Sunday Rants

Did you remember to set your clocks back an hour before going to bed last night? Or more, if you're a Republican?

Thanks to Mike for that image.

So, it's a quiet Sunday morning here in Northern Virginia, and my brain isn't quite focusing on single things yet, so I thought I'd just share a few odds and ends with you. Mostly odds.

This has to be one of the best editorial cartoons I've seen in quite a while ...

I'm reminded of the comment made by an exasperated Air Force colonel who was chairing a difficult budget meeting years ago ... we'd had been squabbling for hours without agreement over how to meet our budget targets, and the colonel finally stood up and said, "Look - sooner or later we've gotta stop chasing this #@%$! chicken around the yard and just fix dinner!" As it happened, we kept on chasing the chicken, anyhow. Little did I know that little drama would play out on a national scale many years later.

From our "Blinding Flash of the Obvious" department comes this headline story in today's Washington Post: A Year from Election 2012, a Dark Mood awaits Obama and GOP Rival. Now, why should that be? The economy is in the toilet, millions of Americans are out of work, China is eating our economic and political lunch, Congress has its head up it's ... uh ... posterior, the President seems to have lost his mojo, and Kim Kardashian has gotten divorced. Oddly enough, the last item on that list seems to have gotten more detailed attention than the others. Perhaps if Harry Reid and John Boehner looked more like Kim Kardashian, we'd be able to forgive the fact that they're clueless, partisan dumbasses.

Did you move what's left of your money from a Big Bank to a credit union in response to the outrage over increasing bank fees and the National Bank Transfer Day? I'd already done it years ago, after what was then called "United Virginia Bank" (God alone knows what it's called today) refused to refund what I believed was an unjustified charge, and their customer service person essentially told me that my account was too small for them to care about. This, of course, highlights the fundamental issue: banks are not service organizations ... they're businesses. They exist to make money, and they make it by using your money to make the loans and investments which provide the earnings they need to pay interest on your savings, dividends to their stockholders, and huge salaries to their CEOs. If you have a balance in your measly checking account that's usually in the four-figure range (with two of those figures on either side of the decimal), you are - quite literally - too small to matter in the bank's search for billions of dollars to invest. You are noise. The bank may be too big to fail, but you're too small to matter.

And that's just the sad reality of economic life.

On the other hand, we had a great evening dancing with our friends at Forever Dancing in Falls Church last night ...

... which is always guaranteed to take the edge off whatever else may be wrong with the world.

And today is a beautiful day, we're going to spend part of it with our local grandchildren, and Once Upon a Time is on TV this evening.

In spite of everything, life's good.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo