Moment, Linger On

Affordable? Maybe for me.

The New York Times had an article today on WalMart's shameless method of offloading the healthcare of its workers onto Medicaid. Especially ludicrous was their contention that their healthcare plan was affordable for their workforce:

But critics say the reality for too many Wal-Mart workers and their families is no insurance - either because they are unable to meet the company's eligibility requirements or because they cannot afford monthly premiums as high as $264 a month for family coverage on an $8-an-hour cashier's wage. Wal-Mart says its employees make $10 an hour on average.

Let's see. My FEHB family plan (you know, the one that Kerry wants you to be allowed to buy into) costs me $105 biweekly, which works out to $193.85 per month. And I make, well, um, ok I'm not going to post it on my blog but let's just go with it being quite a bit more than any WalMart employee outside of the executive class. I, perhaps, could afford the WalMart family plan, but I can't see too many cashiers being able to buy into it.

Bill O'Reilly, sex machine

You really don't want to read about the sordid details of the sexual harrassment lawsuit filed against Bill O'Reilly by his producer, Andrea Mackris, who happens to be over twenty years his junior. No, you don't want to read about it all. You especially don't want to read this, this, or especially this.

Fortunately, we here at Moment, Linger On take care of this stuff for you, saving you the trouble and the emotional trauma. You're welcome.

Moles

We have them, as I discovered on Monday during a long overdue mowing of the lawn. (By the way, did you know that Monday was officially a holiday? I didn't until I came to DC...) I actually don't mow the lawn that often. I hate mowing more than almost anything else in the world and part of the deal about getting a house with a yard was that R. would handle all mowing duties. And by and large she has lived up to her side of the deal. But on Monday she wanted to take J. to playgroup in the morning and I wanted to take J. to the pool with her in the afternoon and she wanted to have the lawn mowed somewhere in there so I offered to do it while she was gone.

Which is how I came to discover the mole infestations in our backyard. (Do moles infest?) The extremely long grass was covering mole runs criss-crossing the entire yard, many right at the surface. I'm not sure whether everyone around here has them or whether they just like our laid back approach to yardwork.

And what is the appropriate response to a mole infestation? My original sentiment was "Cool..."

Gone

Another long hiatus, due to a combination of life and a return to Southern California to visit the ancestral manor.

I hadn't been back to San Diego for five years and I had forgotten how superior it is on the quality of life front. Even the sprawl and traffic issues that I remember being so bad didn't seem so, especially in comparison to the DC area. I don't know if this is a reflection on DC or whether Southern California has gotten things under control, but it was a pleasant surprise anyhow.

Was it just me?

I thought Kerry tore Bush a new one. But of course I want to think that.

Gore beat Bush in the 2000 debates too, but by the time the spin machine was done Bush came out on top. Will it happen this time around?

We're all losers here

Via Laura Rozen, we find that Douglas Feith appears to be having trouble finding enough time to spend with his family:

"Although he said he was inured to criticism, Feith remains noncommittal about staying in the job if Bush is reelected. With a workday that begins at 4 a.m. and runs for 14 or more hours, he said he had about 90 minutes "to do my life and see my wife and four kids."

"It's not much of an existence," he said, "outside of the work."

Poor guy. His family really deseves better. And from our point of view, we would all probably be a lot better off if he was only f***ing things up for 8 hours a day as opposed to be 14. Or better yet, let's put someone in office who will allow him to spend all his time at home with his deserving family. I sense a win-win solution here.

Counting the hours

Jenny Rosenstrach, who in her more time-consuming life is an editor at Real Simple magazine, has a New York Times Op-ed piece today in which she rationalizes away the fact that she spends only three hours a day with her kids.

Now I realize that coming from a male perspective it isn't entirely fair for me to comment on these things. Our society is set up so that it is almost automatically the mother who has to make the tough choices about whether and how much to work versus staying home with the kids. And in my case it was easy in that R. wanted to take a substantial amout of time off to take care of J. (Or at least she says she does and you really have to take these things at face value in the end.) And I'm not going to criticize women who have decided that they don't want to stay home but instead return to work as soon as possible.

But still, there is something pathetic about Jenny's agonizing. As she admits herself, she has other options:

Other more well-adjusted working moms might remind me that I have a choice in the matter and if it's so torturous: "Why don't you find a job that's more flexible? Why don't you work part-time? Why don't you quit?" All valid questions. And all questions you're welcome to discuss with me at 3 a.m. when I'm staring at the ceiling trying to figure out the answers myself.

Well? If she isn't happy with the priorities she has set in her life then shouldn't she do something about it besides pouring her heart out to the Times? I doubt that she makes so much as a magazine editor that there is a huge financial advantage for her to work full time, especially after one factors in the cost of child care and commuting and clothing and all that. So if her decision isn't born of necessity and it isn't personally satisfying, shouldn't she try something else?

I realize that there are other factors here that I'm not taking into account. Laura wrote just yesterday about the financial troubles that divorced women can have due to the fact that they often put their careers on hold for several years. Preserving financial independence is certainly a valid concern for women and a good reason not to take time off. But still... I guess I am just reacting to the tone of the piece as much as the substance. In the end I have no final solution either.

The irony here is that the magazine she works for is one whose focus is on how to simplify your life. I'm not sure she is all that well-qualified...

Well that's good to know

Russia is planning to employ the Bush doctrine and preemptively retaliate against terrorists outside Russian borders. But you can breathe a sigh of relief. According to General Yuri Baluevsky, chief of Russia's general staff, we have nothing to worry about:

"However, this does not mean that we will launch nuclear strikes."

Thanks, Yuri. Glad to hear it.

Hypocrites, every one

Mere words cannot describe the shock and revulsion that the images of the school hostage crisis in Russa generate. I can't imagine the horror that the parents of still missing children must face knowing that their children must be lying in a morgue burned beyond recognition.

I was especially sickened, then, to read that the Bush administration has apparently been meeting with and offering asylum to members of the organizations that committed this act.

(Follow the link. Now scroll down to the last eight paragraphs.)

Bill

My best wishes go out to President Clinton and his family for a speedy and complete recovery from his recent heart surgery.

Teeth

The Washington DC area is the current front-runner to be the new home for the Montreal Expos. There are two competing proposals for where the team should play: one group wants to build a stadium in DC proper and the other wants one in Northern Virgina, out in Loudoun county beyond Dulles.

On Friday the head of the DC city council finance committee, Jack Evans, showed his teeth by threatening to pass legislation barring a Northern Virginia team from playing in RFK stadium while the Loudoun stadium was built. This is no mean threat, since a new stadium in either location couldn't be built until 2007 or (probably) 2008 at the earliest so the Expos will be playing in RFK for two or three years regardless.

I say good on him. If I am going to have to drive 40 or so miles to see a baseball game I may as well go to Camden Yards. I'd much rather be able to walk to the metro and take public transportation to the game.

Why try to justify?

To a person, journalists (and psuedo-journalists like bloggers), including people I respect like Josh Marshall and Amy Sullivan, have consistently defended Robert Novak's right not to divulge his sources in the Valerie Plame outing.

This event, in case you have had your head under a rock for the past year, was where someone in the Bush administration, in retaliation for her husband embarrassing them by exposing them as liars during the rush to war with Iraq, leaked her identity as a covert CIA operative to Robert Novak. Divulging classified information is a felony and Novak, in concealing their identity, is aiding and abetting this felony.

There is a good reason why journalists should be allowed to protect their sources, in that it allows people to expose government or corporate wrongdoing and not suffer from retaliation. But this is entirely the opposite. Here the concealing of the sources allows government wrongdoing to occur, not be exposed. To be allowed to conceal such sources is an abuse of the intent of the first amendment.

If such things are allowed to occur there might come a time when we decided that a free press wasn't worth protecting at all. I doubt that Marshall and Sullivan and the rest would like to see that come to pass.

This is why I'm a Democrat

Click through to hear Ben Barnes apologize for helping George Bush and other undeserving wealthy constituents evade their obligation to serve in Vietnam.

I'm a Democrat because we are the party of common decency.

Not missing it at all

This fall will be the third straight year that the academic year has started without me. I thought I would miss academia terribly when I left, but the fact is that I don't miss it at all. In fact, I feel like someone who escaped from East Germany in the 1980s, looking back at that big wall I climbed over and wondering how I ever was satisfied on the other side and thinking about my family and friends who are still trapped there and don't know that there is a better life on the other side.

None of the things that I once worried about (missing the teaching, not having enough intellectual stimulation, not being able to find compatible people to interact with) came about. If I had known it was going to be this easy I would have left long before I did but one should never underestimate the power of fear and intertia.

What movie was that?

On Sunday evening a three year old boy choked to death on popcorn while watching a movie. I can't express in words that I am capable of writing what a sad thing this is. A parent outliving their child has to be the worst thing that one can experience.

And yet I was not sufficently cowed by the horror of it all not to wonder what movie his family was watching at the time. Rereading the story, it was "Alien vs. Predator."

Alien vs. Predator? Were those parents completely insane? What kind of person takes their three year old kid to a showing (evening showing, no less) of AvP? I saw the original "Alien" when I was 10 and still think it was an inappropriately terrifying film for me to be allowed to watch at that advanced age. But three years old? The mind reels.