There's stimulated, and then there's stimulated

In the new age of bipartisanship, Republicans in the House yesterday unanimously voted against the Obama stimulus plan on the grounds that it represented more of the same old Democratic government spending. Liberal spending is defined as any government spending that doesn’t go to defense contractors in the congressperson’s home district.

From the little I know about it, I agree that some of the proposed new spending seems more stimulating than other new spending, but it seems to me that any money pumped into the economy for any thing will excite our spending molecules and send us on a buying spree. So $200 million to spruce up the National Mall means $200 million spread around the real Washington, D.C. where professional mall sprucers will start spending their money to buy things they wouldn’t have bought otherwise, like food and maybe a new Chevy.

Or a few million $s for the National Endowment for the Arts. Artists need money just like the rest of us, and they’ll spend it on stimulating things like brushes and clay and exotic paints. Nude figure models need work, too.

Which is why I’m looking forward to receiving a few thousand dollars from the VA because, according to them, I was 100 percent disabled with prostate cancer for five months.

When I first learned I had PC a year ago, I began to read everything I could find on the subject, and one of the things I learned was that anyone who served in Vietnam and later developed PC was presumed to have a service-related disability from exposure to Agent Orange. I guess the VA quit trying to determine who might or might not have actually been exposed and just started paying out to anyone who was there because you can’t prove a negative: Nobody can prove I wasn’t downwind from an application that might have been miles away but was sprayed from a massive tanker plane flying at relatively high speeds and altitudes. These were not precision pesticide applications by farmers trying to cover their beet fields while mostly missing the grammar school next door.

So I filed a claim thinking why the hell not? I could be impotent and incontinent in a few weeks, and if that isn’t a double-dog disability, I don’t know what is.

After I had surgery and began to quickly recover, though, I couldn’t help but notice that the plumbing was working pretty much as well as ever, and with a little help from a moderate dose of Viagra, I could fly the flag as high as I could when I was twenty-something. That was actually an improvement over the pre-op me, so I began to actually feel unentitled, an emotion as rare these days as contrition in the political class, but there it was nonetheless. I wrote the VA a letter and said I wanted to withdraw the claim.

Not to be deterred, though, the closest VA office started calling to tell me I needed to come in for a physical to verify somehow that I was still 100 percent disabled. How do I prove impotence? I wondered. That might be a medical test a guy could enjoy failing. “Get undressed in the next room and a nurse will be in shortly to help administer the test. Do you have a gender preference for your nurse?”

I kept telling them I was doing fine and I still wanted to withdraw the claim, but they called back a few more times to remind me to make an appointment. I ignored the messages.

When I didn’t hear anything more for a few months, I forgot about the whole thing until yesterday when I received a big envelope from the VA with lots of official looking documents inside, and when I read through everything a few times, I figured out that they still believed I was totally disable for five months, at which time I became totally not disabled and my benefits were terminated.

There was no check inside, though I assume one is in the mail. Or not. You know how the VA can be.

For a brief moment I thought I can’t possibly accept this money, something around $10,000 before taxes, and then I realized the hell I can’t! I’ve actually been feeling left out because I haven’t received a single billion in bailout money yet, and why am I less deserving than a mall sprucer or bank president? I’m not, and I can assure the Republican super-minority in congress that unlike some of those banks, I always promptly spend whatever I take in and a little bit more, so I’ll have an immediate effect on the economy rather than a long-term effect, which seems to be a bad thing.

I could probably re-file with the VA to start up my benefits again. One of the criteria is continuing drug therapy, and there’s the Viagra thing. This stuff isn’t cheap.

I’ll have to think about it.

My kind of review

From the Washington Post

A Poor Reception for 'Bride Wars'

Ann Hornaday recommends that you send your regrets and not attend "Bride Wars": "Predictable, lazy and as overprocessed as Kate Hudson's hair, this thoroughly joyless movie also possesses a deep nasty streak, making it loathsome when it might have been merely annoying."

I wish I'd said that. Three movies that got good reviews and I thought were merely annoying when they could have been loathsome:

Mama Mia: Shrill, shrill, shrill. Will you all just SHUT UP!

Iron Man: Stupid! We went out to see it, and I should have left and played the motorcycle roadracing game in the lobby. When it was finally over, I badly needed a drink. Tragically, I quit drinking some years ago.

WALL-E: Or however you capitalize it. Great animated film for pre-teens. I'm sixty and could have better used my time Twittering.

None too soon

With only sixteen days left in the Bush administration, we’ll soon see an end to stories like this.
*****
LOS ANGELES -- The Bush administration appears poised to push through a change in U.S. Forest Service agreements that would make it far easier for mountain forests to be converted to housing subdivisions.

Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who heads the Forest Service, last week signaled his intent to formalize the controversial change before the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama. As a candidate, Obama campaigned against the measure in Montana, where local governments have complained of being blindsided by Rey's negotiating the policy shift behind closed doors with the nation's largest private landowner.

The shift is technical but has large implications. It would allow Plum Creek Timber to pave roads through Forest Service land. For decades, such roads were little more than trails used by logging trucks to reach timber stands.
But as Plum Creek has moved into the real estate business, paving those roads became a necessary prelude to opening vast tracts of the company's 8 million acres to the vacation homes that are transforming landscapes across the West.
Scenic western Montana, where Plum Creek owns 1.2 million acres, would be most affected, placing fresh burdens on county governments to provide services and undoing efforts to cluster housing near towns.

"Just within the last couple weeks, they finalized a big subdivision west of Kalispell," said D. James McCubbin, deputy county attorney of Missoula County, which complained that the closed-door negotiations violated federal laws requiring public comment because the changes would affect endangered species and sensitive ecosystems. Kalispell is in Flathead County, where officials also protested.

The uproar last summer forced Rey to postpone finalizing the change, which came after "considerable internal disagreement" within the Forest Service, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report requested by Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.). The report said that 900 miles of logging roads could be paved in Montana and that amending the long-held easements "could have a nationwide impact."