Buddy, Can You Spare A Condom?

Funny how two years ago women all over this country were able to get birth control without government requiring employers to pay for it. Now, without that requirement, we are to believe that women somehow no longer have access to that which lets them have all the unrestrained sex they want. But, that’s precisely the message in the over the top frantic screaming that many on the left are indulging in now in reaction to the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Hobby Lobby.

Here’s what happened. Obamacare was passed into law and the HHS was charged with issuing regulations to manage it. Nowhere in the law does it say that medical insurance has to cover birth control. What it does say is that the insurance must cover, among other things, medical stuff that maintains good health and prevents bad. HHS then created a list of the things that the insurance should cover, including checkups, mammograms, vaccinations and lots of other medical stuff, and some not so medical. HHS then went a step further and defined birth control as health maintenance and bad health prevention. Really.  You know, lots of women throw up when they are pregnant. Some of them even die from pregnancy complications.  If government doesn’t jump in and require someone to pay for their birth control some women will get pregnant, get sick and die.

It’s a highly arguable point, this health maintenance ploy, but HHS did it anyway. Thank you, Sandra Fluke. Remember her, the law student from a well off family who said government should pay for her birth control in a speech at the 2011 Democratic convention? That woman is a future pig at the public trough if I ever saw one.

Hobby Lobby is a corporation owned by a single family. They have provided health insurance for all of their 13,000 or so employees for many years. The coverage even included birth control. What it did not include, and which they purposely did not want to provide, was coverage for abortions, including abortifacients, which are drugs or devices that cause a fertilized egg to no longer be viable (which is a euphemism for killed). The morning after pill is an abortafacient, and so are IUDs. The owners of Hobby Lobby maintained that their religious convictions required that they not support abortions. Forcing them to pay for abortifacients was the same as forcing them to take an active role in abortions. They considered this a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Guess what, the Supreme Court agreed. 

Enter the all too predictable rage and hyperbole from the left. Here is just some of the hysteria spewing from their mouths, pens, and word processors:

• Conservatives hate women and want to keep them chained and pregnant.
• Women all over the country are going to die because they won’t be able to get birth control.
• The Supreme Court likes corporations more than it does people, especially women
• With this ruling dozens, hundreds, thousands of corporations will be able to claim religious objections to vaccinations, blood transfusions and cancer treatment
• This decision is like imposing Sharia Law

Ack! I could go on and on.

In truth, the Supreme Court’s decision had nothing so much to do with any of these things. Actually, what the Supremes said was that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a law that was created with bipartisan support 20 years ago, applies to the sole owners of companies just as it does any other citizen. The law requires that the government not force any person to violate his or her religious beliefs unless there is no other way to achieve a compelling lawful purpose for the greater public good. Essentially, just because you are a sole owner of a business and that business happens to be incorporated, like tens if not hundreds of thousands of businesses today, you do not give up your fundamental constitutional rights. Clearly, many on the left really think that business owners should not have rights, as do apparently four liberal justices, but that’s another topic for another time.

Before you say the government should just pay it, don’t. That is such a slippery slope that once headed down it, we won’t get back up. Hobby Lobby’s owners pay taxes, and so do a lot of other folks who don’t approve of birth control, especially achieved through abortion, on religious grounds. Simply using government funds may remove those folks from directly contributing to the cost, but they would still be contributing. The government would still be violating their religious rights as set forth in the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

So what is to be done?

Do we really need government mandated insurance to pay for $30 a month prescriptions for The Pill? Heck, why the pill at all? Why not just cover condoms? In fact that’s the far healthier way to go, considering STDs are not prevented by birth control pills or IUDs. I saw a box of 50 count condoms, lubricated and ribbed for her pleasure, for sale at Costco for $19.

The real issue is that there was no need to require that health insurance cover birth control. Women who wanted it were paying for it just fine before the law. And before you say some couldn't afford it, just consider. Using prescription birth control is an elective and personal thing. If you can't afford birth control, and you are afraid of getting pregnant, then just don't. Or consider some alternative. You may demand the right to have all the sex you want, but you cannot make that demand without also accepting the responsibility and accountability for doing so. Saying that the government has to pay for your birth control so you don't have to be responsible and accountable is just plain wrong. Nobody got you pregnant but you. That responsibility does not belong to anyone else but you. Do you hear me Sandra Fluke? Enough said. 

The condom argument above was not just sarcasm. Any woman who can't afford even the $19 for 50 condoms, which ought to last her at least a month even with the most virile or numerous of partners, can get them for free from any number of sources, including  Planned Parenthood. The cost issue is not an issue; it's a smoke screen. There is no more sense in requiring birth control coverage than there would be in requiring coverage for breast implants, which are just as helpful in allowing women to have sex as birth control if from a slightly different perspective, and that's the point of both, right? To be able to have sex?

Everyone’s premium is getting jacked up a bit for the cost of the pill, not to mention the cost of the doctor visit to get the prescription to get the pill.

Which brings me to the point we should all be seriously considering. Why does a woman even need a prescription for the pill? A prescription is not required for the so called Plan B morning after pill. Teenage girls all over America are buying them out of vending machines every day. No prescription for The Pill is required in most countries in the world, so why are US women so stupid or incapable that they need one? Most women are quite capable of knowing when their hormones are being jacked improperly, which is the chief risk in the pill. They don't need a doctor to tell them so. Besides which, the pill is no more harmful that a multitude of other over the counter medications. We are just fooling ourselves if we restrict access for the pill and not some of the other equally and even more dangerous products available without a prescription. In my opinion the only reason for such a restriction is that doctors make a lot of money off those ridiculous office visits required to get the prescription, drug companies can continue to charge more than open competition would allow, and the AMA is still a huge lobby concerned with preserving their business and restricting competitors.

Remove the prescription requirement and we come close to completely solving this particular problem. Prices for the drugs would go down as competition went up. The bigger cost of the doctor’s visit would be eliminated. Availability would be assured. Insurance premiums should go down a bit. Conservatives should like it because no one is being forced to violate their religious principles. Liberals should like it because they would achieve all the benefits they exhort in their demand for easily obtained birth control. Women everywhere could have all the sex they want without the fear of unwanted pregnancies. The unwanted pregnancy rate should go down, because, as I have read, many women who have such pregnancies stopped taking their birth control pills because they didn’t go back to the doctor after the prescription ran out. Lesbians and gay men should like it because they would not be forced to pay to enable women and men to have sex with each other. Ick!

What do you think the chances are this is going to happen?

I say about slim and none. Mostly because doing this would take away a “crisis” opportunity for the liberals and Democrats. Why do you think they are screaming so dramatically if illogically? Why didn't Obama and HHS issue an exemption to the birth control coverage for those who asserted a recognizable religious objection? They certainly gave exemptions to unions and other interests on more expensive and important issues. I don't believe for a moment that competent government lawyers actually thought they had a real chance of winning this case. So why push it to the Court in the first place?

Because they don't really care about the birth control coverage. That was never a true concern for Obama or HHS.

Seriously. They saw an outside chance to win big if they won the case. More to the point, there was no down side to losing and a big upside. If they lost, they had another issue to distract the stupid on the left. It will charge up the base. It will help keep the donations coming in. It lets them keep making the argument of how heartless and mean conservatives and Republicans are. They create a false issue to divert America from real issues in an election year that is not looking so good for them right now. The truth is the Supreme Court just did the libs and Dems a huge favor. The Left is not about to throw away all this for something that actually makes sense and is the right thing to do. It almost makes you wonder if they put the birth control coverage mandate in place knowing it would come to this. That seems overly devious, but heck Devious is Obama's other middle name.

In short, the Obama administration, its many constituent supporters and the liberal media enablers  position before the fact and their hyperbolic hysteria after is just more of the same phony  hypocritical practices in the pursuit of their religion, Progressivism.

However, let's take one last look at this to find the silver lining. 

I think a woman should be able to make the choice of having an abortion. I don't think it is a good choice. In my heart I think there is a point before which it is acceptable and after which it does become murder. Don't ask me to explain it any better than that. I think we have nuanced the abortion thing to death, no pun intended. Generally I don't like it and I don't like the things it does to people. I don't like its implications on morality and ethics and our social interactions. But, I can see that sometimes for the poor woman there is no other viable choice. So I am a reluctant pro-choice, and depending on the circumstance am pro-life.

But the one thing that I think is entirely wrong is that the Supreme Court decades ago decided they knew better than the rest of the country about what was morally right or wrong. The Roe v. Wade decision is a travesty of American justice. They created a right where none existed before and stopped in its tracks any opportunity for the democratic system to work. That's the travesty. We the people should be able to reason with each other, scream invective at the top of our voice at those we don't agree with, campaign on platforms and issues and in the end come to a decision about what we want through the election of law makers and the enactment of laws, state by state and nationally. The Supreme Court took all that away with Roe v. Wade. To their shame.

So, the silver lining. For the first time that I can remember, a Supreme Court has acknowledged that citizens may have a legitimate objection to abortion and were within their rights to resist compulsion in the matter. They did that with the Hobby Lobby decision. And don't forget, they also recently ruled that states could not impose artificial barriers to the exercise of free speech, specifically the "buffer zones" around abortion clinics.

I like that this court is focused on the actual Bill of Rights and what it means, and tends to frame their decisions in terms of the original intent. They have done that with several 1st and 2nd Amendment decisions over the last several years. Can it be that we may actually get to have that debate about abortion, so that the majority of citizens of a state can elect to allow it or not based on their own judgment?

There is that observation about the East Coast and the Left Coast and Flyover Country. What do the two Coasts care about what the Flyover Country does? It's not like they plan to live there or even try to understand the people who do. So here's hoping that some courageous state writes an abortion law in such a way that allows the Supreme Court to frame it against the actual Bill of Rights and end 50 years of bad precedent.

Lying Liars

I promised myself I wasn’t going to rant about politics. Everyone is doing it and it’s all being said. Except…well, in all the blather I am not hearing about things in the way that I am thinking about them. So I guess I need to share.

Let’s start with a little enumeration of the usual suspects, in no particular order, and we will keep it simple to make the point. I don’t want to rehash what we all know. 

Benghazi – it was the movie.-  
IRS – a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati and not a smidgen of evidence to the contrary.
Obamacare – you can keep your health insurance, doctor, hospital if you want to

I was watching the Five on Fox the other night. Bob Beckel looked like he was just about to have apoplexy over the creation of a Special Committee to investigate the Benghazi affair. His problem with it was that it was all “just politics”. It was politics when the administration said it was the movie, and not terrorists, and it is politics now with the Republican House appointing a special committee. His point was that that the things done in the exercise of politics are just the way it is.

Apparently in Beckel’s mind it is okay for our government, from the President on down to an IRS lifer bureaucrat, to lie to the American people, as long as it is “just politics”.  I guess in his mind “politics” is a justification for doing things that are illegal, immoral, and just plain wrong.

Since when?

This is supposed to be government of the people, by the people and for the people. However, when it is okay for government to lie to us to avoid losing elections, or to attempt to ruin your political opposition with the illegal application of the IRS, or to garner support for a bad law that attempts to grab a seventh of the economy and place it under the control of government, then that sounds very much to me like people of the government, by the government, for the government.

It. Is. Never. Okay. For. People. In. Government. To. Lie. To. Us. Ever. Period. End. Fucking. Dot!

Government has always had its secrets. Many times we are better off not knowing them. You don’t want the CIA broadcasting who their spies are, for example. Or what our negotiating strategy is on the big treaty. Why in heaven’s name, Bill Clinton, did you tell the world that we could listen in on cell calls around the world, which had the immediate effect of every terrorist out there not using them anymore, eliminating one of our best anti-terrorist intelligence sources? Oh yeah, so he could look tough, you know, “politics”. Keeping secrets, and perhaps even lying about such things as this are acceptable. Unless you’re Edward Snowden, I guess. Hmm. Maybe need a rethink here.

Remember Richard Nixon? He was forced to resign for covering up, in other words lying about, a stupid burglary of a Democratic business office. Nobody ever actually showed that Nixon ordered the burglary or that he even knew about it beforehand. But he sure did lie about it afterwards. Why? So he could get reelected. You know, “politics”. As a nation we were outraged and it was not to be tolerated. He was about to be impeached. So he left.

Most people forget, if they ever knew, that the thing that was really going to get Nixon was that he tried to get the IRS and FBI to investigate, audit and do the other painful things they do to a list of his political opponents and their supporters and fund raisers. Sound familiar? It is very illegal; seriously, there are very real very specific laws about it. In those days the IRS and FBI resisted Nixon and refused to do what he wanted. The worm sure has turned.

I blame Bill Clinton and his willy. He was the one who started the public in your face lying. Remember the asinine excuse that he smoked pot but never inhaled? That was funny and we all sort of snickered, without ever accepting that if he would lie in such a clumsy manner about something like that, then he was capable of lying about anything. It got serious when he looked us right in the eye through the TV camera and told us he “did not have sex with that woman”. Then he tried a somewhat sloppy cover up. He got all slippery about what the definition of sex is, and even what the definition of is is (though that was in a different unrelated sex scandal). We were all a bit uncomfortable with the impeachment, because it was after all a private matter, mostly, and more importantly was all about sex. I think a majority of Americans felt deep down that if they found themselves in the same position, they would lie about it, too. Sort of hard to hold the guy culpable for that.

The problem with Billy’s willy was that he kept trying to shove it into women everywhere. Paula Jones. Jennifer Flowers. Who knows how long the list is? What we did by excusing him the blue dress and cigar stuffing with a 19 year old intern in the Oval Office was condone sexual predatory behavior. A CEO in the same position, even then, would have been fired. Senator Bob Packwood was forced to resign by his fellow Republicans for much of the same things Clinton did. But we let Billy get away with it. I think it set a tone and sent a message.  The message was that we can accept lying from our government if it’s for the right reasons, or at least not for the wrong ones.

Now the right reasons have expanded and the wrong ones shrunk. If you’re my party, and espouse my politics and values, and you are, you know, the right kind of person, then it is permissible to lie for the good of us all. The partisan lines have been drawn so strongly that we will accept just about anything from the guy who is on our side as long as it keeps the guy on the other side at bay. If our guy lies to stay in office, I’m for it. My goodness, if we hold Obama to the outrageous and unattainably high standard of not lying to us, we might, gasp, oh the horrors of the thought, end up with a Republican, or a Conservative, or a Heterosexual, or a Christian, or a Caucasian Male, or all five!

Lie, Barry, Lie!

Right now I don’t believe much of anything the President says, or anything any member of his administration says, including all of the agencies and bureaus and spokesmen. I literally believe nothing they say. I assume that somewhere in the message is an untruth, an evasion, a twisting of reality. I feel this so strongly that I turn off the TV or switch channels whenever the President shows up and starts talking. To me, he’s like the old lawyer joke: How do you know when he’s lying? When his lips are moving.

I don’t like Obama’s policies, or share his priorities or solutions to issues on most things. I can live with and accept an honorable opponent who is sincere. I really wanted to believe that the President’s positions were honestly held and firmly believed. When you are dealing with someone like that, you can have discourse and attempt to reach mutually acceptable positions. Sure you are not going to vote for him, but the USA is well served and that’s the whole point, right?

I don’t think this President is honest about anything. I suspect that he doesn’t really have any firm beliefs or heartfelt convictions, other than those needed to win elections. All the things he expresses are just the necessities required to get him power and keep it.  Whatever it takes. Whatever he has to say. Whatever he has to do that he can get away with.

I came to these opinions because he has been caught lying about so many things. He makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout. I don’t believe he gives a rip what happens to the USA after his is gone, only what he got out of it while he was in it.

Am I wrong?

What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been

Greetings from Boise!

Some of my Facebook friends have heard parts of this already. However, I want to tie it up all neat with one little bow. Let’s start with a bunch of mixed metaphors. Atlas may have held the world on his shoulders, but when it came to the Wilsons, Atlas Van Lines assuredly dropped the ball, fumbling on their own five yard line. It was so bad that if they were in the NBA they would have been called for traveling. Do you know how bad you have to suck to get called for traveling in the NBA? Which is sort of ironic considering that traveling in a sense is what they are supposed to do, but in this case they kept tripping over their own feet. A journey of two thousand miles begins with a single step, except for these guys when it began by falling on their face.

Let’s start with Day 1, loading the truck on Friday, July 26. We have sold the house and must vacate by Sunday midnight, July 28. Atlas Van Lines is there and moving our stuff out of the house and into their truck with a delivery date to our new house in Boise of between Thursday Aug 1 and Monday Aug 5. We have a contract for all this for which we agree to pay the princely sum of almost $11,000.

With the truck half or possibly 2/3 loaded, the driver is taking inventory of remaining stuff in the basement. He moves a plastic container, which is sitting on top of another plastic container, both of which have probably not been moved in ten years. To his horror, he finds some dead bug bodies and one little brown bug crawling across the top of the bottom container.

“Bed Bugs!”

Trust him, he’s seen hundreds of them and there is no doubt. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this Mr. Wilson, but you have bed bugs and we can’t move your stuff. We are prohibited by law from transporting your infestation. We are going to have to unload the truck and disinfect it.”

WTF?

I can go on and on about the several discussions we had, but they boil down to one common theme.

Me: “How do you know they are bed bugs? Those things don’t live in basements; they need human blood to live and there are no indications of them in any of the living areas.”

HIM: “Trust me. I’ve seen them hundreds of times. You have Bed Bugs!”

ME: “But look at this picture on the internet of a Carpet Beetle. It looks a little bit like a bed bug and a lot like the bug you found, but likes basements because the stuff it likes to eat is there: wood, paper, wool. Let’s wait for the exterminator you said you are going to use on your truck. He will be here in a 3 hours and if they are bed bugs, then you can unload and disinfect.”

Him: “No.”

Atlas unloaded all the stuff they had spent much of the day loading. They just took it off the truck and piled it in our house wherever was the easiest space, mostly the garage at my urging. I was hoping they would be coming back soon and this would make the loading that much quicker.Then they were gone. At 6 pm the exterminator showed up and said, “You don’t have bed bugs, you have a few carpet beetles that probably came in through the basement window earlier this summer.”

It’s 6:00 pm on Friday night, and all of our stuff is still in our house and not on its way to Boise. Worse, we have to be out of the house by midnight on Sunday, because, you know, it’s not our house anymore. We sold it to a nice lady and her two kids. Did I mention that Atlas does not load or unload trucks on weekends?

Cheryl did her combo Mommy, Wife, Queen Bitch Thing (I love that one!) and tore into some Atlas people. Finally, some corporate dude in some far off out of state office promised that a truck would show up Saturday or Sunday with a crew to load it. Great. Except that instead of beginning our drive to Boise on Saturday, we will have to stick around in a hotel in Columbus for another day or two.

So the same driver shows up Sunday morning, but with a different crew. He apologized, of course, and we were gracious about it. He told Cheryl the original crew was too embarrassed to come back. They loaded the truck and off they went. But not before Cheryl asked when they were going to arrive in Boise, to which she was informed that this truck was not going to Idaho. They were going to their Columbus warehouse where they would unload the entire truck and a different truck would come along, reload our stuff and head for Boise.

That sounded like a lot of unnecessary work to us, not to mention increasing the possibility of breakage from the extra handling of loading, unloading, loading, unloading, loading and unloading again. Oh well, not our business, except it’s our stuff that could be broken.

When will that second truck get to Boise, we asked? Don’t know; we haven’t found you a truck or driver yet, they said. So you know where this is going right?  We were finally told we wouldn’t get our stuff until the very last day on the contract, Monday, Aug 5. Had to expect that, I guess, given all the loading, unloading, loading, unloading, loading and unloading again.

We gave the kid a hug, who was headed for Michigan and then on to Baltimore to stay with his cousin, and pulled out of town headed west on Monday morning, July 29. Cheryl drove her mustang and I had the truck pulling the trailer and two motorcycles, and the cat in a rabbit cage in the back seat, not to mention all the stuff in the back of my truck and crammed onto the trailer that Atlas would not take. Stuff like aerosol cans, guns, ammo, propane tanks, our clothes, two fireproof safes with our personal papers, and so on. I was seriously overloaded in the truck and trailer. Still, we took it easy and with Cheryl doing a very credible job as wing man, we took four rather uneventful days to get here, arriving on Thursday evening, Aug 1.

Cheryl called Atlas to verify when they would arrive. Guess what? They hadn’t even left Columbus yet, so it would be like Wednesday, Aug 7. Remember that thing about a contract and they promised to deliver by Monday? That doesn’t seem to matter to them.  Cheryl called them on Monday, the 5^th, and guess what again? Still hadn’t left Columbus yet, so now delivery is set for Friday, Aug 7.

I won’t get into the whole thing about our extra expenses of trying to live without any furniture and most of our belongings, and trying to do everything on the cheap, which caused us some serious discomfort and hardship, because we have no confidence whatsoever that Atlas will ever pay us a dime for it. Several less than satisfactory telephone conversations and a look at the Atlas claim form in which they clearly say they ain’t promisin' nothin’ and may not pay if they don't feel like it, made it quite clear it is going to be fight to get anything out of them.  

The truck did arrive on Friday and the driver and crew were very nice and efficient. Perhaps a little too efficient. If you didn’t watch them carefully stuff would just get put in the place easiest for them to carry it to. Cheryl had every box labeled according to the room it went to, and each room was labeled with little signs, including a brief list of the stuff that was to go into each. We are still finding boxes labeled “Bedroom 1” or “Kitchen” stuck in a corner of the garage or next to the shed on the side of the house. One of the crew, probably carrying the patio heater, broke a brace holding a curtain for the patio; just left the rod and curtain lying there on the ground which we didn’t discover until after they were gone. Probably the same guy must have hit is head or a chair on the dining room hanging lamp, knocking the cover from the ceiling. Again, found that one after they were gone, too. I hope it was his head and it hurt.

And, stuff is broken. We are still assessing that. Cheryl’s grandmother’s china teapot is one example. It was wrapped in double bubble wrap in a box clearly labeled “fragile" and the box was just as clearly partially crushed. Lots of little things like that.  Just the thing you would expect with all that loading, unloading, loading, unloading, loading and unloading again. One of the little clauses in the contract says that they aren’t responsible for breakage of things in boxes if they didn’t pack the things into the boxes. We, that is to say Cheryl, packed our stuff. The cost to have them do it is uber prohibitive.

The claim we make to Atlas should be very interesting. For example, just because they didn’t pack the boxes, doesn’t mean they can crush one and break stuff in it. Add to that the breakage of the curtain and hanging light. And on top of that is our extra expenses directly related to them being 5 days late. I suspect that some of you are asking why we didn't just deduct what we think we are owed from the amount we pay them to do the move. Too bad it doesn't work that way. To get our stuff off the truck here in Boise we had to pay the driver right then and there. If we don't pay, he doesn't unload? No tickee, no laundry. So they have our money and now we are going to have to work to get some of it back. What they don’t understand is we know how this works, and we know what buttons to push and levers to pull.

Most importantly, Atlas seems to have forgotten that simple rule of business. Treat one customer right and he will tell three people. Treat him wrong and he will tell 20. Wait, that was the old rule. In the case of our modern telecommunication centric society, he can and will tell 200 or maybe even 200,000.

You have been told.