Haiku #12

What am I seeing
The issues seem distorted
Time for bifocals

Went to the eye doctor monday, must be getting old he said I needed bifocals.

Unemployment

I read an article out of the U.K today stating that 17 percent of the households have no one working. The list includes over 100,000 people who have never worked. All this is bad enough but the one family the story featured was bringing home 33,000 pounds a year in social benefits. This is more than a lot of working families net.

When socialism rears it's ugly head it leads to these kinds of abuses.

Swine flu

Yesterday on the radio they were talking about the coming flu season and swine flu in particular. The news outlets are talking of up to 90,000 deaths related to swine flu. The actual report say a chance of between 30,000 to 90,000 deaths

So are you going to get the swine flu vaccine?

I probably won't it seems like too much hype and not enough facts.

The heart of disagreement

People on the left when discussing health insurance reform are angry with the right. They rant that the right is racist,ignorant ,lying,fear mongering, and violent I might have missed a few. When they finish bad mouthing the right their usual next line is that if they don't like the dem's bill they should work with them to make it better. Sometimes the criticism is that the right has no plan of their own. I believe the reason the right and left aren't working together on this issue is that both sides are so far apart that compromise becomes almost impossible.

When you can't reach a suitable compromise in politics the only solution is to try to stop a great wrong from happening.

Public transportation

There has been some outrage in cities around Cleveland that are losing their circulator buses. The circulators make more frequent stops in a smaller area.

The Plain Dealer reported this morning that the circulator for Lakewood cost $470,274 a year to operate and average 20 riders per hour. I did a little math and if the buses run for 12 hours a day 365 days a year it works out to about $100 dollars an hour. Now the only way I can see for these buses to keep running would be to charge $5 bucks a head.

However public transportation doesn't work this way. Every time an issue over fares comes up no one wants to pay what it cost even to break even. Government subsidizes a mode of transportation that so few people want to use that it isn't viable.

This is why government has such a hard time working within a budget.

Hazards of linking

Being relatively new to hosting a blog I learned something today. When linking always try the links after posting. I linked to two separate blogs this morning and found I did not do either one correctly. One was a misspelling of the url the other I had mistyped when I initially set-up the side bar. I added an s to Keane observations url it should have been keaneobservation.blogspot.com. Oddly enough there is an Edward Keane no relation set-up at the url I mistakenly had typed at my blog roll.

It's good to learn even if you feel a little stupid in the process.

Death penalty

A couple of weeks ago there was a lively debate over at Zeray gazette concerning the death penalty. Two stories this week reaffirmed my position in favor of the death penalty. First was the story from Fridays evening news the bomber who took down the PanAm plane over Lockerbie Scotland killing more than 200 hundred people was being considered for release. He has little time to live suffering with prostate cancer in the U.K. they have a provision for compassionate parole. Secondly I was reminded by my brother over at Keaneobservations of the release of Squeaky Fromme this week for the younger folks she was a disciple of Charles Manson and attempted to kill President Ford.

One of the arguments for dispensing with the death penalty is that life in prison is a better penalty. The problem is that if such high profile criminals can have their life sentences commuted is life in prison really life in prison.