It's Spending Wednesday!

You braved the crowds for deals on Black Friday. You popped down to the local artisan mayo shop for Small Business Saturday. You sought great online deals on Cyber Monday. You opened your wallet and your heart on Giving Tuesday. But are you ready for … Spending Wednesday?

That’s right, today is now Spending Wednesday. I’ve declared an arbitrary day for everyone to just spend money on things.

Here’s the idea: You just go out and spend. Pick the closest businesses to you and just pay for whatever they have. Doesn’t matter what it is or if you even have a use for it. Just hand over your cash or plastic to pay for the first few things you see. Just keep buying things. Do it until you max out every credit card you have, and take advantage of the special Spending Wednesday credit card offers by opening a new card to max out (and smart shoppers get 5% off purchases). Do it until your wallet is full of crickets and tumbleweeds.

The best part of Spending Wednesday is that you can double your donations to for-profit companies just by spending double today.

So get out there! Buy! Pay! SPEND!

Carnage

There’d better be carnage by the time I get up there.

It is unforgivable enough for my field of vision to fill with the angry red of brake lights. There had better be something to see, some reason for this inconvenience. I had better see frantic red and blue flashes highlighting the catalytic convertor melted to slag, or the door twisted to modern sculpture, or the windshield divvied into engagement rings.

Make it worth my while to have lost the length of a pop single grumbling as if my dashboard could hear me.

But (since everything bad always happens to me) I get to the head of the line and it’s nothing. Whatever disaster there may have been vanished in a puff of less than smoke. Or maybe there was never anything more than a cascade of brake tapping by the cautious or incompetent that slowed the whole thing down.

Moments I will never get back and it was all for nothing.

Come on in, Amazon!

Christmas shopping season is starting and I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m chomping at the bit to give Amazon delivery people access to our house with the Amazon Key program! Come on in, stranger!

With this new program, all I have to do is buy a combination smart camera and smart lock for just $250. Then I don’t have to worry about someone swiping my stuff from the front step while I’m not home. I can just let a delivery person unlock my door and leave the package inside. Goodbye, potential for theft!

I just don’t see any downside to this or any way that this could backfire. I assume the people delivering my packages have been vetted with a thoroughness that the CIA would envy, and there’s no risk of anybody poking around my things or casing my possessions for later theft. This is a brilliant plan on the part of Amazon. I no longer have to risk somebody stealing my $10 CD from between my doors, which is good, because the company absolutely and famously refuses to replace any lost or broken item for any reason.

No, the idea of someone breaking in doesn’t bother me in the slightest because I was raised on the set of The Andy Griffith Show. We didn’t actually have a word in out language for “crime” back then. You never locked your door! We didn’t even have locks on our doors. Or even keys or actual doors.

Where can I send my $250 to get started? Black Friday is a few days away but I’d like strangers to have access to my home now.

Judge

It serves Roy Moore right that people are judging him on those accusations of sexual assault from those women who were teenagers in the late ‘70s. After all, he’s spent a career judging entire groups of people.

Moore has consistently judged gay people, Muslims and black people. He has said Muslims should not serve in Congress and made wacky claims that there is sharia law in parts of the United States. He has said Obergefell v. Hodges is a worse Supreme Court decision than Dred Scott, meaning he thinks gay marriage is worse than the dehumanization of black people, which is insulting to gay people and black people.

Now Moore wants the benefit of the doubt? When it comes to other people, Roy Moore wants Old Testament fire and brimstone but when it comes to himself, he only wants New Testament forgiveness. Sorry, Roy—you sowed the wind and now you’re reaping the whirlwind.  

Then you have people in Alabama defending this guy. “Oh, it’s terrible to judge him.” This is a man who called homosexuality, “a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it.” You have 30 people accusing someone of child molestation and people call for a lack of judgment but Moore’s hateful blanket statements, against people accused of no crime, got a pass? Where were all these “judge not lest ye be judged” people when Roy Moore was spewing this trash?

And then there’s that yahoo in Alabama who gave Moore a pass because the Virgin Mary was 14 when Joseph married her. So the reasoning is molesting a 14-year-old girl is OK because Bible? Or “’70s”? How many people would be OK with a 30-something guy hitting on their teenage daughters?

More to the point, how many people are OK with giving this guy the ability to make federal laws? He’s already been kicked off the bench twice for not being able to follow the law. Does anybody really think the third time in office will be the charm?

Mitt Romney made a good point, saying something like, “‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is a standard in criminal trials, not elections,” calling Moore to drop out. We’ve rejected politicians for far less than this. We don’t have to hang Moore in the town square but I think it’s perfectly reasonable not to give him a promotion. If people do have questions about the allegations, why not err on the side of not electing an accused child molester to the Senate?

Thoughts & Prayers & Snark

Some people offer thoughts and prayers after the mass shootings that seem to happen monthly now. It’s true that thinking and praying can’t bring about the change we need to prevent the next atrocity in America, but I think prayers can be very comforting for some people. It doesn’t work for everyone, of course, but it can make some people feel less alone in a time of tragedy to know people wish you well. I don't think there’s anything wrong with offering a prayer because it can be a reaction to a situation for which you don’t have any answers.

The problem, of course, is that politicians who actually are in a position to get answers to prevent gun violence do nothing more than pray. Many religious people believe that prayers don’t mean much without action and prayer can be a spur to that action.

So it makes some sense to call out “thoughts are prayers” but I think everyone, me included, needs to take a look at what we actually are doing to prevent gun massacres. You know what’s just as useless as “thoughts and prayers” in solving this problem? Snark over thoughts and prayers.

Prayers and posting snarky memes following a tragedy effect the same change: Absolutely none. Here are some other things that do nothing following a massacre: Liking shit on Facebook, watching a tearful Jimmy Kimmel or Seth Meyers monologue about guns and nodding vigorously in agreement, condescension, blogging and complaining about politicians but not bothering to vote.

If that’s all we’re doing, then it’s not much. Many some people are doing actual things to prevent these mass murders but I imagine a lot of the people snarking about prayer haven't exactly worked for decades as community organizers with the Committee to Prevent Gun Violence. Most of us, me included, are armchair commenters on Facebook and elsewhere, doing very little other than bitch. And I don’t know what the average person can really do but it’s got to be more than what we're doing.

Double Dipping Pension Padder

Thank God this is the last day I’ll have to hear about a double dipping pension padder and all the other politicians I can’t vote for anyway.

We don’t have an election in Delaware today. Yet because we live so close to Philadelphia, we are in the same media market and have to hear all the commercials about the people running for office in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. So we get all the annoyance of campaign commercials without the benefit of choice.

What have I learned while having the TV on first thing in the morning and while doing the dishes? Oh, a whole lot about neighboring candidates. I’ve learned that Steve Sweeney pads his pension twice and wants people with Down syndrome to have jobs. (This seems like a pretty non-controversial position. Like, is the other guy opposed?) I learned that liberal (GASP!) Phil Murphy wears a tuxedo and wants to raise everyone’s taxes to expand the government like a bloated tick, I assume just for the hell of it and not to provide more services or anything. I learned that Suzanne Fizzano Cannon (or whoever) is related to the family whose cement factory I drive past occasionally. I learned that that judge in the snazzy purple and yellow judge’s collar is not a typical Republican. I learned that Kim Guadagno is forever linked to the closure of both a bridge and a beach.

I know political ads use sleight of hand to bend the truth a little but some of these ads really don’t pass the smell test. One ad said that a politician had voted to RAISE YOUR TAXES something like 154 times. This seems impossible to have happened literally. Over a four-year term, was there really a vote on taxes an average of every nine days?

I wish there were a way for Delaware viewers to opt out of these on the ground that we don’t care and can’t affect the political process in our neighboring states. We have two senators and one congresswoman here. We have three counties, one congressional district and one area code. Leave us alone.