Heya Man.This request was completed under ticketThis request was completed under ticket

It’s been six months since you left and I made the decision to wait until now to write my final letter to you. The reason for this was, of course, because I wanted to see The Dark Knight and take every moment I could to savor the crow literally thousands of people had to feed themselves — namely, those who didn’t think you could play your part or even mad fun of you for it. Fools. Every last one of them.

My wife took your loss pretty hard. I had the less-than-fortunate job of telling her what happened. And I can honestly say that it looked like a good portion of her soul died with you that day. All color dropped from her face and her eyes glassed over as her mind struggled to wrap her head around what I told her is a soft, solemn tone. I know all too well what it feels like to lose a personal hero, but I realized quickly that I have next to no experience in helping someone cope with it.

My wife is still convinced that you actually read my posts to you and I can’t help but wonder if you did. You pulled off The Joker with such incredible skill even I was stunned. Was that because of my advice, or perhaps just the very same advice that anyone with knowledge of Batman’s legacy would give? I guess I’ll never know now.

I guess that’s all I really wanted to say. There’s so much cliche surrounding death that when one goes through it, one might almost be happy to avoid hearing the same old tired phrases. But I do know that you managed to touch and inspire a great many people in Hollywood in your short tenure, as was clearly evident in the weeks after you left. And your baby girl Matilda will grow up with a vast treasure trove of your work and I can only hope that you managed to catch some of your own home movies so that she can treasure who you are as a person as well.

But all in all I wanted to congratulate you for simply the greatest portrayal anyone could expect of what is undoubtedly an iconic character of American literature — The Joker is right up there with Boo Radley and Huck Finn. And you knocked it out of the park. You owned that film and the personality of The Joker is better defined for all time because of it. Thank you for proving me right beyond any of my own expectations.

And farewell Heath. You will be missed terribly.

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Newspapers are on a steady decline, speaking from a print aspect anyway, and that’s pretty much a foregone conclusion to anyone who uses the internet regularly. As it stands, a savvy user can get newsfeeds much more conveniently than if they were to wait around for a newspaper to get it in their hands, even online editions. Because of that most major news outlets are evolving to meet the demands of the times and those that aren’t are left to die a quiet death.

But as with all transitions from an old media to a new (see: repercussions of RIAA failed law suits versus success of major recording artists releasing music directly through their fans), there’s bound to be a few divots in the road. And, as a rule, the louder the splash the more the money rolls in — regardless of what that splash may be.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press, with all of the subtlety of the kid who throws a boulder in the lake to try to skip it, made their splash a few days ago by publishing on their site the ability to search a database that contains the name, title/position and salary of every Minnesota State employee. You can, if motivated, look up the salary of any person who is employed directly by the State.

Now I know what you may be thinking. “Isn’t that public information?” Or, if you’re a cantankerous prick, “My taxes pay your salary and it’s my right!” I’ll grant you that, even if you’re a true asshole. But what the managing editor, Thom Fladung, has presented is a neat and untraceable way to search up public information under his website so that his company can rake in the ad clicks over the fuhrer of the controversy. Sure, this is public information and hardly a secret, but it’s not wrapped up in a neat little bow for any asshole to search. His approach, indeed his sneering letter to those curious of his motivations, was to irresponsibly advertise this information as if it were the missing minutes of the Nixon tapes. And then have the audacity to hide behind the law that states state information is to be made public ad he works for a private company so that no one can call his or any of his co-worker’s salaries and titles into question.

To put this into another perspective; say you work for the state as a corrections officer. Now my personal experience with many of those folks has led me to believe that they’re all drunk on what little power they possess over other human beings and generally act like stuck up pricks. But that’s just my take. Let’s say I’m a guy who’s operating on about 10 good brain cells from years of drug use and I have a beef with some asshole cop who looked at me funny. I can now go to the library, utilize the neat little database that the Pioneer Press has made available and find like four of five guys who work for corrections, print off the page and start looking through phone books and getting all the personal information I need to exact my pithy revenge.

That’s how retarded this is. And the sad thing is that Thom knows it and doesn’t care. His paper is making bucks on this little stunt and that it all that ultimately matters.

My guess is that he’ll learn the hard way about what it means to piss into the wind of the internet in much the way Michelle Malkin did a couple years ago. You see, Malkin was in one of her finer moments (see: crimes against ethics and decency) and published the contact information of a group of UC Santa Cruz students who announced their intentions to protest military recruiters on their campus. It was part of the rights innumerated in the Constitution that Malkin occasionally dusts off when she wants to sound like she has a point. Anyway, she published this personal contact information so as to publicly intimidate these students. Death threats rolled in and these kids were literally scared for their lives. But what ended up happening was, in the grand scheme of things, a sort of Newton’s law paybacks. A group of liberals published the personal contact information for Malkin which included her home address and personal telephone numbers. Malkin, now faced with her own underhanded tactics with no way of defending herself, posted a scathing note on her website blasting those for doing what they did and not once owning up to the fact that she was just force-fed her own medicine. She also never mentioned the students again. Lesson learned.

It’s my understanding that Thom’s personal information has already been posted in the comments section of the Pioneer Press. He’d do well to suck up that rather large chip of entitlement he obviously has on his shoulders and bow out before it gets ugly. And when you consider that he’s ultimately going to seek the help of state employees in the form of police to help to quell this shit storm he created, I find it a little more than ironic in the humorous way.

In the end, all that will be said is that Thom was doing everything he could to stay relevant in an age where his profession is growing increasingly irrelevant. Good luck asshole.

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I keep linking to Blue Girl. I don’t mean to be so one-track-ed in my reading, but I find myself getting lost in her posts sometimes as if she lives next door to me. It’s odd.

The problem is my consistency, and for that I’m sorry. I’ll go for a week and click to her site a good forty times hoping for a new post and the next week I’ll forget to visit, and struggle to keep up with all of the posts done while I was away. But she had a post a little while ago that struck too close to home for me not to write something in answer — sort of like how neighbors gather on their porches, drink coffee and gossip about others.

A guy bought the very beautiful wooded lot behind us last year. Then proceeded to build a McMansion that was way too big for the size of the lot.

That was bad enough, but, now the guy’s in the process of cutting down every single solitary tree on the lot.

Every. Single. One.

All the big, old Oaks and Maples.

Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Gone.

Oh how incredibly tragic. And all I could think was how happy her and the Skimmer must be not to live in our house.

We bought out place back in 1995. Across the street from us is the entrance to a huge wooded area that has pathways that connect to all areas of our city. It’s beautiful. And while it was always known that the very end section of that land was privately owned, the previous owner saw no need to develop it for building and the neighborhood couldn’t have been happier.

A couple of years ago the land got a new owner. This new owner declared that he would be “developing” the area for a bunch of townhouses, or as he referred to them “twin homes”. Horrified by this news, my wife and a good portion of our neighborhood essentially stormed the meeting the new owner had set up to discuss possible concerns we, as neighbors who could very well upset the city council meeting set for his building permits, may have about his intentions.

I discovered early in the meeting that this new owner had absolutely no intention of being honest with us. He, alongside two real estate representative who I’m sure stood to make a good chuck of change from this venture, told us that he wanted to build in the area in a manner consistent with the existing neighborhood so as improve the area. If he wanted to be honest, he could’ve just stated that townhomes tend to be make developers more money than standard homes. But my question was a bit more subtle than that. I asked him how “twin homes” were consistent with a neighborhood that had none within five miles of the place. He gave me a long-winded and, ultimately, uninformative non-answer. By the end of the meeting it became clear that we, as neighbors, would be less than happy with townhomes.

My wife was generally pissed off about the whole deal. We bought the home with the understanding that the woods would be there for the foreseeable future. Instead the land is clearcut, despite objections raised by the real estate guys when that term was used at the meeting. We watched as trees that had stood in the area for hundreds of years came crashing down. As of today’s writing, trees that were promised to be replanted have yet to be done. There are now two full, custom-designed homes on the land with two more being built — at least he saw the wisdom in not putting in townhomes.

So as much as the Skimmer and BG must be upset about the lot behind them being so valiently raped by a new owner, imagine 4 lots of undisturbed woods being treated the same way; years of quiet woodlands replace by one-side-design monstrosities and fenced-in water drainage pools. The city was kind enough to offer to trim the long branches of our pine trees so as to make the view clearer for us.

And there was that bit about one of the council members who was so very much behind the project who turned out to have a keen interest in buying one of the homes…

…I should really get to City Hall today and put in my name for the council. They’d love having me there.

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I would be lying if I said that Obama’s vote to grant the telecoms retroactive immunity didn’t piss me off. It did. As did Hillary’s vote against it, as if she would’ve voted that way if she were the nominee. It really pissed me off because it put my bit of hero worship back on earth with four simple words: He’s just another politician. And above all else, he is. There’s no way around that. Sure, he’s charismatic second coming of William Jefferson Clinton, but he’s still just another politician as well. I think once you ascend to a certain level it’s unavoidable to a certain degree and that’s what corporations count on when they make their political contributions.

But if there’s any reminder as to why I continue to vote Democrat, nothing can be more plainly displayed than that of McCain’s economic advisor, former Senator Phil Gramm, telling the Washington Times that we’re “a nation of whiners” and that we’re actually facing a “mental recession”. “A nation of whiners”? Perhaps. But to anyone with eyes open, this failing economy is anything but a figment of our imagination.

Now my immediate reaction, and I’ve been told by my Republican (who claim they’re independent) friends that it’s wrong, is to start blaming rich people. After all, unless the stock market finally implodes because of the gravitational forces of greed none of the richest 1% of this country (who hold 90% of the wealth) has probably noticed much. They’re lifestyles haven’t changed any. Why should they feel compelled to give back to the country that has allowed them to be so rich in the first place? The plain truth is they don’t and never will under the current rules. I’ll see Barack Obama spit his corporate bit and launch truly progressive reforms in office before I’ll see these rich folks give half a shit.

Thankfully, I have people who agree with me — people like E.J. Dionne of El WaPo. I especially liked this dichotomy:

The old script is in rewrite. “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He noted that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a set of looser banking rules, “we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation.” This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for “a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers.”

Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside “the structure and workings of financial markets” because “recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets.” Sure sounds like Big Government to me.

I’m beginning to warm to that term, by the way. Big Government. Conservatives get whipped into a horrible fits of rage over the concept. Never does it cross their pretty little minds that their beloved representatives actually grew the government while in power while espousing the wickedness of its own existence. Contradictions in logic aside, I can’t help but think, when surveying the economic wasteland they’ve left in their neo-laissez-faire approach, that I’d much prefer Big Government to Big Corporation. And that’s simple enough for even a conservative to understand.

Simply put: I’m much more comfortable putting my faith in Big Government, where those in power are answerable to the American people, than I am putting my faith in Big Corporation, where a select few are seemingly only answerable to those who can afford to buy stock.

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Ladies and gentlemen, your Vice President, Richard B. Cheney.

“The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) … any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change,” Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

*snip*

The letter by Burnett for the first time suggests that Cheney’s office was deeply involved in downplaying the impacts of climate change as related to public health and welfare, Senate investigators believe.

Cheney’s office also objected last January over congressional testimony by Administrator Johnson that “greenhouse gas emissions harm the environment.”

An official in Cheney’s office “called to tell me that his office wanted the language changed” with references to climate change harming the environment deleted, Burnett said. Nevertheless, the phrase was left in Johnson’s testimony.

Cheney’s office and the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) worried that if key health officials provided detailed testimony about global warming’s consequences on public health or the environment, it could make it more difficult to avoid regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, Burnett believes.

When reality faces you and testifies against you, change the record to reflect otherwise. Brilliant.

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