I Went Back to Ohio, and My Election Fraud Evidence Was Gone

I lived in Ohio for the first forty-five years of my life. By the time I escaped in late 2003, the state government had become a bastion of insane, frothing-at-the-mouth, far right wing, all-taxes-are-evil, religious fundamentalist fucknuttery. That being true, reading accounts of the election tampering that resulted in Ohio’s electoral votes going to Bush in 2004, though endlessly disheartening, came as no great surprise.

Even so, this shit is still enough to turn my cynical old stomach.

Shit or Get Off the Pot, Already

Well, that was disappointing. Yesterday’s news reports got me all fired up about actual articles of impeachment, but instead Rep. Inslee introduced a resolution calling for an investigation of whether Gonzales should be impeached.

Yeah, I know, it makes sense from political strategy point of view. After all, an investigation resolution is much more likely to garner mass support than articles of impeachment. But the time for treading lightly is long gone.

Bush and his Rebitchlifuck thugs have, thanks in large measure to the flaccid acquiescence of Congress, done more damage to fundamental separation of powers principles than anyone thought possible. In doing so, they’ve set a precedent for all future administrations. Personally, I don’t want a Democratic president with Hitleresque powers any more than I want what we currently have. These bastards need to be curb-stomped RIGHT NOW. If Congress doesn’t do it, who the hell will?

Getting What You Pay For: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

This is old news, but it’s good news, so what the hell.

I dearly love having Democrats in control of both houses of the Colorado state legislature and the governor’s office. Taking back control of the General Assembly in 2004 was nice, but it had little practical effect with veto-happy Republican obstructionist Bill Owens as governor. Owens dropped the V-bomb over fifty times in 2005 and 2006.

Thanks to the new guy, Bill Ritter, the state legislature can actually get some work done with effect. Take Senate Bill 07-256, which the governor signed into law on June 1, 2007.

Arguably the most important type of auto insurance coverage you can have is uninsured/underinsured (“UM/UIM”) coverage. UM coverage protects you and your family if you’re injured in a crash caused by a driver with no insurance. Assuming the uninsured driver was at fault, you can collect damages from your own insurer for medical expenses, lost income, pain and suffering, etc. up to the limit of your UM coverage.

UIM coverage, which is designed to protect people injured in crashes caused by minimally insured drivers, has historically been among the biggest ripoffs perpetrated by an industry that specializes in outright thievery. You’d think that if you purchased $100,000 worth of UIM coverage, you ought to be able to collect $100,000 in UIM benefits if your claim warrants it, right?

Well, unhand your crank, Kemo Sabe. Doesn’t work that way. Auto insurers write their policies so that you can never collect that $100,000 regardless of how badly you’re injured.

Let’s suppose you’re injured in a car crash caused by the negligence of a driver with a per-person liability coverage limit of $25,000. You have UIM coverage with a per-person limit of $100,000. Your injuries are serious and your claim is easily worth $150,000. You can recover $25,000 from the tortfeasor’s liability insurer, but under the terms of your own policy, your UIM carrier gets full “credit” for that payment, which reduces the amount of UIM benefits you can collect from your own insurer to $75,000. Your total recovery is $100,000.

Yep, that’s right. You paid a premium for $100,000 of UIM coverage but can never, ever, under any circumstances, collect $100,000 of UIM benefits.

S.B. 256 does away with that bullshit. The new law, which applies to all Colorado auto insurance policies issued or renewed on or after January 1, 2008, makes UIM insurance “excess” coverage, meaning that it picks up where the at-fault driver’s liability coverage leaves off. In the hypothetical above, you’d still collect $25,000 from the tortfeasor’s insurer, but you can collect the full limit of your UIM coverage – $100,000 – for a total recovery of $125,000.

S.B. 256 favors consumers in other ways as well, but that’s the biggie. It’s good to see our state legislature looking out for actual people as opposed to whiling away the hours fellating insurance industry lobbyists.

Gonzales in a World O’ Hurt

By now it’s painfully clear to all but the most craven, servile, vacuous neoconservative jagoffs that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales perjured himself multiple times on multiple occasions in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If The Clenis taught us anything, it taught us that perjury qualifies as “other high crimes and misdemeanors” for purposes of Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

Rep. Jay Inslee, (D-WA) plans to introduce articles of impeachment against Gonzales in the U.S. House of Representatives tomorrow. Whether enough House Members actually have the testicular fortitude to stand up and do something about the current administration’s violent assault on the Constitution remains to be seen.

Roberts Hospitalized

John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was hospitalized today after suffering a benign idiopathic seizure and falling at his summer home in Maine. Near as I can tell, “benign idiopathic seizure” is doctorspeak for “Probably not cancer, but we have have no fucking idea what it actually is.”

In any event, it looks as though Chief Justice Roberts is going to be just fine, which means the Court will go right on with the solemn business of paying lip service to precedent while simultaneously rendering it toothless.