Wal-mart Named Top Suspect In Tragic Death

CNN and MSNBC report that police are investigating the tragic death of a Wal-mart employee early yesterday morning. It seems that the seasonal hire was trampled to death as the exterior doors proved futile at retaining crowds of barbaric materialists. Among those less seriously injured but still requiring hospitalization was a woman who was eight months pregnant. Review of store surveillance videos show scenes of customers becoming irate over being blocked by the obstacle created as other workers attempted to aid the eventual deceased. After order was restored, surveillance shows customers expressing annoyance at the decision to immediately close the store in order to investigate the death. Police are now trying to ascertain who, if anyone, should be held criminally responsible for the worker’s death. I’m not sure what the problem is, the guilty party seems pretty cut and dry to me: Wal-mart.

Eventually, after the tapes are all reviewed and witness are interviewed, the police might be able to identify a specific person or party who is directly responsible for breaking down the doors, trampling the person, or whatever ill advised action was carried out leading to the tragedy, and as selfish, hedonistic, and terrible these people may be, they shouldn’t be blamed. All over the country, lines formed around buildings as consumers eagerly waited hours to purchase limited quantity, door buster deals. In order to understand the mechanics of this sort of line, think of cars waiting at a red light. As the light gets closer to changing, cars inch up ever so slightly as drivers anticipate the change, and then again, and again. Eventually the light turns green and everyone goes, but if someone fails to go, horns are honked, fingers are given, and disdain flows freely at the refusing party.  And as it is with cars lined up at intersections…

You Must Give Your Cape and Scepter to Me…

You know who’s living the American dream? Karl Rove, the original Joe the Plumber. Karl, I don’t have a college degree or any sort of objective experience to speak of, but have somehow landed a job as a political analyst despite being fired by several campaigns, doing myriads of unscrupulous deeds, and leading what many to consider to be the most unethical campaign ever, followed by serving as chief adviser to a man who even more refer to as the worst president ever, Rove. If you think your circumstances were hindering or your childhood life was bad, you’re wrong. Karl Rove’s were much, much worse. For most of his life, he erroneously believed the man who raised him was his biological father, only to find out upon leaving his mother on account of being homosexual that in fact he was his adoptive father. Twelve years later, his mother committed suicide. Guys like Karl Rove should inspire all Americans and reinforce that anyone can do anything, make lots of money, and have lots of people honestly believe they have something worthwhile to say, without having to start a cult.

But even Dio, who had his day in the sun, had to pass the torch, and so it’s time for Karl to follow suit. The dream is over, and the ride was nice. It made for some great Daily Show episodes, but has run its course; Karl Rove has no business making any comment on future American politics. Yet recently, Karl Rove stated that he was impressed with the make up of Obama’s economic advisory board. Considering Karl Rove has proven to be the anti-Midas, turning everything he touches into mud, I’m not sure if I should be happy or scared out of my gourd. I’m not sure which is more surprising, the fact that he…

Thanks, But No Thanks.

Here are somethings I won’t be saying ”thanks” for come Thanksgiving dinner.

Bank Fees - All this talk about bailing out this bank and that bank, but what about congress protecting consumers while they’re at it. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but banks charge insanely high fees without any sort of dispute resolution or full disclosure available to the depositor. For instance, Citizen’s Bank and Bank of America will debit your account immediately but take an arbitrary amount of time to credit it. Look in the terms and conditions, it’s in there. In this window of time, they’ll charge you Insufficient Funds (NSF) fees ranging from $35-39 per transaction which they arbitrarily decide to put through and then charge you NSF fees on the original NSF fees. The amazing thing is that they all do it one way or another and thus you have no place to run so they get away scot free.

Christmas Halftime/4am Black Friday - Everyone notices that each year Christmas stuff comes out just a little sooner, or so it seems, right? It used to be that after Thanksgiving people started to think about Christmas, but now Thanksgiving is just Christmas Halftime. Lewis Black has a great rant about this on his latest CD. To make matters worse, Black Friday, the unofficial date in the year where stores go from red to black on their balance sheets, starts earlier and earlier each time around. It used to be that stores would open a little earlier, say 7am, but now… well Kohl’s is opening at 4am. That means that some poor schmuck who works at Kohl’s has to be there around 3am. To get eight hours of sleep and a shower, that guy has to go to bed at 6pm on Thanksgiving. Seriously, why do stores need to be open at 4am?…

Three Words, One Circus; Medicare Open Enrollment.

Three words, one circus; Medicare open enrollment. On the surface, the goal seems simple enough: provide health care services for senior citizens and those who are permanently disabled. Subcutaneous exploration reveals a dark labyrinth of confusion, full of dubious pitfalls and misinformation, with little explanation for those who take time to seek it. Every year most Americans go shopping for health insurance, they call it open enrollment, and for working people who receive benefits through their employer based plans, a lot of the shopping has already been done. Still, many people find it very confusing and difficult to think through the limited amount of decision making they are left to make. Seniors have it worse; they don’t have a human resource department with trained people to make decisions; they have to do it all themselves. Making it worse, insurance companies that provide medicare benefits have to market their products to individuals like any other product, sell sell sell. Now, if seniors were well informed and companies always acted with integrity the environment might not be as threatening, but the current system has created exactly the opposite situation, and plenty of companies try to take advantage of trusting, ill informed Medicare enrollees.

Over time, many managed care organizations have carved out specific benefits to other organizations. For instance, most people have a vision plan, a dental plan, etc. Medicare is no different. The one benefit that has been carved out but is just a little different in nature than the others is the pharmacy benefit. The dental plan wants you to have great teeth, the vision plan wants your eyes to be fine. It’s in their best interest for you to be healthy so that you don’t require costly services; that’s how they make money. The pharmacy benefit is different, it has…

Shiver Me Timbers, Pirates Arrrn’t Cool!

When America stepped on the bus for the first day of school circa 1776, in typical Forest Gump fashion, it was not greeted with warmth and acceptance. One of the playground bullies ready to give fledgling American commerce a rough go of it: Pirates, ask Jefferson. You might think that with all the proverbial swirlies and wedgies America got at the hands of the Barbary pirates the sentiment might be a little… resentful.  Wrong.

Americans love pirates, pirate jokes, pirate talk, pirate costumes, pirate everything; it’s just that simple. If anyone debates the legitimacy of this claim, I challenge you to take a peek at the box office gross of Pirates of the Carribean trilogy. Spoiler: It’s $1,000,000,000 and to put this in prospective the first 4 Harry Potter movies combined grossed less. Interestingly, Waterworld, a movie that depicted people that resembled ‘actual pirates’ lost about $100 million dollars. Lately, our overly romanticized image of scallywags has been challenged by a shot of reality resulting from the recent emergence of  ‘actual pirates’ and their apparent lack of Jack Sparrow adorableness. Still, I have to admit, each time I hear about ‘actual’ pirates on the news I can’t help but talk like a pirate for the next 30-45 seconds while thinking of my friend Drew who loves pirates more than any other heterosexual man ever could/should. However cute and badass they may be, much like Sigfried and Roy’s tigers which are cute and adorable on TV but don’t make great playmates, Pirates are a lot more awesome when they’re not killing you.

Our unhealthy obsession with the neatness of pirates is clouding our general perception that they are in fact terrorists (and the majority: Muslim too, for all you Republicans). It may be hard to imagine, but the threat they currently, at this very moment,…