Our cat acts like a kitten.
We played for a long time today, until she finally chased me around the house at a walking pace a few times — you know, the game kids love but cats can’t figure out. I didn’t get the chance to change directions. And Allie didn’t realize that if she only stood still the green ribbon thing she loves would come back around from the other doorway in just a moment.
“You look like you feel better today,” The Yankee said.
And she was right.
The cat and I started playing because, as I was minding my own business, she started attacking a string she found on one of my socks.
After two or three strafing runs I decided to find a string I could tie to my toe. This would be great, I thought, because now she can scratch up my feet! So I looked around the house. There was not a string or thread or cable to be found. Everything has a use already, you see. Congratulations to us, two people who seem to have all of their long strandy things well accounted for.
I’m sure if I flipped over the sofa I’d find that Allie has stashed every loose string in the house there.
And so it was that we played with one of her long chase toys. It is a red stick with a red string that leads out to a green ribbon:
Feel like I’ve turned a corner today. Not quite a million bucks, but I’ve got titanium inside me and inflation is upon us, so who knows, but I could be like Lee Majors by the end of this update.
We went out for lunch today. I had a sandwich at Niffer’s Place and then settled back in for a day of reading and writing. Now here we are.
So, here. Have a look at some of the things I’ve been reading today, including Doug Mataconis walking through ABC’s poor reporting from the Colorado shooting:
First, soon after the Aurora police revealed the name of the man they had in custody, there was Ross himself on the air with a report claiming to link James Holmes the shooter with a man named Jim Holmes who happened to be listed on the website of a Colorado Tea Party group. That was later revealed to be untrue, and ABC News was later forced to issue an apology:
Editor’s Note: An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.
Properly vetted? It strikes me that there was no vetting of the information at all. There’s really only two ways that Ross could have stumbled across this, either he went directly to a Tea Party site and looked to see if he could find a James Holmes listed. Or he did a Google search of something along the lines of ” “James Holmes” and “Aurora, CO” ” and looked to see what would come up. Neither one is really responsible journalism, and if it was the first one, if he just decided to go to a Tea Party site and look for Holmes’s name even though there was no evidence that anyone affiliated with the Tea Party was involved in this, then it wasn’t just irresponsible it was potentially malicious.
You could say worse. Many have.
Karol Sheinin immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union 34 years ago today:
It’s hard for Americans, even the ones who see America’s greatness and love this country for it, to understand the lack of opportunity that my family left. As Communism retreats into the rear-view mirror of history it’s easy to gloss over the everyday ways that Communism is meant to crush the individual and make everyone equal–equally poor, equally scared, equally hopeless.
Great essay, go read it all.
Surprising exactly no one, the Affordable Healthcare Act just got a lot more expensive:
“According to the updated estimates, the amount of deficit reduction from penalty payments and other effects on tax revenues under the ACA will be $5 billion more than previously estimated,” the CBO reported today. “That change primarily effects a $4 billion increase in collections from such payments by employers, a $1 billion increase in such payments by individuals, and an increase of less than $500 million in tax revenues stemming from a small reduction in employment-based coverage, which will lead to a larger share of total compensation taking the form of taxable wages and salaries and a smaller share taking the form of nontaxable health benefits.”
In short, CBO revised the Obamacare tax burden upward by $4 billion for businesses and $1 billion to $1.5 billion for individual workers.
While we’re on the subject, employers get ready to drop their health coverage:
Around one in 10 employers in the U.S. plans to drop health coverage for workers in the next few years as the bulk of the federal health-care law begins, and more indicated they may do so over time, according to a study to be released Tuesday by consulting company Deloitte.
Those employer numbers dropping health coverage is likely to continue in the coming years. And so we’ll go, chasing this shiny thing. And like the cat, we’ll go around and around, never realizing we could just turn around.
