is the biggest disaster to hit sports since the NBA lockout (but hey, at least the power outages got resolved faster).
Not to be outdone in the overly dramatic department, S.F. Mayor Ed Lee said the city had suffered a “national embarrassment” due to the outages. PG&E, already an expert in deflecting blame, is pointing at the city and the ancient infrastructure at the 51-year-old park. The California Public Utility Commission, the S.F. Department of Parks and Recreation, which maintains the park, and PG&E have all vowed to find out exactly what happened and take steps to prevent future mishaps. All the more important considering that the 49ers will be playing at least one playoff game at Candlestick in the upcoming postseason.
At least one member of the Steelers, obviously stung after a 20 to 3 loss, is speculating that the outage was staged by the 49ers in order to build support for a new stadium in Santa Clara. (Of course, I would probably be looking for excuses too if I had lost that badly and was afraid of saying anything about my gimpy, man-child of a quarterback. Sorry, I digress.) James Harrison, given a one-game suspension for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Cleveland Browns quarterback Colt McCoy, got in on the fun by tweeting, “If I cant (sic) play then can’t nobody (sic) play… Lights out!”
Joking aside, perhaps these outages are being taken a little too seriously. Things happen. In an area known for earthquakes and other natural disasters, it almost seems like a power outage should be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders. As was pointed out by a letter to the editor on Dec. 21 in the San Francisco Chronicle, the power outages got front page coverage while a story about the expiration of unemployment benefits was relegated to page 8.
Update According to The Bay Citizen, PG&E has said that the power line that snapped at Candlestick on Monday night had recently been repaired. However, the utility can’t find any records specifying exactly why or when the repairs were done. Sound familiar?
The Hobbit
Yes, the trailer for The Hobbit is out. Yes, it is everything you had hoped it would be and more. Yes, it will cause a nerd-gasm.
But after the nerd-gasm wears off, and you have watched the trailer about 50 more times, you’ll begin to realize the genius of Peter Jackson. Note the attention to detail that draws The Hobbit, which is essentially a prequel, to The Lord of the Rings. (As an aside, will someone please get George Lucas on the phone? This is how you do prequels, George.)
Listen to the music used in the trailer, especially at the end when we get an inkling of the confrontation between Bilbo and Gollum. As has been mentioned elsewhere, notice that young Bilbo is wearing the same outfit as old Bilbo from Fellowship. Try not to gasp when you see Bilbo inspecting the Shards of Narsil. And above all, notice how going back to Middle Earth feels familiar yet fresh, with tantalizing new adventures to witness.
Is it December 14, 2012 yet?
A Catch-22
Eighty-nine yes votes. In this day and age of hyper-partisan politics, getting 89 members of the U.S. Senate to agree on anything is almost impossible. Yet on Saturday, in a rare showing of bipartisanship, the Senate passed an extension of the payroll tax cut. Three days later, however, the House of Representatives, being held hostage by Tea Party-backed members of the Republican Party, decided to leave Washington without taking action on the Senate bill, almost certainly guaranteeing that the payroll tax cut would expire on December 31.
Speaker of the House John Boehner, who was against a yearlong extension of the payroll tax before he was for it, has said the Senate should return to negotiate with the House. Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that the Senate has done its job, and now it’s time for the members of the House to do what they were elected to do: Vote.
The GOP leadership, led by enforcer-in-chief Eric Cantor, doesn’t want a vote to happen. If there was an actual vote, Republicans would be forced into a catch-22: Voting to extend a tax cut that they support in theory but that would hand the White House and Congressional Democrats a win going into an election year versus voting against a tax cut that primarily benefits the middle class.
The hypocrisy of the Republican Party knows no limits.
An Update
It’s six months since my last major blog overhaul, so it’s about time that I shake things up around here.
As you’ll notice, I’m now using the WordPress.com hosted blogging system. I had been using an installation of WordPress on my own domain, but I didn’t have the time (or the patience) to tweak it the way I wanted. I figure being on a hosted service, I can leave the tweaking to the WordPress gods and not have to worry too much about customizing, keeping everything updated, etc. Hopefully that will mean I can focus more on the actual content (yeah, right).
You may also have noticed that my Web site address has changed. Instead of fauzihamadeh.com, I’m now at fauzihamadeh.net. A small change, but be sure to update your bookmarks, etc.
If you have your own WordPress.com account, you can now also subscribe to my updates via email. That way, you don’t have to come here all the time just find out that I haven’t posted any updates.
Somewhat seriously, I am hoping that this move will help create more of a following and some more feedback. One of the most discouraging I’ve found about trying to maintain a blog is the lack of feedback and interaction. Hopefully being here will create more exposure, which will in turn create more opportunities for a dialogue.
I am going to try to do my part by posting on a more frequent basis. Even though I’ve said this before, I’m actually going to try to stick to it this time. With so much going on – the GOP nomination race, the occupy-wherever movement, and the 2012 election cycle – I figure there has to be something I can write about at least once a week.
If you haven’t heard from me in a while, feel free to poke me. You can also follow me on Facebook (where I post quite a few articles, etc.), on Twitter, and on Google+.
