Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Obama to Address Congress Tonight at 9pm

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President Barack Obama (D) is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress tonight 9pm EST. This is not an official Presidential State of the Union address, as new Presidents traditionally give their first State of the Union address after having served nearly a year in office. Traditionally, this initial address is referred to as an ‘annual message’ or other similar, generic title. Obama’s address will be followed by a Republican response to be given by Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA).

As always, I recommend watching C-SPAN for unfettered, uninterrupted coverage of both.

The Constitution requires that the president report to Congress annually on the state of the union, but does not specify the method or form of this report. The in-person State of the Union address has been a tradition since 1913 (transcripts 1945-2008 available from C-SPAN).

Washington Post Juxtaposition Fail

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Juxtaposition FailI dropped in to one of the news sites I visit regularly, the Washington Post site, and found the juxtaposition of the headline and ‘lead’ photograph quite hilarious.

On the left, the Post was running a cycling slide show of images related to tonight’s Oscar awards, including one of Heath Ledger portraying The Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’. Meanwhile, the headline story on the right was a fluff piece about how the recently-passed ‘stimulus’ plan will potentially benefit government workers.

When you put it all together (especially on a small screen, like that on my Eee PC, which cuts off any/all Oscar related captions), I find it funny.

Everybody Grab Your Ammo

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As my regular readers know, my wife and I have been gun owners since the middle of last year and now have a few handguns between us for purposes of self defense. Like all other responsible gun owners, we hope and pray every day that we will never need to use our guns in an emergency. But, if we are threatened by criminals who intend to harm us, we do not intend to be made into victims.

These days, lots of people are buying guns and stocking up on gun related supplies. In fact, gun, gun accessory, and ammunition sales have been through-the-roof for several months now. The reasons are twofold.

First, people who believe that the right to ‘keep and bear arms’ is a fundamental human right are honestly concerned that the Democratic Party leadership in Congress and the White House will roll out new counterproductive restrictions on civilian firearm ownership. There has been talk of bringing back Clinton-era laws that unnecessarily limited ‘high capacity magazines’ and certain guns that, primarily because of how they looked, got branded as ‘assault weapons’. These laws, like most ‘gun control’ laws, had little or no effect on the criminals (who don’t care if something is illegal) and unlawfully infringed on the right to bear arms for law-abiding, responsible gun owners like myself. We gun owners are stocking up on things that might get restricted, like the 17-round magazines for my Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm, just in case.

Read more . . .

Facebook Won’t Save Metro

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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA, ‘Metro’) has a bright idea for its future: a Facebook page.

Long hovering, like so many other groups, in the nether-region between government agency and for-profit business, Metro’s insanity never ceases to amaze me. They charge higher fares than any other rail transit system in the United States, but MetroRail’s reliability still gives Microsoft operating systems and Chevy automobiles a run for their money. When the Washington Nationals baseball team came to town, Metro thought that Major League Baseball needed to pay them millions of dollars to cover the costs of increased ridership . . . even though common sense would indicate that increased ridership already means increased FARES.

I stopped riding Metro five years ago now. Riding five days a week, it was uncommon that my commute would go as-planned more than 50 percent of the time. Drastic delays—sometimes delivering me to work or home a full hour later than expected—slowly went from being an occasional annoyance in 2001 to a twice-a-week nightmare by 2004. Local media make fairly regular investigative reports, which invariably discover patent mismanagement, millions of wasted dollars, and general ineptitude throughout the management structure of the organization. Best of all, if you’re a resident of Virginia, Maryland, or Washington, DC, your taxes likely contribute to the [mis]management of this agency whether you ride or not.

Here are some ideas for Metro:

  1. Go back in time to 1985 and extend your rail service to Dulles Airport, Tysons Corner, Columbia, Fort Belvoir, and (duh) Georgetown. It’s way, way, way too late now.
  2. After accomplishing step 1, now you can start talking about the rail extensions you should be making today . . . to Manassas, Gainesville, Leesburg, Purcellville, Quantico, Annapolis, and other places in the greater DC metro area.
  3. Stop complaining about money . . . or, as an alternative, lower your fares to be price competitive with every other mass transit system in the country and then complain about money.
  4. Stop assuming everybody lives in the suburbs and works in the city. This isn’t reality anymore, and hasn’t been for fifteen years. Build up methods to commute from suburbs to other suburbs, instead of your vintage 1970s structure where all the rail lines intersect downtown. My commute from Herndon to Alexandria shouldn’t be a two-hour odyssey of driving to a park-and-ride lot, taking a bus to an Orange Line station, transferring to a Blue Line train, and finally hopping a shuttle bus to the office.

Final conclusion: If I can get to work faster and cheaper by driving, even in the DC area’s horrible traffic mess with sky-high gas prices, then Metro really, really, really sucks. Starting a Facebook site won’t fix that.

Big, Dangly Cat Feet

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vincent-bigfeetVincent, our kitten, is weird. I came home today, and this is where I found him: sitting on top of our kitchen cabinets with his front legs dangling down, showing off his mutant, five-toed feet.

And, to top it off, he gives me the ‘dummy’ look. Vincent is very good at the ‘dummy’ look. Pretty regularly, a vacant stare comes across his face as he tries to compute whatever is happening around him. In this case, he was trying to figure out why I was laughing and pointing a cell phone camera at him.

Mei Mei, our older cat, is a bit smarter. When I point the camera at her, she usually stops doing whatever she was doing. She does this to spite us. Vincent hasn’t figured this out yet, and I doubt that he ever will!

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.