I asked for sweata weatha, and I got it. Highs today in the low 50s, and because our Nest thermostat is always trying to save us a few pennies, I realized today that once again it had nudged the thermostat down to 66 and my nose was cold. And this reminded me of a nose warmer that some catalog we used to get carried; it looked like a stocking cap for your nose, and you would presumably give that as a gag gift to someone like me, but certainly never wear it where any other human being could see you.
I couldn’t think of the catalog’s name. And while it wasn’t Hammacher Schlemmer, that’s the only one that came to mind. Does it still exist? It does, as a website now.
And it’s still pretty weird:
And:
But this being the 21st century, guess what, they have vibrators. Behold, the “Award Winning Women’s Sexual Wellness Massager:”
“Come on, CVS carries those things now,” Alan told me. OK, but still. This is the place I first saw the “weather forecaster” that was a picture of a donkey with a tail made of yarn. “If the tail’s movin’, it’s windy. If it’s wet, it’s rainin’,” etc. It was something of a surprise.
But never fear, you can still buy a nose warmer, but not at Hammacher Schlemmer. This was from some other outfit:
They are surprisingly numerous on Etsy, as well. Go figure.
OK, then. I was going to stay away from you-know-who today, but the clips coming out of the Univision town hall last night were absolutely brutal; I suggest you dial some up. And I leave you with this banger of a deep dive out of Fort Wayne, about how Parkview Hospital grew and grew and got greedier and greedier. It’s detail-packed and riveting:
Revenue pressure was even brought down to the level of nurses – some of whom say they have been pushed to charge for the smallest of items from Kleenexes to batteries. One 2022 email, obtained by the Guardian, shows a supervisor at Parkview DeKalb telling nurses that she had reviewed their charts for the week and found they had “missed” $50,000 in charges as a team. The following year, managers told staff to be more stringent about how many linen towels they handed out to patients – an initiative they termed “linen stewardship”.
“It makes me feel disgusting. It makes me feel dirty,” said one current Parkview nurse, describing how staff have been made to charge for supplies and services down to the micro-level. “Why should I be trying to make sure that they’re getting the most money that they can?”
In some cases, these volume and coding protocols resulted in enormous bills and significant additional revenue for the system, according to medical and legal records reviewed by the Guardian.
In 2021, after a young girl went to the ER for an accidental razor cut, a doctor applied an “adhesive skin affix”, a special type of wound glue, on her finger for about 10 seconds, according to her mother. Afterwards, Parkview charged just over $85 for the glue capsule, about four to five times the price listed online. The hospital also tacked another $295 onto the bill for the labor, which it classified as an intermediate surgical procedure, according to paperwork reviewed by the Guardian.
Have a great weekend, all.
susan said on October 17, 2024 at 1:24 pm
Back in the 1970s, I worked on a large archaeological project for three-and-a-half years, straight through the years. Through the winters. Sub-freezing winters. Real winters. Rule of thumb was we wouldn’t go out if it was 10°F or lower. (They didn’t account for the windchill factor, which could be brutal along the River.) We’d cover our excavation units at the end of the day with large garbage bags filled with wood chips, so that the ground where we were working wouldn’t freeze overnight. Cold.
Field work is about half paper work. I’d sit on an over-turned bucket, hunched over a clip board, and write up field notes. And my nose would drip all over the notes because of the cold. Not very pleasant for the lab people who would go over the notes while checking in samples and artifacts. Sometimes I’d circle the splotches and label them to give the lab people a head’s up….
Pretty soon I had an idea: A nose bag! I asked a friend on the project, who was a knitter and crocheter, if she could make me one. I described what I needed, so as to catch all the drips. I think it was the next day, she presented me with the perfect nose bag. Knitted with grey wool, sporting a purple pompom on the end, tied at the back of the head. It worked perfectly. I could wash it at night, it’d be dry by morning.
I should have patented it. Coulda made a million! Dang.
1375 chars
Heather said on October 17, 2024 at 1:39 pm
Was it the Lillian Vernon catalog? I remember that one fondly for a gadget that collected leftover soap ends to press them into one big chunk.
I wonder if people get as outraged about people wearing nose warmers as they do about face masks.
243 chars
Dave said on October 17, 2024 at 2:20 pm
My grandfather died in a Columbus hospital (Mt. Carmel East) in 1988. My father went through the final bills with a finetooth comb and he was shocked what they had charged for, including doctors that Dad was convinced had barely stuck their noses through the door and then charged. I don’t know but I think there’s been a racket for several decades now.
355 chars
Dexter Friend said on October 17, 2024 at 2:41 pm
I pay nothing as in zero for doctor visits nor for all the medicines I take, nor for hospital care should I be near enough to get to a VA hospital. This is a late-in-life reward for allowing myself to be shanghaied to the American War versus Viet Nam when I was a young man. Totally against that war, always shit-talking Nixon, I went because I could not accept the prison term awaiting me had I refused, that is refused simply for being a trouble-making “commie” or whatever I would have been called. Now I accept the monthly small deposit I get for being an Agent Orange disabled veteran, just a partial rating, not the life-changing 100% rating by far.
Now Yahya Sinwar is dead. Until today, never heard of this motherfucker…you?
741 chars
Deborah said on October 17, 2024 at 2:49 pm
There’s a book called “Patient Revolution” that I read for our Dementia Center project. I don’t recall the name of the author, he’s Peruvian and works at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. It’s eloquently written, about all the crap that patients and care givers have to put up with, greed, disrespect, unnecessary procedures, lack of empathy and over medication etc. There is a movement to try to fix it but it’s an uphill battle. https://www.patientrevolution.org/
479 chars
alex said on October 17, 2024 at 2:57 pm
My dad always used to bring home weird stuff from Hammacher Schlemmer every time he’d go to NYC on business. Looks like that nose warmer is really a dog breath protector.
Glad Parkview’s getting exposed, although I doubt the local press will make any mention whatsoever of the Guardian article because it’s dishing dirt on their biggest advertiser.
I can’t even get in for a GI consult at Parkview until mid-March of next year and my doctor is concerned about my elevated liver enzymes. In fact, my primary care doctor is peeved at Parkview for making her leave a nice family practice office that was being leased for her. They stuck her in an office with 20 or so other family practitioners on the hospital campus. I had my first appointment there a couple of months ago and the place was a fucking zoo and probably a great place to catch COVID or whatever other bugs are going around.
Well, at least my ACA plan is paying the lion’s share and my copays are minimal, although that could change if the Orange Turd shuts down Obamacare by executive fiat.
So my ACA plan changed my insulin to one that’s more expensive but it’s still charging me $0. I went without the last several days and ate keto and my blood sugar stayed in the normal range the entire time. Tonight going out to dinner with a friend and living it up so I took my first injection of the new stuff, Tresiba it’s called. We’ll see how that goes.
1420 chars
Dorothy said on October 17, 2024 at 4:20 pm
I had never heard of Hammacher Schlemmer until I saw Wait Until Dark, and Mr. Roat mentions the name while he’s terrorizing Suzy. I directed that play about 25 years ago (the movie is one of my all time favorites) and yep, the reference is in the play, too. I found a David Weis catalog in excellent shape in a box when we were moving to Columbus. I’m pretty sure it belonged to Mike’s aunt and we saved it when cleaning out her condo when she entered the VA for end of life care. I had forgotten we had it and was so tickled to sit down and get lost in it again like I did when I was in middle school or high school, day dreaming of all the things I’d love to buy if I had any money.
We’re having a nice time in Alexandria/Washington D.C. Getting Thai food later and tomorrow we have 9 AM tickets to The People’s’ House: a White House Experience – a fairly new attraction. When VP Harris is the new President we hope to get approval by a congressman to get into the actual White House and take a tour. Maybe at Christmas time next year! Won’t that be nice?!
On Saturday we’re going to see the play Babbitt with Matthew Broderick. And before the matinee we’re eat brunch at Chef Jose Andres’ restaurant that is near the Shakespeare Theatre Company where the play is going to be.
1305 chars
Jeff Borden said on October 17, 2024 at 4:50 pm
The bill for my prostate cancer surgery in 2011 was just slightly below $80,000. I recall three things sticking out of the itemized bill: anesthesiology was $6,000; Room and board was over $4,000 (I was in a room for a little over 12 hours); food was $2,800 (I was given some pudding and two glasses of cranberry juice). Luckily, my wife had an excellent insurance plan at her job and my out of pocket was $1,200, but what would someone without those resources have done? My guess is the cancer they caught so early in me would just grow and grow and kill them. Health care and insurance in this country is just criminal.
It took a Hispanic laborer to ask that big sack of chicken fat the question mainstream journalists have not gotten around to yet, namely, who the fuck will pick the crops when Lumpy deports all the workers? Why did it fall to a Spanish-speaking migrant to ask this and not one of our big network news stars or high profile print journalists? I spent 32 years in the newspaper industry, but I’m disgusted by the media landscape these days. Disgusted and ashamed.
1086 chars
brian stouder said on October 17, 2024 at 5:01 pm
Dorothy- sounds great! We’ve not done DC yet, but we shall (at some point!).
78 chars
Julie Robinson said on October 17, 2024 at 6:02 pm
The Sharper Image. And that store in the mall that also had a catalog, Spencer’s Gifts. Why does my brain retain so much useless knowledge?
In 1980, I birthed a baby at the OG Parkview without benefit of a single tylenol, yet was charged for all kinds of drugs. First bill was one page and incomprehensible. Asked for itemized bill, which was 10 pages long and also incomprehensible, so we had the OB take a look, and he was also puzzled. They knocked a bunch off after admitting they couldn’t explain every item.
Years later, husband’s aunt was there in her final illness, by herself in her room when she was asked to sign over her house to cover her bill. Even barely conscious, she was feisty enough to kick the guy out.
Did I mention she had volunteered there weekly for some 35 years?
But, I could walk into any lab in the network for a blood draw, whereas here I have to make an appointment a month or more in advance.
936 chars
David C said on October 17, 2024 at 6:08 pm
Parade magazine was always a good source for oddball mail order stuff. When David Letterman had a daytime show he did a segment called “Who buys the weird stuff in the back of magazines? We do.”
The coding fuckery doesn’t exist in countries with a sensible medical insurance system. They do an appendectomy, they get paid a set amount. They can’t pad the bill because it wouldn’t do them any good. How I long for such a system.
428 chars
Deborah said on October 17, 2024 at 7:39 pm
We’re in Portland now at an AirBnB. It’s in a fabulous location less than a block from the beach, but the place itself is kind of crappy, especially for the cost. The photos of course looked fine. We decided this is our last AirBnB, they’re just not reliable. But we figure we’ll spend all of our time walking on the lovely beach, or seeing things in town. Saturday we go to the Winslow Homer museum and home. Tomorrow we have nice meal at a restaurant that was highly recommended. And the rest of the time we walk, walk, walk on the fabulous beach, spending as little time in this dump as we can. Sunday morning we head out so it’s all good.
652 chars
alex said on October 18, 2024 at 9:01 am
My hat’s off to the local press, where the Guardian article is receiving plenty of attention this morning, as it should.
120 chars
Robert said on October 18, 2024 at 10:33 am
More and more, hospitals are horrible places staffed by great nurses, doctors, and staff who are hamstrung by administrators and greedy corporations. Is it any wonder that the quality of care suffers?
By the way, rural MAGAs – don’t complain about Dems when you have to wait a month and drive 2 hours to see a doctor.
322 chars
Jeff Borden said on October 18, 2024 at 11:30 am
I’m starting to think tRump is onto something when he says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country. Just look at the horrible damage these three immigrants alone have done: Rupert Murdoch (Australia); Elon Musk (South Africa); and Peter Thiel (Germany).
If you don’t know much about Thiel, do some research. He’s convinced freedom and democracy are incompatible and envisions a world where great thinkers like him mold a new world, not the elected leaders of the people. He’s a terrifying asshole.
509 chars
Suzanne said on October 18, 2024 at 11:57 am
I didn’t read all of the Guardian article regarding Parkview but what I did read sounds like any US hospital. I guess those that are for profit (like Lutheran Hospital in Ft Wayne) just don’t try to hide it as much. They all want to make money off the despair of the sick. It’s going to be this way as long as they exist mainly to make money. Politicians scream for transparency in pricing, but how would that work? With insurance companies negotiating prices, nobody really knows what anything costs. Competition can drive innovation but it can also be the engine driving a race to the bottom. The article mentions Parkview taking over regional hospitals but most of them cannot make it financially alone so latching on to a larger medical center is their only choice. I know the former CEO of the hospital in Decatur, IN & can tell you that the only reason they remain independent is because of the money they make off of the many nursing homes they own or have a financial interest in.
All that said, I can’t say enough about the excellent care I received at Parkview for my cancer treatments. My doctor is amazing, the nursing care was great. I recommend them frequently.
1189 chars
Suzanne said on October 18, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Also, the full 30+ minutes of Trump’s musical moment of reflection. Or whatever it was.
I only watched part of it. It’s weirder than I thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr5JAJRRk4I
197 chars
Bitter Scribe said on October 18, 2024 at 12:24 pm
It was an ordeal to finish that story about Parkview. I had to keep getting up from the desk to walk off my rage.
They skimp on towels and bedsheets so that the CEO can pull down a $3.8 million salary. Some people just need to be stood up against a wall.
257 chars
Icarus said on October 18, 2024 at 12:36 pm
The weekend before last, we were in Toronto and Niagra Falls on a school field trip that was conducted on the Highest difficulty setting possible.
I’m not sure why information flowed so slowly but we didn’t have flight numbers so we could pre-check in or Nightingale use her TSA-precheck creds. We had to get up very early to catch a flight to North Carolina, then connect to Toronto.
While some meals were included (just paid for in advance) we ended up eating at terrible tourist traps at other times. We could not seem to stick to a schedule so we would often have late lunch and then not be hungry enough to thoroughly enjoy the good restaurants.
There was no way to opt out of anything because we moved around by bus a lot. First Toronto, then Niagra Falls.
On the plus side got to see Fort George and Casa Loma. Was not really impressed with the Royal Ontario Museum, nothing wrong with it but it’s not very different from any big city museum I’ve taken Moose and Squirrel to. The C.N. Tower was okay but at my age, I’m over heights like that.
The trip back began with a visit to the Butterfly Conservatory then lunch in a tourist section of Lake of Niagra. then we crossed the border and flew back via Dallas! if there is a flight from Buffalo to Dallas, why not Memphis? 2 hour layover and the 7-11 pizzas were better than 35% of the meals we ate on the trip.
by the time we got home, it was after midnight. Luckily the kids were off all week and Nightingale took that Tuesday off.
1522 chars
alex said on October 18, 2024 at 12:58 pm
Icarus, we visited the Butterfly Conservatory at Niagara just a few months ago and stayed in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I captured some great photos including butterflies fornicating.
One of the more disturbing aspects of the Parkview story was the centralization of OB/GYN services on the main campus and women with ectopic pregnancies being unable to access emergency diagnostics and treatment anywhere else. I’d been following the local stories regarding closure of maternity services at DeKalb and the dismissive way Parkview was treating the concerns of the physicians and staff who have been arguing that these services needed to remain where they were.
656 chars
David C said on October 18, 2024 at 1:22 pm
There are no more nonsense words in American English than not for profit hospital. They don’t have profits, they have revenue in excess of expenses. That makes it all better, doesn’t it? They can use those revenues in excess of expenses to buy for profit businesses.
266 chars
FDChief said on October 18, 2024 at 4:38 pm
My favorite/most-detested “conservative” health care trope is the “government bureaucrat rationing your health care!!!” – as if we all aren’t at the lack of mercy of some insurance company bureaucrats whose bottom line is utterly dependent on denying us as much medical care as they can.
Right behind that is the nonsensical notion of medical “markets”, as if our options are to comparison-shop hip replacement; “Hey, Doc Jones is offering a 50% off deal if you go with used hips! I’m jumping’ on that deal!”
We live in a remarkably stupid timeline.
577 chars
Julie Robinson said on October 18, 2024 at 6:06 pm
My medical rants have been too numerous, so instead I’ll join Deborah in AirBnb rants. We have been negotiating since day two of our trip for our horrible place in London, which had black mold and a nail sticking out of the bathtub, just to name two of the 20 things wrong. All the power seems to be with the owners, and if they choose to be assholes about it, you’re screwed. I’m hoping I don’t have to take it to the credit card company. And our daughter made the arrangements on her AirBnb account, and she’s not pursuing it aggressively, as I would.
At our second place there were some holes in the floor. At our third place we had to pay extra for towels. Ancient towels smelling of mildew. At our fourth place, there was about a third of a roll of toilet paper. When asked, the owner said they only provide a “starter” roll. None of the washer/dryers worked as they should have and actually ruined some clothes. I could go on and on and on, but I wasn’t pleased with any of them.
Every single one came with glowing reviews. Like Deborah, I’m done. Give me a hotel with a manager I can talk to in person if I have a problem.
1135 chars
Deborah said on October 18, 2024 at 7:26 pm
I finally had a lobster dinner in Maine, at a nice restaurant in Portland called Scales. We had tried to make reservations but we ended up showing up there at 4:30 and they managed to get us a table. I’d rather eat dinner at 4:30 than 8 so it worked out. The food was great and the atmosphere was too, except it was a bit loud.
Julie your AirBnB experiences sound horrible. Our place is tiny, which isn’t the worst part (we’re used to tiny), but it’s right on a busy road and I mean right on it, there is a narrow sidewalk between us and the road. A drunken driver could certainly take us out. It’s not like the description and the photos online were artfully shot which were very deceiving. The shower is so tight you can hardly lift your arms.
759 chars
Sherri said on October 18, 2024 at 7:26 pm
We seem determined as a country to rediscover why we had regulations. Without regulations, companies simply push all the risk onto you, the consumer.
The post-Reagan era has been about the individual assuming more and more risk, whether they realized it or not. The death of pensions, tort reform, forced arbitration, the decline of unions, privatization of government services, hollowing out of the safety net, underfunding of government – if something goes wrong, you’re on your own, just like conservatives want it, because conservatives think bad things only happen to bad people.
590 chars
SusanG said on October 18, 2024 at 10:39 pm
My father was a victim of hospital error-thank you Lutheran and Parkview for such spectacularly expensive, lethal care. He died twenty years ago, so this shit’s been going on long before the Guardian article. I remember a local tv newscaster blew the whistle on Lutheran and Parkview “under-reporting” (covering up) hospital errors. Does anyone else remember this?
370 chars
alex said on October 19, 2024 at 8:56 am
I have a friend whose elderly father died after being dropped on his head by Parkview staff who apparently didn’t know how to use a bed lift. Her family gave up on its lawsuit against Parkview after the state medical review board opined that there was no negligence and their attorney demanded tens of thousands in cash up front in order to pursue things any further.
One of my hubby’s relatives, a guy in his 40s, ended up with sepsis at Lutheran following a surgery where they inadvertently punctured his bowel. He ended up having to be transferred to IU in Indianapolis for what proved to be a long and difficult recovery. The family wanted to litigate but ended up similarly discouraged.
I also knew a woman who ended up losing the use of one of her feet to such an extent that she could no longer drive a car and she had a terrible limp. She had rolled her ankle and then received an ill-advised tendon-transfer surgery from an orthopedic doctor, and then a few more from the same doctor to correct things but these only made it worse and left her maimed for life. The state medical review board actually found that these surgeries were needless and did not meet the standard of care, but she decided not to pursue litigation when her attorney demanded tens of thousands in cash up front.
It’s been my own experience that doctors will try to steer you to the most expensive option rather than the one you need. There was an ortho doctor about 15 years ago who insisted that I needed a fusion and artificial discs in my neck for a problem that I overcame with a short course of physical therapy. And when I was sent for an ENT referral to correct a deviated septum and hypertrophic turbinates which were causing me sleep apnea and also making it impossible to breathe through a CPAP machine, he instead tried to sell me on the Inspire implanted sleep apnea device, which I doubt would have done me any good since I couldn’t breathe through my nose in the first place. I had the nasal surgery and no longer have any detectable sleep apnea. But going under the knife is always a scary prospect and I would never consider it other than for life-saving purposes.
2174 chars
Suzanne said on October 19, 2024 at 10:08 am
Capitalism corrupts things like healthcare & education & religion. The sick aren’t cost effective money makers, neither are children who need an education. Religion shouldn’t be a money maker, but too often that’s the focus. Sure, these entities need enough money to function, but when making the most money possible is the goal, society’s losers lose out because they don’t generate enough revenue.
People aren’t widgets and treating them as such results in exactly what you’d expect. You can’t predict how someone is going to react to the medical treatment or to a lesson plan, and the outcomes are never going to be uniform like the efficiency experts want.
But also, from my time under intense medical treatment, I saw first hand how entitled some patients are, wanting their needs met right now by an overworked & understaffed crew, wanting relief immediately for some problem and often, refusing to follow what the doctor told them.
Medical care is a very complex problem for which there is no simple solution, although the multimillion dollar salary of a hospital CEO would seem like a great place to start for cost cutting measures.
1174 chars
David C said on October 19, 2024 at 10:10 am
I had a similar thing happen when I had a slipped disc in my neck. My PCP referred me to a neurosurgeon and he tried to bum rush me into fusion. At that time, the company I worked for had a physical therapist on staff who referred me to a physiatrist, a doctor specializing in rehabilitation. The physiatrist told me I’d feel better in 6-8 weeks and there was no need to do anything but wait it out. He was completely right and I felt better right on schedule. At my follow up, he said I had slight hesitation in my reflexes on the one side but I’d never notice it, and I don’t. I shudder to think what may have happened if I’d have gone to surgery. They say with fusion, one-third get better, one-third get worse, and one-third stay the same. You probably get better odds at a casino.
785 chars
Julie Robinson said on October 19, 2024 at 10:39 am
This is like what’s happened to the Girl Scouts. They are voting this weekend to increase dues from $25 to $85 per year. They’ve reduced expenses everywhere possible, they say with a straight face.
Their CEO earns $785,000 annually, working from offices on 5th Avenue in NYC.
This country ruins everything that is good.
325 chars
susan said on October 19, 2024 at 12:12 pm
I used to donate every year to the UNCF—United Negro College Fund, until I saw on Charity Navigator that the CEO was paid over $600,000 a year. What th’? When they came begging for my gift the following year, I sent them a note stating why I no longer support that grift. I support the kids going to college, not the people running the organization.
That was a several years ago. I just checked again, and Dr Michael L. Lomax, President & Ceo’s current “compensation” is $853,098. The COO = $547,727. Etc. Inflation, I guess.
536 chars
Sherri said on October 19, 2024 at 1:54 pm
Please, before you conclude that an organization is overpaying its CEO, look at the financial report that is included in the annual report. Girl Scouts, for example, are a $120 million organization in annual revenue and expenses. What is an appropriate salary for someone overseeing that size organization?
Consider, also, that if you assume that the CEO should take a discount because “it’s the Girl Scouts!”, then you are limiting who can take the job. Too many nonprofit leaders have been white women because that’s who could afford to take a discount in pay “for the good of the organization.”
I’m not saying ignore CEO pay. I’m saying, as someone with experience in paying the leader of a nonprofit, and trying to make up for the previous leader who was a white woman who took a discount, put the number in context.
And if you’re still concerned, look at the board. It’s the board that sets the pay. Contact a member of the board, and ask them why it’s so high.
Or Ind somewhere else where you’re more comfortable putting your money to work. But do think a moment about the scale of the job before you conclude they’re overpaid.
1173 chars
Sherri said on October 19, 2024 at 3:04 pm
I’m going to sing the praises of Lina Khan once again. Naming her to head the FTC may have been the best thing Biden did, and I hope that Kamala resists the pressures of the Dem billionaire donors who want her to get rid of her. The billionaires hate Khan because she is actually doing things about antitrust, which is great. But I love her for all the little things she’s doing, like the most recent thing she’s put forth, which is to require companies to make it as easy to unsubscribe as to subscribe! When this goes into effect, no more signing up with a single click online, but having to make a phone call through a complex phone tree and listening to someone try to talk you out of unsubscribing to undo it! Or worse, having to go in person to unsubscribe.
769 chars
David C said on October 19, 2024 at 3:23 pm
Mid six figures seems pretty cheap for a CEO, even for a non-profit, these days. Just for kicks, I looked up the highest paid non-profit CEOs. The measure that seems most important is the percentage of revenue they are paid. Some are paid 20% of an organization’s revenue, which seems pretty gross to me.
304 chars
Jeff Borden said on October 19, 2024 at 4:13 pm
The current Extreme Court is hostile to rules and regulations on business. Yes, it’s awful on gender and reproductive issues, but its quite fond of the Gilded Age, when the wealthy dictated the rules of society.
211 chars
Sherri said on October 19, 2024 at 11:33 pm
From what I can tell from watching college football today, illegal immigrants are streaming across the border to do sex change operations on our kids at school. At least, that’s what the political commercials for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz seem to be saying. Or maybe the transgenders are converting all the illegal immigrants. It was hard to tell. They were all murderers and rapists, though, that I’m pretty sure, and if they did go to prison, they’d get free sex change operations.
489 chars
Jeff Gill said on October 20, 2024 at 8:05 am
On non-profit CEO compensation, it’s a topic I end up in the middle of often, whether I like it or not. For Scouting, our council’s “Scout Executive” aka CEO makes just under a quarter million, with an organization that’s based in our state’s capital city, with $5 million total budget of which $2 million is personnel. As with my background in ministry, the big challenge around this is the program runs on the basis of thousands of volunteers, most of whom enjoy in quiet moments bitching about how “that guy in Columbus” makes so much money. I’m not sure if he made half of the current pay they’d be happy — most of us volunteer leaders are mid to high five figure earners, with a large chunk of them high school only, and there’s a certain amount of enjoying the resentment. I usually just say “who do you think we’d get if the pay was lower?” and that mutes the complaints.
Our local housing coalition, which I helped found in 1992 & have been board president twice for, now on my third cycle through the board, takes regular flack from “fellow” housing activists because we are a not-quite $5 million a year budget organization with an executive director who’s paid just under six figures . . . and we don’t give this org or that one money. Never mind we’re 80% HUD grant funded with more regulations on how we operate than any one person can keep track of — the fiscal director (who just became the new exec after our first & only one to date just retired) also makes a comparable amount, but the point being if they mess up, we have penalties and pay-backs to HUD, plus we’re constantly struggling to claim three-fourths or more of what we’re “awarded” in grants. The grant isn’t a guarantee, it’s a ceiling, and you have to demonstrate you have provided the service before you can draw the funds (true of most federal grant programs, and where we end up hiring very expensive auditors to be able to understand how our bookkeeping works; the changeover about twenty years ago from awards to draws just about broke us, and did many smaller organizations who couldn’t figure out how to fund budgets while earning the income).
But it’s a source of ongoing frustration that we end up with so much internal sound and fury in either community over CEO pay, when it is a real issue in some quarters but I think often a placeholder for other more complicated issues. Obviously I think the hospital CEO thing looks skanky, but if the institution’s total budget is in scale larger, then . . .
Don’t even get me started on ministerial pay, and having been “out of it” over four years, how I get sucked into conversations with people who are professionals and well paid in their work who air all sorts of grievances over paying a credentialed clergyperson anything over $40,000, avoiding benefits when possible, and then complaining they aren’t getting full-time out of them (which is often really “24/7 on-call response”).
EDIT: oh, and higher education: our college here has an annual budget of $175 million, with an endowment that passed $1 billion in 2023 (and funds 40% of the budget, w/ 96% of all students receiving support from it). The idea that it’s crazy for the president to be paid a million or so: I don’t get it. He travels close to 250 days a year, mostly fundraising directly or indirectly, constantly speaking to donors and alumni, but still attending a huge number of events on campus. I wouldn’t take his job for two million, no joke. There’s still plenty of grievance aired that I hear in town about “how much [blank] gets paid.” I think it’s a placeholder for a different set of resentments. Again, not to dismiss that there ARE overpaid CEOs out there.
3686 chars
alex said on October 20, 2024 at 8:25 am
So Trump’s at a rally in what happens to be Arnold Palmer’s hometown and he decides to flatter the locals by telling them what a large penis Arnold Palmer supposedly had.
170 chars
brian stouder said on October 20, 2024 at 9:46 am
trump is always going off half-cocked
37 chars
Dexter Friend said on October 20, 2024 at 10:12 am
Sherrod Brown will have to pry my johnson from my cold dead hands when he tries to herd me into a sex change operation. I mean, c’mon! These fucking republicans and their scare-campaign about gender-altering. Fuck them!
craigcrawfordsays:
October 20, 2024
WOW, last night at a Las Vegas Harris/Walz rally Barack Obama dropped a bombshell that ought to be a game changer in this campaign: He detailed how Trump’s incompetence (and lying) killed nearly a half million people:
“When I was president, I had been talking to scientists for a while so during my last year in office, we put together a pandemic playbook for how to deal with the eventuality of a pandemic.. When Trump came in, we gave over this playbook and he threw it out. I want to be fair on this, no matter who was going to president, this was going to be a problem… But if you look at a country like Canada, their per capita death rate was 40% lower than here. So just do the math. That’s more than 400k people. People’s grandparents, people’s fathers, people’s moms who would’ve been alive if Trump had just paid attention and tried to follow the plan that we gave him. It might have been somebody in your family that could’ve been impacted. So, if somebody tells you that this doesn’t make a difference, having somebody competent who cares about you.. it does matter and at some point, it will make a difference to them.”
I POST THIS ADDENDUM IN ALL CAPS TO REMIND…MY WIFE DIED OF THIS
1488 chars
alex said on October 20, 2024 at 11:07 am
Instead of preventing COVID as he might have, Trump masterfully gaslit half the country into believing all sorts of bullshit, anything from COVID being a complete hoax to it being a deep state conspiracy to line Dr. Fauci’s pockets, and that it could be cured by unproven remedies such as horse de-wormers and bleach.
For this alone, that asshole deserves to spend the rest of his days in a penitentiary, and so do his abettors on FOX.
But good luck convincing the zombies of Cult 45 that they’ve been duped.
516 chars
Sherri said on October 20, 2024 at 12:51 pm
As we all watch Elon Musk violate campaign finance laws wantonly, we are provided with a reminder of why billionaires are a policy failure. Musk doesn’t care; he’ll just pay the fines if forced to.
I’m reading Character Limit, the book by Katie Conger and Ryan Mac on how Musk destroyed Twitter. When Musk bought Twitter, he wanted to do massive layoffs quickly, and put his two cousins in charge of deciding whom to layoff. Musk wanted to ignore laws and contracts, deciding he’d rather pay fines and deal with lawsuits and that would be cheaper than having deadweight.
When he was finally convinced that no, it would actually be cheaper to do the layoffs the right way, he became convinced that Twitter was actually full of “ghost employees”, people on the payroll who were not actually people. He demanded a full audit of the payroll in the last days of October, before a major vesting date for employees on November 1. Of course, it was nonsense, there were no ghost employees, but such was his paranoia.
1027 chars
Julie Robinson said on October 20, 2024 at 1:46 pm
Dexter, if I recall, Trump disbanded the pandemic response team Obama had built. Great idea!
Friday I had my poll training and it prompted me to fill out my absentee ballot. Holy moley, we are in for a long day. The ballot is two 17″ pages, printed back to back. We have six proposal for amending the state constitution, and 10 charter changes for county government. I’ve been researching so I knew how I would vote, and it still took 15 minutes to color in my little circles. It’s all paper ballots in our county.
BTW, we didn’t have the option to vote straight ticket. I’m not sure if that’s all of FL or just our county.
We had to pick up a few things at IKEA and they were selling their Uppfylld Ice Pop Makers half price. I can’t imagine why: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/uppfylld-ice-pop-maker-pop-up-turquoise-pink-30533233/
840 chars
alex said on October 20, 2024 at 2:00 pm
I got an Uppfylld at an adult toy store once, only it wasn’t hollow.
68 chars
David C said on October 20, 2024 at 2:31 pm
Most states with Republican governments have eliminated straight ticket voting. They say it’s so people consider each office separately. The real reason is so it takes longer. Then they close polling places in cities and hope the lines are so long that people they don’t think will vote for them will leave the line. If they didn’t have voter suppression, they’d have nothing at all. Thanks Chief Voter Suppressor Roberts.
422 chars
Mark P said on October 21, 2024 at 9:45 am
I stumbled across a great comeback that Harris had for some hecklers. The link is to Quora.com, but it seems to from the Washington Post.
https://www.quora.com/
162 chars
Mark P said on October 21, 2024 at 10:21 am
I didn’t realize my link was incomplete. Just Google Kamala Harris hecklers. It’s at a lot of sites. Newsweek,USA Today etc.
128 chars
alex said on October 21, 2024 at 10:43 am
Try this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=povgf7ZQYuo
Best thing I’ve seen all day. The new polls are worrisome and I need to tear myself away from the computer.
171 chars
Dexter Friend said on October 21, 2024 at 10:52 am
Elated I am as Penna swings towards Harris, but Nevada and North Carolina are long-gone.
The sickening “she’s a shitty Vice President” and the comment about Arnie’s manhood size made me want to act like those anti-W folks who threw shoes at Bush43. Now another lie is everywhere : ” ‘they’ tried to kill him”. “They” are Democrats is the underlying fiction. Also, it was Trump’s administration who initiated the “gender care” in prisons that Trump has flipped the script on with 30,000 ads saying it is all from Kamala Harris.
Trump is a rapist , adjudicated so in civil court, so of course no prison time there, but when he loses in 15 days, Boy Howdy! Jack Smith is going in deep and he will never let this degenerate bastard go scot-free. Cuffed, shackled, and hooded. Off to prison.
The Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville is a medium-security United States federal prison for male inmates located near Otisville, New York. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice. Wikipedia
Address: 2 Mile Drive, Otisville, NY 10963
Good enough for Michael Cohen, perfect for Trump. 30 years ought to do it.
Alex, today’s polls look very good. Still, I worry more each day. Trump has his goons ready to screw up January 6, 2025.
1330 chars
Brandon said on October 22, 2024 at 2:07 am
Although published six years ago, this is a thorough and interesting article on Hammacher Schlemmer in Chicago magazine.
Hammacher Schlemmer isn’t allergic to the internet, and it wasn’t blindsided by the rise of e-commerce. In 1986, the company opened a virtual store on CompuServe and became one of the first major retailers to sell wares on the web. It launched similar ventures with Prodigy and America Online before unveiling its own website in 1998. In 2005, online sales accounted for one-third of its revenue. These days, according to Farrell, the majority of orders come from the website (which he refers to as a “repository”), but the retailer believes the catalog is what pushes people there.
“Our website is modern, like every website,” Farrell says. “But the reality is that this”—and here he picks up a catalog—“is the more sophisticated piece of marketing.”
…
Hammacher Schlemmer started publishing a catalog in 1881, and the business ballooned. Early editions were hardbound and contained beautiful hand-drawn illustrations of workbenches, mortise locks, and plumb bobs—every item the subject of a delicately crosshatched likeness. At a Tolstoyan 1,112 pages, the 1912 catalog remains Hammacher’s largest, and a copy currently resides in the Smithsonian.
(You can still request a print catalog via the website.)
1492 chars