One fellow wrote several long paragraphs comparing me to Rob Reiner and calling me a "meat head," the slang term that Archie Bunker used for his son-in-law in "All in The Family" TV series.  I pretended I didn't understand him.  I'm sure that many younger readers didn't understand his reference to a TV series that's been off the air for a generation.  I challenged him to take a class in English.  Another insult since that's what the tea baggers hurl at anyone who has an accent, looks foreign or refuses to assimilate into the white-as-slice-bread melting pot.

His reply was swift: "You're a loser."

My reply was swifter: "Of course, I'm a loser. I'm a moderate conservative."

How many intellectual brownie points did we score with that exchange?  Not much, if any.  Not that I was keeping track or even care about that.  You will find many windbags on WSJ who try to demonstrate their intellectual superiority in a barrage of words that mean nothing.  A politician's stump speech would be more interesting in comparison, even if you heard 30 times or more during the course of the campaign.  As a fiction writer I keep my verbiage to a minimum to best communicate the human stupidity that I witness in all its forms

Poke, poke.  See how they growl, hiss and snarl.

I hate tea baggers.  If you listen to what they're actually saying rather than accept the "sanitized" version presented by the Republican Party (the Rand Paul episode is a fine example), you soon realize these people have an agenda that would—in my opinion—tea bag America (i.e., in the sexual position).  For example, tea baggers want to return to the original U.S. Constitution without all those pesky amendments that outlawed slavery, allowed women and colored people the right to vote, electing senators directly by popular vote, limited presidents to two terms in office, and prohibited the non-payment of poll taxes to deny people the right to vote.  All the amendments that made modern America so great over the last 200 years is what the tea baggers don't want.

I loved Non Sequitur's take on this.  The heads of tea baggers should explode when they find out that their version of America is unwanted by anyone who can think for themselves and for society as a whole.  America needs to move forward into the future and not backward into the past.

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That's exactly what I did with the savings that I'm rebuilding.

I opened a new stock trading account at ShareBuilders and pay a $4/month fee to invest my savings deposit into shares of iShares Barclays Treasury Inflation Protected Securities Bond Fund (TIP).  If I'm going to pay a monthly service fee for saving money, I might as well get my money worth.

Unlike a regular savings account, I'm extremely reluctant to move money out of a stock brokerage account.  A transfer usually takes three or four days to be processed and figuring out the capital gains for tax purposes takes that long too.  The quarterly dividend payment will be more than what I get in interest from the bank and is automatically reinvested into the fund.  A bond index fund avoids the complications that comes from directly investing in Series I savings bonds and safeguard my money from deflation and inflation.  Based on all the information that I read in recent months, I suspect inflation will be an issue in the future.

This works as long as the stock market doesn't go belly up.  Unlike plain old savings account, there's no insurance protecting a stock brokerage account.  If everyone cashed out their chips at the same time, my entire savings will disappear.  Considering that federal government had bailed out Wall Street once already, and the bankers are still gambling that the federal government will rescue them again, a total economic collapse seems unlikely.

A more conservative option would be to open an Orange savings account that pays better interest rates and doesn't charge a monthly service fee.  I have a small savings account with them for leftover gas money from my budget to cover car expenses and save up for a new used car.  I could've opened another account with them.  That wouldn't removed the temptation from periodically raiding the account.  A stock brokerage account forces me to consider the costs of moving my money around.

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Tom Campbell is reportedly planning to switch from running for California governor to running for U.S. senator this year.  That changes a predictable state election year into something more dynamic by making an interesting governor's race boring and a boring senate race interesting.  This is both disappointing and exciting.

Disappointing because Campbell was the only candidate who talked about reforming the budget process as the centerpiece of his campaign.  Neither Meg Whitman nor Steve Poizner on the Republican side, or the undeclared Jerry Brown on the Democrat side, will talk about reforming the budget process.  They all want to talk about what they're going to do rather than talk about how they're going to do it.  Unless the budget process is reformed, nothing will get done in Sacramento.  Campbell is willing to acknowledge the pink elephant in the room that everyone else wants to avoid since they're afraid of being trampled to death by the special interests even though it's killing the state.  Unlike his opponents, Campbell doesn't have the personal wealth to buy his way into the election.  Now I don't want to vote for anyone in the governor's race since it'll be a choice of the lessor evil.

Exciting because Campbell will be running against two relatively unknown Republican candidates, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and and state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Irvine, and, if he wins the Republican nomination in June despite the tea baggers, he will be a serious threat to incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.  Campbell is no right-wing nut job like the other Republican candidates and has moderate positions similar to Boxer that makes it harder for her to dismiss him as such.  I won't know until Election Day for which candidate I'll vote for since I'm waiting to see who represents the issues better.

On a related note, a job recruiter contacted me for an I.T. support position in a local office for a candidate running for governor.  While making $90,000 USD for nine months work would be great, I quickly determined that the job would require sacrificing my life at the political alter for a candidate I wasn't going to vote for and couldn't see myself remaining apolitical even for that much money.

I'm not cynical enough as a writer to think I could use that experience to write a bestselling political book.  With two novels and two short story collections on deck for this year, I simply don't have the time to chase after another writing project.  I require a full time job that pays the bills without interfering with my writing life.  If that means passing up a job with bucket loads of money, so be it.  If anything that the Great Recession has taught me in the last year, it's the ability to live on substantially less.

I did pick up "Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.6: A Guide to Supporting and Troubleshooting Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard" by Kevin M. White to start studying for the Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) certification.  For the last few months, every recruiter has been calling me about technical support jobs requiring Mac skills and most were for working at Apple.  (One recruiter who called about a "well know company in Cupertino" flat out refused to tell me the company name but hung up in a hurry when I told him that Apple doesn't consider me to be "genius-level" for their direct hire positions.)  Although I'm a Mac user at home for the last five years, my certifications and work experience is with PCs.  Earning an Apple certification should make it easier for me to feel confident about getting a new job that requires Mac skills.

Updated 2010/01/13 @ 12:45PM - The switch is now official and the San Jose Mercury News editorial sums it up nicely.  Another recruiter at a different recruiting compnay called me about that political I.T. support job in Curpertino.  Does anyone in the Tom Campbell campaign want to offer me a similar PAID position?

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I'd earlier blogged about the California Divorce Ban Initiative that's being qualified for the 2010 state ballot.  This turns out to be a satire on the absurdness of the initiative process.  (Then again, maybe not.)  The group behind the 2010 California Marriage Protection Act had put out a video.

Your reaction to this may be laughter, cheering or crying.  I find this funny from the perspective of an anarchist throwing a Motolov cocktail or two into the California political process.  I'm deeply intrigued by how this would play out and will vote to accept the consequences of a ban going into effect.  California is still America's future according to a recent cover story by Time Magazine.  Think about that but not too hard.  Your head might explode.

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Noticed in the Los Angeles Times that California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has authorized a divorce ban initiative to gather signatures to qualify for the 2010 ballot.  California is often regarded as the social laboratory for the rest of the country: movie star governors, the anti-tax revolt, a dysfunctional state government with a budget process teetering on bankruptcy,  pro- and anti-[insert hot button social issue here], and whatever else that can qualify for the ballot.   If California got something going, the rest of country will get it too like a bad case of swine flu.

Marriage used to be considered a serious commitment that wasn't to be taken lightly since dissolving the marriage happened under three common scenarios: legally invalid (i.e., underage without parental consent), adultery, or death of a spouse.  If you made a bad decision when you got married, you had to live with the consequences of your actions.  Short of murder, faking your own death, or joining the French Foreign Legion, you were so out of luck.

Then the divorce laws were liberalized to include "no fault" or "irreconcilable differences," and the divorce rate shoot up so that nearly half of all marriages ended up in divorce.  What used to be a shameful secret in society is now widely accepted. Celebrities getting married and divorced—sometimes in less than a day—is routine coverage for the paparazzi crowd.  The Republicans nominees had more divorces than the Democrats nominees in the 2008 presidential campaign.  With prenuptial agreements, you can even plan for a divorce if that should ever happen.

Now there is an initiative in California to change it back to the way it used to be.  Maybe this will be the initiative to force a change in the initative process.  Or maybe the status quo won't change at all.

What's even more interesting that no one else in the media had picked up on the story.  Probably because the initiative is in the signature gathering stage, and not all initiatives qualify for the ballot.   No sense for the media to focus on an initiative that might go nowhere.  But I'm fascinated by all the questions if the divorce ban is enacted into law and survives a constitutional court challenge.

Will people rush to get a divorce before the amendment was enacted the same way people declared bankruptcy before the new bankruptcy law in 2005 went into effect?

Will the legal profession try to challenge the constitutional amendment to protect their divorce and child support practices?

Will social and religious conservatives find themselves dancing around the issue because divorce rates are higher among the "family values" crowd?

Will the divorce ban apply to gay marriages (once all the legal challenges are cleared)?

Will the homicide rate among spouses increase dramatically?

Will Las Vegas become the key destination to get married and divorced?

Will people leave California to move to a state with liberal divorce laws?

Will the other states enact their own divorce bans?

Will this be the beginning of the end of an uncivil society?

Personally, I might put my signature down and even vote for this initiative.  Not because I have a strong position against divorce, either legally or morally.   But, like an anarchist holding Molotov cocktail at a store front, I want to see the impact of this initiative on society.  California can't get any more screwed up than it is now—or can it?

FTC Disclosure: My parents were married for 47 years until breast cancer took my mother in 2004, although I might have benefited if their attempt for a divorce in the late 1970's had actually succeeded.  I have no financial connections with the backers of this ballot initiative, and, beyond a possible signature and a vote, have no intention of actively supporting them otherwise.

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