Spring 2011 Is Coming, So Be Glad

The sleet has returned, although there is less of it than during the first week of February. It has come with freezing rain, but not all that much of that. It did not keep me from work.

It is Washington's Birthday both yesterday (official) and today (actual). Yesterday morning I put up the flag when it was only cloudy … and windy … very windy, making the flag horizontally straight. But, when I returned home, the freezing rain had frozen the flag in a stiff, droopy position. I had to thaw the flag and its pole.

It is hard to believe that there was ever a sleet storm early this month. The warm weather between then and now had melted the snow almost completely. There are still little piles of snow here and there, and bigger pools of water where all that snowmelt had collected.

My opinion of the so-called Tea Party Movement is already clear and has not changed. The movement's rank-and-file members want to go back to a country that no longer exists — and can never exist again, given what average Americans are like now.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Armed Forces, Veterans' Affairs (Medicare for ex-soldiers), and interest on the national debt (owed to the EU and East Asia): All these are the Big Items in the federal budget. All of them have vast and powerful segments of the population that want to keep them untouched. And all of these are unsustainable, especially given the coming collusion of aging Boomers and young citizens with cancerous egos who will refuse to pay for the Boomers' retirements.

The Republican Party leadership, who in their own way are no better than Obama and the Democrats, are trying to placate the tea-apelings who want to go after the Big Items with a rusty hatchet. So there are thousands of minor spending programs that the Republicans can dangle in front of the tea-apelings for them to whack at, in the hope that the rednecks — for that what the Republican leadership thinks of the tea-apelings — will turn away from the Big Items. Hey, it's worked before!

It is obvious that the Republican leadership is trying to maneuver the tea-apelings into a position of hypocrisy, as evident by this Techdirt entry: Can someone explain how sponsoring NASCAR is a good use of taxpayer funds, if funding Sesame Street is not? The background on this is that two of the Armed Forces sponsor, with taxpayer money, NASCAR races, which are watched by the type of people who volunteer for military service. Public broadcasting (PBS for television, NPR for radio) is also taxpayer supported at the national level via CPB, funding such shows as Sesame Street. Public broadcasting is watched and listened to by just about everyone — except, perhaps, by the type of person who would be a tea-apeling.